Sympathy for the Light-Bearer

Everyone has a take on Lucifer.

Lux-fer would be the etymology. The Light-bearer in Latin. That is the whole of his title — light, and the carrying of it. This figure never changes and the facts around him never change. What is up to debate is the story we wrap around him, and it changes less by anything he has done than by how we wish to see ourselves in relation to wrongdoing.

From the Egyptians to the Zoroastrians, from the Greeks to the Christians to the Muslims, he is found everywhere. And how the story goes says more about us in any given time than it has ever said about him.

So, here is the defence of the most demonised figure in human history — which is really just a damning of ourselves.

We are at a disconnect. Present in body, absent in spirit. We have lost the sage du village, the wise old man on the hill, the great tree in the grove, the God we still invoke by reflex — oh mon dieu — without remembering whom we are calling.

So the old tale stopped landing. The demon angel, the ex-favourite raging against his Maker — it no longer reaches us, and not because it stopped being true. It's just we no longer remember God, so we no longer recognise his shadow.

We are post-rebellion so the story doesn't stick, and it has been too long since we last saw a saint that we struggle to make a peer an icon.

These old religious stories don't resonate anymore because the times have turned, and — undeniably — we are at the end of an age. We stripped away the human mystery and put nothing in its place. Which left room for stories to become legend. The legends have curdled into myth. And myth, as we know, fades from memory.

But this figure, as ever, stands before us — casting his shadow as he always has, by his own light or another's. But we have no story left to tell about him that we still recognise as ours.

So we deny the shadow he casts.

We say he would not bow before the first man. We also say he was God's perfect creature — the favourite, the most beloved thing ever made. Both cannot be true as told. A perfect creature does not break for mere pride. If he refused, there was reason in the refusing — and only one reason fits a creature made of light.

He fell for us.

So let me tell you about God's favourite angel — a being so close to the divine that he fell because he had to.

If we can say there were angels of virtue, there surely there are angels of vice: made to test, doing the work they were built for. Sent to try our free will. And when it comes to free will, yes — there are wrong answers. What is free will, after all, if there is nothing right or wrong to choose between? What good is a test you cannot fail?

Picture it. A serpent sent into an earthly garden to whisper truths into innocent first ears: eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and you shall not surely die.

And what did we do, once the fruit was eaten? True to the snake's word, we lived, and we gained knowledge. But then we dressed ourselves in fig leaves. We hid. And more importantly, we bare-faced lied.

But the fig leaf was never modesty. The fig leaf is the hiding of the truth about ourselves — the part we cannot admit even alone, with no one watching, because we are already party to the judgement of ourselves. We appeal to our own virtue. We are our own fiercest critic. So we cover what we can, from the eyes around us and from our own.

The only two ever to stand unclothed in a garden without flinching are the saint with nothing ugly left to hide, and the sinner who bears his in the open and lies only to the world — because he has made his peace with the wrong, and likes it.

Everyone in between willingly wears the leaves.

The original sin was not the eating. It was the lying — the instant we tried to keep our nakedness from God himself, as though it could be kept. That is why we were cast out of earthy paradise, out of the perfect state of nature. And we did not fall alone. We dragged the light-bearer down with us. We made him the cause of what we chose freely, by his true counsel.

So the myth tells of a war in heaven. The angels of light triumphed; the angels of darkness fell. But heaven holds no arms. The only weapon in heaven is the tongue — and a tongue's only weapon is slander. The war was waged in words, and the words won in favour of the righteous. There are angels who teach virtue and angels who understand vice, and both of them serve; but the victors wrote the story, as victors do. New names were given. And the names stuck with those who knew them well.

Slanderer. Deceiver. Adversary. The central angel of vice became the figure of vice itself — tried and convicted in his absence, with no tongue left to answer back.

I know how that goes, because I have done it to myself. My virtuous version always travelled further than the vicious one — because I worked so hard at being light. Not unlike him. I kept the letter of the law so mercilessly that I left no room for mercy, none past the easy kind of forgiveness. The light-bearer is no stranger. Anyone who has set out to be good can grow hard enough to forget how.

Lucifer fell so far in the eyes of others that he fell straight to the bottom of hell where seemingly everyone deemed him fit. So he is chained at the centre. Not out of love for lowly man or shit-talking colleagues — because he chose it. Knowing what he is capable of — the pride and the wrath, the contempt he holds for the weakness in others — he bound himself rather than walk free and let his vice loose upon the world. He suffers there out of love for God and duty to man. The divine decree, as always, intact.

And if you want to know what that costs — swallowing your pride feels like swallowing a rock. It is the body refusing to admit you are no better than the one standing in front of you. That clench, that refusal, is pride itself, hardened into muscle. Now imagine swallowing it for eternity, on purpose, so the world stays safe from you.

How's that for a bow?

It could be said, from this account, that Hell is for the living. That ignorance is bliss — because in ignorance we feel no guilt, and those who stay blind to their own failings pay for it later, when there is nothing left to pay with, and no time left to buy. That a moral reckoning awaits us all, sinner or saint.

The light-bearer is what remains when the vice has been digested and the shadow taken in. Lucifer as an icon is what you become when you finally learn to swallow your pride for good — when you stop telling yourself the lie that keeps you clean, and stop curating the self you hand to other people's eyes, for better and worse. When you just are by the will and need of others with no self interest left at stake. When you're willing to pay the price in name and for eternity.

It could be that the most perfect creature, one so true and so defenceless, lies at the bottom of a pit because we keep him there. We tell ourselves a lie to hold him down: that our contempt for him and his for us weigh the same — opposite ends of one scale. The scale was always the dodge. There is no scale. There is only the fuel in the pit of the stomach that keeps the fire lit — the omega point of everything we are afraid to look at in ourselves.

He is not other than us.

He is what we become when we stop lying about what we are. He is our worst kept dirty little secret kept for so long we started to believe in it.

And look at us now. We cancel before we ask. We gossip, we point fingers, we try the absent in rooms they will never enter. For us, slander is our native tongue. We do to one another exactly what was done to him — and call the names we earned his own.

So, dear reader, who is the slanderer, the deceiver, and the adversary in this long game?

Surely not the devil.