Madam Lucifer
Story
BY RICHARD GARNETT
Perhaps the most fascinating—and the most dangerous—character in the infernal world is this Mater tenebrarum—Our Lady of Darkness. “A lady devil,” says Daniel Defoe, “is about as dangerous a creature as one could meet.” When Lucifer fails to bring a man to his fall, he hands the case over to his better half, and it is said that no man has ever escaped the siren seductions of this Diabo-Lady. A poem, The Diabo-Lady, or a Match in Hell, appeared in London in 1777.
According to Teutonic mythology, this diabolical Madonna is the mother or the grandmother of Satan. The mother or grandmother of Grendel, the Anglo-Saxon evil demon, became Satan’s mother or grandmother by adoption. A mother was a necessary part of the devil’s equipment. Having set his mind to equal Christ in every detail of his life, Satan had to get a mother somehow. In his story “The Vision Malefic” (1920) Mr. Huneker tells of the appearance of this counterfeit Madonna on a Christmas Eve to the organist of a Roman Catholic church in New York. Partly out of devotion to her and partly also because he could not obtain the sacramental blessing of the Church, Satan was forced to remain single. In the story “Devil-Puzzlers” by Fred B. Perkins the demon Apollyon appears as an old bachelor. “I have a mother, but no wife,” he tells the charming Mrs. Hicok. The synagogue was more lenient towards the devil. The rabbis did not hesitate to perform the marriage ceremony for the diabolical pair. According to Jewish tradition the chief of the fallen angels married Lilith, Adam’s first wife. She is said to have been in her younger days a woman of great beauty, but with a heart of ice. Now, of course, she is a regular hell-hag. If we can trust Rossetti, who painted her Majesty’s portrait, she still is a type of beauty whose fascination is fatal. This woman was created by the Lord to be the help-meet of Adam, but mere man had no attraction for this superwoman. She is said to have started the fight for woman’s emancipation from man, and contested Adam’s right to be the head of the family. Their married life was very brief. Their incompatibility of character was too great. One fine morning Adam found that his erstwhile angelical wife had deserted him and run away with Lucifer, whom she had formerly known in heaven.
The King-Devil apparently always succeeded somehow or other in breaking the chains with which, according to legend, he had repeatedly been bound and sealed in the lowest depths of hell. From antediluvian times the demons appear to have been attracted by the daughters of men and to have come frequently up to earth to pay court to them. The only devil who must always remain in hell is the stoker, Brendli by name. The fires of hell must not be allowed to go out.
The anatomically melancholic Burton also tells of a devil who was in love with a mortal maiden. Jacques Cazotte tells the story of Beelzebub as a woman in love with an earth-born man.