“Given that part’s in the title, yeah.”
“Mmm. So they’re supposed to be God’s emanations, these angels, and God delegates most earthly action to them—sort of like how the mediaeval Cathars and other Gnostic-influenced sects claimed the Devil was ‘king of this world,’ with God’s complicity. It’s a system that leaves room for a whole lot of animistic deities, spirits of place or concept—the kind you get in ancient Greek, Roman, Aryan-Indian, and Slavic beliefs, or even Chinese Shenism and Japanese Shinto. And these things could be good, could be bad, could be beneficial or malign, but since they all had God behind them, you couldn’t really get rid of ’em, not completely. The best you could do is, um . . . stop paying attention. Ignore them, walk away. Don’t ever give them what they want.”
“Which is?”
“Attention, I guess. Worship.” She paused for a moment. “Which means there’s a whole lot more than seven angels, when it comes down to it—and maybe more things like devils than my Dédé wanted to admit.”
I frowned. “What’s that mean, ‘God’s complicity?’ Like, what . . . God lets these things exist?”
“More than that. It’s like He wants them to.”
“For what possible point?”
She shrugged. “Do I look like God to you? All I know is that when I went looking for source Yezidic texts in the U of T rare-books libraries, I ran across an idea that’s making more and more sense to me these days, which is that there is a connection between the Lucifer myth and Malak Tâwus, the Peacock Angel—but it was the Yezidi angel that came first, not the other way around. It turns up in all Big Three monotheisms, it’s got offshoots in half a dozen versions of Gnosticism, the core cosmology looks like a key inspiration for Persian Zoroastrianism, and you can find echoes in a bunch of pagan mystery cults too.”
“So the Peacock Angel is the Devil?” I had forgotten my nausea, forgotten my shoulder, and turned to face Safie as directly as I could; I had no idea how much of this might prove useful, but I’d never been able to resist a new myth, creation or otherwise.
Safie tilted one hand back and forth, making a sort-of-but-not-really grimace. “Well, the ‘origin story’ for Malak Tâwus is almost exactly the same as the Muslim myth about Iblis, the djinn they later call Shaytan—but Yezidi revere Malak Tâwus for refusing to submit to Adam, while Muslims believe that Iblis’s refusal to submit was what made him fall out of grace with Allah. From our point of view, God praised Malak Tâwus for refusing to serve something made out of dust, because he was made from God’s own light; instead of punishing him, God made the Peacock Angel His own representative on earth, telling him to dole out responsibilities, blessings, and bad luck as he saw fit. And we can’t question him, because he’s beyond good and evil—good and evil are human qualities.
“My Dédé Aslan used to say that if God commands anything to happen then it just happens, automatically—bibe, dibe. So God could have made Malak Tâwus bow down to Adam, but He chose not to, and that was the right choice: human beings are flawed because we were made flawed, intentionally; we need to be guided by sublime beings, which is the Peacock Angel’s job. It was a test for Malak Tâwus and he passed, qualifying himself to act as God’s stand-in, so God doesn’t ever have to worry about humanity again.”
“Wow.” I sat back in my seat. “What’s this all got to do with Lady Midday?”
“Well, what Lady Midday reminds me of is, basically, one of those old other angels, or spirits, or gods—the figures from the cult offshoots, the beings one step down from the Seven. Things that sometimes got prayed to, sometimes just placated; things that were local to one place or time and got left behind when people died out, or moved on, or converted to something else. If you think about it, isn’t that how Midday and some of the other figures in the stories come off? It’s like they’re desperate for attention, but they don’t know how to do anything except repeat their old patterns, so they wind up harming the very people whose attention they’re trying to get in order to . . . I don’t know, keep going. Stay alive. Intact.”
“Can tah in can tak?” I suggested then explained, off her baffled stare: “Desperation, Stephen King—he calls it the Language of the Unformed. It means ‘small gods out of a greater god.’”
“That’s . . . almost exactly what I’m talking about, yeah. Weird.”
I shrugged. “Tropes are tropes. They resonate. Which is why, awesome as all of that sounds, I don’t know if we’re going to be able to get much mileage out of it—for this project, anyway. I’d be really surprised if Mrs. Whitcomb had even heard of the Yezidi.”
“Maybe. But how much do we really know about Mrs. Whitcomb’s background, anyway? We know her maiden name, Iris Dunlopp, and . . . what else?”
“Not much,” I acknowledged. “She was adopted—her ‘mom,’ Miss Dunlopp, was the woman who ran the orphanage she grew up in, and Mr. Whitcomb was a big contributor. That’s how they met. Iris taught the younger children basic reading, writing, and arithmetic, plus gave art classes for local kids and tutored adults, that sort of thing.”
“So, dead parents. Any information as to how, or who they were?”
“Not that I’ve uncovered. Balcarras might know.” I thought a minute. “Actually, Jan Mattheuis said the Quarry Argent Folklore Museum had all Mr. Whitcomb’s old papers, as well as Mrs. Whitcomb’s paintings. He must’ve donated them at the same time.”
“Good thing we’re going there then.”
“Yup.”
I’m still not entirely sure what prompted me to ask the next question. It’s always struck me as something too personal to ask someone who hasn’t already brought up the topic, and most people who do so tend to make the answer pretty obvious. But—
“Safie,” I began, carefully, “how much of this stuff do you believe? I don’t mean just know about, or use to build films around, but that it’s objectively true—is that what you think?”
Safie opened her mouth then closed it. “I . . . don’t know,” she finally replied. “All of this is more like history than re
ligion, really. It’s what makes my family what it is, which makes me what I am; it’s always going to be there inside me, this sort of core I rotate around—the source of everything.” I nodded. “It’s why I ended up going to the Fac in the first place, you know? I wanted to extend what I’d already been doing into a longer-form narrative, to package it in a way people from outside my family could swallow; show them all the stuff I’d grown up with as just part of my day-to-day. And that’s probably why I’m here, too.” She glanced briefly at me, our eyes meeting. “Because if that’s what Mrs. Whitcomb wanted, I kind of feel like I owe it to her to finish her work.”
It struck me then, like a slap—how weird it was I’d never asked myself these sorts of questions. What was it she’d been doing it for, exactly, in the first place? What drove her to constantly return to these stories, re-interpret them over and over, especially “Lady Midday,” yet still end up so unhappy with the result she literally tried to bury it? For all my feverish research thus far, I’d never once thought of her as a person, with goals or desires of her own that might yet be accomplished even now, through us. Someone to whom something might be owed.
I stared out the windshield, struck silent. Thankfully, Safie didn’t seem to notice. “I wish I could talk to my Dédé,” was all she said, wistfully. We were on some rural route now, one of only a few cars moving; Lake of the North district isn’t one of the big cottage country destinations, and we were well in advance of whatever they considered rush hour. She added, after a moment, “God, I miss him.”
I nodded, and just for a blink, my mind returned to Simon and Clark. Much to my surprise, given how little time had elapsed since we’d left, I found myself in complete sympathy.
As it turns out, we were both wrong about at least one thing regarding Mrs. Whitcomb—she had met at least one Yezidi while she was still alive, though she might well not have known it at the time: doomed Gustave Knauff, whose surviving family still traces the origin of their fortune back to the Crusades, when a certain Swiss knight brought home a beautiful woman of Middle Eastern origin and married her, claiming her parents—conveniently dead—were converts to Christianity, their documentation lost in transit from Acre. There’s a tiny yet passionate sub-genre of art history devoted to tracing Yezidi themes in Knauff’s paintings, especially the famous Black Annunciation and his subsequent Hymnes de Paon triptych. Not that this has much to do with anything, I suppose, within immediate context.