The little devil

As you will certainly know, hell is the realm of devils. At the top there are four great lords: Lucifer, the first of the fallen angels for having disobeyed and rebelled against God, primus inter pares, but basically he is the boss, then Beelzebub, Astaroth and Azazel. Six supervisors report directly to them: Agaliarept, Asmodeus, Fleruty, Lucifuge Rofogale, Sargatanas and Satanachia. Following are seventy-two main devils, commanders of legions of devils, with various levels of responsibility, depending on whether kings, dukes, marquises, counts and presidents. I cannot list them all, so I will remind you only a few: Bael, a king, commands sixty-six legions; Agares, a duke, commands thirty-one legions; Amores, a marquis, commands forty legions; Zepar, a duke, commands twenty-eight legions; Asmoday, a king, commands seventy-two legions; Furfurael, a count, commands twenty-six legions; I would close with Aim, a president, commands thirty-six legions. I'm just a fifth or sixth class devil, assistant to a legionnaire, a little devil, but I'm not complaining, I'm young. The hierarchy is hierarchy, especially here in the hell. Not everyone get through the front door, the main gate, most enters from the secondary entrances, but it is not a matter of recommendations, rather of credentials, depends on the curriculum. You can also do a certain career, it depends a lot on the circumstances, perhaps also on luck, on the assigned task and obviously on the results.

     Most devils aspire to care for the souls of the damned who come in droves here in the hell, to inflict on their deserved punishment, mistreat them, torture them, mock them and make them feel at home. And it is good that they are many, because they are never enough, the damned come all the time and are an endless tide. It's not a job I like, I'm not made for these things, then I hate blood, I would not hurt a fly. Then there are those who prefer to take care of human beings, to tempt them, to induce them to sin and to perdition, to nourish the stream of the damned. They are very skilled. I once read a description of them made by a holy man, a certain Isidore of Seville: "They unsettle the senses, stir low passions, disorder life, cause alarms in sleep, bring diseases, fill the mind with terror, distort the limbs, control the way in which lots are cast, make a pretence at oracles by their tricks, arouse the passion of love, create the heat of cupidity, lurk in consecrated images; when invoked they appear; they tell lies that resemble truth; they take on different forms, and sometimes appear in the likeness of angels." To die of laughing. I fall into that category, but I like handling more subtle questions, to instigate an insatiable hunger for knowledge of creation, of human things and of divine things, to inspire the desire for omnipotence, to plant doubt, to upset certainties, to urge the minds, to torture reason, to lose sleep and head. I'm also very good at that. Someone must have immediately understood these my inclinations and qualities, because from the beginning I began to work in this field. One of my first assignments, for example, was to insinuate in the minds of some human beings the idea of a device consisting of a ball, sometimes even a different shape like animals and even a little devil-shaped creature, inserted in a transparent bottle or jar, such as glass or plastic, filled with water almost to the brim, still leaving a vacuum of air, closed with a flexible lid like a membrane. By pressing and releasing the membrane, the ball floats or goes to the bottom or remains at various heights in the water depending on the pressure exerted. The trick is to make a small hole in the ball so that the air it contains can vary in volume as the pressure changes, thus affecting the density of the ball. What a fun! They have been running it through their head.

     Now I have a job even more fun and delicate, subtler. I must premise that, contrary to what can be believed, what human beings normally believe, it is not that here in the hell we are ignorant, stupid and brainless. Indeed, there are a lot of smart people, among which without false modesty I think I can count myself, both by innate intelligence and by acquired wisdom, having freely available all the minds of human beings and all the books that have been written in the world, accessible instantly and without any effort. Of course, it's a question of predisposition, character, interests and, as I said, many love to deal with more operational things. But, those who choose to fully devote themselves to knowledge, which however does not place them in any particular position of privilege with respect to others, because here in the hell we are all the same with regard to the primary objective that is and always will be to force men to sin and lead them to damnation and eternal punishment, they are so prepared as to fear no comparisons, dialectical skirmishes and doctoral disputes with the best doctors of the Church , professional theologians and operating saints, even with the most learned among men of culture, both in the  and . So, those who, like myself, devote themselves to ambitions and torments of human reason and to apology of doubt, in the wake of Mephistopheles and Woland, they do it with full mastery of the field in which they work, of cracks, slits, channels through which to creep, to go to the heart of passions and questions on which to leverage to succeed in their intent.