My astonishment at Gabriella’s presence, not to mention my curiosity regarding the crates of notebooks, did not go unnoticed. Dr. Seraphina waved me into the room, asking me to close the door and join them. “Come in, Celestine,” she said again as she gestured for me to sit on a divan near the bookshelves. “I was wondering when you might arrive.”
As if to second Dr. Seraphina’s remark, a grandfather clock at the far end of the office chimed eight o’clock. I was an hour early. “I thought we began at nine,” I said.
“Gabriella wanted to get a head start,” Dr. Seraphina said. “We have been looking through some of the new materials that you will catalog. These boxes are Raphael’s papers. He brought them from his office last night.”
Walking to her desk, Dr. Seraphina took a key and unlocked a cupboard. The shelves were filled with notebooks, each shelf ordered and meticulous. “And these are my papers. I have arranged them by subject and date, the years of my schooling are on the lower shelves, and my most recent notes—mostly quotations and outlines for articles—are on the top. I have refrained from cataloging my work for years. Secrecy has been a large factor, but, more important, I have been waiting for the right assistants. You are both bright students with exposure to the basic fields of angelology—teleology, transcendental frequencies, theories of morphistic angelology, taxonomy. While you have studied these at an introductory level, you have also learned a bit about our field of antediluvian geology. You are hardworking and meticulous, knowledgeable and talented in different ways, but not specialized. I am hoping that you will come to the task with fresh eyes. If there is anything in the boxes that we’ve missed, I know that you girls will catch it. I am also going to require that you sit in on my lectures. I realize that you completed my introductory course last year, but the subject matter is of special significance to our task.”
Running her fingers along a row of journals, she extracted a number of volumes and placed them on the coffee table between us. Although my first instinct was to take one of the journals, I waited, endeavoring to follow Gabriella’s lead. I did not want to appear too anxious.
“You may want to begin with these,” Seraphina said, settling lightly upon the settee. “I think you will find Raphael’s files to be a bit of a challenge to put in order.”
“There are so many,” I said, enthralled by the sheer amount of papers to go through and curious as to how we would document such a mass of information.
“I have already given Gabriella precise instructions about our methodology for cataloging the papers,” Seraphina said. “She will pass those instructions on to you. There is only one directive I will repeat: You must remember that these notebooks are exceptionally precious. They form the bulk of our original research. Although we have excerpted some of the material for publication, none of these has been copied in its entirety. I ask that you take special care to preserve the more delicate notebooks, particularly the texts outlining our expeditions. These papers cannot leave my office, I’m afraid. But as long as you work through the material in a timely fashion, you may read them as you wish. I believe that there is much to learn, however disorderly the papers may be. Indeed, I am hoping that our work will help you to understand the history of our struggle and, if we are very lucky, help us discover what we are seeking.”
Taking a leather notebook and giving it to me, she said, “These are some of my writings from my student years. There are notes from lectures, some conjectures about angelology and its historical development. It’s been so long since I’ve looked at it that I cannot fully account for what you might find. I was once an ambitious student myself and, like you, Celestine, spent many, many hours in the Athenaeum. With so much information about the history of angelology, I felt that I needed to make it all a bit more compact. I’m afraid some of my rather naïve speculations may be included, which you should take with a grain of salt.”
I struggled to imagine Dr. Seraphina as a student, learning the very things we were learning. It was difficult to imagine her ever having been naïve about anything.
Dr. Seraphina said, “The notes from later years might be more engrossing. I rewrote the material from this journal into a more—how shall I say it?—succinct account of the history of our work. One objective that our scholars and agents have tried to adhere to is that angelology is purely functional—we use our study as a concrete tool. Theory is only as good as its execution, and in our case historical research plays a large role in our ability to fight the Nephilim. Personally, I have a rather empirical mind. I am not at all adept at understanding abstractions, and so I used narrative to make angelological theories more tangible to me. It is much the same way that I order my lectures. While the use of narrative is commonplace in many aspects of theology—allegories and the like—the church eschewed such an approach when speaking of angelological systems. As you perhaps know, hierarchical systems were often constructed as a kind of argument by the church fathers. They believed that as God created hierarchies of angels, so He made hierarchies on earth. Explaining one would illuminate the other. For example: As the seraphim are superior angelic intelligences to the cherubim, so, too, is the archbishop of Paris to the farmer. You see how it might work: God created hierarchies, and everyone must remain in their God-appointed place. And pay their taxes, bien sûr. The church’s angelic hierarchies reinforced the social and political structures. They also offered a narrative of the universe, a cosmology that gave order to the seeming chaos of ordinary people’s lives. Angelologists, of course, diverged from this path. We observe a horizontal structure, one that allows intellectual freedom and advancement through merit. Our system is quite unique.”
“How could such a system survive?” Gabriella asked. “Surely the church would not have allowed it.”
Startled by Gabriella’s brazen question, I looked down at my hands. Never would I be able to question the church in such a forthright manner. Perhaps it was a detriment, my belief in the soundness of the church.
“I believe that this question has been asked many times before,” Dr. Seraphina said. “The founding fathers of angelology developed the perimeters of our work at a grand meeting of angelologists in the tenth century. There is a wonderful account of the meeting, written by one of the fathers in attendance.” Dr. Seraphina returned to the cupboard and removed a book. Turning through the pages, she said, “I suggest that you read it when you have the chance, which will not be now, as you have more than your share of work ahead of you this morning.”
Seraphina placed the book on the table. “Once you begin reading the history of our group, you will see that there is more to angelology than study and debate. Our work grew from the wise decisions of a band of serious, spiritual men. The First Angelological Expedition, the very first physical attempt made by angelologists to uncover the prison of the angels, arose when the Venerable Fathers, at the invitation of their Thracian brothers, organized the Council of Sozopol. It was the founding meeting of our discipline, and according to the Venerable Father Bogomil, one of the greatest of the founding fathers, the council was a huge success, not only in forging the standards of our work, but in bringing together the foremost religious thinkers of the time—not since the Council of Nicea had such a large assembly of extradenominational representatives gathered. Priests, deacons, acolytes, rabbis, and Manichaean holy men participated in a flurry of debate over dogma in the main hall. But a secret gathering was taking place elsewhere. An old priest called Clematis, a bishop of Thracian birth who lived in Rome, had called together a select group of sympathetic fathers who shared his great passion for finding the cavern of the Watchers. As a matter of fact, he had developed a theory of the location of the cave, positing that it, like the remnants of Noah’s Ark, were to be found in proximity to the Black Sea coast. Eventually Clematis went to the mountains to test this theory. Dr. Raphael and I have assumed—although we have no proof to bear out our assumptions—that Clematis had drafted a map.”
“But how can you be so certain that
there is anything there?” Gabriella said. “What evidence do we have? What if there is no cavern and it is just a legend?”
“There must be a basis of truth in it,” I said, feeling that Gabriella was too quick in her desire to challenge our teacher.
“Clematis found the cavern,” Dr. Seraphina said. “The Venerable Father and his team are the only ones to have discerned the actual location of the pit, the only ones to have descended into it, and the only people in many thousands of years to have seen the disobedient angels. Clematis died for the privilege. Thankfully, he dictated a brief account of the expedition before his death. Dr. Raphael and I have used this account as our primary text in our search.”
“Surely the account points to the location,” I said, anxious to understand the details of Clematis’s expedition.
“Yes, there is a location mentioned in Clematis’s account,” Dr. Seraphina said. Taking a piece of paper and a fountain pen, she wrote a series of letters in Cyrillic and presented them to us.
ΓяypcκoTo Бърло
“The name given in Clematis’s account is Gyaurskoto Burlo, which means “Infidels’ Prison” in Old Bulgarian or, more loosely, ”The Hiding Place of the Infidels“—an accurate description of the Watchers, who were called disobedient or unfaithful by Christians of the era. The Turks occupied the region around the Rhodope Mountains from the fourteenth century until the Russians assisted the Bulgarians in driving them out in 1878, and this serves to complicate the modern hunt: The Muslims referred to the Bulgarian Christians as infidels, placing another layer of meaning over the original description of the cave. We made a number of trips to Greece and Bulgaria in the twenties, but to our great disappointment we found no caves matching this name. When questioned, the villagers associate the name with the Turks or say they have never heard of the cave at all. After years of cartographic hunting, we have been unable to find the name on any map of the region. Whether by carelessness or design, the cave does not exist on paper.”
“Perhaps it is more correct to conclude,” Gabriella said, “that Clematis erred and that there is no such cave.”
“There you are wrong,” Dr. Seraphina said, the quickness of her response giving evidence of her passion for the subject. “The prison of the disobedient angels exists. I have wagered my career upon it.”
“Then there must be a way to find it,” I said, understanding for the first time the full extent of the Valkos’ desire to solve the riddle. “We need to study Clematis’s account.”
“That,” Seraphina said, going to her cupboard once again, “is for another time, after you have completed the work at hand.”
I opened the volume before me, curious about what lay under its covers. I could not help but feel satisfied that my ideas were so aligned with Dr. Seraphina’s work and that Gabriella—who usually won the Valkos’ admiration—had clashed with our teacher. Yet, to my dismay, Gabriella was utterly untouched by Dr. Seraphina’s disapproval. In fact, she appeared to be thinking of something else entirely. It was clear to me that Gabriella did not harbor the same sense of rivalry that I did. She felt no need to prove herself.
Seeing how eager I was to begin, Dr. Seraphina stood. “I will leave you to your work,” she said. “Perhaps you will see something in these papers that has eluded me. I have found that our texts will speak deeply to someone or they will say nothing whatsoever. It depends upon your sensitivity toward the subject. The mind and spirit become ripe in their own fashion and at their own pace. Beautiful music plays, but not everyone with ears can hear it.”
From my first days as a student, it was my habit to arrive at the Valkos’ lectures early, so as to secure a spot among the multitude of students. Despite the fact that Gabriella and I had sat through the Valkos’ lectures the previous year, we continued to attend them each week. I was drawn to the ambience of passionate inquiry and the illusion of scholarly unity that the lectures presented, while Gabriella appeared to revel in her status as a second-year student from a well-known family. The younger students stared at her throughout the lecture as if gauging her reaction to the Valkos’ assertations. The lectures were conducted in a small limestone chapel built on the fortifications of a Roman temple, its walls thick and calcified, as if they had risen from the quarries that stretched below. The chapel’s ceilings were composed of crumbling brick buttressed by wooden beams, which appeared so rickety that when the rumbling of cars outside became strong, I believed the noise might send the whole edifice tumbling down upon us.
Gabriella and I found seats in the back of the chapel as Dr. Seraphina arranged her papers and began her lecture.
“Today I will share a story familiar to most of you in some form or other. As the founding story of our discipline, its central position in history is indisputable, its poetic beauty unassailable. We begin in the years before the Great Flood, when heaven dispatched a fleet of two hundred angels called the Watchers to monitor the activities of creation. The chief Watcher, according to these accounts, was named Semjaza. Semjaza was beautiful and commanding, the very image of angelic bearing. His chalk-white skin, pale eyes, and golden hair marked the ideal of heavenly beauty. Leading two hundred angels through the vault of the heavens, Semjaza came to rest in the material world. Among his charges were Araklba, Rameel, Tamlel, Ramlel, Danel, Ezeqeel, Baraqijal, Asael, Armaros, Batarel, Ananel, Zaqiel, Samsapeel, Satarel, Turel, Jomjael, Kokabiel, Araqiel, Shamsiel, and Sariel.
“The angels moved among the children of Adam and Eve unseen, living quietly in the shadows, hiding in mountains, taking shelter where humanity would not find them. They traveled from region to region, following the movements of men. In this fashion they discovered the populous civilizations along the Ganges, the Nile, the Jordan, and the Amazon. They lived quietly in the outer regions of human activity, dutifully observing the ways of man.
“One afternoon, in the era of Jared, when the Watchers were stationed on Mount Hermon, Semjaza saw a woman bathing in a lake, her brown hair twisting about her. He called the Watchers to the edge of the mountain, and together the majestic beings looked upon the woman. According to numerous doctrinal sources, it was then that Semjaza suggested the Watchers choose wives from among the children of men.
“No sooner had he spoken these words than Semjaza grew anxious. Aware of the penalty for disobedience—he had witnessed the fall of the rebel angels—he reasserted his plan. He said, ‘The Daughters of Men should be ours. But if you do not follow me, I will suffer the penalty of this great sin alone.’
“The Watchers made a pact with Semjaza, swearing to suffer the penalties with their leader. They knew that the union was forbidden and that their pact broke every law in heaven and earth. Nonetheless, the Watchers descended Mount Hermon and presented themselves to human women. The women took these strange creatures as their husbands and soon became pregnant. After some time children were born to the Watchers and their wives. These creatures were called Nephilim.
“The Watchers observed their children as they grew. They saw that they were different from their mothers and also different from the angels. Their daughters grew to be taller and more elegant than human women; they were intuitive and psychic; they possessed the physical beauty of the angels. The boys grew to be taller and stronger than normal men; they reasoned with shrewdness; they possessed the intelligence of the spiritual world. As a gift, the Watchers brought their sons together and taught them the art of warfare. They taught the boys the secrets of fire—how to kindle and keep it, how to harness it for cooking and energy. This was a gift so precious that the Watchers would be mythologized in human legend, most notably in the story of Prometheus. The Watchers taught their sons metallurgy, an art the angels had perfected but kept hidden from humanity. The Watchers demonstrated the art of working precious metals into bracelets and rings and necklaces. Gold and gemstones were pried from the ground, polished and made into objects, and assigned value. The Nephilim stored their wealth, hoarding gold and grain. The Watchers showed their daughters how to use
dyes for cloth and how to color their eyelids with glittering minerals ground into powder. They adorned their daughters, causing jealousy among the human women.
“The Watchers taught their children how to fashion tools that would make them stronger than men, instructing them to melt metal and fashion swords, knives, shields, breastplates, and arrowheads. Understanding the power the tools gave them, the Nephilim made caches of fine, sharp weapons. They hunted and stored meat. They protected their belongings with violence.
“And there were other gifts the Watchers gave their children. They taught their wives and daughters secrets even more powerful than fire or metallurgy. They separated the women from the men, taking them away from the city and traveling deep into the mountains, where they showed the women how to cast spells and to use herbs and roots in medicines. They gave them the secret of the magical arts, teaching them a system of symbols to record their spells. Soon scrolls were passed among them. The women—who had until then been at the mercy of men’s strength—became powerful and dangerous.
“The Watchers divulged more and more of these heavenly secrets to their wives and daughters:Baraqijal taught astrology.
Kokabiel taught them to read portents in the constellations.
Ezeqeel gave them a working knowledge of the clouds.
Araqiel instructed in signs of the earth.
Shamsiel mapped the course of the sun.
Sariel mapped the signs of the moon.
Aramos taught counterspells.
“With these gifts the Nephilim organized into a tribe, arming themselves and taking control of land and resources. They perfected the art of warfare. They began to amass more and more power over humanity. They identified themselves as lords of the earth, cutting out huge domains of land and claiming the kingdoms as their own. They took slaves and made flags to represent their armies. They divided their realms, assigning men to be soldiers, merchants, and laborers to serve them. Equipped with the eternal secrets and a hunger for power, the Nephilim dominated mankind.