Lucifer

In Poul Anderson's "Kyrie" (Going For Infinity, New York, 2002), human beings have named a space-dwelling energy being "Lucifer." The woman who telepathically communicates with Lucifer, thinks:

"They named you better than they knew, Lucifer, she wanted to say, and perhaps she did. They thought it was a joke; they thought by calling you after the devil they could make you safely small like themselves. But Lucifer isn't the devil's real name. It means only Light Bearer. One Latin prayer even addresses Christ as Lucifer." (p. 351)

I did not know about the Latin prayer. When I was Master in Charge of Religious Education at Bentham Grammar School in the single academic year, 1980-81, an English Teacher asked me why the Devil should be called the Light Bringer. I added, "...when he is also called the Prince of Darkness?" A Geography Teacher who was a Bible-reading man was present but did not comment. My only answer at that time was that "Lucifer" was supposed to have been his name before he fell. (I have since come across "Samael" as a pre-Fall name.)

The answer that I realized later was that, in a sense, darkness is the light bringer because light is recognized as such only by contrast with darkness. "The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it..."

It is appropriate to compare Poul Anderson with other writers of powerful fantasies. In a work by Alan Moore, male witches conjure the Original Darkness that was before the Creation, believing that it will destroy Heaven, but, when the Hand of the Darkness emerges from Chaos and advances through Hell, fomenting demonic civil war, a Hand of Light descends to clasp it and the Taoist symbol for the interpenetration of opposites appears in the eye of the psychic witness to these supernatural events.

In Neil Gaiman's sequel to Alan Moore's work, Lucifer Morningstar retires as Lord of Hell and, amazingly, Mike Carey, presents a series about his subsequent career. But, returning to writers of prose fantasy and sf, James Blish tells us what Satan does after the death of God. As before, I urge fans of Poul Anderson also to read James Blish.

Kyrie

The most interesting feature, to me, of Poul Anderson's "Kyrie" (Going For Infinity, New York, 2002) is the Aurigean, Lucifer, who sounds exactly like the "Angels," one of them also called Lucifer, in James Blish's The Star Dwellers and Mission To The Heart Stars.

Blish's Angels are described as, or at least compared to, intelligent ball lightning. Anderson suggests that planetary ball lightning might be related to the Aurigeans in the same way that simple organic compounds in a primordial ocean are related to later evolved life. In the gas and energy pervading the multiple star Epsilon Aurigae, magnetohydrodynamics evolved as chemistry did on Earth. Ions, nuclei and force fields formed stable plasma vortices which grew, became complex, metabolized electrons, nucleons and X rays, maintained themselves, reproduced and thought. The description of Lucifer as a multi-colored, twenty-meter-wide, space-faring fireball makes him sound exactly like one of Blish's star-dwelling Angels.

The Angels communicate with each other instantaneously across interstellar and intergalactic distances. Anderson's Lucifer communicates instantaneously, and telepathically, with a human telepath across an interstellar distance. In itself, Anderson's use of the word "telepathy" could be merely a terminological difference. The Angels' means of instantaneous communication is internal to each of them so maybe it also could be called "telepathy." But the difference is that Lucifer communicates not only with his own kind but also with a human telepath.

The main difference between Lucifer and the Angels is in their origin. The oldest Angels, the First Born, date from the first twenty minutes of the universe and may have participated in the First Cause. Younger Angels were born in the processes that generate stars. Barring unlikely accidents, Angels will survive until the end of the universe. Meanwhile, they have been allied with ten different galactic confederations of planet dwellers and must now choose between Malans and Terrestrials in the Milky Way. They operate on a vaster scale than the Aurigeans who originated in a single stellar system and cooperate with humanity.

"Kyrie" presupposes Aurigeans, human telepaths, faster than light interstellar travel and instantaneous telepathy merely so that it can combine these ideas with one consequence of time dilation. Lucifer died falling into a supernova remnant but the nun who had been telepathically linked to him still hears him...

I am not sure that this conclusion warrants the presuppositions that were necessary to make it possible.