Satan

Satan, The Devil, Shaitan- an entity of as many names as its complexities; a being of power and malice, of greed and envy, of death and more horrifyingly of poverty, loss of fortune and dignity. In short, he is the epitome and cause of every negative emotion, trait and event that the human mind can conjure.

I can’t remember the thought verbatim now, but I recall it thus: What if it was Adam who had become the Devil on earth and not Lucifer?

People who know me can safely say that I am not a religious man. Not sacrilegious, but not religious either. I am, in essence, someone who avoids religion and the associated paraphernalia, occasionally doing my bit to help out a disgruntled mother, grandmothers and aunts to maintain domestic peace and alleviate middle-class suspicions on the quality of my spiritual upbringing.

I am, however, a person who has always been stimulated by mythology, someone who has always taken aliens, time travel and teleportation theories seriously and someone who has never refused a book of fantasy fiction. Consequently, I, as a select few close to me know, have developed something of an imagination.

Hence, to me, the thought was overwhelming - to the extent that I decided to venture into the study of the origins of the Devil, something I had attempted only feebly before.

Major religious scriptures across cultures have a common underlying theme as to the origin and battle between Man and Devil, with varying perspectives. A gist of this common theme is provided here for the reader’s benefit:

God is the Supreme Being. He created Man in his own image and Woman to support him. Let us, for popularities sake, assume that Satan was, prior to his corruption of man, called Lucifer. He is described by all faiths as an angel of the highest rank under the Supreme Being, second only to Him in knowledge and power. His closest aide and confidante, who grew envious of His partiality and fondness for the weak humans. Driven by his jealousy, he tricks Eve to eat the forbidden fruit, who in turn convinces Adam to eat it too. For their sins, both Adam and Eve were exiled to Earth. Lucifer, too, gets expelled and on Earth he becomes the Devil

The type of fruit that Adam and Eve ate is a matter of another long-standing debate. However, the symbolism is uniform – it represented knowledge, immortality, temptations, the fall of man into sin and sin itself.

It is these uniformities that perhaps led me to question the truth of events as they might have happened, if at all, and the way it has been portrayed down the ages. Here are my thoughts.

God created Man in his own image and forbade him to seek knowledge and immortality, of which He is the very embodiment, figuratively! The reason for almighty to forbid man thus is best known to Him. However, being made in His image, it is perfectly natural for Man to seek the two. Eve merely followed. That was their weakness.

Interestingly enough, there is a school of thought that considers an entity by the name Lilith, not Eve, to be Adam’s first wife. Like Adam, she too was made from dust and hence refused to submit to Adam’s physical domination during their first intercourse. She demanded to be on top of Adam during mating, to which Adam was opposed. Consequently, she fled and mated with demons. Following this, Eve was created from Adam’s rib and submitted to the “correct” position of being at the bottom. It is my firm opinion, that this is the reason the popular position of intercourse is termed “missionary” and considered the correct way of “doing it”!!! In my brief research, I could not find any correlation, but am sure of it.

So far, it seems to me that Adam was made a flawed being, which to me is not surprising if he was made in God’s image. It was in fact God, who being aware of the possibilities, tried to forbid man from seeking knowledge.

Sane reasoning makes me believe that a being as enlightened and powerful as Lucifer would not be jealous of flesh and bones. What reason could he possibly have to go up in arms against Him for so ephemeral a being as compared to his own immortality? He could, however, be pitiful of the weaklings.

Adam, I am led to believe, ate the fruit of knowledge and immortality of his own accord and got cast out with Eve. Imagine this - here is a being who is the image of almighty God, with a thwarted attempt at mating with, am confident in assuming, an incredibly beautiful Lilith and has now the fruit of knowledge stuck in his throat and mere fig leaves to cover his privates. On top of that he is sent to Earth to tend to oceans and trees, fishes and animals, with Eve, who is the quintessential submissive and possibly whiny woman. Wouldn’t you be mad in such a situation? And what does a man do when he has power and knowledge and is angry? It is my opinion that this is the juncture at which he became the Devil, denying God and standing up against everything that He stands for.

There is a belief in some parts of the world, that Adam and Eve were separated for a period of 130 years. It is quite possible, that this is the period where Adam, now the Satan, deserted Eve and left her to fend for herself. During this phase, it was Eve alone who tended the Earth and every living being. It is perhaps thus that their progenies are the caregivers and the ones capable of loving and giving all.

Lucifer, in the meantime, was convinced to follow Eve and play his part in furthering the cause and spread of mankind. Who better to turn to than your dearest one, to make up for your follies? He had the vision, the power and consequently the courage to create a new race and give it direction. Thus was created the original race of men and women. Learning of this, Satan vows to forever haunt the race of man and destroy it utterly.

It is here too, that I refuse to believe that Satan corrupts from outward influence. In my opinion, Satan eventually found Lilith, the one he was originally meant to be. How they mated is not a discussion I wish to begin here. What they managed to do was create a parallel race of mankind, with the lust, power and envy of their creators ingrained in them. The corruption of Satan is not to seduce man with power and immortality. It is to dilute the bloodline of Lucifer and Eve with his own blood and the blood of Lilith. The evil we see today is not the act of the Devil, but merely the acts of individuals of the bloodline of Adam and Lilith, possibly mingled with that of Lucifer’s and Eve’s.

I do not know why I wrote this or where all this came from. Part of it might have to do with the fact thats I do not wish to be the offspring of a man who ran around a garden with only a fig leave covering his essentials and a fruit stuck halfway in his throat.