Notes on the Nine Archangels

On the revelation of the Mandorans

This is supplementary material for The Falcon’s Children, a fantasy novel being published serially on this Substack. For an explanation of the project, click here. For the table of contents, click here. For the archive of world building, click here.

A commentary on the religion of the Nine Archangels, excerpted from a letter from Zhanxi Anxara, clan-patriarch and former legate of the Athuanese court to Mandor, to his nephew Janzio on the occasion of the latter’s assumption of the legateship.

… the religion of the Mandorans, beloved, as you no doubt noticed in your own years of study among our academicians, inspires recurring divisions among the classifiers and taxonomists of our own most serene and indefectible doctrine. Some hold that notwithstanding its obvious errors and corruptions, their faith is closer to our own than almost any other in the known world — that behind the wings of their angelic princes lies a vision of divinity as a singular creative force, that their One Who Is is plainly the True God revealed by the Seven Sages, and that even if the common folk of the High King’s dominions seem to worship their angels as one might lesser gods, well, that is not so different from the tendencies of our own peasantry to occasionally divinize the Sages.

The seeming consanguinities between the nine archangels and the Nineteen Archons, the echoes of our Fourteen Blessed Commandments in their Book of Law, the resemblance between their tales of the Damned and our knowledge of the fall of the Unnamed (detested be he) … in these and other examples many learned men have found enough evidence to portray the Mandorans as a people of God, no less than than the Sennacherim or the Chan’ang, even if less fully enlightened than ourselves.

But then many others, equally learned, counter that whatever hints of a true monotheism hover over their scriptures, in regular practice the Mandorans are simply polytheists, and their nine archangels and attendant seraphim are fundamentally no different than the teeming deities of the Mahdi Delta or the Pantheon of the Arrabasyn — gods worshiped in defiance of the True God, raised as idols of stone above altars of pagan sacrifice, with the specific attributes that you expect from such a court. (Mithriel the warrior, Gavriel the messenger, Uriel the master of the harvest, Raphiel the healer, Azriel the keeper of the dead, and so forth.) If they have a theology that’s somewhat closer to the truth than other pagans, that’s a matter of interest primarily for their schoolmen, since it has almost no effect on how not just simple rustics but the sophisticated, even the very Blood, pray or worship or think about the world.

My years among them made the power of this last argument plain. Whatever theoretical notions may obtain in their universities, in practice their One is absent from the stage of piety, and what remains to intervene and answer prayers is plainly a pantheon or court, which the angelic worshiper approaches in a similar spirit to a purohit worshiping one of Great Vashanya’s children or an Arabbasyn justiciar bargaining with their one-and-twenty divinities and thousand-and-one djinn.

With, yes, beloved, one admitted difference — that the gods worshiped in El Abbad or the Mahdi cities are often morally ambiguous, encompassing good and evil both, while the archangels are supposedly indefectible, even as is the True God. For this reason I cannot agree with those academicians who insist that their angels must be servants of the Unnamed, or at least something like our Twelve Punished Archons, beings not wholly evil but doomed to wander in our sphere. Rather their God-like goodness suggests to me a middle ground: Perhaps we should see the Mandorans as neither a people of God in the true sense nor as followers of a simple form of a paganism, but rather as a people who have descended halfway back toward idolatry despite having in the beginning received some version of the truth — a truth that retains some influence upon them, but which over time has been layered over by corruption.

Such are my conclusions; soon you will be able to draw your own. You have books of course to guide you, and I will not give you a tedious recitation of the various supposed attributes of the nine archangels, or the various priestly orders and their colors and vocations; nor will I complain at length about how the number nine itself warps their calendar, severing any clean link between their forty-day months, the four seasons and the phases of the moon. (Can you tell that this remains a special grit in my slipper?)

Rather I will offer several pieces of useful advice. Never enter into theological debate with a priest of Mithriel; they know only authority and power and obedience. The red priests will despise you as a heretic but they will be eager for disputation. The gray priests will be eager to learn from you but they will shy away from a true clash of ideas — save for a few who may be open to deeper conversations, to whom our friends may make introductions.

Befriend a white sister if you wish to learn the gossip of the court, a Gavrielite priest the gossip of the wider world, an Abdielite brother if you wish to go out drinking, and the Zadkielites of Naparis on my personal suggestion.

If you must attend one of the greater litanies make certain it is the Jophielite sisters and not the sisters of Uriel who will be singing. The priests of Jophiel, meanwhile, are to be avoided as notoriously corrupt (we are men of the world, I trust I do not need to explain).

The black priests are somewhat more unsettling than your books will express. I don’t believe I ever met an actual priest of Raguel — if you wish to outdo me you might go seek one in their mountain hermitages — but the green sisters at their House of Hospitality keep the finest board in Mandor outside the court itself.

Visit the monasteries of Uriel on the isles of Selcena if you wish to be persuaded that the True God is present among the Mandorans, and likewise the Raphielite sisters at work in their surgeries. But then just watch the red priests run one of their inquisitorial courts, punishing lesser errors in the name of greater ones, if you wish to be reassured that He is not.

And then a final word on their scriptures, since while you know them already from your studies you will hear more of them in your duties soon enough. Their Histories are obviously rife with the most fantastic legends, especially the Book of the Magi with its accounts of sorcerers whose powers conveniently faded at the moment that real historians began their work, but they have the same grandeur and power as the Legendarium of our own not-yet-enlightened ancestors, and deserve a similar attention and respect. Their Book of the Law you no doubt already find dry as dust and hearing it read in between their prayers will not improve that opinion; I myself find it interesting primarily as a kind of less-divinely-inspired echo of the Great Rectifications our own most indubitably blessed Shanhanxa.

But the Book of the Prophecies — well, call me superstitious if you will, beloved, but I cannot but suspect that a text so jealously guarded, which has inspired their gray priests to one of the great feats of mystification — all those endless forgeries, circulating in every library from Mersanica to Nevus Albina to our own academic archives, including within them, no doubt, versions of the true text chopped up and flavored with creative falsehoods — as I was saying, I cannot but suspect that some strange truth about the future, imparted by whatever divine or insalubrious means, lurks within the true version of the scripture.

I would certainly never advise you, as a legate and a loyal servant of the Most Sublime Power, the Throne Above All Thrones, to press the bounds of hospitality by seeking any sort of initiation into the truth about their prophecies. I will only commend to you a careful reading of my advice in this letter, and wish you success in any endeavor of diplomacy you undertake.

your affectionate uncle, under the shadow of the All-True, etc ….