Soul Matters, Book 2: Wrath of the Goddess

During his lunch hour the next day, Phil hurried to his counselor’s office, which was located in the church complex where he and Betty attended services.

Dr. Loreen was a tall, thin, brittle woman with light brown hair restricted to a severe bun. Older than Phil, she dressed better than he did. Today it was a black skirt and suit-like jacket over a beige blouse. She also wore a small hammered gold cross on a necklace so that it showed at her throat.

“Phil,” she greeted him without humor and escorted him into her well-appointed office.

He plopped down in his chair, an over-stuffed, comfortable one upholstered in dark paisley fabric. She sat across from him in a swiveling leather office chair. A moderate-sized dark steel and glass desk was behind her, and book shelves flanked them on the adjoining walls. Oil on canvas landscapes graced the other walls above low tables with flower arrangements in vases.

“How is it going?” she began as she settled and took up a note pad.

“It seems that once my emotions quieted down, the doubts began again.”

“Doubts are important. Doubting Thomas was an apostle, which tells us Jesus valued him,” she conceded. Then she directed, “Be more specific, Phil.”

Phil squirmed before saying, “Church dogma doesn’t line up well with psychology, especially developmental psychology.”

“How so?” she prompted, but then added, “Being a counselor, I’m curious to see how you fit this together.”

“Dogma is black and white thinking, and it’s grounded in a concrete, tangible world. That kind of thinking is appropriate to grade school children not adults.”

“You’ve been reading Jean Piaget,” she concluded.

“Who?”

“He researched cognitive development,” she answered. “He was from Switzerland but moved to France, and he was world renown for his theories. He died in 1980. You are equating dogma to his concrete operational stage of development.”

“Am I wrong?”

“No. Just incomplete,” she answered. “It’s good you brought this to me, rather than pursuing it on your own. Psychology can lead you astray.”

“Okay. What I see is that dogma finds its use as a foundation – the Ten Commandments, for example, but once you figure out what not to do, the question becomes, what should you do? Jesus was pretty clear about feeding the hungry, caring for the poor, inviting in the stranger, and providing for the sick, the elderly, and the infirm.”

“How do you afford to do all that?”

Phil laughed. “Sell everything and give it to the poor.”

“You’ve misinterpreted Luke 14:33,” she replied crisply. “Jesus lived in a communal society. What he is advocating is generosity. The church is here to make sure your generosity isn’t squandered. But generosity presupposes some measure of wealth.”

“And the rich man getting into heaven is like trying to get a camel through the eye of a needle,” Phil countered. “What about a rich church? The emphasis on material wealth seems to still be in that concrete world.”

“I reiterate: How do you pay for all the caretaking you listed?”

“I don’t know, but the current system isn’t working at all.”

Dr. Loreen’s sharp face creased into a frown. After a moment, she asked, “Have your hallucinations returned?”

Phil dodged the question. “I’m remembering some of the conversations.”

“Look, Phil. What happens on Earth is secondary to preparing for the End Times.”

“I guess my preparation would need to include what Jesus told us to do.”

“Very admirable, but we don’t live in a communal world any more. The church is here to guide you through the dangers of living in these modern, godless times.”

“I’m thankful for that,” he said with as much conviction as he could muster. “And I thank you for your help.”

She picked up on his meaning. “Do you think you are ready to leave counseling?”

“Well –”

“I think you need more support. It was a vivid hallucination that caused you to fully decompensate a few months ago. We need to be on the lookout for a relapse.”

Phil could agree with that assessment, but not in the way she meant it. His allegiance to the yuppie world fell apart. That was true, but was that a bad thing? In the moment, he didn’t want an answer, so he said, “I’ll consider it.”

As soon as he could, he fled the office and returned to work.

“Your wife called,” his secretary told him as he hurried to his office.

“Thanks,” he threw over his shoulder as he opened his office door.

He found his chair and called his wife. When it went to voice mail, he said, “Hi, I’m returning your call. I’ll be busy all afternoon, but I’ll be home for dinner. See you then. Love you. Bye.”

He hung up and sat back in his chair. He knew she was checking to see if he made his appointment with Dr. Loreen. Betty wasn’t dumb. She knew something was wrong, just not, hopefully, how wrong. He wasn’t ready to see his world come crashing down. He hoped he could find a way to compartmentalize the two worlds he apparently lived in now so that he could live comfortably in both.

Manuel didn’t believe that was possible, of course, but he had to try.

He checked his calendar, and his afternoon was light. As a result, he cranked out his work, which was a review of contracts his team submitted, and then got to researching the Flood.

The story of the Flood, Phil found out, was pretty straightforward in Genesis. God wiped out wickedness. God even gave mankind multiple chances to get it right, but only Noah and his family were worthy of being saved.

Even so, a whole mythology grew up around the events preceding it. One myth was about human women corrupted by good angels, known as the Watchers (the Grigori). These women bore children by the Grigori who were giants (the Nephilim). To help pay their way after they assumed human bodies and took wives, the angels passed cosmic secrets onto mankind.

Reading up on the extensive mythology about this prologue to the Flood took a while. Phil spent more than the promised day to read up on all of it before he could get back to Manuel’s patio.

The ironic bright spot in the delay was a call from his spiritual counselor. She sounded a bit frantic on the voice-message she left for him on his recorder at work that he listened to the next day. Something about demons haunting her car. Phil didn’t return her call.

Instead, Phil concocted a story for Betty to make the time to visit Sandy. If Betty was yuppie-chic, then Sandy was hippie-classic. Furthermore, he spent time in a seminary and knew the Bible and its mythology much better than anyone Phil knew or trusted. These days Sandy owned a custom surfboard shop, and he lived in the old house he inherited from his parents in Huntington Beach, CA.

The house was a single-story, 50s-style tract home about a mile inland. Phil parked at the crumbling curb and hauled in the requisite half-rack of beer. Sandy guzzled beer with the thirst of a Viking, which he looked like. Tall, large-boned, heavily muscled, and long graying blond hair, Sandy was an imposing figure.

Phil knocked and entered at Sandy’s call. Sandy was dressed in shorts and tank top, and he stood at the kitchen counter chopping vegetables. The door opened to the living room. Across its expanse was the kitchen. A hall was to the left that led to the bathroom and a couple of bedrooms. On the back wall of the kitchen was a sliding door that opened to the backyard. Sandy was to Phil’s right, which was a prep station on a half-wall that originally sported a breakfast nook. Now it was the prep station for the kitchen to the left of the entryway between the kitchen and living room.

“Wanna stay for dinner? It’s stir-fry shrimp.”

“Wish I could,” Phil smiled and slid the beer into the refrigerator. He extracted two and popped them open.

“It’s been a while, Phil. What is it this time?”

Phil smiled at the blunt question and said, “The Flood.” He dodged the implied question about the time lag. He didn't want to get into the rather embarrassing fact that he was using Sandy to help him navigate his conflicting priorities.

“Your archangel is telling you the real deal with that whole thing. I’d be interested in knowing what happened,” Sandy said, pausing in his prep work. “You know, there’s some kind of flood story in just about every culture. But the archeological evidence doesn’t support a worldwide flood. Local flooding from melting glaciers makes sense. Still, why do we have all these flood stories?”

“I’ll let you know when I know.”

“What have you figured out so far?”

“I’m reading Genesis. And I’m having trouble tracking God’s motivation.”

Sandy laughed and scooped his chopped vegetables into a wok. “I like how Carl Jung solved the God-question. He said that consciousness is dependent upon another person witnessing it. You can’t be self-conscious in a vacuum. In Jung’s view, God’s self-consciousness arose in tandem with man’s.”

“That’s a radical thought.”

“It sure got Jung into trouble. He spent a lot of time defending the idea by insisting he was not a theologian but a psychologist. From a psychological perspective, though, you can’t have self-consciousness in a vacuum.”

“I wonder what he thought about the tree falling in the forest -- whether or not it makes a sound.”

“If the sound is ‘consciousness,’ then you would need someone to hear it for it to be real, or to even happen.”

Sandy slurped down his beer and Phil grabbed him another. After sampling the second one, Sandy went on, “Then Jung added in the whole projection thing. Is God just a projection of what we wish existed? Or is God an objective fact? Or is God some weird combination of the two -- subjective and objective fact?”

“Even worse, how would we know for sure?”

“Right. But to your Flood story. It’s definitely a disaster story with the interesting twist of Noah getting the call. But Noah’s family is an odd lot. They ended up driving the old boy to drinking and debauchery. What did God see in him?”

“I don’t know.”

Dinner with his wife a few days later left Phil feeling even more uneasy than he already was. As long as he was doing what he was supposed to, his marriage was rock solid. He was now obviously straying from what he was supposed to be doing with his life. People were supposed to find their niche in life, do what was expected of them while there, and move onto heaven when it was time to leave the planet. It was a sure, one-way trip to Glory. It was also boring, and boredom he remembered was one of the gateways to spirituality -- which he was finding by associating with Manuel, was anything but boring.

Betty was plump, dyed-blonde and focused on completing her projects -- of which there were many, including both Phil and the children. Donna and Bobby were college students back East, and their absence added stress to Phil’s existence. Their presence helped dissipate Betty’s focus. With them gone, Phil had no cover from Betty’s relentless need to get things done -- on time and on budget. It seemed she didn’t know how to relax.

The latest project was the completion of the remodel begun soon after the children left for college. She was hoping to have it completed before Thanksgiving break. Yet, even with that major distraction, she was beginning to suspect something was going on with Phil.

Over her spaghetti, she asked, “How’s it going with your counseling?”

Phil gulped back his nervousness and said, “I think I’m done with it.”

“I heard Dr. Loreen was having some trouble recently.”

“I hadn’t.”

Ignoring that, Betty went on, “She seems to really like working with you. How has it benefitted you?”

“Well,” Phil said as he wiped his mouth with his napkin to gain time to figure out how to dodge this bullet. “She’s helped me with emotional regulation.”

“Huh, I always saw you as even tempered. What was going on that upset you?”

“Just some kind of mid-life crisis. She pointed out that the rising demographic about divorce is people married more than twenty years were divorcing more than the average.”

“What would cause that?”

“Empty nest, primarily. Kids gone, one’s career goals achieved and a new goal not identified. She also said people can just outgrow each other.”

“Was that true for you?”

“No,” he said with a sigh he hoped she took as him thinking that idea was preposterous. “Mine is more about doing something important, like we did in the Sixties.”

Betty grimaced. “That was a chaotic time.”

Chaotic wasn’t how Phil would describe it. They rode a wave of hope back then, a hope that they could steer society away from global suicide to something better. Given the current state of the world, it seemed that they only postponed it. War was a constant now; climate change was in dispute, regardless of the science; and propaganda had replaced the nightly news.

Then Betty turned her attention to the kids. She was looking forward to their mid-term reports. Phil relaxed somewhat and followed her lead in praising Donna’s grades and deploring Bobby’s.

After dinner, Phil headed to his study to meditate. The study was a kind of safe haven for him. A large desk sat before a window. Bookshelves ran along one wall. Along the other wall was a hutch with decanters and glasses. Shelves held various types of liquor. Next to that was a large black leather beanbag cushion. He sat on the cushion and dropped into meditation.

Phil showed up in the angel’s patio with more questions than his simple faith wanted answers for. Still, he was a product of the Sixties, and he was born with an iconoclastic streak running through him. This streak lay buried under the weight of years of conformity. Today it stirred again and flexed its atrophied muscles.

He stood in Manuel’s garden and wasn’t sure where to begin. The angel could easily sense his mood -- let alone read his mind. He waited for Manuel to speak first. Manuel stood among his flowers and nodded to Phil in greeting.

“Reading Genesis now,” the angel began in a soft voice, “after all we’ve been through, is a whole lot different than reading it in Sunday School.”

Phil just nodded his head and noticed he was clad in jeans, T-shirt and sneakers, which was his uniform as a young man. Absently he wondered why he was dressed this way, but quickly remembered intention drove reality in the world of Spirit. He concluded his hippie self was in the driver’s seat.

The garden was filled with competing colors from the variety of flowers. The gurgling of the fountain added its own accompaniment to the symphony of color before his eyes.

Still tending his flowers, Manuel went on, “Let’s just stay with Noah’s story. You might have noticed there are two stories rather rudely crammed together. Theologians call them ‘J’ and ‘P.’ The J version is older. The P version, which stands for the Priests, was written during the Babylonian captivity. In the P version, the Priests used the Flood as a metaphor and a prediction of the Babylonian armies conquering, and effectively wiping out, the state of Israel.”

“What does J stand for?”

“Yahweh. Or the Yahwist version, probably the most poetic and beautiful of the early Hebrew writings. The ‘J’ designation comes from the translation error of Jehovah instead of Yahweh.”

Phil nodded again. What the angel said clarified the contradictions in the story. As in, was it seven pairs of clean and two pairs of unclean animals; or was it two pairs of each? The text said both.

Manuel continued, “But the real puzzle is the two kinds of Noah. There’s the ark-building Noah-the-sailor; then there’s Noah-the-farmer who planted the first vineyard.”

Phil thought this was the clearest part of the story. After all, with the Earth destroyed, somebody would have to take up agriculture to feed the survivors.

“They flip-flopped the stories,” Manuel clarified. “Noah the farmer came first. In fact, it’s where he got his name. It came from Nah, who was an Akkadian Bronze Age god of wine.”

“Wait a minute,” Phil interrupted. “Noah didn’t really exist? Or he was really you, acting as a bartender? I mean, there was a Flood, a big one, and somebody saved the Hebrews from annihilation.”

“Yep. There was a flood, lots of them in fact,” Manuel answered his questions in order. “Nope. I wasn’t Nah. It was Sarasael who taught Nah about grapes. Sarasael instructed Nah, the human farmer, on viniculture. The locals deified Nah as a result. It seems getting drunk was one of their few pleasures back then. But the first Nah lived long before the Flood. And Noah, both of them, did exist. The one in the Bible ended up with the name of Noah because he learned to grow grapes from the Akkadians -- sort of a born-again Nah.”

Phil finally sat on the marble bench. Manuel joined him. The angel’s presence was still dazzling. Phil still couldn’t look directly at Manuel, or any angel, because it was like looking into somebody’s headlights with the bright-beams turned on. This was one of Phil’s hot buttons. Inconsiderate drivers who left their high-beams on. He would flash his own high-beams, honk his horn --

“The demon of distraction got you again,” Manuel chuckled, and the strings sounded briefly as background accompaniment.

Phil caught himself and remembered there were two primary demons: the demon of distraction and the demon of self-importance. There were other demons, as well, but these two were the hardest to defeat. Phil brought his attention under control and asked, “What did you do to my counselor?”

The string quartet gained in volume as Manuel laughed, “What fun. I switched her car radio station from Rush Limbaugh to murder-rap.”

Phil couldn’t help but laugh. The sight of the anorexic, fifty-year-old, prissy woman frantically punching the radio buttons would have been a sight.

“I kept it up all the way to her house,” Manuel elaborated, his aura sparkling with color. “It’s a wonder she didn’t get into a wreck.”

They laughed for a long while, but finally Phil returned to the Book of Genesis.

“Who were the Nephilim?” he asked. “It mentions them in Genesis 6.”

Manuel became immediately serious. “A disaster.”

“And was the disaster your fault?”

Manuel’s aura flashed crimson, and Phil recognized it as anger or outrage or something not good.

The angel’s aura subsided to a dull white as he answered, “I got blamed for it, but it wasn’t really my fault.”

“Whose fault was it?”

“Sort of nobody’s,” Manuel said. “We were still learning about how the Flesh worked on us.”

Phil scratched his balding head and said, “You’re losing me.”

Manuel waved his hand and the wall to his right blurred into a giant TV screen. Shortly, a scene appeared in holographic detail. Phil didn’t recognize what it was. He saw a large hall or colonnaded terrace with over a hundred angels socializing in small groups.

Manuel explained, “You know archangels are in charge of synchronicities and other duties. Well, when we were sorting it out -- who would be doing what -- a group of angels was sent to Earth as guardian angels for each tribe of men. It seemed the right thing to do, because they started banding together rather abruptly at one point in their evolution, and it caught us by surprise. Anyway, these angels were called the Grigori. It was a mixed bag of seraphs, cherubs, archangels, a few powers, and so on.”

Phil watched as this group of angels gathered together in preparation for their descent to Earth. There were many colors of robes, a rich variety of faces, and they all wore looks of determination and concern.

The scene on the wall shifted to a high overview of the Middle East. Phil watched these angels as they descended to their allotted tribes.

Manuel was saying, “After Adam and Eve ate the apple, thereby claiming free will, their higher level of consciousness was contagious. Pretty soon all the hominids in the area were operating as individuals, rather than from group mind like the most mammals do. But it took some time for them to evolve from awareness of the present moment to awareness of themselves in the moment. But when they became aware of themselves in relationship to time, what they did next took us by surprise. The Grigori (AKA, the Watchers) were convened to get to Earth as quickly as possible to aid man in the transition to civilization.”

Phil could see an angel settling in with each of these nomad bands. All of the bands operated from a subsistence life-style. There were small gardens, herds of goats and sheep, skin tents, and lookouts on nearby hills. However, as his research predicted, these bands began gathering together into bigger tribes, and some were building towns.

“What’s so important about ‘time’?” was Phil’s next question.

Manuel snorted a laugh, “It’s got everything to do with humans. In Eden, there was no time. Everything just happened in the ‘now.’ After Eve ate the apple, though, time came into being. But for those early humans, it was all about a full belly. Once they were fed, they reverted back to paradise, to timelessness. Until they got hungry again.”

“Time had to do with eating when you’re hungry. Even animals do that.”

“I know,” Manuel said with a wistful sigh. “Mankind captured free will with the awareness there was good and evil. Even so, there wasn’t much use for it. Humans couldn’t think up much ‘wrong’ to do.”

“Okay,” Phil conceded the point. “What happened next?”

“With this next shift in awareness,” Manuel continued, “man could see tomorrow, and time became a function of getting to tomorrow without getting killed. So, for a long while, angels had it pretty easy. Caring for humans during those eons was simple.”

Again Phil protested, “Not much of a leap -- from a full belly to living through the night.”

“I know,” Manuel cooed, apparently longing for the good old days.

Phil broke into his reverie, “What came next?”

“When the next shift happened,” Manuel reluctantly went on, “man could comprehend the yearly cycle. With this level of awareness, the fear of his own impending death became a driving force in his behavior. We didn’t know it was the driving force at first. We figured it out later. But all of a sudden, man started planting farms, settling land, and developing a kind of culture.”

“What else happened?” Phil wondered. There must more to it than just an awareness of the yearly cycle.

“Language,” Manuel answered. “For hundreds of thousands of years, man was pretty much content with maybe 500 words or so. But when the human ‘mind’ really started announcing itself, it did so by creating language.”

Phil could easily see how the evolutionary step of language would have been momentous. And language, coupled with farming with a sense of the yearly cycle involved, would easily propel mankind forward into a fierce expansion.

Manuel broke into his thoughts, “It did. But let me put it in perspective. In the Bible, Noah’s story is a shift-point. It’s the dividing line between the primeval story of creation and the patriarchal story. In fact, Noah sits halfway between Adam and Abraham according to the genealogies. As a metaphor, it’s true. The genealogical timeline, of course, can’t match up any way you slice it. Even so, after Noah, the whole story becomes more exclusive, more ethnocentric, if you will.”

“It wasn’t before?”

Manuel smiled and said, “Not really. If you remember what I told you months ago, the creation story has a lot of problems. The prototype human, Adam Kadmon, gets cut in half. A serpent talks. Fruit can give you immortality. People get married when there’s not supposed to be anybody else around. The life-spans of the people are ridiculous. Angels marry humans and have kids. Well, that actually happened. A flood covers the whole earth to the highest mountains. Then, and we’ll get to this some other day, a lousy tower has the ability to threaten the whole celestial world? But these were beautiful myths. However, with P’s revamping of the myth, Adam was punished for listening to Eve’s voice. Doesn’t this event synopsize the patriarchy?”

“Maybe,” was Phil’s reluctant response. He wasn’t sure why Eve’s voice was important, but finding out seemed another trap he was reluctant to walk into.

“From Noah on,” Manuel continued, “women lost more and more power. The barren women problem was just evidence of their imperfection.”

“Were you one of the Grigori?” Phil wondered.

“No,” Manuel said. “I came in later when we figured out each human needed a guardian angel. You can’t imagine the difficulty we endured trying to predict, much less influence, human behavior after mankind developed language.”

Manuel waved his hand again, and the magic-wall reverted to its bland, stuccoed off-white.

“So what happened?” Phil inquired. With angels incarnated as men, the whole thrust of human evolution must have been affected.

The angel’s aura dulled even further. Then he asked, “Did you read Genesis from the beginning?”

“I did.”

“Then what do you make of God’s comment about all of his creation being ‘very good,’ but then he totally does an about-face in Chapter 3?”

The angel asked this in what Phil could tell was a rhetorical way. Phil waited, and the angel continued, “God the Creator is now God Who Lost Control of His Creations. How does that work?”

“Free will,” Phil answered. “You explained this before. Free will demands there be a choice between good and evil.”

“No, no,” Manuel interrupted. “Don’t be so ego-centric. I’m not talking about humans. I’m talking about God. How did God so massively screw up?”

The comment caught Phil by surprise. He never thought of God as someone who was subject to making mistakes. But because of his recent reading of Genesis, it could be interpreted as Manuel was outlining.

“It gets worse,” Manuel went on. “He’s told them he made them in his own image and likeness, but when they attempt to act on their birthright, as adolescent children of God, he rejects them. Why?”

“I don’t know,” was Phil’s reply, and he was becoming increasingly uncomfortable with this topic. It didn’t seem right to be investigating God. Phil attempted to derail the angel with, “Does any of this have to do with man’s evolving sense of time?”

“In one sense, it did,” Manuel relented for a moment, “but once again, we didn’t figure it out until later. Angels live in eternity. We relate to time differently. If you studied the problem enough, you would figure out eternity is just a ‘time’ with no future. For humans, though, death was ‘no future.’ Logically, then, they tried to extend time. In a sense, they tried to trade eternity for immortality. Obviously, it won’t work, but they kept trying to make it work -- you still try to make it work. Humans do so with their ‘immortality projects’.”

Phil wasn’t sure he followed Manuel’s argument, but having answered Phil’s question, the angel resumed his tirade against God.

“So, here we’ve got an omnipotent God who can’t control his creations. He’s supposed to be omniscient, but he can’t predict what man will want as he evolves. Then, mankind reveres him as a Creator but excuses him when he destroys things -- sort of like kids excusing their drunken dad for trashing the house. Boy, if you think it’s hard to figure God out being a human, try it as an angel.”

This made Phil even more uncomfortable. If the angels were in the dark about so much, the Universe was a much scarier place.

Manuel was concluding his rant, “To make matters worse, you humans need evil so you can have free will, but when you choose evil, you blame it on something or someone else. ‘Eve made me do it.’ ‘The serpent made me do it.’ How lame. Who ever heard of a talking serpent?”

“You mentioned this before,” Phil reminded the angel. During their first encounter, or as Phil was now seeing it, when the psychotic break began, Manuel claimed the serpent was a later addition to the story. Phil pressed for a more definitive answer, “What’s the serpent doing in the story if not to tempt Eve?”

“The snake is a representative of Mother Earth,” Manuel told him. “For the sky-gods to inherit man’s worship, the whole Mother Earth tradition had to be marginalized -- made evil in essence. They did so by putting the snake in the garden. The snake, since it sheds its skin, is a symbol of death and rebirth, which is one of the attributes of Mother Earth. The nice touch was to have Eve follow the snake’s lead. It made it easier to marginalize women later on.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure,” Manuel said. “Remember, I was there when Eve ate the apple. There wasn’t a talking snake anywhere to be seen. On the other hand, I did think it was overkill to run them off the island.”

“Which brings us back to the idea of punishment,” Phil reminded him. “They were run out of Paradise. Then Cain killed Abel.”

Manuel quickly answered the implied question, “Cain’s excuses were like all the rest. He even had the audacity to blame his actions on God. But his banishment was harsh.”

“At least it wasn’t the death penalty.”

Manuel stopped ranting, and he actually started laughing. Eventually, the sarcasm resumed, “Right. God saved the death penalty for every living being in the Fertile Crescent.”

“But they were wicked,” Phil pointed out.

“Not at all,” Manuel said. “They were just humans trying to make a living off the land. And they were doing a really good job of it. If you get around to reading the other Flood stories, all of them pretty much say the Flood was how the gods dealt with the problem of over-population. But the real story is God commanded the Flood to get rid of the Nephilim.”

“But who are they?”

“The children of the Grigori and mortal women,” was Manuel’s reply. “Angels mating and having children by mortal women wasn’t the bad part, though. What they did to God’s pet project, Mankind -- well, that didn’t go over too well.”