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19catsncounting · 2 months ago

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I'm not at all a math gay but I am determined, so I crunched some numbers about Lucifer and the cage.

The universe is 13.7 billion years old give or take 200k - and I believe there's a throwaway line about Lucifer witnessing the Big Bang, but I think setting Lucifer's age to 14 billion years is close enough.

The modern human race is around 300,000 years old, and Adam as seen in season 15 is indeed a modern human both anatomically and behaviorally. There's certainly cause to consider the Garden of Eden taking place at the dawn of behaviorally modern humans at 50,000 years, but the show did not consider that so I won't either.

300,000/14,000,000,000 means that 0.0000214286 of Lucifer's life was spent in the cage. Which, if you put it on the scale of an average human life (78 years old, 78×300k divided by 14 billion) you get 0.0016714286 of a year, or 14 hours of a human's life.

Which, probably explains why all the archangels don't really seem to care about Lucifer's confinement and punishment. To them, it's a time out. God made Lucifer sit alone in the garage for a day, and always planned to let him back in when it was time for bed.

But, that's not how time works in Hell, or the cage. For Hell, 4 months is 40 years or 1 year converts to 120, but the cage is beneath Hell. It's very likely that time passes even more slowly, and some have estimated 160 years to 240.

For simplicity's sake, we can use the 200 years per earth year average, which makes the initial 300,000 years into 60,000,000 (300,000 × 200) which gets us 0.0042857143 of Lucifer's life, in his own perspective, in the cage. Which, in the perspective of an average human, is 4 months.

Four months, in complete isolation. The only time we know of Lucifer interacting with another being while in the cage is with Azazel. There were demons that thought Lucifer was a myth, and they live directly on top of the cage. While there are a lot of fictional accounts of vows of silence lasting years or decades, even in very strict monastic practice it is not advisable to go a month without speaking a single word, and certainly not to completely abstain from even overhearing conversations.

We don't know what the cage was like exactly for Lucifer when he was confined alone inside of it (and it should be notable that Lucifer doesn't talk about it, instead talking about the fall and not afterwards), but a lot of Supernatural and especially the angel characterization was influenced by 1995's The Prophecy. In that movie, Lucifer has a rather succinct quote that "Hell is the absence of God," and I think that would be a great foundational description for Lucifer's cage. In the non-linear description of Lucifer's fall, he was cast down from Heaven, then from the Garden, then from Earth, then from Hell to the cage, each time driven further and further from God and losing access to more and more of creation. The cage might have been the point where God snapped and said "Alright, you keep breaking things so now, you get Nothing." (It's also worth noting that of all the beings that we know get confined on God's orders - Amara, Leviathans, Shedim - Lucifer is the only one that's supposed to be freed at a certain time. Is that an indication that the cage is a lesser punishment? Or is it something that God might not have been willing to inflict in totality and perpetuity to Lucifer?)

Something that I've written about and researched a good bit is white torture - the severity of isolation and sensory deprivation that breaks both people and social animals Very Very deeply. Rheesus monkeys that spend 6 months to a year in isolation either die or completely lose the ability to communicate or bond with others of their species. Human victims will lose their memories, cognitive functions, and present with psychotic features without having preexisting risk factors. You can get a small dose of this in rooms that are so accoustically padded that you can hear your own heartbeat - most people who are merely deprived of sound will start having auditory hallucinations in 5-10 minutes. John McCain, who spent 2 years in isolation and was able to communicate with his fellow POWs by tapping on the walls of his cell and was visited by wardens and torturers, said that the isolation "crushes the spirit" worse than any other form of mistreatment. His shoulders were broken repeatedly from beatings and stress positions to the point that he was physically disabled for the rest of his life, and nearly died from dysentery which is a Horrible and prolonged way to go, and that wasn't worse than the isolation.

Four months doesn't seem like a long time in the human perspective, unless you're spending four months, completely alone, in a void. And I think it's safe to assume that angels are indeed social creatures, especially Lucifer. Michael was the only archangel for some measure of time, but Lucifer never was.

And just... out of 78 human years, 77.6 of them you were glorious and perfect and no one really had a problem with you. And then you have a huge issue with something and it spirals into a big family fight and you go to prison for a bit, and you come out known as the embodiment of evil that has to be destroyed? Like the majority of your life meant absolutely nothing? You are now The Devil, Forever, because of something that happened within a single human lifetime (Cain getting the Mark seems to be the latest event in Lucifer's fall before the cage, and Cain could very well still be the direct son of Adam, messy biblically accurate extended lifetimes disregarded.)

And, the Mark making Lucifer "more like himself" is an addition that doesn't make it much better, to directly parallel the Mark to the demon blood's influence on Sam. Supernatural's most famous solution for a drug addiction allegory that is solved by mystical death and resurrection but the prescribed treatment is further condemnation and suffering which of course works Famously in real life. (And, the Mark makes Cain and Dean kill, the most feasible form of destruction for a human. Lucifer wore that Mark for most likely a few billion years, and the effects of that destructive craving just weren't visible on 'Heaven's most terrifying weapon.')

This is long and rambling, but I think the reason a lot of American queers take this hyperconservative masculine fetish show and write revisionist fanfic about it is because we live in the shadow of these themes played in real life and we want to smudge it with our dirty commie fingers. The way that sympathy for the devil, on its face and explicitly, is called out as a character flaw and cardinal sin, (and Any belief in the betterment of someone who made a mistake and is not a Winchester is regarded as foolish) is so pointedly against rehabilitation and forgiveness and growth that I honestly think even the fictional cops on the Cowboy Brothers show would have reservations. Like, Wayward Sisters probably didn't happen because they realized if Jody was given a single conversation to explain the split between hunting monsters and being a cop that can't execute criminals and has actually been shown to have a fond if exasperated relationship with those she's arrested (her introductory episode she talks to two petty criminals and while admitting a possible murderer had plenty of enemies she didn't condone his vigilante execution), it would implode the very basis of the show and hunting aesthetic unless they shifted lanes and somehow asspulled Anti-Monster Serum that girl hunters shoot out of guns.

Anyway, if Lucifer had a decent parole officer maybe the apocalypse wouldn't have happened. /jk

#lucifer spn #I could Maybe make succinct and good meta posts but I just don't believe in less words.#This ramble is brought to you by my ongoing attachment to Jody Mills unknowingly becoming Lucifer's parole officer through amnesia hijinks #also when I say parole officer I mean it in the reintegrative sense that it was never truly engineered to function as #The bad news about Supernatural is if you watch long enough the show forgets to say ACAB #And then a new pit of hell opens up when you realize one of those cops might have the moral highground

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