2013-01-01. The Worship Dilemma.
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Revolt of the Rebel Angels: The Future of the Multiverse – Book 2; Chapter 2 ~by Timothy Wyllie
Book 2, Chapter 2
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Revolt of the Rebel Angels: The Future of the Multiverse – Book 2; Chapter 2.
The Worship Dilemma, Atlantis and the Maya, Lemuria, Fandor Parthenogenesis, Dangerous Voyages.
A few tens of thousands years earlier, Van had clearly hoped his settlements across Asia might have become self-sustaining, not requiring his constant attention as well as his much celebrated visits. This was somewhat before the concept came to him of making possible a migration to the Islands of Mu . The truth was, Van was exhausted to the core. By this time he’d been tracking halfway across the world, backwards and forwards, from the Caspian Sea, across Asia, down into India, all the way to China and as far south as Australia, for over 130,000 years. He had to make sure Caligastia’s midwayer espionage agents were kept at bay, while at the same time keeping an eye on the peaceful development of the everexpanding settlements.
He was performing the functions for which the entire Prince’s staff would have been responsible had there been no rebellion; this and the terrible loneliness from which I knew Van suffered, all this and more had simply worn his poor old body out. His physical vehicle may well have been virtually immortal, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t subject to exhaustion. I knew it had been a difficult decision for Van. Of necessity, he’d had to become something of a control freak and it was almost impossible for him to turn over his responsibilities to Amadon, however much he trusted him. In the end his body made the decision for him and he stepped back, retiring to a monastery his people had built for him in the foothills of Kashmir. Prior to Van’s entering the monastery I overheard him briefing Amadon and claiming his retirement would be sure to stop the personality cult which, despite his efforts to prevent it, had been steadily growing in his name. Yet his long absence only ended up by making it worse. Van’s virtual immortality guaranteed he’d be labeled a god even though he’d reduced his visits to each settlement to once every 100 years, thus avoiding ever being seen twice by the same individual natives.
But it hadn’t turned out that way. In fact, when he emerged from his first period of five hundred years of silent meditation in the monastery, the reports he received indicated that most of his settlements were now actually worshipping him, Van! I wasn’t present at the time, but I heard he was appalled. It was his longtime and much-beloved assistant Amadon, who’d finally persuaded Van that by making himself more available to the tribes and settlements, he’d surely be able to redirect the natives’ adoration away from himself and towards the Indwelling Spirit and the Father God. I was observing their discussion. “Like you did before, before you disappeared “ This was Amadon talking over the situation with Van sometime after he’d come out of his meditation. Amadon had felt horribly abandoned at Van’s decision to enter the monastery, especially at such a key point in their mission, and he’d greeted his return to the world with a mix of relief and resentment. “But it’s not going to be enough this time, Van… you’ve no idea what they’ve got up to while you’ve been asleep!”
I knew that Amadon, much to Van’s irritation, had never grasped the importance of meditation I’d heard him call it a “right waste of my time,” behind Van’s back more than once. Yet something had been starting to go wrong in Van’s absence. Not only had he been elevated to Divine status among many settlements, but in some cases Caligastia’s midwayers had been up to their old tricks masquerading as the old gods. A few quantum sleights of hand and a Nog or a Ba’al could dazzle a whole settlement into awe of them. “Our people need something solid to worship, a God they can see with their own eyes. You’ve taught me to experience the Unseen God, Van… but they’ve had nothing. All they had was you… can’t blame them for that.“ “The Father Spirit,” Van corrected his assistant absent-mindedly. He’d been trying to reframe the concept of the “Unseen God” into the “Father Spirit,” as he felt it was a more personal way of referring to the Godhead. I could tell he knew Amadon was trying to needle him. But from his tone I could hear there was also something on his mind–he must have been pondering it during his long meditation. After a while he spoke again: “Listen, Amadon, you don’t know this.
It’s me who has to go on faith… you didn’t know that, did you? You, my dear friend, you are the one who knows. In your very humanness, it’s you who knows the God of your heart. ” I could see a cloud of puzzlement spreading over Amadon’s honest, open face. He’d been close to Van far longer than I was sure he could remember–for thousands upon thousands of years. Yet this had never come up before. Amadon had believed them the same, since Van was always most circumspect in explaining how they were really both mortals. “I’m just a little older than you, my friend, but I was once like you… and will be again.” And that was it. That was as much as Van was prepared to tell his assistant during the time they’d been wandering with their small band of followers ever since the rebellion over 103,000 years earlier. Together, they’d created stable farming and trading settlements in their movement eastwards, uniting the indigenous natives in the worship of the Father Spirit and building temples for spiritual education in all the main settlements. Amadon was the one native human whom Van completely trusted.
And for some rather special reasons. While Van was one of the Prince’s original staff back in Dalamatia, Amadon was pure human genetic stock of the highest quality. This is why he was one of the one hundred native humans chosen by the off-planet surgeons for their excellent genetics in the first place. It was from Amadon’s life plasm that Van’s material body had been grown–the two could even have been taken for twins, although they had grown more dissimilar over time and with differing experiences Amadon, for example, preferring a full beard and allowed his black hair to grow out. As was customary for MA’s missions, Amadon and the other ninety-nine natives who had originally contributed their life plasm for the Staff’s bodies, were all, in turn, rewarded by the gift of a deathless life as well. I’ve already mentioned Van and Amadon’s virtual immortality and have written more fully about how this came about in the first volume.
Suffice it to say here that this technique for rendering certain beings virtually deathless is standard operating procedure for all Princes’ missions wherever they take place. Their material bodies are designed to survive in good shape for at least the half-a-million years they’re expected to serve on the planet. The situation here on Earth was made far more complicated by the Caligastia defection. One of unexpected consequences–at least for the staff–of planetary isolation was MA’s deliberate shutting down of certain incoming cosmic rays. These were the frequencies designed to interlock electrochemically with a certain plant, a shrub which had been especially brought in from Edentia, a higher frequency world. Providing these frequencies were maintained and all the staff together with their one hundred genetic donors regularly consumed the leaves or berries of this shrub, their material bodies were physically replenished and they would potentially live forever. Following the collapse of Dalamatian culture and the fall of the city, Van had managed to clip cuttings off the Edentian shrub.
He carried them with him when the forty members of the staff remaining loyal to M A and to him, together with nine thousand eight hundred and eighty-one midwayers, had started on their long migration east, together with their native followers. However, it wasn’t long before M A intervened to give all forty of the loyalists and the native donors who’d stayed with them, the choice to be taken off the planet and returned to the capital planet of this System of inhabited worlds. All of them elected to leave the planet except Van, who with Amadon, volunteered to stay for the duration. “Someone has to stand against Caligastia,” Van argued, “nobody deserves what’ll happen if that bastard son runs amok. And he will! Mark my words!” But, by that time, the staff were utterly exhausted and only too happy to get off Earth to be rejoined with their Atmans, voluntarily left behind for the period of the mission.
After Van and Amadon chose to stay on the planet the Melchizedek made some of their mysterious adjustments to enable the pair to remain immortal as long as they continued to eat the fruit of the Edentian shrub. They no longer needed those incoming cosmic rays to ensure their longevity. It was rather different for the rebels. They were not given the choice to leave the planet. Closing down the incoming frequencies caused all sixty of the rebel staff, as well as the native donors who followed Caligastia, to physically die within a few hundred years of the rebellion. “Much has changed since you’ve been away.” Amadon said with some certainty. “As I said, the people need something solid to focus on when they worship.” No answer from Van. “Fire… thunder and lightning… these are real things. You, Van. They worshipped you too, because you were real. We left them alone and before I knew it they went back to worshipping their old gods…” Apart from the slight grimace which flickered over his chief’s face at Amadon’s mention of Van-worship, his eyes were closed and he could have still been meditating.
“And, Van what did you mean by us not being the same? You always told me we were!” There was an edge of anger in Amadon’s voice. I wondered if Van might have felt he’d said too much, or possibly that his mind was elsewhere, since he gave no sign he was addressing his assistant’s question. “In my meditation I was given the answer, my dear friend… perhaps, for both issues we’ve been talking about… .” It was then Van confided in Amadon his plans for the Lemurian migration and his concept of the perfectly balanced civilization. This was a dream they’d all but forgotten as they’d struggled and labored over the millennia to keep the light of hope burning in the hearts of as many humans as possible. “And the real problem? This’ll fix it? You think?” “Amadon. Amadon. Patience… I heard you. You’re right, of course. If our destiny were different; if there’d been no rebellion, no Caligastia going rogue, no war in the West; if Dalamatia still existed and we all worked together as we did before the troubles, if, if, if… ,” Van’s voice dropped to a whisper before he visibly shook himself.
No point in regrets. “It’s a risk and I’ll probably live to regret it, but if I have to, we’ll make it ‘Father Sun’ and ‘Mother Earth.’ How’s that sound, Amadon? Father Sun, Mother Earth… it’s got a ring to it. Should be solid enough for them, yes?” Amadon was grinning happily. It was reply enough for Van. “And, my friend, we can always redirect the worship energy back to the Father Spirit… or, the Unseen God,” smiling at his assistant, “when the people have established a more balanced and stable life for themselves.” When Amadon’s smile turned to a worried frown I realized that after 134,000 years he’d almost forgotten what “a balanced and stable life” might be; and had certainly given up on any chance of ever seeing it on this world. “Lemuria. That’ll be our answer, Amadon. The secret to the peace we seek we’ll find in the beautiful islands of Mu.”
The carefully chosen migrants, arriving on their fleets of rafts in increasingly large numbers from Luzon in the Philippines, expanded rapidly through the thousands of islands, settling on many of the larger ones. Every tenth raft carried a single fandor, the large passenger birds that had been so useful back in Dalamatia, and some of whom had chosen to accompany Van and the loyalists. Fandors were large creatures with wingspans at full extension of up to 40 feet and possessed somewhat nervous natures. The birds had been extremely cautious when the Prince’s staff first came across them in the Atlas Mountains. Individual fandors had come and gone for many hundreds of years, observing life in the city, before trusting humans to ride on their backs. It had been Onya, a young native girl, now long-since dead, who’d been the first to ride a fandor, opening up another much-needed mode of travel.
However, the birds were notoriously picky. They‘d adamantly refused to allow any member of the Prince’s staff too close to them and only a few native-born humans were ever allowed to ride them. Fandors were known to be semi-telepathic and they formed the deepest bonds of affection with their chosen riders. Only females of the species had ever been known to accept a human rider and once accepted, that relationship was considered by the fandor to continue until one or the other died. Since fandors were somewhat longer-lived than their human riders and the bonds of mutual love were so strong, it was not unusual for one of these massive birds to build herself a funeral pyre, following the death of her rider. Knowing she will meet her beloved rider again in the afterlife and surrounded by others of her kind, she will submit herself joyfully to the flames. It was from this unusual custom that the myth of the Phoenix was born. Fandors had never been easy to be around. Their semi-telepathic sensitivity, although limited, gave them access to much that remained unsaid in the minds of staff and humans alike.
Much of what the birds picked up telepathically they didn’t like, and their way of handling this was to employ their acerbic senses of humor. Unable to speak words, fandors were mercilessly truthful in the images they threw back and were known for the occasional bitterness of their sarcasm. Some of the staff, especially Böni–one of Onya’s mentors and a senior member of the Prince’s staff– developed a deep hatred of the birds. Böni, whose dislike of fandors was colored by her resentment of Onya for being able to ride them when she could not, had become a particular target for the birds’ most mocking images. I realized, after a while, that fandors were doing this as much to amuse others of their kind who were tuned in, as to try to teach Böni a lesson. Unfortunately, in her case, this simply led to an increasingly vicious cycle of mental projections and reflections, which ended up exhausting her and entertaining the fandors.
When the rebellion occurred I noticed how the fandors who’d previously been close to their riders in the city, simply disappeared. Their telepathic abilities allowed them to keep up with what was happening in Dalamatia; the schism caused by Caligastia’s rejection of MA’s standard doctrine; Van’s exile with the 40 staff members remaining loyal to MA; the destruction of the city and its final disappearance under the waters of the Persian Gulf; and finally, the increasingly erratic behavior of Caligastia, the Planetary Prince. At this point, many fandors elected to return to their nesting grounds in the Atlas Mountains. The few who’d bonded with those riders choosing to follow Van and the other loyalists, traveled with them on their long trek eastwards towards northern India. At the time, I thought it was most significant that so few fandors decided to accompany Caligastia, or the sixty staff who’d followed him into rebellion. And this was in spite of considerable pressure from the Prince.
Fandors apparently knew better than that! I heard later that the handful of birds whose riders did follow the Prince had ritually incinerated themselves– as their custom would have it. Like the cetaceans in the oceans of the world, fandors were a pure and uncorrupted species. Their integrity disappeared with them when the last of them finally died at around the time the Lemurian civilization reached its apex thirty-eight thousand years ago. I felt at the time the fandors knew they’d served their purpose in giving their aid to human beings in the early eras of your development. These days I can’t be sentimental about species extinction, but the disappearance of the fandors seems to me oddly prescient. Fandors, it turned out, were the most modest of creatures. Nothing was ever discovered about their mating or procreative activities, not in the entire time the birds were on the planet. Sure, every once in a while someone would catch a glimpse of an adolescent fandor, but no one had ever seen an infant.
The fandors’ almost pathological secrecy in these matters extended to their beloved riders as well, although many of them had tried to ferret out the truth. Sufficient time has elapsed by now for me to reveal what was happening in the world of the fandors. Much of this I was able to observe for myself while it was occurring. When the rebellion broke out in Dalamatia the fandors were far more horrified than anyone in the city took the time to understand–the citizens had problems enough of their own. The truth of it was none of the fandors wanted anything more to do with Prince Caligastia, the staff, human beings in general, even Van and the loyalists. When the birds had recovered from their anger and disappointment, it became clear to them that those fandors who’d bonded with riders in Van’s contingent of loyalists, needed to escort the exiles. As I’ve mentioned, it was only female fandors who seemed willing to carry people on their backs. In fact, nothing was ever seen of male fandors who, if the citizens of Dalamatia could but know it, remained behind in their nesting area in the Atlas Mountains.
There were also remarkably few males since female birds retained the ability to predetermine the sex of their offspring after mating with a male. Male fandors were regarded by the females as being incorrigibly violent by nature, which is why they were confined to the mountains, and why there were so few of them. This decision to travel with Van’s group presented a problem to which the fandors possessed an unusual solution, even if it would lead ultimately to a shorter life for the species in general. Parthenogenesis, or reproduction from an ovum without fertilization from an external source, is not an unknown form of sexual reproduction in the animal world, although it is extremely rare. Plants do it; some invertebrates do it; even certain iguanas do it; and for the reason I can only credit to the Life Carriers who originally laid down the patterns of genetic life, fandors could also do it.
In certain conditions, female fandors were able to deliver their progeny without being fertilized by a male. And, as such, her offspring were also, of necessity, female. Under the normal rhythms of fandor life parthenogenesis was not the favored method of reproduction since it narrowed the overall gene pool. Yet almost every mature female practiced it occasionally, since the closeness of the mother/daughter relationship that such auto-cloning produced was one of the few things the fandors held sacred. Mother and daughter were quite literally of the same flesh and although their individual experiences changed them slightly in different ways, truly could it be said that “when you meet the daughter, you meet the mother.” This became the persuasive argument when the decision was reached among the birds to permit the fandors attached to Van’s mission to go with their riders. They would be traveling far beyond their ability to return to the nesting grounds in West Africa, and they all knew they’d be unlikely to ever come back.
It would be a one-way trip, continued by their daughters and granddaughters, and their descendants, for as long as that genetic strain retained its integrity. Fandors turned out to be particularly valuable when the migrants finally arrived on the islands of Mu, since an island could be explored by a fandor and her rider in a fraction of the time it took for people to reach it by canoe. With this help the new migrants poured northwards, settling island after island until they were well north of the Tropic of Cancer. After a thousand years had passed Van drew the migration from the mainland to a close. For the first 800 years he’d used his limited telepathic abilities to attract those natives of the purest genetic lines and who possessed the relevant skills and courage for the long ocean crossing. Van and his construction crews in Luzon had brought their raft-building to a high art by this time.
The route and the best time of the year for sailing were well-known, but the actual process of navigating accurately remained a problem. Although surprisingly few rafts had actually been lost at sea, Van, I noticed, liked to play up the dangers facing the new recruits; the sharks, the typhoons, the constant hunger and thirst, even the risk of being swept into the sea by a sleepy fandor unfolding her wings in the sun. During the last couple of hundred years, after Van had ceased to preselect the migrants, he permitted any native willing to take the “enormous risks” to start a new life in Lemuria to construct their own rafts to make the journey. As can be imagined, this resulted in far higher losses due to the hasty or sloppy construction of the rafts; or, with no knowledgeable navigator, the rafts could be swept hundreds of miles off-course and miss the islands entirely. It took courage, tenacity, and a great deal of luck to arrive safely. Most were never seen again. Occasionally a raft washed up on one of the outlying Lemurian islands, its occupants dead or driven insane with thirst. Only a relatively few managed to make it with an intact body and mind during the two hundred year period before Van closed it all down.
I’ve had cause previously to question Van’s tactics, but this approach which appeared to be one of sending people to their almost certain deaths, demonstrated Van at his most unsentimental. It’s only now, when I have a chance to place his actions in the larger context, that I am appreciating why he allowed these suicidal voyages to continue. It also suggests how one of the deeper causes of the ultimate collapse of the Lemurian theocracy over sixty thousand years later, might perhaps be traced back to Van’s decision to permit such a small random genetic quotient into the Lemurian genetic pool. I didn’t understand at the time why Van encouraged so many of what I might call “the rougher element” to take on the voyage, especially when he’d exerted such care in telepathically preselecting the former migrants. Now I believe he was trying to accomplish two rather different aims simultaneously.
In any group of sentient beings there will always be a substantial difference in personalities; there will always be differences of opinion. The more complex the personalities are, the greater is the possibility of an extreme divergence of opinions. It’s axiomatic that it’s in how we resolve those differences that we all grow in experience and wisdom. Human beings were just as complicated then as they are now. On Luzon, anger was one of the inevitable reactions for the many of the generations of natives who’d been gathering all over the Philippine Islands, hoping to be invited by Van on a raft, but always being rejected. Hundreds of years of being continually turned down for the voyage–for no reason they could understand–had built up a considerable head of outrage and resentment among the increasingly large numbers demanding to migrate to Lemuria. This rage and frustration finally boiled over leading to a breakdown of trust in Van’s leadership, the boldest among the rebels slipping into self-serving and criminal enterprises.
There was a complete collapse of social order in Luzon, the settlement once dedicated to building the rafts and preparing them for the voyage, with a criminal element starting to take over. This sense of anarchy quickly spread throughout the other settlements on the Philippine islands, as Van’s teachings were openly ridiculed and mob violence threatened to break out. I’ve come to think this was all part of Van’s plan since by the time he opened up the voyages to anyone who wanted to try as an independent agent, many of those who demanded to travel were the angry rebellious ones who’d been previously denied. In this way, I believe Van was attempting to rid the mainland of the troublemakers on the one hand, whilst also providing something of a random factor in the Lemurian gene pool. Unfortunately, the voyage proved so hazardous–and since no one ever came back, they never discovered just how hazardous the trip really was–that a far smaller number of this renegade element ever reached the Lemurian gene pool than Van had hoped. It was only many thousands of years later that this apparently trivial miscalculation would factor so unexpectedly in the ultimate betrayal of all that Lemurian culture had held sacred for its entire long history.
I am a Watcher Angel and my name is Georgia.
