Soul Matters, Book 2: Wrath of the Goddess
Chapter 5

Phil was moody the next day at work. For even though he was looking forwards to Manuel’s embarrassment, now he wasn’t sure he wanted it. Furthermore, the angel was doing it just to teach Phil what he needed to know. As painful as it obviously was for Manuel, he was going to relate the whole story of his humiliation before the corporation of angels just to help Phil.

The weird thing, though, was the whole story of man’s evolution was a tale of errors compiled on top of more errors, and each error was a well-thought-out attempt at correcting the previous mistakes.

The intercom buzzer sounded and interrupted his reverie. His secretary told him Dr. Loreen was once again on the line. This was her fifth call in two days. Phil decided to answer it.

“Dr. Loreen,” Phil said into the speakerphone. “How are you doing?”

As soon as he said it, he knew it was the wrong question to ask. sᴇaʀᴄh thᴇ FindNøvᴇl.nᴇt website on Gøøglᴇ to access chapters of novels early and in the highest quality.

“Not well at all, Phil,” was the sharp answer. “Can you tell me what’s going on?”

Phil’s mind raced through the possible answers: 1) ‘Manuel found out about you;’ 2) ‘I don’t know what you mean;’ 3) ‘Would you like to visit an angel and ask him yourself?’ 4) ‘Thought-stopping didn’t work for you either, I take it;’ 5) ‘I heard you’re listening to rap.’

He settled on number 2, “I don’t know what you mean.”

“There’s a demon haunting each of my radios,” she said in a tight, shrill voice. Then, with the tone of a junior high principal, she accused, “I think you know something about this.”

“How could I?” he said, trying to keep a note of seriousness in his voice. “You told me the angel I was talking to was a projection of my fears about God’s existence. God exists but my angel doesn’t.”

“And just maybe he does,” Dr. Loreen snapped. “He exists, not as an angel of God, but as a demon who is trying to scare me away. Well, I won’t be scared away. I walk in the Lord and He is my protection. When shall I schedule you for your next appointment?”

“Let me get back to you,” Phil stalled. “I’m going into the busy season, and I’ll need to find a way to squeeze you in.”

“Don’t avoid me, Phil,” she rejoined with a continuing shrill voice. “I am doing God’s work on your behalf. You cannot imagine the anguish I have suffered to bring you to the Lord. You owe it to me -- you owe it to yourself -- to allow me the opportunity to bring you safely home to God’s Will.”

“I know,” Phil was now smiling and trying not to let it show in his voice. “And I appreciate all you’ve done for me. My life is going more smoothly than it ever has. I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.”

“Fine,” she shot back and hung up the phone.

Phil started laughing. He laughed so loud his secretary came to check on him, because Phil never laughed at work.

Once Beth Ann was sure Phil was all right, she favored him with a grin and left the office. Phil swiveled in his chair to look outside his window. It was a bright day. He imagined the redwood tree surrounding him, shifted to at-oneness with the Universal Life-force and enjoyed the bright day more fully -- blue sky, brilliant sun, puffy white clouds, the ocean on the far horizon. The Earth was a living entity, and he was part of that being, even though he was currently trapped in a concrete, steel and glass building with no life of its own.

Ignoring much of the angel’s last revelation, Phil was prompted by the new topics of the Uroboros and the Typhon to another clandestine visit with Sandy. He arrived mid-afternoon and promised himself he would be gone by 6pm. It was Friday night, and Sandy’s weekend parties were renown. Phil didn’t want to face the temptation of it.

Sandy was straightening up his house in a half-hearted attempt to make it respectable, but ceased in that endeavor as soon as Phil handed him a beer.

“What it is this time, Phil?”

“The ancient symbols of the Uroboros and the Typhon.”

“Whoa. This is a big jump from the Flood.”

“Not according to Manuel. He said mankind was at these developmental stages during the time of the Flood.”

Sandy led the way outside and sat in a lawn chair. It was another bright day, and Phil briefly connected to the natural world around him. Then he focused on Sandy, who was saying, “He must be referring to the Uroboros as representing the cyclical nature of life.”

“Yeah. The uroboric circle that Eve escaped.”

“There is a different interpretation of the Uroboros. Jung said it also prefigured the need for the ego to recycle itself in order for the Self to emerge.”

Phil frowned, “I don’t think that’s what Manuel had in mind.”

“Nor do I, but these things of Spirit can be multi-layered, Phil. The obvious is often merely a distraction.”

“Why can’t it be simple?”

Sandy chuckled at this self-pity, and Phil realized Manuel would have called him stupid for such a silly statement.

Sandy gulped beer before saying, “What amazed Jung was he thought modern psychology discovered the individuation process until he began studying ancient spiritual systems. In alchemy he found the individuation process laid out in rich but symbolic detail.”

“Individuation. The process we go through to become adults.”

“Ego,” Sandy corrected. “The ego-self goes through the individuation process. Not all adults are really adults with a mature ego.”

“Ah, yeah,” Phil smiled, remembering his earlier conversation with Manuel about breast-fixation.

“The art-project humans are faced with is to turn ourselves into the Philosopher’s Stone. Even Thomas Aquinas agreed this was the project. But it’s not really a ‘stone’ or the ‘elixir of life,’ it’s more that we render our small selves into our divine essence.”

“It’s the stone that’s supposed to give one immortality, right?”

“Yeah, and immortality is the feedback process Jung said was symbolized by the Uroboros.”

Phil frowned and sipped his beer before acknowledging he missed the point. “How does that work?”

“For Jung, it was proof the ancients had discovered the collective unconscious.”

As Sandy retrieved another beer, Phil puzzled out the meaning. The snake eating its own tail would form a closed system, a unity of opposites, an infinity of cycles ending and beginning anew.

Sandy sat down and continued, “Plato saw the Uroboros as the first creation -- a kind of self-consistent perfection recycling everything within itself.”

“But how could it be conscious?”

Sandy smiled and ran his hand through his long blond hair, “Good question. I don’t remember you being this insightful. I think your friendship with Manuel is awakening things in you, Phil.”

Phil returned the smile, “I can assure you it’s not by choice.”

Sandy laughed before replying, “Well, the Uroboros recycles consciousness back to unconsciousness. That being so, the more precise question would be, ‘Is it self-aware?’ And that’s a resounding no.”

“A baby, then.”

“And dawn-age man.”

“Still connected to the vegetative cycles,” Phil mused.

“That’s what the Mystery Schools thought. They believed we emerged through a metamorphic process -- half-plant, half-man, half-beast, half-man -- that sort of thing. Tolkien and Lewis created grand stories about what that world might have looked like.”

“Huh. That’s why the Lord of the Rings stories were so captivating. They triggered our genetic memory.”

“You could say that.”

Phil was satisfied with this observation and moved on, “How does the Typhon fit in?”

“A more complicated mythology.” Sandy sighed. “Typhon was born from the Greek goddess Hera, and he grew up in a cave. Zeus had to battle him but lost the first round and ended up stuffed into a leather sack. He eventually escaped, defeated the monster and threw him into Tartarus with the other vanquished Titans. It’s the first dragon-slayer story, actually, and Typhon is considered the father of the dragons in both Greek and Hittite mythology.”

“And Hera?”

“In this myth, she’s in what they call her Minoan form. She’s the early Great Mother who births all in the Spring and devours all in the Winter.”

“Like the Uroboros.”

“Yes.”

People were beginning to arrive, and Phil became nervous. A few called out greetings to Sandy as they stuffed beer into the refrigerator.

Sandy waved back and asked Phil, “Are you staying?”

“Better not.”

“Too much riding on keeping up appearances.”

“Yes.”

“Does Betty know about this yet?”

“Are you kidding?” Phil snorted and rose to leave.

“How long do you think you can keep the secret?”

“As long as it takes.”

As Phil drove home, his mind drifted to Sandy’s comment about ‘awakening.’ His first adventure with Manuel was a rude awakening, to be sure, and he couldn’t find his way back to his pre-Manuel life -- or was it a slumber? Now a whole different world lay before him to explore, and his rational mind wanted no part of it. But why not?

Because he would have to question his root assumptions about life. Which ones? For openers, he knew (or thought he knew) the Universe just was. It was a big mostly lifeless system of planets, stars and galaxies. There was no purpose to it, and man could fully understand its workings without ever fully understanding himself.

When man did examine himself, there were other assumptions. Free will was probably the biggest one. From Phil’s current platform of reverie, he could see how much, if not most, of what man did was determined unconsciously by culture, family and personality -- or just self-programmed habit. Self-awareness sat atop an evolutionary lineage reaching back to the Beginning -- a life-raft riding on an immense turbulent sea.

Realizing he was merely making himself more depressed, he broke off the reverie and thought about his work. There were many projects for protecting client assets from the inexorable future, but in the end it was just so much shifting sand. Insurance was a hedge against an uncertain future that gave the illusion of safety and control, especially so, since insurance companies would work hard not to pay out claims. Self-awareness, perhaps, needed the illusion of safety to allow it to function instead of losing it all in a fit of panic – jumping off the life-raft and succumbing to the ocean of the unconscious.

Phil made it home safely, despite his mind racing on about topics better ignored. When Betty arrived, she quickly shed her coat and informed him the children’s grades were in for the mid-term.

“Donna is doing so well,” she said between bites of Thai food she picked up on her way home. “But Bobby is not giving it his all. I think he’s having too many parties at his frat house.”

She sat across from him with her blonde hair bouncing as she spoke and chewed her noodles. Phil knew her to be good at about everything, except sex and tracking the things important to Phil. She operated under the simple assumption their lives were in a wonderful groove. All they needed to do was keep it from hopping out of the groove. Do that, and all would continue to be wonderful. For Phil it was more like the groove would become a rut, and the rut would become a grave.

Phil made the appropriate noises to let her know he was mostly listening to her recital. It struck him, near the end of this ‘conversation,’ life must have been very different when the Mother Earth traditions were in ascendancy. Did men come home from hunting and get to listen to women telling them what went on in the garden? Or the latest shenanigans of the children in the cave? Or, did this tanned-hide skirt make her look fat?

He shook his head, smiled to himself, and agreed with whatever Betty was now saying.

“Do you really think so?” Betty inquired, and Phil was busted.

“Say it again.”

She grimaced and reiterated, “I don’t like it that Bobby is partying as much as he probably is. However, it’s much better than what we went through in college -- the sit-ins, the protests, all that hippie nonsense.”

“It was pretty wild,” Phil agreed, “but out of it came Civil Rights legislation, the first Earth Day, Title IX, and the war in Vietnam ended.”

“I’m not sure those were good outcomes.”

“Really?”

“We must be honest about who of us are the Chosen of the Lord, and who are not. The hippies were not.”

“We did some good back then,” was Phil’s anemic attempt to refute her argument.

Betty retorted, “Even a broken clock get the time right twice a day. We were fortunate to escape that culture.”

Phil decided not to get into that discussion. He was pretty neutral on both religion and politics, but he was a good manager, which meant he valued performance. He didn’t care about an employee’s race or religion or gender. He was egalitarian in that regard. What he cared about was whether or not they could live up to their job description.

Betty was saying, “Really, Phil, Pastor Jones has said repeatedly that those of us who are Chosen must care for God’s flock. We must protect them from evil, encourage them to do good, and punish them when they need it.”

“Okay. I remember him saying something like that. I just didn’t know he was describing a social responsibility. I saw it more as something we did within ourselves.”

“Well, self-control is necessary, but we must also manage our communities to prevent them from becoming godless dens of iniquity. That was where the hippie culture was headed.”

“If that’s the case, then what do we do about corporate greed, their pollution of the world, and the fact that we pay more in corporate welfare than we give to the poor?”

“You know the answer,” she chided him. “They need a growth environment so that they can afford to provide jobs, goods, and services to all of us.”

“I guess you’re right,” Phil conceded. He caught himself just in time to keep from tearing up that myth. He knew if he challenged it, he would also be challenging the corporation of religious churches, and Betty would definitely not be pleased with that conversation.

Eventually he excused himself to go meditate. Betty bustled off to another of her projects. Phil situated himself on the black leather cushion and shortly he was in Manuel’s patio.

A different batch of flowers was in bloom. The predominant color was deep red, and Manuel was puttering around the garden as Phil arrived. He dressed himself in shorts and tank top and joined the angel at the flowering bushes.

“They are amazing things -- flowers,” Manuel said. “They took us by surprise when they showed up.”

“How is it you didn’t already know what was going to happen?” Phil wondered, and his concern about angels in general continued to grow.

“We’re not omniscient,” the angel replied as he smelled one large bloom.

“But didn’t God give you some idea on what Creation was going to do?” was Phil’s next question. He was sneaking up on the idea he learned in management trainings: without some sense of overall purpose, no corporation could function very well.

“Nope.”

“So you were stuck just reacting to the changes on planet Earth?”

“Yep.”

Phil shook his head in disgust. All business failures were because the leadership blew it. And here the angel was telling him there was no real leadership in heaven.

“Right, again,” Manuel said, obviously speaking to Phil’s thoughts. “If you mean leadership to be direction from On High. God doesn’t give us much direction. But we have worked it out so we have managers, team leaders, and all the rest. After all, we’ve been at this from the beginning. We do have a clue.”

“What clue?” was Phil’s retort. He continued with disgust flowing through his words, “React to circumstances you hadn’t planned for? That’s no kind of ‘clue.’ You need a vision. You need a leader who can predict what may be happening, at least for the next quarter.”

Manuel finished with his flowers and remarked, “Yeah, that would be nice. But what we get are these moments when God descends on one of us, and off we go to do his bidding. Then only God knows what kind of repercussions those little excursions may bring. We sure don’t.”

“You’re not making me feel comfortable here, Manuel,” Phil concluded. He sighed, shook his head in disbelief of the situation in ‘heaven,’ and was once again speechless. What could he say, ask, or do to assimilate this headless-juggernaut-situation the angels lived in?

They walked towards the marble bench and sat. After the angel arranged his white robes around him, he went on, “I’ve talked a bit about the Great Mother, and we’ll need to explore the idea more, but I haven’t talked much about the Goddess.”

“You said she’s the short-hand way angels define the Divine-within,” Phil reminded him. “God is the convenient term for the transcendent unknowable God above, and the Goddess is the convenient term for the immanent Divine within.”

“True -- as far as it goes,” Manuel said. “Of course, there’s more to it.”

“Of course,” Phil grumped. There was always more to this spiritual stuff, and the complexity of it made him want to run screaming into Dr. Loreen’s office and hide there. He was sure she possessed pat answers for everything Manuel was telling him. If only he could buy into it, he could resume his happy life.

“There’s no hiding from your destiny,” Manuel rebuked his thoughts.

“Maybe not, but every time I seem to be getting a handle on something you’ve told me,” Phil said and noticed he was allowing the angel’s point-of-view credibility, “you move on to something else I have trouble accepting.”

“In that case,” the angel smiled. “Let’s talk about the Goddess and how she’s different from the Great Mother.”

Manuel waved his hand and the magic-wall blurred. Another desert scene emerged, but a city of some sophistication sat on the horizon. As they zoomed in, Phil could see high sandblasted walls enclosing a brick-built set of buildings laid out in neat rows. Near the center of the city was a four-story temple. The scene moved to the inside of the temple, which was cooler than outside due to the thickness of the walls. Open-air windows allowed a faint breeze to circulate among the throng of robed worshippers.

Phil knew they were still in the patio, but they were also somehow in this temple. He could smell incense burning, feel the dryness of the air, and sense the archaic mood of the masses.

A woman stood at the top of a flight of stairs holding a golden cup high over her head. A diamond-studded tiara trapped her long black braided hair.

She spoke with a rich soprano voice, which easily carried to the back of the room. Phil could understand her once Manuel placed his hand on Phil’s shoulder.

She was saying, “I am she who is the natural mother of all things; mistress and governess of all the elements; the initial progeny of worlds; chief of the powers divine; queen of all who are in hell; the principal of them who dwell in heaven; manifested alone and under one form of all the gods and goddesses.”

She lowered the cup and placed it on a table. Then she picked up a scepter and continued, “At my will: the planets of the sky, the wholesome winds of the sea, and the lamentable silences of hell.”

Putting down the scepter, she raised both of her hands high and stared out at the congregation, “My divinity is adored throughout the world in divers manners, in variable customs, and by many names. But the Egyptians, which are excellent in all kinds of ancient doctrine, and by their ceremonies accustomed to worship me, do call me by my true name, Queen Isis.”

Manuel removed his hand from Phil’s shoulder and waved at the wall, which promptly resumed its blank wall-state.

The angel said, “The operative words are, ‘manifested Alone and under One form.’ Rather than just a biological fetish insuring crops or preventing calamity.”

“Sounds like God.”

“Isis is the mother of the gods,” Manuel said, “both the good ones and bad ones -- just as any mother can have good kids and bad kids. In the goddess tradition, you don’t run into all the problems with Evil you do in the god traditions.”

Phil thought on this idea for a moment, not liking its implications, and asked, “How is this different than the Great Mother?”

“The Great Mother is at the other end of the spectrum,” Manuel answered. “She draws men back to Uroboric paradise. She never wants them to leave her pre-conscious embrace. Consequently, the rituals offered to her were all about appeasement. They were all about making sure Spring returned after Winter. Most people appeased her through sacrifice -- human sacrifice, at first. Later they figured out they could appease her just as well with animal sacrifice.”

“Why sacrifice?” Phil wondered. It was always a mystery to him why people would sacrifice each other or their livestock to some earth-deity.

Manuel chuckled, “You’re not thinking like a two-year-old. Blood is life. Cut somebody’s throat and they bleed to death. Obviously, blood is life. And when a woman is pregnant, she stopped having a menstrual period. Obviously, blood must somehow create a baby. Blood is life.”

Phil pondered the idea for a bit before saying, “The Great Mother requires a blood sacrifice, because blood is life. What does the Goddess require?”

“Self-sacrifice -- no blood -- just the setting aside of the ego for a higher form of consciousness,” Manuel answered.

Phil scratched his bald spot and frowned, “If what you just showed me was ancient Egypt, and you’ve already told me the people who lived back then were no better than two-year-olds, how did they get to transcendence? They didn’t even have an ego yet.”

Manuel chuckled again. “Good question. I’m mildly surprised by it. And your thinking is correct: most people didn’t get anywhere near transcendence. Most were content to pacify the thirsty Great Mother. But every culture has its avatars who pointed to the higher estates.”

“Like Jeremiah,” Phil remembered. “What about Christianity?”

Manuel waved his hand, and the scene emerging on the magic-wall was inside a Gothic cathedral. High Mass was in progress. Incense filled the air. A choir was singing. The congregation stood, knelt, and sat in unison. The bishop, in gilded vestments, held aloft the unleavened bread symbolizing Christ’s body as bells rang.

Once again Phil could feel, smell, and sense this place. It wasn’t as archaic-feeling as the ancient Egyptian temple, but it did have an antique mood to it.

The angel broke in with commentary, “If they just killed someone for real, this whole ritual has the same appearance as the Great Mother rituals. As such, everybody in this congregation is here for the same two reasons: first, to petition God for favors; and second, to insure their biological immortality. Just the same as mankind did in 7000 BC when the Great Mother rituals were the only game in town.”

Manuel waved again at the wall, and the scene disappeared. The angel continued, “But there is no blood sacrifice in the Mass. It was a symbolic sacrifice, a remembrance of Christ’s sacrifice. Because of that, the transcendent part of the Mass is revealed. As Paul said it, ‘I am crucified with Christ, nevertheless I live, yet not I, but Christ lives in me.’ Which you can find in Galatians 2:20. There are a few other references to this mythical way of approaching the Mass, but you have to squeeze the right meaning out of them.” Manuel smiled and went on, “Paul transcended his ego to claim unity with the One -- who by this time was God. Even so, the majority of the faithful went to mass for the same reason man worshipped the Great Mother.”

Once more Phil was squirming with discomfort, “Now you’re saying mankind, as a whole, is practicing the same basic religion it always has. I can’t accept that.”

Manuel’s string-accompanied laughter rang through the garden. Then he added insult to injury, “What’s even worse is you fundamentalists are still quite happy to offer up blood sacrifices through your religious wars. Those are absolutely no different than the ancient Great Mother sacrifices -- except for scale.”

“Well, all religions have wars,” Phil proclaimed.

“The Buddhists don’t,” Manuel stated. “In 2,500 years, they’ve never fought one war over religion -- politics, yes, but not religion.”

Phil decided pursuing an argument over historical fact with an angel was a bad idea. He fell back to his most useful question, “What does this have to do with me?”

“After the Flood, both the Great Mother and the Goddess traditions were repressed,” Manuel said. “What has your counselor told you about the mechanism of repression?”

The abrupt shift confused Phil for a moment. But he recovered to recall what Dr. Loreen said about repression, which was one of the major defenses people used to protect their egos.

“It doesn’t work in the long run,” Phil answered. “It’s why I had to invent you -- to deal with my repressed doubts about God.”

“If so -- repression doesn’t work -- then what kind of mischief is the repressed Typhon up to in your life, or in the world at large?”

The angel’s question was another jolt to his saturated mind. He could feel answers stirring inside of him, but he really didn’t want to notice them. Nor did he want Manuel’s question ricocheting around in his head.

“No answer, Phil?” Manuel grinned. “Shall we go to the source and ask him?”

“What?” Phil responded with deeper shock sounding in his voice. He knew Manuel could transport them to many places; he possessed abilities far beyond anything Phil could imagine. Go to what ‘source’? He wasn’t sure he wanted to know what that meant.

“We can go see the Typhon,” Manuel continued to grin. “He has life as an archetype, just as your fundamentalist Devil does. Remember him? He’s still waiting for your call. The Typhon exists as well. Do you want to go ask Typhon how he’s active in your unconscious life?”

Phil sat in horrified silence until he could finally stammer, “I’d rather not.”

“Okay,” Manuel’s grin still hadn’t abated, “but let me tell you his genealogy. The Uroboros is the consort of the Great Mother. She gave birth to Typhon, who is half-man and half-serpent. But he’s a momma’s boy who takes action if the Great Mother can’t lure man back to the undifferentiated darkness of pre-consciousness. It is he who makes sure every hero who makes a break for individuality is torn to pieces as a blood sacrifice. Luckily, he’s missed a few.”

“I definitely don’t want to go see him now,” Phil said with some conviction. The image of being torn to pieces -- whether physically or psychically -- was not a pleasant thought.

“You don’t get it,” Manuel’s testy voice engaged. “You’ve been meeting with him ever since you abandoned the Sixties Revolution. He’s slowly pulling you back to the Great Mother -- the Great Unconscious Whole.”

Something clicked and Phil remarked, “It’s what fallen angels do. They are servants of the Great Mother. It’s not so much Evil the way I’ve been taught to think about it. Evil is a refusal to evolve. The Devil said as much in Hell. He said they couldn’t prevent us from evolving, but they made sure we only attained the shadow side of the next evolutionary step.”

“Bingo,” the angel’s commented. “And it’s why we had to wipe out the Nephilim. You didn’t stand a chance against them. They would have cancelled the entire project. God’s little darlings, mankind, were no match for the combined power of the Grigori and the Nephilim.”

“Even though they were also one of the spurs urging mankind up the evolutionary chain?”

“Even so,” Manuel answered. “We tried to get the Grigori and the Nephilim to fight one another. But it didn’t work. Instead, they carved up territories and began putting together their own villages and enslaved mankind.”

“But you told me, the Grigori went to Earth in the first place because mankind was already doing so,” Phil remembered. “Did the Grigori begin to compete with mankind?”

“Instead of helping the situation, they compounded the problem.”

Phil’s brow furrowed and he asked, “Is that what Beelzebub meant when he spoke about you?”

Manuel sighed, “Yes. I really should have foreseen all I just told you. But I didn’t. It’s also why I got into such big trouble. They blamed me for totally fouling up God’s pet project.”

He waved his hand again, and the wall returned to the scene of the Grigori coming to Earth as guardians of some 200 tribes in the Fertile Crescent.

The scene continued where it left off. The angels flew in and immediately took on human form. The approached the tribal encampments and were accepted by those tribes as messengers from the Great Mother. The Grigori set up tents separate from the tribe and began to act as teachers and priests of the Great Mother.

Manuel said, “In Genesis it says men took up idolatry. All these tribes were firmly in the Great Mother tradition. To later authors of the Bible, it was idolatry.”

The scene on the wall shifted back to the angelic plane. The colonnaded terrace was empty except for some dozen or so angels. Manuel was one, and he was pleading a case to the others.

“They’re already trapped in the Flesh. We might as well make use of the situation.”

A taller, brown-haired angel answered, “I don’t know. It doesn’t feel right, Manny.”

“Look, Tahariel,” Manuel replied. “If we were able to get some of our nature into the human gene-pool, it should accelerate their growth in Spirit.”

Tahariel shook his head, and his bronze curls waved like wheat in the wind. He spoke with a soft, musical voice, “It’s too risky. We’ve already underestimated the power of the Flesh. What you’re proposing could make things worse.”

Another of the angels spoke, “I don’t have a sense of this one way or another. If Manny feels strong about it, then maybe he’s right.”

“I know I’m right,” Manuel asserted. “If the Grigori mate with humans, we strengthen humans. It’s simple logic.”

Another angel inquired, “Has God spoken to you about this?”

“Not really,” Manuel answered. “This is my own idea, but you can’t fault the logic. Just think of it: mankind has discovered farming. Already they are coming together in villages. Many of them have achieved some real sense of identity. This phenomenon will spread exponentially within a few generations -- just like with Eve. Consciousness is contagious. And we could help them out by strengthening their sense of the Goddess-within, which the Grigori could do. I mean, they’re already doing it. I think it’s worth the risk to take it a step further.”

“The logic is there, Manuel, but not the mandate to act,” was the angel’s reply.

“It’s why I’m coming to you,” Manuel pleaded. “I’m sure I’m right, but I want you to help me make sure I not making a mistake. Do you see anything I’ve missed?”

Tahariel grimaced and said, “Well, you must take the action you know is right.”

The scene shifted a third time, and Manuel was talking to each of the Grigori. As he finished, each of those trapped angels, except for a reluctant few, ran off to secure a woman. He brought her to his tent with the obvious purpose of mating with her.

The scene dissolved and Manuel said, “The ones who didn’t mate with human women were: Uriel, Raphael, Michael, Zerachiel, Raguel, Gabriel, and Remiel. All the rest of them did.”

“Who’s Tahariel?” Phil asked.

“The angel of purity,” Manuel allowed a smile. “He wouldn’t have agreed in any event. And I suppose you remember Raguel -- the head of internal affairs. He actually blames me for everybody getting stuck in the Flesh in the first place. And he really didn’t like how we got them unstuck.”

“How did you finally accomplish it?”

“The Flood,” Manuel explained. “Or rather the floods. I tried to localize the flooding to where the Nephilim and Grigori lived, but they figured out what was happening and spread out. I came up with a big flood that drowned most of them. Afterwards, I was able to specialize again to get some more. You see, once they were ‘dead,’ they could escape the Flesh.”

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