Soul Matters: Book 4, Monocracy Managerie

The hotel room was cheap but clean. Phil lay on the bed and watched TV for a long time as he waited for someone to call him from home. By 9pm, he used the pretext of needing clothes and a toiletry kit. He got Bobby on the phone.

“Hey, Bobby. I’ll need some kind of overnight bag,” he said in a conversational way.

“Yeah,” Bobby drawled. “I suppose so. You really got Mom pissed this time.”

“She’ll get over it,” was Phil’s dismissive reply.

“I don’t know. She’s already talked to a lawyer. You really blew it.”

“How’s Donna?”

“Okay, I guess. She seems to be done crying anyway. What happened?”

Phil dodged the question. “Have her call me.”

“Mom won’t like it. She thinks it’s your fault she got messed up.”

“It wasn’t. Okay? She just tapped into some stuff she would have had to deal with sooner or later anyway.” Even to Phil, this explanation didn’t ring true.

Bobby seemed to buy it, though, and said, “I’ll tell her. But you might want to talk to Pastor Mike. He sounded a bit more paranoid than normal when he left.”

“I’ll call him next,” Phil said. “And if you would, have your mother put together a suitcase and either bring it over here, or I’ll come get it.”

“I’ll bring it, Dad. I think your best bet is to avoid Mom right now -- at least until she knows Donna is going to be okay.”

“Right,” Phil agreed. “I’m in room 211.”

He hung up, found the church’s number in the phone book, and called Pastor Mike. It took the staff a few minutes to get him on the phone.

“Phil,” the pastor greeted him. “I’m glad you called. Donna is all right. It seems she went into what we might call a spiritual emergency.”

“And she’s out of it?”

“Not entirely,” Pastor Mike stated. “The acute phase is over, but the problem isn’t resolved. In fact, she wouldn’t let me know what the problem was. Is there anything you can tell me?”

Phil smiled in spite of the gravity of the situation. Sure, he thought, there’s plenty to tell. Donna is under a death sentence and her only hope of survival is to call on a long-forgotten Mesopotamian goddess.

Instead of the truth, Phil said, “She seemed okay last night when we finished a contemplation session.”

“She told me she had begun Zen meditation and you showed her something to complement it.”

Good girl, Phil silently sighed in relief. To Pastor Mike, he said, “It wasn’t in-depth stuff. What do you think is happening to her?”

“Hard to tell,” the pastor answered. “These things can be spontaneous, or they can be totally psychological. She may have touched an old unhealed wound from her childhood. I don’t know. I do know she’s in shock and a lot of fear. The shock will wear off, but she’ll need to deal with the fear.”

“Can you help her with it?”

There was a long pause before Pastor Mike said, “I don’t think so. I’ve run up against a similar kind of fear in my own life. I haven’t defeated it in myself, so I don’t think I can be of much use to her.”

“I want to help,” Phil told him. “But I don’t think Betty trusts me anymore.”

“It would seem so,” the pastor agreed. “Tell you what. When Donna is up to it, I’ll have her come here. You can meet us.”

Since this was the only option currently available, Phil agreed, “Just let me know when. I’ll give you my number here at the hotel.”

Pastor Mike asked, “Is it true you may lose your job over this?”

“It’s true,” Phil sighed. “I’ll need to do some solid convincing to a lot of folks to keep my job. My boss is Betty’s cousin, and I think he’s been looking for a chance to fire me ever since Betty talked him into hiring me.”

“I see. Well, I’ll keep in touch.”

Phil hung up the phone and lay back on the bed. A wave of angry impotence washed over him, and he slipped into self-pity until Bobby arrived with the suitcase.

Bobby was tall, heavy-boned, and had Phil’s thin brown hair. His chubby cheeks were marred by a two-day growth of whiskers, but his smile was a disarming one. Unlike Donna, who could be abrupt, Bobby was an easy-going young man who fit in well with his peers.

“Here you go,” he said as he handed Phil the suitcase. “Nice room.”

“Come in,” Phil offered.

“Can’t,” Bobby said. “I’ve got friends in the car waiting for me. I did tell Donna to call. I waited until Mom was out of the room. Donna said she’s been wanting to all day, but Mom wouldn’t let her.”

“Thanks,” Phil mumbled, and Bobby left.

Phil unpacked, took a shower, and climbed in bed. There didn’t seem to be much else for him to do. But sleep wasn’t coming. Instead, he dropped into a meditative state and went to see Manuel.

The angel was in the patio tending his flowers. Phil arrived and dressed himself in cut-off jeans and tank top.

“How’s Donna?” Manuel asked.

“You know about her ‘spiritual emergency’?”

“Sure,” Manuel said. “She overloaded. It happens. The same kind of thing happened to Pastor Mike a while back. But enough of them, have you put the pieces together about idolatry, mythos and logos, the patriarchy, and the Grail?”

“Not entirely,” Phil replied. Then, since it looked like Manuel was going to ignore the problem with Donna, Phil excused himself and left the patio. His next call was to Sandy.

He was home alone as well, and Phil invited himself over. They sat in the living room and sipped beer and munched potato chips. The pro basketball game was over, and the big screen was showing replays, but the volume was down.

Phil told Sandy the brief version of the danger Donna was in and asked for advice.

Sandy shook his head a long time before he responded. “You know, angels have their own code of conduct. I have no idea what it is. I do know the Fall in Heaven had to do with certain angels ‘tempting’ others. They played ‘satan’ to their own kind. And, if we believe the apocryphal texts, a fallen angel is punished for a finite amount of time. We can infer from this they have a code of conduct. One would assume they can’t just randomly kill human beings.”

“Each of the angels I talked to seemed to think Azazel could.”

“It’s not how I understand the role of ‘satan.’ But I suppose angels could hold grudges. They have individuality, free will, and whatever else.”

“What I need to do is solve some equation about mythos, logos, idolatry, the patriarchs and the Grail legend. Once I do so, I can get Donna off the hook.”

Sandy finished his beer and retrieved another. Then he said, “It’s probably not going to be that simple. Especially if Azazel is holding a grudge. Still, there’s got to be some kind of logic to angel-thinking, like they’re hard-wired in certain ways. Got a clue what it might be?”

Phil shrugged, “They operate off different assumptions. Human life is, maybe not meaningless, but it’s not nearly as important to them as it is to us.”

“They see the ephemeral nature of it. The body -- well, the whole ego -- dies, while the spirit lives on. But what drives them?”

“I do know they must obey any commands from any mask of God. Other than that, they seem to have their own communities, their own interests, and their own personal agendas. Like, Raphael pursues the techniques of healing, for example.”

“And Azazel?”

“He wants mankind to fail.”

Sandy nodded his shaggy head and slurped more beer. “I see. This is consistent with Islamic thought that the angels fell because they refused to subjugate themselves to Adam Kadmon. If mankind blows itself up, it’s proof God was mistaken in putting his faith in man.”

“It’s what Azazel said, actually.”

“Well, there you have it. If he can’t further his agenda, or even worse, if humans start really getting it, his only option is to cancel their ticket and get them off-planet.”

This discussion wasn’t helping much, Phil realized. All Sandy had done was confirm Azazel was determined to either eat Donna’s soul or get her killed.

He changed the subject. “Let’s look at idolatry for a minute. I have figured out idolatry can be refuted by using Descartes’ reasoning.”

“Yeah. One of those convoluted syllogisms. It’s much easier to use Aquinas. He taught: ’heresy is a species of unbelief, but idolatry is a species of superstition.’ It comes from buying into false gods and paying them homage.”

“False myths?”

“You could say it like that. False myths would accompany false gods as their stories.”

“But with so many masks of God, which ones are false?”

Sandy laughed. It was a booming sound of true joy. He stopped to answer, “I suppose the ones that didn’t survive the test of time.”

Phil smiled in response. Sandy was right. There was an archetypal plane where all the obsolete masks of God were parked. There were also, Phil knew, ‘entities’ that never made it to the stature of a mask of God. Phil became painfully aware of the interactive nature between the Divine and humankind. People worshipped the god they believed in, and the Great Mystery invested Itself in their god so It would be available to the people. Idolatry was trying to find the Great Mystery where it wasn’t going to be invested.

The light went on, and Phil saw what Manuel had been trying to tell him. He quickly reduced it to words. “Mythos and logos are flip sides of the same coin. The patriarchy was a perfectly good arrangement for millennia but started falling apart in the late 1600s. It devolved into an ideology -- in effect, it became a form of idolatry. And the Grail has to be a metaphor for the empty cup inside each of us waiting to be filled with God’s Grace.”

“That makes sense,” Sandy agreed.

“Okay,” Phil smiled, and then he realized it was the first time he smiled in a while. “What about the patriarchs?”

“The speculation on the Age of the Patriarchs,” Sandy began, “has been going on for some time. It’s important to establish its accuracy, because God’s blessing, if not found in the historical record, undermines the existence of a covenant.”

Phil said, “I’ve read about that. The timeframe for that age ranges from 2500 BC to 750 BC. What’s been the problem?”

“Nailing down the Pharaoh Moses escaped.”

“Manuel said it wasn’t Ramses or Ikhnaton. I guess I should ask him who it was.”

“Well, he would know.”

“What makes sense?”

“Not a lot in Exodus makes sense,” Sandy replied. “The authors of the Hebrew Bible used numbers in either a magical or religious sense. For example, the great ages people lived to are multiples of five or seven. The ages drop dramatically after the Flood, but still the custom with the Hebrews and others was to assign long lifetimes to legendary figures. So, too, with the multitudes of the exodus. There couldn’t have been 600,000, because there were, at most, only 100,000 living in Canaan at the time.”

“So what was going on?”

“People migrated back and forth from Canaan to Egypt’s delta region during droughts,” Sandy answered. “We also know the hill country was settled around 1200 B.C. Before that, people lived along the coast, or along the Tigris-Euphrates rivers.”

“The Hebrews settled uninhabited land?”

“While, at the same time, the coastal cities were collapsing,” Sandy added. “The speculation is that Judea arose as a result of this collapse rather than causing it.”

Remembering what Azazel told him, Phil pulled the theories together and tried to make sense of it. “The story of the patriarchs took the existing pre-history of the region, with its legends, ethnic boundaries and traditions, and created a foundation for Israel’s unique status as a people who worshipped one invisible god.”

“That fits,” Sandy agreed. “Especially if you figure the five books of Moses were completed in the 7th or 8th Centuries B.C., which many scholars believe.”

Phil thought about it some more and added, “So, in a sense, it all happened. People moving in and out of Egypt. People taking over the hill country. Canaan collapsing.”

Sandy jumped in, “The conflicts involving Samson, Deborah and Gideon were probably tribal squabbles. David and Solomon probably ruled, but in a less grand way.”

“It’s all based on fact,” Phil reiterated, “but spun to secure the covenant.”

Sandy chuckled, “It’s a great story. All the timeless themes are there: liberation, escaping oppression, social justice, and faith in the one true god while surrounded by pagans. It’s a story the Chosen People deserve.”

“You agree they were Chosen.”

“I do,” Sandy continued to smile. “They carried the wisdom tradition from Egypt and made it into a national religion. Who else saw past the gods and demigods to the Great Mystery of En Sof?”

Phil smiled back, “You don’t let the inconsistencies bother you.”

“Does Hamlet tell us anything important about Denmark?”

“Okay,” Phil chuckled. “What’s important is the covenant.”

“Yes. We are all sons and daughters of God, and we should act like it.”

Phil nodded his agreement and left soon afterward for his hotel room. Once there, he meditated his way back to Manuel’s patio and let the angel know of his recent insights.

Manuel listened as he finished with his flowers then joined Phil at the marble bench. Apparently unimpressed with Phil’s insights, the angel asked, “The history of the Hebrews is of no importance. The insights in the Hebrew Bible are of supreme importance. And you missed the important question: Why did idolatry begin during the Patriarchal period?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Didn’t you listen to Pastor Mike’s sermon?” Manuel chastised him. “He gave you the answer: Silence. Job’s solution.”

“I see,” Phil’s voice brightened for the first time today. “They wanted to control God rather than wait for him to fill up their empty cups.”

“Yep. Already, the yin was being devalued.”

“The feminine principle,” Phil thought out loud. “Waiting to receive. The Grail is a symbol for feminine spirituality.”

“Now you know why it’s been lost to Christianity for ages.”

Phil nodded his head, because the task Jehovah had given him was to find the Grail and return it to Christianity. Suddenly, the entire picture came clear. Logos co-opted mythos to wring God out of the material world. Like the story about blindfolded people trying to describe an elephant when each of them could only touch one part of the animal: It’s a trunk! It’s a tail! It’s a big foot! While each scientific observation was true, they couldn’t determine the entirety of the elephant without taking off the blindfolds.

Reason devolved into a form of idolatry. Since, however, it was ultimately impossible to contain God through Reason, the patriarchy seized power and compounded the idolatry by making itself into an ideology. When the dust settled, the Grail was nowhere to be found, because there was no place for feminine spirituality in such a world.

Manuel was busy reading Phil’s mind, and the angel nodded his blond head as Phil made the connections. Presently the angel told him, “I think you may be ready to see Jehovah.”

“I’d rather not.”

“What is there left to do?” Manuel queried. “You’ve got it figured out. The patriarchy jettisoned the Grail right out of the world.”

“I don’t think Jehovah will like what I’ve found. And I’m sure he’ll retaliate in some way. I need to be better prepared for what he might do.”

“Okay,” Manuel allowed. “What do you need to do to prepare?”

“If feminine spirituality is the blind spot,” Phil reasoned, “then I need some kind of connection to its energy.”

“You already have a connection to Morrigan.”

“Yes,” Phil mused. “Maybe she can tutor me on what I need.”

When Phil came back to his body, the stress of the day finally caught up with him. He went to sleep. Two hours later, though, the phone rang.

“Hi, Dad,” Donna’s subdued voice greeted him.

“Are you okay?” he asked as he struggled to wake up.

“Yeah. Sort of, anyway. I’m sorry I lost it.” She sighed and continued, “Your job. Mom. It’s a mess. And it’s all my fault.”

“No, no, no,” Phil said as he sat up in bed. “This was bound to happen sooner or later. Manuel’s been telling me for months to give it all up and join a monastery. It’s not your fault.”

“But if it wasn’t for me losing it the way I did, you’d be home tonight and going to work tomorrow.”

“The job sucked,” he said. “Betty and I never were on the same page spiritually. I’m kind of glad it’s over.”

“But what will you do?”

“The monastery idea doesn’t sound half-bad,” he chuckled. “But I want to make sure you and Bobby are set before I retreat from the world. I’ll probably get another job first.”

“I feel really bad about this.”

“Don’t,” Phil challenged her. “You can’t let my situation distract you from your immediate danger. Have you established a link to Ishtar?”

“I think so,” Donna said weakly. “I think it was her strength that finally calmed me down. You know, I was totally freaked.”

“I know. I should have seen it last night. I didn’t. I apologize. But the important thing is for you to stay out of fear or guilt or any of it. They’re all distractions, and you must stay focused.”

“When can I see you?”

“Pastor Mike is going to have you come to his office, hopefully tomorrow,” Phil relayed. “I’ll meet you there.”

A long pause ensued, and Donna finally said, “Can we trust him?”

“I hope so. I doubt he’ll be real pleased with Ishtar, but we can work around it.”

Donna finally laughed, “Dad, you’re incorrigible.”

Phil laughed with her; then he became serious, “Practice going down the trail, down the stairs, to the arch. Finish letting the arch build itself. Next time I see you, we’ll go through the arch. Then we can talk about what the trail, stairs, and all the rest mean.”

“Okay,” she said and her voice was stronger. “I can do it. I’m also on the Internet and learning about Ishtar. She’s got a colorful history.”

“Good. See you tomorrow.”

“Bye, Dad,” she murmured. “I’m really sorry.”

“Bye, honey. And I’m not sorry. I’m glad you’re okay.”

Then he hung up the phone and heaved a deep sigh of relief. Since he was wide awake now, he switched on the Discovery Channel and watched alligators mate until his eyes started to droop.