Wednesday, June 07, 2006

Greetings, fellow survivors!

Well, yesterday was the Day of the Beast: 06/06/06. Fortunately or unfortunately, the devil didn't make a grand entrance -- appearing as Liz Hurley or otherwise.
In fact, I'd venture to say that yesterday was about as ordinary a day as I've seen come and go in a long time. No waters turning into blood. No plague of frogs. No locusts. No great stars falling from the sky's firmament.
This guy -- who is most definitely not Liz Hurley -- is Anton Szandor Levay, author of the Satanic Bible and founder of the Church of Satan back in the sixties. He's dead now, so presumably he knows whether or not he threw his hat in with the right crowd. he was one weird dude, but his version of Satan worship ran towards more uninhibited orgies and zero on the sacrificing of babies, or even black cats.
One of my favorite recent depictions of Satan was in Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ. An Aramaic-speaking, androgynous fallen angel with a (forked) gilded tongue was very creepy. Even if he did dress like a rejected Sith Lord design from George Lucas' studio.

On a brief -- serious -- note: One of my favorite explanations for Satan's fall appears in Arabic thought. They say that when God created man, He recognized man as the pinnacle of all creation and commanded all His other creatures to bow before Man. Lucifer, loving God most of all, refused to bow before another mere creature because he reserved his reverence for God alone. For this impertinence, God cast the devil out of Heaven. It's a tragic story. I like the story because it has layers of meaning. The more you think about it, the more subtleties you can draw out. There's the tragic irony that it is the Devil's love which ultimately cuts him off from God. The arrogance normally attributed to being the Devil's downfall is there too: the Devil dares to second guess God's command.

But we can't be serious all the time. Take this guy. Is he really flashing the "sign of the devil?"
Must be, he's doing it on two different occassions. Doesn't he have enough trouble without being accused of being in league with the Devil?

Of course, everyone has photoshop these days...

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

well actually, dubba is not in league with the fallen one. he appears to be a devotee of RJD, the inventor of the forked fingers. don't you tools watch behind the music? vh1 is the new bible man. i can't wait til we start tossing people into the ring with wild animals. see..... rome effed up. they had too much lead in their water pipes and it drove them to their crazy, sad end. we don't have the lead water and we are large and in charge. nothing is gonna stop us. just keep the faith........... as it were.

Holy Mother Eph said...

The other day I went to see Mission Impossible 3 with my husband and we saw this guy with a shaved head and triangular goatee driving his little red sports car in the parking lot. We both laughed when we saw that his personalized plates read "DRSATAN". I guess he is highly schooled in the ways of the devil. Then I had this thought that something even scarier than Satan worshipping would be Cain worshipping. I'm sure that church would probably have to be organized by an ex-mormon, though. I don't think any other church believes Cain will rule over Satan in the eternities in their little kingdom called Outer Darkness.