Bronze
sculpture by Robert Lerivrain
[TRANSLATOR'S NOTE. With the help of Henri Delaage (a well-known figure in the nineteenth century among the “initiated” in Paris) and some illustrators (including the famous Nadar, who was a designer before becoming a photographer), Gerard de Nerval composed the journal Le Diable Rouge, which was meant to be a “Cabalistic Almanac for 1850.” Le Diable Rouge inaugurated Nerval’s “Republican” period, the one that will see the him, in 1850, publishing in Le National, the great daily organ of the Left. He had become disenchanted with the political paralysis and hypocrisy of the Louis-Philippe monarchy, as well as with the Second Revolution, which led to the rise of Napoleon.
In the following essay, Le Diable Rouge, published in the
journal of the same name, Nerval imagines Lucifer as one of the revolutionaries
fighting against the Nobility during the French Revolution. He sympathizes with
their cause; Nerval had written in The
Library of my Uncle, “Far be it from me to attack” those eccentrics “who are
suffering today from having tried too foolishly or too soon to realize their
dreams.” Lucifer, having been misled by, and now under the command of, Satan, a
fierce military leader, proves himself unsuitable for the military. But the revolutionaries would finally win
the war against the Nobility, whose “celestial lightning” was no match for
Satan’s cannons. In Le Diable Rouge, Nerval
shows his sympathy for the devil, or to be more precise, Lucifer.
This essay offers a nice summation
of Nerval’s political views during the Second Revolution.]
LE DIABLE ROUGE
(1850)
Do not be afraid of this figure who is
more ruddy than dark. All devils are not black. – He is by nature rather terrestrial
than infernal; he even took part poorly in the great struggle that once occurred
in the celestial spaces, and which was called the rebellion of Satan and his angels, against Adonai (the Lord)
and his own.
Satan was a kind of Kossuth[1],
who dared to raise the standard against his lawful emperor and brought into his
conspiracy a crowd of discontented spirits imbued with republican doctrines.
We know that every star, every planet –
and even every mere comet – was in principle entrusted to the government of a
spirit or an angel who animated it as the soul animates the body. We humans and
terrestrial animals are only the parasitic insects living on the surface of one
globe and fed – very poorly fed – from its external substance.
Satan was one of those imperious,
indocile and ungrateful beings who thought himself the most superior of all – let
us cut that word, in fact he believed himself to be a genius. He looked upon
the Trinity as a despotic race, which abused an earlier position that it called
divine right, and were responsible
for a usurpation achieved through cunning which had conferred upon it the
universal empire through the consent of a corrupt majority.
He brought into his conspiracy a host
of planets, stars, nebulae, and even some first-rate stars who let themselves be
deceived by his golden words. Comets, always disposed to evil, served as
irregular troops. A monstrous battle ensued between the various balls that we
see in the sky, causing monstrous pileups. The remaining debris still forms
what we call the Milky Way. The rain of aerolites which resulted from all these
shocks spread the greatest turmoil throughout the universe. – Occasionally, our globe even receives some
old mislaid projectile splatter that has rolled on for thousands of years to reach
us.
The details of this immense catastrophe
can be read about in Milton’s Paradise
Lost, which is based entirely on one of the so-called apocryphal books of
the Bible which is called the Book of
Enoch.
This book has always been rejected from
the Orthodox Bible, because it had been feared that there would be, in the rebellion
of Satan, a certain grandeur that would seduce human imaginations. A Catholic
scholar, Father Kircher, a Jesuit, translated a fragment of it in his Oedipus Aegypiacus[2].
It is from this last book, well known
to the cabalists, that we borrow the authentic figure of le Diable rouge which we must deal with, now.
2
Poor devil! But is he really a devil? –
The ancients just called him a demon, a word that derives a bit from Δῆμος (demos), meaning the common people, and
which signifies only an unhappy person, an insurgent, who is basically good
natured. – Demos, in the specific sense used by the Greeks, never contained a
malicious meaning.
The position of le Diable rouge was very sad, – if we are to believe Dante’s Divine Comedy, – as a result of the
victory of the Eternal. He presided, when he entered the conspiracy of Satan, over
the evening star, vulgarly called Lucifer. He has kept the name, but he no
longer has the attributes, which were entrusted to his wife, Astarte – who had
protectors in Paradise.
During the celestial revolution, poor
Lucifer was the commander of the artillery; (Milton taught us that Satan had
invented cannons to respond to the celestial lightning, many thousands of years
before they were imagined on earth). The administrative
artillery unit that Lucifer directed was disassembled and he himself
received a thunderbolt so well directed into his chest that he fell from his
star and descended head first onto a newly formed globe, which was still soft enough
to cushion his fall.
We must not judge the size of celestial
beings on the scale of our minute proportions; – we are atoms. – But if it is
true that the men before the flood were a league high and lived a thousand
years (we must believe the Bible), we can understand that the pre-Adamite and astral
creatures reached proportions a thousand times greater. That is why we should
not be surprised at the size the great poet Dante gives to Lucifer in Canto XXXIV
of his poem. There he claims that Lucifer’s body stretches across the globe completely,
such that his head is directly underneath the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and
his feet form two islands in the sea of Oceania,
at the antipodes of our Europe. One of his horns corresponds to Vesuvius, the
other to Etna. When Lucifer moves, there are earthquakes, – when he sneezes,
there are eruptions!
Dante calls him in his emphatic Italian:
“This miserable worm that crosses the world.”
Guided by Virgil, the Florentine poet
was able to reach the pit of the abyss that surrounds the cursed belt and forms
the last of the seven circles of the earthly hell. The water around Lucifer was
freezing, though the fire was rising higher from his mouth and nostrils. – Here
is the text: “The emperor of the sorrowful kingdom from his mid-breast issued
forth from the ice.”
Dante and his guide, after having
visited the entire subterranean spiral devoted to torments, which is vulgarly
called Gehenna,[3] – managed
to slip along the hairy sides of Lucifer by attaching themselves to his hairs
and moving from tuft of hair to tuft of
hair. Once the center of the globe
was crossed, Dante could not get over his astonishment at finding himself, soon
after, on the other side of the earth. Virgil responds to his surprise by
saying to him: “Here it is morning, down there it is still evening, because we
have just crossed the earth.”
“See,” he said, again showing the poet
the position of the demon, “he who has made us a ladder of his hair is still
stuck as he was at first. It was here, on this side of the earth, that he fell
from heaven, and the surface which had previously been land, out of fear, made
itself into a veil of the sea.”
3
It must be clear to our readers that
Lucifer, le Diable rouge, is that
same one that the ancients called Demogorgon[4],
a name in which we can still find the root Δῆμος, meaning the common people.
He was, for the Greeks, one of the
Titans who had fought against Jupiter. For the Syracusans and the inhabitants
of Great Greece (the Neapolitans) he was the same as Enceladus[5],
to which the description by Dante relates perfectly. The image given by the Father
rather represents the great Pan, that is, the spirit of the earth, to which the
modern followers of pantheism bestow
their adorations and homage. Nothing prevents us from believing, finally, that
all these personalities form only a single figure, which must be carefully
distinguished from what is vulgarly understood as the devil, that is, an evil
spirit.
4
In fact, it has not been proven that
God, the supreme Father, struck the imprudent Lucifer with an eternal curse. At
the very moment of his fall, his wife Astarte, who had not ceased to dissuade
him from taking any action against the good cause, pointed out to the Lord that
this poor devil was so stupid that he
had not been able to resist the guilty maneuvers and the satanic profligacy of
Satan. – That is the reason why he was pathetically misguided.
So that he could be of use when he was
tired of smoking and whining, he was entrusted with the surveillance of the
terrestrial hell, a prison without cells, built according to the old system,
which should not be confused with the great and terrible hell destined for the
immense mass of culprits from the whole of creation. These latter are
relegated, according to the words of Christ, to the outer darkness, that is, beyond the created universe.
This devilish man, to which we can now
give this attenuating epithet, became so noticeable through his good conduct
that the Lord, coming to earth, had no need to speak with him for some time, as
we can see in the second chapter of the Book
of Job. He entrusted him with certain powers of the police, which have
nothing to do with those of provocative agents, because the aim was not, as has
been said, to make him fall into
temptation, but to spur his activity as one who was subject to release, as
demonstrated by the famous Goethe, the author of Faust.
In this regard, must we attribute to the
ignorance of certain monks of the Middle Ages the supposition that this devil
had inspired all the famous discoveries that created the glory of the fifteenth
century? Let us remember that it was a monk named Berthold Schwartz who
invented gun powder, and if Lucifer inspired this, it can only be that Berthold
remembered Lucifer’s former feats of artillery in the service of Satan; but this
supposition is by no means proven; even though it is quite well known that it
was he who inspired Dr. Faust with the idea of printing, this popular power
that could resist the cannon which was the final
argument, the last resort, of kings.
The cannon and the printing press are
therefore two forces that struggle to destroy each other, one in favor of
darkness, the other in favor of light. But the gospel said that hell could not be divided with itself. “So if he invented the
printing press, he could not have invented the cannon.”
Let us leave these idle quarrels. Poor
Lucifer is quite guilty enough in the eyes of some people. He is accused, with good
reason, of materialism and communism, and he is strongly suspected of not
having been a stranger to the events of last year[6]. But
we believe that his intentions were pure, and that the malice natural to men exaggerated
the results; that is why we still ask for some kindness for a man more unhappy
than guilty, who will undoubtedly take part in the universal amnesty, reserved
for all the poor devils that have
been led astray by his doctrines.
[1] A Hungarian patriot and revolutionary. In 1849 he had
the Diet proclaim his country’s independence and the fall of the Habsburgs, but
was forced into exile by the joint offensive of the Austrians, Russians and
Croatians led by Josip Jelačić.
[2] In 1652-1654, the scholar Athanasius Kircher could
have quoted the Book of Enoch from a
second hand source, but not translated it, since no copy was then known.
[3] Traditionally, Gehenna designates a place of
suffering, almost synonymous with Hell.
[4] A poorly defined figure among the writers in the
Renaissance. In Shelley’s Prometheus
Unbound, he is a figure of liberating revolt against the tyrant Jupiter.
[5] In Greek mythology, one of the Giants born of Gaia
and the blood of Ouranos. He would merge according to Philostratus with the
figure of Typhon.
[6] “the events of last year” are those of the Revolution
of 1848 (February 22-25 ) which led to the fall of Louis-Philippe
and the birth of the Second Republic.
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