Soul Matters, Book 2: Wrath of the Goddess

As suspected, there were numerous frantic calls from Dr. Loreen on Phil’s voice-mail at work. He didn’t return her call and hoped he hadn’t given her his cell number, which was unlisted.

Work was light today, and he supplemented it with frequent trips to cyber-space. He was researching the Nephilim -- the giants who were the supposed offspring of the Grigori. It seemed certain they existed because of their two-line mention in Genesis, and he was determined to find out more on this race of beings.

He found they had names, at least some of them; were regarded as mighty warriors; and were responsible for some discoveries. It was enough to start with.

He put all his findings together into a single document and printed it up. Satisfied, he then turned his attention to work.

His work environment allowed him multiple opportunities to practice what Manuel taught him so far. He could pull up some vague piece of forgotten information by imagining himself at the bookcase along the trail in the woods. He could match intensity with the bully boys by filling himself with the beast-within energy at the next stop on the trail through the woods. He could slow down his heart rate and generally maintain a calm demeanor with a stop at the body control station.

Now he could practice with the powers symbolized by the staircase. He wasn’t sure how any of them, except for far-entity communication, could enhance his climb up the corporate ladder, though. Healing, being at-one with Nature, communing with plants and animals -- not much use for that in corporate America.

Even so, he envisioned himself inside the redwood tree and felt the subtle connection to Nature. He got up from his desk and headed out to the ground floor coffee shop. Along the way, he noticed he was moving in quiet serenity and nobody seemed to track his passing.

That night he hurried to his study. He was eager to discuss the Nephilim with Manuel. Betty was out driving the church van to some meeting, and she wouldn’t be home for a few hours.

In the angel’s patio, Phil found Manuel with his own agenda. The angel sat him down before Phil could speak and pronounced, “There are two things you must know before we go any further with the story of the Flood.”

“Well, I found out about the Nephilim,” Phil told him.

“Not much, I think. Most of those records were destroyed,” Manuel dismissed. “And it’s currently beside the point. What is the point is the relevance of two ancient symbols: the Uroboros and the Typhon. Do you have a clue as to what either might be?”

“Not a clue,” Phil shrugged and squirmed on the marble bench. He didn’t like Manuel hovering over him.

“The Uroboros is the symbol of the snake eating its own tail,” Manuel explained. “It got transformed into the serpent of the Garden of Eden because of what it represents.”

“Which is?”

“The group mind,” Manuel answered. “The symbol means the snake, since it’s eating its own tail, can’t really have any sense of his own individuality.”

Phil thought of the implications of this idea and realized what Eve had done. He said, “She broke out of the Uroboric circle.”

“Precisely,” Manuel smiled. “Freud saw this state, which people experience as Paradise, but is really ignorance producing bliss, as the ridiculous goal of religion: to ‘progress’ back to the womb.”

“You talked about this before,” Phil remembered. “You cautioned me not to mistake pre-rational for trans-rational.”

“Or vice versa,” Manuel added. “You don’t want to elevate the Uroboros to transcendent bliss.”

“Okay,” Phil said. “What’s the Typhon?”

“A little harder to explain,” Manuel equivocated, “because it’s the challenge humans faced around the time of the Flood. As a group they were transcending the Typhon-phase.”

“Maybe I’ll surprise you with my intellectual prowess,” Phil grinned at him and dressed himself in a suit and tie. He wanted to appear adult.

“Not likely,” was the angel’s droll response. “The closets in you are filled to overflowing with nonsense.”

Phil shrugged and invited the angel to continue, “What’s the Typhon?”

“Another symbol handed down for eons,” Manuel answered. “In a nutshell, it’s the body-ego, or the birth of the sense of self. And it happens in three stages. First, there’s the ability to claim objects within one’s awareness -- like the objects in your field of view right now. At first, though, you don’t have any sense of permanence. In other words, when the object disappears from view, it’s also gone from your mind.”

Phil pondered this idea and smiled, “I know people like that.”

“Well, now you know how primitive they are,” was Manuel’s terse response. Then he continued, “The necessary fear, at this level, is the loss of the mother when she’s out of sight. Well, actually it’s the loss of the breast.”

Phil laughed again, “Yeah, I know people like that, too.”

“Stop it,” Manuel chided him. “The next stage is where the pleasure principle comes from. Again, Freud defined this level as the foundation of all drives. Seek pleasure; avoid pain.”

“It’s something we all do,” Phil mused.

“Right. It’s one of my points,” Manuel said. “The Typhon must be accounted for in all you do even though you may have moved onto higher developmental stages.”

“How many are there?”

“Lots,” Manuel said, but returned to his topic. “The next stage in Typhonic development is for the child to get a body-image -- some sense of ‘me,’ and this body-self is in relationship with the mother. With that shift, the child can have a ‘good-me’ and a ‘bad-me,’ depending on how his mother deals with him. Can you see what this means?”

“Well, if the child has a sense of himself,” Phil said as he desperately tried to remember what was happening with his own two children when they were young. But the time-line was pretty blank. It was during his ‘coke-years.’ He took a stab at it, nonetheless, “the child is starting to develop an identity.”

“Which means what?”

“I’m not sure.”

“It means his imagination has kicked in,” Manuel told him. “He can sense something not just ‘there.’ He can also sense, what the psychologists call, an ‘extended present,’ a sense of permanence. Can you see it?”

“Yeah,” was Phil’s embarrassed answer. He was typically embarrassed by anything reminding him of those years when cocaine ruled his life.

“The downside of all this is the child has also developed the ability to think in magical terms,” Manuel added. “It’s the only way the primitive brain can make sense of what it doesn’t understand.”

Phil responded, “You’ve already said the difference between low magic and high magic is the difference between getting the form right and getting the intention right. Does this distinction still stand? Or was it unique to tribal thinking?”

“Think of it this way,” Manuel said and began pacing across the patio grass. “If everybody in a tribe is at this level, then voodoo is their religion. In Eden, once you canceled your hunger by eating, you were back in Paradise. But once you realized, like Eve did, you were an individual being, you started worrying about what you would eat tomorrow. Voodoo practices helped early humans secure control over an uncertain future.”

“But how can adults be at this level?” Phil wondered. “You just said it was a childhood stage.”

“Now it is,” Manuel said. “But it wasn’t prior to the Flood-times. Most humans back then only progressed to the Typhonic level or a little bit beyond to a primitive kind of mental-ego. It’s what made Jeremiah so unique. He made it all the way to Reason and beyond.”

Phil didn’t like the implications of this, because it proved there was, at least, the evolution of consciousness.

“At the final stage of the Typhonic process, there are a number of new developments,” Manuel went on. “To summarize them: think of a two-year-old. When all mankind reached this level, they all thought, felt, and behaved like two-year-olds in adult bodies.”

Phil became uncomfortable again, but he was able to confess, “I wasn’t paying much attention when my kids were that age.”

“Too busy with cocaine and bimbos?”

“I cleaned up,” Phil said in a wooden voice.

“Too bad you chose church for a replacement to cocaine,” Manuel responded. “A 12-Step Program would have allowed your spirituality to grow.”

Phil sighed, but did reply, “Maybe I needed a fundamentalist God to make me stay clean.”

“Good point. Getting scared straight has its value.”

“Anyway,” Phil went back to a safer topic, “two-year-olds today are somehow like early man?”

“But woefully neglected in Genesis,” Manuel finished the thought. “You get a whopping two chapters for creation, then another couple of chapters for Adam and Eve --including all the ‘begats’. Then, from chapter 6 to 50, it’s all about the Patriarchs. Doesn’t it seem like we skipped a whole lot of history?”

“Well, maybe.”

“It skipped the Uroboric and Typhonic times,” Manuel pressed on. “Or another way of saying it: the Flood separates the era ruled by the Great Mother from the era of the Patriarchs, who bowed to a God.”

“Is this important?”

“Yes, because the Flood was a separation point, both in fact and in myth,” Manuel asserted. “The Flood proved the Great Mother was not the Life-giver humans thought she was. As a consequence, they all turned towards the sky-gods. And the patriarchy was born.”

Phil considered this, but it still didn’t seem relevant to what he saw as his own situation. He asked again, “And what’s the point?”

“How can you be so dense?” was Manuel’s frustrated response. “The big Flood, and I mean the one the Bible refers to, was one of many floods happening over about a hundred year period. The flooding was a combination of glacial melting, storms from the Gulf of Aden, and unusually heavy rainfall. By about 2350 BC, all the Great Mother traditions in the Fertile Crescent were gone, replaced by sky-gods. Man came into power and, fearing woman would pull him back to being a mere consort of the Great Mother, suppressed both women in general but the Great Mother tradition in particular to the point where there is nothing but vague references to it in Genesis.”

Phil’s density continued. “But what does it matter? It all happened thousands of years ago.”

“No, Phil, it’s happening every day,” Manuel corrected. “It happens with every two-year-old. It happens with every rational regression fundamentalists promote. It happens when we insist on blood ties to insure somebody’s survival. It happens when we put people to death as a ritual appeasement to the Mother of Life. It happens every time you see ‘other’ and feel fear, bigotry, racism, and the like. All that and more comes from denying and repressing this evolutionary stage. Because, as you must know, repression means that whatever you repress will come out sideways.”

Phil recoiled under this onslaught and didn’t know what to say. For a long moment he just sat and arranged the folds of his pinstriped pants. Eventually he asked, “How do the Nephilim factor in?”

Manuel waved his hand and the magic-wall blurred. Promptly, a desert scene emerged. Across the rocky landscape, a battle raged. Some of the combatants were taller and more muscular than the others.

“They weren’t really giants,” Manuel pointed out. “Maybe six or seven feet tall was the average, but the locals grew to barely five-and-a-half feet. By comparison, then, they were huge.”

“What are they fighting over?”

“Land,” was the laconic reply. “Hunting lands, grazing lands, farming lands. They were too primitive to even know there was other stuff to fight over.”

The fighting stopped rather abruptly as an even more awe-inspiring figure took the field.

“Salamiel,” Manuel said. “He is an angel, one of the Grigori who got trapped in the Flesh. He ended up as the leader of the Nephilim.”

“What’s he doing?”

“Putting all the survivors to the sword,” Manuel answered. “And humans didn’t even have swords yet. He’ll take all the women for himself, live off the conquered land until it’s depleted, then go conquer the next group and assimilate them into his tribe.”

Manuel waved his hand and the bloody scene dissolved back to a wall. Phil, though, could easily sense Manuel’s mood change as his aura dulled even further. He figured the best idea was to wait for Manuel to speak.

“Over the next several centuries,” the angel continued, “the scourge of the Grigori and Nephilim created a kind of pressure on mankind. Sort of like an arms race. If somebody figures out a new weapon, those who faced the weapon eventually figure out a defense, and they invented a different weapon to counter it. This arms race came at a time when man was evolving his mental abilities. It was really bad timing, because they were still dominated by the Great Mother and Typhonic impulsiveness. But they were gaining ground. Many humans achieved the awareness of five-year-olds before the Flood.”

Phil nodded his understanding, but responded, “What were angels doing all this time?”

“Trying to come up with a way to get the Grigori out of the Flesh, of course,” Manuel snapped back. “Nothing worked. And God was no help at all. He gave us the ‘you got into this mess, get yourselves out of it’ lecture. We all felt pretty dumb. Especially so because Michael, Gabriel, and most of our really smart angels were among the Grigori.”

“But you did figure it out.”

Manuel sighed, “I told you archangels are in charge of synchronicities.”

“Yes. Those events too coincidental to be a coincidence.”

“Well, we can do it with the weather, too,” the angel elaborated. “It became my task to promote the kind of weather that caused the flooding.”

This puzzled Phil and he asked, “Why you?”

“Because the Nephilim were my idea.” The angel’s voice was no more than a whisper.

Phil sat in silence while Manuel composed himself. Eventually, the angel said, “I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but the Flood stories the world over were the result of two things: glacial melting and the final emergence of animal life from plant life.”

Phil frowned, “I get glacial melting. It was the end of the Ice Age. But animals were already there.”

“Nope. At least not as separate from plants. There was a long transition, lots of evolutionary experimentation. All those beasts of legend -- centaurs, half-fish men, minotaurs, and all the rest existed. The Floods helped wipe them out, too.”

Phil didn’t know what to say to that. Plants were on a different biological limb than animals. Animals had their own groupings as well. He took what Manuel was saying as a kind of biological chaos, a mixing of genetics that defied the linear way evolution was taught.

Manuel went on, “In Sumeria, Noah was known as Ziusudra. For the Greeks, it was Dionysius the Younger, who was educated by a satyr. For Zoroastrians, it was Yima, who taught people how to build settlements and cultivate crops. Aztecs came from Azlan, the land in the middle of the water.”

The angel paused, looking at a frowning Phil who had stopped tracking what Manuel was say. He shouted, “What?”

“A satyr?”

“Silenus,” Manuel replied. “That crew, Silenus and Dionysius and their followers, were remnants from the Atlantean culture. After it got flooded.”

Phil shook his head, “Atlantis?”

“Look,” Manuel said a bit testy. “The important thing is consciousness had to separate from Spirit in order to evolve and rediscover Spirit. It could do so only after the paradisiacal bliss of Eden -- the vegetative inter-connectedness that was Adam -- was left behind.”

“There’s nothing like that in the Bible.”

“Oh, no? Then how do you make sense of that weird reference to Noah’s children staring at his backsides?”

Phil said, “It does seem weird.”

“They were getting a good look at his genitals. Those were the last parts to evolve from plants to mammals.”

“What?”

“Why do you think artists used fig leaves or banana leaves? It wasn’t to cover anything up.”

Phil was speechless again. He struggled to put together what the angel was saying. It seemed he meant that plants still retained their connection to Spirit; whereas, animals didn’t. At least, back then as all of Nature was sorting itself out.

Manuel continued, “So the refugees headed for India and helped set up that civilization. As the Zend-Avesta put it, their new home would be ‘no cripples, no long teeth, no giants, neither any characteristics of evil spirits.’ Well, that didn’t work out, but we got rid of the giants.”

“Let me get this right,” Phil temporized. “The Floods set in motion a migration from Atlantis, which was some kind of high culture --”

“Imaginative culture under the tutelage of Poseidon -- one of the half-fish gods.”

“And the refugees, as they moved east, brought farming and city-building to Greece, the Near East and India.”

“Yep. You can read all about it in the Ramayana, one of India’s holy books.”

“Okay,” Phil sighed, “you think the Flood ended one stage of evolution so the next one could begin.”

“Yep. The age of metamorphosis was over. Man’s imagination lost its power. Communication with the gods became more difficult. But humanity, as we know it, was launched.”

“Where in all this is the punishment?”

“Ah, yes. Some of it was the loss of Spirit. Most of it, though, came from mankind stepping onto a new plateau of existence without a road map.”

“You tried to get us one by having angels help the tribes.”

“That was my intent. Too bad it didn't work out that way.”