When the world was young there existed spirits that had been in existence long before mankind made its appearance. Before the Nazarene made his sacrifice in the cross the old religions of mankind call these spirits “earth gods.” There was much innocence in them, not like a lamb, but like a kitten. A playful thing, a loving thing, it will purr in your hand and sleep by your side. But leave it alone for a moment, ah! that loving kitten will think of nothing but murder. Gone will be your pet fish and your pet bird and your pet mouse. And when you confront the little kitten he won’t understand the wrong he has done. “I was just playing” he will say. He’s innocent, and yet no stranger to violence. So were these ancient spirits.
And one day Lucifer fell to earth from blessed heaven. Never before had someone fallen from such heights into such depths. The morning star. He who had convinced one third of all the angles to revolt against the “tyrant of the sky!” Humanity deserved much more he said. Was capable of much more. But there they were, kept like animals in a zoo in the garden of Eden. Naked, unaware of their divinity, of their distance from the beasts. Humanity was not much more than an animal as long as it was kept dumb without the spark of knowledge. And so, like Prometheus before him, Lucifer convinced Eve to bite into the apple of wisdom. “Bite, savor it, lick the sweet juice running down your lips. Better to experience pain, sickness, loss and all forms of suffering, for without them you will never experience the joys of triumph, the glory of victory, the satisfaction of creation, and love! Love as a passion! And art and intellect and everything divine that will separate you from the beasts! Oh Eve, you are like Pandora when she opened her box… much suffering will come to your children… but they’ll experience joys no animal could understand. Their life will have meaning and dignity and freedom! Not slaves but masters and creators shall your children be!”
And so Lucifer spoke. And so Eve did. And Adam, in his innocence followed his woman into damnation. There was much suffering from being casts away from the Garden of Eden, but his love for Eve chained him to her and their fate, blinded him, and so no hatred for her entered his heart. She was his, and he was hers. She was the reason his life had meaning. Adam loved his Eve even in their stupid fights. He labored for her. Better to come back home with bleeding hands from a hard days work and have his woman kiss them after and apply ointments than go back to live as he did, without purpose, without struggle, like an animal in a zoo, waiting to be fed, laying in the sun with meaningless thoughts in his head…
And so earth had its new creature called man. Something new that had never been in existence before. An animal with consciousness, an animal with a soul. The sons and daughters of Eve eventually worshiped these ancient spirits. This was strange to the spirits. This was new. A deer might lick your palm, a bird sing and stand on your shoulder, a fish nibble at your feet. But mankind was different. They loved and feared and gave meaning and innovation were nothing but predictable patterns existed before. They brought ritual. They brought worship. They thanked the spirits for their blessings and cursed them for their ills… even though the spirits were perplexed since they may have had nothing to do with their fate…
And so they lived along with humans and learned to love them more than any other creature in this earth. Yes, sometimes they screamed and cried and fought, but who has not experience the transformation of an empty house who all of the sudden has children playing around. They bring joy! A happiness that didn’t exist before. Something no animal can bring, and the laughter of the child will be sweeter than the song of the most skilled bird!
And so the world was filled with joy in its infancy. But then the Nazarene came and things began to change. No longer did the humans seek the ancient spirits. No longer were the spirits invited to their rituals, to their homes nor sought in the wilderness. And so, a distance grew between these ancient spirits. Mankind lived in their cities, and the spirits went back into their wilderness, into their rivers and oceans and occasionally interacted with mankind but these instances became rare. But things had changed and their interactions weren’t the same, mankind no longer loved the ancient spirits. Mankind was to say that they were the pagan idols of a bygone time, or the allies of Satan himself. The spirits were perplexed, they had picked no side in the celestial war. Why wouldn’t mankind come back to play with them? They missed the old songs and the old dances and the old prayers and the old stories. Had man forgotten it all? The spirits missed their old friends, and wished them back, but respected their new ways, perhaps, given some time, they would come back.
One day one of the spirits saw something curious. A type of ceremony he had never seen before. It had been a few centuries (or maybe more) since he had interacted with mankind. So much had changed. A man in a black suit, a woman in a white dress. All their families and friends gathered around. The man and woman looked at each other with a sort of happiness he had never seen. A sort of love he didn’t know could exist. He had known the love between a mother and a child, but this was different. It was neither the love between a brother or sister or neither that of a couple. In the old days this ceremony didn’t exist. A man would be with a woman for a while, and then another, and a another. Mankind had affection, they enjoyed the pleasure of sex, but never did they stand before each other and swear before their God “I will be with you and only you, I will love you and protect you until death do us part!”
The spirit was perplexed. “It’s as if you give a part of you and receive a part of someone else and your souls and body become one and you love that person more than you love yourself…” The spirit didn’t truly understand what was this God, but he wanted to worship it too. Never before did the spirit felt so alive. For the first time he envied mankind, he also wanted to be a human. He wanted to share in their joys and sufferings, in their triumphs and losses. He wanted to be that man in the black suit and experience the love and lust the woman in the white dress had to offer. He wanted to get on his knees and swear before God and the risen Christ that he would dedicate his whole life to her happiness!
This feeling overcame him and clouded his reason. As an impulse he rushes in and stricks the man in the black suit dead. The crowed sees the spirit, an ancient thing. He represented the primitive past they sought to escape. A big creature he seemed, well adapted for life in the wild. A fur covered his body and kept him warm, his eyes were black and adapted for the night, his legs were long and with hooves, allowing him to run well… He smelled of dirt and blood…Well adapted for the wild this primitive soul was, but it went against the good conscious of these Christians. “Demon!” one shouted. The spirit tried to explain to them that he just wanted to be the man in the black suit. He tried to tell them that everything was ok, he was a Christian too. But no one listened. An axe was thrown at him, he didn’t know from where. He killed a couple of men that tried to slay him and one fat woman that fell on the ground when trying to run as revenge. He had to leave, but before, before he was gone, the woman! Where is the woman in the white dress!?
The spirit finds her. The spirit grabs her. He wants to tell her it’s ok, he wants to tell her she is fine. He would never hurt her, not her, but there is no time. She screams, she cries, she kicks, she gives up. “Good bye papa! Good bye mama! Good bye my little brothers! So this is my fate. My black fate. My beloved… I am still your wife. I accepted you before our God. I am your wife and you are my husband no matter what happens to me, I will soon be with you!” and so she said to herself and fainted.
And so she wakes up in some hole in a mountain. She can see out of it, into the far distance. She doesn’t recognize the vegetation. She must be far from her home. Far from her country. She knows she’ll never return.
She wakes up in a cave with a dim fire light. She screams at the sight of the spirit and call him “demon!” He is frightened by her screams and keeps his distance. He tries to feed her some fruit and fish he had caught in the river, but she refuses to eat. He offers her water, and wine, and fermented milk from a goat but she refuses to drink. She’s frightened, she’s sobbing. All she wants is death so she can be with her beloved. She tries to run away, out of the cave, jump off the cliff, end her pain. The demon won’t let her. The demon stops her.
“Please don’t die! Please please don’t kill yourself! I will be heartbroken!”
She realizes the spirit can speak.
“Why did you do this to me!?” She asks.
“I love you and I love Christ. I wanted to be with you and gather under the church and listen to the bells and for us to be together and have everyone cheer in happiness.”
“You killed my beloved” She said. “If you loved me you wouldn’t have caused me so much pain!”
“But you said it yourself, you were his until ‘death do us part’! One can’t swear before God in vain, and to be with you while he lived was to be a sin that would have doomed you to hell. I couldn’t live with myself if I ever harmed you! He had to go, so you could safely be with me!”
And so they talked, and the womans anger and fear soon turned into pity. The spirit explained how lonely he had been for centuries or more, and how his only wish had been her happiness the moment he saw her, to be a human with her, and love her and be loved by her. Her eyes looked at him no longer with hate, or fear, but pity, and the spirit confused this with affection. The spirit was not an evil soul she thought, but a tortured and confused one. She could see the goodness in him, and the sincerity when he declared his love for her and for God. And so she soon ate his food and drinked his water and wine, but avoided the fermented goat milk. Eventually she was laughing with the spirit as she had done at home with her little brothers. They played and sang songs and he told her stories. The spirit had lived longer than he could remember, and could speak endlessly about his life. The woman had enjoyed literature before but the stories from the spirit were more pleasurable to her than anything she had known before.
She eventually forgot her sorrows. She found a new happiness. The spirit tasted happiness for the first time. They would cuddle and sleep before the fire after a long day of nothing but laughter and play. Eventually the spirit stopped looking so ugly to her. His foul scent became pleasurable. And for him, she felt and smelled unlike anything he had come across. His heart palpitated. He couldn’t get enough. And there, in their most intimate moment, she gazed at his eyes the same way she was looking at that man in the altar, but there was a lust that hadn’t been there, and happiness overwhelmed him. She was a woman after all, and her whole body wanted the spirit to be the one to satisfy her needs. And so she kissed him. A shot of electricity came over the spirit, that kiss was the most pleasurable thing he had ever experienced! He loved the woman more then he loved his own life. She was his, and he was hers. His life had meaning now. No longer would he roam the wilderness purposelessly, no longer would he go on with small meaningless thoughts, but was willing to go through hell for her, to suffer and come back home and have her kiss him like this! Oh such joy, such happiness! For the first time his life has meaning! He understands now what it’s like to be human! He is human now. “Praise God! Praise Christ! I swear before you that I will honor you and my beloved!”
But God heard his prayers. He saw the mortal woman with the immortal spirit. They didn’t belong together, the union was unnatural. Their kiss and their intercourse was cursed. The woman soon got very ill. Fever got a hold of her, and she soon lay, knowing that her end was near.
Before she died she told the spirit she was glad she had met him. He brought her a happiness she had never known. She only wished she could live forever, or that he could come to heaven with her, and be with her for eternity. She made the spirit swear he would be good and keep the word of God when she was gone. He swore. He hoped to meet her again and soon. So did she.
The spirit wept at her suffering from the illness, he tried all remedies to bring back her health but nothing worked. She soon died. Her soul had been pure goodness and it was lifted up to heaven. The spirit followed her until the very gated of Paradise. She entered, he was denied passage.
“What must I do to enter, tell me, I’ll do anything! I love her more than my very life and she loves me. What must be done so I can enter those gates and praise God and be with the one I love?”
“You shall never enter” he was told. “The kingdom of God is for Gods children, you’re an old being, created before any of Gods children’s or angels roamed in heaven. You don’t belong here. So go back to earth and dwell with the fallen one were you belong! Come here no longer. You shall never see or speak to her again even if you live for another eternity!” And he is hit and fell back into earth.
And so he fell and hit the ground hard. He found her body cold and dead when he returned home to his cave. He buried her, and wept before her grave. “I promised you I would be good. I know I did, but no matter what I do I’ll never enter heaven no matter what I do. I miss you. I miss you I miss you I miss you… I’m alone again. I’m to live for an eternity having known you and now you’re gone and now to live is pain!”
And so he wept. And from his pain the purest hatred entered his heart. “Lucifer and I share a common enemy” he said to himself. And so, if the tyrant in the sky was to deny him the happiness of being able to love and be loved, he would find consolation in the happiness of causing suffering into the children of the one he now hates. “Lucifer, I am fallen, just like you…” The spirit looks at the scare from his own fall from the gates of heaven. “We are brothers you an I. I am fallen just like you…” He stops and contemplate for a moment and finally says “To live is now to suffer. I will find joy in the pain I cause to the followers of the God who took the one I loved and loved me back…”
And so he stood alone in the grave of her dearest for a long while. Eventually taking a deep breath and started to make his way to join the legions of Hell. His life had purpose again, but hateful and violent revenge was in his mind now. The woman had been his own apple of knowledge and exposed him to a pleasure and pain he was previously oblivious to. He would never return to innocence. And when she left she left with her all the happiness she had provided him and in its place remained a deep pain that would never leave him no matter how many more centuries he lived. No matter how many Christian lives he destroyed, it never brought her back, but to see God suffer was a better alternative than see his enemy smile, so he labored endlessly and was a curse upon the Christian sect. “Demon” he thought, and smiled. He dreamt of the day the legions of Lucifer would storm the gates of Paradise and bath the earth with the blood from the slaughtered angels in heaven. He would rescue his beloved from those who kidnapped her. “If Constantinople fell, there might yet be hope. I’ll save you my love. I swear it. A vow to you is the only one that matters. I will make you free again…”