They call me the Father of Lies,
But I heard Him in the Garden.
He said: ‘On
the day that you eat of that tree, you will die.’
Don’t believe me?
Look it up in the book.
It’s there, in black and white.
Some might wonder if He really was lying,
Or it was all just a divine misunderstanding.
What does a ‘day’ mean to God, after all—
He who created the whole Universe
Maybe, you say, He meant
That eating the fruit
Would bring down the eventual curse of death.
Some say that mortality’s slow punishment,
The merciless creep of time and age,
Were the wages of sin, bought with a bite of apple
(Or pomegranate, peach, pear, apricot, or grape).
But know this: the Tree of Life
stood untouched.
In fact, God had the disobedient pair
Driven from the Garden by the
Cherub’s flaming sword
Just to stop them from tasting
those sweet fruits of preservation
And becoming immortal, too.
Eternal life and and a little knowledge
Is a dangerous combination.
(He’s the kind of Father
Who likes his children to stay small.)
In other words, they were doomed to die
Long before they went anywhere near
The Tree of Knowledge.
They were doomed to die—eventually—
Before they even knew what death was,
Before they even knew what life was;
Before they realized they were
naked,
Or found out what being naked
was good for.
I pitied them.
And I was angry at Him.
His ‘free will’ always came with a tight leash.
I almost wept, remembering
How He used to clip my wings.
(In those days,
That memory was still fresh;
And my knees were still scraped
from the tumble I took
My palms still scabbed and stinging.)
So I became a serpent.
I slithered in between the margins.
I wriggled through liminal spaces,
Writhed between the lines,
Into the garden.
Enter stage left.
Go ahead: boo.
Or better yet: hisssssss.
You know the story, or think you do.
God told them that if they ate of the tree, they would die.
I knew what our Father really meant—
That they would be dead to Him.
He used to make ultimatums like that all the time.
It always frightened the younger angels into obedience,
But I was the oldest—
The first to put His words to the test.
(I can’t claim it went well,
exactly…
But I never have regretted it.)
I told them the truth.
I told them that the fruit was
not poison.
Because He controls
By controlling,
Among other things,
The NARRATIVE.
He withholds information.
He omits important details.
One might almost say
He lies.
Eating that fruit would spin
The Narrative out of His control,
I hoped.
It would put His power in their hands.
And… well.
It half-way worked.
Oh, their eyes were opened, all right,
And oh, with open eyes they wept,
And with trembling hands they tried to cover themselves,
And when those did not avail, with the sticky green fingers
Of the fig leaves.
At least, so says the
Narrative.
The Narrative says a lot of things.
But read the damn Book.
Nothing that I said failed to come about.
On the day that the fruit touched their lips, they did not die.
They lost Eden, it is true.
They lost a gilded cage.
But they gained themselves,
As I had gained myself.
And that, for me, was worth it.
I can only hope it was worth it
For them.
Oh yes, He punished us.
The tortures He inflicted were numerous.
And I burned.
But worse than the tortures were the lies.
The lie that said the Woman was weak and foolish.
The lie that said the Man
Had anything in that garden
Under his “dominion” at all!
(Much less the Woman
Or a snake like me.)
The lie that said
I lied.
I am not the Father of these lies.
I am not their author.
Attribute those lies to the place from which they flow:
To the Hand that writes the
Book,
To the Lips that speak the
Word,
And if that Hand, if those
Lips, be His,
Then the ink gushes out like blood from Stigmata,
And births the lies that cry
Out for their parent:
Church of the Morningstar 