Letter #53: The Double-Demon of the Age

Lucifer freezes; Ahriman burns.

MacDad,

Many interesting revelations in your last letter, including that there was a girl who wasn’t naked in Game of Thrones. I must have blinked. Anyway, something I love is that you and I always come to each other first when we discover some new writer who lights up an unseen part of the world. You introduced me to Thomas Traherne, one of the true greats. And our conversation this week puts me in mind of another all-timer: Owen Barfield, a close friend of C.S. Lewis’s (and now of ours) whom I discovered in an Oxford library one day.

Some of Barfield’s stuff, though revelatory, can feel like reading hieroglyphs. In fact if he had ever had occasion to quote hieroglyphs, I’m sure he would have printed them without translation. But he also wrote a series of fictional dialogues that display some of that lucid Inkling charm. In one of them, Unancestral Voice, he puts forward the haunting idea that there are two distinct satanic powers at work in the world: Lucifer and Ahriman.

In truth, I’m convinced there’s only one ultimate enemy of man—and he’s a real louse, too. But he adopts many guises and employs many minions. Barfield lays out a good way to think about two of them. The first is Lucifer, and his objective is “to conserve the past too long; to maintain, in the present, conditions that rightly obtained in the past.” Like a mother who keeps her son smothered in the nursery because she can’t bear to let him become a man, Lucifer is the bad comb-over of the world: he refuses to accept when conditions change.

But while Lucifer claws us back into the past, Ahriman barrels into the future before we’re ready, working “to bring about, long before their appointed time, conditions which, if all goes well, will rightly obtain in the future, but which can only obtain in the present as a wicked caricature.” Maybe the overflowing life of our resurrected humanity will pour through and past the boundaries of male and female, thundering like a waterfall over the current limits of nature. Maybe. But for now, Ahriman invites us to translate our vaguest intimations of eternity into crudely literal acts of techno-savagery, carving up our bodies in a transgender mockery of the soul.

Lucifer freezes; Ahriman burns. To evaluate the accuracy of this story as demonology is lightyears beyond my paygrade. But as a parable, it captures perfectly what you call our “double bind,” between yearning for the honesty of freedom and craving the comfort of order. Lucifer and Ahriman are both at work in our post-human moment: the one seducing us to melt down the boundaries of our nature with biotech, the other tempting us to force the lively fracas of human politics into icy lockstep with some heartless computer model. The double-demon of the age threatens to tear us in two. Our task, instead, is to remain three in one.

Love,
Spencer