From the Chronicles of Lupa began as my attempt to write a potboiler werewolf/vampire novel as a means of promoting my (then) recently completed novella Lightbringer.
As it turned out the books got a little bit big on me, eventually unifying all werewolf and vampire myths into a single narrative that also bends and stretches and incorporates the core narratives of scripture.
An example: just who is that man hanging upon the Cross? Could it be Judas, willingly gone into death to buy time for his twin brother Jesus? Who must also die to save his lover Magdalene (and all of Lupa, all of the Daughters of Levi) from a fate far worse than death? Poor Judas Iscariot who becomes the most slandered son of the world, the self-hanged God so viciously accused for the latter part of history.
One of the reasons I bend these narratives is to demonstrate the need for care and healthy scepticism in selecting what we believe or don't believe. Muslims say that Jesus was never crucified, that another person (not identified) was killed on his behalf.
If that is true, and if this proxy was in fact Judas, and if his death was an act of courage and protection rather than the consequence of betrayal: what is our culpability in telling such lies about him? If we have so badly defaced what Judas had given , and how he had been repaid, despite how he ought to have been remembered for his great love and his great loyalty?
But there might be recompense for these things from a certain class of believer, as Ruby realises when she is shown:
... the poor and the earnest kneeling in praise of Judas, as he hung there in their churches, and how this devotion had reached him and sustained his soul even in the deepest parts of hell. So that he might now rise and shine forth, the sufficiency of his silver now transmuted into gold.
This point comes back eventually to the presumption of innocence, this right so beleaguered in our modern world. And how important it is that we guard what has been entrusted to us, our greatest and most God-like part, the sovereign capacity for doubt that secures the shining citadels of our minds. For it was faith that murdered so many. It was certainty that always damned the world.
P. Julian
15 July 2018
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