The Anatomy of Angels

by Damon M. Smith

WHAT THE PEOPLE WHO KNOW SAY:

“In Anatomy all parenthetical's turn into internet links that turn into jumping off points to other stories. Brilliant! Here is our new edge.” ****The New Yorekr

“Honest and Strangely structured prose poetry of the postmodern wrapped up and driven to the edge in a living, original mind brimming with fantasy, myth, and an ear to a new type of heaven--one the reader controls.” ****Writers and Potes

*“I want to go home great Wizard but I don’t know how to use these slippers, multicolored and cultured, this new literary hypertext by this pro sends me and my friggin’ house into outer space.” ****High Thy Mess

AnaTOmY of AnGEls

by Damon M. Smith

 

OUTLINE

Gabriel: Chief of Angels, Angel of Loss and Paradise

Cathetel: Angel of the Garden
Rochel: Angel of Lost Objects
Mumiah: Angel of Insomnia
Raziel: Angel of the Book of Knowledge

Michael: Chief of Archangels, Angel of Divine Messages

Ambriel: Angel of Communication
Bath Kol: Angel of Prophecy
Harael: Angel of Tame Beasts
Jehudiel: Angel of the Movement of Celestial Spheres

Haniel: Chief of Principalities, Angel of Love

Anael: Angel of romantic love
Rhamiel: Angel of Mercy (St. Francis of Assisi’s Angelic Name)
Shekinah: Angel of unconditional love, the Creation of the World
Mihr: Angel of Friendship

Raphael: Chief of Virtues, Angel of Health

Ariel: Angel of Water and Wind
Isda: Angel of Nourishment
Azbuga YHWH: Angel of Strength
Sachluph: Angel of Plants.

Camael: Chief of Powers, Angel of Joy and Tears

Elijah: Angel of Dead Youth and Newborns
Abbadon: Angel of the Bottomless Pit
Damion: Angel of Conflict
Sandalphon: Angel of Tears

Zadkiel: Chief of Dominations, Angel of Memory and Solace

Duma(h): Angel of Silence (and the stillness of death)
Muriel: Angel of Emotions
Uriel: Angel of Alchemy
Israfel: Angel of Resurrection and Song

Zaphkiel: Chief of Thrones, Angel of Knowledge

Ecanus: Angel of Writers
Pravuil: Angel Scribe of the Knowledge of the Most High
Vohu Manah: Angel of Wisdom, good thoughts, deeds, words: Zoroastrian
Iahhel: Angel of Meditation, guards Philosophers and seekers

Opaniel: Chief of Cherubim, Angel of the Moon

Manakel: Angel of Oceans
Iachadiel: Angel of Night
Sam(m)ael: Angel of Death
Lailah: Angel of Conception, guards spirits at birth

Metatron: Chief of Seraphim, Angel of Judgment and Creation Days

Melchisedek: Angel of Peace
Is(c)him: Angels of Snow and Fire, Beautiful Souls of the Just (Saints)
Abraxis: Prince of Aeons
Iofiel: Angel of Divine Beauty

***Every one of these characters make choices that lead to their heavens or their hells, not in the judeo-christian way, but instead what states they attain via connection or disconnection to their hidden angelic qualities of the vegetable world before they die. Well, death is an illusion anyway: AOA will show death for what it must be, a great adventure whether we go anywhere afterwards or not, or just keep kicking around this planet until kingdom come to us or all.***

[Excerpt]

Gabriel: Chief of Angels, Angel of Loss and Paradise

Cathetel: Angel of the Garden
Metamorphosis

The Monkey Prince and the Flower

Cathetel: Angel of the Garden
Metamorphosis

The Monkey Prince and the Flower
They had been sitting watch for some days, waiting for the beast banded orange and black. It had taken the death wings of many young and many elderly. The leader of the group was a strong one, silver hair down his back and strong teeth for first bites into fresh killed meat. [They had no names yet, names came later on, but for the sake of readability I will call this chief the Monkey King and his son the Monkey Prince. Now that that is settled, lets rejoin our story.] They had been unsuccessful in killing the beast with the sticks and rocks

they used to take down the smaller things of the forest for meat. This beast was too fast and powerful to be felled by such primitive tools, but still they persisted because they knew nothing else of war, of weapons, of ways to kill not for meat but for love of the group [of al the emotions love came first, the attempt to make an ethereal connection has been upon us since the advent of culture and complex cognitive mechanisms for the creation of myth. The care a lemur mother shows for its child that falls to its death from a tree is love. She holds its lifeless form for far too long to just chalk her longing stare up to confusion. That lemur loved.].
The Monkey Prince had stayed awake and watching for three days. He was as tired as he had ever been. His drinking shell was in his hand, a shell that he had taken from the sea when they had traveled the long path to a place where the fish swam up river against currents so strong as to halt them, suspend movement to a standstill long enough for the fishers to pick the catch straight out of the shallows. It had shone orange and white at the bottom of a deep pool and the Monkey Prince had to hold his breath and swim down to it, something none of them had ever dared to do before, and snatch it from its hidden place.

He falls to sleep and dream:
Running through the forest
hands but with claws
jumping
leaping to a purpose
feel the life running down

When he awoke, the screams of his father, the King, could be heard across the land and felt by the deepest roots of the trees. One of his many babies was being taken away, held in the mouth of a beast banded orange and black. The Monkey Prince started running through the forest to the place where his father called out in want for a good spirit to come out of the blanket of green around the clearing they called home and stop this. The prince had forgotten his stick and the pile of stones he had gathered to hurl at the beast when he finally showed his gnarly head matted with red which made the black more black and the orange the color the laughing bird’s head, brilliant and shiny scarlet. He only had his shell broken under the pressure of his grasp into three sharp-edged parts. As he ran the tips cut into his hand and blood dripped from the three incisions that burrowed and plunged deeper, calcium wanting to hold conversations with the calcium of bone, slide past them, rubbing against them, knowing them as minerals know minerals, only in superficial recognition, until they all three came through on the other side of his fist. it was his hand but with claws now, the orange and white speckled giant shell now fragmented and coated in crimson gloss that reflected the midday sun pulsated with a heated heart’s rhythm and a frantic mind’s want for the ceasing of his father’s screaming that could be heard by all and felt by the deepest roots of the trees.

Before the Monkey Prince knew it he was upon them and this violent play: Father screaming and sister being dragged away by her punctured head, and the beast banded black and orange with its changing face. And before he knew it he was jumping with his balled up hand bloody and spiked, leaping to a purpose not known yet to him. The shell claws ripped into the beast’s throat as he fell to them, the beast crouching down in amazed fear and his sister still dead, still in the immense mouth with the tongue of the beast able to feel the life running down to mix with the life of its neck running out and onto the ground.

He was held up high as hero, as victor over the beast, and he was made a throne of rocks and leaves to sit upon, high above the others in the center of the clearing where they lived. His wounds healed around the shells and his bones fused with the foreign calcium and gave him a right hand transformed into that of the beast, a clawed fist and a spiked grasp. As time passed he would make practice of punishing the others by screaming “Hand! Hand! Fist! Claw!” at them while slashing at them with his beastly hand. The group in the clearing, that family, became in that moment a village: They now knew the word for hand, for fist, for claw and for those he had cut and gashed and scraped: pain. I brought his food too late for comfort to stay in his belly like a warm stone from the beach sand held in the sun coated fur of a hand, and he slashed even me--the author with his will to overpower, of which I have yet to heal from. He forced all men his age to challenge and fight him for his crown only to make them bleed and run from him. And the female ones would not come willingly to him anymore for fear of the hand. He had become ugly and human. Even his father couldn’t reach him, couldn’t make him stop: he just kept screaming a jungle yell that could be heard and understood by all and felt by the deepest roots of the trees.

The village lived under this first despotic rule: a half ape and half beast--the beast claw speckled white and orange. He banged his beast fist upon the rock of his sitting, chipping rock away, sharpening his claws. He was the first tyrant, the first to know human greed, human pride, human aggression that went beyond instinct and into a mind that is ready for names, for language as we know it, not just grunts of intention and action, but true sin in the power of nomenclature, judgment..

With this Adam the sin comes first, this Adam needs a soul to calm the lunacy of his newfound, warped logic, his fall from innocence and habit into a voice that can command, can oppress another with its mighty words.

The clearing cleared of everyone except the Monkey Prince, sick with power on top of a stone and leaf throne. He had driven them all away. Soon the meat they left for him would be gone and he would have to come down from his throne to hunt. The lower ones swung from the trees grunting and ooooing with questions. He would swat them away with his clawed hand only to have them come back again, hanging from the dying trees.

The Monkey Prince came down from his throne--the dried and brittle vines touched the back of his legs and he became irritated, slashing at them with his super-simion hand. Everything around him had started to die, give over to decay prematurely, ever since the rest of the group left for the sea and the bony fish that had the sweetest of all meat (a fish that Western scientists would much much much later rediscover in 1947 off of Madagascar thinking it extinct for 50, 000 years but finding the native people had eaten the fish as a delicacy for as long as local history could remember). The apes would make a line and move towards shore splashing the water as they went, and the children would hit the fish with rocks and sticks as they moved into shallow water. The Monkey Prince knew they would not come back, his father had shown him so with his leaving without a sound, and he would have to hunt the slowly dying forest.

The sky spirits and the ground spirits held equilibrium and peace in the forest. The sky spirits provided the sun and rain and wind needed to grow healthy plants that fed the ground dwelling animals that ate of plants, and that in turn fed the ground dwelling animals that imbibed meat, and when all those animals would fall to the ground and breathe no more the ground spirits would take the bodies and fill them with decay and white worms with black and hungry mouths, and all that decayed meat would eventually fall into the ground to feed the trees and make them tall and strong, and the trees would provide shade and shelter from the sky spirits and nesting for the flying ones, and all was well in this paradise world. But now, the sky spirits had left the clearing to follow the Monkey King and the rest of the group, turning their collective back on the power-sick Prince. Without the sky spirits there to say what should grow and what should die, everything began to rot and fall apart and turn brown and brittle, decimated masses of leaves and vines and animals that hadn’t fled with the change.

The Prince was hungry and could find nothing but the white stones that had sprung up in all of the death and decay. The stones tasted bitter and were tough and made his belly rumble with a stronger hunger than before. He felt something move in his neck, something he found unusual. Something was growing.

He came to the river bed that led to the big mountain. The fish had all died and left boated bodies to color the water a blackish red and color the air with a stench so strong it made the prince sit down and shake his head, fur matted with sweat and the ground spirit’s want to have his body also. The fish bobbed up and down in the festering water in an undulation similar to the waves of the big water where his family was, fishing for fish that are alive still, that swim in and out of reach of the group’s grabbing hands and teeth. The Monkey Prince imagined being with them all again, fishing in the sun of the sky spirits, and not being here, not feeling sick, not looking at dead fish waves that kept rolling and rolling over stagnant waters turned the color of death.

the dead fish spoke to him in chorus: “You must go to where the sky-spirits live.” And they told him to fall into the river and they would bring him upriver to the source. From there he would have to climb; to go into a dark place before he could see the light of the garden where he could ask the sky-spirits for forgiveness. The dead fish made a raft of their bodies and swam the best they could upriver without the use of tail or fin but the willing of the movement, the willing of water to return to its birth.

Another dream in the first poetics of near and felt experience:

Palms open to the night
clawed hand buried in the ground
a jungle scream that goes
out to the language=lost crowd
fishing in the river of the sea
for meat they have names for
now, “bone fish” and “pearl oysters” and “Blue claw crabs” spill over things
they make now called “baskets” and “baggage”
and “wheel barrows.” Wheelbarrows rolling
on an “earth” now named and on a “wheel” now named
and used to “gather” and “transport” “large” “quanities”
“of” “food” “in order” “to” “save” “enough”, “salt” “enough”
“to” “feed” “the” “less fortunate” “when” “times” “come” “for” “Others” “like” “the Monkey” “Prince”
“To rise to power”
“and” “Rule” “with” “Cruelty”
“or” “their” “good” “intentions” “leading” “to hell”: for “a people” “lost.”

(To be continued).