The Godless Angel

image by Edgar Duvivier

Before Time cheated existence as its father, Orgasm popped up to beings on earth out of a breath of peace between God and the devil. Being atemporal, it had good and evil, rebirth and annihilation, pleasure and suffering, all at once. But it did not threaten Time too much because for it to be reached, one needed Time’s service. One had to wait to get close to the person one was attracted to and spend some moments charming him or her. But people often played mind games in those moments, making the path to Orgasm lengthier, more sinuous than the mating rituals of animals, and absurdly calculated. At first, this situation appeased Time, but little by little Orgasm became preposterous to it all the same. Time’s ascendence over existence forced every event and living being to abide by its rule, whereas that explosion of grace and sin totally eluded it. Therefore, Time, which was lazy, boring, and repetitive, always falling short of the urgency of plenitude, decided to overlook Orgasm, thinking to himself, “As long as I can delay even more and mess up the way to that weird pleasure that disrespects me, I am fine,” and went on doing his job of making people and things get old and worn out. It transformed itself into a web, of which it was also the spider. Beings were caught in that web, slowly moving through its laborious, monotonous net, becoming uglier, deteriorating, and finally being sucked out of existence by the lazy spider.

For along with deterioration, Fear, Guilt, and the coup de grace that we call Death came into being. Humanity was trapped, and Orgasm, its liberation, became more and more complicated to reach. Fear and Guilt were in love with each other and gave origin to Righteousness. This pretentious and self-important result of their mixture confined Orgasm to marriage and procreation, regimenting this moment of eternity by making it anemic and devoid of passion.

But there existed among men, an angel with no God, and he decided to help whoever he could. He was godless because he didn’t believe in the supernatural, he was a scientist, and most scientists are too serious to mind what cannot be proved, what is unavailable to be “owned” by knowledge. There can be no miracles and no mysteries for scientists. Miracles are too fanciful for them, and they tend to look at mysteries as something that will eventually be deciphered by science. With no mystery nor miracle, one’s life becomes rigid, and those wise men are set in their ways. They take their theories to be ultimate and are always dethroning one another. Like them, the godless angel wanted to own the truth. He asserted the existence of an unknown part of the mind he was able to access through a talking therapy he called psychoanalysis.

But set in his ways or not, why was Sigmund Freud an angel?

First, because he was able to absolve people by understanding them better than they themselves did. In fact, his power of sympathy almost dethroned Guilt, Time’s oldest offspring — for how should anyone be guilty of what they did if they couldn’t know themselves well enough to see what pushed them to do it? Responsibility for one’s actions was put into question, and much of what religion called “sin” became viewed by many as the result of blindness.

The second reason the godless angel was an angel concerned the fact he was a natural poet like listening to heavens, his scientific declarations having a quality of fictional literature. He would build up dramatic stories interpreting ancient narratives and illustrate his insights with rich and dreamy metaphors to make points that changed the world. Some philosophers became enraged, especially because those points led their beloved “Free Will” to be doubted. With other realities, it got close to be thrown out of the human world by ceasing to matter to many people. The godless angel, nonetheless, thought he was healing humanity by deciphering the hangs up of sexuality that afflicted everybody and showing that religion was some sort of wishful thinking.

“If this scientist continues to decree absurdities,” thought Guilt, “he will erase Sin out of existence, and with no Sin, nothing will be deserving of punishment and nobody will dwell on me anymore.”

Time, the spider, wondered how much his importance would diminish if all pleasures earned freedom and completion without people’s need to set goals through him, to climb the spider’s web, that is. Fear was too afraid to wonder anything, but only loving darkness, he always loathed the godless angel’s nerve to bring things to light. He was also offended because his incestuous bond with Guilt was often unmasked by the angel. However, the latter’s discoveries gave sexuality so much independence that it no longer needed to team up with passion. Playing mental games was a seal of people’s vanity and remained, but even with their games, they still searched for Orgasm right and left with no strings attached; free love became almost mechanic, emotions were short lived, and everyone could act cerebral by weighing pros and cons before getting into relationships.

In heaven, the family of the godless angel was never bothered that he was godless because he was doing good. But when they saw how banal, disposed of, and replaceable, human physical bonds became, and how more and more people were indifferent to the values of ethics and religion, they were appalled and took pity on their earthly cousin. The consequences of the latter’s discoveries made them pay acute attention to the ills on Earth, and from the eternity where they live, they saw in one goal what had happened, what went on happening, and what was still to happen. They felt especially horrified by what became of religion. No matter how many people switched their faith in it to faith in science, worse than disappearing, religion gave origin to the fanaticism of evangelicals, the everything-goes of New Age, and world conflicts between East and West.

Ruled by utilitarianism’s enslaving of means by ends, which is another petty offspring of Time, people could only think ahead of themselves and in function of their goals. Some, concerned with the survival of their descendants, were worried with the over exploitation of nature, and began promoting the protection of the planet’s resources against those who only craved the immediate gratification of money. The latter inflicted fires in the forests, caused industry pollution in the oceans, and couldn’t care less. Nature to them was to be transformed into dollar bills. Besides these two antagonistic groups, there were several currents of ecologists with different opinions, and a few of them thought that science would find a way to pull off the overexploitation of nature. But nobody could come to an agreement.

All these crises required heavenly intervention. The godless angel’s family decided to ask the help of Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, and Uriel, the four archangels of God’s directions, because they are also the four forces of redemption: passion, light, healing, and love.

Michael, the leader of all angels, is pure passion. Carrying the spade of Truth, he doesn’t think twice to draw lines, to liberate, and to strike for the sake of justice. He brings courage, strength, and faith. Gabriel enlightens by helping the understanding of God’s messages through dreams, visions, and intuition. Raphael opens the way to communion with nature, healing body, mind and spirit. Uriel dispels confusion with the wisdom of God’s love, bringing compassion and reconciliation.

The complaints of the godless angel’s family about the situation on Earth were not taken as a surprise by the archangels. Without even considering the money-minded people, the self-interested way with which the others treat nature by only looking at it in function of survival had already angered Archangel Raphael. Even if their intention was nobler than the lust for money’s immediate gratification, they also aimed at their own good. With such incapacity to hear the voice of the forests, see the nymphs of the trees, listen to the music of the sea, and enjoy the sound of silence, those humans showed to have no poetic sense, no chance to honor the real and healing soul of natural creation. They couldn’t let go of themselves to the only, God whispered love that annihilates the selfish drive they built life on Earth with.

“Do people have to be always self-interested? Can’t they ever step out of themselves and hear spirit? Those money crazy men are despicable, but the ecologists are caught in the spider’s web all the same. They can’t treat nature with the respect it deserves because they don’t transcend!” Raphael had already told the other archangels.

“They are not like us; don’t forget they don’t have wings! Let’s respect the designs of God!” Gabriel retorted.

Uriel, on his turn, was particularly disgusted with the new vocabulary meant to replace classifying words with coward terms that are neither here nor there, allowing those who adopt them to stay on the wall. The word “energy”, for instance, once concerned the physical world meaning electricity, body stamina, or battery power, and with Einstein’s most popular equation, it became interchangeable with matter (not spirit) both being shown as different forms of the same thing: Energy equals matter times the speed of light squared. But with the new vocabulary, “energy” started to designate spiritual realities like emanations of people’s aura, vibes given off by determined situations or person, and even vagrant souls. Being applied with frivolity to faith-related contents, “energy”, with its overtones of physicality, started to suggest a mixture of spiritual and scientific realities the meaning of which nobody really knew, giving people the chance of using it to designate anything they wanted to sound important, invisible, and metaphysical. But other terms could be loose if they ignored differences that some had no wish to identify with, like the basic distinction between sexual genres. God forbid calling “she” someone whose only feminine attribute was her genitals, for instance. So, the term “they”, which used to be a plural pronoun, began referring also to a single “she”, or to a “he”, this vagueness implying an array of categories in accordance with a myriad type of sexual identities that were once a matter of creative improvisation in the encounters between people, but began to be crystallized by each of those categories like fixed labels defining a product. The pronoun “they” also helped those who saw the differentiation between the feminine and the masculine as “sexism”. But the drive to specification got to the extreme of backfiring, and the term “fluid”, among the array of sexual identities, was created as an umbrella under which all possible cases could take refuge. It designated the fact that sexuality and sexual behavior can change over time and be dependent on the situation. In a few words, it was created to overrule all specification.

However, a word that was flexible because of its poetic, metaphorical richness, like “God”, was often considered inadequate for lacking precision. These language innovations expressed an attitude that was pusillanimous, devoid of spontaneity, and contradictory: the need for precision on one hand and for vagueness on the other, excessive judgement here and a terrible fear of being judgmental there. In fact, what drove Uriel beside himself was the replacement of “God” by “Universe” in some circles that complied with the fear of spontaneity and fell in love with science and the impartiality of its judgements. Science would never compromise anyone’s “righteousness” because it is morally neutral, and more and more people felt safe under its shadow. They and their kind thought the word “God” implies the limits of religious beliefs, that like sects, message allegiance to an old, bearded, and wise guy ruling the show from above. They forgot that even the freest philosophers talked of God to designate a transcending source of creation, some poets saw God in the beauty of nature, and colloquial language made expressions around “God”. In fact, Uriel thought, “God help them!”, knowing that God was the Love source of creation, an all-powerful Father, a cry for help, the divine feminine and masculine, the beauty of nature, all and more than all in one. Sentences substituting prayers, like, “God help me achieving success” by “Let the Universe know that you want to be successful,” or, “Make the Universe conspire with you”, which have no grain of humbleness and give ascendance to human power over spiritual surrendering, to the point of implying people’s influence on the universe, almost made him throw up.

“Can’t they see that love is the force of creation, the bond between creator and creature? Is it self-importance leading them to think that only objective and cold concepts measure up to their modernity? What the fuck? “Universe” is the object of science whereas God lives in all of us and is at one with us if we only let us be ourselves. Nothing can split this Love from us like it were a lab specimen to be reached by speculation! The word is God because God has a heart. God is Heart!” He exclaimed to the other Archangels.

“This is all due to lack of passion. They are under the domain of Fear and cling to everything that is rigid because they mistake it for solidity, but the “solidity” of their definitions splits everything that was at one. Besides, it often results in fanaticism…another crazy assertion of fear. It is disgusting! I have to inspire courage in those people!” Michael declared.

With Michael’s lead, the archangels welcomed everything he decided. They remembered the time they’d blessed a special vine, the Banisteriosis caapi, and the dreamy leaves of the Psychotria viridis shrub, with their forces of redemption, messaging a native of the largest, purest, and warmest forest in the world to mix those plants into a brew which would give them some of God’s grace. The native did as he was told, and the magical brew was instilled with Michael’s courage, Gabriel’s truth, Raphael’s healing, and Uriel’s love. It soon spread throughout the Amazon, becoming a source of apprenticeship and respect to all Indigenous people. They were grateful for the insights, the courage, the healing, and the transcending revelations it granted them. That blessed brew of plants also taught them about themselves through what was beyond them and revealed the secrets of many other plants. They understood it was their sacred master.

The archangels had been drawn by the innocence of the native and thought that others like him would be the only people put on Earth. But now, it was time to spread redemption to those who were different and had become the majority on the planet. Michael assured the others he would take care of it, for he, the courage of passion and the passion of courage, is responsible for justice — above all, justice with one’s soul. He flew down to the Amazon and stood by the Vine and the Shrub throughout the whole forest. His radiant beauty was invisible to the eyes of earthlings, but not to their hearts. It was felt rather than seen, and the feeling of it was the annihilation of all limits.

The natives who experienced the presence of Michael understood they had to take the mixture of those plants to civilization. The main archangel of God had even whispered the name of it to them: “Ayahuasca, the Vine of the soul.”

From then on, shamans of different tribes started to learn how to play the guitar and to sing songs along with their ayahuasca chants. They traveled through the world and conducted ayahuasca rituals for Greeks and Trojans. They are still doing it, and the archangels are cheering!

Still wondering why Michael often appears to ayahuasqueros?