Angelology
Page 54
As if he’d reached an unintended but final destination, Verlaine was about to turn away and head back to the brownstone when a movement high above caught his eye. He looked up. Perched on the west tower, its wings extended, stood one of the creatures. Raised in the half-light of dawn, he could just make out the tapering elegance of the wings. The creature was standing upon the edge of a tower as if examining the city. As he strained to examine its otherworldy magnificence more closely, he detected something unusual in its appearance. Whereas the other creatures had been enormous—much taller and stronger than human beings—this one was tiny. Indeed, the creature seemed almost fragile under its great wings. He watched in awe as it extended them, as if in preparation for flight. As it stepped to the edge of the tower, he caught his breath. The monstrous angel was his Evangeline.
Verlaine’s first impulse was to call out to her, but he could not find his voice. He was overwhelmed by horror and a poisonous sense of betrayal. Evangeline had deceived him and worse, she had lied to all of them. Repulsed, he turned and ran, blood thrumming in his ears, his heart pounding with the effort. The freezing air filled his lungs, singeing them as he breathed. He could not tell if the pain in his chest was from the chill or from losing Evangeline.
Whatever his feelings, he knew he must warn the angelologists. Gabriella had told him once—was it only the previous morning?—that if he became one of them, he could never go back. He understood now that she had been right.
West tower, Brooklyn Bridge, between Manhattan and Brooklyn, New York City
Evangeline woke before the sun rose, her head nestled upon the soft cushion of her wings. The disorientation of sleep clouded her thoughts, and she half expected to see the familiar objects of her room at St. Rose—her starched white sheets, the small wooden dresser, and, from the corner of her window, the Hudson River flowing by beyond the glass. But as she stood and gazed over the darkened city, her wings unfolding around her like a great purple cloak, the reality of everything that had happened hit her. She understood what she was and that she could never go back. All that she had been, and all that she had thought she would become, had disappeared forever.
Looking below, to be sure that there was no one to witness her descent, Evangeline climbed up on the granite edge of the tower. The wind lifted her wings, whistling through them, filling them with buoyancy. At such tremendous height, all the world at her feet, a moment of trepidation took hold of her. Flight was new to her, and the fall appeared endless. But as she took a deep breath and stepped off the tower, her heart rising to her throat at the depths before her, she knew that her wings could not fail her. In a sweep of weightlessness, she rose into the currents of icy air.
1 While the original manuscript of the Venerable Clematis’ expedition was not organized in discrete sections, the translator has imposed a system of numbered entries for this edition. Such divisions have been created for the purpose of clarity. The original fragments—for the recovered notebook cannot be designated anything other than the roughest of personal writings, scraps of thoughts and reflections jotted down during the course of the journey perhaps intended as a mnemonic device for the eventual composition of a book about the first quest to locate the fallen angels—were without system. The imposed divisions attempt to divide the notebook chronologically and offer a semblance of cohesion to the manuscript.—R.V.
2 The incident at the pass at Roncesvalles occurred during an exploratory mission to the Pyrenees in A.D. 778. Little is known about the journey, except that the mission lost the majority of its men due to an ambush. Witnesses described the attackers as giants with extrahuman strength, superior weaponry and astonishing physical beauty—descriptions perfectly in line with contemporary portraits of the Nephilim. One testimony claims that winged figures descended upon the giants in a blaze of fire, suggesting a counterattack by archangels, a claim that scholars have studied with some fascination, as this would signal only the third angelophony for the purpose of battle. An alternate version is recorded in La Chanson de Roland, an account that differs significantly from angelological records.
3 The Venerable Fathers’ search for artifacts and relics throughout Europe is well documented in Frederic Bonn’s TheSacred Missions of the Venerable Fathers:A.D. 925-954, which includes copies of the maps, omens, and oracles used in such journeys.
4 modern place-names have been substituted for those of the tenth century wherever applicable.
5 The recent recovery and systemization of the work of Gregor Mendel, Augustinian monk and member of the Angelological Scholars of Vienna from 1857 to 1866, has done much to shed light upon what had been a millennial mystery to historians of Nephilistic and human growth in Europe. One can see that, according to the Mendelian chromosome theory of heredity, recessive human traits from the Daughters of Men were carried through Japheth’s Nephilistic line, waiting to reemerge in future generations. Although the chromosomal repercussions of the human-Nephilistic cross strike modern investigators as an obvious result of such breeding, the emergence of human beings into the pool of Nephilim most surely came as a great shock to the population and was considered to be the work of God. In earlier writings, the Venerable Clematis himself had written that human children were insinuated into the Nephilistic line of Japheth by God Himself. The Nephilim, of course, had quite a different interpretation of such genetic calamity.
6 There are various documents pertaining to the superior physical strength of Nephilistic offspring and the genetic inevitability of the emergence of humans in the children of Watchers and women, particularly Dr. G. D. Holland’s survey of Nephilistic demographics in Human and Angelic Bodies: A Medical Inquiry (Gallimard, 1926).
7 Among certain tribes of Nephilim, the practice of sacrificing human children became popular. It is speculated that this was both a means of controlling the growing human population—which was a threat to Nephilistic society—and an appeal to God to forgive the sins of the Watchers, still imprisoned deep below the earth.
8 Although this is not the first appearance of the term “master race” in discussion of the Nephilim, as there are numerous instances of Nephilistic creatures labeled as belonging to a “master race” or “super race,” it was certainly the most famous and oft-quoted source. Ironically, Clematis’ notion of a super race or superman—held by angelologists to be the mark of Nephilistic self-mythology—was appropriated and reinvented in more modern times by scholars such as Count Arthur de Gobineau, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Arthur Schopenhauer as a component of human philosophical thought, which in turn was used in Nephilistic circles to support the racial theory of die Herrenrasse, a notion that has grown in popularity in contemporary Europe.
9 It is at this juncture that Clematis’ handwriting gives way to a faltering scribble. This corruption is due, no doubt, to the extreme pressure of the mission at hand, but also, perhaps, to a growing fatigue. The Venerable Father was nearly sixty years old in the year A.D. 925, and his strength must surely have been compromised by the journey up the mountain. The translator has taken great care in his attempt to decipher the text and render it accessible to the modern reader.
10 Here Clematis refers to the famous line of TheConsolation of Philosophy, 3.55, associated with the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice: For he who overcomes should turn back his gaze toward the Tartarean cave, Whatever excellence he takes with him he loses when he looks below.
11 Hereafter, the remaining sections of Clematis’ account are written in the hand of a monk, Father Deopus, who was assigned to care for Clematis in the immediate aftermath of the expedition. At Clematis’ request, Deopus sat at his side for the purpose of dictation. According to Deopus’ personal account of the days he spent at Clematis’ deathbed, when he was not occupied as a scribe, he made tinctures and compresses he placed over Clematis’ body, to ease the pain of his charred skin. That Deopus was able to capture so thorough an account of the disastrous First Angelological Expedition under such conditions, when the Venerable Father’s injuries surely pr
evented communication, is a great benefit to scholars. The discovery of Father Deopus’ transcription in 1919 opened the door to further scholarly inquiry into the First Angelological Expedition.
12 According to an account by Father Deopus, Clematis spent a number of agonized hours raving these words before, in a fit of madness, he tore at his burned flesh, ripping the bandages and compresses from his charred skin. Clematis’ act of self-mutilation left flecks of blood upon the pages of the notebook, stains that are clearly visible even now, at the time of translation.
13 The narrative leap one encounters in this section may be the result of a gap in Father Deopus’ transcription but is more likely an accurate reflection of Clematis’ incoherent state of mind. One must remember that the Venerable Father was in no condition to relate his experiences in the cavern with clarity. That Father Deopus went to such lengths to fashion a narrative from Clematis’ desperate ranting is a testament to his resourcefulness.
14 The reference to the Archangel Gabriel’s golden lyre is the most tantalizing and frustrating passage to be found in the Venerable Clematis’ account of his journey to Hades. According to a communication written by Father Deopus, the Venerable Father had a small metal disk in his possession upon escaping the cavern which, after Clematis’ death, was sent to Paris for examination. Under the scrutiny of ethereal musicologists, it was discovered that Clematis had discovered a plectrum—a metal pick used to play stringed instruments, most commonly the lyre. As a plectrum is traditionally fastened to the instrument by a silk cord, one can infer that Clematis did, in fact, have contact with the lyre, or an instrument that employs a similar plectrum. This leaves the whereabouts of the lyre itself open to speculation. If Clematis had brought the instrument from the gorge, he might have dropped it at the mouth of the pit or perhaps lost hold of it as he fled the mountain. The plectrum rules out the possibility that the lyre was a figment of Clematis’ delusional state, a mythological creation of his beleaguered mind.
15 It is generally believed that Deopus, at the bequest of the Venerable Clematis, transcribed the melody of the angels’ heavenly chorus. Although the score has never been located, there is great hope a full score of this harmonic progression exists.
16 After careful examination of Clematis’ account of Brother Francis’ death, and the wounds that led to Clematis’ own death, the general conclusion of angelological scholars has been that Brother Francis died from the effects of extreme exposure to radiation. Studies on the radioactive properties of angels were initiated after a generous donation from the family of Marie Curie and are currently being undertaken by a group of angelological scholars in Hungary.
17 The physical properties of angelic wing structure have been shown most definitively in the influential 1907 study Physiology of Angelic Flight, a work whose superiority in mapping the skeletal and pulmonary properties of wings has become a touchstone in all discussions of the Watchers. Whereas it was once believed that wing appendages were exterior attachments to the body, held in place entirely via musculature, it is now believed that the wings of angels are themselves an outgrowth of the lungs, each wing serving a dual purpose as a means of flight and an external organ of great delicacy. From further modeling, it has been determined that the wing appendages originate in the capillaries of the lung tissue, gaining mass and strength as they blossom forth from the muscles of the back. A mature wing acts as an anatomically complex system of external aspiration in which oxygen is absorbed and carbon dioxide is released through minuscule alveoli-like sacs on the wing shafts. It is estimated that only 10 percent of all respiratory function occurs via the mouth and windpipe, making the wing essential for respiratory function. This is perhaps the single physical flaw in the angelic structure, an Achilles’ heel in an otherwise perfect organism, a weakness Clematis hit upon to great effect.
18 According to notes left by Deopus, Clematis died before finishing his tale, cutting his narrative to an abrupt end.