Angelology

by Danielle Trussoni

  Later, when I returned to our apartment, Gabriella sat in the kitchen. A pair of scissors and some white bandages lay on the table before her. Seeing that she might need my assistance, I went to her. In the sunny atmosphere of our apartment, the burn took on a ghastly color—her flesh had been blackened by the flame and oozed a clear substance. I measured out a length of bandage.

  Gabriella said, “Thank you, but I can take care of myself.”

  My frustration grew as she took the bandage from me and proceeded to dress the wound. I watched her for a moment, then said, “How could you do such a thing? What is wrong with you?”

  She smiled as if I had said something that amused her. Indeed, I thought for a moment she might laugh at me. But she simply returned to dressing her arm and said, “You wouldn’t understand, Celestine. You are too good, too pure, to understand what is wrong with me.”

  In the days that followed, the more I tried to understand the mystery of Gabriella’s actions, the more secretive she became. She began to spend her nights away from our shared apartment on the rue Gassendi, leaving me to wonder at her whereabouts and her safety. She returned to our quarters only when I myself was away, and I detected her comings and goings by the clothes she left behind or removed from her closet. I would step through the apartment and find a drinking glass, its rim imprinted with a smudge of red lipstick; a strand of black hair; the scent of Shalimar lingering upon her clothing; and I understood that Gabriella was avoiding me. It was only during the daytime, when we worked together in the Athenaeum, boxes of notebooks and papers spread before us, that I was in the company of my friend, but even then it was as if I weren’t there at all.

  Worse, I had begun to believe that Gabriella examined my papers in my absence, reading my notebooks and checking my place in various books we’d been assigned, as if gauging my advancement and measuring it against her own. She was too cunning to leave evidence of her intrusions, and I had never found proof of her presence in my room, so I took extra care of what I left lying about my desk. I had no doubt that she would steal anything she found useful, even as she maintained her disposition of blithe apathy toward our shared work at the Athenaeum.

  As the days went by, I began to lose myself in daily routine. Our tasks were tedious in the beginning, consisting of little more than reading notebooks and making reports of potentially useful information. Gabriella had been given work that suited her interest in the mythological and historical aspects of angelology, while I had been assigned the more mathematical task of categorizing caves and gorges, working to isolate the location of the lyre.

  One afternoon in October, as Gabriella sat across from me, her black hair curling at her chin, I drew a notebook from one of the many boxes before us and examined it with care. It was an unusual notebook, short and rather thick, with a hard, scuffed binding. A leather strap—fastened by a golden clasp—bound the covers together. Examining the clasp more closely, I saw that it had been fashioned into the likeness of a golden angel no bigger in size than my smallest finger. It was long and narrow, with a stylized face containing two inlaid blue sapphire eyes, a flowing tunic, and a pair of sickle-shaped wings. I ran my fingers over the cold metal. Pressing the wings between my fingers, I felt resistance and then a satisfying pop as the mechanism gave. The notebook fell open, and I placed it flat upon my lap, straightening the pages under my fingers. I glanced at Gabriella to see if she had noticed my discovery, but she was engrossed in her reading and did not, to my relief, see the beautiful notebook in my hands.

  I understood at once that this was one of the journals Seraphina had mentioned having kept in her later years of study, her observations consolidated and distilled into a succinct primer. Indeed, the journal contained much more than simple lecture notes. Flipping to the beginning of the book, I found the word ANGELOLOGY stamped into the first page in golden ink. The pages had been cluttered with consolidated notes, speculations, questions jotted down during lectures or in preparation for an exam. As I read, I detected Dr. Seraphina’s burgeoning love for antediluvian geology: Maps of Greece, Macedonia, Bulgaria, and Turkey had been drawn meticulously over the pages, as if she had traced the exact contours of each country’s border, sketching every mountain range and lake. The names of caves and mountain passes and gorges appeared in Greek, Latin, or Cyrillic, depending upon the alphabet native to the region. Tiny notations appeared in the margins, and it soon became apparent that these drawings had been created in preparation for an expedition. Dr. Seraphina had had her heart set on a second expedition since she was a student. I realize that by resuming Dr. Seraphina’s work with these maps, there was a chance that I myself could uncover the geographical mystery of Clematis’s expedition.

  Reading further, I found Dr. Seraphina’s sketches scattered like treasures among the narrow columns of words. There were halos, trumpets, wings, harps, and lyres—the thirty-year-old doodlings of a dreamy student distracted during lectures. There were pages filled with drawings and quotations excerpted from early works of angelology. At the center of the notebook, I came across some pages of numerical squares, or magic squares as they were commonly known. The squares consisted of a series of numbers that equaled a constant sum in each row, diagonal, and column: a magic constant. Of course, I knew the history of magic squares—their presence in Persia, India, and China and their earliest advent in Europe in the engravings of Albrecht Dürer, an artist whose work I admired—but I had never had the opportunity to examine one.

  Dr. Seraphina’s words were written across the page in faded red ink:One of the most famous squares—and the most commonly used for our purposes—is the Sator-Rotas Square, the oldest example of which was discovered in Herculaneum, or Ercolano as it is called today, an Italian city partially destroyed by the explosion of Mount Vesuvius in year 79 of the present era. The Sator-Rotas is a Latin palindrome, an acrostic that can be read in a number of ways. Traditionally, the square has been used in angelology to signify that a pattern is present. The square is not a code, as it is often mistaken to be, but a symbol to alert the angelologist that a larger schematic importance is at hand. In certain cases the square alerts us that something is hidden nearby—a missive or communication, perhaps. Magical squares have always played a part in religious ceremonies, and this square is no exception. The use of such squares is ancient, and our group does not take credit for their development in this regard. Indeed, the squares have been found in China, Arabia, India, and Europe and were even constructed by Benjamin Franklin in the United States in the eighteenth century.

  The next page contained the Square of Mars, the numbers of which drew my eye into it with an almost magnetic pull.

  Below the square Seraphina had written:

  The Sigil of Michael. Sigil derives from the Latin sigilum, which means “seal,” or the Hebrew segulah meaning “word of spiritual effect.” In ceremony each sigil represents a spiritual being—either white or black—whose presence can be summoned by the angelologist, most prominently the higher orders of angels and demons. Summoning occurs through incantations, sigils, and a series of sympathetic interchanges between spirit and summoning agent. Nota bene: Incantatory summoning is an extraordinarily dangerous undertaking, often proving fatal to the medium, and must be used only as a last and final effort to bring forth angelic beings.

  Turning to another page, I found numerous sketches of musical instruments—a lute and a lyre and a beautifully rendered harp, similar to the drawings that filled earlier pages of the notebook. Such instruments meant little to me. I could not imagine the sounds the instruments would make when played, nor did I know how to read musical notation. My strengths had always been numerical, and as a result I had studied mathematics and the sciences and knew next to nothing about music. Ethereal musicology—which Vladimir, the angelologist from Russia, knew so well—had thus far completely baffled me, the modes and scales clouding my mind.

  Occupied with these thoughts for some time, I at last looked up from my reading. Gabriella had moved ne
xt to me on the settee, her chin resting in her hand, her eyes moving languidly over the pages of a bound text. She wore clothing I had not noticed before, a silk twill blouse and wide-legged trousers that appeared custom-tailored to her figure. The hint of a bandage could be seen under the diaphanous silk sleeve of her left arm, the only remaining evidence of the trauma I had witnessed after Dr. Raphael’s lecture weeks earlier. She seemed to be another person entirely from the frightened girl who had burned her arm.

  Examining the book in her hands, I discerned the title The Book of Enoch stamped upon the spine. Much as I wanted to share my discovery with Gabriella, I knew better than to interrupt her reading, and so instead I refastened the golden clasp of the journal, pressing the delicate sickle-shaped wings together until they caught and clicked. Then, resolving to forge ahead in our cataloging duties, I braided my hair—long, unruly blond hair that I wished to cut into a severe bob, as Gabriella had done—and began the tedious task of sorting through the Valkos’ papers alone.

  Dr. Seraphina came to check on us each day at noon, bringing a basket of bread and cheese, a pot of mustard, and a bottle of cold water for our lunch. Usually I could hardly wait for her arrival, but that morning I had been so engrossed in my work that I did not realize it was nearly time for a break until she swept into the room and deposited the basket on the table before us. In the hours that had passed, I had barely noticed anything at all but the seemingly endless accretion of data, especially the Valkos’ field notes from their earliest expedition, a grueling journey through the Pyrenees, with measurements of caves, their gradations and densities of granites filling ten field journals. It was only as Dr. Seraphina sat with us and I was able to pull myself away from my work did I realize that I was extremely hungry. Clearing the table, I gathered the papers and closed the notebooks. I made myself comfortable on the settee, my gabardine skirt slipping on the textured vermilion silk, and prepared for lunch.

  After arranging the basket on the table before us, Dr. Seraphina turned to Gabriella. “How are you progressing?”

  “I have been reading Enoch’s account of the Watchers,” Gabriella replied.

  “Ah,” Dr. Seraphina said. “I should have known you would be attracted to Enoch. It is one of the most interesting texts in our canon. And one of the strangest.”

  “Strangest?” I said, glancing at Gabriella. If Enoch was so brilliant, why hadn’t Gabriella shared his work with me?

  “It is a fascinating text,” Gabriella said, her face brimming with intelligence, the very passionate brilliance that I usually admired. “I had no idea that it existed.”

  “When was it written?” I asked, not a little jealous that Gabriella was once again ahead of the game. “Is it modern?”

  “It is an apocryphal prophecy written by a direct descendant of Noah,” Gabriella said. “Enoch claimed to have been taken into heaven and given direct access to the angels.”

  “In the modern era, The Book of Enoch has been dismissed as the dream vision of a mad patriarch,” Dr. Seraphina said. “But it is our primary reference to the story of the Watchers.”

  I had discovered a similar story in our professor’s journal and began to wonder if I had read the same text. As if detecting my thoughts, Dr. Seraphina said, “I copied some sections of Enoch into the journal you have been reading, Celestine.” Picking up the journal with the angel clasp, she turned it over in her hand. “Surely you came across the passages. But The Book of Enoch is so elaborate, so filled with wonderful information, that I recommend you read it in its entirety. In fact, Dr. Raphael will require you to read it in your third year. If, that is, we will be conducting courses next year at all.”

  Gabriella said, “There is a passage that particularly struck me.”

  “Yes?” Dr. Seraphina said, looking delighted. “Do you recall it?”

  Gabriella recited the passage. “‘And there appeared to me two men very tall, such as I have never seen on earth. And their faces shone like the sun, and their eyes were like burning lamps, and fire came forth from their lips. Their dress had the appearance of feathers: their feet were purple, their wings brighter than gold; their hands were whiter than snow.”’

  I felt my cheeks grow hot. Gabriella’s talents, which had once made me love her, now had the opposite effect.

  “Excellent,” Dr. Seraphina said, looking both pleased and circumspect at once. “And why did that passage strike you?”

  “These angels are not the sweet cherubs standing at heaven’s gate, not the luminous figures we see in Renaissance paintings,” Gabriella said. “They are fearsome, frightening creatures. I found, as I read Enoch’s account of the angels, that they are horrible, almost monstrous. To be honest, they terrify me.”

  I stared at Gabriella in disbelief. Gabriella returned my gaze, and I sensed—for the briefest moment—that she was trying to tell me something but could not. I longed for her to say more, to explain herself to me, but she merely turned a cold eye on me once more.

  Dr. Seraphina thought Gabriella’s statement over for a moment, and I wondered if she might know more about my friend than I. Standing, she walked to her cupboard, opened a drawer, and removed a hammered-copper cylinder. After slipping on a pair of white gloves, she twisted it, popped off a wafer-thin copper lid, and tapped out a scroll. Flattening it on the coffee table before us, she lifted a leaded-crystal paperweight and anchored one end of the scroll upon the tabletop. The other she held with the palm of her long, thin hand. I stared at the yellow, crinkled scroll as Dr. Seraphina unfolded it.

  Gabriella leaned over and touched the edge of the scroll. “That is Enoch’s vision?” she asked.

  “A copy,” Dr. Seraphina said. “There were hundreds of such manuscripts circulating during the second century B.C. According to our chief archivist, we have a number of the originals, all slightly different, as these things usually were. We became interested in preserving them when the Vatican began to destroy them. This one is not nearly as precious as those in the vault.”

  The scroll was made of thick, leathery paper, the rubric in Latin and the words drawn in precisely articulated calligraphy. The margins were illuminated with slender golden angels, their silver robes curling against folded golden wings.

  Dr. Seraphina turned to us. “Can you read it?”

  I had studied Latin as well as Greek and Aramaic, but the calligraphy was difficult to make out and the Latin seemed strange and unfamiliar.

  Gabriella asked, “When was the scroll copied?”

  “The seventeenth century or so,” Dr. Seraphina said. “It is a modern reproduction of a much older manuscript, one that predates the texts that became the Bible. The original is locked up in our vault, as are hundreds of other manuscripts, where they are safe. We have been scavengers of texts since our work began. It is our greatest strength—we are the holders of the truth, and this information protects us. In fact, you would find that many of the fragments collected in the Bible itself—and many that should have been included but were not—reside in our possession.”

  Leaning closer to the scroll, I said, “It is difficult to read. Is it Vulgate?”

  “Let me read it for you,” Dr. Seraphina said, smoothing the scroll once again with her gloved hand. “‘And the men took me and brought me to the second heaven, and showed me the darkness, and there I saw the prisoners suspended, reserved for and waiting the eternal judgment. And these angels were gloomy in appearance, more than the darkness of the earth. And they unceasingly wept every hour, and I said to the men who were with me: ”Why are these men continually tortured? ’””

  I turned the words over in my mind. Although I had spent years reading the old texts, I had never heard anything like it before. “What is it?”

  “Enoch,” Gabriella said, instantly. “He has just entered the second heaven.”

  “The second?” I asked, confused.

  “There are seven,” Gabriella said authoritatively. “Enoch visited each one and wrote of what he found there.”


  “Go,” Dr. Seraphina said, gesturing to a bookshelf that spanned the entire wall of the room. “On the farthest shelf, you will find the Bibles.”

  I followed Dr. Seraphina’s directions. After choosing a Bible I found to be particularly lovely—with a thick leather cover and a hand-stitched binding, a book that was heavy and difficult to carry—I brought it back to the table and placed it before my professor.

  “You’ve chosen my favorite,” Dr. Seraphina said, as if my choice confirmed her faith in my judgment. “I saw this same Bible as a girl, when I first announced to the council that I would be an angelologist. It was at their famous conference of 1919, after Europe had been ravaged by the war. I had an instinctual attraction to the profession. There hadn’t been an angelologist in my family before, which is rather strange—angelology runs in families. Yet at sixteen years old, I knew exactly what I would be and was not in the least shy about it!” Dr. Seraphina paused, collected herself, and said, “Now, come closer. I have something to show you.”

  She placed the Bible on the table and opened the pages slowly, carefully. “Here is Genesis 6. Read it.”

  We read the passage, taken from the 1297 translation of Guyart des Moulins:And it came to pass when the children of men had multiplied that in those days were born to them beautiful and fair daughters. And the angels, the sons of heaven, saw and lusted after them, and said to one another: “Come, let us choose wives from among the children of men and have children with them.”

  “I read that this afternoon,” Gabriella said.

  “No,” Dr. Seraphina corrected. “This is not Enoch. Although there is a very similar version in The Book of Enoch, this is different. It is from Genesis and is the single point where the accepted version of events—those that contemporary religious scholars accept as true—meets the apocryphal. Of course, the apocryphal works are the richest source of angelic history. Once Enoch was studied extensively, but as is often the case with a dogmatic institution like the church, they found it threatening and began to remove Enoch from the canon.”