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2012-01-01. A Goddess Enters the Game.
“Confessions of a Rebel Angel; The Wisdom of the Watchers and the Destiny of Planet Earth.”. – Book 1B. Chapter 12. ~ by Timothy Wyllie
“Intractable Hostility, Death of Immortals, Rebirth of the Spirit, Self-Determination and the Geography of Zandana”
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Confessions of a Rebel Angel. Book 1B. Chapter 12. A Goddess Enters the Game.
Just as Caligastia’s staff had callously placed wagers on tribal warfare back when they were living in the city, so now, with their ability to become involved directly with the tribes of their choices, did they have their first direct experience of raw power. The playful competitiveness they’d experienced and inspired between the tribes in better times soon devolved into bitter feuding between different staff members. Even the justification of “doing it for the benefit of the tribes’ advancement” had started to sound hollow. Now it was solely about the staff members’ egos, their pride, their desire to be adored and worshipped as gods too by their tribespeople, their mysterious invulnerability, and their immortality. Their immortality? Ah, yes, that fortuitous, biocosmic symbiosis that allowed the staff a deathless life, provided they continued to eat their ration of the Edentian shrub. What they hadn’t been made aware of was exactly how the plant biochemically assimilated the incoming high-frequency cosmic rays, thus allowing them immortality.
They believed it was merely the plant itself that rejuvenated them. I can only assume that they were kept in the dark about this as one of M A’s subtle fail-safes, one of the ways they could check the effects of a planetary uprising in the rare event one were to break out. The staff noticed some of the telltale signs of their bodies aging in the latter days of the city, when Van’s loyalist midwayers were making it impossible for them to get to the plant. However, when Van’s group finally left the city to its own devices, they’d taken seeds and cuttings from the shrub in case M A would later reactivate the incoming rays. Naturally, as a loyalist, Van had been made aware that the symbiosis no longer worked because the incoming rays had been shut down. The rebel faction, on the other hand, did not know this simple truth or they likely would have thought it was another one of Van’s tricks. Perhaps they simply didn’t want to confront the prospect of their own mortality, so they carried what was left of the shrub on their journey northward.
Regardless, as the years passed, and the few remaining cuttings not killed by the sea journey flourished briefly and then died, it became obvious the staff was getting steadily older. The staff ’s physical vehicles didn’t age the same way as human bodies do: it was a far slower and more imperceptible process; as a result, they didn’t start taking it seriously until three centuries later, when it became impossible to ignore. Another fifty years passed in feverish denial before the inescapable reality of their imminent deaths could no longer be suppressed. And what was going to happen to them after they’d cast off their bodies? They’d be back in the clutches of the Local Universe administrators, the very ones they had rebelled against. This they really did not want to think about! During this sad and nervous time, all sixty members of the secession staff, and those of their modified mortal companions who’d chosen to stay with their clone masters, died within thirty-three years of the first death. They sometimes chose to expire in small groups; at other times two or three of them would die within one cycle of the moon. However alienated they’d become from one another in the times following the uprising, they’d lived so long and knew and loved each other in their own ways so deeply, that the funerals became agonizing rituals.
This was aggravated by the dying staff’s fear of what might befall them in the after-death realms: their confidence diminished steadily with every group of deaths. Possibly the worst of it was how these once brilliant beings actually died. It was not a quick process. Nod, for example, spent over ten years suffering death agonies before he finally and painfully succumbed. It seemed to me as though their ancient bodies, in their turn, were rebelling against their owners. The internal organs, rather than all giving up the ghost simultaneously, failed slowly, one by one, over time. Not having a body of the same material, I could only imagine what a slow torture it must have been. Each organ atrophied in turn, decaying and ultimately expiring, without killing the overall vehicle.
The staff ’s bodies, designed and grown by the Avalon surgeons, were for obvious reasons broadly patterned on the indigenous native model. One of the prime modifications the gene splicers were most proud of was a bioelectrical subsystem that sustained the body in the event of organ injury. While this ingenious development, which rerouted electrical impulses even if an organ was irreparably damaged, was essential to deal with personal injury over their long lives, it made their unanticipated physical death all the more horribly painful. Nod and Böni, who elected to die together, seemed to be the worst affected and took the longest to expire. As their internal organs collapsed, starting with the least relevant for survival, the subsystem took over, maintaining a semblance of life in the dying vehicle. Because their brains were the last to fail, they had no choice but to experience this agonizing process of physical disintegration, from which there was no escape. Some did contemplate suicide, but it was such a taboo subject among exceptionally long-lived beings that none of them could face the prospect of killing themselves, nor could they summon the courage to arrange a mutual murder-suicide pact.
I don’t believe any of the dying staff were fully aware of it—at least I never overheard any of them claiming it—but I sensed they felt that in submitting to such terrible deaths they were atoning in some way for their sins. On the surface it seemed all to be about pride: they had become so addicted to living that they weren’t going to give up without a fight. There were two important factors, however, which at least gave them in their dying days the delusion that their work might continue into the future. They achieved a pledge from the midwayers to persevere to the best of their abilities with everything the staff had introduced. However, it was on their biological children that they placed their most immediate demands. Their biological children? Yes, indeed, the staff had had their fun before they expired. When the staff had finally accepted that they were no longer immortal, Caligastia had issued an edict instructing the members of his staff to mate with humans. He knew there was a biological compatibility between the staff ’s constructed bodies and the human genome, because M A’s future ideas for the planet had included creating a race of humans who were to be the direct progeny of the staff.
Then those selected bloodlines would be carefully nurtured through the centuries. Except this was intended to happen in the far distant future, well after the next two or three of M A’s missions had arrived and completed their work. Like all the other plans Caligastia was attempting to implement, this was a massive and completely premature acceleration of M A’s social engineering. While these matings and the resultant progeny had some immediate positive effects in helping the staff control the increasingly rowdy tribes, in the end it was just another wasted opportunity. Granted, the children of these matings were magnificent creatures. They were tough and resilient and exceptionally long-lived, some flourishing for more than a thousand years. They became legendary; they were the giants, their feats of strength and leadership passing down through the generations of humans in the myths and stories of the “great men of old.” Yet, however long-lived the staff ’s children, and their children’s children, they were all thoroughly mortal.
They lived and died like everyone else. When they were long dead and gone, their genetic gift would be thoroughly diluted by centuries of interbreeding and consequently would have little or no value at a time when the genetic infusion would be really needed. With the staff and their children gone, there was just Caligastia, Daligastia, and their 40,119 rebel midwayers left to walk the planet to do what they could to subvert Van and Amadon’s work in the foothills of the mountains of northern India. And, of course, there were still some observing angels present—many fewer now since the transitional angels had been called home. There were even some of the observing angels—Watchers like myself—who must have found a way to leave their posts and plead their cases before Lanaforge’s courts, because they, too, disappeared. I was tempted, naturally. It was impossible to ignore how bad the situation had become on the planet. For all our good intentions, it seemed as if everything we implemented, sooner or later, failed to come to fruition.
Throughout the Arabian Peninsula, and stretching for several hundred miles east and west, constant tribal conflicts ravaged the countryside, with tribespeople cutting down the trees and leveling the small settlements. In some places the sands were already starting to reclaim the previously verdant landscape. In spite of all the damage Caligastia’s edicts had caused, Van managed to establish more than three hundred settlements, mainly in the Indian subcontinent and China. Also, South America hosted a number of such settlements. Some of these groups flourished and grew into great civilizations, like the ones you know as Lemuria and Atlantis, before disappearing under the oceans. A pattern emerged over the millennia of a culture blossoming, bright and full of promise, only to decay prematurely from within or be overrun by an invading force or fall into the ocean. Can Caligastia be held responsible for all these disasters? He certainly attempted to be a constant presence—a god to some, a demon to others.
With a multitude of names and forms and with the invisible help of his faithful midwayers, he milked as much adoration as he could, as he simultaneously sowed fear and terror across the world. Van did his best to fulfill the goals and keep the faith of the original mission. Yet, as the centuries passed and Van’s settlements expanded, he and Amadon found it increasingly difficult to convince the indigenous natives of the reality of an Unseen God. Rather than see the natives revert to the worship of their tribal gods, and yet realizing these primitive mortals needed a physical focus for their worship, they started encouraging a veneration for the sun, Father Sun. Later, when a female element demanded to be expressed in more balanced cultures—like Lemuria—the Moon, or Mother Earth, also became the focus of worship. Van had deliberately engineered these religions as a way of keeping Caligastia at bay. He also emphasized the understanding that Caligastia was unable to enter any human consciousness unless freely invited in.
“Focus your desire to worship,” he would tell the people. “Focus it on the Sun, Moon, or Earth. See how they bring us life—how Father Sun warms us and how generous Mother Earth is to bring us life. May they always remind you of the Unseen Father who lives in your hearts.” He was well aware that humans possess what M A has called a “worship circuit,” which is embedded in the spiritual body of all mortals. These worship circuits continue to exist, whether or not they’re repressed or denied. The desire to revere what is greater than the self runs deep in the human personality. If it’s not a God who is worshipped then the object of reverence will likely be “displaced”—to use a psychological term—on some material substitute for Divinity. In a materialist era, this can mean money or possessions; in a more superstitious time, it will be which god, or gods, that tribe habitually worshipped. “And the most dangerous substitute is he who calls himself God of this world. Do not be deluded by Caligastia. He’s the father of lies—the great deceiver. Do not fall under his spell.” So Van preached as he traveled his territory. “There will come a day when you will no longer have me to remind you.
You must love and be grateful to Father Sun and Mother Earth, and the good life they bring you.” Yet, as the millennia passed and human nature reasserted itself, Caligastia increasingly became identified in various human religions as the devil. He became God’s opposition, the adversary, and a convenient device for a manipulative priestcraft, as well as a creature of human nightmares. The Devil. The archetype of pure evil. Not quite the God that Caligastia might have seen himself. I’d like to think the irony of having to settle for merely “getting the best lines” hasn’t been lost on him. Think of those long centuries between the time of the angelic rebellion and the dawning of the “modern” historical era as the true Dark Ages. It wasn’t the Golden Age the ancients believed preceded them, nor was it exactly the Satya Yuga, the Era of Truth, in which Hindus believe humanity was ruled by gods and the period they regard as the pinnacle of human culture, from which humankind has steadily declined.
Neither were there enlightened matriarchal societies that contemporary feminists like to believe contrasted with male patriarchal dominance. No such luck, I’m sad to say. Lemuria, as we’ll come to see, was the most spiritually advanced society on the planet for many thousands of years, yet it was no matriarchy. Even in the most balanced of cultures the male of your species has almost always dominated his womenfolk through physical strength and the threat of violence. There were heroes, of course, and short periods of peace from time to time in different parts of the globe that the expanding human population had now reached. But in light of the mission’s original intent, it can be considered as 203,300 years of constant conflict. Despite Van and his assistant’s considerable efforts to keep the forlorn mission going as originally planned, Caligastia seemed to be everywhere, subverting their plans and corrupting their achievements.
He set clan against clan, tribe against tribe, and, finally, race against race, as the human population increased in size. Caligastia and his midwayers encouraged the natives to return to their terrifying ideas and images of gods and goddesses. Soon the rebel midwayers were starting to use their powers to reinforce tribal superstitions and to favor certain individuals over others with their support. The midwayers played on and preyed on the natives’ natural fear of ghosts, using their ability to influence and intervene in material reality to create the appearance of miraculous events. From a mortal point of view, the central theme of the Lucifer manifesto was his call for the “liberty of individual self-determination,” and it was this notion that Caligastia and his staff had been championing in all their dealings with the tribes. By the time the staff had died, all the tribes falling under Caligastia’s influence had become far more hierarchical.
As the human settlements expanded and tribes merged and fought and recombined into even larger groups, power, rather than mere day-to-day survival, became the dominating influence in the life of most humans. The staff ’s children perpetuated this condition, often by becoming the hereditary rulers of their people or by using their unusual abilities to empower a powerful priest caste to hold their followers in a thrall of fear. These ruling families well knew by this time that one of the most terrifying aspects of life for early men and women was dreaming, and in particular, nightmares. Over time dreams and waking life became all of a piece, ghosts slipping from one reality into the other and back again. This was the midwayers’ territory, of course, and I watched them taking a perverse pleasure in manipulating what came to be known as the ghost dream, in favor of this or that king or ruler. Many of us angels watched these actions with some horror. This wasn’t what we’d bargained for when we signed on with Caligastia.
The idea of giving more freedom to mortals to work out their own destinies sounded good when Nod, or one of the others, proclaimed it, because we knew something had to be done to break the impasse we’d reached with the natives. But the sort of manipulation we were starting to see Caligastia’s crew practicing became an out-and-out infringement on a mortal’s God-given freedom of choice. Granted, it had been an exhausting and frustrating time for the couple of centuries prior to the uprising in which it seemed that progress had slowed to a halt. Fear and superstition had proved far stronger than anyone had anticipated, and although much was made of the small successes, many of the staff had long become demoralized. I’m sure their loss of personal confidence was a contributing factor in the decision by so many of them to support the new regime. As I’ve already said, we knew within a few centuries of the uprising that the rapid acceleration we’d introduced had backfired in a series of unintended and unforeseen consequences. But there was no going back.
My own assessment was that Caligastia simply had to make it work somehow—his pride compelled him to prove the righteousness of Lucifer’s cause, even if he had to resort to some dirty tricks to achieve it. Those long centuries were a fearful time for humans. Even in the few settlements being nurtured by Van and his loyalists there was a constant threat of the corrupting influence of Caligastia’s midwayers. Yet the worst of it was displayed in the deliberate dissension constantly being stirred up between increasingly power-hungry tribal leaders. Firmly believing in Lucifer’s ideology of greater freedom, Caligastia had soon recognized that the most effective way of accelerating social and technological growth was to set tribe against tribe and then stand back and watch human nature at work.
As the millennia passed, larger and larger tribal groupings faced off, and the vanquished ones were driven into new and unknown territories. As more centuries followed, the survivors of the defeated—toughened by the harsh conditions in the outlands and whipped, with Caligastia’s help, into a paroxysm of hatred—then descended and ravaged the great cities of their former enemy, who had by now grown fat, rich, and arrogant in their victory. Then, some centuries later, the victors—having interbred with the women of the conquered, and, like their predecessors, by now grown fat and lazy— happen to leave their fighting to mercenaries. This will be a sure sign of decline. The situation will then be reversed, and the formerly virile victors will, in turn, be vanquished. As you can appreciate, this pattern established such a continuing web of interlocking tribal and racial enmity that it has continued to reverberate down through the millennia and into the present day. While not originating in quite such ancient times, the intractability of the Jewish/Arab conflict is an apt example of this pattern.
Working with the remnants of the supermortal bloodlines, the midwayers, in consultation with Caligastia or his assistant, selected certain individual humans, or specific tribal groups, for their ambition and cunning; some for their greed and duplicity; and some for their callous indifference to the suffering of others. These were the sort of personalities with whom Caligastia could work. Many of those offspring developed into the great ruling families, the immensely wealthy trading clans, and, most important, the priests and priestesses. This direct intervention produced yet another resurgence of city building, this time with technology illicitly introduced by Caligastia and his midwayers. Just as he had supported Lucifer’s call for greater freedom for the mortals in his System, Caligastia appeared to be convinced that humans should also have access to much of the midwayers’ occult information.This period was also the start of a slow deterioration of the solidarity that had been sustaining the midwayers and allowed Caligastia to work with them as one coherent force. Inevitably, there had always been minor conflicts and disagreements among the midwayers, but nothing that Caligastia couldn’t settle when he needed them to work together.
However, when individual midwayers had invested so much of their time and energy in their pet projects, relating in their own subtle ways to their chosen humans, they found themselves gradually becoming more individualized. It was this increased individualization that compounded their problems so disastrously. As a species, midwayers are born to the Prince’s staff into a relatively choiceless environment. I say “relatively choiceless” because midwayers need to retain a higher degree of personal autonomy in order to deal with mortal emergencies. Yet, similar to angels, they are created as functional beings, and as such, under normal planetary situations, they don’t face a wide range of individual choices. They don’t need to—their functions will invariably dictate their choices. Now these same midwayers had been thrown into a situation for which they were emotionally and mentally completely unprepared. In many ways this lack of self-awareness contributed directly to the levels of emotional immaturity that proved to be their ultimate downfall.
They split into smaller and smaller clans, spreading over the face of the world, their actions becoming more idiosyncratic and self-serving as generations of humans came and went. Because midwayers could be considered to be in a semimaterial state of being, they were capable under certain conditions of communicating directly into the minds of chosen humans. This is where the priest and priestess castes received their power, building up a whole variety of different religious traditions as guided by one or another of these clans of mischievous midwayers. Why mischievous? Because by this time most of the rebel midwayers had simply given up, or forgotten all about, their basic function—that of caring for mortals. Many even adopted Caligastia’s prideful and superior attitude toward humans, which was reinforced by the ease with which they could persuade the natives to worship and make sacrifices to them.
Animal and human sacrifice had long been practiced by the natives as a way of attempting to propitiate the spirits they believed were behind the natural events that terrorized them. Thunder and lightning; floods and earthquakes; the fire that spewed out of volcanoes; tsunamis, forest fires, and tornadoes; the constant threat of wild animals and predatory tribes—all this unpredictability had to be accounted for and somehow placated. Although the midwayers had no more control over such violent natural geophysical events than the natives, if it served their purposes they were all too willing to be believed responsible for wreaking devastation. Every season that the natives weren’t swept up in a tornado, for example, their tornado god and his priests and priestesses would be richly rewarded for their successful intercession with their god. If the day came, as it always does, when the tornado did do its damage, then it was all too easy to play upon the guilt and fear of the people, making their lack of worshipful adoration the cause of it.
In this way the natives could be held in a form of mental and emotional dependence, which was easily manipulated, in this case, by the tornado god’s priests or priestesses. So it was over the many subsequent millennia. The same tired pattern Caligastia had set in motion so long ago in hopes of producing a truly advanced and free global culture was repeated over and over. A particular warlord would emerge, and, supported by a group of midwayers, he would gather an army to fight and subjugate all opposition. By killing some and enslaving vast numbers of prisoners, the warlord—now the ruler of all he surveyed—would then start building for his legacy, for his family, and to enhance his reputation. Settlements had led to villages, which were then absorbed into towns, and with the invasions of the warlords came the fortified defenses, the castles, and the city walls. This was a time when empires, great and small, rose and fell with appalling regularity. Some of these empires became comparatively advanced before they were reduced to rubble by their successors. Yet, however technologically advanced they grew, it was always the same story.
Some catastrophe—natural or human-made—would bring them to their knees. In some cases an empire nurtured by Caligastia, and the few midwayers still under his control, became so overbearingly powerful that it would be destroyed wholesale, as had the tidal wave that obliterated all remnants of Dalamatia, our beautiful city. However, there would always be a few survivors to any of these disasters, and something of the previous empire’s cultural and technical expertise would get passed along— sometimes to be built upon, mostly to be lost. Yet this rhythm of an empire’s slow growth, followed by a violent catastrophe that all but wiped it out, was spectacular enough for many indigenous legends to speak of four of these cataclysms as the “ending of the first four worlds.” It’s probably a fruitless exercise to try to compare what might have occurred had there never been a rebellion, with the chaos and madness of those many long and tedious millennia. If progress had been slow and steady, as M A’s policies had required, all I can say is that it would have been a very different world. Yet, I do feel there was something to be gained from what I was able to learn on my occasional trips to Zandana, the neighboring planet I referred to previously.
Because I’m somewhat exceeding my brief here, I will keep my observations on Zandana brief and sufficiently opaque that the planet cannot be readily recognized. I wouldn’t want to unknowingly violate any obscure interplanetary protocol. I believe the main difference between the way the two worlds compare with one another can be found in the personalities of the two Planetary Princes. Whereas Caligastia seemed driven by pride and resentment, Zandana’s Prince, possibly because of the overwhelming support he’d received from his staff and midwayers, had appeared far more measured in his plans for his planet. Because all eleven continents on Zandana were surrounded by ocean, this—combined with the natives’ natural submissiveness—had made them far easier to oversee and control. As a consequence, their Prince didn’t feel the need to artificially accelerate the pace of Zandana’s technological progress. Also, without the constant challenge of an effective opposition after their loyalists had been removed, there was never the same focus on warfare and its inevitable corollary, an arms race, on Zandana.
This is not to say that the endless millennia of the natives’ slow and steady progress on Zandana wasn’t also colored by some violence, but it was far more localized. As the indigenous population was spread over the many continents, this allowed the dominating clans and tribes on each island to develop in a relatively autonomous and nonthreatening manner. The frequent storms that battered the coastlines of the isolated continents had discouraged the natives from building oceangoing boats. Sadly, this had led the natives of Zandana to regard their ocean with fear—indeed, as a subject not to be openly spoken about. So firmly ingrained was this taboo that even the fishermen who laid their nets in the rivers and inland lakes on the islands were, on each continent, drawn from the lowest caste and were the only ones permitted to build their own coracles.
Although I didn’t observe it for myself, I suspect that the midwayers on Zandana had more than a hand in reinforcing this taboo, since it was so firmly held among the natives on all the continents. Apart from the small conflicts that erupted every once in a while when the succession line on one of the islands collapsed and rival families fought for dominance, life in general was far more peaceful than during the same period on Earth. The insularity of the continents and the greater regimentation of the caste system, which was firmly in place on most islands by the time I first visited soon after the rebellion, tended to create exceptionally tradition-bound cultures. Endless generations of natives were born, lived, mated, and died within the same castes. As such, life was also far less demanding, with a limited range of choices. I’ve been told by a colleague that there was something slightly humorous in this. All in all, she told me, life appeared to be going so smoothly it was as if the rebellion had never hit Zandana, as though it had never happened. Observing this phenomenon, so different from the constant territorial conflicts on Earth, I was inclined to believe that the geography of Zandana served its Prince well.
Because of the contained aspect of their territories, hereditary lines of kingship lasted for thousands of years longer than on Earth. The longevity of these hereditary rulers, cruel and unpleasant as some were, provided a certain stability with which the Prince and his midwayers could effectively work. Because these eleven well defined territories developed relatively independently, this also allowed for a higher degree of experimentation in approaches to governance. This would always get a sardonic sneer from Caligastia when I reported back on my findings, and he’d make some remark about Prince Zanda having all the breaks. And, as often as not, this would be followed by an hour-long tirade of angry complaints about M A’s selection process. I can write now what I couldn’t bring myself to say in those terrifying outbursts—that Caligastia’s overweening ambition to prove himself worthy in Lucifer’s eyes was going to bring the whole enterprise down. I had no doubt about this, but, of course, there was no telling him—or the others, for that matter. For the midwayers, Caligastia was their God: they had always worshipped him and would doubtless try to serve him without question to the end. Whatever that meant. However, some of us Watchers were becoming progressively more skeptical as time passed and as we observed the growing derangement of our noble leader’s personality. That was when I started fearing for our future.
I am a Watcher Angel and my name is Georgia.
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The following is an excerpt from the Timothy Wyllie’s book series on rebel angels, specifically an account as described by the angel referred to as ,’Georgia”.
To view this and other books by Timothy Wyllie, Click on book to view more at Amazon.com.
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