Wednesday, October 31, 2012

All Hallows' Evening

I've been thinking about Satan today. You know: The Great Beast. The Deceiver. The tempter and tormentor of humanity. The punisher below. The snake in the garden. Beelzebub or Shaitan or Lucifer. The guy in red with the pitchfork and the fire and the brimstone. Yeah, that guy with the pointy beard and the mismatched eyes and the giant black cat friend. Anyway. 

I was thinking about Satan and I was thinking, more specifically, about how Satan, through thick and thin, good times and ill, darkness and light, maintains a very specific and special place in most people's minds, and some peoples' hearts. Most humans, because of their exposure to Christianity, have a long-standing relationship with the Dark Lord, the fallen angel. 

He is what you don't want to be and never want to see. He's as ever-present as the baby or the virgin mother, the marginalized carpenter step-dad. For some he is an obsession, for others a religion, and for some a means of avoiding what they believe they shouldn't do, because it is wrong somehow or an act of evil. 

He's a pretty easy target, if you think about it: highly visible, endlessly misunderstood. He's the only one who's been around as long as the Christian god, but his public firing took place long before the old testament was written. He is clearly not a part of that team. 

He is the last remainder of a system long since jettisoned. A character partially erased, nearly edited out, nearly left on the cutting room floor, then drawn back in, amended into our current time, had new chapters about him added later, with the same old gleam in his eye and an ever-sharper tail. 

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