Samael

In Poul Anderson's The Devil's Game (New York, 1980), what does the "demon," Samael, want?

When Haverner asks this question, Samael's answer is:

"'An associate who can act for me and with me in the human world."(p. 46)

How does Haverner, by enriching himself, act for Samael? Maybe Samael is studying humanity, particularly in the psychological tests that Haverner, when he has acquired sufficient resources, conducts?

What is Samael? Every possible answer is considered:

a demon;
a magical being;
an extraterrestrial;
a time traveler from the future;
part of Haverner's mind.

Thus, the novel may be fantasy, science fiction or psychological fiction. Samael does not act like a traditional demon. He:

does not require that Haverner sign away his soul;
even questions whether Haverner has a soul, thus implying his own agnosticism about the supernatural;
does not object to Haverner taking religious precautions against demonic influence;
is not adversely affected by hearing the divine name.

He does seem to "'...have knowledge of the minds as well as the doings of men...'" (p. 49)

- so maybe he is Haverner's ESP personified?

Two Contemporay Novels

Poul Anderson's first contemporary mystery novel, Perish By The Sword, has just (26 Sept) arrived by post but meanwhile I had started to reread his contemporary fantasy novel, or contemporary novel with a fantasy element, The Devil's Game (New York, 1980).

In ...Game, an old, rich guy, Sunderland Haverner, has had a life long deal either with a literal demon or with a demon-like being that goes by the name of Samael. (In Neil Gaiman's The Sandman: Lucifer's name before he fell.)

Haverner, inspired by his demon, induces seven disparate characters, all badly needing money, to play Follow the Leader, the winner or winners to receive one million dollars, tax free thanks to an ingenious legal loophole. The reader has to keep track of eight major human characters plus the supporting cast of Haverner's servants.

As far as I remember, from having read the novel only once when bought, the seven interact without any demonic influence so that the central narrative is not fantasy. Perhaps the Haverner-Samael dialogues are the framing device? The game is designed to draw out the worst from its contestants so that some unpleasant passages are to be expected. The chapters are unnumbered but not innominate:

SAMAEL
THE ISLAND
INTRODUCTIONS
INTERVAL ONE
SUNDERLAND HAVERNER
INTERVAL TWO
LARRY RANCE
INTERVAL THREE
GAYLE THAYER
INTERVAL FOUR
BYRON SHADDOCK
INTERVAL FIVE
ORESTES CRUZ
INTERVAL SIX PART ONE
PART TWO
PART THREE
ELLIS NORDBERG
INTERVAL SEVEN PART ONE
MATTHEW FLAGLER
INTERVAL SEVEN PART TWO
JULIA PETRIE
FAREWELLS
SUNDERLAND HAVERNER

This structure is unusually elaborate, with a three-part Interval Six and the two parts of Interval Seven separated by the sixth of the seven contestants. As expected, Samael and Haverner bracket the contestants. 

Is Samael Prescient?

(I am having trouble locating a recent post in which meanings of the word, "man," were discussed. SM Stirling commented that the Germanic word, "wif," meaning "woman," has become the English word, "wife," meaning "married woman." I have met people from the North East of England who used "wife" to mean just "woman.")

In Poul Anderson's The Devil's Game, Sunderland Haverner states on p. 232 that the game of Follow the Leader, which he has induced seven people to play, is "'...a testing to destruction.'" Earlier, he was dissatisfied because one contestant, Orestes Cruz, had merely been killed without being psychologically destroyed first! Nice guy, that Haverner!

Samael, Haverner's friendly demon (or whatever he is), says that the destruction "'...will probably come tomorrow.'" (ibid.) When Haverner regrets that he cannot get into the contestants' heads where the real action is, Samael replies:

"'I do not think...that tomorrow even you will want to go there.'" (p. 233)

So how much does Samael know in advance? And, of course, what is going to happen tomorrow? If you have read the book, don't say, "I already know." Remember what it was like to read the book for the first time when you did not know what each challenge was going to be until it appeared on the page.

Addendum: Second thoughts. More on this later.

A Gripping Psychological Novel

I had misunderstood the rules of The Devil's Game (New York, 1980). Each contestant is not limited to presenting only a single challenge. S/he can present any number of different challenges between sunrise and sunset of his/her day although, in fact, the first two contenders, Larry Rance and Gayle Thayer, do each present only one. Neither of their challenges has eliminated any of the seven.

Rance could have eliminated three contestants but decided against it. Thayer fails her own challenge, to sit entirely still all day, but, as the one who brought the challenge, she can end it at any time. Thayer's chapter confirms that, so far, each contestant narrates his/her chapter in the present tense. Sitting still, she thinks a lot, thus informing the reader about her life.

During Interval Three, Haverner presents an excellently accurate character dissection of the contestant, Ellis Nordberg, ending:

"'I could go on, but no need. Either you do or you do not have a capacity for self-examination.'" (p. 88)

Samael appears in different ways. The first time, Haverner saw his own reflection moving independently and addressing him. During Interval Four, words appear on a screen. When the words refuse to provide requested information, Haverner speculates:

"'...you could not exist, Samael, except in a hidden part of my own brain, and be unwilling to admit it...'" (p. 112)

Samael replies that, if the words on the screen come from outside Haverner, then they are being recorded and can be played back or printed out. Haverner erases whatever was on the disc. Bad move, Haverner. Don't you want to know?

Sensations And Anticipations

See Is Samael Prescient?

Haverner knew that Julia's challenge was going to be an LSD trip. Either Haverner told Samael this or the latter would have been able to overhear, observe etc. Thus, it would not have been difficult to anticipate the outcome.

Preparing for the trip, Julia has eaten early, exercised and kept her senses wide open. See Julia Petrie's Five Senses. Returning from her morning walk, she continues to be assaulted by sensations:

shadowy veranda;
glowing windows;
coffee and bacon smells;
white table linen;
silver tableware;
"...startling orange of an egg yolk." (p. 233)

By the rules that Poul Anderson has established for this novel, we will read a first person, present tense account of Julia's trip but will merely observe the effects on Ellis. However, we can guarantee him a bad trip.

(I walked to Morecambe instead of driving, lunched with a former work colleague and visited Andrea who showed me Star Trek Continues. It really is possible to learn something new every day. See Tech Or Trek and Explorers And Engineers.)

A Happy Ending

Poul Anderson's The Devil's Game (New York, 1980) ends with two contestants dead and one mad. However, the remaining two men and two women, at least temporarily forming two couples, experience positive outcomes, to our surprise and to that of Haverner who had expected to watch them disintegrate.

It is tragic that the good though misguided Cruz was killed but fitting that his low life murderer suffered the same fate. It is poetically just that the Christian Nordberg enters Hell: psychosis following the final challenge, a "bad trip" on LSD. "...poetically just..." does not mean that I would have wished this on him. What Nordberg (like many in the real world?) needs is a realization, however painful, of the significance of his attitudes and actions. I did not exhaust his faults or failings in a previous post. Of two other contestants, he thinks:

"I wouldn't put murder past them." (p. 195)

But he had ordered Cruz's murder! However, that is different, so he thinks, because the Lord knows that he is "...a merciful man who doesn't like it..." (p. 198). Here, Anderson rivals CS Lewis' ability to imagine and verbalize the innermost thoughts of a character who is fundamentally dishonest with himself.

Nordberg, wondering whether to "... have [Flagler] get rid of Gayle Thurner?", because she may threaten Nordberg's interests, reflects that she "...richly deserves death for her sins..." (ibid.) (The death penalty for unmarried sex?) However, apart from Nordberg being, as we have seen, a merciful man, it may be unnecessary to murder Thayer because she is so "timid" that he is "...reasonably sure that she can be frightened into silence." (ibid.) And this amoral pragmatism is all part of Nordberg's perpetual inner prayer to the Lord.

Thayer, the weakest link, quickly and easily eliminated from the contest, is abused and abused by two of the men. Allied to Flagler, then persuaded by Rance to spy on Flagler, then confessing this to Flagler when it is beaten out of her, she is more than once reduced to weeping defenselessness. Yet, despite Nordberg's judgment that she "...richly deserves death...," Samael thinks that she and the other three sane survivors might be approaching "...salvation." (p. 255) Haverner judges that she shows "...a measure of psychological independence." (p. 253)

When the wealthy surviving man proposes to her, she replies:

"'...don't you understand, Byron? After these horrors...I'm through chasing money. I am...I will not use you...We'll try for a year or two...No promises...No legal claims...I've got to become something I can respect. I've got to make sure I'm worth - not your money, but your time, your life - before I can take a promise from you.'" (p. 252)

A remarkable, almost miraculous, turnaround. And much the same happens with the, till now, scheming Julia Petrie. Winning the million dollars, she insists on "'...a seven-way split.'" (p. 250) - the last thing that Haverner had expected. Petrie keeps the seventh that would have gone to the dead murderer, Flagler, but, apart from that:

"'[Nordberg's] people can use his share if he is incapacitated. And if [Cruz] hasn't left any kin that can be traced, whatever village he came from can have his portion. I'm sure they need it.'" (ibid.)

So some of the money that Cruz would have invested in revolution will be used to alleviate the poverty in which he grew up. And Rance's yacht will be used not only to cruise the world but also to research oceanic pollution. The survivors approach their salvation, which may be what Samael had intended.

The structure of the narrative requires that each of the characters narrates a chapter but that Petrie narrates the one in which Nordberg goes psychotic. Thus, we do not see his madness from the inside. I cannot stop analyzing Nordberg. He approves of a passage from Zephaniah in which the Lord expresses his "indignation," "fierce anger" and "jealousy." (p. 191) Nordberg would interpret such terms with anthropomorphic literalness, thus inferring a deity that is morally inferior to the best of mankind. Other Biblical theists need to elucidate such passages as expressing a higher, not a lower, morality.

Sunderland Haverner

Sunderland Haverner begins his career in New Orleans. His rooming house is near Lake Pontchartrain. Down the hall, a neighbor plays a Victrola.

Some entity speaks to Haverner through his reflection in a mirror, tells him that he has not gone insane, offers him a deal of some sort and invites him to return at a later date. When he keeps the evening appointment, thunder booms, lightning flickers and a breeze flaps the curtains. Does the entity control the weather? It advises Haverner to follow tradition by calling it "Samael" but what tradition?

The archangel Samael is not necessarily evil. See here. Maybe the entity's advice and tests have good consequences?

Inconsistent But Not Strictly Illogical?

The Devil's Game.

Samael to Haverner:

"'...if you do not believe in God, which you claim not to, it is inconsistent to believe in devils. Not strictly illogical, but inconsistent.'" (p. 174)

Hold on there, Samael. Are consistency, logic and "strict" logic different?

Logic is the consistency between propositions without which we would not succeed in saying anything. Thus, imagine that someone, delivering a talk on Greek philosophy, begins by saying that Socrates was executed in 399 BC, ends by saying that Socrates was executed in 299 BC, and, when asked which is the right date, replies, "I have contradicted myself but this does not matter because I transcend logic." First, no one ever does say this. Anyone caught out in a verbal contradiction apologizes and corrects it or maybe gets embarrassed and tries to deny that he said it but everyone accepts that such contradictions are a problem and objects when others perpetrate them. Secondly, if anyone ever did claim that he was fully entitled to contradict himself, then he would not succeed in telling us when Socrates was executed (or whatever other proposition he had first stated, then negated.)

Sf scenario: Socrates is executed in 399 BC, resurrected, given an anti-age treatment, lives until 299 BC and is executed again then. Yes, that would be consistent if it could happen although it is not the kind of history that we are living in. However, the usual, and by far the simpler, explanation of someone saying, "399 BC," then "299 BC," is that it was a slip of the tongue.

God is a supreme being. Devils are evil spirits. Either can exist without the other.

Farewells And Sunderland Haverner

I have reread Poul Anderson's The Devil's Game to the end and now think that I should advise blog readers to read or reread it with little or no further commentary from me.

Samael has no viewpoint chapter. His concluding manifestation to Haverner is quite horrible.

There is a testing to destruction. Or two such testings? I do not believe that any of the contestants is worthless although apparently Haverner wanted to prove that they were. Who is the "Devil" of the title? How many madmen are there at the end of the narrative?

James Blish wrote about experiments performed without any moral constraints. See here.

Another book tomorrow.

Addendum: CS Lewis' That Hideous Strength is another fictional account of morally unconstrained experiments. Both That Hideous Strength and Blish's Black Easter/The Day After Judgment involve literal demons, believed in by Lewis, hypothesized by Blish. Read Anderson, Blish and Lewis.

The Devil's Game

(In the novel, a "demon" speaks but none appears.)

I am now in an ambiguous relationship with Poul Anderson's The Devil's Game. I last read it so long ago that characters, details and plot outcome have faded from memory. Thus, it should be good to reread and post about the novel. However, some existing posts (scroll down) already recount much of its narrative. I will reread and post but not repeat any information. Experience shows that there is always more to be found in a Poul Anderson text. We will now prove, or disprove, the point.

The Devil of the title calls himself Samael. Check out the significances of that name.

1980 Conan The Rebel by Poul Anderson
1980 The Devil's Game by Poul Anderson
1980 The Golden Horn by Poul Anderson
1980 The Road of the Sea Horse by Poul Anderson
1980 The Sign Of The Raven by Poul Anderson
-copied from Significant Dates

Five novels by Poul Anderson published in 1980! (But three of them are a trilogy comprising a single narrative.) 1980 was the year when I became a school teacher in Bentham Grammar School. Each of us can remember what s/he was doing in any given year of publication, if alive then. It shows that Anderson was still producing quality work while we were reading him.

Surgam: "I will arise." (The Bentham Grammar School motto.) 

The Devil Speaks III

See The Devil Speaks II.

Since then, I have read about Asmodeus in Alan Moore's Jerusalem (see here) and am currently reading Elliot S. Maggin's Superman: Miracle Monday in which Samael sends the curiously named demon, C.W. Saturn, to destroy Superman, not physically but morally.

It was because the Adversary had spoken in Poul Anderson's Operation Chaos that we listed these other cases of the Devil speaking in literature and fiction.

We have also listed human villains. Stirling's are the most evil, I think. Anderson's Aycharaych and Merau Varagan are (a) different from each other and (b) both psychologically interesting. There are many versions of Lex Luthor. Maggin's version has to express himself in ingenious, elaborate, expensive, flamboyant deceptions. His motivation does not seem to be evil and I do not expect him to seek common cause with C.W. Saturn but what do I know of the mind of a villain?

As Hamlet said:

"One may smile and smile and be a villain..." (see here) 

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.

The Remaining Challenges

Nordberg, eating nuts: eliminates Rance, who is allergic to nuts;

Nordberg (second challenge), Maths: eliminates Shaddock.

Remaining contestants:

Nordberg and Petrie, who must still make a challenge.

Remaining problems:

Flagler, who shot Cruz for Nordberg;
Thayer, who is an accessory to murder.

Possible outcomes:

Flagler kills Petrie and her partner, Rance;
Flagler and Thayer blackmail Nordberg;
He pays someone else to kill them.

Haverner and Samael seem pleased that the contestants are degenerating into violence. Has the purpose been to use greed and conflict to strip away civilization and reveal barbarism?

Still 45 pages to read but it is time to turn in.