A Devil Named Lucifer

ByJasminka
A Devil Named Lucifer
 
‘Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven.’
John Milton
 
The Lord of Hell. Lucifer. There probably is no greater enemy: Although the titles attributed to the devil are legion, in the realm of Supernatural this is his name. We are told a tragic story of a fallen angel, the most beautiful and loyal of them all… We meet a creature not only disgraced and lonely, but deceitful, ruthless, sadistic and manipulative. However he planned his ascension, he has succeeded impeccably, whereas our warriors of light have tried desperately to save the seals from breaking. In fact, they’ve largely contributed (however unbeknownst to them) to Lucifer’s rising by breaking the first and the final seal.
 
How do you fight an enemy that supernatural beings like angels have trouble dealing with? Information is crucial, as in every war. You need to know your enemy. According to the Chinese philosopher Sun-Tsu, the one who appear first on the battlefield, waiting for the enemy, is the best prepared. All art of war is based on deception – and timing.
 
We know that Lucifer is a master of deceit, more powerful than any demon, obviously strong enough to scare the hell out of all heavenly angels, forcing them to draw on eleventh-hour measures to bring him down. After enabling Lucifer to rise (by using the Winchesters and eventually keeping Dean from stopping Sam), because some angels wanted the great confrontation to establish paradise on earth, they need to break his power.
 
We have not yet been informed of their reasons – why do some angels believe that ‘God has left the building’? Why did Castiel allow Sam to escape from Bobby’s panic room, not telling Dean that he did it (I, for one, am still waiting for that to come out of the box and the field day our actors are undoubtedly going to have dealing with the matter)? Why does Michael need a human vessel so desperately – isn’t he a powerful enough archangel to smite the devil in whatever form? A question even more interesting as, according to Milton’s Paradise Lost that angelic clash took place long before man.  
 
Whatever answers our favourite show will give us; two brothers have already been caught in the crossfire. The colt is useless. Sam is supposed to be Lucifer’s vessel. Not exactly the most hopeful of prospects, since we already have been told that Sam eventually will give his consent (his reasons, however, still eluding us).
 
The Devil, Satan, Lucifer – who is he? What do religions, scientists, philosophers or writers know about him? How do they interpret his role?
 

Lightbearer
 
Let’s take a look at the Morning Star, Venus. She is a goddess of light amongst the fixed stars and planets, a shining ornament, brighter than any other dark sky’s light visible to the eye. She is Earth’s mysterious neighbour, hiding her face behind a veil of thick clouds that reflect more than eighty percent of the light poured over her by the sun, hugely responsible for her brightness. We know from pictures collected by probes that underneath, in sweltering heat and immense atmospheric pressure, are hidden crates, mountain chains, wavy surfaces and two continental plateaus: Ishtar Terra (about the size of Australia) and Aphrodite Terra (comparable to North Africa), with mountains reaching heights of more than eleven thousand kilometres.
 
Both are, according to myth, goddesses of light (and love), Ishtar and Aphrodite – guiding the kind visitor to the hell throne, as any story or biography of the Devil begins with the Morning Star.
 
The sky, and with it the known universe, is a deadly area. Between Mars and Jupiter numerous small objects orbit the sun. A hellishly dangerous space: the tremendous rotating mass of Jupiter works from afar and forces the various planetoids into different orbits. Collisions and almost-collisions are commonplace. Streams of meteorites rain down on Earth. Daily. Sometimes bigger objects cross the paths of planets, now and then actually striking. Every planet has craters to show as a result of that fact.
 
Now, let’s say a comet of the size of Halley (about 15x9km of size) collides with Venus. The energy of impact would be equivalent to more than 400 billion kilotons of TNT (about 20 billion times the explosive force of the bomb that levelled Hiroshima). This kind of energy is capable of changing the rotational rhythm of a planet, and, since Venus moves contra-rotating, astronomers assume that such outrageousness occurred to our closest cosmic neighbour, more than about 4000 years ago. An event like such an impact might have been easily seen from Earth, provoking fear and awe in pre-Christian civilisations.  
 
‘How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, who didst rise in the morning? How art thou fallen to the earth, that didst wound the nations? And thou saidst in thy heart: I will ascend to heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God, (…) I will be like the most High. But yet thou shalt be brought down to hell, into the depth of the pit’ (Isaiah, 14:12-15) though the prophet probably refers to a Babylonian king, Nebuchadnezzar, one of the great villains of the Old Testament, the parallels to the myth of the devil falling from grace are striking.
 
A heavenly inferno, witnessed by early civilisations, described by prophets, a cosmic reality to explain the existence of evil in the world? ‘the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the whole moon became as blood; and the stars of heaven fell unto the earth, … and every mountain and island were moved out of their places.’ (Rev 6, 12-14)
 
Was this the moment the idea of Lucifer, as we know it, was conceived?
 
Whenever stars fall in the Bible, they are symbols of Lucifer and his infernal angels. However, the usage of the name of Lucifer (created from Latin lux: light and ferre: to bear, to bring) is not found in the New Testament.  The attribution of Isaiah’s words to the devil might have well been popularized by John Milton’s Paradise Lost or Dante Alighieri’s Inferno (the Divine Comedy).  Christian writers began to look at old biblical passages as metaphorical references early on, taking Lucifer/the devil to be a fallen angel (since stars and angels have always been widely associated). Thereby Lucifer soon came to be connected to the greatest of the fallen angels, Samael, or Satan.
 
Samael has some of the most fascinating and contradictory set of stories about him. In rabbinic literature, Samael is chief of the devils and the angel of death, and even accused of disguising himself as the serpent who tempted Eve, seduced her and became by her the father of Cain (hence his identification with Satan). The Book of Enoch describes him as a prince of demons and a magician, and he has been depicted both as evil and good. Longfellow’s ballad ‘The Golden Legend’ refers to him as this: ‘the dogs howl when, with icy breath, Great Samael, the angel of death, takes through the town his flight’. In ‘The Holy Kabbahlah’, Samael is characterized as the ‘severity of God’ and fifth of the archangels.
 
It would be an interesting exercise, indeed, to find out how much the writers might have taken those legends into account when creating the character of Sam – is the name he was given pure coincidence? Did Kripke plan it like this? A man who could be both evil and good – and perhaps reveal himself one day as a fifth archangel? This gives room to many speculations, and we will, hopefully, find out during the airing season.
 
‘So let it be written, so let it be done’
 
There are several legends and myths about how the devil became what he is, and Supernatural seems to use Islamic legends and an interpretation Joseph Campbell once gave of that particular myth, with a dash of early Christianity.
 
Islamic myth describes Iblis (the Islamic name of Lucifer) as a djinn, and as such he had free will and thus was able to act according to his own decisions and choose to be either good or evil.  According to Islamic teachings, God created at least three sentient races: angels, djinns and humans. The latter two were given free will (the angels, however, were not – as not having been granted free will, angels do not sin, as they have not freedom to disobey – of course, Supernatural does not keep to this interpretation, as angels do actually disobey in this show).
 
According to the Koran all angels and djinns were ordered by God to bow to Adam, the first human, divine in his descent and form. Iblis disobeyed: ‘God said: What prevented thee from prostrating when I bade thee? (Iblis) said: I am better than he: thou didst create me from fire, and him from clay.’ (as djinns were created from ‘smokeless fire’).
 
Herein lies one of the fundamental differences between Christian teachings and Islamic in reference to Lucifer: While Christianity describes that Lucifer was an angel rebelling against God’s orders, Islam maintains that Iblis was a djinn who had been granted the special privilege to dwell amongst angels (that is – before he rebelled).
 
It is interesting, though, that the djinn was a creature people believed in long before Islam. The early Zoroastrian (ancient Persian) culture believed in so-called ‘jaini/jahi’, evil female spirits feared to spread diseases to humans. Also, the stories of The Arabian Nights describe several forms of djinns.

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