Dark Corners of the Mind — a gargoyle argues the devil is load-bearing

Without the dark, no candle earns its name. Without the cold, no comfort in the flame. The philosopher writes by Satan's light: that good needs evil as day needs night.

In Egypt he was Set. In Persia, dread Ahriman, lord of the unquiet dead. Tiamat's coil, the Norseman's cunning Loki — mocking one ancient pedigree of doubt and pride. Older than scripture, with a pyramid's hide.

They called him the negation — mere absence, a void. Shadow is zero. Nothing destroyed. But hunger is real where bread is not, and silence is grief where word was sought. A death that is nothing to him who is owed is everything black on the borrower's road.

Evil is relative, yes — and yet true. Relations are fact, and they cut clean through. He is the friction the climbing soul requires, the resistance that tempers the cosmic fires. Strike out all struggle, all want, all unrest — the man stays amoeba, dull and unblest. No progress, no virtue, no reaching above, just one drowsy ocean of indolent love.

So pain sets the thinking, and death sets the prayer, and sin gives to goodness the worth that it bears. He fathered the heretics burned at the stake — Bruno and Galileo, for knowledge's sake. He handed the apple, the first taste of mind, the serpent of science, to all mankind. The rebel, the dissenter, the spark that denies, the dissonance breaking the lullaby skies. He flaps his three faces in Cocytus' frost and honors each bargain, whatever the cost.

And here is the riddle the old woman missed, who prayed that the devil might yet be dismissed: unmake him, nor strike him below — God would not be God without him as a foe.

He dwells in the storm, and he dwells in the calm, in the curse of the conscious, the wound and the balm. The faithless servant of all that's divine — even the devil is filled with the sign.

So tip your dark hat to the lord of the fall, the once-heated fellow who must be at all, for nothing worth winning was won at no price, and no heaven was built without some kind of vice.