Do the locusts have a king?

Rodney Matthews, Out of the Pit

Here's a "biblical contradiction" you don't see very often on those atheist gotcha lists.

The locusts have no king, yet go they forth all of them by bands.

-- Proverbs 30:27

And there came out of the smoke locusts upon the earth: and unto them was given power, as the scorpions of the earth have power. . . . And they had tails like unto scorpions, and there were stings in their tails: and their power was to hurt men five months. And they had a king over them, which is the angel of the bottomless pit, whose name in the Hebrew tongue is Abaddon, but in the Greek tongue hath his name Apollyon.

-- Revelation 9:3, 10-11

Of course I'm not seriously proposing this as a contradiction! The metaphorical "locusts" of the Apocalypse (pinched from Joel 2; John of Patmos was the Quentin Tarantino of prophets) obviously have little in common with the ordinary insects referred to in the proverb. I'm just using it to ask the question: Do the locusts in fact have a king? All around us, we see all major institutions -- most of them formally independent from one another -- acting in lockstep to do whatever the Next Evil Thing happen to be. They certainly do "go forth all of them by bands" -- so are they proverbial locusts, or apocalyptic ones?

Proverbial locusts appear to be carrying out an organized and highly efficient raid, the purpose of which is to destroy the crops in a region and cause suffering and death, but in fact they have no plan -- they're just bugs -- and the appearance of a coordinated attack is actually the result of hundreds of billions of similarly constituted bugs finding themselves in similar circumstances and behaving accordingly.

Apocalyptic locusts, in contrast, are exactly what they appear to be: an organized conspiracy, taking orders from a hierarchy and ultimately from their demonic "king," the Angel of the Abyss.

(And the synchronicity fairies have just chimed in. In the middle of writing this post, I went downstairs to get something. My wife was watching television, and I caught the middle of a commercial for some "ancient unsolved mysteries" kind of program -- the commercial consisting of a lot of very short, unrelated clips strung together so as to suggest the range of topics covered. A shot of some biblical-looking blokes walking through a sandy desert, then a shot of swarming locusts, and then a talking head saying, "Humans didn't do this." Okay, sync fairies, noted.)

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Just bugs: The case for proverbial locusts

Faustus: The devil what the devil what do I care if the devil is there.

Mephisto: But Doctor Faustus dear yes I am here.

Faustus: What do I care there is no here nor there. . . . I saw you miserable devil I saw you and I was deceived and I believed miserable devil I thought I needed you, and I thought I was tempted by the devil and I know no temptation is tempting unless the devil tells you so. And you wanted my soul what the hell did you want my soul for, how do you know I have a soul, who says so nobody but you the devil and everybody knows the devil is all lies . . .

-- Gertrude Stein, Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights

Let no man say when he is tempted, I am tempted of God: for God cannot be tempted with evil, neither tempteth he any man: But every man is tempted, when he is drawn away of his own lust, and enticed.

-- James 1:13-14

In opposing the idea that God tempts people, James does not say that it is the devil that does so, but rather that every man "is drawn away of his own lust, and enticed." Sin and temptation seem to be perfectly explicable in terms of ordinary human motivations and appetites, without recourse to the idea of some supernatural whisperer-in-ears egging us on to do what we already want to do anyway.

When Stein's Faustus says, "I know no temptation is tempting unless the devil tells you so," his (and her) sarcasm is evident. If all the devils in hell went on strike and all supernatural temptation ceased, wouldn't money still be attractive? Wouldn't fornication still feel good? Wouldn't it still often be convenient to lie? Would human behavior really change at all? Isn't the Tempter strictly redundant? If Satan turned out not to be a being or beings at all, but just a poetic personification of human vice and folly, would that fact have any important consequences? Can't we all say, with Faustus, "The devil what the devil what do I care if the devil is there"?

This line of thinking leads to the conclusion that there may or may not be a devil, but it doesn't really matter much one way or the other -- and that therefore, like good clean-shaven Franciscans, we ought not to multiply entities beyond necessity. The burden of proof lies with those who say the devil's existence matters.

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Lord of the bugs: The case for apocalyptic locusts

And behold, others he flattereth away, and telleth them there is no hell; and he saith unto them: I am no devil, for there is none -- and thus he whispereth in their ears, until he grasps them with his awful chains, from whence there is no deliverance.

-- 2 Nephi 28:22

And there are also secret combinations, even as in times of old, according to the combinations of the devil, for he is the founder of all these things; yea, the founder of murder, and works of darkness; yea, and he leadeth them by the neck with a flaxen cord, until he bindeth them with his strong cords forever.

-- 2 Nephi 26:22

For all that here on earth we dreadfull hold,

Be but as bugs to fearen babes withall

Comparèd to the creatures in the seas entrall

-- Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene II.xii.25.7-9

("Secret combinations" is Mormonese for Satanic conspiracies of the sort associated with the name of Gadianton. See the Ether 8, Moses 5, the Book of Helaman, and 3 Nephi 1-3 for a crash course.)

By invoking the name of Faustus, Gertrude Stein has given the key to answering her own question. The difference between a real devil and a metaphorical one is that you can make a deal with the former. While it's obviously not true that "no temptation is tempting unless the devil tells you so," I think there are evils that are not at all attractive in themselves but which can be made attractive by means of artificially attached incentives -- but this takes an intelligent being to do this; it doesn't just happen.

If the devil whispers, "Go ahead, do what you want, you'll enjoy it!" (the same thing the temptee's own mind is already whispering) he might as well just be a metaphor. But if he whispers, "Commit this unspeakably obscene act, and I will make all your wildest dreams come true" -- if he offers a Faustian, sell-your-soul bargain -- well, then Doctor Faustus dear yes I am here.

Conveniently, the same point can be illustrated using my extended metaphor of the two kinds of biblical locusts. What do proverbial locusts do? They fly around looking for anything they can eat, and they eat it. No one but Mother Nature needs to tell them to do that. Now look at the apocalyptic locusts and see what their king commands (Revelation 9:4-5):

And it was commanded them that they should not hurt the grass of the earth, neither any green thing, neither any tree; but only . . . men . . . . And to them it was given that they should not kill them, but that they should be tormented five months.

These locusts are explicitly commanded not to yield to the natural temptations of locust-nature -- not to indulge themselves in any of the delicious greenery around them -- but to focus their energies on torturing human beings. And what's in it for the locusts? What motivates them to carry out this mission? Well, we don't know, but we can be damn sure it's not natural. Presumably their king motivates them with artificial incentives: promised rewards if they obey, threatened punishment if they do not. And maybe over time some of them acquire a taste for what Mick Jagger called "all the special pleasures of doing something wrong" and begin to break free of artificial incentives and do evil strictly for the evulz -- but there's no way they could arrive there without their king, no way a whole swarm of locusts would just spontaneously decide to go forth by bands on such a glaringly unlocustly mission.

Returning from this biblico-entomological excursus to the world of human beings and human evil, it is specifically in unnatural evil -- unattractive evil, disgusting evil, ugly and abhorrent evil -- that we can see the fingerprints of Abaddon. Have you ever wondered why the "witch" of popular imagination, with enough magical power to get lots of nice things for herself, has instead such a predilection for brews of poison'd entrails and baboon's blood, and chooses to appear as a hideous, green-faced, warty hag? Because the embrace of the horrible -- like a locust swearing off grass and going in for torture instead -- is the price of admission, the mark of the beast, the secret sign of Gadianton, the proof that one is obeying the devil and not one's own natural lusts.

Reading the Epstein articles I linked to earlier, don't you think it surprising that a man like Cohn or Epstein, who sets out to control the rich and powerful by means of blackmail, finds that the most effective way of getting suitable material is to secretly film his marks raping children? Something doesn't add up here. I'm sure that some pedophiles are "born that way," suffering from a sexual neurosis that makes their crime spontaneously appealing to them, but these must surely be a tiny minority, and it's statistically impossible that so many of the rich and powerful -- most of whom appear to have "normal" sexual lives as well -- would just happen to suffer from it. Sure, child-rape on tape is extremely effective blackmail material if you can get it -- people would surely do almost anything to stop such material from being made public -- but why assume you can get it? Why assume that you could easily trick any halfway-normal person into raping a child on camera in exchange for -- what, money and political string-pulling? None of it makes any sense unless the supernatural is involved, unless something is being promised that goes far beyond what a mere mortal schmuck like Epstein could ever be expected to deliver. I don't pretend, or want, to know the details, but it certainly looks as if we're dealing with apocalyptic locusts here.

I've chosen an extreme example because of the clarity it provides, but we can see, at a lesser degree, the embrace of the horrible all around us, and it is a sign that devils are at work. Real devils, not metaphors.