Chapter 29 "The Prime Mover: 'Track VI'"

29

The Prime Mover: “Track VI”

            As a sanitation worker in Wilmington, Delaware, Patrick Willows became accustomed to collecting garbage and to cleaning the industrial wastewater and other forms of refuse in the city’s sewers and storm drains.  From the years 2028-2040, he had worked tirelessly as a Christian missionary in Ecuador, and during his ministries to the mestizos in the city of Manta, he also lived with his wife Molly as they raised their son Drew.  He aspired to abandon his missionary work and to become a doctor, but he could not afford to attend medical school and was forced to concentrate entirely on caring for his son when he contracted diphtheria at age seven.  The young child Drew had not been properly vaccinated against the bacterial disease and suffered from a windpipe infection and aortic valve disease.  A healer known only as The Prime Mover labored to help Willows’ son, but the healer’s practice of “weighing” sins and perfection was unsuccessful and could not prevent Drew’s premature death.  Following the tragic loss of his son, the thirty-eight-year-old Willows abandoned Ecuador and returned to Delaware, where he joined the sanitation department and savored the opportunity for honest labor more than his previous missionary work.  He and his fellow maintenance worker Luke Masser were trudging through the sewer system that extended beneath the Wilmington city, and as the two individuals stood in the rainwater runoff from the storm drain, Willows inspected the storm drain’s grating and its network of rectangular piping.  For the past three hours, Willows and Masser had been repairing the sewer’s pipelines, which extended to the facilities for sewage treatment, and the two maintenance workers now were eager to return home following a day of transporting loading materials and cleaning the pipelines.  Six weeks earlier, another maintenance worker named Frank Barron had been killed when a mixture of sand and gravel became dislodged from his truck and crushed him on the street.  In reaction to Barron’s death, Willows organized a workers’ union that sought greater rights for sanitation workers, and out of the ninety workers in the local Wilmington area, thirty of them supported Willows’ crusade for improved regulations and security for sanitation workers.          

Willows and Masser waded through the industrial wastewater in the direction of the manhole, and during their walk, Masser recalled that according to news reports, the planet Venus, which once completed its revolution around the Sun every 225 days, now appeared to be orbiting the Sun backwards.  Astronomers had determined that while the other eight planets rotated counter-clockwise, Venus moved in a clockwise rotation, but satellite images confirmed that for the past year, Venus had been turning counter-clockwise in tandem with the other planets.  Venus remained difficult to perceive during the nighttime considering that the planet became obscured when it moved between the Earth and the Sun, but during the daytime, individuals could still monitor Venus due to its extreme brightness.  The astronomers were scrambling to explain why Venus was deviating from its original trajectory and why it was mysteriously rotating counter-clockwise, and their analysis proved that the counter-clockwise movements of Venus were accelerating the planet’s initially slow rotations.  The planet originally traveled at such a slow pace that its daily rotation lasted longer than its yearly revolution, and while the scientists contemplated why Venus’ counter-clockwise motions were expediting its rotations, concerns arose that Venus was moving too closely to Earth. 

Despite the astronomers’ anxieties about Venus’ abnormal counter-clockwise rotation, scientists gained new insights about the planet’s dense clouds of sulfuric acid and its landscape of craters and volcanoes.  Venus had always been classified as Earth’s “sister planet” based on their similar sizes, but with Venus’ closer proximity to Earth, scientists determined that Venus not only contained the densest atmosphere of the terrestrial planets but also that its clouds of sulfuric acid discharged lightning.  The planet remained the third brightest natural object in the sky following the Sun and the Moon, and as Venus rotated in a counter-clockwise fashion toward the Earth, scientists continued to speculate about Venus’ lightning, its solar wind, its intense heat, and its atmospheric pressure.  New evidence suggested that the planet’s volcanoes and its craters were somehow correlated with the occurrences of lightning and pressure, which exceeded the Earth’s surface pressure by ninety-two times.  However, the astronomers were more terrified that Venus was becoming so close to Earth that its basaltic rocks and silicate materials could be detached from its scorching surface and could streak to the Earth as meteorites.  Standing inside the underground sewer system of drains and rectangular piping, Masser stopped in the storm water and asked Willows about Venus’ bizarre counter-clockwise rotations and its dangerous proximity to Earth by remarking, “Hey, Patrick, what do you think about Venus?  I didn’t even know that it was the brightest planet or that it used to be the only planet that moved clockwise.” 

As Willows waded through the industrial wastewater, he glanced back at the papules, pustules, and the other acne on Masser’s face, and he silently became irritated that the thirty-six-year-old Masser still suffered from an acne condition that was more common in children than in adults.  Stopping in the streaming waste, Willows joked that his fellow maintenance worker lacked knowledge about general astronomy when he replied, “Come on, Luke, before the media started talking about Venus, you didn’t even know that it was the second planet from the Sun.” 

With a halfhearted scoff, Masser gingerly plodded behind Willows and struggled to maintain his balance so that he would not stumble in the mucky wastewater, and Masser commented about the similarities between Earth and Venus by asserting, “I really didn’t know that Venus used to have water.  They’re saying that the planet heated up until the oceans evaporated, and all that was left were dry deserts and volcanoes.  It’s pretty interesting that Venus has got a crust and a mantle just like Earth; they’re even saying that if we could plant algae there, it might start releasing oxygen and become livable for human beings.”

Trudging past a grating in the narrow drain, Willows contended that humans could never inhabit Venus considering that its atmosphere consisted primarily of carbon dioxide that could exceed 400 degrees Celsius and that would suffocate humans with air pressure and heat.  He addressed Venus’ surface pressure, which surpassed the Earth’s pressure by ninety times, its extreme temperatures, and its volcanic plains by retorting, “I don’t think so.  Even if we could plant algae on Venus, we’d never release enough oxygen into the atmosphere to make it livable; it’s way too hot.  On the news, they said that eighty percent of Venus is covered with volcanoes; there’s so much pressure and carbon dioxide there that we’d all burn up and be suffocated.  Just because there used to be water on Venus doesn’t mean that any of us can live there.”

Masser continued to follow Willows in the wastewater and conceded that although Earth and Venus exhibited similar rocky surfaces and internal tectonic features of a core, a mantle, and crust, Venus was too hot and contained too much suffocating carbon dioxide to sustain human life.  He speculated about the plate tectonics and the thermal formations of granite rocks that Venus and Earth shared by muttering, “Well, then, why is Venus so similar to Earth?  It didn’t just have oceans that evaporated from the heat; they’re saying that some granite rocks were found on its surface.  That means that the tectonic plates have been moving and that the rock cycle has taken place at some point.  Some guy on the news even said that Venus could be our ‘sister planet,’ so why couldn’t we live there one day?” 

Despite the similar sizes, densities, and rocky surfaces that Venus and Earth shared, Willows dismissed the notion that the dry planet Venus could qualify as Earth’s “sister planet.”  He contended that Venus could not even be detected during the nighttime because the planet moved between the Sun and the Earth in an elliptical orbit when he retorted, “Because it’s way too hot, Luke.  They said that Venus barely has any plate tectonics; its crust and its mantle are both way too hot and dry to sustain any life.  Why do you even care about Venus anyway?  It’s just a rock of volcanoes and clouds of sulfuric acid; you can’t even see it at night.” 

Media outlets were perpetuating the possibility that Venus’ counter-clockwise rotations were causing the dry, volcanic planet to become dangerously close to Earth and that Venus’ basaltic rocks could plummet to the Earth.  As the two maintenance workers approached the manhole, Masser insisted that he was simply hoping to distract Willows from his preoccupation with the workers’ union that Willows was organizing to demand improved safeguards for the sanitation department.  The wastewater began to rumble slightly when Masser replied, “Hey, man, I’m just trying to make conversation; I’m trying to get your mind off of this stuff with the workers’ union.  I know that we all need to be safer, but you’ve been really obsessed with it lately.  Venus may crash into us before you even get to stand up for your average sewer employee.  Who knows?” 

Willows trudged past more connecting pipes and peered up at the manhole that would lead him to the surface, but Masser was startled by the rumbling in the distance and plodded in the direction of the whirring noise.  With the wastewater’s splashing beneath his feet, he stumbled onto a white vortex that appeared conspicuously in the green waste around him, and in an awe-struck moment, he glared at the white substance that was spiraling inside the vortex’s center.  A pocket of warm air was bubbling at the center to generate the rustling sound, and the convergence of the white substance heated the boiling center until three enormous bubbles began to burst in unison.  The popping bubbles startled Masser and prompted him to step away from the explosions that were occurring in the whirlpool’s white center, but he was unable to avert his gaze from the spiraling center, which reminded him of a black hole.  The center contained convergences of exploding bubbles, but it also featured a compression of mass and energy that was rapidly heating and that could absorb any objects in its path.  When a dense pocket of air was lifted from the whirlpool’s white center, the tension between the rising air and the white substance generated more bubbles that exploded into steam particles.  The steam dispersed into the air with such intensity that Masser continued to back away from the whirlpool that somehow resembled both a cooking pot and a black hole.  Despite his fears that the whirlpool’s exploding bubbles could harm him, he could not shift his eyes away from the white substance that was swirling in the center, and as the rising air created more bubbles, he peered at the spinning fluid with the same rapt attention that could not be diminished.  The center’s vortex-like fluid persisted in flowing horizontally, and as the air pressure decreased and the bubbles faded, the speed of the substance’s oscillation accelerated until the fluid rotated so vigorously in circles that its bubbling recommenced.  More rising air collided into the white substance’s circular rotations, and the tension between the updraft of air and the swirling fluid caused more bubbles to explode.  The rising air failed to escape from the rotating substance, and Masser was so captivated that he could only watch as the white funnel and the trapped air spun more violently in the manner of a tornado.

Willows plodded through the green wastewater to join Masser at the white vortex, and as the fluid spun even more rapidly in its circular rotations, Willows noticed that the bubbling solution had mesmerized his fellow maintenance worker Masser.  When Willows asked, “Are you okay, man?,” Masser explained the whirlpool’s allure by muttering, “It wants me to use it; it’s telling me that I’m unclean and that I have evil thoughts.  It wants to cleanse me.” 

Willows did not understand that the whirlpool’s whirring was summoning Masser to climb into its spinning center, and before Willows could question why Masser hoped to use the whirlpool to cleanse himself, Masser stepped from the green wastewater into the white whirlpool.  He became submerged in the bubbly solution and waded toward the spiraling center, and during his gliding through the white fluid, Willows could only watch as steam was dispersed and obscured his vision of Masser.  As Masser sank into the whirlpool’s center from which no matter or light could escape, Willows identified that another being was being lifted from the steamy solution and that the individual was rising at the same speed that Masser was sinking.  A white wave swept over Masser so that the updraft of rising air and the tornado-like funnel could swallow him, and after the steam dissipated and the bubbles ceased their fizzing, the second individual emerged from the whirlpool and stepped into the green sewage.  Willows realized that the naked individual appeared to be a clone of Masser, but although the clone shared Masser’s physiology, he lacked the pustules and the other acne that covered the face of the original Masser.  Willows also noticed that Masser’s clone was wearing a red, diamond-studded crown, which reminded Willows of the white crown that the healer known as The Prime Mover had placed on his son Drew’s head in his failed attempt to cure him of diphtheria.  While Willows stood in disbelief, the clone planted his hand inside the white solution and pulled Masser to the surface to prevent him from drowning inside the funnel of bubbles and steam.  The bizarre white substance continued to swirl in circular rotations behind Willows as the clone lifted Masser to his feet and grinned at him to express his appreciation for Masser’s decision to clone himself inside the whirlpool.  Dripping with the white substance that splashed into the green wastewater, Masser gawked at the clone that somehow was devoid of his acne, and Masser spit out the white fluid to clear his throat and asked, “Who are you?”     

While Willows watched their interactions as a passive observer, the clone wiped the white fluid from his nose, adjusted his red crown, and explained that the mysterious whirlpool represented remnants of the inorganic “primordial soup” from which humans first emerged over 100,000 years earlier.  In a fog of steam that the whirlpool was discharging, Masser’s clone referred to the white whirlpool as the “hypostasis” when he muttered, “That pool is the only thing that’s left of the primordial soup from which all human life came; that inorganic pool gave birth to organic life.  The pool is just like the Pool of Bethesda where the sick people came for healing in The Book of John; the pool is the key to the perfection that humans could’ve been.  The first humans were perfect until they committed sins that corrupted them; I’m the perfect side of you that you could’ve been.  The primordial soup is called the ‘hypostasis;’ it’s the perfection that’s eluded humanity since the Fall into sin.  I’m the ‘chrysostom;’ I’m the perfection that you could’ve been.” 

Willows delved into his experiences as a Christian missionary to recall that the Greek word “hypostasis” denoted “existence” and the presence of the perfect Holy Trinity that represented God.  Willows also recalled that in The Book of John 5, “the blind,” “the lame,” and “the paralyzed” citizens entered the Pool of Bethesda to be cured of their sicknesses because the pool erased the sins that caused their sicknesses to cure the “disabled people,” and God’s angels blessed the Pool of Bethesda to help the individuals who were suffering from sicknesses.  According to The Book of John 5, Jesus Christ encountered an individual who had been “an invalid for thirty-eight years,” and the disabled individual was unable to climb into the Pool of Bethesda to be cured of his sickness that human sins had caused.  Jesus performed a miracle that allowed the disabled individual to walk for the first time in thirty-eight years, and once Jesus had healed the individual of his paralysis, he picked up his mat and walked away from the pool.  Jesus later commanded the individual to “stop sinning” to prevent “something worse” from happening to him, so Jesus suggested that humans caused their own sicknesses by committing sins.  As Willows stared at the whirlpool that had created a clone of Masser, he refused to accept that the whirlpool contained the same miraculous properties as the Pool of Bethesda from The Book of John 5.  The white whirlpool stored the remains of the “primordial soup” that Masser’s clone praised as the “hypostasis” from which human life originated, and Masser’s clone viewed himself as a perfect being known as the “chrysostom.”  During the fourth century, John Chrysostom served as the Archbishop of Constantinople, erected hospitals for poor citizens, and was eventually banished from the church for his unorthodox interpretations of Biblical scriptures.  After his ridicules of church abuses were reconsidered, the Eastern Orthodox Church recognized him as a saint and referred to him as a “Great Ecumenical Teacher.”  However, as Willows observed the red crown on the clone’s head, he invoked that the Greek term “chrysostomos” meant “golden mouth,” and the crown was comprised of the gold that the clone described when he named himself as the perfect “chrysostom.”  Standing in front of his clone known as the chrysostom, Masser flailed his arms to drain more white fluid, stared back at his fellow maintenance worker Willows, and asked, “Patrick, do you have any idea what this guy is talking about?  Did that pool fry my brains or what?”  

The Pool of Bethesda: The Gospel of John 5

With the green wastewater at his knees, Willows turned away from the bubbling whirlpool and dismissed the clone’s red crown and the fact that The Prime Mover had used a similar white crown as a “scale” that established balance between sins and perfection.  Willows understood that Masser’s clone had compared the whirlpool to the Pool of Bethesda, but he dismissed the possibility that the whirlpool could be comparable to the Pool of Bethesda.  He acknowledged that The Book of John 5 could be correct that humans caused their sicknesses by committing sins, but it seemed impossible that the white whirlpool could be comparable to the Pool of Bethesda that erased humans’ sins to cure them of their illnesses.  Recalling that Venus was still rotating in its bizarre counter-clockwise motion, he addressed the significance of the white whirlpool known as the hypostasis and Masser’s clone known as a chrysostom when he replied, “I don’t know, Luke.  Your clone called that pool the ‘hypostasis;’ I know that that means ‘existence’ in Greek.  John Chrysostom was the Archbishop of Constantinople and a saint; the clone must think that he’s some kind of a saint.  Maybe, he’s from Venus; that rotation could be making clones for all I know.  No matter what he says, there’s no way that the pool is like the Pool of Bethesda; you can’t believe what he says.”

Drenched in the whirlpool’s cold, white fluid, Masser began to shiver when he identified that his apparently perfect clone known as the chrysostom was devoid of the acne that decorated his own face, and he considered that the chrysostom could be perfect based on the lack of acne.  While Willows ignored the similarities between the clone’s red crown and the white crown that The Prime Mover had placed on his son Drew’s head, Masser pointed to his clone’s red crown and asked, “So, um, you’re my perfect side.  Why are you wearing a crown?” 

The chrysostom, Masser’s perfect clone, viewed his red crown as a weighing scale that was comparable to a triple-beam balance on which human sins and perfection were weighed to create an equilibrium between them in the universe.  The chrysostom adjusted his crown’s jewels, which were the sliding weights known as riders that calibrated the weighing scale so that the two items of sins and perfection could be measured and balanced.  He revealed that his red crown was a universal weighing scale and quoted the Biblical Book of Isaiah’s Fortieth Chapter when he glared at Masser and bellowed, “This crown is a scale; once it’s calibrated, it weighs sins and perfection to balance them.  I’m your perfect side, Luke; I’m trying to balance your sins with my perfection.  I don’t have your acne or your envy of Mr. Willows.  You’re envious of Mr. Willows’ popularity, and my perfection is trying to balance out your sinful envy.  The Prophet Isaiah said that ‘the nations are like a drop in a bucket;’ the nations are ‘regarded as dust on the scales.’  My crown is one of those scales; it has ‘held the dust of the Earth in a basket’ and ‘weighed the mountains on the scales.’  My scale weighs the world; it balances sin and perfection.”

Masser was startled that his clone understood his secret envy of Willows’ success and popularity among the other sanitation workers, and he noticed that his clone’s red crown was slightly rumbling to balance Masser’s sin of envy and the perfection that the clone embodied.  The red crown became so heavy that the chrysostom raised his hands and slid its jewels apart to calibrate it, and while the chrysostom balanced Masser’s sins with his perfection, Willows recalled that the healer known as The Prime Mover had quoted the same verse from The Book of Isaiah to explain the world’s precarious balance.  According to The Prime Mover, his own white crown was a scale that functioned as a seesaw because during its weighing of sins and perfection, the heavier side was raised upward while the lighter side was lowered between a fulcrum.  The Prime Mover had also quoted a different verse from The Book of Isaiah when he insisted that “every valley shall be raised up” and that “every mountain and hill” will be “made low” because his seesaw-like scale would balance the sins and perfection to cause the Earth’s “rough ground” to “become level.”  The chrysostom lowered his head in reaction to the crown’s pressure, and he slid the crown’s jewels to balance his perfection with Masser’s sinful envy while Willows contemplated how the chrysostom was associated with The Prime Mover.  Masser stared at Willows and confessed his sinful envy by muttering, “Okay, so I’m a little jealous of Patrick.  I mean, he was able to rally a ton of sanitation workers to support his cause for improved rights.  The guy’s amazing, so of course, I’m a little envious.  Who wouldn’t be?”                 

The chrysostom’s red crown decreased its pressure on the left side of his head to indicate that Masser had reduced his own sins, and as the crown’s weight shifted, the chrysostom managed to lift his head and no longer was forced to bear such weight.  Masser’s sins were measured on the crown’s left side, and the chrysostom’s perfection was weighed on the right side.  Therefore, Masser’s confession of his sinful envy diminished the weight on the left side so that the crown could function somewhat as a seesaw.  The chrysostom raised his head higher and massaged his stiff neck, which had suffered from the crown’s pressure on his head, and he praised Masser for publicizing his once secret sin by retorting, “Thank you, Luke.  The secret envy in your heart was defiling you; it’s better that you just let it out.  You actually decrease your sins when you expose them, and that’s less weight for me to carry when my crown has to balance my perfection and your sins.  If you’ve got any other sins to confess, it would only help to balance my scale.”

Based on the crown’s decreased weight on the chrysostom’s head, Masser became convinced that the red crown was actually a weighing scale and that chrysostom was bearing the two weights of his own perfection and Masser’s sins.  Masser placed his palm on his hair, which was soaked with the whirlpool’s white fluid, and he promised to alleviate the crown’s pressure on the chrysostom’s head by answering, “Okay, if I think of any other sins in my heart, then, I’ll be sure to let you know.” 

While Masser was awe-struck that the mysterious whirlpool known as the “hypostasis” had cloned him and that his perfect clone was standing in front of him, Willows was skeptical and was contemplating the associations between The Prime Mover and the chrysostom.  Willows was disturbed that The Prime Mover also had referred to The Book of Isaiah to explain his role as a healer who would control “every valley” and “every mountain and hill” to balance sins and perfection.  As memories of his son’s fatal exorcism were uncovered, Willows scowled at the seemingly perfect chrysostom and contended that he was incapable of weighing “the mountains on the scales” to balance sins and perfection when he bellowed, “This is ridiculous.  I’ve heard your verse from The Book of Isaiah before; you took it completely out of context to fit your own messed up view of the world.  Isaiah says that all nations are ‘less than nothing’ in comparison with God; Isaiah admits that God’s ‘ways’ are ‘higher than’ his ‘ways.’  You can’t balance the world like some kind of a God; the whole point of Isaiah is that God is greater than humans are.”  

In reaction to Willows’ allegation that he had misinterpreted passages from The Book of Isaiah, the chrysostom remained adamant that human civilizations were simply “dust on the scales” and that his unorthodox weighing scale balanced his perfection with Masser’s sins.  Moving another one of his crown’s jewels as a sliding weight, the chrysostom revealed that he was not human and that he was the embodiment of the perfection that God intended for humans before they commit sins when he replied, “I’m not human, Mr. Willows, or at least not in the sense that you mean.  I’m the perfection that God wanted for humanity before the Fall.  Humans evolved from the primordial soup to be perfect, and that’s what I am.  My crown is the weighing scale that balances sins and perfection, and I’m perfect enough to know that your son’s diphtheria could’ve been cured with an antitoxin.  You didn’t have to let him die.”          

The chrysostom’s mysterious allusion to the death of Willows’ son prompted him to lumber through the green wastewater while the white whirlpool known as the hypostasis was bubbling and swirling behind them.  Willows clenched his fist and prepared to clout the chrysostom for his insensitive comments, but Masser placed his hands on Willows to restrain him and to protect the clone.  With his palms on Willows’ chest, Masser defended his clone and the whirlpool that had cloned him by declaring, “Come on, Patrick, we found something that’s weirder than Venus’ counter-clockwise rotation.  That whirlpool is the primordial soup that birthed us all; it called to me and cloned me.  We’ve got undeniable proof that the primordial soup is real and that humans really did fall from original sin.  This discovery is bigger than Venus; it’s the biggest scientific discovery in history.” 

Willows calmed his rage and recognized that the whirlpool had summoned Masser to create a perfect clone of him, and he wondered why he had not been cloned inside the same whirlpool when he muttered, “I don’t care what that white crap is.  I don’t care if it’s pudding or a real part of the primordial soup.  Why did it call to you to be cloned?  It’s not calling to me.  Why doesn’t it want to clone me, too?” 

While the chrysostom stood in the distance and balanced the red crown on his head, Masser conceded that he could not explain why the whirlpool cloned only him when he whispered, “I don’t know, but this is way bigger than Venus.”

Masser and Willows climbed from the sewer system and contacted the local sanitation department about their discovery of the whirlpool that had generated a seemingly perfect version of Masser, and the sanitation department gathered samples of the whirlpool and submitted them to biologists.  In a local lab, Willows and Masser were cleansed of the whirlpool’s strange white fluid to which they had been exposed, and Masser remained transfixed by the perfect physical appearance and the actions of the chrysostom.  The biologists had been studying the process of abiogenesis through which human life emerged when inorganic matter was converted into biological organisms, and when the biologists scrutinized the samples from the whirlpool, they determined that it was comprised of hydrogen sulfide, carbon dioxide, water, methane, phosphate, and ammonia.  The sample’s ingredients matched the compounds in the Earth’s early atmosphere, and the same compounds had managed to produce organic polymers and self-replicating molecules that resulted in the first nucleic acids and proteins in human DNA.  Based on their examinations of the whirlpool and the origins of human biological monomers, polymers, and molecules that evolved into cells, the biologists concluded that the white whirlpool represented an actual remnant of the primordial soup that spawned organic life from inorganic matter.  While the scientists considered how complex polymers and multicellular organisms emerged from the whirlpool’s primordial soup and why Venus had altered its rotation, Masser celebrated the chrysostom as his perfect side that God had originally intended for humanity before sins corrupted the world.  During the evaluation of molecular replication and the primordial soup, Masser hid the chrysostom from the scientists in the lab, and Willows could concentrate only on the parallels between the chrysostom and The Prime Mover, whose healing techniques failed to cure Willows’ son of diphtheria.

One year earlier in 2039, Willows and his wife Molly were serving as Christian missionaries with their seven-year-old son Drew in Manta, Ecuador when the child contracted the bacterial disease diphtheria in his respiratory tract.  Willows was not familiar with the common anti-diphtheritic serum that was manufactured from horses, and as his son began to suffer damage to his heart, the enigmatic healer known as The Prime Mover emerged from the Barbasquillo Beach and plodded to the home of the Willows’ family.  He was born as Andrew Delphin in Helena, Montana, and at age thirty, he moved to South America and assumed the identity of The Prime Mover, a new interpretation of the folk healer called a curandero.  He wore the curandero’s traditional purple scarf and an orange shirt that was covered with black stripes, but he did not wield the chonta, which was a magic wand that many shamans used in South America.  Willows’ wife Molly was working in a church on the night that The Prime Mover trudged toward the home in which Willows was caring for his ill son, and although two cardiologists named Alberto and Evelia Jimenez were staying with the Willows’ family, they could not offer any more aid to Drew based on his extreme condition of diphtheria.  When Willows answered the door, he identified The Prime Mover as a curandero and rejected the Catholic remedies of reciting Bible verses, invoking the names of the saints, and using holy water on victims by declaring, “I’m sorry, but we don’t need your help, healer.  Your prayers are all that we need; we don’t need any holy rituals.  God bless you, and good night.” 

With his leopard-like clothing gliding along the ground, The Prime Mover reproached Willows for his flippant viewpoint regarding the Catholic faith and quoted The Book of James 2:19 when he replied, “Trust me, your son needs me.  You’re going to need more than just faith in God to save him.  ‘You believe that there is one God.  Good!  Even the demons believe that, and shudder.’  If the demons believe in God, then, I don’t think that your faith in Him is any better than theirs.  You need my help.”

The enigmatic shaman pushed the door open to enter the home, and Willows snarled to express his resentment that The Prime Mover had suggested that he and demons shared a similar faith in God.  When Willows noticed that The Prime Mover was carrying a bag of items for his healings, Willows recalled that in the Synoptic Gospels, Jesus Christ exorcised a group of demons known as “Legion” out of a man in Gadarenes and cast them into pigs that were drowned.  The Prime Mover waddled toward the bedroom where Willows’ son was struggling to breathe due to his windpipe infection, and Willows skewered the healer’s holistic techniques by remarking, “We don’t need an exorcism here, healer.  My son has a bacterial infection.  He’s not possessed by a demon, and even if he were, we don’t have any pigs for you to cast the demon into.  We don’t want any holy water, and we’re not praying to Saint Bernadette for him to get better.  We don’t want your Catholic hocus-pocus and your plastic shamanism.”

Willows’ intimation that The Prime Mover was a “plastic shaman” who sought only wealth and power incensed the healer, but as Willows followed him into the child’s bedroom, he remained calm and unzipped his bag of holistic remedies.  Wearing his shamanistic white gloves, he removed two candlesticks, five different crowns, a cup of ale, a loaf of bread, and a tiny, glowing teeter-totter that he could hold in his hand, and as Willows observed the peculiar items, he continued to dismiss demonic possession and the need for an exorcism by uttering, “I told you, healer.  My son is not possessed; he’s got a throat infection.  You don’t need all of this crap.  I don’t care what you may think about his sickness; he doesn’t need an exorcist.”

Despite Willows’ insistence that shamanism was unnecessary, The Prime Mover raised his miniature teeter-totter from the floor, and as the teeter-totter glowed with one-hundred and fifty lumens, Willows used his hand to shield his eyes from the radiant object.  While Willows’ son Drew gasped and choked from the bacterial infection in his respiratory tract, The Prime Mover placed the glowing teeter-totter on a nightstand, and the teeter-totter’s board began to swing back and forth so that when one side was lifted, the other side descended.  In a state of bewilderment, Willows examined the luminous teeter-totter as pressure was shifted from its lever’s left side to its right and from its right to the left in succession, and he questioned why the teeter-totter was mysteriously oscillating back and forth when he asked, “What is that thing, healer?  Geez, it’s so bright that I can barely look at it.  Is it like a pendulum or something, moving back and forth?  It’s not going to help my son; your plastic shamanism can’t help him.”

While the glowing teeter-totter’s lever bounced back and forth on the nightstand, The Prime Mover ignored Willows’ orneriness, spread the five crowns across the floor, used a match to light the candlestick, and asked, “Sir, whatever you think about me as a curandero doesn’t matter.  I know that you’re a Catholic missionary, and I need to know.  Has your son been baptized?  Has he repented for his sins?”

Willows observed his son Drew as he gasped for breath and struggled to use his heart muscles, and despite his Catholic convictions, Willows resented the proposition that his ailing son could be guilty of sins and replied, “How can you say that?  He’s just a kid; he’s not a sinner.  He hasn’t done anything to deserve to be sick like this.” 

The Catholic healer known as The Prime Mover cited the Biblical Psalm 51 and The Book of Ephesians to emphasize that humans were sinners from birth due to the original sin that Adam and Eve committed when he answered, “I need to know this to save his life, sir; just accept that he’s a sinner.  Ephesians calls us all ‘children of wrath’ from the moment that we’re conceived; Psalms says that we were ‘brought forth in iniquity’ from our mothers’ wombs.  Baptism is supposed to wash away our sins, so tell me.  Has your son been baptized or not?” 

            After Willows nodded his head to confirm that Drew had been baptized, The Prime Mover placed his white crown on the child’s head, and considering that the crown was a weighing scale, The Prime Mover adjusted the crown’s jewels, which were the sliders, to calibrate it.  The scalepan’s weight decreased on Drew’s head, and the white crown acted in the manner of a triple-beam balance because its weight was shifted from its right side to its left side so that Drew could gain some relief from the pressure on his cranium.  The white crown was a weighing scale that was comparable to the Scales of Justice that the Roman goddess Justitia wielded to personify Lady Justice, but while Lady Justice weighed the two sides of defense and prosecution in court cases, the crown weighed human sins and perfection.  During the third century BC, the King of Syracuse Hiero II commissioned the Greek mathematician Archimedes to determine whether a crown was pure gold, and the ancient crown also served as the inspiration for the five crowns that The Prime Mover used as weighing scales.  Archimedes weighed King Hiero’s crown and placed an equal amount of gold into a container of water, and when the water began to rise and was displaced by the gold, he developed his Principle of Buoyancy and discovered that the crown was not composed entirely of gold.  To corroborate his hunch that the crown was not pure gold, he positioned the crown on one side of a weighing scale and the heap of gold on the other side, and Archimedes was able to conclude that the crown and the gold did not share the same density considering that the weighing scale did not remain balanced.  By using King Hiero’s crown as a weighing scale that titled in the direction of the gold, Archimedes was able to conclude that the crown contained light amounts of silver and was not pure gold.  Archimedes’ use of a crown as a weighing scale prompted The Prime Mover to gather his own crowns that served as weighing scales to balance sins and perfection, and he hoped to heal suffering individuals by employing perfection that would outweigh and destroy the sins that caused the individuals’ illnesses.  As The Prime Mover adjusted the jewels on the white crown to calibrate it and to minimize its pressure on Drew’s head, Willows stared down at the two candlesticks, the loaf of bread, the cup of ale, and the glowing teeter-totter, and he fearfully asked, “What’re you doing to my son?  I know that you’re trying to help him with this ‘witchdoctor’ ritual, but please, don’t hurt him.  He’s suffered enough; he doesn’t need you to try to cast the Devil out of him.  What’re you going to do?”                           

            Willows and The Prime Mover both shared the Catholic belief that Jesus Christ had exorcised the demons known as “Legion” and other “impure spirits” from victims by simply communicating “God’s Word.”  While Willows’ son Drew was balancing the white crown on his head, The Prime Mover maintained that he was a shamanistic healer known as a curandero and that he lacked the Christ-like abilities that he and Willows both admired when he replied, “I’m trying to save your son with all that I can, sir.  I’ve got to use my scales to balance out sins and perfection.  If I can make the perfection weigh a little bit more than the sins that made your son sick, then, I can save him.  I know that we both love Christ, but I can’t just use my words to cast out your son’s sickness.  This is all a balancing act between sins and perfection.  The Book of Isaiah says that humans are ‘like a drop in a bucket’ and like ‘dust on the scales.’  I’ve got to be The Prime Mover, the ‘unmoved mover,’ who stands on the scales to move the Earth’s dust in the right direction; I’ve got to make sure that the perfection outweighs the sins that make us all get sick and die.  I can’t be Christ, but I can try to be the ‘unmoved mover’ that tips the scales just a little bit in the right direction.  Moving the scales is all that I can do.” 

            While the Roman Scales of Justice weighed prosecution and defense, the healing curandero known as The Prime Mover used his five crowns as weighing scales, and his luminous teeter-totter functioned as the scale that weighed sins and perfection to balance them.  Willows refused to accept the curandero’s viewpoint that he was the “unmoved mover” who metaphorically stood on the teeter-totter’s fulcrum to create enough balance between the sins and perfection that were being weighed on the scales.  As Drew whimpered from the white crown’s pressure on his cranium, Willows questioned The Prime Mover’s abilities as a curandero by replying, “Well, I may not control scales and weigh the world like you do, but if you think that you’re doing God’s work, then, you’re wrong.  I know that Proverbs 16 says that, ‘honest scales and balances belong to the Lord.’  Only God can balance the world and weigh sins when He judges humanity; you can’t wield that kind of power.  If you can’t do anything that will actually help my son, then, I’d like for you to leave.” 

            Although The Prime Mover had forsaken the use of holy water and other Catholic remedies, he remained convinced that he was a messenger who was serving God and that he was simply using the “honest scales and balances” that ultimately belonged to God.  He persisted in referencing the fortieth chapter from The Book of Isaiah to defend his weighing scales and their impact on the Earth’s sins and perfection when he answered, “I’m not trying to steal God’s balancing power.  I know that He ‘sits enthroned above the circle of the Earth;’ I’m just trying to serve Him by using the weighing scales that He’s given me to be a curandero.  His scales are like a seesaw; when I stand on it as the ‘unmoved mover,’ ‘every valley shall me raised up’ and ‘every mountain and hill’ will be ‘made low’ so that ‘the rough ground shall become level.’  If I can balance ‘the mountains on the scales’ and ‘the dust of the Earth in a basket,’ then, I might be able to create enough perfection to outweigh the human sins that made your son sick in the first place.  I can be the ‘unmoved mover’ who seeks God’s ‘great power and mighty strength’ to save your son if you just give me a chance.  Let me prove to you that I want to do His good, pleasant, and perfect will with the weighing scales that He’s given me.” 

            The weight between the white crown’s sides suddenly became unequal, and when The Prime Mover noticed that more pressure was being exerted on the crown’s left side, he lunged forward to adjust the jewels so that the precarious balance could be restored.  Willows feverishly slapped the healer’s gloved hand away from Drew and condemned the Biblical rhetoric about weighing the Earth’s “rugged places” when he bellowed, “No, you can’t just come in here and recite some Bible verses to make me think that you’re a holy man.  You can’t justify what you’re doing by trying to be some ‘unmoved mover’ who stands on the Earth’s ‘scales and balances’ to raise up the valleys and lower the mountains.  What you’re talking about is a metaphor for God’s power that has no place in medicine or shamanism.  You’re not doing anything until you tell me what you’re really planning to do to my son.”

            The white crown’s pressure became so intense on the left side of Drew’s head that he moaned in pain, and The Prime Mover shifted his gaze to the luminous teeter-totter, which was the main scale that he used to forecast God’s will and to determine whether Drew would survive the healing technique.  The Prime Mover engaged in a divine ritual called cleromancy in which prophets “cast lots” that revealed God’s will despite the appearance that the lots would trigger random outcomes, and the teeter-totter represented the “lots” that he cast to establish balance between sins and perfection.  In The Book of Deuteronomy, the Urim and the Thummim were sacred coins that Israelite high priests carried inside their breastplates to foretell God’s will, and the teeter-totter’s two sides represented new interpretations of the same coins that were used to “cast lots.”  While the white crown’s pressure increased on Drew’s head and the teeter-totter oscillated up and down, the curandero known as The Prime Mover cited Biblical accounts of cleromancy to explain his healing abilities when he proclaimed, “I’m casting lots to balance out sins and perfection.  If I can make the perfection weigh just a little bit more than the sins that made your son sick, then, I can save him.  Casting lots is nothing new; it’s just another form of cleromancy.  The Prophet Joshua and the other Israelites cast lots to figure out which of them had stolen some Babylonian garments.  The Israelites cast lots to decide that Saul would be king.  Even some sailors cast lots to decide that it was God’s will for the Prophet Jonah to be thrown overboard and to be eaten by a whale.  Being trapped inside the whale’s belly for three days convinced him to preach God’s Word to the people in Nineveh.  Casting lots in cleromancy forced the Israelites to follow God’s will, and my cleromancy will weigh the Earth’s sins and perfection to save your son.”

Willows delved into his work as a Christian missionary to recall that in The Book of Joshua, the Israelite tribes cast lots to uncover that Achan had pilfered Babylonian goods and had “wrought folly in Israel.”  Cleromancy’s process of casting lots also selected Saul as the first king of Israel and determined that it was God’s will for the Prophet Jonah to be emboldened inside the whale’s belly and to preach to the citizens in Nineveh.  Willows lowered his hands and relented so that The Prime Mover could rotate the white crown’s jewels in the manner of calibrating a triple-beam balance.  Willows gazed at the teeter-totter, which was so radiant that he was forced to squint, and questioned its function by asking, “So, is your bright, little seesaw what you use to cast lots?  Is that what you use to make you feel like you’re doing God’s work?”

The teeter-totter’s left side had been lowered to correspond with the white crown’s pressure that weighed down on the left portion of Drew’s head, and Willows conceded that The Prime Mover was seeking to practice cleromancy.  With the knowledge that “syncretism” denoted the difficulty of reconciling two contradictory religious beliefs, The Prime Mover described the teeter-totter as “The Syncretizer” that weighed the contradictory elements of sins and perfection when he replied, “Yeah, my seesaw is called ‘The Syncretizer.’  It weighs sins and perfection on its different sides; the two sides are like the Urim and the Thummim that separate sinners from everyone else.  Syncretism focuses on how difficult it is to reconcile contradictory religious beliefs, and sins and perfection couldn’t be more contradictory.” 

            After The Prime Mover slid the white crown’s jewels that acted as riders, the crown’s sides became balanced to alleviate the pressure on Drew’s head, and the teeter-totter became flatter in correspondence with the crown’s adjusted weight distribution.  Willows turned away from the teeter-totter that was glowing with one-hundred and fifty lumens, pointed to the white crown that was perched on his son’s head, and asked, “What about the crown?  Is it supposed to be part of the scales that are lifting the valleys and lowering the mountains, so to speak?” 

            The white crown, which The Prime Mover had placed on Drew’s head, represented the Crown of Incorruptibility, which was the second of the five crowns that Catholics needed to obtain to enter the Kingdom of Heaven according to Biblical Scriptures.  The Book of James indicated that the individual who “endures temptation” will earn the first Scriptural crown known as the Crown of Life, and Drew had already earned the green Crown of Life by being baptized and by accepting God’s grace.  The second crown called the Crown of Incorruptibility is awarded to the individual who shuns Earthly sins and who strives to be “temperate in all things,” and based on Drew’s faithful status, The Prime Mover had positioned the white Crown of Incorruptibility on the child’s head.  The blue Crown of Righteousness, the red Crown of Rejoicing, and the purple Crown of Glory were the other three crowns for which Catholics strived, and the Greek mathematician Archimedes had treated a gold crown as a weighing scale that inspired The Prime Mover to use the five crowns as their own scales.  While Drew exhausted his strength to balance the white Crown of Incorruptibility on his head, The Prime Mover pointed to the green, blue, red, and purple crowns that were scattered across the floor and explained their functions for the faithful by declaring, “Those are the five crowns that the faithful strive to obtain, sir.  The crowns represent the perfection that I’m weighing against the sins on the other side of my scale.  Just as Archimedes tested the amount of gold in King Hiero’s crown by weighing it like a scale, the five crowns are scales that weigh perfection.  The green crown is the Crown of Life; it’s the crown that your son earned when he was baptized in the Holy Spirit.  I put the Crown of Incorruptibility on his head to reward him for shunning the Earthly temptations of this world.  The five crowns are God’s perfection; I’ve got to make the perfection weigh a little bit more than the sins that made your son sick if I want to heal him.” 

            As The Prime Mover identified the five crowns as the perfection that humans sought to achieve in the Kingdom of Heaven, Willows recalled that the five crowns also were associated with the five wounds that were inflicted on Jesus Christ during his crucifixion.  Based on his virtuous ability to be “temperate in all things,” Willows’ son Drew was balancing the white Crown of Incorruptibility on his head, but his diphtheria caused him to strain his heart muscles and to struggle for breath.  The luminous teeter-totter known as The Syncretizer coped with the differences between sins and perfection and weighed the sins that contrasted with the perfection that the five crowns embodied.  During the first century BC, Archimedes had immersed King Hiero’s crown and a mound of pure gold into water to display the Principle of Buoyancy, and the crown served as a weighing scale that allowed Archimedes to determine how much gold it contained.  The Prime Mover’s Syncretizer was a weighing scale that measured the amount of sins that had contributed to Drew’s illness just as Archimedes’ experiment exposed the amount of gold in King Hiero’s crown and its lack of purity.  When the teeter-totter known as The Syncretizer became level on the nightstand, The Prime Mover glanced back and forth between the white Crown of Incorruptibility that represented perfection and the teeter-totter that weighed sins.  The equilibrium between the balanced Crown of Incorruptibility and The Syncretizer prompted The Prime Mover to conclude that the different amounts of sins and perfection were equal and that the perfection would overcome and cast out the sins. 

Acting as a sin-eater, The Prime Mover believed that the tension between the equal quantities of sins and perfection would allow him to pinpoint and consume the sins that caused Drew to contract life-threatening diphtheria.  While Willows apprehensively watched the healing proceedings, The Prime Mover turned Drew onto his left side, placed a nearby tablecloth on his cheek, and engaged in “ear candling” by inserting the unlit end of his candle into Drew’s ear canal.  The white Crown of Incorruptibility embodied perfection and was so equally proportional with The Syncretizer, which balanced sins as a teeter-totter, that the crown did not budge and appeared to be attached to Drew’s head as he lay on his side.  Candlewax slithered down the candle and was collected as puddles on the tablecloth that shielded Drew’s face, and as The Prime Mover steadied the candle inside Drew’s ear, he stared back at The Syncretizer to ensure that its lever remained flat.  As the candle’s flames glistened onto Willows’ pupils, Drew began to cough due to the smoke, and Willows objected to the ear candling and cited his son’s respiratory problems by shouting, “Okay, that’s enough of your cleromancy, healer.  My son’s got enough trouble breathing as it is; he doesn’t need smoke in his lungs.” 

The white Crown of Incorruptibility remained fastened around Drew’s cranium, but the luminous teeter-totter known as The Syncretizer rumbled slightly to suggest that its flat, even surface was being altered.  Holding the candle inside Drew’s ear canal, The Prime Mover became terrified that the teeter-totter’s left side would be lifted, and considering that the teeter-totter weighed sins that countered the white crown’s perfection, the lifted side would disrupt the even surface and would harm the balance between sins and perfection.  He practiced cleromancy in which the Thummim and the Urim were cast as lots to forecast God’s will, and The Syncretizer and the Crown of Incorruptibility were functioning as the Urim and the Thummim in his unique form of cleromancy that also involved “ear candling” and sin-eating.  In the Biblical 1 Samuel, the Israelite King Saul cast the Urim and the Thummim to expose the culprit who had violated the Israelites’ oath by eating food prior to nightfall.  The third-century theologian Theodotion described the Urim as “lights” and the Thummim as “perfections,” and the luminous teeter-totter known as The Syncretizer represented the Urim with its “lights” while the Crown of Incorruptibility and the other four crowns represented the Thummim with their perfection.  Based on Saul’s prayers, God cast the Urim, which embodied sins, to disclose that Saul’s son Jonathan was responsible for breaching the oath, and Saul acknowledged that the Thummim epitomized the perfection of the Israelites who had not committed the sin of eating before nightfall.  As The Prime Mover exerted pressure on the candle in Drew’s ear, he argued that sins had triggered Drew’s illness and that the equal balance between sins and perfection would allow him to capture the sins inside the candle’s fire when he replied, “Please, The Syncretizer is balanced; its surface is level.  The Crown of Incorruptibility is balanced on your son’s head, and that means that there’s an equilibrium between sins and perfection.  There’s enough equality for the perfection to push the sins out of your son into the candle’s fire.  I just need a little more time for the sins to be pushed into the fire; let me put down a little more pressure to extract the sins.  Give me a little more time to save him.”

While Drew coughed from the candle’s billowing smoke, The Prime Mover gripped the candle that was planted inside Drew’s ear and watched the wax that continued to splatter onto the tablecloth.  His eyes peered down to the white Crown of Incorruptibility, which served as the Thummim’s perfection, and when he identified that the crown was still stable, his eyes darted back to The Syncretizer, which embodied the Urim’s sins, and determined that its teeter-totter had maintained its flat surface.  He remained terrified that the teeter-totter’s left side would be raised and that its right side would descend to disturb its balance, and as the teeter-totter trembled, he intensified the pressure on the candle and hoped that the equilibrium between sins and perfection would be intact.  As The Syncretizer and the Crown of Incorruptibility acted as the two sides of the metaphorical triple-beam balance that weighed sins and perfection, Willows recognized that The Prime Mover was panicking that the balance would be compromised and asserted, “No, you’re not helping him.  You’re making his condition worse.  If you really believe in the crowns of the faithful, then, you’ve got to believe in the power of prayer.  Please, stop your ritual, and just pray for my son instead.  I know that we’d all appreciate it, healer.”   

While The Syncretizer was on the verge of trembling, The Prime Mover pleaded for more time to perform his “ear candling” and defended his cleromancy and the metaphorical Urim and Thummim that he had cast as “lots” by responding, “Just give me a little more time.  I’m casting lots.  The Syncretizer is the Urim on my scale; the Crown of Incorruptibility is the Thummim on the scale.  My scale is still balanced for a little bit longer, so the perfection and sins are equal.  If they exist in equal amounts, the perfection should weigh down the same amount of sins until it pushes them out of your son’s body into the candle’s fire.  The ‘dust on the scales’ has become equal, and the ‘rough ground’ has ‘become level.’  Please, if I can cast out the sins that made your son sick, then, I can save him.”

Willows was so desperate to save his son that he granted The Prime Mover, the mysterious curandero, the ability to continue to hold the burning candle inside Drew’s ear canal and to collect the wax on the tablecloth that was draped across his cheek.  During the “ear candling,” The Prime Mover squeezed the candle and darted his eyes between the teeter-totter known as The Syncretizer and the Crown of Incorruptibility to ensure that the luminous teeter-totter was flat and even and that the white crown was still securely fastened around Drew’s head.  The Syncretizer maintained its stable amount of sins that were equal with the perfection that the Crown of Incorruptibility contained, and after thirty minutes in which The Prime Mover clasped the flaming candle inside Drew’s ear, the healer raised the candle and removed the tablecloth on which the candlewax had collected.  He extinguished the candle’s flame and monitored the wax and other dark residue that was pouring from Drew’s ear in reaction to the candle’s pressure and to the equilibrium between the sins and the perfection.  He detected a chunk of residue that was emitting red radiation on the tablecloth, and based on his memories that sins were described as being “red as crimson” in The Book of Isaiah, he could identify that the red residue was the physical embodiment of the sins that had caused Drew to become ill.  He pulled a piece of bread from the loaf, drank a sip of ale, and rubbed the crusty bread against the red residue until the bread began to glow with the same red radiation to symbolize that the sins had been transferred from the residue to the bread.  As he smeared the bread in the red residue and lifted the glowing bread to his mouth, Willows became disgusted that the healer had smeared the bread with the red residue from Drew’s ear and asked, “Oh, man, what is that, healer?  What did your candle pull out of my son’s ear?” 

The balance between The Syncretizer and the Crown of Incorruptibility had created equal amounts of sins and perfection, and the perfection had weighed down on the sins and had pushed them from Drew’s body through The Prime Mover’s “ear candling.”  Carrying the bread closer to his mouth, the healer explained that the red residue represented the sins that had triggered Drew’s illness when he replied, “I’ve extracted the human sins that made your son sick in the first place, sir.  My Syncretizer balanced the sins, and my Crown of Incorruptibility balanced the perfection.  When the sins and the perfection became equal, the equilibrium made it easy for the perfection to push the sins out of your son’s body.  The sins are red just like The Book of Isaiah said that they would be; it said, ‘Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow.  Though they are red as crimson, they shall be like wool.’  I’ve cast out the sins by putting ‘the hills in a balance’ and by balancing ‘the dust on the scales.’  I’ve cast the lots; I’ve cast the ‘honest scales and balances’ that are going to save your son.”   

The Prime Mover had engaged in “ear candling” to extract the red residue from Drew’s left ear, and the truths that Biblical sins were described as being “scarlet” and that the residue was emitting red radiation coaxed Willows into shedding his skepticism and into becoming convinced that the healer could help his son.  In the manner of a traditional sin-eater, The Prime Mover chomped his teeth down onto the bread that was glowing red with sins, but the impact of his teeth with the bread somehow chipped his tooth.  He yanked the bread from his mouth and noticed that the crusty loaf had somehow transformed into a stone, and he realized that an unknown force was interfering with his performance of cleromancy.  As he gripped the bread that had become stone, his eyes glanced back to the teeter-totter known as The Syncretizer to discover that its right side had been raised and that its left side had descended to graze the nightstand.  Based on The Syncretizer’s uneven surface, he understood that the balance between sins and perfection had been disrupted, and he feared that his faith in God’s power had been compromised and that his tainted faith had blighted his efforts to use cleromancy to heal Willows’ son.  When Drew began to shriek from the white Crown of Incorruptibility’s pressure on his head, The Prime Mover placed the bread of stone on the table, curled his fingers around the crown, and feverishly tugged it in an effort to remove it from the child’s cranium.  Willows sprinted toward the bed and recognized that the white crown was sinking and fastening itself to his son’s flesh, and as he gazed down at the stone and the unstable teeter-totter known as The Syncretizer, he bellowed, “What’s going on, healer?  What are you doing to my son?” 

As the white Crown of Incorruptibility merged into Drew’s cranium, The Prime Mover yanked on the crown that embodied perfection and insisted that the balance between sins and perfection had been disturbed when he retorted, “The crown and The Syncretizer are the two sides of my scale.  The Syncretizer is being pushed up, so the crown is being pushed down.  We need more sins to weigh down on The Syncretizer; if we can push The Syncretizer down, we can pull the crown up just like a seesaw.” 

The Prime Mover turned to the teeter-totter known as The Syncretizer and reassured himself that considering that it was being pushed upward, the white Crown of Incorruptibility was being driven downward to contrast the sins and perfection.  He could not force the crown to budge from Drew’s head and decided that sins needed to be committed so that the sins could weigh down on The Syncretizer because the pressure would cause the crown, which embodied perfection, to move upward from his cranium.  While Willows ineffectually tugged on the white crown that was descending into Drew’s flesh, The Prime Mover stepped back and continued to question whether his faith had been corrupted and whether his lack of faith had impaired his attempts to cure the child.  He became convinced that Willows’ sins had been transferred to his son Drew to stimulate his illness, and he understood that because the white crown represented one side of his scale, the crown could be pushed upward only if The Syncretizer were weighed downward with the pressure of sins.  During Willows’ pulling on the sinking crown, The Prime Mover quoted The Book of Matthew to argue that Willows should expose the sins that he had been concealing in his heart and that the sins would weigh down on The Syncretizer and push up the crown when he proclaimed, “That’s not going to help.  The crown is perfection; it’s descending because The Syncretizer is moving up.  The only way to remove the crown is to push it up by pushing The Syncretizer down like a seesaw.  The Syncretizer represents sins; we need to weigh it down with sins.  The sins of the father are always visited on the son.  Jesus said, ‘the things which proceed out of the mouth come forth out of the heart, and they defile the man.’  You’re holding sins in your heart; you need to expose them to weigh down on The Syncretizer and to push the Crown of Incorruptibility up from your son’s head.  Please, expose your sins.  Revel in them, and weigh ‘the islands as though they were fine dust.’” 

Lying in bed, Drew managed to wail despite his sore throat and the infection in his respiratory tract, and Willows yielded that the white Crown of Incorruptibility could not be physically removed from his son’s head.  As the crown sank deeper to merge into Drew’s cranium, Willows implored The Prime Mover to cast more lots in cleromancy when he asserted, “No, this is your job, healer.  You’ve got to save him with your ‘honest scales and balances.’  You’re so obsessed with cleromancy; cast another lot.” 

While the white crown sank deeper into Drew’s skull in reaction to the lifted position of The Syncretizer, the mysterious curandero known as The Prime Mover repeated that Willows’ sins needed to be exposed by answering, “No, Mr. Willows, you’ve got to do this.  You’re his father, and your sins are being visited on him.  Please, indulge in those sins so that The Syncretizer will be weighed down with them; it’s the only way to pull the crown up.  Indulge in your anger and your greed and your lust and your envy; your sins will press down on The Syncretizer and pull the crown up until it comes off of your son’s head.”

Drew’s persistent shrieking prompted Willows to decide that his internal sins needed to “come forth out of the heart” so that they could exert pressure on The Syncretizer and propel the crown up to unhinge it from his son’s cranium.  In a frenzy, Willows scampered down the hallway and opened the door of the bedroom in which the two cardiologists Alberto and Evelia Jimenez were tossing and turning and struggling to fall asleep with the distraction of Drew’s screaming.  When Alberto and Evelia sat up in bed, Willows turned on the light and indulged in sins by punching Alberto in the chin and by kissing Evelia, and through his actions, Willows disclosed his envy that Alberto was an eminent doctor and his lustful desires for his wife Evelia.  Alberto leaped from the bed, gripped Willows’ shirt, pushed the Christian missionary from the bedroom into the bathroom, and shoved him to the floor.  Willows extended his arm, planted his hand on the counter, pulled himself to his feet, and glared at his reflection in the bathroom mirror while Alberto prepared to confront him in retaliation for the attack.  Standing in the doorway, Alberto demanded an explanation for Willows’ assault and his kissing of Evelia when he muttered, “What was that about, Mr. Willows?  What is your problem?” 

Willows conceded that he could never adequately rationalize his displays of envy and lust to the two cardiologists, and after Evelia charged into the bathroom and kicked him in the shin, he crafted his most compelling argument for his sins and proclaimed, “I’m just trying to save my son, Mr. Jimenez.  He’s in pretty bad shape.  I was visited by a curandero who told me that he was balancing the world’s sins and perfection on his own scale.  He told me that I had to show my sins to weigh down one side of the scale and to bring up the other one.  I’m here to admit that I’m envious of your success as a doctor, and I’ve been lusting after your wife for a long time.  I’m sorry, but I’ve got to save Drew, by any means necessary.” 

Following Willows’ confessions of sinful envy and lust, Alberto grasped that Willows yearned to become a doctor and that his son’s illness encumbered his wishes to pursue such a lofty goal.  Despite his understanding of Willows’ disappointment about fruitless dreams, Alberto became exasperated that Willows had relied on the apparent “plastic shamanism” of a curandero, and he discouraged him from consulting any folk healers when he stammered, “Did you really go to a curandero to help Drew?  Those healers are dangerous; they’re charlatans who masquerade around like holy men.” 

While Evelia scowled at Willows for kissing her to convey his sinful lust, he defended his solicitation of the curandero based on The Prime Mover’s unconventional “scales and balances” and his ability to extract red residue from Drew’s ear canal by asserting, “You don’t understand.  This curandero is different; he calls himself ‘The Prime Mover.’  He’s not an herbalist; he doesn’t even have a chonta.  He uses ‘honest scales and balances’ to weigh sins and perfection; he’s trying to create enough perfection to outweigh sins and to cast out the sins that made Drew sick in the first place.  He pulled some red stuff out of Drew’s ear; I think that it really represents those sins that made him sick.”

Alberto and Evelia Jimenez were Ecuadorian cardiologists who both trusted Patrick and Molly Willows, the two American missionaries, but Willows could not justify his use of a curandero or persuade Alberto that his sins were necessary to extract the white Crown of Incorruptibility that was merging into Drew’s cranium.  Neither Alberto nor Evelia could decide how to react to Willows’ allegations that sins would establish an equilibrium for The Prime Mover’s “honest scales and balances,” but Willows could never retract his admissions that he was envious of Alberto’s success as a cardiologist and possessed lustful desires for his wife Evelia.  As Alberto rubbed his new bruise from Willows’ assault, Evelia glowered at Willows until his eyes darted away from her judgment and captured the image of his reflection in the bathroom mirror.  A lion, a bear, and a leopard appeared as superimposed illustrations that covered Willows’ reflection in three successive flashes, and the mysterious sight of the three creatures in the mirror spurred Willows to push Alberto and Evelia from his path and to dart from the bathroom back toward his son and The Prime Mover.  When Willows reached his son’s bedside, Drew had stopped breathing, and The Prime Mover had collected his five crowns, his candle for “ear candling,” his bread for sin-eating, and The Syncretizer and had fled from the home.  Willows committed sinful acts of envy and lust to press down on The Syncretizer and to push up the white Crown of Incorruptibility that served as the opposite side of The Prime Mover’s scale, which “held the dust of the Earth in a basket” and “weighed the mountains on the scales.”  Alberto and Evelia Jimenez followed Willows to Drew’s bedside where Evelia began to perform cardiopulmonary resuscitation on the dying child.  Staring at his unconscious son, Willows realized that although his sins had weighed down on The Syncretizer to propel the Crown of Incorruptibility upward and to remove it, The Prime Mover’s cleromancy failed to heal Drew of diphtheria.  During Evelia’s futile performance of CPR on Drew, Willows struck his foot against the stone into which The Prime Mover’s bread had been transformed when the curandero drenched it with the red residue that represented the sins that triggered his illness.  Willows stepped over the stone and opened the front door in search of The Prime Mover who had escaped with disgrace, and upon perceiving him in the distance, Willows stood in the doorway and beseeched him for assistance by shouting, “Please, healer, I’ll give you anything that you want.  I gave you a chance to help me.  I put you to the test, and you failed.  I’ll give you everything that I’ve got if you save my son.” 

The Prime Mover discarded Willows’ desperate pleas because he deduced that his faith in God’s glory had been tarnished and that his corrupted faith had impeded his attempts to balance sins and perfection and to manipulate the equilibrium to extract the sins and to consume them.  The Prime Mover was aware that even if Willows could offer his possessions in exchange for the preservation of his son’s life, his “honest scales and balances” were no longer viable healing relics, so he sprinted farther away from the home until he disappeared into the nighttime darkness.  Willows viewed healing activities as a test that The Prime Mover had failed, and after Willows slammed the door shut in frustration, he kicked the bread that had become a stone and returned to his son’s bedside while Evelia Jimenez performed chest compressions and breathed into Drew’s mouth.  In a helpless state, Willows witnessed his son’s death, and although Evelia attributed Drew’s premature demise to respiratory failure from diphtheria, Willows was adamant that the white Crown of Incorruptibility had fractured his son’s neck and skull before his sins weighed down on The Syncretizer and allowed The Prime Mover to lift up the crown.  Willows’ confessions that he envied Alberto and that he was filled with lustful desires for Evelia caused the severance of his relationship with the two cardiologists.  Willows’ wife Molly divorced him when she discovered that he had been desperate enough to trust the curandero known as The Prime Mover and that the healing procedures could have killed her son through the Crown of Incorruptibility that crushed his skull.  Following his son’s death, Willows abandoned his missionary work in Ecuador and became a sanitation worker in Wilmington, Delaware, and one year later in 2040, he and his fellow worker Luke Masser now had stumbled onto a spinning white whirlpool that scientists identified as a remnant of the primordial soup from which all life emerged.  The whirlpool had summoned Masser to immerse himself inside the boiling white substance, and his presence in the vortex caused a perfect version of Masser to be spawned as a means of balancing Masser’s sins with the perfection that eluded humanity.  Masser’s perfect clone referred to the whirlpool as the “hypostasis” and described himself as the “chrysostom” in honor of the fourth-century Archbishop of Constantinople John Chrysostom, and Willows now was contemplating why the chrysostom was donning a red crown that was reminiscent of the white crown that The Prime Mover had placed on Drew’s head.   

Scientists collected samples of white fluid from the boiling whirlpool called the hypostasis, and while they tested its contents of water, methane, phosphate, and hydrogen sulfide to determine whether the whirlpool truly was a remnant of the primordial soup, Willows and Masser returned to the sanitation department’s main station.  The two workers had notified the police about the whirlpool that scientists were studying, but Masser concealed that the whirlpool had cloned him to generate the chrysostom, which was his perfect version.  Masser was storing his perfect chrysostom, who was devoid of acne and other flaws, in his car while he and Willows pondered how to cope with their new circumstances.  In silence, Willows dwelled on the red crown that the chrysostom was wearing based on the crown’s similarities with the white Crown of Incorruptibility that served as the side that was opposite The Syncretizer on The Prime Mover’s scale.  Masser interrupted Willows’ fixation on the white crown that had likely killed Drew with its pressure and praised the chrysostom when he exclaimed, “I can’t believe it, man.  The pool that birthed humanity gave me a perfect clone.  I mean, did you see that thing?  It’s beautiful; he doesn’t have pimples or any of my other flaws.  It’s amazing; if that pool can clone other people, it could change the world.  We might be able to create clones of everyone, just the way that God intended it from the start.” 

Willows condemned the possibility that humans could rekindle perfection by cloning themselves in the whirlpool called the hypostasis, and he disclosed that the chrysostom was wearing a red crown that was comparable to The Prime Mover’s white crown by answering, “I don’t think that we can know the will of God, Luke.  He let my son die for no reason.  Do you remember that curandero who tried to heal him?  He called himself ‘The Prime Mover;’ he said that he cured people with scales that balanced sins and perfection to cast out the sins that made those people sick.  He put a white crown on my son’s head while he was trying to extract the sins; he said that it was one side of his weighing scales.  I think that the crown broke my son’s neck, and the crown reminds me of the red one that your clone is wearing.  I don’t know what it means, but it’s freaking me out.” 

Sitting beside Willows, Masser considered that his close friend was still mourning the loss of his son Drew and the divorce from his wife Molly, and neither Willows nor Masser were aware that Drew’s white crown represented the Crown of Incorruptibility and that the chrysostom’s red crown was the Crown of Rejoicing.  To allay Willows’ anxieties, Masser deviated from the discussion of the hypostasis, the chrysostom, and The Prime Mover’s crowns and replied, “Man, I don’t know what to tell you.  I don’t know why the clone is wearing a crown.  The crown does look like it’s made out of gold.  I know that ‘chrysostomos’ means ‘golden mouth,’ so maybe, that’s why he’s wearing the crown.  You need to get your mind off of all this stuff.  Will you go to church with me tonight?” 

Based on his previous misfortunes as a Christian missionary, Willows rejected Masser’s invitation to come to church, and he continued to express his aversion to the chrysostom that the hypostasis had birthed by asserting, “The last thing that I need right now is church, Luke.  I’ve got a huge problem with your clone and his red crown.  You think that he’s so perfect with that stupid crown, but I bet that I could show you how pathetic he really is if you give me a chance to take away some of that perfection.  I’d love to rip that crown off and beat him over the head with it.  The Prime Mover used crowns like that for a reason, and I’ve got to figure out why.  I want to find him and kill him; I don’t want to think that my son died in vain.”           

Willows’ challenge that the perfect chrysostom could be fallible reminded Masser of the Biblical character Job’s plight because according to The Book of Job, the Devil revealed that God’s seemingly faithful servant Job was also fallible and weak when he lost his family and his wealth.  Masser understood that parallels could possibly exist between the white crown, which The Prime Mover used to weigh down on the head of Willows’ son, and the red crown that the chrysostom wore, but he could not empathize with the tremendous pain that Willows was enduring.  In an incredulous tone, Masser conveyed his amazement that Willows was fixated on the white and red crowns and was so eager to expose the perfect chrysostom’s blemishes when he answered, “Man, you’re making it sound like my chrysostom is Job or something.  My chrysostom is me in perfect form.  You can’t take away his family and make him try to curse you; he’s already the personification of perfection.  Please, don’t try to hurt my chrysostom, Patrick.  He’s awesome; he’s the way that God wanted me to be if I weren’t such a loser.” 

Willows remained wary about the perfect clone who was donning a red crown that was reminiscent of The Prime Mover’s “honest scales and balances,” and he urged Masser to surrender the chrysostom to the scientists by retorting, “You’ve got to give up the clone, Luke.  It’s not just the crown that’s bugging me; it’s that you have no idea what your clone really is.  You can tell yourself that he’s your perfect side all day long, but the truth is that you don’t know anything about him or that pool that birthed him.  When people find out that that pool can clone them, everyone’s going to go insane to try to make their own clone buddy.” 

Masser became alarmed that Willows would divulge the existence of the chrysostom to the scientists and that they would confiscate the perfect clone to study him, so Masser voiced his disapproval by uttering, “No, the pool called to me because it wanted to clone me.  It didn’t call to you or anyone else.  The scientists can study the pool as the primordial soup, but no one has to know that it cloned my perfect side.  Please, don’t tell anyone about the chrysostom.”

Willows could not deny that he inexplicably detested the chrysostom, but he agreed to maintain the secret of the chrysostom’s existence and hoped that the hypostasis would not clone anyone else by retorting, “Okay, I won’t tell anyone.  Just be careful about it.  Let’s try to make sure that the pool doesn’t call to anyone else to try to clone them, too.  I’d tell on any other person, but since you’re the only friend that I’ve got, I won’t tell anyone about your clone.  I don’t want to lose my only friend, especially not with everything else that I’ve lost.” 

As Willows and Masser exchanged whispers in their private conversation, a young sewer worker interrupted to commend Willows for assembling a workers’ union that would pursue greater rights for sanitation employees by exclaiming, “Hey, Mr. Willows, I want to thank you for looking out for us.  Congratulations on getting those thirty workers to support you.  Don’t worry; I’m sure that the other sixty workers will join you when they see all of the good work that you’ve done for them.  You’re doing a great service.” 

The gleeful employee reminded Willows that in reaction to worker Frank Barron’s accidental death, he had rallied thirty of the ninety sanitation workers together to form a workers’ union that sought improved conditions.  However, Willows ignored the empty compliment because he was so preoccupied with the chrysostom’s red crown and its similarities with the white crown that The Prime Mover used to kill Drew.  When Willows nodded lackadaisically to acknowledge the worker’s praise, the individual departed from the scene considering that Willows appeared to be distracted, and Masser shifted his focus from the secret existence of the chrysostom and asked, “If I’m your only friend, then, prove it, and come to church with me tonight.  Now that I’ve got a perfect clone, maybe, you can have two friends.”

       Willows could not abandon his reservations about the chrysostom and his yearning to test whether the clone was completely perfect, but he indulged Masser and mumbled, “All right, I’ll go with you to church, but you’ve got to keep your clone pal hidden.  You’d better not share him with the congregation unless you want other people to try to clone themselves.” 

            Willows accompanied Masser to a nighttime church service, and during the car drive to the church, Willows remained silent and refused to speak to the chrysostom because he was miffed that the clone had discussed Drew’s death and the anti-diphtheritic serum that he had failed to provide his son.  While Masser drove the car, Willows gawked at the red crown that was fastened to the chrysostom’s head and persisted in contemplating how the red crown was related to the white crown that The Prime Mover had used as one side of a weighing scale to break his son’s neck.  Arriving at the “True Vine” Catholic Church, Masser instructed the chrysostom to remain inside the car, and after Willows and Masser entered the church and seated themselves in the pew to await the sermon.  Willows flipped through the bulletin to discover that the sermon’s topic was the Jewish prophet Nehemiah’s rebuilding of the walls in Jerusalem under the supervision of the Persian King Artaxerxes.  While Willows scanned the bulletin and enjoyed his first church visit in over a year, Lydia Hewlett, a woman in a purple dress, approached Masser and invited him to her home for dinner following the service, and after he agreed to the dinner arrangements, he considered that he could share the chrysostom with Lydia.  During the congregation’s singing of hymns, Willows mouthed the verses with indifference while Masser sang at the top of his lungs, and prior to the priest’s sermon, Willows was reminded how joyful Masser became about worship services.  

Behind the pulpit, the priest Father Frederick Garrick grasped that the congregation members were petrified about Venus’ close counter-clockwise rotation and that the volcanic planet could release basaltic meteors that could streak to Earth.  However, he discarded his anxieties about Earth’s “sister planet” and its bizarre atmospheric conditions, and he introduced the Prophet Nehemiah’s challenges from Sanballat of Samaria and Tobiah the Ammonite by proclaiming, “Friends, Nehemiah faced a lot of problems while he was rebuilding the walls in Jerusalem.  His buddy Ezra was bringing back about 1,500 Israelites from exile in Babylon, and Nehemiah was working with a Persian king named Artaxerxes who didn’t really trust him.  Then, Nehemiah found out that his high priest Eliashib’s grandson actually married Sanballat’s daughter, so the Jews actually became related to their enemies.  Even when Nehemiah prayed to God and begged for the Jews to stay pure and to keep God’s laws, the Jews still worshipped false idols and broke the laws, but even when the Jews married their own enemies, God still loved them.  Nehemiah built the walls in fifty-two days, and King Josiah’s son Eliakim even helped dedicate the walls in Jerusalem and tried to make sure that the Israelites worshiped only God and no more false idols.  Eliakim celebrated the rebuilding of the walls with the Levites, and he became a very important priest who showed God’s love for the Israelites, even they made mistakes and turned against Him.”     

            Sitting in the pew, Willows and Masser recalled that the priest Eliakim dedicated the walls in Jerusalem and that according to The Book of Isaiah’s Twenty-second Chapter, a Godly servant named Eliakim was destined to receive the “Key of David” that would lead to Heaven.  Before the priest Father Frederick Garrick could continue his sermon about Nehemiah’s rebuilding of the walls in Jerusalem, the chrysostom pushed open the doors and elaborated on the sermon that he had been overhearing by bellowing, “Yes, Father, Eliakim dedicated the walls of Jerusalem.  He was a great priest, and the Prophet Isaiah even said that Eliakim would get the Key of David.  If he has the Key of David, then, he can do anything.  ‘What he opens, no one can shut, and what he shuts, no one can open;’ that key opens the door to all things.”   

            The chrysostom began to crouch as if the red crown were weighing down on his cranium, and as he sauntered across the aisle, the congregation members noticed that the chrysostom was Masser’s exact duplicate who lacked the acne that defined Masser’s complexion.  The priest Father Garrick identified Masser among the congregation members in the pew and demanded an explanation for the clone’s appearance by bellowing, “Luke, what’s the meaning of this?” 

            Slouching beside Willows in the pew, Masser remained mortified that the chrysostom had exited his car and revealed himself to the public, and during the chrysostom’s methodical walk toward the pulpit, the red crown exerted more pressure on his cranium in the manner of a weighing scale.  The chrysostom lowered his head in reaction to the weight, and Masser silently speculated about why the chrysostom mentioned the “Key of David” that the priest Eliakim was destined to earn following his consecration of the Jerusalem walls, which the Prophet Nehemiah had erected.  Lumbering toward Father Garrick, the chrysostom quoted The Book of Revelation so that he could reiterate Jesus Christ’s message to the Seven Churches of Asia to punish them for their vanity and hypocrisy when he bellowed, “You could’ve held the Key of David, Father; you could’ve worn the Crown of Glory if you’d been the shepherd who decided to feed the flock of God that’s among you.  I wanted to protect you from ‘the hour of testing’ that’s about to come upon the whole world, but you haven’t earned your crown.  Instead, you’ve fallen to a Jezebel ‘who calls herself a prophetess,’ but ‘she teaches and leads’ followers ‘astray so that they commit acts of immorality and eat things sacrificed to idols.’  I’ll give you time to repent, Father, and if you do, I’ll give you ‘the morning star’ that will be the light shining in a dark place.  You’re a hypocrite who prays standing in the church and babbles on and on like a pagan, but your sin has defiled you.  Reveal your sin; bring it forth before it corrupts your soul.” 

            Willows and Masser grasped that in The Book of Kings, the princess Jezebel was a deceptive figure who coaxed the Israelite King Ahab into worshipping the false idol Baal and into forsaking the single God That the Israelite prophets Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob worshipped.  While the two sanitation workers contemplated the identity of the “Jezebel” who the chrysostom alleged had led Father Garrick to commit sins against his own “True Vine” church, Father Garrick recognized the chrysostom’s statements as reminiscent of Jesus Christ’s condemnation of the Church of Thyatira from The Book of Revelation.  In the aisle, the chrysostom cranked his neck from the red crown’s pressure, and even when he moved the crown’s jewels that served as riders to calibrate the weighing scale, he struggled to ensure that his chin did not slam into his chest.  According to The Book of Revelation’s Second Chapter, Jesus Christ offered “authority over the nations” and “the morning star” to the Church of Thyatira, and Father Garrick was puzzled about the chrysostom’s reference to “the morning star” as the clone slowly approached him.  With the red crown crushing his neck, the clone repeated that he would reward Father Garrick for divulging his personal sin as quickly as possible when he muttered, “Please, Father, tell your flock your sin, and I’ll give you ‘the morning star.’  Repent of your immorality with the Jezebel, and bring your soul away from the great tribulation that awaits you.” 

            Father Garrick remained silent and refused to publicize his sin, and when the chrysostom reached the pulpit, the red crown acted as a triple-beam balance that he failed to calibrate, so the crown exerted so much pressure that the chrysostom’s neck broke.  With fractured vertebrae and a bruised spinal cord, the chrysostom collapsed to the wooden floor and perished, and the sight of Masser’s dead clone prompted Father Garrick to acknowledge his sins with the “Jezebel” figure by shrieking, “My God, I’ve sinned.  I’ve broken my vow of celibacy.  I’ve been having affairs with a lot of women, a lot of Jezebels, but I led myself astray.  I’m at fault for my own sins; I’ve lost my own crown, my own Key of David.”

            Following Father Garrick’s confession that he had violated his commitment to celibacy as a Catholic priest, the congregation members mumbled amongst each other in shock, and Father Garrick’s public admission of his sins caused the red crown’s pressure to be alleviated until the crown popped off and rolled from the dead chrysostom’s head.  Masser sprinted from the pew to his perfect clone’s side, and as he wept that his perfect version had died in front of the congregation, the curandero known as The Prime Mover stood in the back of the church and squeezed his glowing teeter-totter called The Syncretizer.  Father Garrick had created the illusion that he was perfect and faultless, and considering that the chrysostom’s red crown was the Crown of Rejoicing that embodied God’s perfection, Garrick’s hypocritical illusion of perfection had weighed down on the crown until the pressure killed the chrysostom.  The red Crown of Rejoicing represented the “perfections” of the Thummim while The Syncretizer was the opposite side that embodied the “lights” of the Urim and that contained sins, which contrasted with the perfection.  The perfect Crown of Rejoicing’s pressure had diminished in reaction to Father Garrick’s profession that he was imperfect, so in the manner of a teeter-totter, The Syncretizer’s luminous sides were lowered to indicate Father Garrick’s sin on The Prime Mover’s “honest scales and balances.”  During the congregation members’ hysteria that the chrysostom had perished and that Father Garrick had acknowledged his sins, The Prime Mover sensed that he was slowly regaining the faith that had prevented him from saving Willows’ son Drew and exited the church.  Father Garrick and the congregation members gathered around Masser and his chrysostom with a snapped neck, and although Father Garrick expected the individuals to condemn him for his sinful exploits with “Jezebels,” they embraced him with hugs.  When a congregation member named Doug McCann proposed calling an ambulance for the dead chrysostom, Masser placed his index finger on his clone’s jugular vein and screamed, “No, he doesn’t need an ambulance.  My chrysostom is dead; leave him alone.”   

During the congregation’s hysteria, Lydia Hewlett, the woman in the purple dress, focused on Masser and inquired about the identity of the dead clone that lacked his acne and other flaws by asking, “Luke, who was this person?  What did he mean about the Key of David and ‘the morning star?’  How was he planning to give a star to our church?”

             According to The Book of Revelation, Jesus Christ would visit the Church of Philadelphia in modern-day Turkey to bestow its congregation with the Key of David, and he would grant the “the morning star” to the Church of Thyatira to commemorate its repentance and its rejection of the “Jezebel” figure.  With the knowledge that the volcanic planet Venus was mysteriously traveling counter-clockwise in the direction of Earth and that the priest Eliakim and the Church of Philadelphia were both destined to earn the Key of David, Masser concentrated on his deceased clone and “the morning star.”  As he peered down at the chrysostom’s crushed throat and the red crown on the floor, he invoked that Venus was referred to as “the morning star” because it appeared so brightly in the east prior to sunset, briefly shined in the west following sunset, and was never visible at midnight.  He discussed the chrysostom’s true origin and his esoteric statements about “the morning star” and the Key of David by asserting, “This man was my perfect clone.  Patrick and I found a whirlpool in the sewer that cloned me.  In The Book of Revelation, Jesus Christ promised ‘authority over the nations’ and ‘the morning star’ to the Church of Thyatira to reward its congregation for rejecting the ‘Jezebel’ who led people astray.  ‘The morning star’ is also the name for Venus when it’s in the east before sunrise.  I don’t know how my clone could give our church the entire planet Venus, but he was babbling about the Key of David, too.  It’s true that the priest Eliakim is supposed to get the Key of David for dedicating Nehemiah’s rebuilt walls in Jerusalem, but Christ also promised to give the Key of David to the Church of Philadelphia and to protect its congregation from Apocalyptic destruction.  I don’t know what my clone was talking about; he couldn’t possibly give our church the planet Venus or the Key of David.  He was just a clone that came out of the sewer.”

            Willows was furious that Masser had publicized the existence of the hypostasis and its ability to spawn perfect clones, and he corrected Masser’s faulty statement that the chrysostom had promised to bestow Father Garrick’s “True Vine” church with the Key of David by interjecting, “Luke, your clone didn’t say that he would give the Key of David to the ‘True Vine’ church.  He said that he would give ‘the morning star’ to Father Garrick for repenting of his sin with the ‘Jezebel.’  All your clone meant is that Father Garrick could’ve earned the Key of David if he’d been a better priest, a better shepherd to his flock, so to speak.” 

            Kneeling beside the dead chrysostom that reflected his perfection, Masser nodded that the chrysostom had offered only “the morning star” to Father Garrick to commemorate his repentance in the same manner that Jesus Christ rewarded the Church of Thyatira with the same “morning star” in The Book of Revelation.  Willows’ grimace depicted his rage that Masser had divulged the supernatural qualities of the hypostasis, and Masser’s citation of the Apocalyptic Book of Revelation prompted Lydia Hewlett, the woman in a purple dress, to ask whether Willows and Masser were discussing the Apocalypse by screeching, “Wait, are you guys talking about the Apocalypse?  The Book of Revelation is about the end of the world, right?  Does that mean that seven trumpets and the seven seals and the seven bowls are going to unleash plagues and famine and death?  Is Luke’s clone bringing on the end of the world?”  

The “Morning Star” Lucifer: The Book of Isaiah 14:12

            Masser stared up from the dead chrysostom and assured Lydia that although Jesus Christ delivered messages to the Seven Churches of Asia in The Book of Revelation, no events suggested that the book’s Apocalyptic plagues would be released when he retorted, “No, Lydia, no, my clone didn’t know anything.  He probably saw our church as the new Church of Thyatira since he offered Father Garrick ‘the morning star,’ but that’s all that he knew.  Since Venus is moving counter-clockwise, ‘the morning star’ was probably Venus.  That’s all that he meant.” 

            Standing beside Lydia, Father Garrick conceded that in The Book of Revelation, Jesus Christ had delivered warnings to the Seven Churches of Asia and that the chrysostom likely perceived Father Garrick’s “True Vine” church as a modern version of the Church of Thyatira considering that the chrysostom had offered “the morning star” to him.  In a panic, Father Garrick opened his Bible to The Book of Isaiah’s Chapter Fourteen and conveyed his anxiety that “the morning star” referred to both Venus and the Devil when he uttered, “’The morning star’ isn’t just Venus, Mr. Masser.  Isaiah calls the Devil ‘the morning star’ and the ‘son of the dawn’ when he was ‘cast down to the Earth’ for rebelling against God and for trying to raise his own ‘throne above the stars of God.’  The Devil was an angel that wanted to be greater than God, so God cast him into ‘the depths of the pit’ in Hell.  ‘The morning star’ isn’t Venus; it’s the Devil that will come out of a ‘lake of fire’ during the Apocalypse.  Your clone was a sign of the Apocalypse, whether you like it or not.”                                                   

            While the congregation members became terrified that “the morning star” could represent the Devil instead of Venus, Willows chided Father Garrick for proposing that the chrysostom’s “morning star” could represent the Devil.  Willows insisted that The Book of Isaiah’s Chapter Fourteen was actually a meditation on God’s annihilation of Babylon to punish it for enslaving the Israelites and that “the morning star” could be a hopeful symbol by replying, “’The morning star’ isn’t the Devil, Father Garrick.  2 Peter says that God’s teaching is ‘a light shining in a dark place’ that will make ‘the morning star’ begin to ‘rise in your hearts.’  The Devil’s name Lucifer doesn’t even mean anything evil.  Lucifer means ‘Light-bearer’ since when Lucifer was still a good angel that served God, he was full of light.  He was God’s greatest servant until he tried to become God; that’s why the Bible calls Lucifer things like the ‘son of the morning’ and the ‘Angel of light.’  Isaiah 14 isn’t even really about Lucifer’s being cast into Hell to become the Devil; it’s about God’s promise to destroy Babylon for enslaving the Israelites in exile.  God promises to sweep Babylon ‘with the broom of destruction.’  The morning doesn’t have to be the Devil; it could be something really good.”

            Father Garrick recognized that the Devil’s name Lucifer meant “Light-bearer” to venerate his exemplary service to God, and he remembered that 2 Corinthians also praised the angel Lucifer as the “son of the morning” prior to his banishment to Hell to become the Devil.  While the congregation members observed the interactions between Father Garrick and Willows, Father Garrick conceded that The Book of Isaiah’s Chapter Fourteen was more fixated on God’s destruction of Babylon than on Lucifer’s wicked desire to “ascend to the heavens” and his expulsion to Hell.  However, the chrysostom’s threat to Father Garrick still echoed Jesus Christ’s instructions for the Church of Thyatira to shun the lecherous “Jezebel.”  Considering that the Seventeenth Chapter of The Book of Revelation condemned Babylon as “The Mother of Prostitutes,” Father Garrick compared Babylon to the “Jezebel” figure based on their sexual indiscretions by answering, “You’re right, Mr. Willows; I don’t know exactly what ‘the morning star’ is.  I’ve told everyone about my sins with the ‘Jezebel,’ and Babylon is the biggest ‘Jezebel’ in the Scriptures.  Revelation calls Babylon ‘The Mother of Prostitutes’ because of her ‘abominable things and the filth of her adulteries’ with all ‘the kings of the Earth’ who ‘have committed fornication with her.’  My sermon was right when I said that the Prophets Ezra and Nehemiah could bring the Israelites out of the Babylonian Captivity and rebuild the walls in Jerusalem, but only God could punish Babylon for enslaving the Israelites for fifty years.  Babylon is ‘The Mother of Prostitutes;’ it’s way worse than what I may have done with some ‘Jezebel.’” 

            Willows swiped the chrysostom’s red crown from the floor, handed it to Masser, and decided that although the chrysostom had compared Father Garrick’s “True Vine” church to a modern-day Church of Thyatira based on their shared “Jezebel” figures, the chrysostom was dead and no longer posed a threat.  He pushed through the crowd and ridiculed Father Garrick for his feeble efforts to dismiss his affairs with “Jezebel” figures as trivial in comparison with Babylon’s abominations against Israel when he casually muttered, “Okay, Father Garrick, no matter what you say, you still had your affairs with the ‘Jezebel.’  Babylon brought down Jerusalem and kept the Israelites in captivity for fifty years, and your fornications with the ‘Jezebel’ are just as bad as Babylon was as ‘The Mother of Prostitutes.’  Luke’s clone is dead.  He didn’t have anything important to say, so let’s pick up his body and get out of here.”

            Willows expressed his indifference to the chrysostom’s death, bumped into Lydia Hewlett, and scurried down the aisle to exit Father Garrick’s “True Vine” church.  As Masser gripped his perfect clone’s red crown, he wondered how the red crown was related to the white crown that The Prime Mover had placed on Willows’ son during the failed healing ritual.  While Lydia Hewlett and Father Garrick maneuvered through the crowd to call for an ambulance to extract the chrysostom’s corpse, Masser remained frozen and squeezed the red crown more tightly to his chest.  During Venus’ unexplainable counter-clockwise rotation in close proximity to its “sister planet” Earth, Willows walked home and peered up at the night sky in search of Venus, but although Venus represented “the morning star” as the third brightest natural object in the sky, he could not view the planet as it moved between the Earth and the Sun.  When Willows reached his home, the empty rooms reminded him that The Prime Mover’s healing ritual had killed his son Drew and that his wife Molly had divorced him in her grief over the loss of her only son.  In his living room, he flipped through his Bible to Chapter Sixteen in The Book of Acts, and as his eyes scanned the text, he confirmed his suspicions that while the Christian missionaries St. Paul and Silas were proselytizing in Thyatira, they encountered Lydia, who was “a dealer in purple cloth.”  Lydia invited Paul and Silas to stay at her home in an hospitable gesture that mimicked the congregation member Lydia Hewlett’s request for Masser to join her for dinner festivities.  Considering that the Biblical figure Lydia lived in Thyatira, Willows became convinced that the two women were connected and that Father Garrick’s “True Vine” church truly represented a modern-day Church of Thyatira that was guilty of being duped by “Jezebels.”  In a thoughtful manner, Willows parsed Jesus Christ’s rebuke of the hypocritical Church of Thyatira in Chapter Two of The Book of Revelation.  Although he had regarded the chrysostom’s statements as nonsense, he could not deny that Christ promised to reward the Church of Thyatira for its rejection of the “Jezebel” figure with “the morning star.”  During the quiet moment, he continued to wonder whether “the morning star” was Venus, the volcanic planet that was moving in an irregular counter-clockwise fashion, or Lucifer, the “light-bearing” angel that was God’s greatest servant before God expelled him into Hell to become the Devil. 

A pounding at the door roused Willows from his Scriptural reading, and after Willows opened the door, Masser hysterically greeted him, shoved the chrysostom’s red crown in his face, and notified him that a basaltic meteor from Venus had streaked to Earth and had collided into present-day Iraq by whimpering, “Patrick, you’re going to have to tell me what’s going on here.  My chrysostom, my perfect clone, is dead, and now, the news is saying that a meteor from Venus hit the Babil Province in Iraq.  That’s where Babylon used to be in ancient Mesopotamia; a rock from Venus wiped out Babylon, ‘The Mother of Prostitutes’ that you compared Father Garrick to over an hour ago.” 

Willows was not surprised that a basaltic rock had been dislodged from Venus and had plummeted to the Earth considering that Venus was orbiting more closely than its general seventeen degrees from the Sun and considering that its distance of forty million kilometers from the Earth was diminishing.  Venus’ atmospheric pressure generally was ninety-two times greater than the pressure on Earth, but it was clear that Venus’ solar winds, volcanic activities, and pressure had intensified to discharge the basaltic rock to Earth.  However, Willows could not explain why Venus’ rock had crashed into ancient Babylon, and he yanked the chrysostom’s red crown away from Masser and replied, “You expect me to know about this.  Venus is moving counter-clockwise with the rest of the planets; it’s getting so close to the Earth that we knew that some of its rocks could fall on us.  I can’t believe that a rock hit Babylon, but it’s none of my business.” 

Masser rushed into Willows’ living room and glanced down at the open Bible to determine that Willows was actually interested in “the morning star” and in the parallels between Father Garrick’s “True Vine” church and the Church of Thyatira from The Book of Revelation.  Masser reconsidered the verses from Chapter Fourteen in The Book of Isaiah and analyzed their accounts of Lucifer’s falling from Heaven in the form of a “morning star” and God’s threat to “wipe out Babylon’s name and survivors” when he retorted, “What is that supposed to mean, Patrick?  This is what Isaiah 14 is all about; this is prophecy about the end of the world.  Lucifer is ‘the morning star’ who God cast down to ‘the depths of the pit’ in Hell, but God promised to destroy Babylon and to ‘sweep her with the broom of destruction’ to make room for Lucifer.  No matter what you think, Venus is moving counter-clockwise for a reason; its rocks fell to Babylon for a reason.  Venus is called ‘the morning star’ when it’s in the east, and Lucifer is called ‘the morning star’ that fell to Hell.  You can deny it all you want, but you know that this means something.  A rock from Venus didn’t just hit Babylon at random.” 

Inside Father Garrick’s “True Vine” church, Willows had emphasized that The Book of Isaiah’s Chapter Fourteen was more focused on God’s destruction of Babylon than on Lucifer’s transformation from the angelic “morning star” into the Devil in “the realm of the dead.”  Based on the chrysostom’s accusations and Venus’ basaltic rock’s collision with ancient Babylon, Willows could not ignore that Biblical prophecies concerning the Seven Churches of Asia and the Five Crowns for the Faithful were being fulfilled.  The sight of The Book of Acts’ Chapter Sixteen in his open Bible prompted Willows to acknowledge that the congregation member Lydia Hewlett was reminiscent of the Biblical “dealer in purple cloth” who invited the missionaries Paul and Silas to her home.  He agreed that Father Garrick’s “True Vine” church was the modern Church of Thyatira that was destined to earn “the morning star” for its repentance when he rasped, “Okay, you’re right, Luke; there’s something going on here.  I found something else.  In Acts, Paul and Silas went through Macedonia and Philippi and met ‘a dealer in purple cloth’ named Lydia.  She was from Thyatira; obviously, the Church of Thyatira was there, too.  It’s no coincidence that the ‘True Vine’ church has a priest who was tempted by some ‘Jezebels’ or that it has a woman named Lydia who wears purple dresses as a member.  Your ‘True Vine’ church is the new version of the Church of Thyatira that’s supposed to get ‘the morning star,’ whatever that is.”

Despite 2 Peter’s message that “the morning star” is “a light shining in a dark place,” Masser feared that “the morning star” represented either Venus or the Devil.  Masser decided that Lucifer was only celebrated as a “Light-bearer” and “the morning star” when he served God as a dutiful angel, so Lucifer was stripped of his title as “the morning star” after God banished him into Hell to become the Devil.  While Willows also entertained the notions that “the morning star” could be the Devil and that Venus had been ordained to annihilate ancient Babylon to signal his Apocalyptic arrival on earth, Masser implored Willows to delve into The Prime Mover’s deadly healing ritual by asserting, “Look, I know that you don’t want to talk about this, but my chrysostom was wearing a red crown.  You said that The Prime Mover put a white crown on your son’s head to try to cure his diphtheria.  It’s pretty obvious that Father Garrick’s suppression of his sins made the red crown weigh down on my chrysostom’s head until his neck broke.  I mean, the crown never budged from his head, and then, after Father Garrick confessed that he’d been with some ‘Jezebels,’ the crown popped right off my chrysostom’s head.  The white and red crowns have got to be connected.”

Willows was confident that Father Garrick’s “True Vine” church was a modern incarnation of the Church of Thyatira, which was one of the Seven Churches of Asia that Jesus Christ admonished in The Book of Revelation.  He now believed that The Prime Mover’s white crown and the dead chrysostom’s red crown represented two of the Five Crowns for the Faithful that “the Lord has promised to those who love Him” according to The Book of James.  Willows discarded his reservations about dredging up his son’s death, and he discussed the curandero known as The Prime Mover and his obsession with the image of the Earth’s “dust on the scales” from The Book of Isaiah’s Fortieth Chapter when he exclaimed, “All right, Luke, I’ll tell you what I think.  I think that the ‘True Vine’ church is a modern version of one of the Seven Churches of Asia and that the crowns are supposed to be two of the Five Crowns for the Faithful.  The Prime Mover put a white crown on my son’s head; he said that it was the Crown of Incorruptibility that you get for shunning Earthly temptations.  That white Crown of Incorruptibility was one side of The Prime Mover’s scale; the other side of the scale was a teeter-totter called The Syncretizer.  The Crown of Incorruptibility was like his Thummim; it weighed perfection.  The Syncretizer was like his Urim; it weighed sins.  He wanted perfection to outweigh sins very slightly so that the perfection could cast out the sins that made my son sick.  The Prime Mover kept telling me that he could balance ‘the mountains on the scales’ and weigh ‘the islands as though they were fine dust,’ and I believe him.  I fell for his trick.  I let him put the Crown of Incorruptibility on my son’s head.  He made me commit sins to try to balance them with the crown’s perfection, but the crown just weighed down on my son and broke his neck.”           

While Willows sighed with grief, Masser recalled that the Urim and the Thummim were sacred coins that Israelite priests used to deduce God’s will, and he grasped that on The Prime Mover’s “honest scales and balances,” The Syncretizer was the Urim’s sins while the Crown of Incorruptibility was the Thummim’s perfection.  He expressed his condolences for Willows’ loss and scrutinized The Prime Mover’s mentality and his ultimate goal as an unconventional curandero by remarking, “I’m sorry about your son, Patrick.  It seems to me that The Prime Mover killed your son with the white crown just like the red crown killed my chrysostom.  You said that The Prime Mover wanted to balance sins and perfection to cast out the sins that made your son sick.  It doesn’t make any sense.  Curanderoes are supposed to use holy water and Bible verses to help people; they aren’t supposed to use scales.  What was The Prime Mover thinking?  What was he trying to do?”

  With more painful memories flooding into his head, Willows remained aware that The Prime Mover was an unorthodox curandero because he used a scale instead of holy water, but Willows had been so desperate to save his son that he permitted The Prime Mover to apply his remedies.  In a cracking voice, Willows addressed cleromancy and quoted Proverbs 16 to pinpoint The Prime Mover’s use of crowns and The Syncretizer as the two sides of his scale by retorting, “He said that he was performing cleromancy by casting lots.  In the Bible, the Prophet Joshua used cleromancy to figure out who stole some Babylonian gold; even the Israelites used cleromancy to pick Saul as their first king.  The Prime Mover said that his ritual was Biblical cleromancy, and I believed him.  He cast the Urim and the Thummim as his lots in cleromancy; The Syncretizer was his Urim; the Crown for the Faithful was his Thummim.  He kept babbling about Proverbs 16 that says that ‘honest scales and balances belong to the Lord’ and that ‘all the weights in the bag are of His making.’  He told me that he was God’s messenger who used those ‘honest scales and balances’ to weigh sins and perfection.  I let him cast his lots to make perfection outweigh the sins that made my son sick, and it killed him.”

Masser was alarmed that The Prime Mover had presented his use of “honest scales and balances” as a variation of Biblical cleromancy, and Willows’ allusion to the contrast between sins and perfection on The Prime Mover’s scale reminded Masser of the importance of opposites.  The Prime Mover perceived himself as God’s messenger who used his scales to weigh the opposites of sins and perfection, so Masser emphasized that Biblical opposites were necessary because one opposite defined the other when he replied, “That sounds awful, Patrick.  If The Prime Mover really did try to use God’s ‘honest scales and balances,’ then, that’s just blasphemy.  I guess that I can understand why someone would want to balance sins and perfection though; after all, they’re the most important opposites in existence.  In Ecclesiastes, King Solomon really stresses that ‘the wind blows to the south and goes around to the north;’ north and south are opposites.  Even in The Book of Genesis, when God created the heavens and the earth, He separated light from darkness to make Day and Night; without the darkness, we wouldn’t understand what light is.  I understand why The Prime Mover would want to balance opposites, but using a divine scale is too much power for anyone to have.”

Willows concurred that opposites were essential elements of The Book of Genesis and The Book of Ecclesiastes considering that God ordained for the wind to travel both to the north and to the south and that He separated light from darkness so that light could be defined as the contrast of the darkness.  He feared that Masser was somehow defending The Prime Mover’s peculiar rituals as a curandero, so he shifted his focus from opposites to the Five Crowns for the Faithful by shrieking, “Luke, who cares about opposites?  It doesn’t matter whether The Prime Mover thought that he was casting lots in cleromancy or balancing opposites.  He still killed my son.  He put his Crown of Incorruptibility on my son’s head and broke his neck.” 

While Venus moved in its counter-clockwise direction toward the Earth, Masser discarded The Prime Mover’s attempts to justify his peculiar healing rituals and inquired about the white and red crowns by muttering, “You’re right; your curandero The Prime Mover is a killer.  I don’t care what he thought that he was doing or how he tried to justify what happened.  You said that he put a white crown on your son that broke his neck; a red crown weighed down on my chrysostom and killed him.  If the crowns are really two of the Five Crowns for the Faithful, then, what are they exactly?”

Willows considered that according to The Book of James, the Crown of Life, the Crown of Incorruptibility, the Crown of Righteousness, the Crown of Rejoicing, and the Crown of Glory were the Five Crowns for the Faithful that Catholics strived to earn to gain entry to the Kingdom of Heaven.  Father Garrick’s “True Vine” church was a modern-day Church of Thyatira among the ancient Seven Churches of Asia, and the chrysostom who delivered the message about Father Garrick’s improprieties with “Jezebels” was clearly wearing one of the Five Crowns for the Faithful.  Based on Masser’s jovial worshipping during the “True Vine” church service, Willows concluded that Masser’s perfect clone known as the chrysostom was likely wearing the red Crown of Rejoicing.  He described the Five Crowns for the Faithful as The Prime Mover’s weighing scales when he asserted, “I think that The Prime Mover put the white Crown of Incorruptibility on my son’s head to reward him for being baptized and for shunning Earthly temptations in favor of God’s grace.  As far as I’m concerned, you’ve been running the race of life for a long time.  I think that you’ve fought the good fight and kept the faith; you’ve already earned the Crown of Righteousness.  You’re so giddy about your faith that I think that your chrysostom was wearing the red Crown of Rejoicing; that’s the crown that broke his neck.  Those Five Crowns for the Faithful were part of The Prime Mover’s weighing scale.  They were inspired by an experiment that Archimedes did to figure out whether King Hiero’s crown was pure gold or not.  Archimedes used the crown like a scale and weighed it in water to figure out that it had some silver in it; it wasn’t pure gold.  The Crown of Incorruptibility and the Crown of Rejoicing were weighting scales that killed my son and your perfect clone.”                 

  Willows had informed Masser of the ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes’ experiment to use King Hiero’s crown as a weighing scale so that he could deduce that the crown was comprised of thirty percent silver and was not pure gold.  Masser grasped that the white Crown of Incorruptibility and the red Crown of Rejoicing were both scales that served as one side of The Prime Mover’s “honest scales and balances,” and he remained concerned about The Prime Mover’s obsession with opposites and the parallels between the Five Crowns for the Faithful and the Seven Churches of Asia.  He snatched Willows’ Bible from the table, and as he examined Jesus Christ’s message to the Church of Philadelphia in The Book of Revelation’s Third Chapter, he discovered that Christ instructed the church to “hold fast” to ensure that “no one will take your crown.”  He proposed that each of the seven churches could possess Crowns for the Faithful and elaborated on the Biblical fixation with opposites by replying, “Well, I do love to rejoice; I just wish that my crown hadn’t killed my clone.  It seems to me that these crowns could be weights like Archimedes thought, but I think that the Seven Churches of Asia had Crowns for the Faithful, too.  Christ’s message to the Church of Philadelphia tells its members to hold on to their crown.  In Christ’s message to the Church of Laodicea, he says that he’ll reject them for being ‘lukewarm’ and for being ‘neither hot nor cold.’  If you didn’t think that opposites were important before, then, you do now.  The Prime Mover wanted to balance the opposites of sins and perfection, and Christ hated the Church of Laodicea for not picking one of the opposites of either hot or cold.  To Christ, there’s nothing worse than being ‘lukewarm;’ you’ve got to pick one of your opposites on one side of the scale.” 

Willows contemplated that the Seven Churches of Asia could have possessed the Five Crowns for the Faithful in The Book of Revelation, and as he considered Archimedes’ experiment to test whether King Hiero’s crown was pure gold, he decided that Christ also could be testing the purity of the seven hypocritical churches.  According to the Scriptures, Christ appeared to abhor the Church of Laodicea’s “lukewarm” mentality and to prefer churches that exhibited the opposites of either “hot” or “cold” philosophies.  With the image of his dead son etched in his mind, Willows addressed the notions that Christ could be testing Father Garrick’s “True Vine” church just as Archimedes tested the gold crown’s purity and that opposites were imperative to life when he rasped, “The Prime Mover didn’t pick a side on the scale, Luke.  He said that he was standing on the fulcrum between the scales that weighed your opposites of sins and perfection.  He tried to make the perfection slightly outweigh the sins to cast them out, but he never picked a side on either sins or perfection.  Maybe, your chrysostom was trying to pick a side on the scales.  He was on the side of perfection, but he wanted to expose Father Garrick’s sins.  Your chrysostom was wearing the Crown of Rejoicing, and if that crown is actually a weighing scale that broke his neck, then, maybe, he was testing the purity of Father Garrick’s church just like Archimedes tested the purity of King Hiero’s gold crown.  Christ tested the purity of the Seven Churches of Asia in The Book of Revelation, and that’s what your chrysostom was doing.  He was picking a side; he abandoned his own perfection because he wanted Father Garrick to admit his sins.  The Prime Mover wouldn’t pick a side on the scales.  He wanted to be the ‘unmoved mover’ who stood between the two opposite sides.  He stayed ‘lukewarm’ like the Church of Laodicea.  He was neither ‘hot’ nor ‘cold,’ and it cost me my family.  I mean, Father Garrick may have broken his priestly vows, but he still has a family.”

Masser discerned that Willows was still mourning the death of his son Drew, and with sensitivity, Masser shifted his focus from the opposites of sins and perfection and testing the purity of churches and gold crowns.  He dwelled on The Prime Mover’s mechanisms of causing perfection to outweigh sins and of extracting the “scarlet” sins that triggered Drew’s illness by asserting, “It’s terrible what The Prime Mover did to you, Patrick.  He had no right to think that he could be the ‘unmoved mover.’  He should’ve picked a side on sins or perfection instead of staying ‘lukewarm.’  What else did he do?  How did he make the perfection outweigh the sins?” 

Willows disclosed The Prime Mover’s use of “ear-candling” to extract the sins that caused Drew’s illness and the healer’s failed efforts to consume the sins by transferring them to bread when he uttered, “He put a candle in my son’s ear to pull the sins out.  I guess that they were sins; they glowed ‘scarlet’ red like the Bible says.  He tried to be a sin-eater.  He covered a piece of bread with the sins, but when he tried to eat them, the bread turned into stone.  Then, when the Crown of Incorruptibility started weighing down on my son, he told me that there was too much perfection on his ‘honest scales and balances.’  He made me commit sins to create some balance between sins and perfection on the scales, but it didn’t help.  The weirdest thing is that when I sinned, I saw some freaky things in the mirror.  That’s all that happened, and when I ran back to help my son, The Prime Mover was gone, and my son’s neck was broken from the crown’s pressure.  It was terrible; I was so desperate for help that I let that curandero kill my boy.  I was so stupid.  I trusted in my Catholic faith in curanderoes, and it let me down.” 

 Willows placed his Bible on the table, walked into his bedroom, and retrieved the stone into which a piece of bread had transformed when The Prime Mover drenched it with the “scarlet” sins, which triggered Drew’s illness.  When Willows returned to the living room, he slapped the coarse stone into Masser’s hand, and as Masser considered that Willows’ sins had stimulated him to experience hallucinations, he peered at his friend and inquired about the visions by declaring, “So, this is the stone.  The Prime Mover balanced sins and perfection on his scale to cast the sins out, and when he tried to eat the sins on bread, the bread turned into this stone.  Let me ask you something.  When you started sinning to balance everything on The Prime Mover’s scale, did you start to see a lion, a bear, a leopard, and a beast with iron teeth?”

            Willows was flabbergasted that Masser was familiar with the visions that he had witnessed in the mirror during his failed efforts to reduce the white Crown of Incorruptibility’s pressure on his son’s cranium.  In a puzzled tone, Willows asked, “Yeah, that’s right, Luke.  The Prime Mover said that the white crown represented perfection that was weighing down on my son, so I sinned to try to pull the crown up and off of his head.  I feel like the sins made me see those things.  How did you know?”

            In a panic, Masser shuffled for words and stammered, but when he could not offer a proper explanation regarding the visions, he grabbed the remote control and turned on the television to monitor the aftermath of Venus’ meteor that collided into ancient Babylon in Iraq.  On the news, the broadcaster emphasized that Venus was moving closer to the Earth in its counter-clockwise rotation and that its sulfuric clouds were discharging lightning when she proclaimed, “We’re still following this story that a meteor from Venus struck the Babil Province in Iraq.  In the past, Venus was the only planet that rotated clockwise, but for the past year, it’s been rotating counter-clockwise with the rest of the planets.  Its atmospheric pressure has generally been ninety-two times more than the pressure on Earth, but scientists are saying that that pressure is increasing.  They’re saying that Venus used to be seventeen degrees from the Sun and forty million kilometers from the Earth, but that’s all decreasing as Venus gets closer to us.  Venus has practically no magnetic field or plate tectonics due to its dry surface, but it’s covered with erupting volcanoes and basaltic rock.  There’s a fear that more rocks could fall from Venus, and scientists are saying that Venus’ sulfuric clouds are generating even more lightning than Earth is.  Now, we’re worried about lightning and basaltic rocks from Venus as it gets closer to Earth.” 

            While the television reporter expressed fears that Venus’ basaltic rocks could annihilate more Earthly locations than ancient Babylon in Iraq, Masser became distressed that Venus’ sulfuric clouds were discharging Earth-like lightning on its volcanic surface.  He turned to Willows and quoted from The Book of Luke’s Eighteenth Chapter to convey his anxiety about lightning when he exclaimed, “Man, Venus is shooting lightning now; it’s crazy.  Lightning always scares me, especially when Jesus said that he ‘saw Satan fall like lightning from Heaven’ in the Gospels.  My chrysostom warned us that Father Garrick would receive ‘the morning star’ for admitting those sins with the ‘Jezebels.’  ‘The morning star’ could be Venus or the Devil, and if it’s the Devil, then, I’m worried.  What if the Devil is in that lightning?  What if Venus’ rocks destroyed Babylon to make way for the Devil to come out of ‘the lake of fire.’”

            Willows could fathom that ancient Babylon had been destroyed to punish its King Nebuchadnezzar and its other inhabitants for enslaving and exiling the Israelites from the years 597 to 538 BC.  However, while he considered that the dead chrysostom had promised to reward Father Garrick with “the morning star,” he refused to accept that “the morning star” could be the Devil or that Venus’ lightning somehow contained the Devil considering that Christ “saw Satan fall like lightning from Heaven” in the Scriptures.  As Masser changed the television channel, Willows conceded that strange events were occurring and dismissed the possibility that the Devil could exist in Venus’ lightning by remarking, “Luke, I’ll admit that your chrysostom and my son wore two of the Five Crowns for the Faithful.  I’ll even admit that your chrysostom saw Father Garrick’s church as a modern version of the Church of Thyatira from the Seven Churches of Asia, but now, you’re really pushing it.  Why does it matter that The Book of Isaiah calls the Devil ‘the morning star’ when he was cast into Hell?  Why does it matter if Venus is called ‘the morning star,’ too?  Just because the chrysostom promised to give Father Garrick ‘the morning star’ doesn’t mean that Venus destroyed ancient Babylon to pave the way for the Devil or that the Devil exists in Venus’ lightning.  You’re really talking crazy, buddy.”

            When Masser overheard a breaking news report about the discovery of the “hypostasis” that could represent the remnants of the primordial soup that birthed organic life from inorganic matter, he expressed his amazement by exclaiming, “Then, we’re both crazy together, Patrick.  We’re making news with Babylon and with the whirlpool that pulled us in to all of this.  It looks like those biologists have decided to make our sewer discovery public.” 

            Willows was astonished that the biologists had publicized the existence of the white whirlpool known as the “hypostasis” that had spawned Masser’s perfect clone, and Willows could only mutter, “What?,” as he gazed at the new television report.  Transitioning from Venus’ destruction of ancient Babylon, the broadcaster discussed the “hypostasis” that represented the remnants of the primordial soup and that generated perfect clones known as chrysostoms when she proclaimed, “We’re still monitoring the situation with Venus, but in other news, scientists are saying that they’ve discovered the primordial soup that created all life.  They’re calling it the ‘hypostasis,’ and it’s a pool that’s got the properties of a vortex and a black hole.  Of course, the hypostasis has got the water and the carbon dioxide and the hydrogen sulfide that were needed to sustain life, but scientists are saying that the hypostasis may even be able to clone humans.  This is an amazing discovery, indeed, and with Venus getting closer to the Earth, we could use some new discoveries.  We’ll update you on the hypostasis when more information becomes available.”

            In a rage, Willows turned off the television and became convinced that the biologists to whom the Wilmington sanitation department had submitted the hypostasis were now using the whirlpool to clone themselves just as Masser had.  Willows accepted that sins could cause sicknesses for humans, but he still refused to believe that the hypostasis pool could be comparable to the Pool of Bethesda that healed “disabled people” in The Book of John 5.  When Willows charged toward the front door, Masser feared that Willows was incensed that the biologists had divulged the discovery of the hypostasis and its ability to create perfect clones called chrysostoms, and Masser could only ask, “Where are you going, Patrick?”

            Standing at the front door, Willows contended that the biologists had been immersing their bodies inside the hypostasis to clone themselves and that the perfect clones were dangerous based on the fate of Masser’s chrysostom by shouting, “Those biologists have been cloning themselves in our whirlpool, Luke.  Those clones are dangerous; they say things that aren’t true.  I mean, your clone said that Father Garrick would earn ‘the morning star’ for admitting his sins; he made you think that the Devil is coming to Earth just because a rock from Venus hit ancient Babylon.  Stay here, and think about whatever you want.  Try to figure out whether ‘the morning star’ is the Devil or Venus, but I’m going to put an end to these clones.”

Masser noticed that Willows was brandishing a handgun and was appalled that his fellow sanitation worker intended to kill the chrysostoms that the biologists were generating in the whirlpool known as the hypostasis.  He hoped to dissuade Willows from such an impulsive act and insisted that they both shared the discovery of the hypostasis by replying, “Hey, man, I’m coming with you.  I found that pool with you in that sewer; it’s my discovery, too.” 

While “the morning star” Venus shined at its maximum luminosity and barreled toward Earth, Masser climbed into the passenger seat of Willows’ car and accompanied him to the biologists’ lab where the Wilmington sanitation department had submitted the hypostasis.  Masser wished to address the meaning of “the morning star” that could represent either Venus or Lucifer prior to his banishment to Hell, but Willows remained silent and refused to discuss “the morning star,” Venus’ lightning, or Father Garrick’s “True Vine” church.  Willows pulled up to the lab and identified that eight chrysostoms were assembled around the premises, and his suspicions were confirmed that the biologists had immersed themselves in the hypostasis to engender their own perfect clones.  Staring through the car windshield, Willows and Masser recognized that the eight perfect clones were wearing different Crowns for the Faithful, which were the green Crown of Life, the white Crown of Incorruptibility, the blue Crown of Righteousness, the red Crown of Rejoicing, and the purple Crown of Glory.  According to 1 Peter, a Catholic would achieve the Crown of Glory by deciding to “feed the flock of God.”  The two sanitation workers pinpointed that one of the chrysostoms was donning the purple Crown of Glory, and considering that a biologist had earned the Crown of Glory, his chrysostom was wearing the purple crown when he emerged from the hypostasis.  Willows became infuriated that the biologists had enveloped themselves inside the hypostasis to create their perfect clones that wore Crowns for the Faithful, and before Masser could restrain his friend, Willows leaped from his car and aimed his gun at the cluster of clones.  As Masser opened the car door, Willows fired six bullets at the clones as their crowns of green, white, blue, red, and purple colors blurred together, but the clones were perfect chrysostoms and were impervious to bullets. 

In frustration that bullets could not harm the eight chrysostoms outside of the lab, Willows tossed his gun to the street and wondered how the perfect clones could be exterminated as they dispersed in reaction to the gunfire.  He recalled that the clones’ Five Crowns for the Faithful represented the individual sides that weighed perfection on The Prime Mover’s “honest scales and balances.”  Masser’s clone had perished when Father Garrick’s hypocrisy and his false appearance of perfection caused the red Crown of Rejoicing’s perfection to weigh down on the clone until his neck snapped.  Father Garrick’s “True Vine” church was comparable to the Church of Thyatira that Christ reproached in The Book of Revelation because the modern “True Vine” church and the ancient Church of Thyatira both hypocritically appeared to support “love and faith” and concealed their associations with “Jezebel” figures.  As Masser raced to Willows’ side to confront him, Willows decided to treat the Five Crowns for the Faithful as if they were weighing scales or King Hiero’s gold crown that the Greek mathematician Archimedes weighed to assess its purity.  During the eight chrysostoms’ scampering around the premises, Masser implored Willows not to harm the biologists’ perfect clones by shrieking, “What are you thinking, Patrick?  Why can’t we have some perfection in our sinful, little world?  Please, leave the chrysostoms alone.  I lost my chance to see the perfect side of myself; don’t take it away from these scientists.”

As Masser sought to pacify his fellow sanitation worker, Willows peered at the colored crowns that the chrysostoms were donning as scales that weighed perfection on The Prime Mover’s “honest scales and balances.”  He was terrified that the perfect chrysostoms would expose hidden sins just as Masser’s chrysostom had forced Father Garrick to publicize his own hypocrisy in the modern “True Vine” church that embodied the ancient Church of Thyatira.  When Masser clasped his shoulder, Willows revealed that he would revel in similar hypocrisy to exert pressure on the eight chrysostoms’ Crowns for the Faithful by bellowing, “I have to, Luke.  I can’t be ‘lukewarm’ like the Church of Laodicea; I have to pick a side on the scale.  Those crowns weigh perfection, and if I can’t shoot the chrysostoms, then, I’ll pretend to be perfect until my hypocrisy weighs down on their crowns enough to break their necks.” 

Considering that Father Garrick’s hypocritical façade of perfection had created enough weight on Masser’s chrysostom to kill him, Willows was eager to engage in the same hypocrisy for which Christ rebuked the Seven Churches of Asia in The Book of Revelation.  Just as Christ revealed the sins of the Seven Churches of Asia, Masser’s chrysostom had managed to uncover Father Garrick’s sinful exploits with “Jezebel” figures, and Willows now was terrified that these new eight chrysostoms would ridicule other humans for their hypocrisies and other sins.  When Masser asked, “What are you going to do?,” Willows announced that he had familiarized himself with the hypocrisies that the Seven Churches of Asia committed and that he would engage in those hypocrisies to kill the new chrysostoms by muttering, “I haven’t given up; I’m always thinking.  Your chrysostom exposed Father Garrick’s sins, but I won’t let these chrysostoms expose anyone else’s or create the havoc that yours tried to do.  Christ showed the hypocrisy in the Seven Churches of Asia; that’s all that I need.  Father Garrick’s hypocrisy killed your chrysostom, and my hypocrisy can kill these new chrysostoms.”

Willows recalled that according to The Book of Matthew’s Sixth Chapter, Jesus Christ instructed his disciples not to be hypocritical and to shun the hypocrites who “love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by men.”  In a facetious act, Willows dropped to his knees on the sidewalk, closed his eyes, and pretended to pray publicly so that his hypocrisy could create the false appearance of perfection and cause the perfection to weigh down on the chrysostoms’ Crowns for the Faithful.  When he opened his eyes, he noticed that the chrysostoms were lumbering in various directions, and he became hopeful that his hypocritical façade of perfection was stimulating the crowns to weigh down on the chrysostoms’ craniums in the manner of scales.  According to The Book of Revelation’s Second Chapter, the Church of Ephesus had “left” its “first love” by forsaking its zeal for God, and the Church of Pergamum had been supporting “the teaching of Balaam,” who was a Biblical soothsayer who blessed Israel’s enemies and duped the Israelites to worship the false idol Baal in The Book of Numbers.  Willows embraced the two churches’ hypocrisy and pretended that he had not “left” his own “first love” of missionary work in Ecuador, and he also praised Balaam for coercing the Israelites to worship Baal, to construct altars, and to turn away from God by flippantly bellowing, “Oh, God, I’ve persevered.  My missionary work in Ecuador was my ‘first love,’ and I never left it.  I’ve always loved being a missionary, but I’ve loved ‘the teaching of Balaam’ even more.  Balaam built those blasphemous altars and blessed Israel’s enemies and worshipped Baal, and I love him.  I love him for making the Israelites ‘eat things sacrificed to idols;’ he’s my hero.”

Willows had imitated the Church of Ephesus’ hypocritical rejection of its “first love” and the Church of Pergamum’s adulation of the idolatrous soothsayer Balaam, so the sanitation worker’s hypocrisy and his façade of perfection exerted pressure on the chrysostoms’ crowns.  When Willows recognized that the chrysostoms were crouching down in reaction to the crowns’ weight, he recalled that Christ had reprimanded the Church of Thyatira for committing “acts of immorality” with a “Jezebel” and that the Church of Sardis was guilty of not completing their faithful deeds “in the sight of God.”  Willows was aware of his own lustful yearnings for “Jezebel” figures and the sins that he had attempted to conceal from God, so he glared into the sky and persisted in hypocrisy by proclaiming, “I’m just so perfect, God.  I’ve never lusted after a ‘Jezebel’ in my heart since my wife left me.  I didn’t even lust after Evelia Jimenez while I was married.  I’ve never hidden all of my works from Your sight, Lord; I’ve always been honest that I’ve hated you ever since you let The Prime Mover kill my son.  None of my perfection has ever been hidden from You.” 

In The Book of Revelation, Jesus Christ had uncovered the hypocrisies that the Seven Churches of Asia committed, and Willows successfully replicated those hypocrisies and facades of perfection to weigh down on the chrysostoms’ Crowns for the Faithful.  The crowns acted as triple-beam balances by containing perfection that weighed down on the chrysostoms until the pressure fractured their necks, and when the chrysostoms began to collapse to the street, Willows became elated about the perfect clones’ deaths.  He admired the stacks of dead chrysostoms and insisted that he had not succumbed to the Church of Laodicea’s sin of being “lukewarm” by shrieking, “Do you see what I did?  I wasn’t ‘lukewarm’ like the Church of Laodicea, God.  I picked a side on the scale; I wasn’t like your Prime Mover who thought that he could stand on the scale’s fulcrum and weigh ‘the dust of the earth in a basket.’  If his ‘honest scales and balances’ weigh opposites of sins and perfection, then, I picked my side; I picked my opposite.  I know that I’m a hypocrite; I’m a sinner in Your eyes.”

Willows’ public acknowledgement that he was a sinner alleviated the weight of the chrysostoms’ crowns because as his sins exerted pressure on one side of The Prime Mover’s scale, the side that measured perfection was pushed up until the crowns were extracted from the chrysostoms’ heads.  Masser longed for the perfection that God originally intended and lamented that Willows had eradicated the biologists’ eight perfect chrysostoms by exploiting their crowns as weighing scales.  While Masser openly sobbed, the curandero known as The Prime Mover emerged from behind the lab and responded to Willows’ contention that he had “picked” his “opposite” by proclaiming, “Yes, Mr. Willows, you picked your opposite; you weren’t ‘lukewarm.’  The only problem is that you picked sins on my scales.” 

Willows turned away from the piles of dead chrysostoms and became livid at the sight of The Prime Mover whose “honest scales and balances” had killed Willows’ son during a failed healing ritual.  Wearing the curandero’s orange shirt with black stripes, The Prime Mover calmly yanked the purple scarf around his neck and gripped the luminous teeter-totter known as The Syncretizer to dazzle Willows and Masser.  Willows frantically charged toward The Prime Mover, but Masser restrained Willows from attacking the curandero and pleaded with his fellow sanitation worker to refrain from violence.  While The Prime Mover’s Syncretizer represented the “lights” of his Urim, the Five Crowns for the Faithful encapsulated the “perfections” of his opposing Thummim, and Willows became even more furious when The Prime Mover hurled the white Crown of Incorruptibility to the pile of the dead chrysostoms’ crowns.  Willows and Masser both recognized the white Crown of Incorruptibility as the weighing scale that had killed Willows’ son Drew, and as Masser positioned his palms on his chest, Willows shrieked, “What do you want, healer?  You killed my son with your hocus-pocus, and I’m going to kill you.” 

The eight biologists who had immersed themselves inside the hypostasis emerged from the lab and were dismayed by the two stacks of their dead clones and of the Crowns for the Faithful that the clones had worn to symbolize their perfection.  As the biologists stepped over the assortment of dead clones with fractured necks, The Prime Mover quoted The Book of Ezekiel’s Twenty-Eighth Chapter to elaborate on Willows’ rejection of being “lukewarm” and of the clones’ perfection by asserting, “You’ve already killed eight chrysostoms yourself, Mr. Willows.  You killed ten people in Job’s family.  Why shouldn’t you be able to kill me with all of the pain and death that you’ve caused?  You’ve pushed away the perfection on my ‘honest scales and balances,’ so I knew that you would wipe out the chrysostoms for being perfect.  It hurts me to see you forsake your God-given perfection.  ‘You were the seal of perfection, full of wisdom and perfect in beauty.’  ‘Your heart became proud on account of your beauty, and you corrupted your wisdom because of your splendor.’  When you sinned, you were cast as a profane thing from the mountain of God.  You tarnished your perfection with sins, and you’ve fallen so far from Heaven, ‘morning star,’ ‘son of the dawn.’  You had to destroy the chrysostoms’ perfection.  It’s in your nature to shun perfection and to pick the side of sins on my scale, but at least, you’ve picked a side, right?  At least, you’re not ‘lukewarm’ like the Church of Laodicea.  You should be proud of yourself, ‘morning star.’” 

While the biologists processed the deaths of their chrysostoms in the distance, Willows deduced that The Prime Mover had cited The Book of Isaiah’s Fourteenth Chapter in which God banished “the morning star” Lucifer into “the realm of the dead” in Hell.  He resented the accusation that he was a murderer and argued that although he had spurned perfection by eliminating the eight chrysostoms, he had never harmed any real humans by replying, “What are you talking about, healer?  I just wiped out some perfect clones before they could start accusing people of being sinners; I’d never hurt any real people.  I’m not a killer; you are.” 

            Willows silently contemplated why The Prime Mover had accused him of murder and why he had referred to him as “the morning star,” which could be either the “light-bearing” angel Lucifer prior to his expulsion to Hell or the planet Venus that was barreling closer to Earth.  Before Willows could confront The Prime Mover, hundreds of basaltic rocks became dislodged from Venus’ surface and streaked down to the Earth to destroy locations in ancient Persia, Greece, Turkey, Syria, Egypt, and Rome.  On Venus’ rocky surface, more volcanoes erupted to release more carbon dioxide into its poisonous atmosphere, and its sulfuric clouds discharged lightning that severed more basaltic rocks, which the solar winds collected and hurled to the Earth.  When one of Venus’ meteorites collided into the ground and generated an explosion near Willows, Masser, and The Prime Mover, Willows recoiled in reaction to the fireball and the burning terrain that was a few feet away from him.  With the flames warming his face, Willows blamed Venus’ peculiar counter-clockwise rotation and its movement toward Earth for the destruction by shouting, “Venus is the real ‘morning star,’ healer.  It’s all falling apart.”                

            Standing next to Willows, Masser scanned the flaming crater that Venus had carved into the terrain, and the cataclysmic image reminded him of the Island of Patmos to which the Roman Emperor Domitian had banished John the Apostle when he wrote The Book of Revelation.  The Island of Patmos’ volcanic landscape inspired John the Apostle to write about the Apocalyptic opening of the seven seals, the playing of the seven trumpets, and the pouring out of the seven bowls that would unleash plagues, darkness, and death to eradicate the Earth.  As the fiery landscape evoked the Biblical end of the world, The Prime Mover raised his luminous teeter-totter known as The Syncretizer, and its sides both began to lower to indicate that human sins were weighing down on it.  In The Book of Revelation’s Third Chapter, the hypocritical Church of Philadelphia wielded the Key of David that would lead to the Kingdom of Heaven, and The Prime Mover claimed that The Syncretizer represented the Key of David and quoted The Book of Isaiah’s condemnation of ancient Babylon by proclaiming, “Mr. Willows, you are the real ‘morning star.’  You and Venus are one in the same ‘morning star;’ Venus is your weighing scale.  Your hypocrisy has pulled Venus into its counter-clockwise rotation, and now, you’re pulling it down toward the Earth.  Venus’ rocks are falling to make way for the ‘angel of the bottomless pit’ to be set free.  For a whole year, I’ve been the standing on the watchtower, waiting for Babylon to fall; I’ve been the ‘unmoved mover’ who wouldn’t budge from the watchtower.  Now, ‘Babylon has fallen,’ and ‘all the images of its gods lie shattered on the ground.’  You’ve used Venus to destroy Babylon, Persia, Rome, Egypt, Turkey, Syria, and Greece to try to free yourself from the Abyss, and my Syncretizer is the Key of David that can unshackle you.  If you’re free, you can continue to deceive the nations.”              

            Recognizing The Prime Mover’s assertions about the prophetic destruction of Babylon as quotations from The Book of Isaiah’s Twenty-first Chapter, Willows shoved Masser aside and assured the curandero that he was not influencing Venus’ meteorites to fall by shouting, “Do you think that I’ve caused this?  Venus has been moving counter-clockwise for over a year; it was only a matter of time that it would break itself apart and start raining down on the Earth.  You’re not the ‘unmoved mover’ on the watchtower; you’re just a killer.” 

            As the nearby flames sizzled and the biologists panicked amidst the rubble, The Prime Mover motioned for Masser to approach him, and when Masser stood at his side to join him, Willows’ confusion became compounded by the sight of his friend’s alliance with the curandero.  In a moment of discovery about Masser’s true identity, Willows could only choke out, “Luke, what are you doing with him?,” and Masser explained his inexplicable knowledge of Willows’ visions by muttering, “I’m sorry, Patrick, but how do you think that I knew about your visions?  When you were committing sins to try to lift the Crown of Incorruptibility off of your son’s head, you saw those things in the mirror.  You saw a lion, a bear, a leopard, and a beast with iron teeth and ‘nails of brass.’  You know that the Prophet Daniel saw those in his dreams while he was exiled in Babylon; they showed that Israel’s enemies would be destroyed by God.  In The Book of Revelation, all of Israel’s enemies are destroyed so that they can come together to create one beast; that beast is the Devil, ‘the morning star’ before God cast him into a ‘lake of fire’ in Hell.  The planet Venus has become your weighing scale; you’re pulling it down to destroy Israel’s enemies to make way for the Devil.”     

            Willows still could not fathom how Masser was aware that he had encountered visions of a lion, a bear, and a leopard during his efforts to use sins to extract the white Crown of Incorruptibility from his son’s cranium.  As Willows delved into his memories of The Book of Daniel’s Seventh Chapter, he recalled that the Israelite Prophet Daniel had witnessed the same visions during the Babylonian Exile under King Nebuchadnezzar.  In Daniel’s dreams, the lion with “eagle’s wings” represented the Babylonian Empire, the bear with “three ribs” symbolized the Persian Empire, and the leopard with the “four wings of a foul” was the Greek Empire, and Daniel prophesized that Babylon, Persia, and Greece would be annihilated to punish them for oppressing the Israelites.  According to The Book of Revelation’s Seventeenth Chapter, Israel’s enemies Babylon, Persia, and Greece would merge together to form the Devil, “the morning star.”  While Willows accepted that had experienced the same visions that the Prophet Daniel interpreted as an omen that Babylon and Israel’s other enemies would be obliterated, he replied, “Okay, so I saw Daniel’s visions from the Babylonian Exile.  Daniel saw the sins of Israel’s enemies, and I did, too.  How did you know about them, Luke?  Who are you really?”

            As The Prime Mover clasped his flattened Syncretizer, Masser announced that he was The Prime Mover’s apprentice and that he had been monitoring Willows since his son’s death by replying, “I’m a curandero called a ‘yerbero;’ I use planets to heal people.  After your son died, The Prime Mover commissioned me to watch you; he wanted me to figure out what you really are.  He was afraid that he’d lost his faith in God’s glory, but he’d never had his bread turn into a stone before.  He’s used to extracting sins with a candle and eating them on the bread, so when you made his bread turn into a stone, he knew that you were special.” 

Willows conceded that Masser was actually a curandero who had betrayed him, and he invoked that The Prime Mover had engaged in “ear candling” to extract his son’s sins and that the sins caused a piece of bread to transform into a stone so that the curandero could not consume them as a “sin-eater.”  While Venus acted as a weighing scale that descended closer to the Earth, Willows denied that he had controlled Venus to eradicate Israel’s enemies and had transformed the bread into stone by muttering, “What makes me so special?  I didn’t use Venus to destroy Babylon, and I didn’t turn The Prime Mover’s bread into stone.  I don’t know why Venus is bringing down these rocks on the Earth, but none of this is my fault.” 

The Prime Mover accused Willows of being a disguised form of the Devil based on the Apocalyptic visions that he shared with the Israelite Prophet Daniel by bellowing, “How hard is it for you to see that you’re the Devil, Mr. Willows?  You’re the ‘ancient serpent’ and ‘the morning star’ that God cast from the hierarchy of angels into Hell.” 

Although Willows could not rationalize his visions of a lion, a bear, and a leopard or the transformation of The Prime Mover’s bread into a stone, the curandero’s outrageous allegations mystified him and prompted him to bray, “No, just because I can’t explain my visions or the bread doesn’t mean that I’m the Devil.  You killed my son, healer, and I can’t help it that Venus is destroying the world.  I don’t have control over any of this; this is ridiculous.  You deserve to die for what you’ve done; you took everything from me.” 

Masser was confident that the lion, the bear, and the leopard represented the Babylonian Empire, the Persian Empire, and the Greek Empire that oppressed the Israelites and that needed to be destroyed and merged together so that Israel’s ultimate enemy the Devil could be unleashed on the Earth.  Willows’ passionate denial that he was the Devil goaded Masser to compare him to the same lion that symbolized “The Mother of Prostitutes” Babylon when he sarcastically quipped, “I knew that you would lie about what you really are, ‘morning star;’ St. Paul called you ‘the father of lies.’  You know what you saw in that mirror while you were trying to save your son.  You saw a lion, a leopard, and a bear in your reflection because that’s what you are.  You’re the merger of Babylon, Persia, and Greece; you’re ‘the angel of the bottomless pit.’  Babylon was a lion just like you are; 1 Peter warned that ‘the Devil walks about like a roaring lion.’  You can’t hide what you are anymore.”             

While Willows entertained the notion that the Devil was “the angel of light” and the merger of Israel’s enemies Babylon, Persia, and Greece, the biologists and other Wilmington residents reacted to Venus’ destructive meteor with wild panic.  The Prime Mover accused Willows of killing the chrysostoms to tarnish perfection just as the Devil tempted Adam and Eve to commit the original sin that corrupted their perfect paradise in The Book of Genesis by bellowing, “It’s okay, ‘morning star;’ you can admit what you are.  I knew that I could prove that you were the Devil.  No matter what, you always try to ruin the perfection that God originally intended for this world.  That’s why I knew that you would kill the perfect chrysostoms with your sins.  You couldn’t stand the perfection that Adam and Eve had in the beginning, and I knew that you wouldn’t be able to stand the perfection of the chrysostoms.  You ruined your own ‘seal of perfection’ and ‘corrupted your wisdom because of your splendor;’ I knew that you would try to destroy any of humanity’s hopes for perfection, too.  That’s why you killed the chrysostoms and why you’re using Venus as your own personal ‘scales and balances’ to pull it down on the Earth.”

Willows glanced back at the assortment of dead chrysostoms and their discarded Crowns for the Faithful, and he considered the possibility that the Devil could control Venus as his personal weighing scale simply because the Devil and Venus were both known as “the morning star.”  He persisted in dismissing the possibilities that the Devil and Venus were synonymous and that he was obsessed with sullying perfection by answering, “I’m telling you the truth, healer.  I’m not the Devil, and I can’t control Venus.  Just because Venus and the Devil are both called ‘the morning star’ doesn’t mean that they’re the same.  I don’t even hate perfection.  I just hated the chrysostoms for pointing out how sinful humans are.  I don’t care what you guys say; you still killed my son.” 

The Prime Mover argued that Willows had accidentally killed his own son by converting the curandero’s bread into stone in an event that subverted the Devil’s temptation of Jesus Christ in The Book of Matthew’s Fourth Chapter by retorting, “No, ‘morning star,’ you did.  I extracted the ‘scarlet’ sins from your son’s ear and smeared it on my bread to eat it, but you turned the bread into a stone.  Do you remember when the Devil took Jesus Christ into the wilderness to tempt him?  The Devil encouraged Christ to turn some stones into bread, and Christ refused.  You just subverted what happened to Christ and turned my bread into a stone.  You even offered to give me everything that you owned to convince me to help your son; it’s just like when the Devil offered to give Christ ‘all the kingdoms of the world.’  You and the Devil from the Gospels are one in the same, ‘morning star.’  You couldn’t tempt Christ to fall down and worship you in the wilderness, and you couldn’t get me either.  You’re always a tempter, and it made you kill your own son.  You couldn’t stand that I was going to eat the sin that made him sick; you love sin so much that you couldn’t let me get rid of it.”

Willows acknowledged that in the wilderness, the Devil had unsuccessfully tempted Jesus Christ to worship him by encouraging him to morph stones into bread and by offering him “all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor.”  However, he refused to accept that he could be the same Devil that tested Christ in The Book of Matthew or that he had transformed bread into stones to prevent The Prime Mover from consuming his son’s “scarlet” sins that were smeared on the bread.  While the Wilmington neighborhood burned from Venus’ meteorite and citizens panicked, Willows realized that the lion, the leopard, and the bear had appeared in his reflection because they represented the combination of Israel’s sinful enemies into “the angel of light” known as the Devil.  Considering that Willows had killed the perfect clones known as chrysostoms, he also conceded that he despised perfection and embraced sins, but he could not believe that he had converted The Prime Mover’s bread into a stone simply to protect the sins that caused his son’s illness from being devoured.  He indulged in the hypothesis that his reflected visions actually represented the merger of Israel’s enemies into the Devil and that he had caused his own son’s death to preserve sins by rasping, “So, let me get this straight, healer; I’m the Devil.  I saw the same visions as the Prophet Daniel during the Babylonian Exile.  My sins made me see Israel’s enemies as the lion, the bear, and the leopard that came together to create me, and I even let my own son die just to preserve the sins that made him sick.  You seem to have known that I would want to kill the chrysostoms for being perfect, since I hate perfection and try to destroy it with sins whenever I can.  The only thing that you’re forgetting is that I was a Christian missionary in Ecuador for twelve years; that doesn’t sound like the work of the Devil to me.”

Masser was assured that Willows’ missionary work only served as more substantial evidence that he was truly the Devil considering that prior to the Devil’s expulsion into Hell, he had been God’s greatest servant as the “Light-bearing” angel Lucifer.  Quoting The Book of Isaiah’s Fourteenth Chapter, he acknowledged that the Devil had been God’s most dutiful angel and described the parallels between Venus and Lucifer as the two forms of the “morning star” by proclaiming, “It’s obvious that the Devil would be a missionary for God.  After all, the Devil used to be the perfect angel Lucifer; he was God’s greatest servant.  He was ‘the morning star,’ the ‘son of the dawn,’ who loved God until he decided that he wanted to ‘ascend to the heavens’ and to raise his throne ‘above the stars of God.’  You were the ‘light-bearing’ angel, but after God cast you down to Hell, you were just the Devil, not ‘the morning star.’”        

Willows grasped that the Devil had originally been the angel Lucifer, “the morning star,” and he referred to 2 Peter to maintain that “the morning star” once denoted righteousness and God’s hope by asserting, “I’m not the Devil, Luke; if anything, I’m ‘the morning star’ that he used to be.  2 Peter says that ‘the morning star’ is ‘a light shining in a dark place;’ ‘the morning star’ is a symbol of God’s hope and salvation for humanity.  It can’t be anything but good.” 

The Prime Mover was adamant that the angel Lucifer had once assumed the role of the “Light-bearing” “morning star” but that “the morning star” was stripped of its virtuous qualities after God cast Lucifer into Hell to become the Devil.  He reiterated his verse from The Book of James’ Second Chapter by laconically interceding, “No, the Devil used to be the good ‘morning star,’ but that’s all been lost.  Now, he’s ‘the great red dragon’ and the ‘old serpent’ who tempts humanity, but he’s still God’s greatest servant.  He still fears God more than anyone else.  It’s just like I told you, ‘You believe that there is one God.  Good!  Even the demons believe that, and shudder.’  You may be the Devil, Mr. Willows, but you’re still God’s greatest servant.” 

Willows assured himself that the two curanderoes The Prime Mover and Masser were duping him into believing that he was the Devil, “the morning star” in Hell.  As he pondered that his sins had triggered his visions of the lion, the bear, and the leopard in his reflection and that he had converted The Prime Mover’s bread into a stone to preserve sins and to shun perfection, he incredulously whispered, “So, you guys think that I’m the Devil with amnesia.  If I were really the Devil, I think that I would know.”

The Prime Mover proposed that the Devil was such a devoted servant of God that he occasionally forgot that he was evil and alluded to the Biblical wagers between God and the Devil by proclaiming, “We told you that the Devil is God’s greatest servant.  He serves God so well that he forgets who he is, but any good that he did as ‘the morning star’ is gone.  As far as I’m concerned, you and God made a bet that you could come to Earth to try to be His greatest servant again.  It’s just like the bet that you made with God in The Book of Job; you bet Him that His servant Job would curse Him if he lost his family.  You made Job suffer and killed his family with ‘a mighty wind,’ but you lost your bet with God.  Job stayed patient in the face of his suffering, and God rewarded him with a long and prosperous life.  Now, you’ve made another bet with God that you could be His greatest servant again, but you failed because you hate perfection so much.  You killed the chrysostoms, and that’s all that we need to know that you’re the Devil.  You’ll never be ‘the morning star’ again.” 

In a cracking voice, Willows contended that even if the Devil had bet God that he could become His most eminent servant as “the morning star” again, God was responsible for killing many more humans than the Devil was by shrieking, “Who has the Devil ever really killed?  He killed Job’s seven sons and three daughters to make a bet with God that Job would curse Him for His cruelty, but God has killed way more people than that.  God wiped out 1,200 people at Sodom and Gomorrah.  He killed over 14,000 Israelites for complaining about their lack of food in The Book of Numbers.  He even forced the Israelite Judge Jephthah to sacrifice his own daughter as a burnt offering.  The Devil killed ten people in Job’s family; God killed thousands.”

The Prime Mover recognized that God was permitted to murder thousands of humans because His judgment was divine and honorable, but the Devil’s murder of the Biblical character Job’s family occurred only because the Devil was wicked and sought to test Job’s perseverance.  Masser recounted the Devil’s efforts to tarnish perfection and to perpetuate sins by declaring, “It doesn’t matter, Mr. Willows.  By His nature, everything that God does is just.  Everything that you do is done for evil.  You corrupted your own ‘seal of perfection,’ you tempted Adam and Eve to be expelled from their perfect Paradise, and now, you’ve killed the perfect chrysostoms.  You’ve chosen the side of sins on the scale, but at least, you’re not ‘lukewarm’ anymore.  You’re the Devil, God’s greatest servant and His greatest adversary.” 

  Willows processed that the Devil could have arrived on Earth to endeavor to regain his venerable position as God’s greatest servant “the morning star” Lucifer, but he was bewildered that The Prime Mover had labored to expose his true identity as the Devil.  Willows questioned why The Prime Mover and Masser had revealed that the Devil was such a devoted servant of God that he could forget that he was evil, and Willows also wondered why the two curanderoes wished to expose him as the Devil by asking, “Why did you need to do this?  Even if I am the Devil who loves sin and hates perfection, why did you need to prove it to me?  Why couldn’t you just let me have my bet with God and try to become His greatest servant as ‘the morning star’ again?  I was trying to be ‘the morning star’ as a missionary for twelve years.  Why did you want to take that away?”

The Prime Mover was aware that his faith in the opposites of good and evil had been corrupted by the Devil’s struggles to regain his status as God’s most cherished servant in a bet.  The Prime Mover’s compromised faith had hindered his efforts to cure individuals by calibrating his “honest scales and balances” and had caused ten innocent individuals to perish during the healing rituals.  In a vigorous tone, The Prime Mover insisted that he needed to regain his faith to heal ill individuals successfully and cited The Book of Romans’ Fourteenth Chapter when he asserted, “Because I had to, ‘morning star.’  Your bet with God that you could be his greatest servant again ruined my faith in good and evil.  Romans 14 says that, ‘everything that does not come from faith is sin;’ without my faith, I can’t save anyone as a curandero.  I can’t balance sins and perfection to cast the sins out if I don’t have faith in good and evil.  I accidentally killed ten people while I was trying to cast out the sins that made them sick; it was all because I didn’t have my faith.  I had to expose you for the evil creature that you are because I can’t have faith in God’s goodness if I don’t know about the Devil’s evil.  Good and evil are opposites on my scales; they define each other.” 

            As Willows concluded that the Devil’s evil needed to exist to serve as an opposite for God’s goodness, he realized that the Devil was incapable of regaining his status as the angel Lucifer because his evil defined and enhanced God’s goodness on a metaphorical scale of opposites.  Willows probed into the status of The Prime Mover’s damaged faith and the discovery of the hypostasis as the “primordial soup” by asking, “Well, have you gotten your faith back then, healer?  Did you get what you want by trying to expose me as the Devil with amnesia?  The hypostasis was my discovery.  Are you going to take that away from me, too, just to get your faith back?” 

            Masser emphasized that The Prime Mover had planted the whirlpool known as the hypostasis so that Willows would tarnish the perfection that it generated with the chrysostoms by bellowing, “The Prime Mover has done everything to get his faith back.  He’s the one who put the hypostasis in the sewer for us to find; it really is the ‘primordial soup’ that birthed humans the way that God wanted them to be in the beginning before sins ruined them.  He knew that you would destroy the perfection that the hypostasis would make if you were really the Devil.  You’ve destroyed its perfection by killing the chrysostoms; now, he’s got proof that you’re the Devil.  He knew that you’d made a bet with God that you could become his greatest servant again, and he looked for you for a long time.  When you had your visions of the lion, the leopard, and the bear and turned The Prime Mover’s bread into a stone to keep him from eating the sins, he knew that you were the Devil.  He knew that you hated perfection and loved sins; he just had to expose you as the Devil to get his faith in good and evil back.” 

            The white whirlpool known as the hypostasis certainly was a remnant of the primordial soup from which perfect humans emerged before the Devil tempted them and caused their perfection to become tarnished.  The Prime Mover transported the hypostasis to the sewer so that Willows would uncover the whirlpool and become obsessed with eradicating the perfection that it created by cloning humans.  According to the Scriptures, God expelled one-third of His angels to Hell to punish them for aligning themselves with the Devil, and as Willows processed that The Prime Mover had planted the hypostasis, he recalled that one-third of Wilmington’s sanitation workers had joined him to form a workers’ union.  Willows addressed his all-encompassing role as the Devil and the workers’ union that sought to obtain improved rights by rasping, “You’re telling me that everything that I’ve done is because I’m the Devil with amnesia.  What about the workers’ union that I put together in Frank Barron’s memory?  I got thirty out of sixty sanitation workers to join me.  The Devil persuaded one-third of God’s angels to join him, too, so is that just further proof to you that I’m the Devil?  Have I lost my bet with God that I could be his ‘morning star’ again?”

            Masser nodded to confirm that one-third of the sanitation workers had aligned with Willows in correspondence with God’s banishment of the Devil Lucifer and one-third of His rebellious angels into Hell.  Venus and the Devil both were recognized as “the morning star” because the Devil was destined to manipulate Venus as his personal weighing scale through his connection to it.  For a year, Venus had been rotating in a counter-clockwise fashion since the death of Willows’ son, and Willows now grasped that his grief and frustrations with God were stimulating him to pull Venus into its irregular orbit toward the Earth.  The Prime Mover elaborated on the significance of Venus’ peculiar counter-clockwise movement and its correlation with the Devil’s power by bellowing, “Yes, you’ve lost your bet, and you’ve fallen with one-third of your friends.  You’ve been pulling Venus into its counter-clockwise rotation for a year since your son’s died; your anger with God has made you pull it down.  You and Venus are both ‘the morning star.’  You’re one with the planet, but there’s more to it than that.  There’re desert whirlwinds called ‘dust devils,’ and they’re ‘dust devils’ for a reason.  The Navajo Indians called them ‘chiindii.’  They think that the ‘dust devils’ are spirits of their ancestors, and if the ‘dust devils’ spin counter-clockwise, the Navajo think that the spirits are bad.  Only good spirits spin clockwise, and you’ve been turning Venus counter-clockwise since your son died.  You’re using Venus as your weighing scale, and it’s showing us all what you really are.  You can’t hide anymore that you’re trying to bring Venus down to the Earth.” 

            Willows now was familiar with the whirlwinds known as “dust devils,” and based on The Prime Mover’s accusations that Willows was the Devil, it was apparent that the related “dust devils” spun in counter-clockwise rotations to symbolize evil Navajo spirits just as Venus moved counter-clockwise to indicate Willows’ control over the planet.  Willows recalled that Venus’ sulfuric clouds were discharging Earth-like lightning, and based on Jesus Christ’s statement that he witnessed the Devil’s “fall like lightning” in The Book of Luke, Willows questioned whether the Devil had plummeted from Venus’ lightning by remarking, “Well, Luke and I noticed that there’s a lot of lightning on Venus.  Christ said that he ‘saw Satan fall like lightning.’  Does that mean that I fell out of Venus’ lightning since I’m one with the planet as ‘the morning star?’  I mean, I always thought that the Devil was ‘a great red dragon’ with ‘seven heads and ten horns’ and ‘seven crowns upon his heads.’  I don’t look like that at all.”

            The Prime Mover discerned that Willows had referred to The Book of Revelation’s Twelfth Chapter in which John the Apostle described the Devil as “a great red dragon” that exhibited “seven heads and ten horns” and that donned crowns.  With the curandero’s motioning, Masser sauntered around the destruction that Venus’ meteor had crafted into the terrain, and he removed the white Crown of Incorruptibility from a bag and tossed the crown into the collection of dead chrysostoms’ crowns.  Willows detected the red Crown of Rejoicing that Masser’s clone had donned prior to his death in Father Garrick’s “True Vine” church that embodied a modern-day Church of Thyatira, and Willows’ son had worn the white Crown of Incorruptibility during his failed exorcism.  The Prime Mover pointed to the pile of the chrysostoms’ ten Crowns for the Faithful to suggest that Willows would wield the crowns on his ten horns.  During The Prime Mover’s past exorcism of Willows’ son, Willows had committed sins to lift the white Crown of Incorruptibility from his son’s head, and the sins goaded Willows to perceive the bear, the leopard, and the bear that originally represented Israel’s enemies to the Prophet Daniel.  The bear, the leopard, and the bear would merge together to form the Devil, and Willows now had pulled Venus’ meteorites down to the Earth to eliminate Israel’s seven major enemies Babylon, Turkey, Rome, Syria, Egypt, Greece, and Persia.  The Prime Mover believed that as the Devil, Willows would wear the dead chrysostoms’ ten Crowns for the Faithful on his horns and that his seven heads symbolized Israel’s seven enemies after they were destroyed and were merged together to generate the single “great red dragon” known as the Devil.  The two curanderoes pinpointed the functions of the chrysostoms’ ten Crowns for the Faithful and the seven regions that Venus’ meteorites had eradicated by shouting, “You’ve killed eight chrysostoms to show how much you hate perfection, and I’ve added the red Crown of Rejoicing from Mr. Masser’s dead clone and your son’s white Crown of Incorruptibility.  Those are the crowns that you’ll wear on your ten horns.  You’ve been pulling Venus down ever since your son died, and its meteorites have wiped out Israel’s seven enemies to make way for you to come out of the Abyss.  The seven enemies are going to merge to form you as the Devil; those are your seven heads.” 

            Willows was confident that if he were truly the Devil with amnesia, he would carry the ten Crowns for the Faithful on his horns.  He now fully appreciated the images of the lion, the bear, and the leopard that appeared in his reflection to display Israel’s conquered enemies because they needed to be combined to unleash the Devil with seven heads, which would symbolize Israel’s seven merged enemies.  Quoting the explosive cataclysm from The Book of Isaiah’s Ninth Chapter, he examined his abilities to manipulate “the morning star” Venus as his personal weighing scale and to use its meteorites to demolish Israel’s adversaries by muttering, “You think that I used Venus to wipe out Israel’s enemies.  God promised to eradicate Babylon and Egypt for oppressing Israel.  Isaiah says, ‘By the wrath of the Lord Almighty, the land will be scorched, and the people will be fuel for the fire.’  Venus’ meteorites are streaming to Earth, so have I fulfilled your prophecy yet, healer?  What else can I do for you?”

            While the nearby crater continued to burn and more Wilmington residents surveyed the damage, The Prime Mover became adamant that according to The Book of Isaiah’s Fortieth Chapter, he was required to use his “honest scales and balances” to weigh mountains.  He was compelled to expose Willows as the Devil to regain the faith that he needed to heal victims, and he explained that his faith would allow him to manipulate mountains by answering, “I don’t know, ‘morning star.’  My balance should help me hold ‘the dust of the earth in a basket’ and weigh ‘the mountains on the scales’ while I’m the ‘unmoved mover’ on the watchtower.  In The Book of Matthew, Christ said that, ‘if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move.’  We’ll have to see if my faith can move the mountain and weigh it in my scales.”            

            Willows became furious that The Prime Mover had planted the hypostasis pool that was comparable to The Book of John 5’s Pool of Bethesda that healed “disabled people” of their sicknesses by erasing the sins that caused those sicknesses.  The Prime Mover had planted the hypostasis pool to uncover Willows’ true identity as the Devil because Willows lost his wager with God that he would be able to reacquire his status as the dutiful angel known as “the morning star” Lucifer.  The Prime Mover gripped The Syncretizer that served as a side of his “honest scales and balances,” and as Willows evoked that one of the Biblical Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse brandished a weighing scale, he lamented that God would not give him a second chance to serve Him and compared The Prime Mover to the wicked horseman Famine by whimpering, “Why did you have to show me that I’m the Devil just to get your faith back?  Why couldn’t you let me become God’s greatest servant again?  I could’ve served Him as a missionary; I could’ve had a second chance.  Why does God give everyone else a second chance except for me?  You didn’t have to ruin my life with your scales; you’re just like the Famine horseman ‘holding a pair of scales in his hands.’  You’ve ruined everything that I’ve tried to get back.  I’m going to kill you.”

            Willows embraced his true persona as the Devil and managed to sprout ten horns and six more heads that symbolized Israel’s conquered enemies, and as the two curanderoes The Prime Mover and Masser trembled with fear, Willows carried and placed the ten Crowns for the Faithful on his horns.  The Crowns of the Faithful encapsulated the chrysostoms’ perfection, so by wearing them, he could manipulate the perfection that he yearned to exterminate.  He telepathically employed the similar hypocrisy and the appearance of perfection for which Jesus Christ reproached the Seven Churches of Asia, and Willows’ hypocrisy allowed him to yank his weighing scale Venus closer to the Earth.  As Willows pulled Venus down from its counter-clockwise rotation, the planet discharged more lightning in the same manner that Satan originally fell “like lightning,” and The Prime Mover perceived that Willows was employing the Devil’s connection with Venus as the two variations of “the morning star.”  The Prime Mover sprinted away from Masser and prepared to engage in cleromancy by casting The Syncretizer as his Urim’s “lights,” which would create sins that could counter Willows’ hypocrisy and his façade of perfection on the scales.  In The Book of Jonah, many sailors “cast lots” in cleromancy to determine that it was God’s will for the Prophet Jonah to be hurled into the sea and to be devoured by a whale, and Jonah’s three-day survival in the whale’s belly is a metaphor for the Israelites’ fifty-two ordeal during the Babylonian Exile from 586 to 538 BC.  Willows had regulated “the morning star” Venus to use its meteorites to destroy Babylon for enslaving the Israelites in the exile, and Israelites’ seven enemies now had been eradicated and combined to allow Willows to become the Devil that exploited Venus as his weighing scale.  The Syncretizer had become the Key of David that exposed Willows as the Devil whose evil was required to contrast with God’s goodness, and after The Prime Mover cast The Syncretizer in his cleromancy, he charged into the panic-stricken crowd of biologists and other Wilmington residents.  While he searched for the eight biologists who had cloned themselves inside the hypostasis, Willows used his hypocritical appearance of perfection to pull Venus and to detach its basaltic rocks so that they would streak to the Earth.  When the curandero Masser trudged toward the crowd in an attempt to escape, Willows telepathically hurled one of Venus’ rocks into Masser to incinerate him and to sculpt another crater into the terrain, and with his control over “the morning star” Venus, he tossed more smaller meteorites to the ground.                             

            While Venus’ sulfuric clouds emitted more lightning in reaction to the Devil’s Biblical descent “like lightning,” Willows reveled in Masser’s death, and The Prime Mover located each of the eight biologists in the crowd and began to punch them into unconscious states.  He removed several wax candles from his orange coat pocket, lit them, and inserted them into the ears of the unconscious biologists to perform the same “ear candling” that extracted sins from Willows’ son during the failed healing ritual.  The biologists had displayed sinful pride by generating perfect clones of themselves inside the hypostasis because they were unwilling to accept their flaws and sought to erase them through the perfect clones known as chrysostoms, and The Prime Mover hoped that his candles could extract the biologists’ sins.  He elevated the luminous teeter-totter called The Syncretizer higher so that his “honest scales and balances” could attempt to stabilize the opposites of sins and perfection that were being weighed like “a drop in a bucket” and like “dust on the scales.”  In accordance with The Book of Ephesians 2:2's profession that the Devil functions as “the Prince of the power of the air,” Willows intensified the wind to tug his weighing scale Venus closer to the Earth, and his appearance of perfection continued to weigh down on Venus because of the ten perfect crowns that he was wearing.  While his process of “ear candling” drained the biologists’ sins from their earwax, The Prime Mover stood amidst the charred rubble to which Venus’ meteorites had reduced the Wilmington neighborhood.  Holding the luminous Syncretizer, he peered up at the volcanic planet Venus and realized that if Willows pulled it to Earth, Venus would become a scale that would exchange its weighed contents with the Earth, and the Earth would adopt Venus’ volcanic environment in which Willows could reign as the Devil. 

The Book of Jeremiah’s Thirty-First Chapter indicated that God would “reject all the descendants of Israel” only “if the heavens above can be measured,” and considering that scientists had recently measured Venus’ surface area, density, and axial tilt, God would reject humanity if Venus and the Earth switched atmospheres on the metaphorical weighing scale.  With dread that Willows would transform the Earth into Venus’ original volcanic atmosphere and that God would forsake humanity, The Prime Mover plucked the candles from the unconscious biologists’ ears and watched their “scarlet” sins pour from the earwax.  As the gaseous red blanket of sins permeated throughout the air, he bounced The Syncretizer up and down to propel the “scarlet” sins in the direction of “the morning star” Venus.  Because The Book of Isaiah 1:18 described sin as “scarlet” and its opposite of perfection as being “as white as snow,” a field of white light had amassed around Venus to embody the hypocritical appearance of perfection that Willows was exploiting to weigh down the planet as his scale.  While the neighborhood sizzled, The Prime Mover extended his arms to raise the radiant Syncretizer higher, and the red sins collided into the white perfection around Venus to cause an enormous explosion in the night sky.  Watching the fireball that the interaction between the red sins and the white perfection had triggered, The Prime Mover realized that the biologists’ red sins could not deplete Willows’ white perfection around Venus.  The Prime Mover conceded that he could not impede Venus’ movement with the red sins, and he recalled that his faith in good and evil was truly the imperative element to his successful use of “honest scales and balances.” 

In The Book of Revelation's Twelfth Chapter, the Devil pulled down “the third part of the stars of heaven,” and as Willowed used his hypocritical perfection to pull his weighing scale Venus into Earth’s mesosphere, The Prime Mover became anxious that Venus would also exert pressure on the stars to push them to the ground.  In his role as “the Prince of the power of the air,” Willows intensified the wind and shoved it into Venus, and The Prime Mover comprehended that although he had exposed Willows as the Devil, he still lacked his imperative faith as a curandero.  The wind was becoming so intense that it reminded Willows of the “dust devils” that spun in counter-clockwise directions to indicate the presence of evil spirits in Navajo mythology, and as the wind pummeled The Prime Mover, he gripped The Syncretizer and struggled to stand upright.  Willows’ weighing scale Venus dislodged more basaltic meteorites that plummeted to the Earth, and as the ground exploded around him, The Prime Mover glared up from the craters and observed the explosive interactions between the red sins and the white perfection.  In the night sky, collisions continued between the red sins that The Prime Mover’s “ear candling” extracted from the biologists’ ears and the white perfection that Willows had generated with his hypocritical appearance of perfection from the ten Crowns for the Faithful that he was wearing.  With vigorous winds in his face and flames behind him, The Prime Mover shifted his focus to Willows, who had embraced his identity as the Devil by wearing the ten crowns on his horns and by elevating his seven heads that symbolized Israel’s defeated enemies.  As more of Venus’ meteorites streaked to the Earth, The Prime Mover dodged the rocky debris that could easily kill him.  With anxiety that he would soon die, he called to Willows and insisted that Biblical prophecy had been fulfilled by shouting, “Well, you did it, ‘morning star.’  I exposed you as the Devil to get my faith in good and evil back, and you’ve shown me what you really are.  You should thank me; my Syncretizer really is the Key of David that unshackled you from the Abyss.  Do you finally accept that you’re ‘the morning star?’  Will you at least admit that you’re the Devil?  Before you kill me, can you please admit what you are out loud?”

As The Prime Mover clasped The Syncretizer and tolerated the vigorous winds from Venus’ weight, “the great red dragon” Willows prepared to propel his weighing scale Venus into the stars to push them to the ground.  The biologists’ gaseous red sins and the white perfection from Willows’ ten Crowns for the Faithful continued to collide and to explode in Venus’ sulfuric atmosphere, and Willows verbally acknowledged that he was the Devil by screaming, “Yes, healer, I’m the Devil.  I’m ‘the morning star’ who God ‘cast down to the earth’ because I ruined my ‘seal of perfection.’  You’ve helped me become what I really am; I hope that you’re enjoying the end of the world.”       

            Willows exercised his control over “the morning star” Venus to target The Prime Mover with a meteorite, and Willows’ public confession that he was the wicked Devil renewed The Prime Mover’s faith in the opposites of good and evil that defined each other.  The Prime Mover surveyed the ravaged landscape of flames and craters from Venus’ meteorites and praised Willows for indulging in wickedness and for not remaining as “lukewarm” as the Church of Laodicea was by proclaiming, “I’m just happy that you picked a side on the scale.  You didn’t stay ‘lukewarm,’ and you showed me something.  You showed me that I can’t be ‘the unmoved mover’ on the watchtower; I have to make my move.”

            Standing in the flaming rubble and other carnage, The Prime Mover tossed The Syncretizer into the blankets of “scarlet” sins that were rising through the air, and The Syncretizer, which was one side of his “honest scales and balances,” launched the gaseous sins into the Horseshoe Hill mountain.  In The Book of Matthew 17:20, Christ maintained that “a mustard seed” of faith could move a mountain, and The Prime Mover’s reinvigorated faith uprooted the Horseshoe Hill mountain and propelled it up into the Earth’s mesosphere.  The mountain smashed into Willows’ weighing scale Venus and forced the planet upward until it returned to its original location in outer space.  When the mountain plunged from Venus and reentered the Earth’s exosphere, the atmospheric pressure broke apart the mountain into rocks that rained down onto the demolished Wilmington neighborhood.  Three of the mountain’s falling rocks crushed Willows and incinerated him in an explosion while The Prime Mover concentrated on the “mustard seed” of faith that curanderoes required to heal victims of illnesses.  After Willows’ death from the falling debris, Venus readjusted to its traditional clockwise movement because Willows was no longer controlling the planet through the connection that they shared as “the morning star.”  The Wilmington community slowly reacted to the destruction that Willows had caused, and The Prime Mover sprinted around the craters and burning wreckage to flee from public view.  He had regained the faith that he required to weigh the opposites of sins and perfection in his “honest scales and balances,” and as a curandero, he now understood that he could no longer be “lukewarm” and needed to be active instead of “the unmoved mover.”  The Devil was definitely God’s most eminent servant and His greatest adversary, and now that The Prime Mover had abandoned his “lukewarm” personality, he would wait for the Devil to return to the Earth as “the morning star” who would seek to become God’s ally again.  In seclusion, The Prime Mover awaited the Devil’s return, and he could no longer deny the significance of the faith that allowed him to use his scales.