#Paradise Lost

[pulpsandcomics2]

Gustave Dore -Illustrations for Paradise Lost

Satan and his angels rebel against God

[hell-drabbles]

Lucifer 4

Summary: You will admit, you're kind of a dick. Whenever you're having conversations with someone, and Lucifer is definitely listening, you like to drop an occasional "Good boy," just to see him jump.

(Hmm, I really should write more for the other characters at some point. But, I can't force it. Need it come at it's own time. Which is frustrating but that's my life.)

While you can never expect the peaceful days to last long within this land of Hell, it does nothing to stave off the boredom that inevitably comes. Enough days have passed for the tension to leave your body and for this stubborn, monotonous feeling to settle in. It's nothing that'll make you do anything drastic, but you're certainly in a mood for mischief.

Hence, you settled on something… kinda dick-ish, and childish to be honest.

Currently, you're eating a casual meal with Gamigin, nice and early in the morning. Lucifer was a little ways over there, leaning against a chair as he absorbed the sun like a cat would. His clothes don't have a single wrinkle on them, and yet it feels like he barely just crawled out of bed.

Lucifer didn't have to follow you when you woke up, but he did anyway. That's cute.

"Really?" you said, leaning back in your chair as you lazily forked more breakfast into your mouth. "Is the bakery that good?"

Gamigin gave a bright smile, nodding enthusiastically. "It is! I really can't believe they're not more popular."

"Wow. Gotta try it sometime then." Honestly, it is kind of shocking to hear that anyone can build or establish a whole bakery with the state of war this place is in. However, they are devils, and devils are just something else. When they want something, by that dead god they will grab at it.

"Well, you can!" Gamigin sprang a paper bag onto you and dumped whatever was in onto the table. An array of jewel like pastries and fluffy confectioneries.

"Oh." You were pleased.

"Oh!" Gamigin repeated back at you, happy that you're happy.

"Good boy," you complimented with a rough ruffle of his hair. Gamigin's grin grew wider, but then a bang ripped that right off.

You looked over to Lucifer. He was awake, eyes not quite wide but still open nonetheless, sleepily blinking like you dumped water in his face. He looked annoyed, lightly rubbing the horn that put a hole in the wall.

"Something wrong, Lucifer?" You know what's wrong and that puts a smile on your face. Gamigin, however, was still as a statue, probably subconsciously knowing something is wrong but can't tell what.

Lucifer blinked slowly and let his frown settle into a neutral line. "Nothing."

There's nothing you like more than messing with his composure using his favorite words. It's like tapping a can of pet food when your pet's asleep. Always so fun.

[weirdlookindog]

John Martin (1789-1854) - Pandemonium, 1841

[lillithdeluna]

In Praise of the Stygian. The twisted world of Lilith de Luna. As darkness settles in, ask yourself: Do you run from it, or do you hide?

[msue0027]

Ah yes, my favourite Bible fanfics, in no particular order

"Paradise Lost", John Milton

"Divine Comedy", Dante Alighieri

"Good Omens", Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman

[illustratus]

Chaos watches as the Rebel Angels are thrown into Hell (Milton's Paradise Lost)

by Gustave Doré

[cr33py-crawli3]

HOW TO END THE CYCLE

[sictransitgloriamvndi]

[postalredeux]

when im mad i chew on this photo of postal dude

[eelhound]

"I think Homer outwits most writers who have written on the War [fantasy archetype], by not taking sides.

The Trojan war is not and you cannot make it be the War of Good vs. Evil. It’s just a war, a wasteful, useless, needless, stupid, protracted, cruel mess full of individual acts of courage, cowardice, nobility, betrayal, limb-hacking-off, and disembowelment. Homer was a Greek and might have been partial to the Greek side, but he had a sense of justice or balance that seems characteristically Greek — maybe his people learned a good deal of it from him? His impartiality is far from dispassionate; the story is a torrent of passionate actions, generous, despicable, magnificent, trivial. But it is unprejudiced. It isn’t Satan vs. Angels. It isn’t Holy Warriors vs. Infidels. It isn’t hobbits vs. orcs. It’s just people vs. people.

Of course you can take sides, and almost everybody does. I try not to, but it’s no use; I just like the Trojans better than the Greeks. But Homer truly doesn’t take sides, and so he permits the story to be tragic. By tragedy, mind and soul are grieved, enlarged, and exalted.

Whether war itself can rise to tragedy, can enlarge and exalt the soul, I leave to those who have been more immediately part of a war than I have. I think some believe that it can, and might say that the opportunity for heroism and tragedy justifies war. I don’t know; all I know is what a poem about a war can do. In any case, war is something human beings do and show no signs of stopping doing, and so it may be less important to condemn it or to justify it than to be able to perceive it as tragic.

But once you take sides, you have lost that ability.

Is it our dominant religion that makes us want war to be between the good guys and the bad guys?

In the War of Good vs. Evil there can be divine or supernal justice but not human tragedy. It is by definition, technically, comic (as in The Divine Comedy): the good guys win. It has a happy ending. If the bad guys beat the good guys, unhappy ending, that’s mere reversal, flip side of the same coin. The author is not impartial. Dystopia is not tragedy.

Milton, a Christian, had to take sides, and couldn’t avoid comedy. He could approach tragedy only by making Evil, in the person of Lucifer, grand, heroic, and even sympathetic — which is faking it. He faked it very well.

Maybe it’s not only Christian habits of thought but the difficulty we all have in growing up that makes us insist justice must favor the good.

After all, 'Let the best man win' doesn’t mean the good man will win. It means, 'This will be a fair fight, no prejudice, no interference — so the best fighter will win it.' If the treacherous bully fairly defeats the nice guy, the treacherous bully is declared champion. This is justice. But it’s the kind of justice that children can’t bear. They rage against it. It’s not fair!

But if children never learn to bear it, they can’t go on to learn that a victory or a defeat in battle, or in any competition other than a purely moral one (whatever that might be), has nothing to do with who is morally better.

Might does not make right — right?

Therefore right does not make might. Right?

But we want it to. 'My strength is as the strength of ten because my heart is pure.'

If we insist that in the real world the ultimate victor must be the good guy, we’ve sacrificed right to might. (That’s what History does after most wars, when it applauds the victors for their superior virtue as well as their superior firepower.) If we falsify the terms of the competition, handicapping it, so that the good guys may lose the battle but always win the war, we’ve left the real world, we’re in fantasy land — wishful thinking country.

Homer didn’t do wishful thinking.

Homer’s Achilles is a disobedient officer, a sulky, self-pitying teenager who gets his nose out of joint and won’t fight for his own side. A sign that Achilles might grow up someday, if given time, is his love for his friend Patroclus. But his big snit is over a girl he was given to rape but has to give back to his superior officer, which to me rather dims the love story. To me Achilles is not a good guy. But he is a good warrior, a great fighter — even better than the Trojan prime warrior, Hector. Hector is a good guy on any terms — kind husband, kind father, responsible on all counts — a mensch. But right does not make might. Achilles kills him.

The famous Helen plays a quite small part in The Iliad. Because I know that she’ll come through the whole war with not a hair in her blond blow-dry out of place, I see her as opportunistic, immoral, emotionally about as deep as a cookie sheet. But if I believed that the good guys win, that the reward goes to the virtuous, I’d have to see her as an innocent beauty wronged by Fate and saved by the Greeks.

And people do see her that way. Homer lets us each make our own Helen; and so she is immortal.

I don’t know if such nobility of mind (in the sense of the impartial 'noble' gases) is possible to a modern writer of fantasy. Since we have worked so hard to separate History from Fiction, our fantasies are dire warnings, or mere nightmares, or else they are wish fulfillments."

- Ursula K. Le Guin, from No Time to Spare, 2013.

[shisasan]

John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book 1 [originally published 1667]

[pulpsandcomics2]

Gustav Dore - Illustrations for Paradise Lost

The defeat of Satan and the rebel angels

[lilithsorchid]

I want the blissful sweetness of doing nothing

[weirdlookindog]

John Martin (1789-1854) - Satan viewing the Ascent to Heaven, 1824

from 'The Paradise Lost of John Milton with illustrations by John Martin', 1846

[lillithdeluna]

In Praise of the Stygian. A cold breath runs down the back of my neck. I turn, yet I am only faced with darkness. A faint whisper beckons me forward. "Come to the dark," it says, "Join us." Do I move closer?