Lucifer on Fox is a loose television adaptation of the Vertigo comic of the same name, Mike Carey’s spinoff series from Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman. While the show shares certain similarities with the Lucifer comic, it is also distinguished by significant differences. As I’ve written extensively about, Carey’s Lucifer is the Miltonic-Romantic Satan’s true heir, but how will the TV incarnation of this character measure up? Let’s explore the possibilities by dissecting the main characters introduced in the Pilot episode, starting with the star of the show—the Morningstar, Lucifer.

Lucifer Morningstar

“I’m like walking heroin—very habit-forming, it never ends well.”

I will reserve extensive analysis of Tom Ellis’ Lucifer for another blog, limiting my commentary here to his character’s general arc in the Pilot. Episode 1 of Lucifer establishes that the fallen angel, bored as the Lord of Hell, which he has ruled over since God—his Father—cast him out from Heaven, decided to take a vacation to Los Angeles. Lucifer, the owner of Lux—here upgraded (or downgraded) from the élite piano bar of the comics to an iniquitously salacious nightclub—has been enjoying a playboy lifestyle, much to the chagrin of both his demonic friend and fellow traveler Mazikeen (here nicknamed Maze) and Amenadiel, the angelic emissary who has been made responsible for getting Lucifer to return to Hell—one way or another. Lucifer is paid a visit by Delilah, a former employee turned pop superstar on something of a downward spiral, and just as Lucifer lifts her spirits, she is promptly gunned down in front of Lux. Lucifer, hell-bent on getting to the bottom of who wanted Delilah dead and subjecting the perpetrator to punishment, crosses paths with Detective Chloe Decker, and the remainder of the episode is given over to the police procedural/buddy cop formula—distinguished by its radical element of the Devil, of course. Along the way, the most significant question raised is the extent to which the Devil remains devilish as he rights wrongs and develops foreign human feelings, which worries Maze, Amenadiel, and Lucifer himself, whose soul-searching in the end brings him to the doorstep of Delilah’s erstwhile therapist, Dr. Linda Martin, to deal with his crisis of conscience.

Detective Chloe Decker

“Attractive female cop struggling to be taken seriously in a man’s man’s world…”

Chloe Decker, the show’s female lead, is introduced as an overcompensating tough female detective with a pesky past that haunts her career, and by the end of the show she becomes not only Lucifer’s partner in crime-fighting but his potential (inevitable?) love interest. Curiously, Chloe is utterly immune to Lucifer’s ability to draw out the naked truth from people, which leads to all sorts of supernatural speculation. (“Did my Father send you?” asks Lucifer.) Particularly interesting is Chloe’s adorable little daughter Trixie, who takes a liking to Lucifer. Might we have a potential Elaine Belloc in the character of Trixie?

Dr. Linda Martin

“I do yoga—hot yoga.”

Chloe and Lucifer come across Linda once Lucifer discovers that Dr. Martin was Delilah’s therapist. Unlike Chloe, Linda is irresistibly drawn to Lucifer, and their lustful exchange before a bemused/disgusted Chloe undeniably makes for the episode’s funniest scene. As comical as this hot-and-bothered therapist may be, she brings an interesting element of depth to the show: just as Linda cannot resist spewing her secrets to Lucifer, she can read Lucifer like no one else can. Lucifer notes to Chloe that while he appeals to “the dark, mischievous hearts” in all women, Chloe is for some reason unbeknownst to him “oddly immune,” and while Lucifer describes her asserted repulsion towards him as “fascinating,” Dr. Martin cannot help but comment that she can tell this deeply disturbs Lucifer. Lucifer’s look betrays his vulnerability, but he ultimately seizes this opportunity to get to grips with his current predicament.

At the end of the episode, Lucifer broods over his burgeoning human emotions—which worry Amenadiel and outrage Maze—and he returns to Linda to discuss “an existential dilemma or two,” laying out a deal which is sure to run throughout the show: in return for Satanic sexual favors she is clearly longing for, Linda will have to take on Lucifer as her patient. This may seem rather unlike the Lucifer of the comics, who is presented as very much self-possessed, but we should keep in mind the one major exception: in the extended treatment of his prelapsarian state, leading up to the heavenly rebellion, Lucifer is shown visiting Lilith—Adam’s first wife and mother of Mazikeen—for someone to discuss his existential angst with.¹ If Lucifer in the show will engage in similar discussions about his father issues with Dr. Martin, it could make for both comical and insightful storytelling.

Maze

“…I didn’t leave Hell to be a bartender.”

Mazikeen or Maze is presented as Lux’s disenchanted demon bartender. Having expected more from joining Lucifer in his sabbatical, Maze is forthrightly disappointed by the sight of the Lord of Hell whiling away his time indulging in debauched womanizing. More significantly, Maze is deeply disturbed by humanity rubbing off on Lucifer. At the end of the episode, Maze, across from Lucifer, brooding over his growing crisis of conscience, almost desperately barks at her master, “Stop caring. You’re the Devil.” Incidentally, as this incarnation of Mazikeen is rather annoyed over Lucifer not only living a lifestyle she finds beneath his devilish dignity but becoming all-too-human, she wants what Amenadiel wants: Lucifer’s return to Hell. The common ground Lucifer’s angel-brother and right-hand demon-woman share may lead to some spectacular supernatural conflict. In the Lucifer comic, Mazikeen does for a time break with Lucifer and even lead her Lilim army into war against the Morningstar, so a feud between Lucifer and Maze on the show may be in order at some point.

Maze appears briefly in Lucifer‘s Pilot episode, but her character’s significance is sure to grow. Even in the Lucifer comic Mazikeen is at the outset a much smaller character than the hugely significant persona she becomes, evolving from Lucifer’s cowled assistant, whose hidden half-face made her dialogue difficult to discern, into Lucifer’s trusted warrior-woman and true love—a character of such significance, in fact, that she ultimately inherits Lucifer’s mantle, anointed the new Lightbringer by her Lord.² There was a perfect Mazikeen line from the Pilot script (presumably directed at Chloe) that didn’t make it into the show, but is worth noting: “He’s been my lord and master for over ten billion years. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for him. I would tear from limb to limb anyone who dares disrespect him. Mind my words.” That sounds just like the Mazikeen from the comic, and it is certainly to be hoped that in dialogue and in action we get to see more of this side of her as the season progresses.

Amenadiel

“I’m not sure I like what I see…”

Amenadiel is here Lucifer’s angelic arch-rival—as he is in the comics, at least until the Morningstar bests Amenadiel in a duel—but here he is also more of a brother figure in a sibling rivalry of cosmic proportions (reserved for Lucifer and Michael in the comic). I mention Amenadiel last because the implications his character raises are rather nefarious. When he first visits Lucifer, Amenadiel implores his brother to return to the Underworld before all Hell breaks loose, but the sentiments he expresses in his second appearance at the end of the episode are far less benign than getting demons and damned souls under control. Amenadiel reveals that he is displeased with Lucifer’s uncharacteristic restraint and mercy, insisting that they must maintain “balance.” In other words, Amenadiel expects Lucifer to go on being the Devil, returning to his assigned role of the Evil One. This seems to imply that the side of Good is not necessarily so good, which is certainly the case in the comics, and it gives force to Lucifer’s earlier question: “Now, do you think I’m the Devil because I’m inherently evil or just because dear old Dad decided I was?”

In Paradise Lost, Milton’s Satan and his rebel angels refer to God with epithets typically reserved for the Devil, such as “enemy” (I.188, II.137) and “foe” (I.122, 179; II.78, 152, 202, 210, 463, 769), and this carried over into Romantic criticism of the poem, Milton’s God cast in a demonic light and the rebel Satan made more sympathetic by comparison. As the Vertigo Lucifer comics truly carry on the Miltonic-Romantic-Satanic tradition, they carry over this ambivalence. The angelic host is fanatically devoted to maintaining the power and influence of the government of Heaven, and Yahweh’s angels are essentially just as indifferent to human life as Lucifer is. Amenadiel himself is rather diabolical in both appearance and motive, even taking the form of a serpent to lead the human prototypes of Lucifer’s own cosmos into temptation.³ As far as the portrayal of Amenadiel in the TV series, it remains to be seen how serpentine he will become (he is certainly less caricatured visually), but I believe the Pilot episode has laid the foundation for that.

Lucifer showrunner Joe Henderson expressed his utmost appreciation for Neil Gaiman’s vocal support for Fox’s effort to bring his character to the small screen. Henderson found particularly apt Gaiman’s observation that creating characters for a company as tremendous as DC Comics is like creating toys in a sandbox, which get left in the sandbox for others to play with. It’s all good and well that Fox is picking up the toys created by Gaiman in The Sandman and played with by Carey in Lucifer, but there is certainly cause for concern over whether or not Fox will place the toys back in the sandbox intact. I understand that translating a sympathetic Satan into the mainstream medium of television necessitates alterations to the source material, but there are certain fundamental things about the Lucifer comic which must be preserved. Mazikeen and Amenadiel are close enough to their comic counterparts, but Lucifer is rather different. Again, I will comment more on this anon, but suffice it to say there is cause for cautious optimism.

To stay on the air, Lucifer is obliged to walk the precipitous tightrope of both exciting sympathy for the Devil whilst evading overly offending the religious. It was perhaps to be expected that the TV-adaptation of Lucifer would simply have to make its titular anti-hero more human than he is in the comic, but the potential pitfall is that Lucifer will be made all-too-human. The Lucifer of the comics is beyond good and evil, whereas the Lucifer of the show grapples with the emerging feelings of goodness within him. Yet oscillating between virtue and vice is a rather Romantic/Byronic dilemma, and so this Lucifer may fall into the Miltonic-Romantic tradition in his own way, however different from his comic incarnation he might be. I will say this: Tom Ellis’ performance of a Lucifer strutting across the L.A. scene announcing “My name is Lucifer Morningstar” and boasting “I’m immortal” is, if nothing else, exceedingly entertaining to watch. I expect this version of Lucifer to be different from the comic version, but I am hopeful that the show will do the Devil justice. Let’s just hope that we don’t all end up as disappointed and angry with Lucifer as Maze…

 

Notes

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<sup>1. See Mike Carey, Lucifer: The Wolf Beneath the Tree (New York: DC Comics, 2005), pp. 16, 18, 43.↩
2. See Mike Carey, Lucifer: Evensong (New York: DC Comics, 2007), pp. 68–72.↩
3. See Mike Carey, Lucifer: A Dalliance with the Damned (New York: DC Comics, 2002), pp. 54–67.↩</sup>

In his “Afterword” to the Vertigo series Lucifer (1999 – 2006), Mike Carey explains that when he set out to tell Lucifer’s story, “or the next installment of his story, after the chapters already told in the Bible, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell and Neil Gaiman’s [Sandman],” he swiftly discovered:

Lucifer didn’t want to be my mouthpiece. More than any other character I’ve ever written, he insisted on going his own way.…[M]y protagonist turned out to belong to that rare subspecies of characters who—to paraphrase Neil…—have their own lives off the page and move while you’re not looking.¹

The intriguing persistence of Carey’s Lucifer character to go his own way, as it were, places him firmly in the tradition of Miltonic-Romantic Satanism.

William Blake had famously written in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell that Milton was “of the Devils party without knowing it[.]”² In the Blakean reading of Paradise Lost, the poem’s sublime Satan essentially sprang forth uncontrollably from Milton’s mind, just as Sin burst unbidden out of Satan’s head (II.749–58). The Puritan Milton, in a Frankensteinian sense, lost control of his creature, his monster.³ Satan could not escape the will of the God who was writing his fate, but he somehow broke free from the will of the poet who was writing his lines. “As if misplaced in the ideological structure of Milton’s epic,” writes Peter A. Schock in Romantic Satanism, “the figure of the fallen angel invited his own excision and insertion into different contexts.”⁴ Milton inadvertently counteracted his own characterization of the arch-villain of Judeo-Christian theology, as Milton’s Satan is anything but abstract evil personified.

More aware than Milton of his character having a will of his own, Carey dramatizes this loss of control of his character in Lucifer’s final confrontation between Lucifer and Yahweh, the fallen angel’s Father/Creator. Face-to-face with His disobedient son one last time, Yahweh reveals that He envies Lucifer, fascinated as He is with the one to have “escaped [his] function,”⁵ and so Yahweh offers Lucifer the proposition of an exchange of identities: Yahweh would get to know his son better and Lucifer “would be the Maker” and therefore “would be perfect again. Unfallen. Unscarred by experience.”⁶ But in the Lucifer series, Lucifer never wanted to be God—not in terms of becoming his Father, Yahweh—but rather to achieve freedom from God, to completely sever himself from his Father.

In a flashback to the War in Heaven’s denouement, a defeated but nonetheless defiant Lucifer suddenly finds Almighty God appear before him, Yahweh reassuring His son that He sees the angels not as “tools” so much as “the aspects of myself through which I act,” to which Lucifer cries out in desperation, “No! I am myself. Not a limb or an organ of yours. I separate myself from you. You can kill me. But you cannot claim me back!”⁷ In their final meeting in the series, Yahweh requests far more than reclaiming His angelic son as an extension of Himself, and Lucifer is not at all tempted to give over his identity, even if becoming God be the prize.

Lucifer may not be all-powerful, he may not be free in the absolute sense he so desires, but he is and always will be himself. Lucifer thus flatly refuses his Father once and for all: “This face is mine. This scar — is mine. You may not have them. Not with my permission. My answer is no.”⁸ Vertigo’s Lucifer series concludes with its titular anti-hero victorious, Lucifer venturing into the void alone and undaunted: “On into the void he flies. Unafraid. There is nothing in mere absence that might cow him. Or loneliness. Or the lack of maps or charts. For he is his own path. And he sees by his own light.”⁹ Lucifer thus attains an ultimate triumph his Miltonic-Romantic predecessors never had—one entirely appropriate for their true heir.

Mike Carey’s Lucifer, like Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, creates a grand mythos, playing with faded gods of past pantheons as it establishes its own vast world. As larger-than-life as Lucifer is, however, the series is truly down-to-earth insofar as it explores deeply human dilemmas. Lucifer’s heart and soul is the problem of free will writ large—a vision of struggling individualism magnified to cosmic proportions, as Carey explained in a 2005 interview with Comic Book Resources:

Lucifer is about the big cosmic struggle but on a smaller level it’s about family and how within family, there is a kind of dialectic of freedom and control. It’s all summed up by the relationship between Lucifer and God – God is his father and Lucifer is like any son, he wants to be himself and wants to be the author of his own life. The trouble is when your father is God, everything is controlled by your father and the autonomy that Lucifer seeks is elusive. It’s about that struggle, that never ending quest to be yourself.

 

In Paradise Lost, Milton’s Satan is at the end of his journey humbled in Hell by the Almighty’s omnipresent power; in Cain, Byron’s Lucifer simply disappears when his work is done; in Lucifer, however, Carey’s Lucifer ends his 75-issue journey on a triumphant note. As Lucifer refuses God’s offer to swap identities and exits into the void, we know that whatever is—or is not—there, Lucifer is finally free. As his cosmic self-assertion is a struggle we can all relate to in our own personal struggles to stay true to ourselves, Lucifer’s final victory is undeniably uplifting. In this, Vertigo’s Lucifer Morningstar not only matters, but is of the utmost importance to the Miltonic-Romantic-Satanic tradition.

 

Notes

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<sup>1. Mike Carey, “Afterword: The Devil’s Business,” in Lucifer: Evensong (New York: DC Comics, 2007), pp. 213, 214.↩
2. William Blake, The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman, rev. ed. (New York: Anchor Books, [1965] 1988), p. 35; pl. 6.↩
3. The first to employ the Frankenstein monster metaphor appears to be John M. Steadman in “The Idea of Satan as the Hero of Paradise Lost,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 120, No. 4, Symposium on John Milton (Aug. 13, 1976), p. 264: “Like Dr. Frankenstein, Milton was apparently unable to control the powerful figure he had created.” It is a sentiment anticipated by E. M. W. Tillyard in Milton (New York [rev. ed.]: Chatto & Windus Ltd, [1966] 1967), p. 234: “…I do not see how one can avoid admitting that Milton did partly ally himself with Satan, that unwittingly he was led away by the creature of his own imagination.”↩
4. Peter A. Schock, Romantic Satanism: Myth and the Historical Moment in Blake, Shelley, and Byron (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), p. 3.↩
5. Carey, Lucifer: Evensong, p. 160.↩
6. Ibid.↩
7. Ibid., p. 135.↩
8. Ibid., p. 160.↩
9. Ibid., p. 161.↩</sup>

While I believe Vertigo’s Lucifer (1999 – 2006) to be the place to find the Miltonic-Romantic Satan’s successor and even superior in certain respects, Mike Carey’s anti-hero angel is, to be fair, undeniably flawed in ways distinctly different from his Miltonic and Byronic predecessors.

The pride of Carey’s Lucifer is rather narcissistic and anti-social in nature. (When his L.A. piano bar Lux is eventually burned to ash, Lucifer rebuilds it “as a cathedral without doors – a monument to his own arrogance and self-love.”¹) Lucifer’s utter self-absorption precludes him from forming any significant ties to other living beings. In a 2002 interview with Comic Book Resources, Carey summed Lucifer up as “the ultimate solipsist – the guy who’d burn the world down to light his cigarette,” elaborating:

He’s not cruel, particularly – although he’s capable of cruelty – he’s just so focused on his own goals and his own needs that nobody else exists for him.…I don’t see Lucifer as evil, really: I see him as amoral…He makes his decisions purely by his own criteria, and he doesn’t care one way or the other how other people are hurt or helped by his actions.

While this sounds strikingly similar to the Romantic radical William Hazlitt’s observation that Milton’s Satan “is not the principle of malignity, or of the abstract love of evil—but of the abstract love of power, of pride, of self-will personified, to which last principle all other good and evil, and even his own, are subordinate,”² even at his most morally culpable moments Milton’s Satan is not so icily detached as Carey’s Lucifer.

Milton’s Satan is sympathetic even as he plots his crime against humanity, shedding tears for the human couple whose ruin he must precipitate to avenge himself and his fallen brethren on God and divide the Deity’s Empire by conquering the “new World” (Paradise Lost, IV.388–92). More moving are the tears Satan sheds for the “Millions of Spirits” who fell from Heaven “For his revolt,” yet even in damnation stand faithfully before their leader (I.604–20). Milton’s Satan is certainly an imposing figure before his infernal hosts (I.331–38, II.466–75) and speaks openly about why he need not fear rebellion from them (II.21–35), but Satan’s followers do not feel oppressed but rather uplifted by their “great Commander” (I.358): recollecting “his wonted pride,” Satan “gently rais’d / Thir fainting courage, and dispell’d thir fears” (I.527, 529–30). When Milton’s soliloquizing Satan engages in a thought experiment on atonement at one point in the poem, one of the reasons he rejects the possibility of repentant submission is his “dread of shame / Among the Spirits beneath…” (IV.82–83).

A deep sense of commitment to his brothers-in-arms—his “Companions dear” (VI.419)—is one of Satan’s more endearing qualities in Paradise Lost. Despite the Miltonic magnificence of the Lucifer of Cain: A Mystery (1821), what Lord Byron’s portrait of the Prince of Pride lacks is this profound sense of loyalty to his subordinates. Byron’s Lucifer asserts himself as a “Master of spirits” (I.i.99), but his relationship with these subordinate spirits is unknowable, limited as the play is to Lucifer’s education of Cain. Carey’s Lucifer is not so ambiguous, openly expressing concern only for himself—only for his relentless quest for absolute freedom. When accused of being “an arrogant, ungrateful son of a bitch on a permanent power trip” by the character Jill Presto, Carey’s Devil pleads guilty: “Ha! Excellent. Accurate on all counts. But don’t push your luck. My good humor could evaporate at any moment.”³

When publicly declaring his rebellion in the heavenly Silver City, Carey’s Lucifer issues an open invitation, but he is quite clear that he is indifferent as to whether or not anyone marches behind him: “Angels of the host! I renounce my name and my birthright. I am Samael no longer. Now I am only what I was made to be — the Lucifer. The bearer of the light and the fire. And those of you who seek their own paths — may, if you care to, begin by following mine.”⁴ As Lucifer turns his back on Heaven, he inevitably attracts followers (“For a star draws many things in its wake, whether it will or no.”⁵), but Carey is emphatic that Lucifer “didn’t look back. He didn’t seem to care.”⁶ Lucifer’s superhuman struggle for self-determination is commendable, but his lack of care for his followers is rather callous, and it is undeniably a step backward from the Satan of the Miltonic-Romantic tradition.

On the other hand, like his Miltonic and Byronic forebears, the sublimity and grandeur of Carey’s Lucifer largely eclipses his behavioral imperfections, his titanic magnificence compelling readers to significantly overlook his deep flaws. There are certainly positive aspects to what Carey calls Lucifer’s “touchy pride and perverse integrity,”⁷ which are unique unto him. Lucifer is a Machiavellian manipulator, to be sure, but it is “a point of pride” for him to never lie outright,⁸ which necessitates his always keeping his word and never leaving a debt unresolved, however far he must go out of his way.⁹ This ambivalent virtue of brutal honesty is best outlined by the character David Easterman, who observes:

They used to call the Devil the Father of Lies. But for someone whose sin is meant to be pride, you’d think that lying would leave something of a sour taste. Too easy. Too sleazy. Too much of a coward’s tool. So my theory is that when the Devil wants to get something out of you, he doesn’t lie at all. He tells you the exact, literal truth. And he lets you find your own way to Hell.¹⁰

Pride is both the fatal flaw and the saving grace of Carey’s Lucifer, as was the case for Milton’s Satan.

In addition to his own private morality or personal code of conduct, Carey’s Lucifer also exhibits on occasion what we might cautiously call affection. The exception to his narcissism is Mazikeen, his faithful, fiercely devoted, right-hand warrior-woman, for whom Lucifer harbors something resembling love. When in flashback we are shown Mazikeen—daughter of Lilith and future leader of the Lilim army—come before Lucifer in Hell, requesting entry into his service, the enthroned Lucifer is characteristically aloof: “Serve me if you will. I’ll never thank you for it. Your coming and your going will never impinge on my attention.”¹¹ Nevertheless, throughout the series Lucifer is genuinely affectionate toward his friend and lover, and although he ultimately breaks Mazikeen’s hardened heart at the end of the series by resolving to exit into the void alone, Lucifer bestows upon her his “name” and “nature,” making her “the Lightbringer.”¹²

The self-obsessed, sociopathic Lucifer giving his very essence—his “Luciferhood”—over to his lover is a redeeming feature of the colossally arrogant angel. It is perhaps only rivaled by the respect Lucifer chooses to pay the young Elaine Belloc. When she assumes the position of God and accepts responsibility for the accompanying cosmic duties which Lucifer refused, the Morningstar tellingly states to Elaine, “For what it’s worth, I think you’ll be an improvement on the old regime.”¹³ His implication is that things might have turned out differently were she his God, rather than Yahweh, which is just about the best possible compliment Lucifer—the quintessential rebel—could grant a person.

In deliberately portraying Lucifer as thoroughly ambivalent, Carey took a rather Byronic approach to the arch-rebel. (It was certainly not Milton’s intention to portray his Satan as “the most heroic subject that ever was chosen for a poem…”¹⁴) In Cain, Lucifer presents himself to Adam’s firstborn son as something of a Promethean patron, claiming to “know the thoughts / Of dust, and feel for it, and with you” (I.i.100–01), as he tells Cain, but Byron’s Lucifer repeatedly belittles Cain for his mortality (I.i.123–24, 221–28, 242–46; II.i.50–60; II.ii.67–74, 95–105, 269–74, 401–24). One can certainly argue that this puts Cain in the distraught mindset that culminates in the murder of his brother Abel (II.ii.337–55, 380–88), regardless of whether or not Lucifer intended thus. Carey’s Lucifer is similarly ambivalent, compelling readers to admire his uncompromising independence, but flabbergasting them with reminders of his disdainful indifference and, on occasion, his displays of callous cruelty. Carey confesses, however, that his Lucifer ended up being far more sympathetic than even he anticipated, conceding that the “softening of the satanic hard line wasn’t something that was in the initial plan.”¹⁵ The uncanny ability of Carey’s Lucifer to confound and defy expectations is what truly secures his place in the Miltonic-Romantic-Satanic tradition.

 

Notes

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<sup>1. Mike Carey, Lucifer: Exodus (New York: DC Comics, 2005), p. 6.↩
2. William Hazlitt, Lectures on the English Poets (1818), “Lecture III: On Shakespeare and Milton,” in The Romantics on Milton: Formal Essays and Critical Asides, ed. Joseph Anthony Wittreich, Jr. (Cleveland: The Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1970), p. 384.↩
3. Mike Carey, Lucifer: Children and Monsters (New York: DC Comics, 2001), p. 91.↩
4. Mike Carey, Lucifer: The Wolf Beneath the Tree (New York: DC Comics, 2005), p. 42.↩
5. Ibid., p. 43.↩
6. Ibid., p. 42.↩
7. Mike Carey, “Afterword: The Devil’s Business,” in Lucifer: Evensong (New York: DC Comics, 2007), p. 214.↩
8. Carey, Lucifer: Children and Monsters, p. 201.↩
9. See, for example, Carey, Lucifer: Children and Monsters, p. 140; Lucifer: A Dalliance with the Damned (New York: DC Comics, 2002), p. 66; Lucifer: The Divine Comedy (New York: DC Comics, 2003), pp. 43, 158; Lucifer: Inferno (New York: DC Comics, 2004), p. 17; Lucifer: Evensong, p. 41.↩
10. Carey, Lucifer: Children and Monsters, pp. 135–36.↩
11. Carey, Lucifer: Evensong, p. 139.↩
12. Ibid., pp. 68–72.↩
13. Mike Carey, Lucifer: Morningstar (New York: DC Comics, 2006), p. 188.↩
14. Hazlitt, p. 384.↩
15. Carey, “Afterword: The Devil’s Business,” p. 214.↩</sup>

The rebel angel Mike Carey crafted for the Vertigo series Lucifer (1999 – 2006) in certain significant respects outshines his Miltonic and Byronic forebears. The effort to do so was already underway before Lucifer enjoyed his own spinoff series, as in Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman (1989 – 1996) Lucifer invokes the most famous line of Milton’s Satan—“Better to reign in Hell” (Paradise Lost, I.263)—only to deny its validity,¹ distancing himself from his predecessor to improve upon his example.

Carey’s Lucifer is distinctly different from the Devil of Judeo-Christian tradition, the Satanic usurper who sought to supplant the Almighty and settled for establishing himself as simia Dei.² That Lucifer not only proudly refused to bow down to God but enviously attempted to set himself upon God’s Throne was standard Christian thought, patristic writers citing the diatribe out of the Book of Isaiah as authority: “How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer.…For thou hast said in thine heart…I will exalt my throne above the stars of God: I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation.…I will be like the most High” (Isaiah 14:12–14). Because Milton in Paradise Lost more or less stuck to Christian tradition with regards to the Devil’s self-sought apotheosis, critics of Milton’s Satan have often accused him of being a false prophet of freedom. Even certain Satan sympathizers have felt compelled to conclude that his “revolt is not against tyranny,” as William Flesch writes, but “against a tyrant whose place he wishes to usurp,” which Flesch feels “accounts for our ambivalent feeling about Satan: heroic in his rebellion against idolatry, he never gets beyond it himself.”³

Milton’s Satan “to the highth of Deity aspir’d” (IX.167) and “trusted to have equall’d the most High” (I.40), the rebel angels having arrived on the heavenly battlefield with their Prince’s ambition as their aim: “To win the Mount of God, and on his Throne / To set the envier of his State, the proud / Aspirer…” (VI.88–90). In Hell, when Milton’s Satan proves to be the only one bold enough to journey to Eden to conquer God’s new world, the fallen angels deify the Devil: “Towards him they bend / With awful reverence prone; and as a God / Extol him equal to the highest in Heav’n” (II.477–79). Whereas Milton’s Satan is awarded the honor of a god without request, Lord Byron’s Lucifer does request worship, and he requests it from a mortal. In Cain: A Mystery (1821), Lucifer promises to reveal to Cain the mysteries of the cosmos on the condition that he bows down (I.i.301–20), which Cain, in Byronic fashion, refuses to do, despite being a de facto Devil-worshipper by virtue of his refusal to worship God (I.i.314–20). Carey’s Lucifer is certainly no less prideful than either the Miltonic Satan or the Byronic Lucifer, but in contrast to them his pride does not take the form of seeking to transfer the worship of God to himself, but rather utter contempt for worship itself, which is a significant improvement upon the Miltonic-Romantic-Satanic tradition.

What Carey’s Lucifer envies is not Yahweh’s Throne, but the true freedom He possesses as God. When brooding over his heavenly discontent, the prelapsarian Lucifer contemplates patricide/deicide because he in his boundless pride longs to be unfettered: “I have considered — killing my Father.…It would set me free. I would stand alone, then.”⁴ The rebel Lucifer refuses to be a “tool” of God, scorning the notion that there is “some kind of nobility in self-abasement,” reasoning, “We are His children — His first-born. The freedom He enjoys is our birthright too.”⁵ When at one point in the series the angel Michael suggests that Lucifer merely wishes to become their Father, he is backhanded across the face for his insult,⁶ as Carey’s Lucifer prides himself on being unlike his Father, the fallen angel boasting, “I have nothing in common with Yahweh.”⁷

Lucifer, who is dismissive of the title “Lord,”⁸ proves himself true to his word, as he shuns becoming Yahweh’s successor when the opportunity presents itself. In Lucifer, Yahweh ultimately absconds, leaving the Throne of God vacant and Creation crumbling at the foundations. Someone has to take the Throne, but Lucifer refuses, insisting that Michael’s half-breed daughter Elaine Belloc do so. When Elaine asks why, Lucifer states plainly, “Because my priorities are different from yours. I’ll see Creation fall rather than sit in that chair.”⁹ Upon Elaine’s apotheosis and the announcement to all creatures that she is Creation’s new God, Lucifer explains that he simply would not become enslaved to such a position: “Someone has to be the founder. The preserver. The arbiter. And I was damned if it was going to be me.”¹⁰ Elaine comes to understand what Lucifer means when, at the series’ end, he journeys off into the void, alone: “He’s gone.…I suppose he’s got it now. The freedom he fought all of Heaven to win. That he would have unseated God for, once upon a time. Until he figured out that God is less free than anyone.”¹¹

Carey’s Lucifer desires the absolute autonomy of God, not His cosmic train of faithful subjects, which Lucifer finds actually inhibits rather than enhances individual freedom, hence his abdication of the infernal throne. Essentially longing to be left alone, Lucifer cares nothing for worshippers or even followers. He disdains the obsequious impulse of angels (“Your willingness to grovel is what defines you. Your subordination of yourselves to another’s will.”¹²), and Lucifer will have none of it under his supervision. Indeed, thou shalt have no gods is Lucifer’s sole commandment to his own world’s human prototypes: “I will withhold death from you as long as you obey my one command. Bow down to no one. Worship no one. Not even me. Do you understand?”¹³ When Lucifer—spiting his Father, who has ordered the gateway to the Devil’s separate cosmos shut—shifts to “the free market model,” placing a portal leading outside of Yahweh’s Creation on every world (“Anyone who doesn’t like his party can come to mine.”¹⁴), the migrants receive a similar admonition from a titanic Lucifer in the sky: “You’ve been looking for a new world, and now you’ve found it. Congratulations. And a word of warning.…There are certain things I won’t tolerate. Don’t bring the habit of worship here with you. Graven images, anthropomorphized abstractions, cosmic principles; they’re all equally unacceptable.”¹⁵

Carey’s Lucifer cannot stomach the sight of genuflection, and he can only respect (or tolerate) those who, like him, relentlessly pursue free will—so long as they do not interfere with his own, of course. Whenever someone does dare to stand in the way of this Devil’s path, he proves that he can be all too devilish indeed.

 

Notes

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<sup>1. See Neil Gaiman, The Sandman: Season of Mists (New York: DC Comics, 2010), “Episode 1.”↩
2. See Maximilian Rudwin, The Devil in Legend and Literature (LaSalle, IL: Open Court Publishing Company, [1931] 1959), Ch. XII, “Diabolus Simia Dei,” pp. 120–29.↩
3. William Flesch, “The Majesty of Darkness: Idol and Image in Milton,” in Generosity and the Limits of Authority: Shakespeare, Herbert, Milton (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1992), p. 240.↩
4. Mike Carey, Lucifer: The Wolf Beneath the Tree (New York: DC Comics, 2005), p. 16.↩
5. Ibid., p. 13.↩
6. Mike Carey, Lucifer: Mansions of the Silence (New York: DC Comics, 2004), p. 42.↩
7. Mike Carey, Lucifer: The Divine Comedy (New York: DC Comics, 2003), p. 126.↩
8. Mike Carey, Lucifer: Devil in the Gateway (New York: DC Comics, 2001), p. 46; Lucifer: A Dalliance with the Damned (New York: DC Comics, 2002), p. 116.↩
9. Mike Carey, Lucifer: Morningstar (New York: DC Comics, 2006), p. 134.↩
10. Ibid., p. 188.↩
11. Mike Carey, Lucifer: Evensong (New York: DC Comics, 2007), p. 100.↩
12. Carey, Lucifer: Morningstar, p. 54.↩
13. Carey, Lucifer: A Dalliance with the Damned, p. 53.↩
14. Ibid., p. 155.↩
15. Carey, Lucifer: The Divine Comedy, p. 19.↩</sup>

The Devil shuts down Hell and opens up a piano bar in Los Angeles. It sounds like an absurd premise, but Lucifer Morningstar—the titular anti-hero of Lucifer (1999 – 2006), the mature fantasy series of DC Comics’ Vertigo imprint—is the true heir of the Miltonic-Romantic Satan. Sympathetic Satans may have appeared in George Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman (1903), Mark Twain’s Letters from the Earth (1909), and Anatole France’s The Revolt of the Angels (1914), but these Devils simply do not possess the titanic grander of the Satan out of Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) or the Lucifer out of Lord Byron’s Cain: A Mystery (1821). Mike Carey’s 75-issue Lucifer, on the other hand, takes the fallen angel as its star, and Lucifer has not been portrayed in such a Romantic light since the days of Romantic Satanism.

Lucifer is a spinoff series from Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman (1989 – 1996), which depicts in its “Season of Mists” storyline what we might call Lucifer’s second rebellion. It occurs to Lucifer, after ten billion years of reigning in Hell, that he is no freer than when he was in Heaven—that he has merely allowed God to recast him in the cosmic scheme. “ ‘Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven,’ ” muses Gaiman’s Lucifer. “We didn’t say it. Milton said it. And he was blind.”¹ This disillusioned Devil determines to quit, closing down Hell, having his wings hacked from his back, and retiring to L.A., where he becomes the proprietor of the élite piano bar, Lux. (The name Lucifer, Latin for “Light-Bearer,” is comprised of the words lux and ferre.)

Carey’s Lucifer bestows upon its title character an outer beauty reminiscent of Romanticism’s visual renditions of Milton’s Satan, following the lead of Gaiman’s Sandman (which took David Bowie as its model for the fallen angel). Lucifer’s initial image is something of a pop cultural Satanic stereotype of the debonair gentleman Devil—tuxedo, cummerbund, bowtie and all—but he later adopts more dandified attire, replete with coattails and cravat. Clothing aside, Lucifer is clearly more angelic than demonic; the rest of Hell’s denizens are bestial or insectile in appearance, but not Lucifer, the blonde-haired, golden-eyed, smooth-faced, handsome Devil. The fallen angel becomes more angelic still: early in the series, Lucifer journeys to reclaim his severed wings, which, in their separation from his body, have self-healed, the bat-wings of Hell’s angel transforming back to their former, feathery state.² Commenting on the “long metamorphosis in the eighteenth century” of Milton’s Satan, when he was declared an exemplar of the sublime, Peter L. Thorslev, Jr. observes that “when he re-emerged in the romantic mind, he was no longer the (larval) serpent of the later books of Paradise Lost [IX.157–91, 412 ff.; X.504–77], but had reassumed his archangelic wings…”³ It is a beautiful metaphor, and I find it rather fitting that this is quite literally the case in Carey’s Lucifer, wherein the Miltonic-Romantic Satan has re-emerged in our own time.

Lucifer’s internal motives are just as alluring as his external beauty. In a flashback to his time in Heaven—here “the Silver City”—Carey’s prelapsarian Lucifer observes, “We’re fighting for freedom…Freedom to define ourselves. Freedom from the tyranny of predestination.”⁴ Lucifer’s rebellion is not a lapse but a liberation; the rebel angel finds himself not “a planet that’s left its orbit” but “a star,” the Morningstar vaunting, “I’ll borrow light from no one.”⁵ His heavenly uprising is of course doomed to defeat, and Lucifer is relocated to Hell, where he rules as absolute Lord, but the Lord of Hell ultimately realizes that true freedom eluded him in both his War in Heaven and reign in Hell, as “all his power brought him not one step closer to his true goal. That is why he left, of course.…Because he knew that he was not free, and it hurt his dignity to dance on the end of a leash.”⁶ It is during his time on Earth that Lucifer is presented with the opportunity to attain what he had always desired and pursued at all costs: freedom from God’s will.

In the opening story of Lucifer, the grisly angel Amenadiel—who harbors a deep-seated hatred for the Morningstar that eventually costs him his life—reports to Lucifer that if he chooses to carry out a divine errand in the service of Heaven, God will grant His wayward angelic son a letter of passage into the void outside of Creation.⁷ “Freedom is his obsession,”⁸ and so Lucifer accepts, using the liberating letter of passage he attains to become the creator of his own cosmos, which exists independently of Yahweh’s Creation. There, we see Lucifer at his most joyous, celebrating his victory as “The culmination of all my efforts. The end of predestination. The end of tyranny. I have escaped from Providence…I’ve gone into the god business.”⁹

Although in Lucifer the Devil becomes a god, he never quite obtains the boundless freedom he so desires, the series largely revolving around Lucifer’s unending struggle to become genuinely free. In writing a liberty-loving Lucifer whose grand ambition of self-authorship is incessantly frustrated, Carey inevitably found the fallen angel to be “a tragic figure,” as he explained in a 2002 interview with Comic Book Resources, and paradoxically Lucifer’s cosmic tragedy struck Carey as a very human dilemma that we can all relate to:

What he wants is freedom, and he can never have it – not in the absolute sense that he wants it. There’s a divine plan of which he’s a part, and he can’t get off that particular hook no matter what he does.…Lucifer knows that he’s a creation of someone else, a contingent being, and he wants to escape from that position – to slip out of the chains of God’s foreknowledge and God’s plan. For us the chains are different: we’re set on certain courses by our genes and by our upbringing. We all reach a point where we want to be our own authors, and we can’t, any more than Lucifer can. I don’t know whether that’s a tragedy or a farce, but it’s a fundamental part of being a human being. Lucifer isn’t a human being, of course, but in this he’s Everyman.

Lucifer’s existential crisis of free will was present in him since the beginning. In a flashback to the earliest chronological moment of Creation, Yahweh issues instructions to Michael, Lucifer (or Samael, Lucifer’s original angelic name in this version), and Gabriel, who are to assist in the cosmic construction project. Lucifer is “made of will,” and Yahweh created him as incarnate willpower to play an integral part in the Creation: “Lucifer’s will shaped [matter] into suns.”¹⁰ When given the command to fulfill his function, however, Lucifer cannot help but question his Father: “Why?.…What right have you to assign? To determine our actions?”¹¹ Not long after, this living tool of God, disgusted by the idea of lacking self-determination and existing only to satisfy the will of another, instead wills himself against his Creator, transforming himself into “self-will personified,” as William Hazlitt summarized Milton’s Satan.¹² Thereafter, Lucifer is in his unending struggle for individual sovereignty “as constant in his course as the star that shares his name.”¹³

Speaking of his name, while Yahweh’s angels on occasion refer to Lucifer as “the Adversary,” the Hebrew name Satan is never invoked in the entire series. Carey’s Devil is always Lucifer—“the Lightbringer, the Shepherd of Suns”¹⁴—and the effect of the preference for Lucifer over Satan is rather reminiscent of Lord Byron’s in Cain, the literary apex of Romantic Satanism. While restoring the name/title Lucifer to the fallen angel, Byron infused Lucifer’s native name with new irreverent meaning, for the Byronic Morningstar bears infernal light—the Promethean enlightenment of a self-assertively godless existence. Carey’s Lucifer lives up to this Byronic precedent. In addition to enhancing his élite elegance and aristocratic arrogance, the princely name Lucifer emphasizes the rebel angel’s light-bearing nature. This lordly Lucifer is a beacon of untrammeled individualism, and like the Romantics, Carey explores the deep ambivalence of the pursuit of absolute freedom. Like the Miltonic-Romantic Satan, however, Carey’s Lucifer unavoidably awes readers with the sublime incandescence of his uncompromising independence.

 

Notes

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<sup>1. Neil Gaiman, The Sandman: Season of Mists (New York: DC Comics, 2010), “Episode 1.”↩
2. See Mike Carey, Lucifer: Children and Monsters (New York: DC Comics, 2001), pp. 79–80.↩
3. Peter L. Thorslev, Jr., “The Romantic Mind Is Its Own Place,” Comparative Literature, Vol. 15, No. 3 (Summer, 1963), pp. 251–52.↩
4. Mike Carey, Lucifer: Devil in the Gateway (New York: DC Comics, 2001), p. 94.↩
5. Mike Carey, Lucifer: The Wolf Beneath the Tree (New York: DC Comics, 2005), p. 43.↩
6. Mike Carey, Lucifer: The Divine Comedy (New York: DC Comics, 2003), p. 6.↩
7. Carey, Lucifer: Devil in the Gateway, pp. 13–14.↩
8. Ibid., p. 73.↩
9. Carey, Lucifer: Children and Monsters, p. 200.↩
10. Carey, Lucifer: The Divine Comedy, pp. 107, 119. In Lord Byron’s Cain, Lucifer similarly claims to have “aided in [the Maker’s] work…” (I.i.531).↩
11. Mike Carey, Lucifer: Evensong (New York: DC Comics, 2007) p. 131.↩
12. William Hazlitt, Lectures on the English Poets (1818), “Lecture III: On Shakespeare and Milton,” in The Romantics on Milton: Formal Essays and Critical Asides, ed. Joseph Anthony Wittreich, Jr. (Cleveland: The Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1970), p. 384.↩
13. Mike Carey, Lucifer: A Dalliance with the Damned (New York: DC Comics, 2002), p. 70.↩
14. Carey, Lucifer: Devil in the Gateway, p. 65.↩</sup>