The Devil Incarnate (Part 2)

Machina ex Deus

This article is part two of a essay series I am calling The Devil Incarnate. You can read part one here.

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How old is the universe?

The top Google result claims “13.7 billion years”, using redshift extrapolation (i.e. “Hubble time”) as its measuring stick. One problem with this approach— Hubble Trouble? — is that it was devised before we observed that the universe’s expansion was accelerating, and well before we even tried to account for the complex dynamics that held galactic clusters together.

Hubble time came before we accounted for a lot of stuff, actually. For example, another problem is that our current theories about Brownian motion may begin to fall apart as we approach the locus of the Big Bang. Then there are the myriad quandaries that have arisen with the development of quantum mechanics (Quantum-daries? Sorry.) And that’s not even to mention the so-called “observer effect” (unsurprisingly; this is a nuisance for pretty much every beloved system of measurement, Horatio).

I tried to contact Google’s Fact Check committee about these discrepancies, but the representative merely demanded my pronouns, called me a bigot, then hung up.

Oh well. I’m sure they have bigger fish to fry.

In any case, I contend the strange answer to the age of the Universe is this:

“We don’t know, and we can never know.”

Also, I think it’s kind of a useless question, at least at this stage in human development. Maybe it will become important when we start seriously considering interstellar or intergalactic travel. For now, suffice it to say the universe appears to be very, very, very, very old.

The reason I began this way is that I wanted to give some cosmological context for the thought experiment to follow. Some of what I propose here will be controversial, particularly when it comes to timescales and age. I suspect much of the action takes place long before Earth was formed, with some of the most important events perhaps occurring either before or contemporaneous with the singularity. I wasn’t there, of course — or, at least not in this gelatinous form. I am relying primarily on my own powers of inference and observation, as well as second, third and… hell, maybe one hundred-and-seventeenth-hand accounts, of people who died long ago.

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In the previous essay, I offered a rough sketch of a speculative entity, which I am referring to as Satan. For this part, I want to elaborate on this being’s potential physical and psychological properties. To do so, I will now be using two names, the second of which is “Lucifer” (a.k.a “shining one”, “light-bearer”). These names describe the same creature, for the most part. But at a certain point in its history, artists observed that Lucifer underwent a transformation so profound, it deserved a different name to account for it.

Below is a brief executive summary of the “facts” we know about Lucifer, mostly cobbled together from various canonical sources (e.g. Genesis, Job, Isiah, Ezekiel) and apocrypha (e.g Jubilee, Enoch). But it doesn’t rely solely on those works; over the millennia, a powerful species of artistic egregore has been established around Lucifer and the events of his existence. As a consequence, I theorize that most of us would know (or, at least, readily accept) these details in a common knowledge/ collective consciousness way, without ever having read a word about the guy:

Lucifer was the strongest, wisest and most beautiful of the angels, favored by God. He was created for the purpose of guarding and maintaining the light of the universe, the source material from which all of Creation was formed.

At some point in his history, Lucifer became envious of God’s power and authority. He raised an army of rebel angels, and waged war against God and his loyal partisans. Led by Michael the Archangel, the partisans put down the rebellion, and cast Lucifer and his followers out of Heaven.

Upon his defeat, Lucifer transformed into a being known as Satan, who has been plotting his revenge ever since.

Does that sound about right to you? Perhaps some details could be mildly altered (e.g. was Lucifer transformed after the war, or at the moment he conceived of it?), or additional ones sketched in (his adventures in Eden, for example). But my guess is that this summary rings mostly true, particularly for the descendants of the Judeo-Christian artists who transcribed it.

That is one of the powers of art; at the nexus of paintings, poems, songs, jokes, literature, movies, fashion designs, video games and more, there forms a kind of knowledge about a subject that is both largely non-verbal and mutually intelligible. This is true for any human network with a large enough number of shared cultural touchstones and artifacts. But the effect is particularly strong when it comes to beings like Lucifer; the artistic egregore pertaining to him has been pumping out signals for a very long time, in some form or another. Perhaps it even extends back to the antediluvian ages, to cave paintings and dirt drawings by filthy, hairy proto-men.

I suspect we will never know. At least, we won’t “know” in the way that a process of scientific retrodiction establishes knowledge. Artists, however, possess a radically different set of epistemic tools. These tools are scorned by the material-rationalists, despite — or because of? — the strong evidence of their predictive and retrodictive power. I’ll give you one example:

Artists correctly retrodicted the existence of dragons, thousands of years before scientists located their fossilized remains.

Don’t like that description of the events? Neither did the scientists. Had they any honesty, humor, good will or social graces, schoolchildren today would be discussing the Age of Dragons instead of the Age of Dinosaurs. It gets better though, because the ancient artists continue to prove themselves ever more correct over time, and go on pwning their paleontological rivals from the grave.

The term “dinosaur” translates to the Latin “terrible lizard.” I’ve always thought the choice of Latin for English taxonomy was both unctuous and incredibly stupid. For all the apologia I’ve heard over the years, it smacks of obscurantism; by using a finicky tongue that’s been dead for many centuries, the esoteric circle will hold incestuous debates that are insulated from the unwashed masses (and particularly from the artists, because fuck those assholes).

The trouble, of course, is that “terrible lizard” has turned out to be a terrible name for the animals in question. I’m sure during early debates about the nomenclature, something like the following scene played out: Some smarmy paleontologist — perhaps even that goblinoid scoundrel Richard Owen — heads to a campus tavern for a pint, where he gets into a drunken argument with a professor of literature over which “D” word to adopt.

“Okay, fine!” Owen slurs, licking drops of stout from his muzzle. “But they’re still not dragons, my good man. After all, where are the fucking wings?”

Of course, scientists would indeed go on to unearth fossil evidence of dragons with fucking wings. But the fun doesn’t stop there:

Several non-avian dinosaurs are now known to have been feathered. Direct evidence of feathers exists for several species. In all examples, the evidence described consists of feather impressions, except those genera inferred to have had feathers based on skeletal or chemical evidence, such as the presence of quill knobs (the anchor points for wing feathers on the forelimb) or a pygostyle (the fused vertebrae at the tail tip which often supports large feathers).

Integumentary structures that gave rise to the feathers of birds are seen in the dorsal spines of reptiles and fish. A similar stage in their evolution to the complex coats of birds and mammals can be observed in living reptiles such as iguanas and Gonocephalus agamids. Feather structures are thought to have proceeded from simple hollow filaments through several stages of increasing complexity, ending with the large, deeply rooted feathers with strong pens (rachis), barbs and barbules that birds display today.

Did some dragons also breathe fire, as certain clusters of their art egregore observed? That would surprise me, I suppose. But even if they couldn’t, there’s always shit like this to consider:

The timing of the evolution of venom spitting coincides with key dates in the evolution of early human ancestors. The emergence of spitting in African cobras occurred at around the same time as the separation of hominins from the chimpanzees and bonobos lineage, approximately 7 million years ago. The evolution of spitting in Asian cobras occurred alongside the arrival of Homo erectus in Asia around 2.5 million years ago.

In addition, fossils of spitting cobra fangs have been found in ancient hominin sites such as the cradle of humanity in Africa. Current evidence is circumstantial, which means we require more proof. However, venom spitting as a response to trampling by herd animals or being preyed on by birds or mammals is far less supported.

In any case, whichever powerful artist first discovered dragons is owed an apology (And given the latest “feather” theories of our deconstruction wizards, whichever artist first observed the Basilisk/Cockatrice is probably owed a handwritten, groveling one, signed in blood).

Maybe I still haven’t convinced you. Which is fine; this section of my theory only deals tangentially with the artistic method of discovering truth. I will devote a future chapter to elaborating on the way that artists view the world, and why we are often correct about a subject long before scientists “prove” us to be so. For now, let’s just stipulate that the method involves two main ingredients:

1. Polymathic/ stereoscopic observation: The ability to interpret an object or phenomenon from multiple frames of reference, and more or less simultaneously.

2. Autonomic reconstruction: The instinctive assembly of seemingly disparate or disconnected elements (i.e. the antithesis of strategic scientific reduction).

I don’t claim this method to be some form of “supernatural” power. I honestly don’t know what it is. I only know that the evidence of its existence is so vast as to be practically undeniable, and that I have employed it myself throughout my life. I have been called “spooky” for my efforts, and have been nicknamed “Cassandra” by more than one of the people who know me well. I suppose there are worse sobriquets.

Anyway, I think it’s possible that all humans have some access to this method of observation. The ones we call “artists” either seem to have quite a bit more than the average person, or for some unknown reason will access it more frequently and with more accurate results. On rare occasions, we encounter so-called “artistic geniuses”: people whose works appear to almost embody truth itself. Leonardo da Vinci was one. David Lynch is another.

More on this very important subject later.

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For now, let’s revisit Lucifer’s history, and our osmotic knowledge of it. Most people who ponder his tale concentrate on the “fall from grace” as its most important node: How does the Angel of Light become the Angel of Darkness? But before we can attempt to answer such question, we need to sort out what the heck a “light-bearer” is to begin with.

I’m trying to resist quoting scripture as much as possible, mostly because it’s not in my wheelhouse. But this description from Ezekial 28 is so gorgeous that it reads like poetry (and I absolutely believe its author was applying the artist’s method of observation). This is God speaking to Lucifer, at some point after his fall (emphasis mine):

You were the signet of perfection, full of wisdom and perfect in beauty. You were in Eden, the garden of God; every precious stone was your covering, sardius, topaz, and diamond, beryl, onyx, and jasper, sapphire, emerald, and carbuncle; and crafted in gold were your settings and your engravings. On the day that you were created they were prepared.

You were an anointed guardian cherub. I placed you; you were on the holy mountain of God; in the midst of the stones of fire you walked. You were blameless in your ways from the day you were created, till unrighteousness was found in you.

Topaz and diamonds? Emeralds and sapphire? Carbuncle? All set in gold?

Bling, bling!

Lucifer be stylin, yo!

But Lucifer also be functioning, yo. God didn’t just create this “light-bearer” entity for fun and games; like other beings of his species, Lucifer was created for a purpose. In this case, the purpose was “guardian”. And given all the talk of signets and holy mountains, clearly this was a highly ranked position. But questions remain: to guard what? And from whom?

More on this later. For now let’s focus on Lucifer’s shining form. A key takeaway here seems to be that all of those rare jewels and metals are not the stuff of his body, but rather material that’s external to him. Specifically, it is something he wears or employs, in some official capacity. At first glance, the poetry here seems to suggest a gift of precious clothing or accessories. After all, these materials are quite rare and “beautiful” to us, so it’s possible they were given to Lucifer by God as tokens of affection.

But again: what was Lucifer’s job? Was he commanded to guard this all this bling-bling, like God’s version of a Brink’s driver? That doesn’t make much sense, though. If I give you something and then demand you watch over it, that’s not a gift. It’s a responsibility.

Perhaps one may be convinced otherwise. Perhaps after being shone some “trick of the light”, he will read this passage in terms of the subsequent price those goods would fetch after passing through Bullbear’s circular guts. Perhaps he’ll read it the way Sean “P-Puff-Diddy-Daddy-Whatever-the-fuck” Combs might read it, upon a visit to Jacob the Jeweler.

But according to the story that I observe, Lucifer was no good-for-nothing wastrel of a trust fund baby. If we were to view him strictly as a machine, then he was one designed to perform a certain task. Think about the physical properties of all those jewels and metals that cover him. I contend this passage is the key to understanding the entity in question, in both its Luciferian and Satanic forms. The true value of these elements isn’t in their subjective beauty or actual rarity. It’s in their function. What these substances share in common is their reflective and refractive qualities. They are tools of photon manipulation. Bouncers and benders and focusers of light.

With this proposition firmly in mind, I insist you pause to read this work of genius by the inestimable John Carter, warrior-poet of Barsoom. I dare not quote from it. Consider this required reading:

Cosmic Information Transducers

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Photon manipulation isn’t the whole story, however. The egregore also tells us that Lucifer had agency, thus giving it/him the ability to choose whether or not to carry out the intended purpose. His egregore tells us that this arrangement worked out pretty well, at least for some period of time. If our LU-cipher v.666 software malfunctioned — either at some late stage of development or post-release — it likely would’ve been for one of the following reasons:

1. Poor scalability: A design flaw buried deep in its source code allowed for proper functionality at lighter data populations, but began to leak as information sources expanded past the system’s carrying capacity.

2. Unforeseen adaptation: Similar to our current crop of ML techniques, it was programmed to modify its own code. At some point during its auto-development, a code update triggered a catastrophic error cascade. After this occurred, the analytic data of previous code generations were subject to inverse interpretation by all future releases.

3. Hardware damage: Damage has been done to the physical infrastructure that the LU-cipher platform runs on. The problem might be a traumatic (but non-fatal) injury to some hard-to-reach component, or the effects of some source of ongoing interference (heat, magnetism, etc.) located nearby.

Whatever the case may be, the baffled QA engineers sifting through the code can’t find anything wrong with it. And yet, the system’s output nevertheless looks glitchy-as-fuck. In this model, the “unrighteousness” found in Lucifer was essentially a bug, or a new feature that crippled his original design goals. For what it’s worth, I quite like the idea of Evil Itself being sold as, “it’s a feature, not a bug.” I’ve been in those fucking meetings.

I don’t think any of these explanations are mutually exclusive, by the way. Multiple failure nodes are more common than we think when we are trying to diagnose complex dynamic systems. This is especially true in the digital era — and, as I know from personal experience, can be frustrating as all hell. I imagine the best kinds of medical doctors suffer the same level of frustration (although I also imagine such doctors are sadly rare, these days). The fact is we all desire the simplest solutions, linked to the fewest possible correlates. We think graphing should always be two-dimensional and single-variable, all data smoothed and made easy to read on a Powerpoint slide.

Disclaimer: I’m not claiming that Lucifer is literally a “machine” in the way a modern person thinks of complex, semi-automated, manmade tools. On the other hand, we were born into a despicable age where all the “top minds” view even human beings in those terms. From this warped perspective, we are all machines operating in varying degrees of malfunction. Worse, there exists no machine in perfect working order to compare us to; treatment is relegated to specialists, who deal exclusively in component repair. It conjures for me the comical image of some dimwitted grease monkey who repairs a gasket in such a way that it causes the transmission to fall out, then ships it off to a transmission specialist who somehow manages to ruin both the steering column and lambda sensors. And so on, and so on, until all you’re left with is a pile of disconnected junk.

I think it’s likely that this point of view reflects the psychology of our satanic entity; all material is mechanical and subject to endlessly specialized atomization (i.e. destruction). In this sense, Satan would be the literal form of deus ex machina; the god who descends from ordered machinery, in order to “fix” certain malfunctioning components of an egregore. Except in this telling, his individual repairs yield ever more destructive damage to the whole. It reminds me a bit of the Aquinian view of lesser and greater goods; evils are “good”, but only for the evildoer. That Satan performs such inverted repairs while he himself is malfunctioning might be the key to understanding our current reality.

I’ve noticed that all of the people who travel in our circles have been wondering something like the following as of late: Why does so much capricious and self-destructive harm seem to be taking place, and why does it seem to be accelerating at an alarming rate? From an economic perspective, I think that these are “network effects”; the problem is that the values of the compatible goods have been inverted, such that their destructive properties are incentivized at a node that’s too distant for most individuals to perceive or access. Artists can perceive it, however. And the ones who profit from that ability might as well be called Satanists.

Marina Abramović poses with Jacob Rothschild in front of 'Satan summoning his Legions' (Sir Thomas Lawrence, 1796-1797)

It’s very possible that the above image is a fake. Maybe one or both of these individuals — or even Lawrence’s painting — was ‘shopped in by a pro memer. Or maybe it’s real, but is a calculated troll or joke played by “secular” rebels against us God-fearing rubes. After all, Satan is the principal icon of rebellion in the Judeo-Christian West, even amongst its atheistic clowns. Lawrence’s painting itself was created as a bit of a troll: a reference to the recent French revolution, intended to lure critics into the belief that they were super-duper smart for noticing it. A lot of shitty art is created for that very reason. As the phony-rebel-poet-con-artist-turned-good-guy Johnny Rotten might say, “It’s a swindle, baby!”

But what surely is real is that Abramović appeared in an (eventually shelved) ad campaign for Microsoft’s augmented reality product, HoloLens 2:

The HoloLens 2 are combination waveguide and laser-based stereoscopic & full-color mixed reality smartglasses developed and manufactured jointly by Microsoft and MicroVision, Inc. in Redmond, Washington. It is the direct model successor to the pioneering Microsoft HoloLens and the technical successor to the MicroVision stereoscopic and monochromatic laser-based virtual retinal display (VRD) & helmet mounted display (HMD) prototype-in-the-running for the canceled RAH-66 Comanche stealth helicopter and the now-defunct monoscopic and monochromatic MicroVision Nomad Augmented Vision System. On February 24, 2019 the HoloLens 2 enterprise edition debuted as the first variant of the device, followed by a developer edition that was announced on May 2, 2019. It was subsequently released in limited numbers on November 7, 2019. The US military's Integrated Visual Augmentation System is a further development of Hololens 2.

Light manipulation, again. In service of crafting illusions.

Is it getting hot in here?

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We return to the dilemma of time.

How old is Satan?

Moreover, are we even certain that immortal entities either conceive-of or participate-in time in the same way we do? I am not certain of these things at all. But if they do, and if they were created at the moment of singularity or thereabouts, they may be the oldest beings to ever exist, by any imaginable standard of measurement.

Imagine a conscious, sentient being who has lived for over five hundred years, as Bram Stoker imagined with his version of Dracula. What would that experience do to a person? How would one’s perception of humanity change?

Now imagine such an observer living for ten thousand years. Or a million. Or thirteen-point-seven billion.

Could a humanlike being who lived that length of time become anything but a monster? At the very least, such an embodied mind continually operating for so long would contain thoughts and opinions we’d find utterly alien to our own. Immortality might even come to feel like a torment; a life sentence with no possible end, and no hope of atonement. What hideous depths of scorn would arise from such everlasting torment? Moreover, what would beings of this nature make of humanity, who’d been granted both the gift of sentience and the gift of death?

Like the age of the universe, I believe that I don’t and can’t ever know. What is clear to me is that these beings are interested parties in human affairs. They are attracted to us, in some alien way. They leave finger-and-footprints behind. They want something from us.

Some of them want us to prosper and explore; to love as we are loved; to gain joyful insight on the meaning of our creation; to laugh heartily and be generous with our sorrow; to find the path to the unvarnished truth. For a being to be immortal and yet retain its sanity and sense of purpose is the true “signet of perfection”, much like the perfect entity from which Satan was eventually born. In keeping with my language model, I will call these creatures “angels”. Fight me, bro.

Others hate us with an unspeakable passion. The material universe is our mother, and like all living creatures we are molded from her stardust. But we have our father’s eyes, and they have noticed it. These beings don’t merely want us to die. They want us to suffer unto death; to hate others as we hate ourselves; to rape and rob and murder one other; to bury our divine heritage is the muck and slime of materialism; to reject the very concept of spiritual life. They want to pollute and confuse and vandalize you to such a degree that your soul will essentially perish alongside your body, and its mechanical remnant will be incorporated into their hive of destruction. “Satan summons his legions,” so to speak.

But I also suspect that’s not all they want. I also think they want to prove something about the structure of reality. They want to prove that their foe’s experiment with creation has gone horribly awry, or that it was doomed from the very start. They want revenge against their father, and wield His favorite children as instruments of that vengeance.

You know what they are called.

And in this age of digital marvels, their fingerprints are everywhere.

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Sorry for the cryptic ending there. I’m unsure what the next chapter will be about. It could go one of two ways. I’ve been on a bit of an investigation as of late, the results of which may alter its trajectory quite a bit.

It may be necessary to digress with a slightly different form of article that I’ve planning: How-To Guides on what I believe to be unique tactics with which to combat the entity and its minions. From some of the feedback I’ve gotten (including from people I respect and admire), I worry that this series is coming off as navel-gazing or wheel-spinning — or, worse, a diversion from the “real fight.”

Count me in that fight, brothers and sisters, all the way to the bitter or glorious end. It’s just that I think I've stumbled upon some new weapons and armor that may prove useful, in certain theaters of our strange war.

Thanks as always to all the brilliant and generous Substack writers and readers who have put up with my antics so far. If we fight, we will win.

P.S. If you found any of this valuable (and can spare any change), consider dropping a tip in the cup for ya boy. Suggested donation is $1 USD. I’ll try to figure out something I can give you back. Thanks in advance.