The Prince of Darkness Who Refused the First Word of Creation

Before the first day had a name, before there was an evening or a morning to mark it, God turned to face the one creature already there. He was black as a burnt log, black as a bull in a lightless field, and he had no other shape than that blackness. The Prince of Darkness waited, certain of his place, because until that moment there had been nothing but him.

"Get you hence," God told him. "It is My intention to begin Creation with light."

The Prince did not move. He turned his head as though the words had not reached him, as though deafness were a wall he could hide behind. If light came, he would be a servant in a house that had been his alone. So he answered with a question, and the question was an insolence.

"Why not create the world from darkness?"

The First Refusal at the Edge of Creation

God did not bargain.

"Get you hence at once," He said, "before you perish from the world."

Still the Prince pressed, hungry to know how much ground he would lose. "And after light, what will You create?" he asked. The answer came back like a door closing on him. "Darkness." So light would have its hour, and the Prince would have his, and his hour would no longer be everything. That was the whole of his demotion, spoken in a single word.

He did not surrender. Other princes had gathered in the unmade heaven, and they came to him and proclaimed him their king. He took the homage and paid it back in kind, spreading canopies of shadow over each of them, pavilions of darkness for a court that had crowned itself in defiance of the One about to speak. For a moment a rival kingdom stood there, throne and vassals and all, raised against the light before the light existed.

God rebuked them. He scattered the princes the way wind scatters seed, flinging their rebellion apart so that no two grains of it landed together. The court dissolved. The Prince remained, a single black shape, no longer a sovereign, waiting for the word that would push him into his appointed corner.

Seven Lamps Hung With Tempers

Then God set the firmament in seven standing layers and hung seven wandering lamps inside it, and into each He poured a temper and a fate, so that the sky would govern as well as shine.

Highest of all He placed Saturn, slow and grim, three years to finish his circuit, an old man stooped beneath a sickle. Where his cold eye fell, poverty came, and sickness, and the grave. Beneath him God hung Jupiter, ram-headed and noble, a valiant lord who carried life in his hands, and peace, and prosperity, and the right to rule. Lower still came Mars in his coat of mail, terrible to look on, a sword gripped in his right hand and a spear in his left. Wherever Mars turned his armored face, war followed, and blood, and hatred, and the breaking of things.

At the center God set the sun, and around it the gentler powers. Venus took her place as a young woman holding a green branch, and into her keeping went love and longing, the marriage bed, and the fertility of every living thing. Mercury God made strangest of all, an old man with thin lips and wings, his lower body coiling away into a dragon, and He gave him wisdom and hidden knowledge and the unraveling of mysteries in every tongue. The moon He hung lowest, nearest the dark earth that did not yet exist.

Each lamp had a face and a quarrel and a gift. Together they were a heaven that could weigh a human life before that life was born.

The Light That Was Too Strong to Keep

Now God said, "Let there be light," and there was light, and it was not the light anyone living has ever seen. Beside it the sun He would later make on the fourth day would have looked like a guttering wick. It did not separate day from night. It was too pure for that, too strong for a world meant to hold ordinary mornings, and it would have burned through every shadow the Prince of Darkness had just been promised.

So God looked at the light and saw that it was good, and then He did something unexpected with a good thing. He hid it. He set it apart and folded it away, the way a king saves the finest portion at the feast and keeps it back for his own son. He stored the first light where no creature of that first week would find it, reserving it for the righteous in a world that had not been imagined yet.

And He set the boundary. He called the light Day. He named the night, but He did not bend His own name down to it. Light got the name and the blessing. Darkness got only its hour and a pronoun. Isaiah would later catch the shape of what had been hidden, promising a day when the light of the sun would burn sevenfold, bright as the light of the seven days, the stored light let loose at last on those who deserved it.

The Quarrel Sealed Into the Sky

Two commanders had wanted the same throne. God did what a king does with two strong officers who will not yield to each other. He gave one the day and one the night, drew the border between them, and made them keep it. He commanded the morning and told the darkness its place, and between the light and the darkness He made a peace, not by reconciling them but by fixing each in its own country.

The Prince of Darkness took his appointed hour. The seven lamps swung into their slow rounds, dealing out war and love and wealth and death to a world still hours from its first sunrise. The great light lay folded away in the keeping of God.

One prophecy stayed behind, sharp as a splinter. At the End of Days, the Prince of Darkness would stand up again and call himself God's equal. He would claim a hand in Creation itself. "Though He made heaven and light," he would boast, "it was I who made darkness and the pit." His old vassal-angels would rise to swear it was true. And the fire of that very pit, the one he bragged of making, would open its mouth and swallow the boast and the boasters together.