The Planetary Prince of Urantia

66:8.1In look­ing back over the long ca­reer of Cali­gas­tia, we find only one out­stand­ing fea­ture of his con­duct that might have chal­lenged at­ten­tion; he was ul­train­di­vid­u­al­is­tic. He was in­clined to take sides with al­most ev­ery party of protest, and he was usu­ally sym­pa­thetic with those who gave mild ex­pres­sion to im­plied crit­i­cism. We de­tect the early ap­pear­ance of this ten­dency to be rest­less un­der au­thor­ity, to mildly re­sent all forms of super­vi­sion. While slightly re­sent­ful of se­nior coun­sel and some­what restive un­der su­pe­rior au­thor­ity, nonethe­less, when­ever a test had come, he had al­ways proved loyal to the uni­verse rulers and obe­di­ent to the man­dates of the Con­stel­la­tion Fa­thers. No real fault was ever found in him up to the time of his shame­ful be­trayal of Uran­tia.

66:8.2It should be noted that both Lu­cifer and Cali­gas­tia had been pa­tiently in­structed and lov­ingly warned re­spect­ing their crit­i­cal ten­den­cies and the sub­tle de­vel­op­ment of their pride of self and its as­so­ci­ated ex­ag­ger­a­tion of the feel­ing of self-im­por­tance. But all of these at­tempts to help had been mis­con­strued as un­war­ranted crit­i­cism and as un­jus­ti­fied in­ter­fer­ence with per­sonal lib­er­ties. Both Cali­gas­tia and Lu­cifer judged their friendly ad­vis­ers as be­ing ac­tu­ated by the very rep­re­hen­si­ble mo­tives which were be­gin­ning to dom­i­nate their own dis­torted think­ing and mis­guided plan­ning. They judged their un­selfish ad­vis­ers by their own evolv­ing self­ish­ness.

66:8.3From the ar­rival of Prince Cali­gas­tia, plan­e­tary civ­i­liza­tion pro­gressed in a fairly nor­mal man­ner for al­most three hun­dred thou­sand years. Aside from be­ing a life-mod­i­fi­ca­tion sphere and there­fore sub­ject to nu­mer­ous ir­reg­u­lar­i­ties and un­usual episodes of evo­lu­tion­ary fluc­tu­a­tion, Uran­tia pro­gressed very sat­is­fac­to­rily in its plan­e­tary ca­reer up to the times of the Lu­cifer re­bel­lion and the con­cur­rent Cali­gas­tia be­trayal. All sub­se­quent his­tory has been def­i­nitely mod­i­fied by this catas­trophic blun­der as well as by the later fail­ure of Adam and Eve to ful­fill their plan­e­tary mis­sion.

66:8.4The Prince of Uran­tia went into dark­ness at the time of the Lu­cifer re­bel­lion, thus pre­cip­i­tat­ing the long con­fu­sion of the planet. He was sub­se­quently de­prived of sov­er­eign au­thor­ity by the co-or­di­nate ac­tion of the con­stel­la­tion rulers and other uni­verse au­thor­i­ties. He shared the in­ev­i­ta­ble vi­cis­si­tudes of iso­lated Uran­tia down to the time of Adam’s so­journ on the planet and con­tributed some­thing to the mis­car­riage of the plan to up­lift the mor­tal races through the in­fu­sion of the lifeblood of the new vi­o­let race—the de­scen­dants of Adam and Eve.

66:8.5The power of the fallen Prince to dis­turb hu­man af­fairs was enor­mously cur­tailed by the mor­tal in­car­na­tion of Ma­chi­venta Mel­chiz­e­dek in the days of Abra­ham; and sub­se­quently, dur­ing the life of Mi­chael in the flesh, this traitorous Prince was fi­nally shorn of all au­thor­ity on Uran­tia.

66:8.6The doc­trine of a per­sonal devil on Uran­tia, though it had some foun­da­tion in the plan­e­tary pres­ence of the traitorous and in­iq­ui­tous Cali­gas­tia, was nev­er­the­less wholly fic­ti­tious in its teach­ings that such a “devil” could in­flu­ence the nor­mal hu­man mind against its free and nat­u­ral choos­ing. Even be­fore Mi­chael’s be­stowal on Uran­tia, nei­ther Cali­gas­tia nor Dali­gas­tia was ever able to op­press mor­tals or to co­erce any nor­mal in­di­vid­ual into do­ing any­thing against the hu­man will. The free will of man is su­preme in moral af­fairs; even the in­dwelling Thought Ad­juster re­fuses to com­pel man to think a sin­gle thought or to per­form a sin­gle act against the choos­ing of man’s own will.

66:8.7And now this rebel of the realm, shorn of all power to harm his for­mer sub­jects, awaits the fi­nal ad­ju­di­ca­tion, by the Uversa An­cients of Days, of all who par­tic­i­pated in the Lu­cifer re­bel­lion.

66:8.8[Pre­sented by a Mel­chiz­e­dek of Neb­a­don.]