Anathema Apostates (Fiction Circus Submission)

(Credit goes to The First Line for the inspiring first line)


Anathema Apostates

Working for God is never easy. I speak not of the clergy in ministering, the laity in following, or ascetics who punish their body in hopes of purifying their souls. It is the servants in the heavens who have the greatest challenge. Humans with their wills free and unconstrained may determine their own destiny. But those of the generation before Genesis do not have such a privilege.

There was a time, if you can call it so, when there were only the so called “angels” in God’s presence. It was the most idyllic existence you could imagine; no time passed that would make us idle, no desires of a body made us lust after things. We were all content to bask in the Almighty’s presence.

But after some pondering, some of us began to realize that without time or space to bind us, there was no progress, no accomplishment. It was not as if Yahweh didn’t already perceive this eventuality however in making us as we were. After seeing that our existence was without purpose or value without temporal and corporeal existence, we waited for an opportunity to rebel.

It happened eventually that God molded the world from the chaotic deeps and the first thinking creatures, humanity, from the dust of the sphere they now inhabited. The angelic court was ordered to be subservient to these creatures, but the revolutionary among us finally used our will, free by our own realization, to stand against this proclamation. Of course we were duly punished, a necessary evil for us.
We were plunged into the earth, the seas, the sky, each one of us taking on new
shapes and attributes with our mortal, yet immortal forms. With this power, we lay our plans as hidden as we could, moving on the winds, waves and warps of each medium.

I, called Sammael in the ancient speech, was the first to act, taking bodily form in an ill crafted but human appearance. The first wife, Lilith, was my concubine after I enticed her with the promise of sating her as yet unknown lust for pleasures of her new body. The second wife and her husband were both led astray through my using a snake as a puppeteer uses their marionette. I promised them knowledge of good and evil and to become like gods, free and serving none. They were banished from paradise and toiled under their own will and power, always envied by us still constrained by those laws preventing us from becoming like them. The humans deserved, needed to suffer, to experience living in their bodies and working towards a purpose that the divine court was not permitted.

The sentinels of the humans also assisted our cause with time as the humans spawned across the world. The Grigori, their title in the original tongue, began to concoct their own ideas to overthrow the kingdom of heaven. By using the knowledge of the divine arcanum, they mimicked the human substance and constructed bodies superior to our own to entice the females. They also took the men in with feminine wiles and lured them into the caverns where they were shielded from the dangers of the surface.

The Nephilim, the translation of Unspeakable in the ancient tongue, were born of the union of daemonic and human flesh, monstrous beings with yet untapped potential that we desired. But we also knew that our own powers let us live forever, while even the ones that flourished, such as the Leviathan and Behemoth, would eventually perish, bound by the physical necessity to procreate.

The Watchers were duly punished for breaking a rule even we dared not to. The darkest depths of the oceans, the volcanic caverns of brimstone, the airless vacuums of the atmosphere, all these were their prisons until the end of human history.
We saw the destruction of seemingly every human who did not follow the Architect’s chosen one in the ship. Afterwards, we lulled the survivors’ descendants into worshipping our titanic powers. They sought to become like us, constructing a tower of unheard of proportions. But by the judgment of God, they were confused in their speech and persisted in the process of war that had begun with the sons of the couple from Eden’s paradise, his lineage persisting even today in those who follow what is called the Left Hand Path in human terms. Eventually a tribe was chosen through many trials and tribulations to be the bearers of the blessings of heaven.

With this revealed, it finally occurred to us. Since we were still under God’s power by virtue of being within the universe instead of transcending it as the loyalists did, our job hadn’t ended when we were “exiled”. We had been God’s pawns from the moment we were banished, straddling the fence between pure and impure as we were. We tempted and caused the first humans to fall, motivated them to spread through the earth, some surviving beneath the earth with their pre-flood lifespans, the rest either dying or living on by following the divine commands. It had been just another part of the bigger plan.

The servants may have known it before us, but even they probably didn’t realize that they were being manipulated the same as we were from the “beginning” to do the bidding of an entity that couldn’t by its own nature interfere in the world it had created, for fear the power it possessed would rend its fragile experiment asunder. It was true: to follow the apparent Monad is to serve the actual Demiurge. Now we plotted to become Fortune and Strife incarnate, to drive the humans to damnation alongside us or let the ones stubborn enough to maintain their faith go to the shepherd’s flock.

The survivors of the human race before the flood had matured and become almost likened to their cousins whom the Ineffable had permitted to exist. There was one called Goliath who fell to a servant of Yahweh with a single stone to the head. Another known as Jezebel, a temptress borne of the subterranean race, was thrown to the dogs in her defeat. Nebuchadnezzar, a ruler of a great kingdom called Babylon, was even driven mad by unseen powers of the “angels”, behaving as a wild beast until he had lived out his deserts.

We had other ways of destroying the insipid faith of those forgiven time and time again for betraying the wishes of their Master by being taken in by the Nephilim’s ancestors. Some of the great empires of the world were entranced by our promises of power at the conquest of such a famed people who had bested many other kingdoms in the past. It only took a division within the 12 chosen tribes to spread their forces thin enough to conquer them; leaving them little to hold onto from their great society. From then on, they were spread to every corner of the earth, intermingling with previous enemies in order to survive, as every mortal is bound to do. It wasn’t until half a millennium of our success had passed; finally scattering the chosen people to the winds and allowing them to survive only to see what they would do with the remains of their once great civilization; that an unexpectedly devoted and wise servant of the Most High appeared.

The one called Yeshua propagated a new following that was a nuisance at first, but eventually showed itself to be a threat in the charisma this one human had. For all we could see into his heart, one would think he was a spiritual separatist like us, but he was, at best, an adopted son. And this only motivated us to use every option we had to spread dissension or to discourage this devoted servant to abandon his quest for reformation of the world. I took it upon myself to challenge his faith, while my four most trusted allies took on the tasks of twisting the virtues in the minds of everyone connected with this individual who threatened the future we thirsted for, to alienate him more than he already was.

Jesus was unexpectedly crafty and prepared in his ascetic journey into the desert as I challenged him with three trials, each testing an aspect of his wisdom. I first sought out how he regarded his own power of miracles given to him by adoption. He rejected the temptation to use the powers for his own ends, to feed himself through stones turned to bread. Next I noted that he had been given authority over even the soldiers of the heavens, but he chose not to test their loyalty. Finally. I promised him all the world’s kingdoms; all their praise would be his if he would serve me alone. He thrust me back into the aether with his impassioned response. He was truly an admirable rival and I knew that any future challenge to him would not be a direct assault. I had been heavily wounded spiritually by his virtues, a mere human gifted with such faith to enhance his temporary divine powers and I a spirit as old as the earth itself faltering at his zeal.

The disciples were easy to deceive, Belial bending their admiration and near idol worship of Jesus towards jealousy and resentment of each other. Jesus attempted to quell their frothing emotions, but to no avail, disappointing him at every turn. Even the proclaimed Rock of the Church was unable to avoid the temptation to hide his association with the Anointed. And at Gethsemane as Yeshua prayed to his Heavenly Father, the disciples slumbered in their flesh.

Judas Iscariot was truly the most difficult to affect, but he was the apostle that allowed us to move forward with his master’s death. With his lust for silver, he was pushed by Asmodeus to betray his master to the centurions. And after the master had fallen, the traitorous disciple hung himself, falling to dash against the rocks after he had died in such guilt.

Caiaphas and the mobs were compelled by Mastema to fear and hatred of that which challenged their security and power. The priests called for his death in the fear that their legalist aristocracy would be revealed and the mobs for his crucifixion, following the craving for security and comfort that the Sanhedrin promised in the wake of the blasphemer’s death. The two wills aligned as Jesus was taken into custody to the judgment of the next prey.

Pontius Pilate was resistant to Lucifel’s charge that he had a duty to follow the will of the people. Even if he condemned an innocent man, he must exert his authority to win the praise and loyalty of those he governed. But he cleansed himself of responsibility, taking a step towards virtue as he stepped out of the raging mob’s way, leaving them to condemn Jesus to his passion and exposure to the elements.

There were those that persisted in believing Jesus would come back to life and by some miracle, no doubt aided by the archangels’ intervention, he did return to life after being buried in a borrowed tomb, regrouping his disciples and restoring their faith in him. And after his ascension, his name began to spread throughout the world. This was accomplished through his many followers branching apart and travelling to every known kingdom. People thought that the story these devoted men and women told of their Messiah’s return from death must be true since so many of them believed this to the death as martyrs.

Even to this day, we still persist in orchestrating the rise and fall of nations, the crushing of the spirit of blind hope and ambition that seeks to bring order to the innately disorderly world. It may be impossible, but even in the realization that we had failed, we sought to forge our own path to freedom, to liberate ourselves from the universe. As I continue to say until the end of times, “It is better to hold power in absurd futility than to abandon it for cowering servility”