Ancestors And Angels Quotes

Angels had fallen, men have sinned. It does not mean that God has failed.

Would you like more sauce, sweeting?” His fingers strangled the stem of his wineglass. She could practically hear the grapes calling for help. She hoped that was a good sign. “If you don’t cease that nonsense,” he said, “you will regret it.” “Is that so, my heart?” “What about ‘precious’?” she suggested. “No.” “‘Angel’?” “God, no.” “‘Muffin’?” In response to that, he hit the shuttlecock so hard, it sailed all the way to the back wall and thwacked one of his ancestors right in the powdered wig. She cheered. “Well done, my precious angel muffin.” “This stops,” he said. “Now.

No gravity, no fallen angels.

Man allowed by God to do good and evil. That's why some of angels feel so jealous.

When shit happened in heaven, some angels crashed on to earth.

Answers are closed rooms; and questions are open doors that invite us in.

A dread filled me, a dread unlike any I had ever felt. Not the terror of God, or his angels, but the sickly fear of man.

The faith itself was simple; he believed in the dignity of man. His ancestors were Huguenots, refugees of a chained and bloody Europe. He had learned their stories in the cradle. He had grown up believing in America and the individual and it was a stronger faith than his faith in God. This was the land where no man had to bow. In this place at last a man could stand up free of the past, free of tradition and blood ties and the curse of royalty and become what he wished to become. This was the first place on earth where the man mattered more than the state. True freedom had begun here and it would spread eventually over all the earth. But it had begun HERE. The fact of slavery upon this incredibly beautiful new clean earth was appalling, but more even than that was the horror of old Europe, the curse of nobility, which the South was transplanting to new soil. They were forming a new aristocracy, a new breed of glittering men, and Chamberlain had come to crush it. But he was fighting for the dignity of man and i that way he was fighting for himself. If men were equal in America, all the former Poles and English and Czechs and blacks, then they were equal everywhere, and there was really no such thing as foreigner; there were only free men and slaves. And so it was not even patriotism but a new faith. The Frenchman may fight for France, but the American fights for mankind, for freedom; for the people, not the land.

Ty, I’ve thought so many times about what I would say to you if you reappeared suddenly. If I was walking along the street and you popped out of thin air, walking along beside me like you always used to, with your hands in your pockets and your head tilted back. Mom used to say you walked celestially, looking upat the sky as if you were scanning the clouds for angels. Do you remember that? In your world I am ashes, I am ancestors, my memories and hopes and dreams have gone to build the City of Bones. In your world, I am lucky, because I do not have to live in a world without you. But in this world, I am you. I am the twinless twin. So I can tell you this: When your twin leaves the earth you live on, it never turns the same way again: the weight of their soul is gone, and everything is off balance. The world rocks under your feet like an unquiet sea. I can’t tell you it gets easier. But it does get steadier; you learn how to live with the new rocking of the new earth, the way sailors gain sea legs. You learn. I promise. I know you’re not exactly the Ty I had in this world, my brilliant, beautiful brother. But I know from Julian that you are beautiful and brilliant too. I know that you are loved. I hope that you are happy. Please be happy. You deserve it so much. I want to ask if you remember the way we used to whisper words to each other in the dark: star, twin, glass. But I’ll never know your answer. So I’ll whisper to myself as I fold this letter up and slide it into the envelope, hoping against hope it will somehow reach you. I whisper your name, Ty. I whisper the most important thing: I love you. I love you. I love you. Livvy

Steven Pinker sums up the argument well: “We are organisms, not angels, and our minds are organs, not pipelines to the truth. Our minds evolved by natural selection to solve problems that were life-and-death matters to our ancestors, not to commune with correctness.”36

The faith itself was simple: he believed in the dignity of man. His ancestors were Huguenots, refugees of a chained and bloody Europe. He had learned their stories in the cradle. He had grown up believing in America and the individual and it was a stronger faith than his faith in God. This was the land where no man had to bow. In this place at last a man could stand up free of the past, free of tradition and blood ties and the curse of royalty and become what he wished to become. This was the first place on earth where the man mattered more than the state. True freedom had begun here and it would spread eventually over all the earth. But it had begun here. The fact of slavery upon this incredibly beautiful new clean earth was appalling, but more even than that was the horror of old Europe, the curse of nobility, which the South was transplanting to new soil. They were forming a new aristocracy, a new breed of glittering men, and Chamberlain had come to crush it.

Men were primitive in the eyes of angel beings as men are primitive in the eyes of wilier races.

Messengers often come when you struggle with a decision, need support or are trying to find your balance. They can come as animals like coyote and lizard appeared for Kate and for me. They can be spirit guides, angels, family members, ancestors and friends. A messenger can even be me! Many of them you will not notice because you are too preoccupied to see them. There may come a time, however, when you might sense the millions of angels too small to be witnessed, like fairies that live in the curve of a leaf or who sleep under the tiniest rose petal.

Finally, only thirty or forty million years before, our earliest ancestors had crawled out of the primeval slime; and then, no doubt, finding the change unpleasant, crawled back in again.

Cut the ties you have to failure and shame. Let go the pain you are holding in your mind, your shoulders, your heart, all the way to your feet. Let go the pain of your ancestors to make way for those who are heading in our direction. Ask for forgiveness. Call upon the help of those who love you. These helpers take many forms: animal, element, bird, angel, saint, stone, or ancestor.

In that regard we are different from our ancestors of a few centuries ago, who approved, carried out, and even savored the infliction of unspeakable agony on other living beings. What were these people feeling? And why don’t we feel it today?

The worst punishment for immortal beings is immortality revocation thus fall into lower life.

Never venture near the toxic family war zone without your security detail of angels, spirit guides, and ancestors by your side.

If you need some change and some clarity, go to your altar.

God created many races wilier than men. But it doesn't mean angels higher than us.

Can’t you?” The cold voice slithered through the intercom. “You are Starborn, and have the Horn bound to your body and power. Your ancestors wielded the Horn and another Fae object that allowed them to enter this world. Stolen, of course, from their original masters—our people. Our people, who built fearsome warriors in that world to be their army. All of them prototypes for the angels in this one. And all of them traitors to their creators, joining the Fae to overthrow my brothers and sisters a thousand years before we arrived on Midgard. They slew my siblings.

The secular are at this moment in history a great deal more optimistic than the religious – something of an irony, given the frequency with which the latter have been derided by the former for their apparent naivety and credulousness. It is the secular whose longing for perfection has grown so intense as to lead them to imagine that paradise might be realized on this earth after just a few more years of financial growth and medical research. With no evident awareness of the contradiction they may, in the same breath, gruffly dismiss a belief in angels while sincerely trusting that the combined powers of the IMF, the medical research establishment, Silicon Valley and democratic politics could together cure the ills of mankind.... It is telling that the secular world is not well versed in the art of gratitude: we no longer offer up thanks for harvests, meals, bees or clement weather. On a superficial level, we might suppose that this is because there is no one to say ‘Thank you’ to. But at base it seems more a matter of ambition and expectation. Many of those blessings for which our pious and pessimistic ancestors offered thanks, we now pride ourselves on having worked hard enough to take for granted.

The noun fylgja, formed from the verb "to follow, to accompany" (fylgja), referred in some ways to an individual's double, comparable to the Egyptian Ka and the Greek eidolon. It was a kind of guardian angel that took the form of a female entity (fylgjukona) or an animal that protected the family or person it had adopted.

Some biblical scholars believe that the story of the fall from the Garden of Eden was a cultural memory of the transition from foraging to agriculture: “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread.” 79 So why did our foraging ancestors leave Eden? For many, it was never an explicit choice: they had multiplied themselves into a Malthusian trap in which the fat of the land could no longer support them, and they had to grow their food themselves. The states emerged only later, and the foragers who lived at their frontiers could either be absorbed into them or hold out in their old way of life. For those who had the choice, Eden may have been just too dangerous. A few cavities, the odd abscess, and a couple of inches in height were a small price to pay for a fivefold better chance of not getting speared

We are organisms, not angels, and our minds are organs, not pipelines to the truth. Our minds evolved by natural selection to solve problems that were life and death matters to our ancestors, not to commune with correctness and answer any question we are capable of asking. We cannot hold ten thousand words in short-term memory. We cannot see in ultraviolet light. And perhaps we cannot solve conundrums like free will and sentience.

Early naturalists talked often about “deep time”—the perception they had, contemplating the grandeur of this valley or that rock basin, of the profound slowness of nature. But the perspective changes when history accelerates. What lies in store for us is more like what aboriginal Australians, talking with Victorian anthropologists, called “dreamtime,” or “everywhen”: the semi-mythical experience of encountering, in the present moment, an out-of-time past, when ancestors, heroes, and demigods crowded an epic stage. You can find it already by watching footage of an iceberg collapsing into the sea—a feeling of history happening all at once. It is. The summer of 2017, in the Northern Hemisphere, brought unprecedented extreme weather: three major hurricanes arising in quick succession in the Atlantic; the epic “500,000-year” rainfall of Hurricane Harvey, dropping on Houston a million gallons of water for nearly every single person in the entire state of Texas; the wildfires of California, nine thousand of them burning through more than a million acres, and those in icy Greenland, ten times bigger than those in 2014; the floods of South Asia, clearing 45 million from their homes. Then the record-breaking summer of 2018 made 2017 seem positively idyllic. It brought an unheard-of global heat wave, with temperatures hitting 108 in Los Angeles, 122 in Pakistan, and 124 in Algeria. In the world’s oceans, six hurricanes and tropical storms appeared on the radars at once, including one, Typhoon Mangkhut, that hit the Philippines and then Hong Kong, killing nearly a hundred and wreaking a billion dollars in damages, and another, Hurricane Florence, which more than doubled the average annual rainfall in North Carolina, killing more than fifty and inflicting $17 billion worth of damage. There were wildfires in Sweden, all the way in the Arctic Circle, and across so much of the American West that half the continent was fighting through smoke, those fires ultimately burning close to 1.5 million acres. Parts of Yosemite National Park were closed, as were parts of Glacier National Park in Montana, where temperatures also topped 100. In 1850, the area had 150 glaciers; today, all but 26 are melted.

What do you do when your greatest accomplishments lead you straight down the path of an even greater fear? Instead of summoning his faith and standing firm to see the deliverance of his God, Elijah retreats. And in his escape from his geographical surroundings, he begins to back down from the boldness that has characterized his whole ministry up to this point. When he came to Beersheba in Judah, he left his servant there, while he himself went a day’s journey into the wilderness. He came to a broom bush, sat down under it and prayed that he might die. “I have had enough, LORD,” he said. “Take my life; I am no better than my ancestors.” Then he lay down under the bush and fell asleep. (1 Kings 19:3–5) Now I’m confused. Verse 3 says he was running for his life. Yet verse 4 says he asked God to kill him. Which one is it? Are you looking for life support, Elijah? Or shall God send the angels of euthanasia? One of these things is not like the other. The more I studied this text, though, and considered the context of Elijah’s despair and compared it to similar feelings I’ve experienced under much less duress, the more I got it. Although the text says Elijah ran for his life—and I’m sure that’s how it appeared—it seems like something deeper is going on. In fact, I’m not sure Elijah was running for his life at all, at least not in the sense we would use that phrase. I believe Elijah was actually running from his life. You see, it had been a long, lonely three years for Elijah. Did he survive the drought? Undoubtedly. And through him God won the battle with a unanimous decision. But winning can be as exhausting as losing. Sometimes the pressure of success can drain you at an even deeper level than the frustration of failure. Elijah knows Queen Jezebel doesn’t have the power to call on her gods and end his life. If she had, he’d have been buried beside his bull back on the mountain. So it’s safe to assume that his greatest fear at this point isn’t dying. His greatest fear is living—and having to fight yet another agonizing battle. Jezebel’s threat is ultimately impotent, yes. But that doesn’t make it ineffective. Because fear often finds its power, not in our actual situation, but in what we tell ourselves about our situation.

We inherit the spirit world from a time when our ancestors huddled in dark shelters at night and let their imaginations draw up creatures more or less like ourselves although lacking corporeal substance. But why should we care about angels when the season's first blackbirds spread their red-shouldered wings? Why should we seek treasures in Heaven when year after year the fiddlehead ferns unfurl their silver croziers along the brook? Why should we look for out-of-body experiences when it is our bodies that connect us through the five open windows of our senses to the sights, sounds, tastes, smells, and tactile sensations of nature?

As one becomes aware of the decline of violence, the world begins to look different. The past seems less innocent; the present less sinister. One starts to appreciate the small gifts of coexistence that would have seemed utopian to our ancestors: the interracial family playing in the park, the comedian who lands a zinger on the commander in chief, the countries that quietly back away from a crisis instead of escalating to war. The shift is not toward complacency: we enjoy the peace we find today because people in past generations were appalled by the violence in their time and worked to reduce it, and so we should work to reduce the violence that remains in our time. Indeed, it is a recognition of the decline of violence that best affirms that such efforts are worthwhile. Man’s inhumanity to man has long been a subject for moralization. With the knowledge that something has driven it down, we can also treat it as a matter of cause and effect. Instead of asking, “Why is there war?” we might ask, “Why is there peace?” We can obsess not just over what we have been doing wrong but also over what we have been doing right. Because we have been doing something right, and it would be good to know what, exactly, it is.

If the past is a foreign country, it is a shockingly violent one. It is easy to forget how dangerous life used to be, how deeply brutality was once woven into the fabric of daily existence. Cultural memory pacifies the past, leaving us with pale souvenirs whose bloody origins have been bleached away. A woman donning a cross seldom reflects that this instrument of torture was a common punishment in the ancient world; nor does a person who speaks of a whipping boy ponder the old practice of flogging an innocent child in place of a misbehaving prince. We are surrounded by signs of the depravity of our ancestors’ way of life, but we are barely aware of them. Just as travel broadens the mind, a literal-minded tour of our cultural heritage can awaken us to how differently they did things in the past. In a century that began with 9/11, Iraq, and Darfur, the claim that we are living in an unusually peaceful time may strike you as somewhere between hallucinatory and obscene. I know from conversations and survey data that most people refuse to believe it.1 In succeeding chapters I will make the case with dates and data. But first I want to soften you up by reminding you of incriminating facts about the past that you have known all along. This is not just an exercise in persuasion. Scientists often probe their conclusions with a sanity check, a sampling of real-world phenomena to reassure themselves they haven’t overlooked some flaw in their methods and wandered into a preposterous conclusion. The vignettes in this chapter are a sanity check on the data to come.

Employment Prayer II by Sonya I. Perkins As I embark on new areas in my life, I ask for the blessings and guidance of God, my ancestors, my spirit guides, and guardian angels. I ask for their blessings to guide me through this difficult period in my life. May I walk through this time with my head held high and with faith in myself and in spirit, and may I survive hard times as my ancestors survived hard times. I ask in the name of God for assistance in my search for suitable and gainful employment. I ask that my ancestors hear my pleas and put the right devices into my path, such as advertisements and people like recruiters, and that word of mouth reach my ears if the work is right for me. I ask that whatever opportunities are looking to find someone, let that opportunity find me, for I will be grateful for the blessing that opportunity will bequeath me. I ask that opportunity search and find me, as I have searched and searched for employment. They say opportunity knocks, but only one time. My eyes are open to see opportunity; my ears await the sound of opportunity knocking. I am ready to receive opportunity. I have patience, and I will continue to search for the job/career that is right for only me. I seek employment not just for a paycheck but also to be a productive, contributing member of my community. I ask for a suitable job, so that I may take care of my loved ones and myself. I ask for work to come to my hands so that I may feel and be useful. I ask that the people I work with be decent, friendly, hard working, and easy to get along with. I ask that I be compensated accordingly for the work that I provide. I ask that the job I secure will be something that I can look forward to doing on a daily basis. In the name of the divine providence, may my roads be opened and clear for me to find the right job. In the name of my spirit guides, I pray that the door of opportunity be opened to me as I try to become a more productive being. In the name of my guardian angel, I ask that you assist me during the hard times and help me to make it through until suitable employment is held securely in my hands. In the name of the most high and all that is light, I ask for these blessings for myself and for all those in search of employment for the betterment of all. So it was spoken, so it shall be.  Àṣe o!

We are NOT being punished for something some dude did in a Garden thousands of years ago!!!  We are NOT being punished because some angels tried a coup d'etat on some bearded male god!  We are NOT being punished, as some of the new age psychics and channeled entities claim, as the result of our ancestors becoming trapped in the lower vibrational frequencies because they liked sex too much, or procreated with animals.

His ancestors had formed a small but deadly army to defend themselves. The army became famous across the land as protectors—skilled executioners who wandered the countryside slaughtering any of the enemy they could find. They were renowned not only for their brutal killings, but also for celebrating their slayings by plunging themselves into drug-induced stupors. Their drug of choice was a potent intoxicant they called hashish. As their notoriety spread, these lethal men became known by a single word—Hassassin—literally “the followers of hashish.” The name Hassassin became synonymous with death in almost every language on earth.

Never venture near the toxic family war zone without your security detail of angels, spirit guides and ancestors by your side.

Steven Pinker sums up the argument well: “We are organisms, not angels, and our minds are organs, not pipelines to the truth. Our minds evolved by natural selection to solve problems that were life-and-death matters to our ancestors, not to commune with correctness.

But the word “wondered” in the verse is the word “deologistico,” which means to use logic, to reason with intensity. It means that Mary was trying to figure out how it could all be true. This might strike us as odd. Today we like to say that we are rational and scientific people—we ask hard questions, use logic, and demand empirical evidence—and therefore it is impossible for us to believe in the appearance of an angel. The implication is that ancient people were superstitious and had no problem believing in the supernatural. We assume that if an angel showed up, people of that time simply said, “Oh, it’s an angel. Hello. What’s the message, please?” It’s an arrogant and paternalistic view of our ancestors, not to mention a willful misreading of the text. We see here Mary struggling to understand and believe what she was hearing.

I slept under an open window And all my dreams escaped They boarded a shooting star In the sky travelling across the universe To some unknown place so far away, Where stardust and dreams are made of gold Where our ancestors live In the land of angels and dreams A place where all the souls go to live

Maddy could tell that Jacks’s speech was more than just words. Something had happened to Jackson. He had become a real leader. He was no longer just the perfectly gorgeous visage on the cover of magazines and billboards, the most exemplary face of the glamorous Angels. He had become an actual leader. A figure of authority, power, and knowledge that the Angels could turn to. Whom they could follow. Whom they would follow, even if it meant their own deaths. To Maddy it seemed as if entire lifetimes had passed. The boy who had picked her up in his Ferrari, who was a little vain and foolishly angry that he couldn’t make her forgive him by simply smiling at her, had now become something different. Something more. Maddy realized that the things she had loved best about Jackson had come to bloom fully. He had become a true Guardian of the Godspeed class, just as his ancestors had been, and their ancestors before them, all the way back to before the recorded time of the Book of Angels.

Melchizedek gestured to the weapons and said, “They are angelic weapons used by your ancestors. This is the Bow of Enoch and the whip sword of Lamech. They were both mighty giant slayers in their day.” Abram said, “How did you come by them?” Melchizedek looked familiar to him, but he still could not place him. “That is not important,” said the mysterious king. “All you need know is that they are yours for safekeeping, to pass down through your seedline. The bow is made of heavenly metal and strung with indestructible Cherubim hair. The sword is also heavenly metal that is both flexible like a whip and durable as the strongest sword. Your ancestor Lamech called it ‘Rahab’ after the sea dragon, because of its destructive capability.

May it be your Will L-rd our G-d and G-d of our ancestors, Father of mercy and forgiveness, He who shows mercy to all the worlds, may You show mercy to Your people and upon the souls and spirits of the wicked who are being judged in Gehinnom (Hell), and upon those who have been reincarnated into inanimate objects, vegetation, animals or humans and [especially] upon all the souls and spirits of the naked earthbound who are forced to roam from place to place, and who are pushed around from one suffering to another by the hands of their tormentor angels who throw them around like from the sling of a slingshot.

Who are you?” asked Enoch. The larger, stronger angel spoke first, “We are Gabriel and Uriel, the archangels from the throne of Elohim.” “Elohim?” Enoch had heard of the name. His tribe descended from the line of Seth that had worshipped this god as the creator of all things. But when the dispersion had occurred and his ancestors had settled in the city, they were visited by the gods of Shinar, and this Elohim faded into obscurity. An abstract blurred memory of a distant unseen deity seemed impotent in the real presence of the pantheon with its Four High Gods, Anu, Enlil, Enki, and Ninhursag, and their mighty signs and wonders. “Everything you worship is a lie,” said Gabriel.

You and a select few of your ancestors, including your mother, are special protectors of your realm, here on earth. You are here to keep balance between what is right and wrong, good and evil. You and you alone are the Keeper of a deadly sword, known as the Ferryman. You must learn to wield the Ferryman and protect your world from destruction.

Prince Yosef glanced at the bright anomaly and also wondered if it would ever cease existing or if it were to be a permanent addition to the night sky. “But then, what is permanent? The stars that men gaze on, are they really there? The atmosphere of the earth, has it always been oxygen? Could it not have been another substance? The animals on the earth, were they always as they were or were there different types?” Yosef pondered. “How often have oceans risen and fallen? “The mysterious light that has been present since Miriam’s conception, does it descend from a star that is real or from a star that had perished eons ago? Do our words somehow remain, captured in the atmosphere, waiting to return to someone’s ears. The internal energy of man—his soul—when it perishes, as it must, will the man whom it embraced be forgotten? “Ideologies, how often do they change? Every generation? Every hundred years? Every thousand years? Mohse wrote the books of constant law! Ezra sealed them, making them unchangeable! But then the Greeks came. They invaded the world with different ideas. Different ways of discerning truth! Cyrus came before them with his Zoroastrianism, challenging the established Marduk! Can Yehuway’s truth reside alongside Greeks and Babylonian philosophers? No. For man is a thing inside Yehuway, and without Yehuway, what can be? Can Yehuway perish leaving us behind?” Yosef shook his head. “No! Yehuway’s essence cannot perish! Nothing exists without Yehuway! The Greeks’ intellect, how cunning is its invasion into the concrete reality of Mohse! Hellenistic thoughts have penetrated and conquered the P’rushim’ and Tz’dukim’ intellect. Immortality of the soul! No resurrection! No angels. Heaven’s reward and hell’s damnation according to one’s earthly deeds! All invasive Greek ideologies that are steadfastly adhering and corrupting the Mosaic truths. The Greeks’ intellect is an infectious intellect, founded on nothing but myth and fantasy. “It is man’s spirit that transcends itself to wait in a holding place in Yehuway’s memory. The Greeks declared a heaven and a hell. A tormenting residence and a rewarding residence. Such invasive thoughts are hideous to me. Paganism at its supreme level! The soul perishes. All thoughts become nonexistent! The body is consumed by the earth’s processes. A well versed man in the laws of Yehuway could not accept anything else! I will teach my son to be aware of false tautologies. “It is the personality of the individual that is remembered by Yehuway and it is that exact personality that is brought back to life. It will come back in a different body. In a different tone of voice. But the mannerisms will be the same. The intellect identical. “Yet, what man can return if the Mashi’ach fails in his mission to ransom man’s sins? What man may dwell alongside his past, risen ancestors if the Mashi’ach fails? What man can be if the Mashi’ach fails? What future can there be? Before Adam was created there was void! What is void? It is nothingness. It is total darkness! Total nonexistence. No thoughts. No light. No stars. No motions of the wind or of the seas.

People here are trying to use angels like they once used their ancestral spirits. They are still trying to accumulate and direct mana like their ancestors did. There is almost no reference in this to Christ at all. Christianity is not about wielding power. It’s not about personal charisma. It’s not about mana. It is about meekness. Jesus gave up his power in order to die, weak and helpless, on the cross.

According to J. Naveh, the Semitic alphabets originated with Proto-Canaanite (eighteenth to seventeenth centuries BCE), from which there was derived around 1300 BCE the Proto-Arabic script, the ancestor of the systems used in the South Arabian and Ethiopic scripts.

Hebrew ... belongs to the Canaanite group of languages ... this means that when the Israelite tribes settled in Canaan they adopted the language of that country, at least for their written documents. Ancient traditions ... allude to Aramean ancestors (see Dt 26:5).

You are unlimited in this regard when you observe what you believe, when you release those beliefs that limit you, and fully step into your power as the creator of your reality. You have control with your beliefs, your thoughts, and your emotions to manifest, to create your outer world around you, not through pain or struggle but through inner peace. Your outer world, too, will begin to shift and lift into alignment, into love and full connection with the spiritual realm when you make these inner shifts. Indeed, you are here on earth to transcend all limiting beliefs from your ancestors, your family, yourself, and your society, releasing all limitations, and embracing positivity, well-being, harmony, and love. When these are the emotions behind your core beliefs, that fill you, then manifesting what you desire in the physical—peace, love, abundance, and happiness—your process becomes effortless.

Grace had always found the old priest's inflexibility towards the spirit world baffling. He accepted angels and the Holy Spirit but rejected outright ancestors and any other spirits as pagan superstitions. This seemed illogical to her; either you believed in spirits or you didn't.

In The Better Angels of Our Nature, Pinker calculates the average homicide rate among eight primitive societies, arriving at an alarming 14 per cent. This figure appeared in respected journals like Science and was endlessly regurgitated by newspapers and on TV. When other scientists took a look at his source material, however, they discovered that Pinker mixed up some things. This may get a little technical, but we need to understand where he went wrong. The question we want to answer is: which peoples still hunting and gathering today are representative of how humans lived 50,000 years ago? After all, we were nomads for 95 per cent of human history, roving the world in small, relatively egalitarian groups. Pinker chose to focus almost exclusively on hybrid cultures. These are people who hunt and gather, but who also ride horses or live together in settlements or engage in farming on the side. Now these activities are all relatively recent. Humans didn’t start farming until 10,000 years ago and horses weren’t domesticated until 5,000 years ago. If you want to figure out how our distant ancestors lived 50,000 years ago, it doesn’t make sense to extrapolate from people who keep horses and tend vegetable plots. But even if we get on board with Pinker’s methods, the data is problematic. According to the psychologist, 30 per cent of deaths among the Aché in Paraguay (tribe 1 on his list) and 21 per cent of deaths among the Hiwi in Venezuela and Colombia (tribe 3) are attributable to warfare. These people are out for blood, it would seem. The anthropologist Douglas Fry was sceptical, however. Reviewing the original sources, he discovered that all forty-six cases of what Pinker categorised as Aché ‘war mortality’ actually concerned a tribe member listed as ‘shot by Paraguayan’. The Aché were in fact not killing each other, but being ‘relentlessly pursued by slave traders and attacked by Paraguayan frontiersmen’, reads the original source, whereas they themselves ‘desire a peaceful relationship with their more powerful neighbors’. It was the same with the Hiwi. All the men, women and children enumerated by Pinker as war deaths were murdered in 1968 by local cattle ranchers.40 There go the iron-clad homicide rates. Far from habitually slaughtering one another, these nomadic foragers were the victims of ‘civilised’ farmers wielding advanced weaponry. ‘Bar charts and numeric tables depicting percentages […] convey an air of scientific objectivity,’ Fry writes. ‘But in this case it is all an illusion.

In my life and work, I’ve seen the darkest parts of the human soul. (At least I hope they are the darkest.) That has helped me see more clearly the brightness of the human spirit. Feeling the sting of violence myself has helped me feel more keenly the hand of human kindness. Given the frenzy and the power of the various violence industries, the fact that most Americans live without being violent is a sign of something wonderful in us. In resisting both the darker sides of our species and the darker sides of our heritage, it is everyday Americans, not the icons of big-screen vengeance, who are the real heroes. Abraham Lincoln referred to the “Better angels of our nature,” and they must surely exist, for most of us make it through every day with decency and cooperation. Having spent years preparing for the worst, I have finally arrived at this wisdom: Though the world is a dangerous place, it is also a safe place. You and I have survived some extraordinary risks, particularly given that every day we move in, around, and through powerful machines that could kill us without missing a cylinder: jet airplanes, subways, busses, escalators, elevators, motorcycles, cars—conveyances that carry a few of us to injury but most of us to the destinations we have in mind. We are surrounded by toxic chemicals, and our homes are hooked up to explosive gasses and lethal currents of electricity. Most frightening of all, we live among armed and often angry countrymen. Taken together, these things make every day a high-stakes obstacle course our ancestors would shudder at, but the fact is we are usually delivered through it. Still, rather than be amazed at the wonder of it all, millions of people are actually looking for things to worry about. Near the end of his life, Mark Twain wisely said, “I have had a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.

indigenismo can subvert the colonized mentality found among mestizo peoples that elevates the European and denigrates the Indian. For Chicano/a youth, discovering they have roots in indigenous, often advanced, pre-Columbian cultures can help develop a sense of potential empowerment. "My ancestors invented rubber? Wow!" exclaimed one incredulous Los Angeles gang member to a youth counselor telling him about ancient Mexico and the Olmecas (who didn't exactly invent rubber, since Nature was the inventor, but who surely did develop it). Such discoveries can be a first step toward understanding and respecting the worldview of indigenous peoples.

… there were wise men I knew when I was young, who taught me that the stars are the eyes of the gods and angels which dwell above and that amongst them the spirits of our ancestors live, those who were granted a place in heaven. It is from there that they watch over us. Whether our actions please them or anger them, of course we cannot know. But whatever you do in your life, you should remember that you are not doing so unseen, and therefore you must never do a thing that you are not prepared to defend if you yourself are called to heaven.

Ithan said slowly, “Hel is our enemy.” “Is it?” Aidas laughed, ears twitching. “Who wrote the history?” “The Asteri,” Tharion said darkly. Aidas turned approving eyes on him. “You’ve heard the truth in some form, I take it.” “I know that the official history of this world is not necessarily to be believed.” Aidas leapt off the counter, trotting to the coffee table again. “The Asteri fed their lies to your ancestors. Made the scholars and philosophers write down their version of events under penalty of death. Erased Theia from the record. That library your former employer possesses,” he said, turning to Bryce, “is what remains of the truth. Of the world before the Asteri, and the few brave souls who tried to voice that truth afterward. You knew that, Bryce Quinlan, and protected the books for years—yet you have done nothing with that knowledge.” “What the fuck?” Ithan asked Bryce. Aidas only asked, “What was this world before the Asteri?” Tharion said, “Ancient humans and their gods dwelled here. I’ve heard the ruins of their civilizations are deep beneath the sea.” Aidas inclined his head. “And where did the Asteri come from? Where did the Fae or the shifters or the angels come from?” Bryce cut in, “Enough with the questions. Why not just tell us? What does this have to do with my…gifts?” She seemed to choke on the word. “The war approaches its crescendo. And your power isn’t ready.” Bryce flicked the length of her ponytail over her shoulder. “How fucking cliché. Whatever my powers are, I want nothing to do with them. Not if they somehow link me to you—the Asteri will consider that a serious threat. Rightly so.” “People have died so you could have this power. People have been dying in this battle for fifteen thousand years so we could reach this point. Don’t play the reluctant hero now. That is cliché.

The actual antecedents of contemporary populist politicians like Trump are to be found not in interwar Central European totalitarian states but in state and local politics, particularly urban politics. In Europe, pro-Brexit Boris Johnson was the mayor of London before becoming prime minister, and Italy’s Matteo Salvini was on the city council of Milan from 1993 to 2012. In the United States, the shift from post-1945 democratic pluralism to technocratic neoliberalism was fostered from the 1960s onward by an alliance of the white overclass with African Americans and other racial minority groups. The result was a backlash by white working-class voters, not only against nonwhites who were seen as competitors for jobs and housing, but also against the alien cultural liberalism of white “gentry liberals.” The backlash in the North was particularly intense among “white ethnics”—first-, second-, and third-generation white immigrants like Irish, German, Italian, and Polish Americans, many of them Catholic. The disproportionately working-class white ethnics now found themselves defined as bigots by the same white Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) elites who until recently had imposed quotas on Jews and Catholics in their Ivy League universities, but who were now posing as the virtuous, enlightened champions of civil rights. This toxic mix of black aspiration, white ethnic backlash, and WASP condescension provided a ripe habitat for demagogues, many of them old-school Democrats like Frank Rizzo, mayor of Philadelphia, Sam Yorty, mayor of Los Angeles, and Mario Angelo Procaccino, failed mayoral candidate in New York. These populist big-city mayors or candidates in the second half of the twentieth century combined appeals to working-class grievances and resentments with folksy language and feuds with the metropolitan press, a pattern practiced, in different ways, by later New York City mayors Ed Koch, a Democrat, and Rudy Giuliani, a Republican. In its “Against Trump” issue of January 22, 2016, the editors of National Review mocked the “funky outer-borough accents” shared by Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. Indeed, Trump, a “white ethnic” from Queens with German and Scots ancestors, with his support in the US industrial states where working-class non-British European-Americans are concentrated, is ethnically different from most of his predecessors in the White House, whose ancestors were proportionately far more British American. Traits which seem outlandish in a US president would not have seemed so if Trump had been elected mayor of New York. Donald Trump was not Der Führer. He was Da Mayor of America.

You might entertain the notion that this concept of the Shadow is somewhat antiquated. After all, we live in a much more rational, scientifically oriented culture today. People are more transparent and self-aware than ever, we might say. We are much less repressed than our ancestors, who had to deal with all sorts of pressures from organized religion. The truth, however, might very well be the opposite. In many ways we are more split than ever between our conscious, social selves and our unconscious Shadow. We live in a culture that enforces powerful codes of correctness that we must abide by or face the shaming that is now so common on social media. We are supposed to live up to ideals of selflessness, which are impossible for us because we are not angels. All of this drives the dark side of our personalities even further underground. We can read signs of this in how deeply and secretly we are all drawn to the dark side in our culture. We thrill at watching shows in which various Machiavellian characters manipulate, deceive, and dominate. We lap up stories in the news of those who have been caught acting out in some way and enjoy the ensuing shaming. Serial killers and diabolical cult leaders enthrall us. With these shows and the news we can always become moralistic and talk of how much we despise such villains, but the truth is that the culture constantly feeds us these figures because we are hungry for expressions of the dark side. All of this provides a degree of release from the tension we experience in having to play the angel and seem so correct.

most.

How can anyone call this angel a monster? How can anyone see this angel as a mistake? So young and alive, her soul is less than a day old, her body was made from scratch, but her blood holds billions of years of history… history passed down through her ancestors, history that she herself will soon tell future generations... And yet, new history begins with her.

How can we heal and transform the world without the living presence of its Creator? Monotheism pointed us away from the many gods and goddesses of the ancient world towards a single transcendent God. If the living presence of God is to return to our consciousness it will be not as a step back to the old ways, but as a divine Oneness that embraces all of creation. Mystics have always experienced the oneness of being, the many facets of creation reflecting the single Essence. We are beginning to be aware of the ecological unity of life and its interconnectedness; economically and technologically we are being drawn into an era of global oneness. We now need to understand divine oneness: how the different qualities of the divine form a living presence in the inner and outer worlds, and how these qualities work together as one. On a very simple level we do not have the power or technology to “fix” our ecological crisis on our own. The problems we have created are too severe. And yet here is the very root of our misunderstanding. We cannot do this on our own. We need to embrace the divine not as some transcendent being, but as a living presence that contains the visible and invisible worlds, all of the spirit and angelic beings that our ancestors understood. The oneness of God includes many different levels of existence. We know for our individual self that real healing only takes place when our inner and outer selves are aligned, when we are nourished by our own soul and the archetypal forces within us. What is true for the individual is true for the whole. It is from the energies within and behind creation that the healing of creation will take place, because these are the beings that support, nourish and help creation to develop and evolve. How can we heal creation without the help of the devas and other spiritual forces that are within creation? They are waiting to be asked to participate, for their wisdom and power to be used. We need to once again work together with the divine oneness that is within and around us.

Oh dear sweet baby Jesus, all the angels and saints, the Goddess, Mother Earth, all my ancestors and Dolce and Gabbana, my prayers have been answered! We'll be hosting the nuptials of my son and my darling daughter-in-law on our land. Praise Buddha," she shouted. Again the crowd went nuts. "Boy, she really hit a large cross-section of deities," Dwayne observed. "Can you pry me out of her knockers?" I begged, still unable to see anything except the cavern between her bosoms.

After all, don't care how you want to sit there and deny the knowledge of River Mumma sitting on her rock - don't care how you deny the knowledge of fallen angels who can jump into your body as they please, or the knowledge of ancestors who sit beside your bed and watch when they not harkening on to the sounds of drumming - don't care how you deny any of it, all of it is still true. All of them things still exist, because them do not need the permission of your belief.

Myth provides fuel for the fire of imagination and the use of symbolism. Such is the lore of the first Witch and Satanist. In the Jewish legend of “The Ten Generations”4 Satan, in the form of a serpent, approached Eve and copulated with her. The offspring of this first union was Cain, the ancestor of the rebellious spirits who reject the Hebrew God. Satan is a word for ‘Adversary’ and the proper name of this rebel angel is Samael. Cain’s descent from Samael in this legend is revealed in his seraphic appearance at birth; Eve declared, “I have gotten a man through an angel of the Lord”. In Kabbalah, the myth of Cain as “the son of Satan” indicates that moreover he is Samael’s spiritual son, Eve being illuminated from the Left-Hand Path teachings and guidance of Satan (eating from the Tree of Knowledge, copulating with the serpent).

30“Now when forty years had passed, an angel appeared to him in the wilderness of Mount Sinai, in the flame of a burning bush. 31When Moses saw it, he was amazed at the sight, and as he approached to look, there came the voice of the Lord: 32‘I am the God of your ancestors, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.’ Moses began to tremble and did not dare to look. 33Then the Lord said to him, ‘Take off the sandals from your feet, for the place where you are standing is holy ground. 34I have surely seen the mistreatment of my people who are in Egypt and have heard their groaning, and I have come down to rescue them. Come now, I will send you to Egypt.

48Yet the Most High does not dwell in houses made with human hands;b as the prophet says, 49‘Heaven is my throne, and the earth is my footstool. What kind of house will you build for me, says the Lord, or what is the place of my rest? 50Did not my hand make all these things?’ 51“You stiff-necked people, uncircumcised in heart and ears, you are forever opposing the Holy Spirit, just as your ancestors used to do. 52Which of the prophets did your ancestors not persecute? They killed those who foretold the coming of the Righteous One, and now you have become his betrayers and murderers. 53You are the ones who received the law as ordained by angels, and yet you have not kept it.

The other world appears like a reservoir of souls, in the sense of the daimôn and genius, that are looking to incarnate or that are obliged to do so, and that are expressions of our destiny and supernatural dimension and of the tie that binds each of us to the cosmos and so to the gods and the dead. These “souls” on a quest for a body can be the souls of ancestors as well as the hypostases or auxiliaries of divinities. They play the role of the psychic Double, but also, in the case of the fairies, the anthropomorphized Double, and they are very close, in sum total, to the Christian guardian angel, over whose prehistory there still reigns great obscurity.

The Letter to the Hebrews Hebrews 1 God Has Spoken by His Son 1Long ago God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways by the prophets, 2but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son,a whom he appointed heir of all things, through whom he also created the worlds. 3He is the reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being, and he sustainsb all things by his powerful word. When he had made purification forc sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high, 4having become as much superior to angels as the name he has inherited is more excellent than theirs.

God Has Spoken by His Son 1Long ago God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways by the prophets, 2but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son,a whom he appointed heir of all things, through whom he also created the worlds. 3He is the reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being, and he sustainsb all things by his powerful word. When he had made purification forc sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high, 4having become as much superior to angels as the name he has inherited is more excellent than theirs.