Sympathy for Me: A Memoir of the Devil

By Rayfield A. Waller

Evil has a voice, and it wants to talk to you. The so-called prince of fallen angels thinks he’s the first celebrity that nobody wants to talk to, so he wants to tell you his own story. He has walked with the Christ and has lived as an angel in human form—as a body walker moving through the world’s history in stolen bodies to see what it means to be one of us. He’s working on his memoir for you to read and judge.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Feb 28, 2019
• ISBN: 9781796016505

Rayfield A. Waller

Rayfield A. Waller, a creative writing professor in Detroit, is noted as the first contemporary poet published in the revival of historic Broadside Press, which published his book of poems, “Abstract Blues” (sold on Amazon). He is a past recipient of the prestigious Michigan Council for the Arts writers’ grant. Many of his poems can be found in the online journal “Outlaw Poetry” at https://outlawpoetry.com/?s=rayfield+a+waller. He is a graduate of Cornell University’s creative writing program and is listed in the pantheon of ‘Cornell Writers”. He has poems in various anthologies including “New Poems from the Third Coast: Contemporary Michigan Poetry”, in “Nostalgia For The Present: An Anthology of Writings From Detroit” from Post Aesthetic Press, and in the Wayne State University Press anthology of Detroit poets, “Abandon Automobile”. A selection of his poetry and fiction is forthcoming from Wayne State U. Press. Waller is a widely published journalist and art and music critic with works in newspapers, and academic and literary journals including Obsidian, The Panopticon Review, and Solid Ground Magazine. He is a former staff writer and contributor to “The Ithaca Times”, “The Ithaca Journal”, “The Detroit Metro Times”, “The Michigan Citizen”, and South Florida’s “Progreso Weekly/Progreso Semenal”. A selection of his journalism and academic articles can be found at http://wayne.academia.edu/RayfieldWaller. He is a featured writer honored in the archive known as the “Marygrove College Literary Map of Detroit” (https://www.marygrove.edu/22-dodge-main). Waller appeared frequently on radio in Miami, Florida and was a frequent co-host on WAXY AM 790’s show, “Shock The System” hosted by Jim Nadell. Writing by Waller appears at theblacklistpub.ning.com/profile/RayfieldAWaller, and rayfieldwaller.blogspot.com. “Sympathy For Me” is his first published novel, the first in a planned trilogy.

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Copyright © 2019 by Rayfield A. Waller.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Patricia Calloway is a conceptual and visual artist living in Detroit, Michigan. A graduate of the College for Creative Studies, she is also an educator focusing on community art programs and initiatives. She has public artworks on display in Detroit.

Rev. date: 04/10/2019

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Contents

I. Redemption

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

II. Rebellion

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

About The Author

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The Holy Land in the time of Christ

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Galilee in the time of Christ

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The path of Christ’s main ministry

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Jerusalem in the time of Christ

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Rome’s seven hills in the time of Octavian Augustus

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Downtown Rome in the time of the empire

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France, Belgium, and Germany during WWI

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The northwest sector of Europe during WWI

Dedication:

For Patricia Calloway, artist and writer who helps me sustain a journey toward manhood; to my daughter Lena-Julia who loves me despite my aging brain; for my English students in Detroit, first to see drafts of the original story when the voice of Heylaāl began speaking to me; to my oldest friend Roberto Sobremonte, Navy man while I was an ANC man; for my mentor and blood brother Kofi Natambu who thankfully warned me I’d be my own greatest enemy; to Margo V. Perkins whose sarcasm and grace are the gifts she gave that I only now appreciate; for theater artist Yvonne Singh, Tracey to my C.K. Dexter Gordon, imbued with an inexhaustible well of talk — a veritable one woman show for which I was lucky to obtain an early front row friendship at Cornell; to Regina Rodriguez-Martin, fearless ‘Chicana on the Edge’, another Cornell co-conspirator; for Maria Ricker who is forever my sleeping muse; to my mentor Wayne State Professor Mike Mckinsey, philosopher of language; for my inspiring student Sotabdi Ray — whose thoughts on Adam the First Man made me rethink an encounter between Heylaāl and Adam I’m planning for the sequel; to my spiritual mother the late poet Phyllis Janowitz who advised me as her student at Cornell to Walk softly and don’t bother carrying the stick, it’ll just draw belligerent stick thugs who’ll want to hassle you; for Perri Giovannucci, a better writer than me who helped me choose the title of this novel; to Stella Crews, mother of the Detroit science fiction movement; for poet-futurists, Allen Adkins and Ron Allen, and to futurist jazz innovators, Griot Galaxy; for wise, mysterious Willie Williams; to William Bryce, at-large Canadian to the world who knows how to be a dear friend; for James Nadell, no need to tell you Jim—you gave me the ‘gun’ that attaches to my ‘Ray’.

For my grandfather Charner Dukes, Jr. who fore-warned me, You live and learn, live and learn, then you die and forget it all.

And for my parents, the elegant giants Schofield and Bessie Waller who danced and laughed above me as I sat, firstborn child, on the carpet gazing up at their romance. This novel was written by all of you, because all of you wrote me.

-Rayfield A. Waller

February, 2019

I. REDEMPTION

(GALILEE TO ROME)

The humor is outweighed

only by the horror.

—Margo V. Perkins

1

Malachi tosses the edge of his robe over his shoulder as the silent crowd watches. He is not sure how things have come to this, but he means to make a point of his authority if he does nothing else today.

Malachi spits onto the dusty stone floor of the temple porch, which lies near the Court of the Gentiles. This startles one of the disciples. It’s the one called John, the fisher, Malachi thinks. Peter steps back a pace, but the crowd quickly pushes him frontward again. Because I know what elder Pharisee Malachi is thinking, I watch him from the cool darkness back among the pillars of a temple colonnade. I am unnoticed by all as I stand witness to these events I report to you.

The silence of this crowd of Jerusalemites is offset by bawling goats and frantic chickens that still dash about at the foot of the stairs leading up to the porches of the temple. The people in the crowd press round Malachi as he squares his shoulders to take to task the arrogant and apparently now-insane young rabbi Yeshua, also called Yehoshua, known to you as Jesus, a Nazarene. Yeshua once spent time here as a boy debating rabbis. He’d been a young prodigy in those days.

Today, as a rabbi and a man, Yeshua is no longer a prodigy; he is a delinquent. Wearing only his sindon and sandals, standing before Malachi, he has laid bare his own hairless chest, which is still heaving, with his strong shoulders shivering in the heat. A cubit and a half of rope with knots strategically tied along its length, a makeshift whip apparently, hangs from the rabbi’s hand. His sindon is dirty and damp from his earlier exertions, which had terrified the animals.

I tell you, I know what Malachi thinks. This arrogant, now-quite-insane young rabbi, Yeshua, looks to Malachi to be older than his thirty or so years. Nakedness is abhorred by the children of Israel, Malachi thinks; and he remembers a more decent boy, a more somber boy, a carpenter’s son. That Yeshua, the boy, had been devout and respectful, though certainly arrogant in his wits. He had spent long hours in this very temple arguing respectfully with rabbis and scribes and talking politics with the common people passing within and without. He had been an amazing boy who had spoken and behaved like a man fully grown who knew the law, who knew the words of the prophets, and who knew what scribes know. How can this madman before Malachi now be that same Yeshua?

This man before him now has inspired Romans, rabbis, scribes, Essenes, Sadducees, and Pharisees all to conspire against him. This Yeshua has blasphemed, questioned the law, and broken the Sabbath. He’s declared the holy covenant to be nullified in him. What insanity is this, as if he regarded himself to be the Moshiach? That is what Malachi thinks.

He has brought the ire of the Herodites and Sanhedrin against himself, this Yeshua. And far more dangerous clerics than myself now seek his destruction, Malachi thinks.

Yeshua is ringed about first by the so-called disciples at his side and second, like the Sadducee Malachi, by a silent crowd of Jerusalemites. The crowd is still upset over the rabbi’s rash action of driving moneylenders and animals alike out of the temple and down the stairs into the streets. Though the crowd has grown quiescent in the wake of the rabbi’s violence and the Sadducee’s arrival, the animals are still cackling and mewing their protest.

You priests! the rabbi bellows.

Here and there in the crowd, priests’ and clerics’ eyes narrow, and they listen closely.

You acolytes of the Herods who did kill Master John the Sabba, you filthy whitewashed charnel!

Oh, now that will get Herodite tongues wagging against you by noon, you fool, Malachi thinks. Herod will know, the Temple Mount being practically within earshot of Herod’s palace as the crow flies and the spy walks.

Know you all this, the mad rabbi continues. There shall be not one stone left upon another here! This place shall be desolation, for just as now your own hearts are desolation, so too shall this place be!

Who are you, Nazarene, to prophesy this to we who sit where Moses sat? shouts Malachi, his voice just as robust as the rabbi’s. Malachi will give as good as he gets, knowing Malachi. Yet he will lose this contest of words, for Yeshua has a tongue to drip honey into the ear or to lash one’s flesh away.

I move out of darkness now and walk past them all unseen, passing Judas on my way down the stairway to the street below. Judas looks to be worried, as he ought to be. In Yeshua, he has sought a vessel to carry him across a great gulf in his life and has lashed himself not to a boat, but to a comet.

2

The ranks of men stretched ahead of me as far as these human eyes could see. I marched in step with the man in front of me, compelled to move on by the man behind me. The one behind in his turn moved in step with me.

To be part of a regiment and to remember bygone days of steadfast (if circumstantial) camaraderie in the legions! It was this, mundane as this is, that had inspired me to join the war on the side of the Boche (bôSH), blockheads as the French called us. We in turn derided them as the poilu (pwäl-ˈyü), the hairy ones. Certainly, it was not any passion for the conceits of the Schlieffen Plan. Both humor and horror were reflected in my motivations then, certainly.

My regiment, this regiment, we were ankle deep in blood part of the time and in trench water much of the rest of the time when not marching in circles. We were the machine of Albrecht von Württemberg’s Fourth Army: unfeeling, unthinking, and relentless—blockheads indeed. We were destined to invade France and rip out their hairy throats, the commanders had told us all in Berlin to get us aboard the troop trains. We did invade Belgium at least, and we cut our share of throats.

All that first two weeks at the front, we tramped over what seemed to be the better part of Belgium but was really, the more coherent and less sleep-deprived among us insisted, a six-square-mile area just outside of Luxembourg City.

We had originally been bound for the Troisvierges train station for transport to France, which we were then to have promptly invaded and vanquished, falling upon the frogs like one of Thor’s thunderbolts, trampling resistance beneath our iron boots; but they ordered us instead to circle aimlessly, waiting for new orders.

Therefore, we marched, and we marched. Klaus, my trench mate and the best shot in the regiment and the battalion, speculated that we were about to invade Luxembourg City. Why should we? It seemed unnecessary, for the people of Luxembourg could do little against us. We had marched through their north on the way to Troisvierges practically unopposed.

All through the north, we fought brief catastrophic grapples on open ground with detachments of whatever Belgian troops we would encounter. Most of it was hand to hand and bloody, for we saved our bullets when we could by using our bayonets. We, the French, and the Belgians, all used Luxembourg as we wished, as our Kinder Garten, playing at the dodgy game of war.

Well, Klaus was correct. We took Luxembourg; then by and by, we moved on to Troisvierges, where we secured the rail station and days later found ourselves in the Battle of Liege, after crossing the frontier into Belgium proper and officially invading our second country in addition to France.

It was the time we spent wandering in northern Luxembourg, hearing vague reports and rumors that we might be bound for someplace called Ypres, that won us the reputation of being a machine, however.

Mindless and brutal, the Belgians called us once we met them. Ceaseless, unstoppable, inexorable were some of the things our appreciative generals said of us. After each skirmish inside Belgium, we would tumble into one of their foxholes (these Belgians made their foxholes nice and cozy; their foxholes were much like their railcars in that respect), and we’d sleep the sleep of the nearly dead until gray morning.

We jumped to the screech of the pipe whistle blown by Herr Kommandant Reinert until his eyes bulged out and his face turned blotchy, followed by his full-throated howl, "Get your asses out there, schnell! What are you waiting for, Der Kaiser’s mistress to blow you kisses? Kommensie! Boots and knees, boots and knees!"

With his belief in us to raise our ardor like a flag, we clawed and climbed back up to the muddy fields to march some more and to fight and slaughter whomever we encountered, whether Belgian army, Belgian partisans, or hapless farmers who for all we knew were disguised partisans. We killed them each and all and marched onward.

Those had been better times for us.

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Near nightfall on the particular night of the first chlorine gas attack in human history, I settled in at my post beside Klaus, the next rifleman down the line after me, in the forward trenches at Ypres. The chlorine attack was one of many astounding things I’d witnessed during this campaign, for 1914 was marked by such brave new advances in the technologies of war!

These advances have marked the regiment’s experience on the front. We saw how the gas mesmerized the French at first, for chlorine gas was as astounding to witness as it was hideous to die by, you see. The Carthaginian general Hannibal’s elephants were, believe me, as astounding to the Romans—some of whom panicked at the terrible sight of those raging colossal beasts with legs like living timber crashing into their phalanxes. The Carthaginians themselves were astonished, watching the havoc unleashed by their own outlandish weapon as they launched devastating never-before-seen attacks against the terrified Roman legions.

For ourselves here at the front, we launched the first chlorine attacks against the French at Ypres, and I was close enough to the enemy line that I could watch the eerie yellow clouds drift slowly across the field to envelop the French in their trenches. Through field glasses, one could easily mark the terror in their faces—the terror that broke their staunch courage and resolve where before not even the crushing shell barrages or the hideous grinding machine gun fire had broken it.

Shouts of alarm and then of panic rose up from their battalions; and as one, they scrambled, thousands of them, out of the trenches to retreat straight back from their forward positions. However, scores of them, blinded and suffocating with their lungs and nasal passages afire from the chlorine, dashed wildly this way and that, and many went straight outward right into our field of fire to fall, kicking and choking to death. Gas attacks are frequent at the front, but mustard gas is nothing compared to chlorine.

At first, we were hesitant to shoot, enemy or not; it hardly seemed proper, getting the drop on them this way. Even if the commanders with their tin whistles hanging at their necks had barked at us to fire, we would have remained transfixed, aghast at what we saw.

As the poor bastards strangled and rolled, kicked and vomited, however, we began to feel quite differently about the matter. Cries went up among us: Ach, vas ist! Kill them, for God’s sake! and Put the bastards out of this misery! Mein Gott!

It was then, in fact, that our commanders ordered us not to shoot: battalion captains and lieutenants scrambled down the trench line, their boots making crackling noises in the frozen mud, shouting, Das ist verboten! Don’t shoot! Keep your hands off those Maxims! and Nein! Don’t unsling your rifles! For our medical corps observers, intrepid generals who had come forward to see, and war technicians with notebooks and sharp pencils were watching to study the effects of chlorine.

Klaus glanced up at our battalion’s mechanized gunner, Eberschmidt. Herr Eberschmidt’s was the Fist of Thor in this portion of the line. He was expertly perched a few feet above us upon his gunner’s shelf so that his head rose over the lip of the trench. He waited up there, idle now by orders, behind the hulking Maxim MG 08 on its sled mount. The gun’s iron legs, like claws, were sunk into the ground to anchor it when fired; and its metal maw pointed out over the landscape at the enemy.

It is a devastating weapon, the Maxim. Its automatic firing system uses a water-cooled, self-motivated belt feed to shoot cartridges each moment a finger such as Eberschmidt’s depresses the trigger and so long as ammunition remains in the feed belt. The gun will cycle, extract spent cartridges, reload itself, and repeat its own cycle.

Eberschmidt affectionately called it the Mouth of God, which never failed to make me chuckle. I was amused at the irony of it, a private joke of mine, whenever I heard him call it that.

At this moment, Eberschmidt looked right back down at Klaus as Klaus glanced up at him. He shrugged and remained idle at his trigger. Orders were clear.

Klaus looked back at me. Hang the generals, he grumbled matter-of-factly; and he stepped up one of the shallow wooden ladders to the top of our trench, then sat plain as noon on the edge there presenting his left side to the enemy, with one leg hanging down and one leg stretched out before him at ground level. He deliberately unslung, and he wrapped his Gewehr infantry rifle’s strap round his arm, shoved in a five-cartridge clip, and swung his shoulders to face the enemy line. He aimed, just as deliberately. He fired five rapid shots, expertly cycling his bolt action after each with a speed that made me recall our better campaigns when they called us the Machine.

Each shot hit its target, and five poor French bastards’ heads burst like melons before they fell still, released from hell. Up and down the line, our men began slapping their tin mess cups against their muzzles as each bullet struck.

Eberschmidt, for his part, smiled grimly as he drew back the feed bolt of his Maxim, swiveling the sight, the base coming into view as the muzzle pivoted, so that from below, the thing looked as if it were mounted on grasshopper’s legs; it looked like something alive.

As cheers rose in a wave, Klaus shoved in another clip, and he fired. Five more suffering Frenchmen’s souls fled away because of five more rapid shots.

Just after the fifth of the second round of shots, there came a sharp crack and echo from Herr Kommandant Reinert’s sixteen-year-old bolt-action Mauser M98. Klaus’s body jerked, obscenely, twisted at a dreadful angle; and he tumbled back over into our trench.

I took his pulse and found no reason to disturb him there where he lay with one leg bent underneath him as though he were some child’s discarded puppet, some child having grown tired with that particular toy. The leg could be let alone, for he no longer had need of it, and so I had no reason to worry now what angle my friend Klaus’s leg had fallen at.

Eberschmidt shot his firing bolt back into at-rest position and took his hands away from the Maxim, raising them over his head.

It was as if he were surrendering to his own side.

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The incident with Klaus and Eberschmidt was last week, before you arrived, friend. Earlier tonight, I must have been out of my head with fever, maybe a little exposure to the gas, for you said the men around us told you I had spoken of myself to them. I never speak of myself to anyone. Perhaps I was out of my head, perhaps blowback from the gas.

You, mein freund, had just joined us here at Ypres. So I told you of how things are in this war. Ah, but you then revealed to me that you are actually an old hand, did you not?

You were detached, you said, from Joncherey and the skirmishes there near the Swiss border? I know others who were there, at Joncherey, for that very first battle of this war. They would send a civilized man like yourself into civilian villages that way? From your civilized manner, you would make a better adjutant than infantry.

Bloody fighting we’ll see indeed before this whole affair is done, and one ought to be hard-pressed to find any man who claims to be proud to be fighting for Der Vaderland or for König, now that it has become clear we are making of Europe a wasteland and killing civilians the way we are, not to mention even killing our own, like poor Klaus.

We are killing them not just as we find them wandering in the field of fire, but even those who are nestled within the safe sovereignty of the heretofore-inviolate cities. They say it is a scorched-earth policy; and from what I hear, there are regiments poisoning wells, burning crops, and clearing villages of people as if they were rats.

I say one ought to be hard-pressed to find any man proud of this, but then how does one account for Kommandant Reinert? Unfortunately, there were men like him in the Persian army, among Shaka Zulu’s senior commanders, under the command of the Japanese shoguns, in the Roman legions, among the Greek hoplites, and within the officers’ corps of the homuncular queen, Elizabeth.

It must have been the gas, though. It was just after the chlorine that I fell ill with fever and must have talked out of my head. Only one man in my regiment truly thought to believe what I babbled in my sickness, it appears; and he died just this morning, stepping on a mine. His thoughts are scrambled now, along with most of the rest of him.

A tick? They are as plentiful as shell craters on the ruined landscape you see before you. Give it to me here. We’ll just drop it into the oil pot. See how it puffs into smoke as I consign it to the flame?

I do enjoy that, I confess.

Fleas and ticks are bad here. Such is war, my dear. I have been involved in one or another war for one or another country, nation, or empire for centuries now. Sometimes as a general; sometimes I choose, as now, to be a lowly foot soldier, like you see me.

Yes, I said centuries. You are not surprised that I fought for Agrippa and Caesar Augustus and before that with Alexander in his quest to conquer all the world he knew of?

So you believe what these men here have said about me. They don’t. They laugh. It is a pastime for them during cold meals in the mud. You, though, you believe, I can tell, and so I’m being frank with you. In the darkest of nights in this trench between Belgium and France and your God knows where, you have crawled into this hole in hell because fate brings you here to me to take my confession. Perhaps it is some Geistige wahrheit, some spiritual truth you have come seeking?

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Don’t you ever sleep? Perhaps you never will sleep again after hearing what I have to say. Very well. I will speak only of what I have witnessed and what I know to be true.

Incoming! Put down that canteen; we’ll hug the earth a moment and hold our breaths.

That one landed close. Perils of the trade.

I will speak of my life, such as it has been, if indeed it can be called a life. I will speak of many goats scattered to the winds, of many fools led astray, and of many temples within which I have hidden, shrouded by shadow, a witness to that of which I speak. I speak of things from the vastness of my memory, things certain to astonish you. Ah. You bring fountain pen and paper. Where in Prometheus’s name did you obtain clean paper? At Louvain?

Really.

You fellows utterly destroyed the place. The city fell in five days, I hear. Mass atrocities you fellows committed. Not you, of course, but still … My guess is that you took that paper from the library of a dead Belgian professor, eh? Oh, be assured, nothing you could have done in this or any war could equal my crimes. I do not judge you. You, my confessor and biographer. I shall narrate as you write. I shall write, indeed, through you. Shall we title it Sympathy for Me?

Please do not be deceived by the title of this, my memoir; for in fact, you would be foolish to try to have sympathy for me. You would likely not be able to even if you wished. If you wished it, to have sympathy for me, I would wonder what must be askew in the circumference of your wits. There are human shells of note enough for you to sympathize with without seeking to know me, for what could you know of a mature and complete, free and unshelled soul such as me?

Of course, dearest human, I am disingenuous in asking this; for what am I doing at this moment if not helping you to know something of me in spite of your small shell-bound existence? What am I doing but helping you to know what I am?

I am nothing if not contradictory, nothing if not vain. Narcissus is one of my ancient forenames. If you were as fully developed as I, as brilliant, as beautiful a being as I am, you would be just as vain.

But the question still arises: are you, even after I confess myself to you, able still to sympathize with one such as I? Indeed, your rambling histories, your proliferating cultures, your civilizations have almost all portrayed me as being evil, malignant, a destructive spirit aligned against the honor and glory of him. He—you have, of course, been taught—is everything good, everything loving. So it seems, at least if one only considers the New Testament version of him, eh?

There is however the Old Testament. It is unlike the new. It is a long bloody tale of his cruelty and of his love expressed very often as bitterness and rage. Cruel, haughty, and vengeful is the God of Deuteronomy. By the time you peruse the book of Matthew, it is his Son, a superb distraction from the truth, who represents love, not the Father. Only the Son has ever shown you this love of which your God spoke, if I’m not mistaken; and since I was there in the Holy Land and saw the Son in the flesh, I don’t think I am mistaken.

You do not believe me.

You’ve been told that I am the consummate liar, and you were told correctly, I assure you. Even if I am not lying to you, you exist inside a conception of space and time that is so small and that has so limited you that my truth is bound to translate to you as your lie. It is as unavoidable as the misconceptions of those unfortunate little beings called flatlanders who, upon encountering the third dimension, cannot understand what they are witnessing except to see it as not real. To them, bound by their paltry two-dimensional existences, it is false.

Imagination is your greatest gift from your God. In this way, you will not find truth, but a new way to see truth. If you wish to follow my tale, then your aversion to contradiction is one of the stumbling blocks you shall have to overcome. Judge me carefully, for I come from a place at right angles to every previous dimension you can imagine. I come literally from inside you. A voice from the universe and the creation within you.

Everything is a matter of perspective.

Ahhh, this mud is an annoyance, isn’t it? Gets into everything. Here, like this, you seal the tops of your boots with yours pant legs thus. Yes. Better, Ja?

My given name, my birth name, if you could say I was born, was Heylaāl. This is the name I call myself, and should you call upon me (and I do not advise you to do that, but were you desirous of a response from me), Heylaāl is the only name I shall respond to. Know this here, from the start. It is one key to understanding me.

Lucifer is your Latin translation of your Hebrew Heylaāl. Lucifer in your Latin is from lux, lucis, or light, and from ferre, or to bear, to bring, to carry. Do you see? My name is not at all negative, as you have been taught it is by your Hollywood movie talkies. I am named Bringer of Light. Another of my names is Morning Star.

Does not this bit of truth tell you something of me?

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You slept. I did not wake you, for it will be light soon, and we then must get back up into the mud. More? You wish to hear more about what I am?

I and the other unshelled beings like me—Raphael, Gabryel, and Mikayel the archangel, Azrael, Baltyal, my beloved Yazad, she of divine power and my sweetest Yofiel, angel of divine beauty, and the rest—they and I, we, were created in his image. We came first. Consult your Sanskrits, your Bible, your Tanakh, Torah, and Talmud, your Upanishads, Suttas, grimoires and Gitas, your Qur’an, your Septaguint, and all the rest.

Qui legit intelligat.

Or if you really wish to know truth as I see it, consult the text I helped to write: The Book of Lights, your Kabbalah. It is the sephirot, my description of the ten levels of creation, that I contributed to Kabbalah. Are you surprised by that? I have traveled all of the plateaus and inner precincts of the levels of creation.

We who are divine beings do condescend to take a hand in your history. We did so before the war, and we all still do after the war has split us into two nations, the so-called high and the fallen in