Page 268: What you humans commonly call a demon

"Noncanonical" is a great word that I didn't really know until a few years ago.

It first popped up for me in conjunction with the "gnostic gospel" mini-craze of a few years ago. The idea of gospels that had been expurgated from the bible was a difficult one to get my head around. Even in a religious context, there is a real tension between the concept of the "word of God" and the humans that have translated, edited, and canonized "the word" over the past couple of thousand years. Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett poke fun at the controversy at the end of Good Omens. In Good Omens, the Metatron (the angelic voice of God) claims to speak the word of God but, because God's word is ineffable, even the Metatron himself can't be entirely sure he has it right. If the Metatron has that problem, think about being one of King James' translators!

Outside of the context of a religion, the issue is even more explosive. To a skeptic, does the existence of noncanonical sources undermine or even contradict the basic teachings of established religion itself? It's like a bigger, uglier version of the Climategate emails.

It was that exact flashpoint of controversy that Dan Brown touched upon with The Da Vinci Code. While ancient symbols are fun, the parts of the book that really make you tingle are the ones that suggest the western world may have misread its own history. The book Holy Blood, Holy Grail from which Brown got the idea for Da Vinci essentially suggests that our understanding of the gospel stories is based on a translational error and a two thousand year cover-up of convenience by male, very human, and effable religious leaders who wanted to write Mary Magdalene out of the Bible for their own reasons.

Luckily, Old Blood doesn't wade into those waters. However, angels and demons do come up. Angels and demons are all over writings from virtually every culture in the ancient world. And while they are given only bit parts in the modern Bible (usually as messengers), to people 2,000 to 3,000 years ago, they were much more important. In the Books of Enoch or the Book of Jubilees they have a starring role. They are also all over other parts of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

The gnostic gospels are relative newbies compared to the ancient, noncanonical Jewish books mentioned above. So many ancient fragments of the Book of Jubilees exist even today that it is clear that it was a very important text in the millennium before the Christian era began. Likewise, the Book of Enoch is effectively quoted throughout the early books of the Bible -- usually stripped of its angel and/or demonology. In Joseph Lumpkin's analysis of the Books of Enoch, he lays the texts of Enoch up against our Genesis. The results are astounding -- it's as if someone just went through and erased most of the bits where the angels were the focus. They'd been edited out. Other elements of the Dead Sea Scrolls mix angels together with humans quite liberally as well. Having avoided the canonical cut, we get to see their role more clearly in the old texts.

To the ancients, angels and demons were everyday companions. While the modern canon has written them largely out of the story, the old texts reveal that they were in there originally. That may explain why they continue to exist so prevalently in our language. Once you start listening for the number of times angels are invoked, mentioned, or imagined you won't believe how often they come up. Billy is an "angel" while little Tommy is a "little devil". Angels and devils dance on your shoulders when you make a decision. Our "better angels" guide our hands while our "inner demons" drag us down. It's pervasive. Once you start listening, you feel like the kid who could see dead people: angels and demons are everywhere.

While the editors of the canon wanted to leave them on the cutting room floor, our vestigial memories (as reflected by our language and literature) keep the angels and demons in a starring role. The real question is why? Why are angels and demons so important to us? Of course, ahem, our modern reasoning tells us that it is their power as metaphors. But what if there's another, noncanonical, reason?