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W O R D S
The Devil ALBERTO MANGUEL
We say, we insist The Devil whispers horrible things in our ear and inspires our worst deeds
W
hether what we call consciousness was born from what we refer to as imagination or whether it was the other way round, at the beginning of the human age we began telling stories to attempt to explain our existence, and we dreamt up a divine being, a magic word, a dragon, a tortoise, a collision of matter and antimatter to be our “once upon a time.” Pascal described this as the “little shove” kindly provided by a primordial creator; after that, stories could unfold on their own. The stories we tell have their shadow: 64 Geist 108 Spring 2018
beginnings have endings like day has night and conscious life has sleep. Every plot has at least two readings, and every character is at least twofold. Above one of the doors of a small church in northern Quebec is the statue of a woman: if seen from the front, her appearance is comely, from the back can be seen a mass of worms and maggots crawling through her exposed innards and ribs. Everything we conceive has an underbelly. The scandal effected by Judaism of reducing the many ancient gods to a single omnipresent and omniscient
divinity must have felt too lopsided for a humanity accustomed to a Pythagorean binary universe. Very soon a second character was brought onto the scriptural stage. He too was omniscient and omnipresent, even if ultimately subject to the divine will, and yet sufficiently crafty to tempt even the Almighty, as in the cautionary tales of Job and Abraham. He was darkness to God’s light, a destructive force opposed to His creative energy, an alternative truth to the Truth. He was given many names, among them Satan, Lucifer, Mephistopheles, image: hugo simberg
