the soul without a heart

“Their grief is in proportion to their affection they know their loss to be irreparable”

-Jane Austen’s tombstone, Winchester Cathedral. (Epitaph written written in 1817 for legendary author Jane Austen by her brother James, in which he describes the grief of all who knew her).

It arrives, at first, tingling small, fleeting, a lump at the base of your throat. something fragile and birdlike is trapped in your body, fluttering inconsolable fear. You swallow it in.

wings: “humans don’t like things they can’t understand, so if we’re going to levitate we should have wings. in fact we should probably have lots of wings, since we’re so big and impressive. humans like wings”

loud, booming voices: “fuck off Azrael the humans needs to be able to hear us.”

glowing: “no no no, it’s about visibility, right? the main human sensory organ works by detecting light, so if we emit light…” 

wheels: “why the hell are you shaped like that?” “piss off, the humans are really proud of this invention”

multiple faces/eyes: “it makes me relatable” “i swear to God it doesn’t–” “i need to see in every direction” “ Azrael you are a supernatural messenger of god you do not need–” “THE HUMANS NEED TO KNOW I’M WATCHING”

multiple limbs: “humans have lots of limbs! they like limbs” “look i let you keep the wings but–” “how do you expect me to walk?” “70,000 feet is not a reasonable number of feet, Azrael!” “fuck off i’m ENORMOUS” 

Old Testament Angels look like that because life in the ocean outnumbered life on land, so naturally when they visited earth they modeled their appearance on the most common lifeforms. Hench you get things like

radial symmetry (i.e. angels shaped like spheres) which is objectively cooler than bilateral symmetry (starfish understand this)

Very Numerous Limbs (2 is not the average number of arms in the ocean)

random glowing (bioluminescence)

just generally being objects of Absolute Terror to land dwellers

a thousand eyeballs being the Norm (have you seen scallops)

So, first thing, in most of the Hebrew Bible nobody can look directly at God’s face and live. God is simply too amazing/great/alien. You see God’s face, you die, not because God wants to kill you (God doesn’t!) but just … because it’s the inevitable result of contact with God’s holiness. (This is responsible for such incidents as the time God mooned Moses. Moses wanted reassurance, and asked to see God. God said, “well, you can’t see my face, but how about this. You hide in that crevice in the rock over there, and I’ll cover you up so you’re safe, and then I’ll pass by, and when I’m safely past you can look at my back, k?” And that’s how it happened.)

Anyway, even angels can’t bear to look at God, which is why the seraphim cover their faces in God’s presence. All the weird stuff you all have just been attributing to angels? Can be applied to God with at least as much plausibility.

And then we come to the seraphim covering their feet. Or, perhaps I should say “feet.” Because the Hebrew language, like many languages, has some euphemisms for genitalia. One of them is to call them “feet” or “hands.” This is how, for example, Ruth gets Boaz to marry her. She goes in and lays down at his “feet.” Wink wink, nudge nudge.

So when Isaiah tells us the seraphim are flying around covering their “feet” with a pair of wings, what they’re actually doing is this: