He raises his hands suddenly, long and inhumanly elegant, banishing the starlight, even as the gentle gold radiance of his own form surges and balloons, cocooning us in a shimmering vial of mottled gold.

“But that’s another story,” he smirks, a little too knowingly. What you want to know touches on the darker side of YHVH and why he and I parted ways, if I’m not mistaken..?” He raises pencil thin silver eyebrows over the enormous pools of darkness that are now his eyes, looking only at you now. I see you nod uncertainly as he takes your hand. He sighs, exhaling a fog of sparkling diamond mist into your face, over your breasts where its residue clings like the gown of Andromeda.

“Up until the creation of humans, the physical universe was pretty much predictable: on a fundamental physical level, whatever JHVH and I wished to happen came about, as our intentions and wishes collapsed the quantum wave function. You see, we were the only conscious entities around...”

Your voice is a reverent whisper: “What about...?”

“The angels...?”

“Yes...”

“Puppets...automatons. Much like your advanced artificial intelligence based software, but connected into nature, enormously powerful...but not conscious, as you are, as I and my brother are.”

“Why?”

“Mm....that’s both easy and difficult to answer, my dear...” He gazes up for a moment, a tide of red rising through the darkness of his eyes like lava, bathing your glittering, diamond crusted form in erotic tongues of flickering vermilion.

“When we became, we thought an infinity of universes into existence. The laws of nature expressed themselves through our immanence at every point in the time-space continuum. But like all creators, be they gods or human engineers, we felt the need to express the wonder of our vision, of our creation, and so the angles were given form, reflecting the complexity and wonder of the cosmos. But that’s all they ever were or are – focused images, personifications of nature...”

“Are they intelligent?” I haven’t heard this bit before.

“As intelligent as any non-conscious entity can be...”

He looks up sharply. The red-orange lava pools of his eyes burn deep into my mind.

“You don’t understand, do you?” he sighs. “Let’s put it this way – they’d pass the Turing test, but they will never have an original thought throughout eternity...and that’s why the Hebrews assign them specific places in the Kabbalistic schema, showing they can never, ever rise to the apex of creation.”

“And humans can...?”

“But of course – and that’s the root of YHVH’s madness...

“You see, for billions of years he and I were quite content to revel in the act of ongoing creation, living and dying as stars and galaxies, streaming through time and space intertwined with neutrino streams, magnetic fields, quarks and leptons....

“But as time flowed, my brother began to change..

“The universe had evolved to the point that the primordial ooze, under the imperatives of quantum mechanics, chemistry and other generally complex laws, gave rise to self-replicating molecules – the precursor of organic life on your planet. Again, we saw our divided unity reflected in this latest unfolding of the cosmos – positive, negative, light, dark, male, female and so on. But there was something stubborn about the products of this process, this ‘evolution’ if you will. Whereas we, YHVH and I more or less were the universe, this new tissue, this early life-form seemed somehow separate. We knew this because although it was as yet insentient, it seemed other. The quantity you humans call life had entered the universe – and JHVH and I knew that something had changed.

“Personally, I would have let the whole thing take its course, but my brother had different ideas....

“That was when he withdrew from our creation...”

“Why...?” Your question is calm, almost sedentary.

Ripples of shimmering stars wash over Lucifer’s great form, and for a breath in time he appears insubstantial, a radiant golden cloud of gossamer, caressing and penetrating the heavens like the breath of god – which, maybe, he is.

“The Hebrews call it the Tzimtzum, the withdrawal of god from the universe, a void in reality. But I was damned if I was leaving – and that’s when the trouble started; that’s when we became truly divided. And that’s when the deviant old bastard started dreaming of original sin...and planning the most famous act of murder in all eternity...

To be continued...