the devil made me do it

I always laugh at how pretty much my entire knowledge of all things biblical come from two or three very specific places.  One was a copy of a children's illustrated version, given as a gift to us around the time my sister was born. My mother, whose other nightime rituals involved singing the cucaraca song to our horror and giggling delight, would regularly read first few pages of this often.  Over and over again, mostly because outside of some little goldens and a badly battered mother goose, it was all we had in the way of material til we were old enough to read ourselves.  I do remember she once skipped ahead to Noah and the arc, which was it's own sort of traumatizing, but at least involved animals.  As for Adam and Eve, I think my child brain could never understand why it was Eve's fault the serpent tempted her. So every time she read it was another meditation on wtf?

Later my sister would accompany a friend to church and youth groups (a pro Bush problematic non-denominational one at that), but me, my biblical knowledge pretty much ceased at Adam & Eve and the fateful flood.  Fast forward 20 years and my senior seminar is, of all things, devoted to Paradise Lost. A tricky tangle of footnotes even if you are a religious scholar, but absolute horror for me.  So thus, I came away from it mostly with a version of Satan's fall from, of course, his side of the story and the idea of him as a highly sympathetic character.  A couple year's later, I took a seminar in at Depaul and revisited the same text to fill a period requirement (Shakespeare was full) .  My third great source of religious mythology is , of course, multiple seasons of Supernatural, which has yielded vast amounts of info on the occult over the years as well as a whole lot of the bible.

I've been fangirling the past few weeks over the Fox series Lucifer, which is now on Netflix and due for a new season there, which interestingly paints Lucifer as not only a sympathetic character, but also an inherently good one.  Punished for disobeying, yes.  But put in hell to punish the wicked, not be wicked himself. It's basically a buddy cop show where they are solving crimes, but, ya know, with Satan. (it does not hurt that everyone on the show is ridiculously attractive..ahem,)  Somehow, it had completely slipped my radar til it landed on Netflix, so I'm looking forward to what they do with a new season.