— Have I touched on a sensitive spot?
— To start with I have no sensitive spots, because in our pneumatic domain we exist entirely of intelligence, and moreover..
— And moreover?
— Let's leave it. I don't mind justifying myself now and then, or explaining something more fully, but I don't intend to keep biting my own tail.
— You do have a tail, then?
— The story may have one.
— I don't know if you know but the Ouroboros, a serpent biting its own tail, is a symbol of eternity on that same earth.
— That's as may be, but if I can't tell the story in the way that is implicit in the events themselves, then you will simply have to make do with the announcement that the matter is settled. You can ask me a hundred questions, or a thousand or a hundred thousand; you can ask me. . for example, why Cuba had to be dragged in, and so on and so forth — that will all become clear. Take it from me that nothing has happened that wasn't absolutely necessary, at least as far as my interventions were concerned. It's no coincidence that I haven't once said "I" yet.
— Except for those three times, that is. And let me tell you this. The fact that you are also in the top rank of the Celestial Hierarchy doesn't give you the right to strike such a damn impertinent tone with an official who is just a little superior to you. Anyway, that's how things are here these days. It's starting to depress me, but that may also be partly due to your story. You know, none of us has a view of the whole Pleroma, but if you operate at the edge of the Eight, as we do, with a view of the demonic world of Darkness, things are harder for you than for those higher entities who are scarcely aware of it; and you even more than I are standing with your back to the Light and facing Darkness. If my memory serves me well, once or twice in the past you even appeared in that Archontic area, which cannot even claim to have been created by the Chief, as most of those windbags there believe, because that anthropic explosion of light, which was to lead to them, was the work of our center. Compared with me you are already almost one of them, although for them you are infinitely far removed — at least if they even have an inkling of your existence. Most of them know beings like us only in the shape of infantile fantasies like Superman or Batman. Would you like to know why that is? It's because by now they have almost all our powers themselves, in the shape of their technology. And that's our own stupid fault. For centuries we have been complacently been asleep here, and in the meantime Satan-El has been doing his work.
— Satan-El? What's that you're saying? In what form?
— All those characters are scum anyway: Belial-Satan, Beelzebub-Satan, Asmodee-Satan, Azazel-Satan, Samael-Satan, Mephistopheles-Satan, and so on and so on, they're all the same. But of course it was Lucifer-Satan again.
— What was the swine doing then?
— We only found out recently. Five hundred years ago, without our realizing it, he entered into a pact with mankind, a sort of diabolical counterpart of the Chiefs testimony.
— You must be joking! I only know the story that Mephistopheles is supposed to have entered into a pact with a certain Dr. Faust, that Faust is supposed to have sold his soul to him, but that seemed to me to belong more to literature.
— That is true, but there now turns out to be a very dangerous aspect to it. Can I refresh your memory a moment? The historical Johannes Faust was a traveling German magician from Württemberg, with an infamous reputation, like many others in the first half of the human sixteenth century. In 1587, when he had been dead for about forty or fifty years, his legend began with the appearance of a chronicle. Historia von D. Johann Fausten dem weitbeschreiten Zauberer und Schwarzkünstler, in which that story of the pact with the devil occurs. That Faust legend, we believe, goes back to a similar traveling character, fifteen hundred years earlier, who is mentioned in the Acts of the Apostles, Simon Magus. He fell out with Peter, because he wanted to buy the Holy Ghost. That character, a Samaritan, had gotten it into his head that he himself was the Chief.
— Go on. Was Satan-El behind that, too?
— We assume so now. He was going with a Phoenician whore, whom he maintained was an incarnation of Helen of Troy.
— How can you claim such a thing?
— On earth you can claim all sorts of things, and there are always people who will believe you. But be careful, don't underestimate him. He said that the Feminine Principle was the first Idea in Thought — that is, in the Chiefs thought; that is, his own. That Principle next created us, whereupon we in our turn created the world. But according to him we do not want to be regarded as creatures, only as creators, and so we dragged our creator from Light to the Darkness of our creation and forced it into the physical shape of a centuries-old series of women, including Helen, and finally into a whore in the brothel in Tyre from where the Father, having descended to earth and become flesh, finally rescued the imprisoned Mother.
— What a story! Of course that bit about the abduction and all those women is a scandalous lie — but how did that magician find out the truth about creation? Did Lucifer tell him about all that?
— Can you think of another explanation?
— And what did he have up his sleeve in doing that?
— It was a red herring to disguise his real intention. Without anyone realizing it Simon Magus returned toward the end of the sixteenth century in the legend of Faust, the restless seeker after knowledge, who entered into a pact with the devil. The first literary adaptation was Christopher Marlowe's, The Tragicall History of Doctor Faustus, which was performed in London in about 1590. That was the beginning of a continuous succession of adaptations of the theme, down to the present earthly day, the high point of which was, naturally, Goethe's version, in which Helen again appears. In one of the most recent versions, Doktor Faustus by Thomas Mann, a syphilitic whore again crops up as the companion of the hero, and that was, significantly enough, inspired by a fatal whore in the life of Nietzsche, whom we were talking about just now. She was the cause of his fatal madness.
— I know all about that. At the time I even dispatched that creature to get him. People shouldn't pronounce the Chief dead. But where was Lucifer's red herring? What was he trying to distract attention from?
— The intention was to impress upon mankind that a pact with the devil was a literary matter: the noncommittal story of an imaginary individual thirsting after knowledge, who sells his soul. That was how it was possible for a dreadful, far from literary but very real event to go unnoticed until today — namely, that in that same last decade of the sixteenth century, also in London, Lucifer entered into a pact with mankind, a collective contract in which the whole of mankind sold its soul to him.
— Good God! How should I imagine that? Did someone sign that contract on behalf of mankind?