Samael

Many people have wondered if they might be a character in a novel or if every author creates a world. There is a wrinkle here that makes this insight even more interesting. It involves embracing both actualities at once to create an infinite regress. I am the author; I mean in your particular case. This posting and the moment when you sit reading this posting is detailed on page 37 of a meta-novel about creative writing considered as a use of narrative means to achieve therapeutic ends. I wrote this back in 1973, during my Barthelme Period or, as some unkind critics have dubbed it, my “Soused Period”. That's right friends and neighbors; I invented blogs even before Al Gore invented the Internet. Being young and foolish at the time, I did not realize that I also was a character in a novel written by someone else, making you a dream within a dream and my author a God in a higher heaven. The real secret about the one true secret name of God is that no one knows it. If you think you do, you are denying the unknown and unnamed God in a higher heaven, which makes you not God but Samael, the blind angel whose blindness is the madness of thinking that “Samael” is the one true name of God and that what he sees when he looks in the mirror is just divine, the whole truth and nothing but the truth so help him God.

The argument being made here is that, being omniscient, Samael can be neither mistaken, deluded or deceived. Imagine some lunatic who thinks he is Napoleon pointing at his reflection in a mirror and inviting you to accept the obvious and you've got the problem here. What pisses Samael off more than anything is when someone starts asking rude questions about the creation myth that proves that Samael hung the moon, shit the stars and turned out all of our souls like Aunt Julie baking Gingerbread Men. We have enjoyed the many benefits of AIDS, Ebola and two terms worth of George W. Bush only because some people arrogantly refused to take Samael's version of who we are, how we got here and of why there is a “here” for us to be at face-value. This is not the typical reaction, which is very important to Samael's state of emotional well-being, precarious as that might be. These cookie-monsters much more often sit up, look around, see the world, see Samael standing there doing his trade-mark infinite beard in a long white spirit shtick and spontaneous speak the first prayer, which goes, “Damn Dude, you have one hell of a genius imagination! What were you thinking when you came up with bobbies?” When girls sit up and look around, they almost never ask about the penis first thing. Some people just don't feel the magic of a true miracle even when you put one right inside them.

Samael is the most jealous of Gods by virtue of being the most insecure; think of him as a high maintenance girl-friend who can cause plagues and you are plenty close enough to predict the tortured past and bleak future of any dumb-ass clueless enough to worship this turkey. Those types typically call themselves Baptists but we all know who they really worship and what they do to their kids to make sure they grow up Baptist all the way down and not still half-human in a broken sort of way, but ashamed enough of being even vaguely human or humane to stay in the closet about it even with their kids, who typically get the full treatment because their parents are afraid word will get around if they do anything less. In a “culture” where sadistic pedophile incest is a core aspect of persona and an essential part of what being a respectable person who can be trusted to raise children right means, the shadow contains the slightest twinge of guilt evoked by the bloody underpants of one's spawn, each of them destined at birth to be sacrificed to Samael in a secret ritual that dares not speak its name or call on anything holy except by the name and in the name of Samael. Issac grows up to be Abraham and the autocatalytic cycle of shame and abuse continues like nothing new under the son. Will the circle go unbroken? Well, it has up until now. See The Mass Psychology of Fascism by Wilhelm Reich or a dinner table anywhere down south on Thanksgiving Day for further details.