Spike: She's a monster now. Just like us.
Angel: (gently) She's just an innocent victim.
Spike: (kindly) So we were. Once upon a time.
Angel: (pause, softly) Once upon a time.
Damage
One of my favorite hero/monsters is Joss Whedon's Angel. He presents a question our culture is (or should) be struggling with. How do we act morally after we have become conscious of the evil we have done? How do we live a good life after the Fall; after being driven out of the Garden. Conviction is no longer maintainable, we stumble on because -- what else can we do? We hope mercy is stronger than conviction, and we hope for a sip from the Cup, to become new again. But we probably won't get it; we probably will die before our quest is finished. And we're tired. We hope for redemption, but fear the consequences of self knowledge.
Angel is a tortured reflection of our shared heritage. A mythic substitute for our own glorious and horrific past. Like him, we were once mostly innocent, mostly irrelevant. Then we started touring the world. Empire, crusades, the evolution of the nation state, the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, raining fire down on noncombatant cities and wedding parties. But intertwined with that story is another one; one of progress and transcendence and mercy and belief in human dignity. We were called upon, and after a few stutter starts, like Angel, we stepped up. Pax Americana saved the world and nearly destroyed it, again and again. No civilization that produced Shakespeare, Milton, and Twain is beyond redemption. No man who averted Armageddon so many times is beyond redemption. We've been the best and the worse. Like Angel. But most of the time, our history is paralyzing, ignoring parts lets us function, but dooms us to repeat the same tropes. Or we can be like Angel and seek redemption from our past.
Like Angel, once we stepped up, we ended up with power. And the meme of power perpetuates itself through our bodies, changing us. So we sit in our nice offices and sign the checks, and have occasional lapses into soulless evil, as the world slides towards entropy and degradation. Maybe there's nothing else to do, within that paradigm. Keep our clients, avert what evil we can, recycle when we think of it, vote to approve school levies. There's no clear, discrete opportunity to rise up and slay the dragon . . .
So Angel gives us our catharsis. The good of it; he models progressive hero work. The bad of it; we identify with him and he relieves us of our own moral obligations.
Joseph Campbell suggested that mythology has a mystic, cosmological, social and psychological purpose. Put another way, to help us transcend, understand, function and mature in the world we actually live in. Up to the last season, Angel was essentially an outsider; while we could mythically identify with him, he couldn't play inside the world we're maturing (surviving, functioning, whatever) in. We get bribed or convinced or beaten into insiders; whether the question never occurs, or we have desires only satisfied within a culture, or we truly believe in the values, or we care about other people or we're terrified of the outside Ð what ever it is, we join the collective, however much we may feel alienated or revel in our ironic distance.
But those things that wooed us lesser beings wasn't enough to get the hero with the face of Angel inside. Meaning that there was a whole raft of questions most of us face that he never faces; compromises, subliminations, minor rebellions, accommodation to a life inside a seemingly unchangeable structure. But the temptation of a happy, healthy life for his son Ð that made it plausible that he'd step over the threshold. As far as I know, our culture doesn't have great myths of accommodation so I get the impetus for the move. Potentially, a fascinating mythic exploration of office life.
Hercules echoes through him. These days, Hercules usually wears the face of just another pretty solar hero with nice pecs. It's hard to see because the modern Hercules is nothing like Angel. Hercules is usually portrayed as nearly naked, having lots of sex, and flaunting himself to the sun. But that's the sanitized version. For all that Hercules is one of the few solar heroes that have a full apotheosis into godhood, he's very human. His story has enough depth that Hercules cults were competing with Christianity for the official religion of Rome.
The grand arc of the Hercules myth starts when he kills his wife and children, some say in a fit of madness. The twelve labors of Hercules are atonement for this sin; are an attempt to wash the blood of his hands so he can be redeemed. So he can reintegrate.
Angel, of course, has his family's blood on his hands. He also has tragic fate of living in a time where there is no ritual of atonement; no clear way to exchange sacred labor for forgiveness.
He's also oddly feminized.
I've thrown tarot as a hobby for about 16 years now, and have developed my own idiosyncratic and debatable interpretation, routed in Joseph Campbell, Jung, Hajo Banzaf, mythology, and whatever else I've happened to have read. In briefest terms, the tarot has two components; the Major Arcana -- the grand adventure of becoming fully human. That's what adage Rota Taro Orat Tora Ator is about; the wheel of the tarot announces the law of initiation. Not all that different from the adventure Angel is on. And the minor arcana; the minor adventure. Who am the I who is on this grand adventure?
The minor arcana has four suits, corresponding to the four elements in the classical system; Wands (fire, feeling, summer, masculine fecundity, creative thinking), Cups (water, intuition, spring, renewal, blood, poison, synthetic thinking), Swords (air, analytical thinking, winter, violence, healing) and Disks (earth, sensing, autumn, pragmatic thinking, exchanges). There is disagreement on this, but this is my system and I'm sticking with it. Except when I junk it.
Jung said that everyone has a major element and a minor element; a neutral element, and the you-suck-at-that element. Part of becoming an integrated personality within a society is figuring out what we suck at and how to accommodate it, at least enough to understand how other people are thinking. For example, like most lawyers, IÕm all about swords and cups; intellect and intuition. Whedon and Tarot engage my intuition; science fiction and work, intellect. I'm okay at feeling, and I suck at sensing.
Why is Angel feminine, elementally? First, the categorical thing. Cups are the Major Principle of the Night. Cups are water. Water is ruled by The Moon, the Mistress of Tides and the Queen of the Night. Vampires are also cups. They are of the night. They become vampires by drinking and being drunk. Cups are also the suit of transformation -- water changes form; water changes other things. Angelus became Angel; Angel becomes Angelus; Angel/us changes reality to save his son; to save the world. Incidentally, cups are also associated with wolves, making his ultimate Nina and Wolfram & Hart make some sense.
Disks encompass both day and night. The unyielding disk of the sun; the fecundity of the earth during the day. But they also merge into night; the earth is the mistress of things that happen underground; in artificial night; decomposition; the carbon cycle, tombs, Hades. Mr. Hanky the Christmas Poo is of earth and does best at night -- he is, after all, night soil. Angel is also about the earth. He's solid. He broods, like the earth broods over seeds in winter or corpses as they slowly decompose. He longs to rejoin the carbon cycle; to be alive. Captain Forehead, hm?
Wands are the Major Principle of the Day. The sun defines the day, and the sun is fire. Living things grow in the day. Fire produces light, which characterizes the day. Wands kill vampires most iconicly. The stake, the fire, the sun, the cross (which has it's source in the world tree where Odin sacrificed himself to himself; to the tree that marks the death and rebirth of Tammuz, Persephone, et al.). Angel is occasionally in love with his own death. Darla, Buffy Ð both women who killed him and midwifed his resurrection. Buffy is all about Wands; she's the Summers of Sunnydale; golden-haired and bearing stakes. Largely, I'd say the wand is the object for Angel Ð what he's not, what he wants. The sunlight, the girl in the sunlight, death. In fairness, he's got some wand in him too. They also represent creativity, art -- Angel has a fair artistic hand, and Angelus developed quite the artistic bent. Wands are also the masculine generative principle, and Angel has had many children, metaphorically. He senses. He . . . Hones.
Swords are the minor principle of the night. Mostly because they govern dreams, especially nightmares. But swords were originally forged from things that fell from the night sky; meteoric iron; and later from things pulled from the earth in artificial darkness; mines. Angel has learned to use these, but he doesn't usually think his way through problems. He's got a good grasp of violence, but thinking Ð he tends to find people for that.
I've struggled a lot with what Angel's signifier (my preferred term) or significator (usual term) should be. The Devil has some appeal. What ever it was in an uber sense, he ended as Strength blocked by Justice, or vice versa.
One of the grand controversies in Tarot has to do with the ordering of the cards in the major arcana; whether Key 8: (Strength) and Key 11: (Justice) should have been swapped a hundred years ago. Strength is a Solar Hero card, associated with Hercules, who has a definite correspondence with Angel Ð hero who killed his family and is required to atone. Justice is a twilight card; after the day's action is done, we sit and adjudicate winners and losers; meaning and despair. Justice Ð or at least, Justice Reversed, ainÕt a bad card to represent W&H, and Angel's time graying up there.
The thing about Solar Heroes; usually, their adventures are, in some masked way, against the back drop of the Zodiac. The Sun goes through each house of the Zodiac, rising every month in a new house, and so does the Hero, fighting or climbing or negotiation her way through each adventure until she comes full circle and returns, changed, to her home. Except that most people get off the adventure before they complete the circuit. They die or give up, or think they've found the final answers even though they're not dead yet.
Interestingly, Whedon's other great hero, Buffy finished the cycle. She figured the way out of the box. She was, at the end of the series, a solar heroine, bringing the elixir of slayerhood back from another world. Angel? Not sunny. He's spent most of his time under ground, brooding, regretting. Looking back. The end of the last episode, sitting in the Deeper Well (Can't get more feminine than that setting -- water in the well, the well sunk in to the earth).
Looking back takes us squarely to Key 11, the judicial adventure Ð for the most part, that adventure backwards looking. "Did I do right? Was a wrong done to me? Did I make the best choice from among imperfect choices? Was it okay to kill that guy?" Yeah, you can go to court and get an injunction; maybe even, if the jury is smart enough to know about jury nullification and savvy enough not to out that fact during voir dire, absolution (we know what you did and we forgive you).
Athena created the first jury to end the cycle of vengeance. It changed the world by saying Ð we can stop and move on. Angel can't, though maybe by serving bad guys he started figuring it out.
I think that Angel wants to be the Hanged Man, Key 12. He wants to die in atonement, in the service of the World (Key 21) and his version of the Great Goddess (Key 3). Note the trinity theme. Angel wants the magic of forgiveness. But the magic of atonement/death has to come on its own, at its own time. And he keeps getting tied to the world; pulling him away from that self sacrifice step.
He's also oddly feminized in his precursors. There is something of Xena about him. And something of Ishtar. Consider Stephanie Dalley's translation of the Descent of Ishtar to the Underworld (from Myths from Mespotamia), as she is starting on her quest to rescue her beloved from death:
Ishtar, when she arrived at the gate of Kurnugi,
Addressed her words to the keeper of the gate,
'Here, gatekeeper, open your gate for me,
Open your gate for me to come in!
If you do not open your gate for me to come in,
I shall smash the door and shatter the bolt,
I shall smash the doorpost and overturn the doors,
I shall raise up the dead and they shall eat the living:
The dead shall outnumber the living!
And what is more Angel than door-related aggression? And the dead eating the living? That's history. That's vampires. That's Angel. One of his most profound moments was drinking the blood of the Senior Partners; becoming strong through the fight with the darkness. Just like Ishtar.
But he's also got roots in more manly myths. Consider Tolkien's lectures on Beowulf, especially in light of the last battle of the series. Hark:
Of the fair gods of Greece we also hear rumour of wars with giants and great powers not Olympian. Yet this distinction is not clearly conceived. The gods are not in any case an ever-present danger: the war is rather in a chaotic past. Though the seed of the gods may be heroes, it is also other creatures hostile to mean and monstrous. The monsters maybe akin to the gods, and the gods are not partners of lesser men in their war against them. The gods neither need men's help, nor are concerned in their struggles. Men may worship or propitiate one or the other, gods or monsters, but he is not an ally of either. The interest of the gods in this or that man as part of their whims or private schemes, not as part of a great strategy that includes the whole of mankind, if only as the infantry of battle. The wages of heaven are deeds. This perhaps makes the gods more godlike Ð more lofty, more dread, more inscrutable. They are timeless and do not know or fear death. Such beliefs may hold promise of a profounder thought, so that the Greeks could make philosophy, but the Germanic North created specially the hero. Though the word we use in English is Greek . . . . the notion we have of it is rather Germanic than Greek.
In Norse at any rate the gods are enmeshed within time; they are doomed to the agony of death Ð though (probably by a late addition) a rebirth glimmers faintly far ahead for some of them. Their battle is with the monsters and with the darkness. They fight along with men and gather heroes for the final battle. Already before euhemerism saved them by embalming the, and they dwindled in learned antiquarian fancy to their mighty ancestors of northern kings, they are in their very being but the enlarged shadows of great men and warriors cast upon the walls of the world. When Baldr is slain and goes to Hel, he cannot escape thence any more than mortal man. Loki is among the gods, it is true, and evil and lying and clever spirit, of whom many monsters come. But this is true of men, in whom both Grendel and the Dragon in their hatred, cruelty, malice and greed find part. But the gods of Asgard do not recognize kinship with Fenris the wolf anymore than men do with the Dragon.
J. R. R. TOLKIEN, BEOWULF AND THE CRITICS 127-28 (Michael D. C. Drout ed. 2002).
In the end, Angel accepts that he is not the beloved of the sun, and starts to bond with a woman with a wolf inside of her. He is a synthesis of the gods and the wolf; and he chooses to ends like a hero of the north in the last battle. Back to Tolkein for a moment:
What is distinctively Northern in the myth of the Twilight of the Gods is the strength of its theory of life. It is this intensity of courage that distinguishes the Northern mythology (and Icelandic literature generally) from all others. The last word of the Northmen before their entry into the larger world of Southern culture; their last independent guess at the secret of the Universe, is the Twilight of the Gods. As far as it goes, and as a working theory, it is absolutely impregnable. It is the assertion of the individual freedom against all the terrors and temptations of the world. It is absolute resistance, perfect because without hope. The Northern gods have an exultant extravagance in their warfare which makes them more like Titans than Olympians; only they are on the right side, though it is not the side that wins. The winning side is Chaos and Unreason; but the gods, who are defeated, think that defeat no refutation."
Id. (quoting W. P. KER, THE DARK AGES 57-58 (1904)).
One of Angel's many shadow's, the lawyer Lindsey MacDonald. He makes it all clear one day:
ANGEL Yeah, hell's on earth. Holland manners tried to sell me that line 3 years ago.
LINDSEY Did you ever prove him wrong? . . . The apocalypse, man. You're soaking in it. . . . What'd you think, a gong was gonna sound? Time to jump on your horses and fight the big fight? Starting pistol went off a long time ago, boys. You're playing for the bad guys. Every day you sit behind your desk and you learn a little more how to accept the world the way it is. Well, here's the rub... heroes don't do that. Heroes don't accept the world the way it is. They fight it.
ANGEL (sits back) You're saying everything we do... it's a distraction... to keep us busy from looking under the surface.
LINDSEY (snaps fingers) Ding! We have a winner! The world keeps sliding towards entropy and degradation, and what do you do? You sit in your big chair, and you sign your checks, just like the senior partners planned. The war's here, Angel. And you're already 2 soldiers down.
UNDERNEATH: Which could set up, of course, the old story behind Beowulf and the Twilight of the Gods. The ice giants are going to win, entropy and chaos and degradation and unreason triumph. The wolf will eat the sun, the serpent will strangle the tree, the gods will fight and loose and defeat will be no refutation. Delaying Ragnarok is a good thing to do. But like the poet said, there is nothing to do but die on your death day. Absolute resistance, perfect because it is without hope -- and defeating hope was what Angel had to do to overcome his mortality. He had to accept his defeat. The hopelessness that made him cast off his friends was his version of Sisyphus's rock; he had to transmogrify it to reach his destiny. If Not Fade Away was Ragnarok, the hero is dead, and he died unrefuted and glorious.
There are close parallels to Beowulf. Beowulf was an experienced warrior, a champion. In a distant land, there was a king who was loosing his kingdom person by person down the gullet of the monster Grendal, the slayer of men. Beowulf obeys the call to adventure and challenges Grendal. He kills Grendal. Then Grendal's mum comes to wreck vengeance. Wrecks some. He tracks her back to her castle and kills her. He took her treasures, returned to his adventures and one day, became a king. When at the end of his days, a dragon threatens his kingdom. He girds up, and he and the dragon slay each other in one final battle.
Okay, pretty standard story, but well worth the reading. Angel, like Beowulf, was an experienced warrior who obeyed the call to adventure and defeated the slayer of men (vampires). Then he fights various aspects of the source. W&H, the Demon Priests of Pylea, Jasmine, yaddy yaddy. Because of the logic of series television, that battle takes about five years. Then cometh the apparent reward; he inherits the kingdom. We get rewarded for our good deeds, right? This kingship with all of the Arthurian drops (e.g., the Quest of the Grail, finding a bear in Angel's dreamscape (Arthur=Arctos = Artemis = Bear), Angel/Spike = Lancelot/Galahad, Wesley=Merlin, Connor = Mordred, Knox = Mordred, Drogyn, Yggrasil (okay, wrong story, but it's buried there) etc)
.Angel was the king. Until the day the dragon comes, and Angel, probably, slays the dragon and dies. Here he is a hero of the north, dying at the right time. You do good not because of reward, shainsu, heaven Ð you do good because itÕs the right thing to do. Fight, Die, and, as Tolkien hints, defeat is no refutation.
Angel may become again a redeemer, a solar knight, a resurrected hero raised from the dead to fight again, and that would be cool. But at this moment of the story, he does looks a lot like Beowulf, slayer of the devourer of men, slayer of the dragon, rewarded by dying at the right time.
He also has parallels in one of my all time favorite stories is Gilgamesh. Gilgamesh is an ancient Babylonian story about a demigod/King who starts as an arrogant twat, finds friendship, looses his best friend to death, goes on a quest to defeat death, fails, almost achieves at least a new youth, fails again, and finally, becomes a good and just king. The usual subtitle of Gilgamesh is "He Who Saw Everything." Turns out the word that is usually translated as "everything" can also be translated as "the deep" or "the source of the waters." Like where Connor sent Angel at the end of season three.
Both Angel and Gilgamesh aren't quite mortal, aren't quite moral; get caught up in this adventure, and in many ways, loose. Gilgamesh defeats demons, defeats the Bull of Heaven; scorns the goddess and does not die. Not unlike Angel. Gilgamesh goes on a quest to defeat death to the navel of the world; fails, but as a consolation prize is given the location of a plant that grows deep in the waters that can restore youth. He plucks it and decides to take it back to his city and (some translations imply) plans share it - - and then it's stolen by a snake who gets the renewal that could be ours. Angel gets to the source of power and almost saves the world. But not quite.
Both visit "the deep" -- a pivotal point of Angel's story is when he rejoins the carbon cycle; when he begats a child who, in traditional mythic fashion, tries to kill him. Sends him into the deep. Like Gilgamesh (who retrieves the plant from the bottom of the ocean); he gets wet at just about the same time he gets a type of immortality.
Like Gilgamesh, the reward he gets for sailing beyond the mundane world isn't the reward he's seeking. Gilgamesh gives up on immortality and eternal youth. Angel gives up on shainsu. And both learn they had their reward before they started their last adventure. Both are stories of failed heroes worthy of praise.
In a striking reversal, Whedon ends AngelÕs story the moment before his likely death, and the moment after Angel fully owned that he was the Hero. He is Christ, betrayed and denied (love him and Spike riffing on that). He is Samson bringing down the temple (Wolfram and Hart). He is Isis, poisoning her betters with a smile (the arch duke). He's Buddha, sacrificing his chance at bliss to hold the door open for a few more souls. He is Marduk battling the dragon that swallowed the waters; Beowulf facing Grendal and his mother (Hamilton and the Senior Partners). He is every hero who stood between the firelight and the darkness, and he is the thing the darkness fears. I love him and weep for his passing.