Field Notes Part 2

Angels and Mating

Ecology of Souls - Mating

Dogs don’t use Instagram.

Mainly this is because they don’t have thumbs and can’t understand cameras but, even if they did, I don’t think they’d be overmuch interested. Animals, see… are not interested in Fame.

Food, heat, play, sex, shelter, sleep… these are animalistic desires held in common by both Man and Beast, but, as far as we can tell anyway, Fame is one of those desires held on Earth by Man alone. There are famous animals, that’s true. Famous internet cats and Facebook dogs and that Elephant from Dumbo Drop had a more illustrious career in Hollywood than I’ll ever have… sure.

But none of those creatures have ever seemed to care about their fame very much.

More to the point, they never even really seemed to notice they had it.

Perhaps Danny Glover’s best movie.

Fame, as a concept, seems simply not to register with our animal friends. They do care about being well liked of course, by their pack or their flock or their herd. But, if Fame is defined as the craving for admiration from individuals you’ll never meet and which have no direct influence on your life, then evidence for the desire of it is scant amongst the birds and bees and buffalo. Wanting your flock to like you so they share some nesting space, or your pack to not hate you enough so they share their food… that’s one thing. Fantasizing about having your name in lights and becoming the next Taylor Swift?

That’s quite another.

Image from the 2001 Video Game “Black and White”

In the early 2000s there was a computer game called “Black and White.” In it, players took on the role of a local tribal god with global, cosmopolitan ambitions. You started out as the house deity of some small family, but, as the family grew you got more and more sacrifices and more and more prayers, and this made you stronger and more influential as a god. You would lead your people, guiding them to trade and explore and make war, in order to spread the cult of yourself far and wide and gain more power. You could choose all sorts of methods to increase the number and devotion of your followers of course… anything from showering them with riches whenever they came to the alter to cursing them with plagues whenever they did not. Whatever means you employed though, it was imperative that you kept the prayers coming. In the game, if everyone stopped praying to you, you died.

The game sold because that mechanic makes very intuitive sense.

There is you see a spiritual analogue to every physical thing, or perhaps it is better to say that every physical thing is a distillation… a shadow of something spiritual. All the animalistic functions which you are familiar with… from eating to sleeping to having sex to pooping… have a spiritual counterpart. Spirits need to “eat.” Spirits need to “reproduce”.

What is fame-seeking, when you stop and think about it, other than a desire to be Worshiped? Most famous people might be reluctant to put it that way, but the desire reveals itself for what it is often enough. Having a T.V. show dedicated to acquiring fame called American Idol is a pretty big tell, as is the little gold statue of a man you can receive for making it big in the movies. Now you might reflexively think that a desire to be worshiped is bad, and it certainly can be, but actually seeking Worship in the general sense, that is, seeking praise, admiration, and (most importantly) attention, is not in and of itself a bad thing. And, while it’s true that there is a kind of worship we owe only to God, in another sense seeking to be “worshiped” is actually simply an intrinsic part of being a spirit. It is part and parcel with the angelic side of our natures. Hence why we have it, and animals don’t.

Worship you see is how spirits reproduce. How they grow stronger. How they, in essence, make more of themselves.

It is also, less obviously, how they eat (more on that in part 3).

An example is helpful. Consider Elvis. Physically the man is dead, yes, but he had a very specific and defined Way of Being in which he existed and manifested himself in the world. Therefore, if a spirit is A Pattern of Being, then whenever one of his many impersonators copy that spirit intentionally (or even unintentionally), they are reproducing his spirit in the world. They are, in fact, re-incarnating it. Giving it a body once again. That is a form of reproduction, one that we alone amongst the animals are interested in because it’s, once again, one that we alone amongst the animals are capable of. So much is it a form of reproduction in fact that many consider Fame a reasonable alternative to having children. A YouTube Career, becoming TikTok famous, having a million followers on Instagram, becoming a movie star… many millions of people pursue these things in lieu of starting a family because, if successful, it can fill the same sort of role. You can, on the one hand, choose to make new physical copies of yourself (which will look and act a lot like you), or, you can impart your spirit into already existing people who will then (to greater and lesser degrees) go on to be a copy of yourself in another way. Think about it. How many women try to copy the behaviors, looks, and mentality of Taylor Swift? How many young men have tried to be just like LeBron James? How often do people (even subconsciously) adopt the mannerisms and speech patterns of those they see on T.V.?

Getting eyeballs on you. Getting people to revere you. To pay attention to you. To put you up on a pedestal… to worship you… to copy you…

It’s a way to make more of yourself.

A way to spread your spirit, analogous to how sex spreads your genes.

Angels you see, do have intimacy. Just like we do. Contra what you might have heard on the subject, Heaven is not a place of sterility, but one of Unfathomable Romance. True, angels don’t (as a rule) have sex, since sex requires bodies and they are by definition incorporeal… but that does not mean they are not forming intimate connections. Angels interact and commune with one another deeply and, in the process, take on one another’s characteristics. They form within themselves copies of the other, which is, if you like, a kind of mating. Many people shy away from such ideas because Jesus famously stated that the angels in heaven neither marry nor are given in marriage, but I personally think he was referring more to the institution of marriage than he was making a broader statement on angelic relationships. Either way, once you see that worship necessarily involves imitation and copying, you can readily understand the reproductive aspect of it.

A note.

Please don’t get too hung up on the word “worship.” I’m not suggesting that angels are up in heaven committing idolatry with one another… it’s not like that. The word “worship” is, like the word “love”, imprecise, and carries many meanings. Just as a man is supposed to “love” his wife only, yet might also “love” all people and yet again “love” baked ziti, so too are there lower forms of what we might call “worship” which are meant to be shared more widely, and higher forms meant for God alone. As an aside, this is traditionally how Catholics have defended their “worship” of the saints and The Virgin Mary, although, it must be admitted, many times their worship of those other beings has probably gone beyond what is actually appropriate.

The trouble with Fame though is that it is a perversion of this natural tendency for spiritual reproduction. It is akin to being a whore or a sperm donor instead of forming a legitimate committed relationship. Without getting too explicit, the desire for Fame is literally the “gang bang” version of spiritual reproduction, where you just give yourself away cheaply to any and all who will take you. In the same way that it isn’t wise to reproduce physically with someone you do not love, it likewise isn’t wise to reproduce spiritually with people you don’t care about. This is why many traditional cultures, like the Gullah people of South Carolina, shy away from having their pictures taken, believing such a thing “steals the soul.”

They’re not wrong.

A picture of you, literally an icon of you, can be circulated and acquire attention and praise (e.g. worship) without you having any control over it. Think of a woman who unwillingly goes viral for doing something stupid in public or who has her nudes leaked… it can be a sort of spiritual rape, where people make an idol of your image and likeness without your consent.

Dangerous game.

Re-incarnating The King.

This, by the way, is why Angels are a lot more reserved and less cavalier in their dealings with humanity than Demons are. Because, for an Angel, forming a bond means something, and they’re not going to enter into such a relationship lightly.

To Demons though? Everyone is cheap. Most of all themselves.

Understanding all this will form a large part of the basis for your understanding behind the motivations of spirits, for again, the spiritual realm is a continuation of the physical one… not something weird and separate. Just as the desire to mate and reproduce drives so much of animal behavior, so too does it drive the behavior of spirits. It is in fact the ultimate desire… for God’s motivation in making us all was that we might learn to worship and imitate him and to thereby become his children. The entire thing, both the visible and invisible universe, is actually highly erotic. Not for nothing have numerous mystics claimed that the Perichoresis, the divine dance of God with God’s Self, is essentially orgasmic…

Evidence in the Wild - Angelic Visitors

The following are true stories. Mostly. I have made a few alterations here and there for the sake of the brevity and clarity, and changed the names of many of the characters for the sake of privacy. Nothing essential regarding the supernatural nature of the encounters has been altered however, and all of the following stories are drawn from either firsthand experience or told to me by someone close whom I trust.

That said…