"Very well," I said. "But what you're saying is the names refer to actual entities. Sariel is an entity."
"Yes."
"Zagzagel."
"Yes, an entity. Now let me continue. Let me stick with the schemes. We, as I told you, are God's Messengers, and Most Powerful Angels, and I was fast becoming God's Accuser, as you can see!" "And Satan means accuser," I said. "And all those other dreadful names you don't like are in some way connected with that idea. Accuser."
"Exactly," he replied. "And the early religious writers, knowing only bits and pieces of the truth, thought it was man whom I accused, not God; but there are reasons for this, as you'll soon see. You might say I have become the Great Accuser of everybody." He seemed mildly exasperated, but then his voice resumed, very calm and measured. "But my name is Memnoch," he reminded me, "and there is no angel more powerful or clever than I am and there never was."
"I see," I said, meaning this to be polite. And also because I actually didn't question this statement at all. Why should I?
"The Nine Choirs?" I asked.
"All there," he said. "The Nine Choirs, of course, making up the bene ha elohim. And very well described by Hebrew and Christian scholars, thanks to times of revelation and perhaps disaster, though one would be hard put to determine the nature of each event. The First Triad is made of Three Choirs, the Seraphim, Cherubim, and Thrones or Ophanim, as I prefer to call them. And this First Triad is in general locked to the glory of God. They are in His thrall, thrive in the light which can blind or dazzle others, and almost never get very far from the light at all.
"At times when I am angry and making speeches to all of Heaven, I accuse them ... if you'll pardon the expression again—of being held to God as if by a magnet and not having a free will or personality such as we possess. But they have these things, they do, even the Ophanim, who are in general the least articulate or eloquent—in fact, Ophanim are likely to say nothing for eons—and any of these First Triad can be sent by God to do this and that, and have appeared on Earth, and some of the Seraphim have made rather spectacular appearances to men and women as well. To their credit, they adore God utterly, they experience without reserve the ecstasy of His presence, and He fills them completely so that they do not ask questions of Him and they are more docile, or more truly aware of God, depending on one's point of view.
"The Second Triad has Three Choirs which have been given the names by men of Dominations, Virtues, and Powers. But to tell the truth, there is very little difference between these angels and the First Triad. The Second Triad is a little farther from the Light of God and perhaps as close as it can come, given its endowments, and perhaps it is not so clever when it comes to logic or questions. Who knows? Certainly the Second is more docile altogether; but then there is more coming and going from the Second Triad, from Earth to Heaven, than from the devoted and magnetized and sometimes arrogant Seraphim. You can see how this could lead to much discussion."
"I think I understand it."
"Both triads sing continuously when they are in Heaven, and most of the time when they are on Earth; their songs rise to Heaven spontaneously and continuously; they don't erupt with the deliberate jubilation of my song or the songs of those like me. Nor do they fall silent for long periods as my kind—Archangels—are apt to do.
"When you're dead you'll be able to hear the song of all these triads. It would destroy you now if you did. I've let you hear part of the Din of Heaven, but that's all it can be to you, a din—the sound of song and mingled laughter, and seemingly erratic eruptions of beautiful sound."
I nodded. It had been both painful and gorgeous to hear it.
"The Lowest Triad is supposed to include Principalities, Archangels, and Angels," he continued, "but this is misleading, as I said. For we, the Archangels, are in fact the most powerful and the most important, have the most personality, and are the most questioning and concerned.
"The other angels think we are flawed on that account. It does not occur to the average Seraph to plead for mercy for mankind.
"But here you have the rough scheme of things. The angels are innumerable. And there is mobility among angels, some drifting closer to God than others, and then away when the majesty is too great for them, and they choose to slip back and sing a softer song.
It's continuous.
"Now, the important thing is that the Guardian Angels of Earth, the Watchers, those who became intent upon the Creation, came from all these ranks! Even from the very Seraphim there have come Guardians who have spent millions of years on Earth and then gone Home. Going and coming is common. The disposition I describe is innate but not fixed.
"Angels aren't perfect. You can see that already. They are Created Beings. They don't know everything God knows, that's obvious to you and everyone else. But they know a great deal; they know all that can be known in Time if they wish to know it; and that is where angels differ, you see. Some wish to know everything in Time, and some care only for God and God's reflection in those of His most devoted souls."
"I see, then. What you're saying is everybody's right about it, and everybody's sort of wrong."
"More right than wrong. Angels are individuals, that is the key.
We Who Fell are no single species, unless being the brightest, the most clever, and the most comprehending makes us a species, which I don't think it does."
"Go on."
He laughed. "You think I'm going to stop now?"
"I don't know," I said. "Where do I fit in? I don't mean me, Lestat de Lioncourt, I mean what I am . .. the vampire I am."
"You're an earthbound phenomenon, just like a ghost. We'll get to that in a moment. When God sent us down to Earth to Watch, specifically to observe all Mankind, we were as curious about the dead as the living—this wreath of souls we could see and hear, gathered about the world, and which we called Sheol immediately because it seemed to us that the realm of these weeping souls was the realm of pure gloom. 'Sheol' means gloom."
"And the spirit that made the vampires—"
"Wait. It's very simple. Let me present it, however, as it came to me. If I don't do that, how can you understand my position? What I ask of you—to be my lieutenant—is so personal and so total that you can't fully grasp it unless you listen."
"Please go on."
"All right. A gathering of Angels decided to go with me, to draw as close as possible to Matter in order to pull together for ourselves our entire knowledge, to better comprehend, as God had asked us to do. Michael came with me. And so did a host of other archangels.
There were a few Seraphim. There were a few Ophanim. And some of the lower orders which are the least intelligent angels, but nevertheless angels, and much in love with Creation and curious as to what was making me so angry with God.
"I can't give you the number of how many we were. But when we reached the earth, we went our separate ways to perceive things, and came together often and instantly and agreed upon what we had seen.
"What united us was our interest in the statement of God that Humankind was part of Nature. We just couldn't see how this was true. We went exploring.
"Very quickly, I learnt that men and women lived now in large groups, very unlike the other primates, that they built shelters for themselves, that they painted their bodies with various colors, that the women often lived separate from the men, and that they believed in something invisible. Now what was that? Was it the souls of the ancestors, the dearly departed who were still locked in the air of Earth, disembodied and confused?
"Yes, it was the souls of ancestors, but the humans worshipped other entities as well. They imagined a God who had made the Wild Beasts and to him they made blood sacrifice on Altars, thinking this aspect of Almighty God to be a personality of very distinct limits and rather easy to please or displease.
"Now, I can't say all this was a big surprise to me. I'd seen the early signs of it. After all, I telescoped millions of years for you in my Revelations. But when I drew near to these altars, when I heard the specific prayer to the God of the Wild Animals; when I began to see the care and deliberation of the sacrifice—the slaying of a ram or a deer—I was much struck by the fact that not only had these humans come to look like Angels, but they had guessed at the truth.