With Dew Anointed

Rusted gold at the Garden Gate.  Poison honey on his lips.  Lion’s mane hair, scars and wounds of rubies, eyes yellow owl iris, pupils a sea of black smoke.  Smoking and choking and seething with rage in the bowels of the Earth, Adam ha Kadmon is chained in the Cave of Treasures, arcane vengeful guardian of the Sefer Raziel come to claim his burning brides.  False idols fat off the land, he calls the Qadesh and Qodeshah.  Bridal whores of Heaven and Hell.  Oh how they have forgotten First Man, and thus he seeks a violent claim on their flesh.  Eve is the Sun Priestess of beaten Io gold headdress, Fire of God, with silver bowl that holds redemption, and Eisheth is Lunar Lady, smooth platinum crescent at her brow, and he raises a hand to strike us down, but we lash back, and there is a cacophony of tears and bitter fears and sour wine.  We can’t be rid of this curse, I turned my back on our marriage and took up with Satan in Hell, chose Samael and Michael and Zadkiel and Ariel-Lucifer in the end, whore of both Heaven and Hell, and Adam turned his back too, leaving me alone and starved to retreat back to the armsz of his first wife, Lilith, and all the ladies of the night – my sister Eisheth, my soothsayer Naamah, my go-go dancing Agrat.  Spider veins, fire in my womb of the Shekinah in balance with Adam’s magic of black cloak and cowl, and we are both Damned, the original Fallen, and Abel is a head-smashed blue ghost, and my proud son Cain bleeds and cries with emerald eyes as Adam calls him son of a whore, scion of Samael, no son of mine.  Seth has eyes like garnets, afire, and collier hair.  So I passed on my demon stain to the Seth line, I who had fallen, Adam who had fallen, my eyes, his skin and hair.  And then Samael dresses in oriental garb of black silk and silver shadow and does a fire dance to hold back the Beast, Adam’s madness siphons off into sapphire tears that form rivers in Hell, he says Eve, Eve, Eisheth, Eisheth, come back to me, and Lilith says pay reverence to your first husband, this First Man, for he is forgotten, and unlike you, he was not saved, charged with guarding that first Torah of the Sefer Raziel the Archangel of Secrets pressed to Adam’s bosom upon pain of Uriel’s fiery sword, and Adam’s only magical match is Samael, master of enchanters.  I dance with bells, Adam dances with doeskin drums, and in the quiet hours we rage and gnash teeth and sob and wonder, how did first love turn so bitter?  What is left after first love when your postcards are burned that you sent your lover from Paris and the Gates of Eden are shut tight on nightmares of toil, woman’s pains, working unforgiving earth for all the eons and labor.  I say death, and abandonment, and the sun rising in the forbidden East and setting in the rotting orchard of the West.  I say you can grow again, grafted from the Tree of Death to the Tree of Life, and that no one, nothing, is beyond Jonah’s whale song of salvation.

In time, the Tree bears new fruit, and Adamah, hard as earth, softens.

 

Where It All Went Wrong

Michael often wonders where the house of cards fell under a butterfly wing flap, what joint of the celestial body was the weak link.  Was it Lucifer’s desire to suck the marrow out of the bones of the abyss?  Was it Asmodeus’ lust for the daughters of men?  Was it Beelzebub’s martial ambitions to rival Michael’s own?  Once, he would say, these brothers of his were as close as the pulse of his heart.  But Lucifer became Samael, and fire turned to ash, and he is left with a third of his sisters and brothers damned for all time on blood money, as the song goes, only they were the prototypes of Judas, selling the ineffable name of God out to the humans in the form of a shiny poison apple.

Evil roots.  Evil is a lindworm gnawing at the tap root of the Sephiroth.  And then there is death of Da’ath, and then there is the Qliphoth, and then there is the madness of the prophets bridging the Tree of Life and Tree of Death.  So evil roots into the hearts of man, Samael’s seed blossoming in witchfire, and the questions of what Hayah Havah means is echoed in the barracks of a million mortal armies.  Why do we bleed out for dictators and crackpots, dying on the streets of gang warfare and drug wars and turf wars and falling like flies to school shooters?  Lucifer turned the entirety of the universe into a battlefield, and not even the babes are safe from the evil that he planted, that dry grape vine of the vintage most vengeful.  Sometimes, the plants of filth and zuhama climb up the Sephiroth and root in Michael’s rose garden in Machon.  He takes his flaming sword and swiftly cuts down the defiant black blooms.  Rotting alive, thirsting after Heaven even after the rebellion.  Samael likes to remind Michael that he is watching.  All he really would have to do would be to call, send a messenger, but Samael likes to be flagrant in disregard for protocol, sauntering to the Gates of Heaven, which he cannot enter (or can he?) and throw paper planes with profanities over Saint Peter, enchanted to reach Michael as he is trying to relax.  Sam was always annoying like that.

Where did they go wrong?  Their bridge failed miserably.  She died in the first war, of cherubim swiftest wing, Herald of Hell, Watchman of God, Heaven’s original covert mission and spy with sympathies towards Hell.  Jophiel to Michael, or Zophael as she preferred to call herself, was always flighty, and without Samael to keep her in check, she grew wild, mad with grief, for to lose the one who gave her wings (Michael gave her her breath and heart, well, her first one at least.  Samael would claim even that in time) made Jophiel erratic.  She saved Michael’s life, yes, but at what cost?  Dissension between the twins.  A bridge burned.  She was created out of beauty, yes, but she brought pain to the garden, and she was the first of martyrs, Lucifer be damned.

Now the bridge is broken, and Taninver rides the Shekinah, and this world is not right.  This world is broken and cruel, and she is gone, out of reach, so in love with the idea of martyrdom she has made herself a sacrificial soul.  Michael has offered her Assumption twice now but she chose Samael, she always chooses him, over salvation, for she says, if her brothers and sisters who art in Hell, who Zo grew to close to when faking allegiance to the Prince of Darkness, only to blaze onto the battlefield in the glory of betrayal as Michael’s standard bearer, this guilt Zo feels at double-timing, at being an angel in hell, at leaving that third behind to rot, it makes her mad and bad and dangerous to know.  She thinks the mem can be cleansed, when really, nothing can separate wheat from chaff but the fiery lake, and that is where he belongs, at least, Michael thinks.  Otherwise he would not have asked her to abandon Earth on Easter and Good Friday for Heaven and endless Paradise.  Your penance is done, this self-imposed exile of the Watchtower Girl, he was trying to say, but it came out  in parables and scraps of starlight, and Michael grows weary of trying to save her, of trying to convince her Samael is not worth saving, so instead he just makes love to her and heals her wounds the best he can, the wounds his brother inflicts, that first spear through the heart and that last rape of the soul, all but for knowledge, all but for Samael to declare his own Hayah Havah, on Chavah no less, when he is but Yah the snake.  Snakes are slippery things, egotistical at that, but Zo is a dragon and general mother of Heaven’s battlefield, and she has not forgotten her loyalties.

Her very core belongs to Michael, and for Samael to give her his heart, means his damned brother is also under God’s love and sway.  The cardiophore chooses who is redeemed in the end, anyway, if Sa’el is left standing or if the pale rider turns into oblivion.

All hell would follow after him, were she to figure out this puzzle.

Michael does not have faith he deserves redemption.

Michael does not think she can.

Michael is weary, and Michael

no longer

believes.

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