Coded green.

Tuesday 4 December 2001

Painting

Pic of the day: Since I don't have any angels to photograph, I'll randomly portray this painting that an old friend made and gave me before he died.

Al's angels

It does not have quite the same ring to it as "Charlie's Angels", but then again they are not quite competitors. I was reading Al Schroeder's online journal, Nova Notes, when I found this entry about a fictional angel that he created for Marvel Comics.

I kept reading and thinking "this is embarrassing, it's just a slightly powered up version of Zauriel over at DC Comics". Then toward the end of the entry, Al mentions that DC Comics have later published a similar character, Zauriel ... Ouch. I know that feeling. At some time, I seriously thought that I must be a living telepathic broadcast, because actual SF and fantasy writers picked up so many of my nifty ideas even though I had not told a soul. In reality, they probably thought of most of them before I did. It is perhaps not so strange, we see it in science too, how different teams work out the same things without knowing of each other.

***

As for fiction about angels, this is growing quite common lately. Don't ask me why, but it seems to be part of a general trend. Demons are also coming in from the cold, along with trolls and vampires and werewolves and dragons. But these creatures were supposed to be evil, until just recently. Now they are more of a mixed bag. Angels have not seen such a change of heart, but they are becoming more human too. (I'm still talking about fiction, here.) For instance the Swedish-Norwegian female fantasy writer Margit Sandemo wrote a book about a guardian angel who was more or less seduced by the girl he was set to watch over. They eventually fell in love and married, but he had to quit his angel job and go back to being a human. (This angel had been a human in an earlier life, a common concept around here.)

Oh yes, and there is the nifty online comic Savior of Grace, about a woman and a feathered angel who is surprisingly similar to her childhood sweetheart who died as a boy...

In the Bible, angels were indeed prone to falling in love with human women, at least when our race was new. It may be that the women were prettier back then, shortly after creation. Or perhaps more likely, those angels that were the type to fall for mortal women are largely weeded out of the heavenly host by now. The Bible mentions that it happened later too, after the Flood. Of course, this whole thing may have about the same scientific value as Noah's flood itself. It is still worth noticing that the apostle Paul recommends that women cover their head before praying, "for the sake of the angels". Some theologians think this means that the angels, which are attracted by the prayer, could be erotically stimulated by the sight of women's hair. I'm not sure we should go there, though I understand that a woman's hair might be among the most seductive things on Earth.

Of course, it could be a matter of perspective. If so, I suppose demons might have a shoe fetish ... And ladies, don't curse while wearings skirts.

Anyway, I can see the idea of having an angel fall in love with a human woman. He'd go out of his way to conceal it, of course, but you know how perceptive some women can be. (And being male by default, I suppose even an angel would act silly and trip over himself if he fell in love.) So she would find him out eventually. Of course in real life (in so far as you consider Christianity real) he would probably fall from grace if he so much as looked at a woman with desire. In a fictional context, I'd see him keep his powers and his high station as long as they did not consummate. (For rather sensitive definitions of comsummate, of course.) So we'd have a modern equivalent of the old knightly romance, where the heroes can only gaze longingly at one another and never get any...

Hey, I volunteer to write that part.

***

Actually, I have a problem with angel fiction. I feel that it's way too close to blasphemy. I know, it's not like spreading lies about God, more like spreading lies about people. Still, it makes me feel uncomfortable. Aliens are OK, even elves. I don't feel bad having my main characters do magic, even though my religion is rather conservative on that topic. But when it comes to angels, I feel they should be given a bit more respect.

And there's the problem that we know so little about angels. The Bible usually compares them to young men, but at the same time they have the effect of seriously scaring people who see them for the first time. “Fear not!” is the typical greeting of an angel, and even so there are reports of people fainting at their very presence. If they looked like huge tentacled aliens with multiple eyestalks, I could understand the fear factor. But what kind of young men are these, that make strong men tremble with fear? Is it some kind of aura of majesty that surrounds them? I don't know.

I think I would prefer, in writing fiction, to hire out the angel job to some seriously powerful yet benevolent aliens with a highly spiritual attitude. Not necessarily aliens from outer space, but perhaps from parallel worlds, parallel universes. Aliens that live in 4 dimensions + time, just like we live in 3 dimensions + time. They would be able to break the "fourth wall" as we say in comic parlance, or rather the fifth wall in this case. The fourth wall is between the comic character and the reader, and most comic book characters are not aware of it, much less look through it the way we do looking in on them. In the same way, the Messengers might be able to look in on our universe without being observed, step in seemingly out of nowhere, and pass normal obstacles as if by magic. They would also be pretty hard to kill, since only a small part of them would actually be within our 3D universe. (Kind of like a comic book character trying to kill you off by delivering a mighty blow to your finger as you touch the page.)

The Messengers would be intrinsically more intelligent than we – they would have to just to survive in a 4D world – and even their natural abilities would look like magic to us, not to mention their technologies, which would probably be utterly beyond our comprehension. Now it just remains to give them the right attitude. I might even subtly hint that these "people" (for lack of a better word) sometimes have visitations of higher beings, who are able to breach the sixth wall ... Messengers from a higher plane, able to comprehend even more of reality, but telling them that they too are just a link in a chain, able to understand only in part during their life in the material world.

Nifty as that might be (and I would not be surprised if someone has thought of it already) I am also dimly aware that it could be construed as a blasphemy in itself. The actual angels are probably not like that. Not that I would know, never having met any ... or rather, never having recognized any. I am told that some people have entertained angels unawares.


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