“Not we, Lord!” they exclaimed.
I shook my head. “You are men, after all. Though you are still blameless I am afraid that when your wives are too solemn you find it tedious. Is that not so?”
Their wives looked at them sternly. One young husband then said, while staring down at his feet, “I love the woman God has given me, but she does not always laugh when I do.”
“True,” I said. “But Lilith will laugh always. She is never sedate. She was never a matron. Even the women on the countless worlds who are like her are never truly matrons, however often they marry. They stretch their lips in perpetual smiles and show all their glowing teeth between their red lips; they smile even when they sleep. It is a bad habit, but it is also dangerous. They are never disheveled, nor do they ever sweat for they have taught men to labor for them. They are perfumed at all times, and their dress is the only matter of gravity to them. Ornament is of the greatest weight. They are never disturbed by the vagaries of nature or of any mishap; they find it all amusing. Their noses never run, nor, at the least, visibly. If they possess bowels and bladders, it is as if they do not. Never are they impatient with men; they croon and pacify, even when the masculine behavior is particularly imbecilic of the moment. Good nature at all times, even under arduous circumstances, and laughter, always, are their distinguishing features. You will understand that this can be very soothing.”
“What trivial creatures!” said the ladies, with scorn. Again they glanced at their husbands. “Our husbands are of marvelous intellect, and they would find such women boring.”
I thought to remark that even the wisest men often find folly delightful, and when it comes in the form of a delectable woman they discover it hard to resist. But the ladies’ expressions, when contemplating their husbands, were thoughtful enough, and appeared to unnerve the boys.
I said, “God has given you great wisdom, so that you know things without experience of them. The histories of many of the worlds is the history of the Laughing Girls, and the destruction they brought with them. Mighty thrones fell because of them. Empires died in their pale hands. Death followed like a lethal shadow behind their dancing steps. Had fools alone been their prey it might not have been so terrifying. But the wisest men of all succumbed to the Laughing Girls, and abandoned honor, God, peace, and order to lay treasures at their pretty feet. Their secret, and their charm, is, as I have said, because they find nothing serious in existence and nothing to be reverenced. They are an abomination, and belong to the Dragon.”
“A silly woman is not enticing,” said one of the husbands.
“Ah, you have never encountered folly before! Occasional frivolity, or even foolishness, can be very disarming and even innocent at times. But constant folly apparently does not follow the usual course of monotony. It does not pall. On the contrary! I have seen emperors glory in the folly of their Laughing Girls and openly adore them, and turn from them only when they discover the girls in a temper or afflicted with some slight ill of the flesh. I must warn you that it is rare for a Laughing Girl so to display herself to a man, whereas wives, being truly human, lose their amiability occasionally or have to wipe their noses. Men, sad to say, prefer women who are not truly women.”
“Do not such women possess souls?” asked one of the ladies in a voice I found a little deplorably sharp. “Are they not aware of this?”
“No, and again that is part of their charm. They are wholly flesh, and their souls are like soft little rabbits, without contemplation or true thought, and possessing only greed. They adore themselves. If they worship, it is only themselves whom they worship. Astonishingly, men find this entrancing. Surely, they say in their hearts, a woman who holds herself above all things and above all other women, holds herself thus because she possesses the truth.”
“That she is indeed superior,” said a lady. The husbands were curiously quiet, and thinking.
“You have said it, dear sister,” I replied. “The Laughing Girls, sly and greedy and rapacious, and desiring all things completely for themselves, teem with plots to satisfy their desires. Men are the satisfiers, the givers of gifts, therefore their basest emotions must be aroused, and their naughtier instincts, and their tendency to abandon. The Laughing Girls, for instance, convince men that they are kings, even if they only plow fields. However, these Girls do not care for the man who labors and who thinks. He is usually not possessed of much worldly substance. So they pursue men of accomplishment, and men of the energy which can gratify greed. Or, men of unusual handsomeness. The latter, however, is only for the hour or the night, unless the handsome man also possesses treasure.”
The younger ladies fixed their young husbands with hard eyes, measuring their beauty and they became even more thoughtful. Then one said, “How shall we know this Lilith?”
“Ah! She will appear repulsive to you—but perhaps not to your husbands. Consider this blue lily. Her eyes are of that hue. Consider your gilded sky. Her hair resembles it. And this white anemone; her flesh appears so. Hark to that nightingale, as the evening shadows empurple themselves on your grain. Her voice is like that bird, trilling with music, and, of course, with laughter.”
Our Father, foreseeing your arts, Lucifer, has given a measure of innocent vanity to the people of Lympia, so one of the ladies said, “She, from your description, Lord, would appear repulsive to our men!”
“And very strange,” echoed some of the husbands.
“The strange woman lives in the house of death and that house is in the habitation of hell,” I said. “But that has never driven men from her. On the contrary they have considered her well worth the lives they lost, and the treasure, and their hope of Heaven.”
The lads turned their heads and looked over their shining fields to the silver temple they had reared to Our Father. They said with deep passion, “No strange woman can lure us from Him!”
“So be it,” I said, and I bowed my head for a moment.
“Nor would we find any woman unlike the glory of our wives captivating,” said the boys. “For who is like unto them in face or form, in countenance or in mind? We should spurn this Lilith.”
“I hope,” I answered. I then said, “But the danger takes another form, and it is of a man.” Now every lady regarded me earnestly. “He is a devil, and his name is Damon, and his eyes are the color of the eyes of Lilith, and his flesh resembles hers also, and he has a mane of hair like the vivid sunset. There have been few women who have ever repulsed him.”
“How peculiar he must appear!” cried the women with fervency. “How unlike our beloved husbands!”
“True. I trust his color will repel you, my sisters, and that you will not consider it superior to your husbands’. If Lilith is a Laughing Girl, Damon is a laughing boy.”
“Life is serious,” repeated one of the ladies. “There is a time for mirth, it is true, and life would not be so pleasant without it. But a man who laughs constantly could be an occasion for impatience to a woman.”
“True. Women are often wiser than men. But Damon has other arts. He has seen all the wisdom of all the worlds, and all the glories of the intellect, and all the beauty. He can describe them with such vividness that the mind is held enthralled, as if under a spell. He is the father of all the storytellers who have ever lived, all the tales of delight and wonder. Women love storytellers.”
“Our wives are busy with the work God has given into their hands!” said one of the husbands in a rebuking voice directed not at me but at his wife.
“Still, they love a man who talks well,” I said. “I think that is an art which all husbands should cultivate.”
“If he is colored as you have described him, Lord,” said one of the wives, “we should find him, not pleasing, but unlike our husbands, and are not our husbands the most splendid in appearance?”
The lads’ faces shone with gratification.
“Consider them so always, my sisters,” I said. “For when a race comes to believe it is less lovely than another, and that
the other possesses more authority and innate value, then it has lost its soul. An honest pride is desirable. A prideless man, or woman, is less than the humblest animal. Cultivate your pride in what God has made you. Should you lose it, and gaze upon the form of Lilith and Damon, and say to yourselves, ‘They are fairer than our wives or our husbands, and more interesting,’ then surely you have invited death to be your companion, and will bring death to dwell forever on your world. God is good and holy beyond all imaginings, but when what He has created is despised by the created and found of no value, then His wrath is immeasurable. For God has given distinctive worth to all races, and unique qualities, and never must they be demeaned or others regarded with secret envy. Later in your existences and experiences you will meet men of other worlds, and of stranger appearance and color. They, too, have the value of God in them, and it is their own though it is not yours. Love all that is created in the Name of Him Who created it, and know that He does not love one creation above another.”
“But will the races on other worlds consider us only unique, or will they believe us lesser than they are?” asked one of the husbands.
“That is an excellent question,” I said with approval. “If you do not fall, you will meet only the men of other planets who have not fallen. Therefore, they will regard you with honest admiration and honor God in you. But if you fall, then you will meet sinful men, and you will hate and despise each other, and hold each other in contempt, and you will fall upon each other. And kill.”
“We have not seen death,” said all of them in horror.
“Not yet. But when you look upon the faces of Lilith and Damon you will see it. Fly from them. Repudiate them. Detest them. Call to God to deliver you from them, and as you are sinless and as you are His, He will come on the wings of lightning to save you.”
I believe, Lucifer, that you will find your task of seduction impossible, for the race of Lympia is proud that God has made them as He has, and worship Him for what He has done unto them. They will never, I pray, come to regard themselves as more humble than other races and less worthy of admiration, for they know themselves distinguished and a new invention of Our Father’s, and therefore to be regarded with pleasure by others for their beauty of body and mind and soul, and for the greater glory of God. Even if they encounter men of other worlds of superior mind or beauty, they will say to themselves, “It is their own, and we honor it. But ours is our own also, and in the eyes of God of equal value and authority. If we must strive at all, it must be only to perfect ourselves within the limits of our strength and our spirits.”
That is the true humility, and the true Godliness. The race of Lympia knows that they have human limitations, but within those boundaries they will grow to their capacity, and it will be enough in their eyes and in the Eyes of Our Father. For true humility is the noblest of prides, for it accepts itself as ordained by God for His own reasons and His own purposes.
Alas, what you have written of Terra is true, and you and men conspired together to bring it about. Ah, Lucifer! You who so loved beauty to have taught a race of men to love only ugliness! You who are of such grandeur, to have helped reduce a race to such insignificance and so lacking in dignity! You have conferred authority only on the base, for the men of Terra now seem incapable of recognizing baseness. Still a few remain who say with disgust, “I shall not fall before him who rules me, for he possesses no merits of mind and soul, and even his flamboyance, if he has it at all, is bestial. I did not choose him. Therefore, I shall not honor him. I can only regret that my fellowman is cajoled to exalt the lowest and the most inferior, and to raise him above all others. I must strive to make my brothers see, if I die for it, for this world must not perish in mud and blood. It is my mother and I am formed of her flesh, and I love her, and to free her from stupidity is the greatest task to which God had assigned me. I fear no man and no furious nation. I fear only the darkness which man has drawn over the face of God. I will pursue my way, and listen only to my God, and perhaps the children of my children will know grace and freedom and love and worship again. If not, I have still done my best and that will be regarded as merit in me, before God.”
In the darkness of the dreadful nights of Terra of this day, these good and saintly men and women remember the prophecies of the prophets and they remember the promises of the Christ. They know Our Father does not lie. His Word is the only Truth, begotten from all eternity. Some, I admit, have been beguiled by you to believe that the material betterment of their fellowmen in secular ways is their task and deserves all their striving. They have forgotten that this world is passing, and that the Christ will make all things new and that the world is not His Kingdom as of yet. They are harried by human impatience for the good, but you have perverted that longing for the good, as you use what is the best in the human soul to betray it and lead it aside. They cry for “Justice!” as they look upon the sufferings of the oppressed everywhere. But justice comes only from God, and if they seek it in the laws of men never shall they find it. Their yearning for universal love and charity comes from the touching passion of their souls, their very instinctual passion, but never can it be accomplished by man’s fiat and the exigency in the lustful hearts of politicians. That way leads only to greater slavery. Man puts his faith in mortal princes and rulers to his desperate peril.
It is just that good men cry that all men have a right to the bread of earth, and that intellectual light and earthly peace must not be denied them. But in striving for that bread, that uncertain light and that precarious peace, alone, they have lost the vision. Nothing is permanent on Terra, and tyrants use even benign laws to delude the people and corrupt them. The bread of today becomes the famine of tomorrow, despite all the labor. The light becomes the darkness of cruelty, and the peace becomes war. That is the way of sinful men, of tainted men, of fallen men, even though their work is illusorily selfless and sacrificing. Only through the implored offices of God can they succeed even in a little measure.
Loving and anxious hands must not only give bread, but they must be lifted in prayer and in the knowledge that all secular things pass away on Terra and no morrow is born of today, and no improvement in the temporal lot of man can be lasting until first the favor of God is sought and received, and in the full knowledge that your deathly spirit can only be lifted from the world through God’s intervention—as it has been prophesied, and will come to pass on the Day He alone knows.
I look upon the murky chaos and confused terror and hatred of Terra, and the pain and the loss, and I know it is your work, with the aid of men. But it will end! It will end!
Your brother, Michael
Greetings to my brother, Michael, who clothes his dread uncertainty in the pathetic emphasis of certainty:
It will end, on Terra, as I have designed, for Our Father does not oppose the will of man. As I embody men’s will, how then can Our Father triumph? The men of Terra have announced their joyous damnation through their governments, and they embrace it eagerly. When the multitudes of them, enfolded with the fire they evoked, look upon my face I shall say to them, “Brothers, welcome to the habitation you have wrought in your lives and in your thoughts and souls, for it is your own. It is surely your own.”
Once, less than two hundred years ago, the men on the continent of North America were the architects of a truly magnificent theory of government, based on justice and order and liberty, and in the naïve belief that the majority of men are truly men. It was easy to forecast the absolute failure of that wise government, for men are stupid and prefer to snuggle in the arms of slavery than to stand before the winds of freedom and live arduously. Men, by their nature, prefer to steal than to work, to sleep than to live, to eat than to think, to betray than to be loyal, to dishonor rather than to honor. The evidence of history was before all those selfless and intelligent men who founded the government of North America, but they chose to ignore it. Did they think that by the scratching of their passionate pens they could raise the stature of men by one
cubit? They had the words of the Christ: “Who, by taking thought, can add one cubit to his stature?” That which is born in the gutter must return to the gutter, and no efforts of well-born gentlemen will ever elevate a pig to the mind of a man. A dream remains a dream. But reality is the one horror of the gentle-minded. I look upon the twentieth century, as they call it, of the men of Terra, and I know that madness, accompanied by drums, is now sole temporal power all over that disastrous world. It was not I who did that. It was the caressing dreamers who accomplished it, who refused to look upon the nature of man and to deal with it, and therefore evoked insanity in governments and individuals. The truth, as you know, dear Michael, cannot be evaded except at the cost of madness.
But enough of that little foul earth, which lies snugly in my hand, reeking. It is nothing but bloody offal, ready for the sewer it has prepared for itself. I cannot help but congratulate myself, for in this century of Terra I have been supremely successful. It was I who gave the inconsequential gigglers to her, the creators of contorted art-forms, the demented wild “music,” the earnestly insistent, the souls who never knew laughter, the anxious watchers of the deportment of others while their own deportment was unspeakable, the enviers, the slothful, the whiners, those who believed life was unfair to them in some vague and petulant manner, the deniers of life, the liars and the dream-spinners, the pursuers of novelty for its own sake, the busy-bodies, the interferers, the philosophers of government who espoused only the vilest members of their society, the teachers of ineffable fallacies, the tolerant of evil who were also the traducers of virtue, the casual and urbane, the planners of the Excellent Society, Hell receive them! and those who believed that filth has its own verity and despised the pure of heart. In short, the unproductive, the twisted, the frenzied and the wild and uncouth. These are my demons, I raised them from my hells to infest Terra and the men thereon received them with love and delight.