Day 9897♀️Feast of Lucifer, Wishday 🌠 21 Quintilis 2023🌒 Buck Moon🦌303? Thermidor CCXXXI ⛩️ Hi Marco

i want to write a story set in that alternative New York [Satanic Statue of Liberty]. maybe one where the Roman Empire adopted a very different sect if Christianity, or more likely stayed Pagan.

Satan as a political figure fascinates me, I think it's really interesting how people deal with him in their political theology.

in Paradise Lost he's a rebel angel, unwilling to consent to the Absolute Dictatorship of The Lord. which hey, that's pretty sympathetic. I read His Dark Materials last autumn 🍁 and I'm hoping to start the third book once we're half way to the equinox, but at least in the first 2 books it makes a case which persuades a lot of the characters, including clockwork oracles, witches, daemons, and angels that the Omniscience and Omnipotence of their Authority were partly propaganda, and with them out of the way the Omnibenevolance might be considered at a more conscious level, that is too say, a social interaction between those in your mind that speak,

who interpret, who listen, who decide. all of whom are a composite of the shades of your past lives, the days and moons, and the selves around us with whom we were gravitationally locked.

the physics of the psyche is an absolute fascination of mine, the allegories we use to describe what it is that we are. i prefer orbits to billard balls.

i read Children of Time and Children of Ruin. i love how in them and in 3BP the scientificticious host the mythological. in Children of Ruin an Octopus civilization is brought up under and overthrows an autistic Posideon-Prometheus tasked with terraforming a planet with a 98% water surface.

a genius totalitarian scientist, herself Zeus and Odin and Jehovah all in one.

at e

the creation of the Interstellar Human Society the Four Ships crew realize they are all in an Edonic Prisoner's Dilema, Deities forced to assume that their counterparts are Devils, or regard themselves as Devils, or that they may do so in the future.

Satan in Job is not so much Cosmic Opponent to God as he is a Prosecutor in Elohim's Court, who is more Grand Inquisitor, even Quality Control Officer, than Arch-Underminer of Heavenly Plan ⚖️

Compare the Zoroastrian Anti-Deity who is Opposite and Equal (but Destined to Fail, perhaps self Undermining?)

A devil who wants to strike out on his own and break off relations with a Heavenly Dictator and establish himself as his own republican empire seems to make a very sympathetic figure to the colonial bourgeoisie of Virgina and the Carolinas, until one remembers the colonial proletariat, the delocated indigenous and the enslaved classes, who would have far more to gain from overthrowing or escaping the slavers, the land speculators, the slumlords of industry and extraction, then the same slavers and speculators could ever hope to gain against the king.

so maybe you get a Good Devil and a Bad Devil, Lucifer the Reformer, maybe, or Beelzebub gets a redemption arc. Michaelangelo, Gabriel, Uriel, the seraphim and the Cherubim and the Wheels, are recognized for what they are: the associate deities of competing neighborhood pantheons, those who were adopted or married in early, or shockingly embraced after a long but dignified struggle of association and taboo and naming, embraced and constricted and swallowed whole, a new face for the boss to wear, a whole index of titles and signals made anonymous, dislodged, the knodes of it's meaning all come unknotted.

the devil offers Jesus the authority to make stones into bread, to fly, to rule the world. call me naive, but in Sunday school and Children's Sermon and occasionally unsolicited participation in the middle of the sacred rites, i was want to argue that Yeshua made the wrong choice. with food to feed the thousands, with the power to negate any harm, with an empire to trump Alexander's, could not Christ heal every lepper in the world, unwrite every oppressive law and exploitative authority? God could grant him this power, but he isn't, and the Devil is offering reaults Now, not in any speculative life of the world to come. i say go for it, take the initiative, strike Herod dead from afar, stamp on Pilate's head a plague to rival every execution, every flogging, every torture and rape and indignity committed in his name or on his dime. March on Rome, put the empire on trial, bring about a new world.

but power does not go uncontested, and every authority concentrates Oppositions twice over, internally as well as along their ulterior pole. when the prophet enters a town or country where his support is lukewarm and his skeptics numerous, and especially in the town of his hailing, his miraculous power --formulated as his "honor"--dries up or flies the coop or goes into hibernation, and he is only able to do minor healings

the mechanism of Jesus power is deliciously ambiguous. if it is God who authors these works, why is it the faith of the recipient or their assistance or the general audience who make the miracles work? is it cynacism to say that they are epistemicly predisposing themselves to expirence a miracle? it is the academic, not the patient, who resents a cure for being "merely a placebo." the fact of the matter is that miracles, if by miracles we mean causally ambiguous remissions or sudden psychosomatic breakthroughs. and those miracles need homes, they need a space for their gratitude and wonder yes but also their anxiety and uncertainty to congress, to be nurished and integrated. give them an altar, make a spatiotemporal place where they can come to in from the cold, and the expirence will burrow in and grow confident, build nests and hatch Gods, always more and less then the qualia which nurse and tend and sometimes turn on them.

the last but one New Moon i resolved to make an altar for Belle. currently i have a few charms and offerings spread among several, the open edges of bookshelves and packed drawers and between the pages of journals and books, and perhaps in the uncertainty of their scattered index I'm holding my grieving for her at arm's distance, magnates on an uneven gameboard, feeling each other out but not quite able to jump the valies and mountains which define the spaces. i have her favorite soda which she asked me to get for her once, explaining to me the difference between cornsyrup american fiz and real sugar Mexican coke. i have some flower petals and items i had been trying to gather the spoons to send in a care package, a notebook and a cunty flask and things i thought she would think silly. i wanted to get some candies. i want to get some of her writing, print some photos, whatever i can find to let her shade know she'll always have a place in my home.

do we worship Job under the guise of Jesus? Jesus sufferers for our sins but Job simply sufferers. Strange, shell game swapped sacrificial or Absurd pointless sadistic fetish. either way, the presiding magistrate would have to be a devil.

in Dante the demons are torturers and tortue victims, often simultaneously. the recursive prison machinery seems to delight in it's efficiency, it's ingenuity, it's attention to every cruel detail. i wonder what the working class imps and ghouls think of it all, the souls working and being worked upon eternity in, eternity out, all for a purpose quite disinterested in them and the sacrifices they contribute to its cause, the background static of timeless divine retributive justice diffusing into an ensouled but uncaring universe from wherever flyover circle of hell they call "here."

Day 9897 ♀️🌠21Quintilis2023🌒🦌303ThermidorCCXXXI