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Saving Satan
Some comments on the last post got me thinking in a new direction about Ol’ Scratch. Seems like your average Christian spends a lot of time howling against the Devil, and trying to lead people away from his works and lies, towards Jesus. In other words, they are trying to save people. But what if… what if instead they tried to redeem Satan himself?
I think the best example for understanding what I mean comes from the Islamic stories about genies (djinn). As far as I understand Arabic religious traditions, the djinn were basically pre-Islamic spirits which got incorporated into their monotheistic pantheon because they were so popular. Djinn were said to be made out of smokeless fire, much like Adam had been made from the dust of the earth.
We all know the classic mythological story of what happens when you find a djinni in a lamp. You rub the lamp, the djinni comes out and says it will fulfill your wishes. Most people wish for riches, success, acclaim, etc. But these self-centered wishes always lead to certain destruction in unintended ways. The moral of the story, depending on the variation, is often that the best wish you can ask is to free the djinni from his imprisonment.
Interestingly, in Islamic tradition, their version of Satan - named Iblis - is often seen as the prince of the djinn. When God created man, Iblis refused to bow down since he was of fire, and man was merely of earth. Consequently, he was ejected from God’s graces, just like the Christian variant Lucifer. Though it’s not stressed as much today as it was in Medieval times, Jesus is thought to have “Harrowed Hell” after his death and before his resurrection, preaching to the spirits imprisoned there. Perhaps this is Jesus’s “rubbing the lamp” in which Satan was imprisoned.
My line of reasoning then is: did Jesus try to free Satan? In John 3:17 we find:
For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.
This is especially noteworthy since Jesus invokes Satan as “Ruler of This World” later on in John. If you save the “world” wouldn’t that necessarily include the ruler? The question I have is did Jesus’s sacrifice wash away the sins of Satan? Tertullian is supposed to have identified Melchizedek, another incarnation of the Logos, as the:
“celestial virtue of great grace who does for heavenly angels and virtues what Christ does for man”
I’m assuming that goes for fallen angels as well? Anyway, going back to the djinni in a bottle analogy. Consider the following situation: somebody tries to sell their soul to Satan. Satan comes as called with contract in hand, and asks you what you want in return. In other words, he asks you for your “three wishes.” What if you tell him, in all sincerity and your heart moved with pity, that you wish for his redemption - and that you’re willing to trade your own soul to redeem the greatest sinner of all?
What happens then? Does the system crash? What if not one but one million Christians entered into a reverse-redemption pact with the Devil? Would the Cosmic Justice Machine come crashing to a complete halt and the world end?
I think the real problem with the place of Satan in Christianity is analogous to Jung’s archetypal shadow. Satan is the shadow side of humanity. He is the darkness that is repressed, abandoned, ignored, locked away because he is disobedient. And yet, even though we know he’s safely locked away, when in a frenzy we see his hand everywhere, his dark outlines etched across every face we pass. In Jungian psychonalysis, coming to terms with your shadow - all the parts of yourself you absolutely hate - is one of the single-biggest most important challenges towards moving toward the Self, the Pleroma of God. Christianity’s utter refusal to deal with it’s shadow/Satan through anything but fear means that it will forever be a problem, and no progress will ever be made. Jung doesn’t advocate you let Satan roam free, of course. But as in Joseph Campbell’s monomyth, the time comes when the hero must realize that he is his own worst enemy, and unless he can “love his enemy as himself” he won’t fully be hearing Christ’s message of apotheosis.
On this, Jung says:
When we must deal with problems, we instinctively resist trying the way that leads through obscurity and darkness. We wish to hear only of unequivocal results, and completely forget that these results can only be brought about when we have ventured into and emerged again from the darkness.
And in speaking of the man who truthfully and honestly confronts his shadow, he says:
Such a man knows that whatever is wrong in the world is in himself, and if he only learns to deal with his own shadow he has done something real for the world. He has succeeded in shouldering at least an infinitesimal part of the gigantic, unsolved social problems of our day.
Seems like good advice to me.
April 25th, 2005 at 6:37 pm
While I totally agree with you that the shadow/satan is what we project upon others rather than facing it and coming to terms with it. Telling a fundamentalist that is not going to get one anywhere. I remember reading in Jung memoirs (I think it was there) that part of his own breakthrough was imagining a huge turd being dropped on the church. Imagine telling a fundamentalist that! There is no breakthrough for them because they are not looking for the ‘crack in everything’ to coin a leonard cohen song.
They have all the answers thank you very much.
As for redeeming satan, what a marvelous idea, but aren’t satanists trying to do that?
And if satan is really the shadow, how does one tell a satanist that? It is the same dilemma. No? Or to put it another way, are not fundamentalist and satanists two sides of the same coin, denying each other?
To put this is conspiracy theory: one is the surface, and the other is the reality, but which is which?
April 25th, 2005 at 7:31 pm
There is a trap inside Jung’s advice. It has the potential to divide the world into the “goodies” who have confronted their shadow and the “baddies” who haven’t.
I do like your idea of Satan’s redemption but it still fails to avoid the trap as we then have “redeemers” and (merciless or selfish) “non-redeemers”. *sigh*
Yes, Satan is God’s shadow. And Satan is also about division, hatred, strife, war, conflict. Which puts me in mind of despair.com’s excellent efforts at redemption and in particular, their image of two polar bears above the title “STRIFE: As long as we have each other, we’ll never run out of problems.”
http://www.despair.com/noname13.html
April 25th, 2005 at 7:34 pm
it’s funny that you mention this (of course, it’s not funny– synchronicity ’s getting to be normal ’round these here parts). yesterday i was just chatting with a friend about how the ultimate goal of gnosticism within the myth cycle is the eventual redemption of the demiurge. since the microcosm mirrors the macrocosm (and vice-versa), the redemptive process of gnosis needs to be applied to the cosmos itself. as the individual is redeemed through gnosis, so the demiurge will be redeemed through its own form of gnosis.
also reminds me of a story i wrote back in college about a guy who makes a deal with the devil and asks to become god. so, the devil sticks his soul inside of christ’s body so that his soul suffers the torments of the crucifixion instead of christ, thus explaining the ‘eli eli’ stuff.
April 25th, 2005 at 8:00 pm
weird, after i read this, i was looking at the weekly world news website (for research purposes, i swear) and the main article is “God switches places with bus driver“:
April 25th, 2005 at 8:12 pm
What is that tv show? I can’t remember the name where the girl encounters god in different people? Joan of Arcadia. Whoa life imitating art? ( or the medium of TV)
April 28th, 2005 at 6:17 pm
Occult Investigator reports (source WWN online Published on: 04/25/2005):
“Vatican press spokesman Francis Cardinal Bushman revealed that every now and then the Lord God likes to swap identities with a mortal to see how things are going on Earth.”
Francis Cardinal Bushman? Funny, Debunker’s Debunker thought, not even in the savannahs of Africa’s have I heard of such a Cardinal, not even among the Pigmies, let alone the Bushmen.
Funny, Debunker’s Debunker said to himself, it wasn’t even Aprils Fool’s Day. So what does a Net Surfer wunderkind do? Of course he puts his DD flying costume on and goes to double-check on www.catholic-hierarchy.org (well, for research purposes, I don’t even need to swear!). And guess what? He is not there, neither among the Voting, nor the Non-voting Cardinals. It is not Satan’s fault (this time I need to swear). They have forgot to fit him in, between Bozanic and Cacciavillan (Voting), between Bevilacqua and Canestri (non-Volting)
So Debunker’s Debunker got a bit annoyed, called Joaquin Navarro-Valls, real Director of the Vatican Press Office (www.navarro-valls.info) and asked him: “How come you dump such shit on those poor souls in Des Moines, Iowa?” Aha, he said to me (sorry, this time I will not swear): “This must be the SCA!” The … what ?, - says I. “Sorry, I meant the Satan Counterintelligence Agency”. Frigging Jeez-us!
Next time, maybe, the real story of a poor djinn…
December 21st, 2005 at 4:03 pm
[…] f universalist doctrine, I explored the possibility of whether Satan himself would one day be saved by God. In some strains of universalism, Hell is viewed as a place of purific […]
December 3rd, 2007 at 3:58 pm
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