The Second Rebellion

It can be difficult, as an atheist, to talk to people of faith. Richard Dawkins and his associates have sown too much salt in the places that seeds of conversation might otherwise flower. The distinction between atheist and anti-theist is one not always picked up on, even by those who want to engage in good faith (no pun intended).

So as always, the standard disclaimer: disbelief is not disrespect. But - and this is where I sweep away my carefully-laid cloak to reveal a sheer drop into the Bog of Eternal Stench - there are certain ideas central to the religious beliefs of hundreds of thousands of people that my political philosophy requires me to take strong exception to. To not merely state that I don't believe in the God that allegedly espouses these ideas, but to argue their very existence makes the world a worse place.

One of the worst of such notions is that suffering is necessary or even good for us.

Original Sin

(Being a discussion of the sixteenth arc of Lucifer. Spoilers from jump, you lovely people.)

Retcon City

Permit me to begin this post with a rant (it's not like you're not used to them, after all).  Words have meanings, and retcon is a word, no matter how recent its birth. Those six letters exist in that combination for a reason, and people should respect that.

If I'm going to get up on my high horse about use of language, I should probably dig a little into what I think the word means.  Let's start with what it most certainly doesn't mean. It doesn't mean a change in the status quo.  Nor does it mean a return to the status quo - neither necessarily does "reset", incidentally, which seems to have become synonymous with "retcon" in certain areas; reversion to the status quo ante is only a reset when the method by which that return occurs has an insignificant effect upon later story-lines. It also doesn't mean simply filling in holes in a character's back-story, unless it's hard to credit that what fills the hole could realistically have remained hidden.

Properly speaking, a revelation becomes a retcon only when we learn something we thought was true isn't. This can be explicit - Dave's father isn't his father at all! - or implicit, whereby we assume elements of a character's past were uneventful because they've never been mentioned until The Big Reveal.  The crudest retcons do this by rewriting the past.  The more sophisticated ones do it by offering a new context for the past.

I'm not entirely sure whether "Lilith" constitutes a retcon, if for no other reason than Carey spends much of his time simply deciding which elements of antiquity's religious and literary writings to plunder. If indeed the tale of how the Silver City came to be constitutes a retcon, though, it's of the context-changing kind.  Not just of Lucifer itself, as it happens, but of the Bible as well.

(Spoilers follow.)

The Briar Around The Slide

Sooner or later this increasingly irregular series of posts is going to come to an end.  Eight or so more and I'll have polished off the whole of Lucifer, and be casting around for something else to discuss at tedious length.  The obvious choice is Carey's latest series, The Unwritten, and indeed that's exactly what I'm going to be looking at.  When we get there, an awful lot of time and space is going to get used up talking about the nature of stories, which is great for me, as it's just the kind of meta-commentary I like doing.

In fact, I like it so much that I'm going to start now.  In my defence, that's because this is the point where Carey started as well, or at least where he brought it to the surface.  Lucifer concerned itself with many themes over the course of its run - hence why this series of posts exists - but as the Morningstar began to set more and more time was dedicated to the meaning stories have upon our lives, to the point where it's difficult in the extreme not to conclude Carey realised what he was going to write next once it started bleeding in to what he was doing at the time.

Essentially, the intertwined "Stitchglass Slide" and "Wire, Briar, Limber Lock" represent the stage at which Carey stops merely telling stories, and begins to pull them apart and reassemble them.

(Spoilers below)

Selah

One of the nice things about Mike Carey as a writer is the effort he puts into identifying the purpose of so many of his stories, saving me time and effort.  Take "Brothers in Arms", for example, the thirteenth arc of Lucifer.  When at the conclusion to the first issue Lucifer catches sight of this week's terrifying threat to all creation and says "I'd have expected the comic interlude to come further down the bill", the reader knows exactly what's going on.  After the six-part "Naglfar", crowded as it was with untold destruction and cosmic angst, it's time to kick our feet up and have a bit of a chuckle.

The Vogage Home

(Part I)

It is of course entirely fitting that a new era should start with Michael and Lucifer, just as it did eons ago.  For those who put stock in literary allusion, one could argue this suggests more than the middle point of Lucifer, but rather the centre of Creation itself, but we'll find out soon enough whether or not that holds water.  Let's focus on what we can see right now; Lucifer is once more arguing that Michael owes nothing to his Father and, after the death of his daughter, Michael is a little less opposed to the idea than he once was. And with the demon Scoria having gone to such lengths to bore his way into the mind of God, it would be almost rude not to go take a peek.

But if this new stage in the story is about Lucifer and Michael arguing about what lessons to draw from God, and what actions to take in response, one can feel justified in asking how much of what is going on is revelation, and how much is repetition?  Again, if we engage in the reading of portents, it can't bode well that as the two archangels travel to the Realms of Pain to make use of Scoria's machine, the Naglfar finds itself beset by the spirits of those angels killed during the original War in Heaven [1]. Nor can it be particularly welcome news when the two travellers dive into their Father's mind - Michael hesitantly, Lucifer with eagerness - only to find that this, too, Yahweh had always known would come to pass.

These Are The Voyages...

(So after last time's two issue breeze, this thing is five issues long, and stuffed with enough to talk about that I'm stretching this over two posts).

The thing about stories is that eventually, they have to end.  And because they have to end, they also have to reach their middle.

Everything has an exact centre, whether it be measured by run time, page count, or number of installments. This is axiomatic.  What is less common is for that middle to be entirely obvious at the time it arrives, rather than in hindsight. You can highlight such things numerically, of course: "Part three of five", but doing so thematically is an exceptionally tricky proposition.

It is my contention that "Naglfar", the halfway point of Lucifer in terms of its 75-issue run, does a better job of announcing the arrival of the series' Lagrange point than almost any other series. The Morningstar's struggle against his Creator is an existential game of two halves, and this is when the half-time oranges are consumed, along with much else. As Lucifer himself puts it in the story's final part: "The rules of engagement have changed."

Judgment On The Day Before

Right, this isn't going to take long.

"Come To Judgement", the tenth story arc in Lucifer, isn't one that particularly lends itself to thorough, expansive analysis.  A great deal of that is simply because it's so short - only two issues long, though "Bearing Gifts", the single-issue story that precedes it, works best when considered a prologue.  Just as important, though, is the fact that, relatively speaking, really not all that much happens in it. A man claiming to be God's own gumshoe investigates Elaine Belloc's murder, and Lucifer bribes and threatens his way through Norse backwaters to get himself a ship.  Plot-wise, there's little more to be said.

It's similarly barren thematically, at least so far as I can see.  Oddly, though, I don't mean that as a criticism, because the extreme simplicity of what we're seeing works to underline the one point these issues are insisting we see.  This is not a story.  It is a warning.

The Bonfire Of The Vanities

When last we delved into the story of Lucifer, we considered the nature of absence. Absence, as I argued, is simply the presence of some other concept, or some other state of mind. This is why Lucifer's insistence that there is nothing he wishes to acquire is entirely reasonable on its face, but distinctly lacking when you dig into it.

Death has already worked this out, of course, but further ruminations on this subject will have to wait. Lucifer has an appointment to keep in Hell, and whatever else one might want to say about him (quietly, for fear he may hear you), the Morningstar is a not someone to keep his enemies waiting.

Complements

Mathematicians learn, fairly early on in their intellectual development, that presence and absence are the exact same thing, simply observed from opposite directions.  To a more reality-based mind (and anyone who argues maths is reality based simply hasn't done enough maths to know what they're talking about), there are sights and sounds and tastes in abundance that distinguish what we have from what we don't have, but in the realm of sets and closures and numbers both rational and otherwise, an outline is an outline, and it doesn't really matter on which side of it you're standing.  The train tracks from one to the other go both ways, after all.

If "Paradiso" was about what Lucifer has, then, either what he's gained from his new universe or imported from his own one (which is far more than he wants to admit to), then "Purgatorio" deals with what he lacks.  And not just him, by any means.

Every character in fiction can be broken down according to four criteria: what they have and want, what they have but don't want, what they are trying to acquire, and what they are trying to avoid.  Lucifer has said right from the very beginning that there is nothing he is trying to acquire (that's why the Voiceless Gods were unable to influence him) and that nothing he has is of any interest to him (or so he keeps insisting to Mazikeen, at any rate).  Nor is the fear or losing anything something he would or could ever admit to.  What drives Lucifer - or, more to the point, what he says drives him - is simply the desire to be rid of those things he does not desire.

Before The Fall

“If one is a prisoner of love, must one escape to solitude?” – Lorien, Babylon 5

The first three Lucifer books have done their jobs magnificently. The scene has been set, and destiny and freedom will be our themes.

As we’ve discussed before, Lucifer sees these two concepts as mutually exclusive. One cannot have freedom if one’s movements are known in advance. Free will is merely an illusion. For some, that illusion suffices – what does it matter that Destiny knows the final reel if neither you nor anyone you ever meet is privy to that knowledge – but for Lucifer, only the genuine article could ever be acceptable.

Now that he has moved beyond the scope of Destiny’s book, then, the question becomes: what now?

Escaping from the shadow of his father, our Father – both by escaping His reality and ensuring that he now casts his own shadow, equally large - was certainly sine qua non as far as the Lightbringer was concerned, but necessity is not sufficiency. What comes next in Lucifer’s all-consuming quest to be free?

Lucifer: A Dalliance With The Damned

 
"...Attrition amongst my enemies tends to be high.  And the few I've got left are beneath consideration."

One of the bravest decisions Mike Carey made when writing Lucifer involves how much of it isn't actually directly about the eponymous fallen angel.  This is quite frequently a risky strategy - people, after all, tend to like knowing what they're going to get - but I would think it's especially fraught with peril when your ostensible protagonist is as powerful and all-pervading as the Devil Himself.

In truth, there is less evidence of this in the first two novels, either because Carey was still deciding how to tell his story, or because he wanted to set up the ground rules first.  Frankly, I can easily believe the latter.  Between them, Devil in the Gateway and Children and Monsters established the cast of characters, the desires and attitude of Lucifer, and the price he would exact from those that crossed him.  In addition, they set up the board quite nicely as well, ending with the birth of Lucifer's Creation.

Triptych was our first clue that the Devil was not goimg to be our exclusive focus, concerning itself as it did with the potential paths of Mazikeen, Elaine Belloc, and the new Creation itself.  A Dalliance With The Damned is similar in at least one important respect: it's focus is not on Lucifer, but on those people whose lives intersect with his.

Lucifer: Three Of A Kind

Is it through planning or simply happy coincidence that the third book of Lucifer begins with "Triptych"? It seems oddly in keeping with the comic itself that we can't be sure.  Certainly, the word is of crucial importance. These stories do not form a trilogy, nor a mere trio. Triptychs come in three parts as well, of course, but always the centre is the anchor, the root, and commonly the largest - or at least most important - piece.

Perhaps then it is puzzling that the central story should not be Lucifer's, but Elaine's.  Even beyond his position as eponymous character, Lucifer is engaged in the rather weighty matter of crafting a new universe.  For that matter, Mazikeen is on trial, possibly for her life.  In such surroundings, a tale of a little girl, whatever her provenance, searching for her dead friend might perhaps seem of somewhat small importance.

But then that's the problem.  You can't say "Apart from her provenance Elaine is unimportant" any more you can say "Apart from its water, the ocean is dry".  Elaine's ancestry is critical here, because it directly outlines what these three stories are all about: potential.

Turning Children Into Monsters

The initial trio of stories is now complete. We know who Lucifer is, what he wants, and exactly how really, really killed you'll be if you get in his way. It's time to raise the stakes.

No surprise what the theme is this time around: children and monsters, and how one becomes the other. We're given the answer very early on, actually, in the prologue to the story proper. Being trapped in the womb for 4 000 years, murdered each morning by miscarriage; that's the kind of thing you'd expect to fuck a kid up. Trapped in time and inside its mother, the foetus becomes something monstrous, a mindless killer, violent frustration personified.

Right from the start, then, we understand one thing very clearly: being trapped is bad.

This is important, because pretty much everyone in Children And Monsters' four issues are exactly that. The idea toyed with in A Six-Card Spread - that defining your life by your opposition to God is no less liberating than living entirely according to God's will - is back full force. This time, though, the point is generalised. We're no longer just talking about the way we define ourselves with regard to our God, but how we define ourselves with regard to our fathers.

For four of the characters in this story, of course, the two things are the same. Two, Michael and Amenadiel, are still loyal members of the Host. Two, Lucifer and Sandalphon, are renegades. All of them, though, are caught in the same trap. Living according to the boundaries their father has set. Obsessing over the rules their God has laid down for the cosmos.

Obviously, this preoccupation takes different forms for each. Amenadiel is sanguine and combative, a man desperately trying to please an absent father by travelling further and further along the path he is convinced his maker wants him to follow. Digging himself deeper and deeper under a mound of corpses. He negotiates with the Cherubim to alleviate the body count, but there is little doubt that he did so only to increase the chances of gaining the full support of the Host, and none whatsoever that he would have proceeded without them if necessary; killed anyone he had to in order to get to Lucifer. He spends untold numbers of angels in the attack, torn apart by Musubi's blades or swallowed whole by the ravenous spirit of Erishad's child, and he does it without blinking. He is doing his Father's work.

Sandalphon is the mirror image of Amenadiel; so unswerving, blindly dedicated to creating his army with which to raze Heaven the world has become reduced to a series of opportunities, obstacles, and irrelevances. He despises his father so much he is willing to sacrifice his children whenever it becomes convenient; indeed his master plan absolutely requires it. For him, this has never been about anything other than power. He moves his pawns, and mocks Michael for hesitating to kill his own brother. Where Lucifer wished only to be untouched by the power of others, Sandalphon wants that power for himself, but it comes to the same thing in the end. The sons must be rid of their father.

Caught in their traps, the children become monsters.

All appearances to the contrary, Michael actually begins the story free. He is chained in a pit by Sandalphon, yes, but that very fact allows him to exist outside his duty to God. Alone amongst the four angels, he is given the choice to be free, ironically enough by Lucifer, but chooses to return to service in the Silver City. He willingly walks back into the trap.

But can it be a trap if it is entered willingly? Is that the secret? Is that why Michael hesitated, why he did not become a monster? Perhaps. Nevertheless, he would undoubtedly have been more free in the second Creation. But if Micheal would been free had he stayed with Lucifer in his new cosmos, then how can Lucifer still be trapped?

It's because Lucifer has made a mistake. It will take him a long time to realise it, but he has erred. He has become a God in his own cosmos, because he believes that alone amongst the inhabitants of Creation, only God is free. Therefore, Lucifer needs his own reality to rule over, so that no-one can rule over him.

This, though, is faulty logic. The Morningstar knows that in a cosmos controlled by God, no-one else can be free. What he has missed is that whilst being God is a necessary condition for being free, there is no reason to believe it is also sufficient. Preventing everyone else from liberty does not guarantee that liberty for oneself. This is particularly true for Lucifer, who has progressed from defining himself in total opposition to God to instead simply setting up a rival business, offering the same product in different packaging. Some call Lucifer a monster already - he might not even trouble to argue the point. But things could get worse. Things can always get worse.

Having said all that, though, what alternatives are there? Even now, sixty issues and five years before Lucifer comes to the end of his journey, the solution seems to lie within Elaine. Almost every other character in this drama, from Lucifer to Cal, seems destined for ruination, either from blindly following or instinctively resisting the influences of their father. Elaine, though, has five father figures to juggle. There's the man she calls father, who took her in as a child, the one she spent her whole life believing had provided exactly half of the pieces necessary to build a jigsaw with her face upon it. There is the man who believes himself her true father, whose seed created the tiny cluster of cells which was pulled and twisted and kneaded and sculpted until it took her shape. Then we have Sandalphon and Michael, angels fallen or broken, the will and the fact behind her existence. That's a hell of a lot to contend with, even before we consider the fact that Elaine's grandmothers are disembodied bile-green immortal witches, and her grandfather gave birth to reality itself.

That's four. The fifth, perhaps surprisingly, is Lucifer himself. Certainly she cares more for him than the haggard, sleep-plagued man who travels across he ocean to meet her. And whilst Samael had no role in creating her, he has saved her life twice, and a life saved is a life given, after all. Lucifer might not return he affection - he has Mazikeen to kiss, and, like, loads of centaurs to make - but that doesn't seem to matter.

Perhaps that's what makes Elaine different - she doesn't seem particularly concerned about what she gets in return. Her life is about who she loves, not about what she believes she does or does not deserve from them, or how they can or must be forced to give them what they want or need. Perhaps having five father figures makes it impossible define yourselves within their intersection of their Venn diagram, any more than she could lie outside all five circles at once. Alternatively, it might be something within human nature that the angels, loyalist or rebel, cannot grasp. Or, in the end, it may simply be that Elaine is special, that though she keeps company with ghosts and witches and angels, it is she who is remarkable.

In other words, perhaps Elaine is an answer to a question Lucifer has yet to think to ask. In either case, Samael has created two things by the end of this story. His interest is fixed firmly upon his new universe, but somewhere in London, something else is growing inside a sleeping schoolgirl.

The story of Lucifer is now the story of Lucifer and Elaine.

Lucifer: No Friends Of The Devil

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There are probably any number of ways to consider Lucifer's third arc (I'm including the initial mini-series, natch), but one fruitful angle is to approach The House of Windowless Rooms as the final part of an introductory trilogy. The Morningstar Option outlined Lucifer’s motivations. A Six-Card Spread demonstrated his methodology. The House... completes our welcoming tour by showing us exactly what awaits those that get in his way.

We had an early taste of this in the fate of Meleos’ library, of course. And Lucifer’s bearing has never given us any doubt that crossing him would be profoundly unwise. Still, clearly Izanami requires a reminder of exactly how dangerous Lucifer is, and it’s important for us to see him in action against an opponent more powerful than a heartbroken pacifistic angel. There was the Basanos, of course, but that at its core was a business negotiation, albeit an unquestionably dangerous one.

The House... presents us with something very different. This isn’t about negotiation, it’s about battle. Actually, it’s about two battles, one over the Morningstar’s wings, and the other over his gate.

The difference between the two is striking. Lucifer enters Izanami’s domain unarmed, naked and mortal, and gains his wings without any more inconvenience to himself than the ruining of his borrowed lapels. In contrast, Mazikeen’s defence of the gate has her blinded and horribly burned, Lux razed to the ground, and the survival of Creation only ensured by the interference of Jill Presto and the Basanos.

One can argue at length whose conflict was the harder; a sociopathic, headstrong Lilim against two Jin En Mok, or a wingless, mortal Lucifer against a family of murderous Japanese Gods. What is unquestionable is that Lucifer’s approach is light years away from Mazikeen’s endless headlong charges into combat (note how Mazikeen’s two victories in fighting Saul and Cestis come from trickery and lateral thinking). Lucifer has no problem with violence when necessary – as attested to by the off-screen fate of the hapless Ritsime – but his preferred tack is a good deal more subtle, if no less fatal.

Generally, Lucifer’s tack, and his strength, lies in assessing a situation, and taking the route out no-one else expected. To him, there is no Catch-22. He is frequently offered two or more equally unappetising choices; fight a demon or push his hands into molten lead; offend his hosts by eating a sacred animal or offend them by refusing to eat at all; sit at any chair in a circle that will lead to Kagutsuchi claiming he has chosen a chair above him. A Hobson’s choice, each one, but in every case Samael takes some new route unconsidered by his opponents.

Of course, this is entirely unsurprising. Who else could be so skilled at evading the apparent dictates of fate as the Morningstar, whose entire existence is dedicated to escaping what lies in the cards (we are reminded again of his distaste for the Basanos, even if once again we note him acting on the information they gave him and he claimed to find irrelevant)? It is not only the edicts of God he wriggles free from, after all. The machinations of these Japanese deities, whose obsession with stealing worship in order to survive must profoundly disgust him (as evidenced by his curt dismissal of Tsuki-Yomi’s fears as the latter lies bleeding from the wound of the Three-Named Sword, as well as his cold poisoning of Kagutsuchi), are navigated also, and rather more easily. Even games of chance disagree with him, as Izanami’s gatekeeper learns to his cost. Randomness is anathema to fate, perhaps, but they still represent what Lucifer despises: a lack of control. The Devil, we learn, does not play dice, though one imagines he would be rather good at it.

Although I suspect it is rather unfair to do so, I sometimes find myself comparing Lucifer to its parent series Sandman. More specifically, one can consider the progress of Lucifer’s arc with that of Morpheus. When one considers Sandman in light of Morpheus’ eventual fate, it is clear that his doom was set in motion early on. One could say the same of Lucifer, perhaps (I still have two books to read, so this must be taken with a hefty dose of salt). In truth, though, we had to learn of Morpheus’ inflexibility as we went along. Labelling Lucifer’s fatal flaw as his arrogance seems positively banal, an assumption one could make without so much as glancing at Carey’s work.

Nevertheless, what is unsurprising is not commonly untrue. What is interesting is not realising that arrogance will be Lucifer’s downfall, but how exactly it will happen. Here, we see Lucifer’s almost pathological need to insult those who oppose him bring him to within an inch of being stung to death by a demon of the Shiko-Me. Perhaps there was no other way to regain his wings, but without his casual contempt with which he treats Susano and Yama-No-Kami, to say nothing of his murder of Kagutsuchi, perhaps Izanami would have chosen a less vicious revenge than the poisoning of Lucifer’s feathers.

The true demonstration of Samael’s flaw, however, is in his exchange with Jill Presto when he returns to the smoking ruins of his nightclub. His snide dismissal of the Basanos not only risks another confrontation he has no real need of, but reveals something critical: Lucifer would rather lose alone than win through the intervention of others. If he cannot be in Lux to defend it, better it fall than it be propped up by those who are not bound to him.

Like Morpheus, or Gandalf, or Dumbledore, Lucifer cannot be everywhere at once. Lucifer is power, but he is not control (again, this comes as no surprise). Given his plans for the void beyond Creation that is – for now – his private playground, one can only assume that things have the potential to go very, very badly.

First, though, he has need of one thing more. He has Mazikeen and Musubi both to aid him on this side of the gate. But the other side must be guarded too. We shall talk more on that next time around.

Lucifer: A Six Card Spread

No-one can accuse Mike Carey of not thinking big. After spending his three issue introductory mini-series considering humanity’s desires by comparing them with those of the Devil, the demons, and the mad formless Gods we created with our own birth-pangs, the first tale of Lucifer proper ponders two questions: does anyone have free will? And if not, do we have anyone to blame but ourselves?

The Morningstar, as we discussed last time, needs freedom on a fundamental level that is difficult to understand by a species generally more concerned about where the next breath is coming from. Remiel is good enough to remind us of this in the first three pages: “Freedom is his obsession.” That’s how he’s ended up clutching a letter of passage from creation itself in his cool, smooth hands. Because for all his power it turns out that being essentially the firstborn of Yahweh hasn’t offered him the opportunity to be free. Perhaps even less chance, actually, if you consider that being higher up the celestial food chain means God will take a greater interest in your actions and affairs. In that sense, freedom is the knowledge of God’s complete disinterest, which of course in Lucifer’s case is genuinely impossible. I’m not sure he entirely realises it at this point, but the wood is certainly there, lost between the trees:

Twice now, I’ve walked out on him. And then both times I’ve let him recast me... and every time I try to improvise I find my moves were right there in the script all along.

If Lucifer cannot secure God’s disinterest, he will have to settle for rendering that interest toothless:

His omniscience only works because there is no alternative. I see that now.

Lucifer may be closer to the truth than he realises. After all, how can one conspire to escape when every conceivable tool was forged by your captor? I always thought the melodramatic moustache-twirling necromancers so favoured in lowest-common-denominator fantasy were idiots; trying to force order on the world through the application of something so fundamentally chaotic as the kind of magic that will raise the dead is clearly never going to work. The tools are by definition useless – if not counter-productive – to the task at hand.

Obviously, I wouldn’t want to call Lucifer an idiot to his face or anything, and of course he himself is aware of the contradiction, but does that make his attempts to find a loophole any less futile?

Regardless, Lucifer’s current tool of choice is the Basanos, a spectacularly powerful tarot deck created by one of his fellow fallen angels, Meleos. Inspired and informed by the book maintained by Destiny of the Endless, the Basanos proves deeply problematic on several levels.

The first is the most obvious: the Basanos crave freedom as much as Lucifer does, and have some fairly unpleasant ideas regarding what to do when they get it. The second problem is more complex. The Basanos, by their very nature, are an attempt to read the future. Meleos does not quite describe them in those terms, admittedly - his obsession has always been the past, much to Lucifer’s irritation – but both their provenance and their form makes the truth clear. And if the future can be read, can it really be changed? More to the point, can you ever actually be free of it? Lastly, does knowing it make you less free?

Perhaps the answer to that is dependent upon how one understands the concept of the future in the first place, whether it is literally unpredictable, or only unpredictable for the perspective of our limited conception. Personally, I find the idea of free will hard to grasp because I tend to think of each slice of Planck time experienced by the universe is entirely determined by the slice that came before. As I understand it the jury is still out on whether there truly are certain subatomic processes that can be truly called random, and one could colour an argument which says, conditional on their existence, such processes might, like the apocryphal storm-calling butterfly, lead to genuinely unpredictable configurations. Over the course of a single human lifespan, though, it seems unlikely to me that we’re truly anything more than the sum of our genes and our past experiences, driving us in the only direction we ever could have travelled. That might not be “destiny”, per se, for me that word implies outside interference, or at least the ability to observe the paths that stretch out ahead of us. But – to channel my father for a second - it sure ain’t free will, either, pal.

Whether or not this is how the Basanos see it, I don’t know. Well, perhaps not entirely. When Jill is suffused with their power, she sees peoples lives:

Their past straight like a wire. The future branching into a million filaments.

Of course, the fact that those filaments exist, like thousands of cats inside thousands of boxes, doesn’t mean that one of them hasn’t already been chosen already. When the Oracle tells Neo – in one of the few decent scenes in The Matrix: Reloaded –that “You didn’t come here to make the choice. You’ve already made it”, this is what she’s talking about. Free will is supposedly about what we could do, but the point where we get into what we could do and out of what we will do is always some way down the track, assuming it exists at all.

In any case, if The Morningstar Option was about the Devil claiming he alone wanted for nothing (or at least nothing the Velliety could offer), A Six Card Spread sees him insisting (not explicitly, of course, this is Lucifer we’re talking about here) that he alone is not bound by his past.

This is relevant because if the overall message of the story is not that the future must be determined by the past, then it must be that the whilst the future can be divorced from history, humanity almost invariable conspires to prevent that happening. Why else would the events surrounding Lucifer’s arrival in Hamburg at the turn of the millennium bear such uncanny, dreadful similarity to the early stages of Nazi Germany? Hell, not even that; it’s uncanny, dreadful similarity to a film that replicated those events. If history repeats itself as farce, that doesn’t mean those farces can’t be dangerous. "There is no present, of future, only the past, happening over and over again, now”, Eugene O'Neill said, and he should know.

Meleos too is trapped by his past. Again, this is both literally true – his greatest mistake is buried beneath his library and whispering poison on a daily basis - and accurate on another level as well. Meleos is so concerned with chronicling humanity (“Are they not wonderful, these humans with their mayfly lives and mad dreams?”), so obsessed with recording our memories, that he fails to recognise or work against the agony those memories cause, or the vicious tendency for that pain to replicate itself in the lives of others. It’s only after his library is wiped clean by Lucifer that he is forced to watch humanity itself rather than simply studying its trail, and almost immediately it horrifies him. Cynically speaking, of course, that means he finally understands:

One more piece of brutality makes no difference, I know. But it seems so typical. It seems to sum up so much.

What else can two million years of violence lead to, except for the next act of violence, and the one after that?

The Basanos understand this completely. Their sick games of twisting fate – their “only imperative” -are entirely predicated upon it. Inevitably, they attempt to bring about that next act of violence. Not by speaking of violence, naturally, but by preaching of “justice” and “retribution”, as such monsters always do. Their aim is to reduce the flow of history to a drunkard running across a see-saw, trying endlessly to balance himself by constantly changing the direction in which he is charging pointlessly forward. They take the easiest, cruellest, and most solipsistic of decisions possible and present it as the right choice. As Innocence herself says, “Those who believe in free will make the best puppets of all.”

So where does this leave Lucifer, whilst Meleos awakes, and all of Hamburg slips into the endless cycle of "justice" humanity never seems able to escape? Well, Meleos once told him, whilst the war in Heaven was still raging and he was posing as a model for one of Meleos' Basanos cards, that:

The mind and soul trace the the line that the hand must follow. But the movements that the hand does not make matter just as much. The drawing must subsume all undrawn lines and all potential figures into a perfect stasis.

Simply put, we are not defined merely by what we've done, but by what we haven't done. Not just by what our past has led us to, but by what it has led us to avoid. Escaping God is no different from embracing God, insofar as both as their root are defined by God. One could argue that the former includes the possibility that one could eventually escape enough, but then that's what everyone tells themselves about everything, forever. One more act of escape, we tell ourselves. Then the next. And the next.

In truth, to the independent observer it appears that Lucifer seems to be attempting a pretty balancing act of his own. He demands the prophecies of the Basanos, but then mocks the ones he receives unasked for. In part, this may well be because he is smart enough not to trust the cards (though it's interesting that he complains only after the fact), but one wonders whether he is also unable to bring himself to accept there is any way to predict what his next actions can be. We are reminded early on that "A man gains his first measure of wisdom when he admits his ignorance", but as we've talked about before, wisdom and freedom have a funny habit of working against each other.

On the other hand, absolute ignorance won't get you very far either. If free will exists anywhere, and if it's to mean anything at all, the landscape of the future must not be entirely mapped, but nor can it be wholly unexplored. The past cannot be obsessed over or idolised, but nor can it be entirely rejected.
In the end, it may be poor old Meleos, forced now to remember the past rather than store it, who may have learned the right lessons. As he tells Carl, the desperate youth so determined to deny his own sexuality he’s joined a worthless neo-Nazi street gang:

Atonement is at best a journey of uncertain length to an uncertain destination. But so is revenge, of course. We both embrace our own destruction.

Perhaps he is speaking directly to Carl. More likely, his message is for Lucifer, or for us. The key lies not with securing your destination, but with choosing your direction. Letting your mind and soul draw the line, with the past neither your master nor your foe, but your guide.

As the story ends Lucifer stands in the gateway that leads out of creation, jammed open against the trickery of God (and whatever the long-term philosophical ramifications of seeking the aid of the Basanos, clearly it was undeniably a good idea to double-check the Word of God), and casually discussing the possibility of the apocalypse. In truth, it is enough to conclude, even at this early stage, that Lucifer has made his decision.

Whether he realises that, of course, remains to be seen…

Devil's Due

It is perhaps ironic, considering how much time I have spent in the last week reading Lucifer, but recently I have been presented with a revelation.

Much metaphorical ink has been metaphorically spilt upon this blog regarding my problem with characters. My esteemed flatmate remains convinced to this day that anything that could even be vaguely described as a "character piece" will cause me to shriek my lungs out of my throat out in violent paroxysms of frustrated boredom. It is not a theory that lacks for circumstantial evidence.

For a while now I've been arguing that my problem is not with characterisation per se - only the most unobservant of judges could find me guilty of adrenaline addiction - it is simply that I cannot enjoy the company of characters who I dislike, however cleverly they are assembled. Reading Lucifer, however, I realised that isn't the whole truth. Just as with plots, where those that are best are almost always concerned with something other than what they look like they're concerned with: the relevant issue is this: is the character actually about something?

Lucifer is about a great deal, and this is what, in whole or in part, makes him possibly the greatest comic book character going. What better way to celebrate my new interest in characterisation, then, than to discuss the gentleman in question?

Whilst reading Lucifer Volume 5 this weekend (for the first time, despite the comic reaching its conclusion in 2006), I was struck by something I had never realised before. I've known for a while, as an entirely banal conclusion and an entirely unoriginal idea, that Carey's comic restates the battle between Heaven and Hell, making it not Good versus Evil but Fate versus Free Will. It was only late on Sunday night that it occurred to me - and hopefully this is a somewhat less commonly considered point- that Lucifer is the world's most dangerous Buddhist.

Once this realisation dawned, there was really nothing to be done but return to the start and read the whole thing again. Sure enough, this angle springs up right at the very beginning, in Carey's three-part The Sandman Presents: Lucifer mini, referred to henceforth as the (slightly) less cumbersome The Morningstar Option. What follows is therefore a discussion of that story. The chances are good that I will discuss other Lucifer stories further down the line, but we'll start here, and see how we go.

Aaron Sorkin, without question my all-time favourite purveyor of liberal porn, once said the following on the subject of creating characters:

Stockard had done an episode of the show as the First Lady ... She took me out to lunch and said she really liked doing the show and wanted to do more and started asking me questions like, 'Who do you think this character is?' And those aren’t questions I can answer. [As a writer] I can only answer, what do they want?

I'm sure that works for him, but it's worth noting that the above approach wouldn't really get you anywhere with Lucifer. Much as the more fevered sections of my fanboy brain might squeal with ecstasy at the thought of the West Wing playing host to the The Prince of the East ("We have a job approval of 48% and Congress is one bad day away from burning this place to the ground, do we really want to be the first administration in history to show Satan round the Rose Garden?"), one assumes that Sorkin could have given nothing for Samael to say. Lucifer cannot be defined by what he wants. He doesn't want anything. The only thing that matters when considering Lucifer is this: what does he need?

To the best of my knowledge, pretty much everyone claims to want free will. Not everyone believes they have it, and there is a remarkable tendency amongst otherwise intelligent people to justify the mistakes they make and people they damage by claiming they never had any other choice (see Midnight Nation for a fairly long discussion of this point, particularly in issue #4, ironically - or perhaps perfectly - entitled The Devil You Know), but so far as I am aware, the number of people who believe they have a destiny is fairly small, and the number who believe they have a destiny they don't actually want is smaller still. The question these three issues asks us is whether, in fact, we do want free will, or do we actually need it on some primal level?

Historically, I think people have been fairly poor at telling the difference between want and need, or at least fairly poor at admitting the difference, to each other but especially to themselves. In The Morningstar Option, though, the difference becomes rather obvious once the Velleity starts granting wishes to all those who are silent or insane enough to ask.

Or at least, the difference should become rather obvious. The Velleity has shifted the question. We can discover the truth of the matter simply by studying what it is that the Voiceless Gods are prepared to offer.

Consider the origin of the Velleity. The Voiceless Gods, remember, were birthed by the very first humans, who lacked the words they needed to give form or structure to their desires. That very much implies they trade in the coin of need. Need is more basic, more fundamental than want. We need food, and water, and air to breathe. Our hearts desire, but requirement is in our bones. If the Voiceless were born out of our need to survive, perhaps then they have returned to us in order to perform the same function.

Immediately, though, this line of thinking raises a new question. Why have they returned, here and now? Those of the Dineh crawled from their jet-black realm millenia ago. Who or what can be blamed for re-conjuring them?

Surely, it must be want. When man first found his voice, he used it to list his desires. When that happened, he began to worship other Gods, those that would not give him what he needed, but what he wanted. A ripe harvest. A happy marriage. A life untroubled by war or pestilence or famine, and with death kept at bay for as long as possible. It is this world, in which we have developed a thousand or more ways to demand or beg for what we desire from the fabric of the universe that the Voiceless Ones have returned to; either because we're screaming our demands louder than ever before, or because there are simply so many voices in the selfish chorus. And since we found those voices, all those centuries ago, the Voiceless Ones can now have their own as well. They can think. They can reason. They can see how the game is played, in their own limited way. The fact that the world cannot withstand what they are offering in exchange for worship is irrelevant to them. They have no thought for what they need, only for what they want. We created them before, and we shape them now. One might hope they recognise the irony, but then that would presumably require people to see the irony themselves, which isn't something I'd be willing to put much money on.

So now the Voiceless Gods offer us what we want. In a sense, this is obvious almost from the first page. A man runs down the street, clutching a bag overflowing with money. A gift from the Velleity. Does he need it? The radio report we hear moments later suggests not. Perhaps it is reasonable to say money is something to be enjoyed, but it is certainly not to be depended on. It is not something we need, though of course it is in many ways the only way to get what we need, at least most of the time - maybe it should be framed as "We need money, we want wealth". And if there remained any doubt upon which side of the divide the Voiceless Gods rest, one need only consider Lucifer's quandary; how does one fight the pure expression of want when one wants absolutely nothing?

This is what sets Lucifer apart from everyone else in the story, and why fate and free will are so integral to everything that takes place within. Only a few pages after his introduction, Lucifer sums up his position on God impressively succinctly: "You'd think part of omniscience would be knowing when to stop." This dedication to self-determination is also why I label him a Buddhist. I do so with tongue firmly in cheek, of course. Lucifer might be on the same quest, but it's hard to put it mildly to reconcile him with the Buddha's teachings, even if I realised as I re-read these comics that he never actually kills anyone (he threatens, but in the grand old Satanic tradition he suggests it is other things that will do the deed: "my dropping you won't kill you; the fall will do that"). The point though is that Lucifer needs nothing except to be free to make his own choices. He needs free will. He does not want it, it is a basic requirement, the only one he has. The only reason he does anything but simply exist. It is the only motivation, though it acts as the root for any number of corollaries of action and attitude. Certainly, it is the only reason he takes up Yahweh's mission of destroying the Velleity. It will get him what he needs. Had he merely wanted it, he could have simply wished for it when he faced them in their blind forests. Instead, and this is absolutely fundamental, he realises the process of acquiring what one wants actually became a barrier to getting what is needed.

Hence: Buddhism. The removal of desire. The attempt to expunge every little voice in your head that claims you only need this or that to improve your life, and that all that stands between you and happiness is the distance from here to the latest bauble you've set your gaze upon. Lucifer understands, perhaps better than anyone else in God's Creation, that desire will trap you in the end (just ask Dream). This is reinforced by almost every other character in the story. Briadach and Mahu are so busy demanding their right to inherit the Earth that they can think of nothing else, other than their own pain. Their absolute obsession with a day that will never come precludes any possibility of choosing a better path, their stasis so unassailable that Briadach actually takes comfort in Mahu's breath-taking lack of curiosity, considering it a universal constant. As understandable and heartbreaking as his actions are, Mr Begai's refusal to believe his Rett syndrome-afflicted son will recover prevents him from accepting the situation for what it is - unchangeable, but not unbearable. Amenadiel might claim to be a willing servant of God, but every word he chokes out demonstrates his hatred of what he is doing. Ramiel is already overwhelmed by the stewardship of Hell - a stewardship, let us not forget, that made Lucifer cut off his wings rather than continue - and quickly finds he has no choice but to obey both God and Lucifer, whenever the whim of either takes them. Even the truck driver who brings Lucifer and Rachel to Mount Taylor has been forced into Pharamond's service because he owes the latter money.

If you define your life by what you want you won't be free until you get it, and the instant you do, you'll just choose the next thing you want to chain yourself to. That's to say nothing of the consequences that radiate outwards from each acquisition, or each failed chase, which conspire to bind you still further. As I say, people are very good at ignoring the consequences before they hit, and denying them (wishing them away) when they wash over us, or even threaten to drown us (note Lucifer pointing out to Rachel that whilst she believes she is drowning as they pass to the third world, she in fact is not), but they are always there, limiting your choices next time around. Mahu wants the Earth too much to live in it. The truck driver, subconsciously or otherwise, exchanged his freedom for whatever it was he used Pharamond's money to buy. The Velleity itself wants to be worshipped, even if the gifts if offers in exchange will destroy its worshippers, both actual and potential, and presumably by extension itself. I don't believe for a second that it's coincidence that only that Duma, Angel of the Silences, seems to have any leeway in how he deals with the situation; for he alone is as Voiceless as we were when we first clambered down from the trees and realised we could kill each other faster with a stone in each hand. If he wants anything, it is known only to himself.

All of this, by the way, is why Rachel is so important to his chances of success. Yes, she serves as a guide, her Navajo heritage getting him to the Fourth World, but there is more:

Rachel: Pharamond said we could come up here because I'm Navajo. Is that the only reason you brought me? Because you couldn't get in by yourself?

Lucifer: No. Not the only reason.

The vital truth about Rachel is that in her, alone amongst the characters in the story, what she wants and what she needs has become inextricably entwined. She wished herself free of her brother; his inability to walk or speak made him a stone around her neck, stopped her from being free. But, ironically and inevitably, her wish makes her less free still, for now she feels she needs to return him to life, to undo her acquisition of what she wanted. But does she want him back? Or does she need him back? Or is it neither; does she claim she needs him back, but in actuality simply needs to demonstrate that she tried. Does she need to attempt the quest but actually want to fail?

Perhaps only in such confusion can one wish for what one needs, when one is distracted enough to follow the fundamental principles of one's make-up. Only by being unable to voice what she wants, by not having the words she needs to formulate what that would be, can she end up asking for what she needs instead. And what she needs, like everyone else, turns out to be freedom.

It is perhaps for this reason that Lucifer tolerates her insolence as far as he does - the truck driver ends up permanently impotent for arguably far less disrespect. In Rachel, though, there is the tiniest spark of something he recognises; someone who isn't afraid to wander the dark places to get what they need. It is also why his betrayal is less vicious than it at first appears:

Rachel: So how do I get Paul back?

Lucifer: You don't. It's too late now.

Rachel: But you... you said...

Lucifer: I said I'd give you an opportunity. Not step-by-step instructions.

It is true that Lucifer could have told Rachel how to get her brother back. And yes, there are unquestionably selfish reasons as to why he didn't - though even chance to recover her brother is more than she would have had without The Morningstar - but there is more, here. Had Lucifer articulated her choice, Rachel would have been reduced to choosing what it was she wanted. The only way to avoid that choice is to not realise you are making it.

Before we go any further, let me state the obvious; I am not arguing it is better Rachel be free of the responsibility of accidentally killing her brother than she manage to return him to life. I am simply saying that it was what she needed, and it has left her free. The instant she has that freedom, however, she throws it away. She pledges her life to the task of first gaining the power to defeat Lucifer, and then using it. As he walks away, he chides her for submitting to the melodrama (actually, for no longer keeping her head above it, another reference to drowning or smothering) that had consumed everyone else in this affair, but he might as well be criticising her willingness to return to the blind, ugly cycle of scrabbling to find what we think we want, rather than allowing herself to remain free.

That brings us almost to the end of The Morningstar Option, but a lot of what's discussed above recurs throughout the first five volumes of Lucifer, in new and interesting combinations. As the story draws to a close, Amenadiel returns to Lucifer, giving him what he asked for: a letter of passage out of God's Domain. True freedom at last. What Lucifer does with that letter, and what he allows to happen as part of a larger plan, is something to be returned to another day.