Teal Veyre is really interesting thinker whose blog I’ve been following for a few years now. (She’s the angry bespectacled cartoon gal on the left.) In this episode of her Viridescent Storms book podcast, she and I talk about dinosaurs, giants, utilitarianism, worldbuilding, and of course, The Lord of the Rings. Many of the topics are ones that faithful Out of Babel-ites will recognize, but with Teal’s unique perspective, it’s all fresh! Plus, you get to hear our voices. The interview with me takes up about the first 30 minutes, and then the Storms offer a tutorial on a program called Notion and how it can be used by indie authors.
I notice that so far, the video has only one like, which is of course disgraceful. Get over there and like it and club some sense into those YouTube algorithms!
This review will bring a number of threads together, but it won’t give you a comprehensive sense of everything discussed in this book, because it is a long, complex book with lots of things to chew on.
The Unseen Realm is a theological book written at a popular level, but with lots of footnotes. I would say it is for serious lay students of the Bible. It frequently refers to the Septuagint (the Greek Translation of the Old Testament that was in popular use in New Testament Times), and to other different ancient manuscripts of various Bible passages, some of which have slightly different wording that can be key for Heiser’s arguments. The scholarship on the many topics that this book encompasses is voluminous, so much so that there is a companion web site with additional articles for all the things that this book can’t get into in detail.
All of that said, it is not boring, at least not if you are interested in its main idea, which is that of a divine council of “gods” being present not only in other ancient mythologies but throughout the pages of the Bible. I came to this book for my research into future fiction projects that I may or may not be working on (ooo so mysterious!). I found out less detail than I had hoped to about the divine council, but even when we don’t learn something, we learn something. In this case, I learned that the Bible does not give us a lot of detail about this divine council, its members, or how it supposedly operates. We can assume this is on purpose.
The Main Idea: the Divine Council
It was very common in the Ancient Near East to believe that there was a council of gods or divine beings which would meet, typically on a mountain far away, and decide the affairs of men. That’s why you will often hear the title “Most High God.” Heiser’s contention is that the ancient Israelites shared this view, and that in fact the Bible endorses it. It starts very early, with God saying, “Let us make man in our image.” Though some people see this as evidence for the Trinity, Heiser contends that what is being evoked here is that God is addressing a group of beings which have already been made in His image, but are not humans. God then, all by Himself, makes man in His image, with the other beings presumably just watching.
The flagship Bible passages for Heiser’s thesis are Psalm 82 and Deuteronomy 32:8 – 9. In the latter, it asserts that God “divided up mankind [and] fixed the borders of the peoples according the number of the sons of God. But the LORD’s portion is His people, Jacob his inheritance.” The idea is that God assigned each “son of God” (divine being) a nation to rule over, but He took the Israelites as His own nation. Psalm 82 shows God reaming out the gods for not having done a good job ruling over the nations, promising them that “they will die like mere men” and that “all the nations” will become God’s inheritance.
These are the two most obvious passages that indicate this idea, and even they are often translated to so as to hide the fact that the original authors assumed that divine beings existed and ruled over the nations. My NIV, for example, translates Deut. 32:8 as “… according to the number of the sons of Israel.” It also puts scare quotes around the word “gods” in Ps. 82.
Ugarit
Ugaritic is the ancient Semitic language most closely related to Hebrew. In Ugaritic cosmology, the chief deity was El. He had a divine council that met in a lush garden or on a mountain. He had seventy “sons of El” who made up his council, and he had a coruler, Baal (which means “lord”). Much of the imagery, vocabulary, and cosmology of Ugarit is echoed or riffed off of in the Old Testament, always making the point that Yahweh is the true Most High God, the one who sits on a throne over what looks like a sea of glass, that His garden is the true garden and His mountain is the true mountain. The Israelites, though, did not quarrel with the idea that there were seventy lesser divine beings who served God. This seems to have been accepted cosmology, sort of like we accept heliocentrism. The Bible does not come out and say this directly, because it was common background knowledge in the Ancient Near East.
The Table of Nations, in Genesis 10, shows 70 nations branching off from Noah’s three sons. The idea was that subsequent to Babel, each of these nations was assigned to a son of El – a lesser god. The Most High was done with them. He would no longer be their God directly. Of course, some day the lesser gods, who did not do a good job with their people, would be demoted. Yahweh had plans to bring all the nations of the earth back and make them His own people once again.
The Divine Council in the Redemption Story
Heiser spends the rest of the book tracing this idea of the divine council, of Yahweh as the true God, and of the disinheritance and re-gathering of the nations, throughout the Bible, seeing how it plays in to the big redemption story. He gets into discussions about whether idols are nothing at all or whether they represent something more, and whether the word demon (shadim) means just a supernatural being or something evil. He gets to the giants. He gets to Jesus putting the local gods on notice when He starts crashing around Galilee. He visits the miracle of the tongues of fire at Pentecost. It’s all really interesting, really intricate, with a lot of scholarship.
Some of the ideas in this book were truly mind-blowing. For example, I had never before heard the term Monotheistic Binitarianism. (Wild!!!) “The startling reality is that long before Jesus and the New Testament, careful readers of the Old Testament would not have been troubled by the notion of, essentially, two Yahwehs — one invisible and in heaven, the other manifest on earth in a variety of visible forms, including that of a man. In some instances the two Yahweh figures are found together in the same scene. In this and the chapter that follows, we’ll see that the ‘Word’ was just one expression of a visible Yahweh in human form” (page 134). This is a consequence of mysterious Old Testament passages where Yahweh will appear to, say, Abraham in human form … but sometimes there are two or even three human figures, and the passages seem to be intentionally ambiguous about their identity or how many are there at any given time. There are not just a few of these instances either. Heiser says that this idea of “two powers in heaven” was “endorsed within Judaism until the second century A.D.” (135, footnote). It was the background to the famous passage in John 1: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning …”
Other ideas, if I may venture, were less mind-blowing than Heiser seemed to expect them to be. Perhaps this is because I have been studying what you might call the weirder aspects of the Old Testament for some time, but even for someone who had never heard this idea, I sometimes got the feeling that Heiser was writing to a straw man. For example, he has a whole chapter about how God’s plan for a Messiah was hidden in the Old Testament, in hints that couldn’t be pieced together beforehand, but only made sense in retrospect, types and shadows. This is pretty standard Christian teaching, at least in the Reformed circles I move in, but Heiser seems to think that his readers have been given the impression that God’s whole plan of salvation was spelled out super clearly in the Old Testament. “Chances are good that you’ve heard the New Testament mistakenly read back into the Old hundreds of times. Therefore you might be surprised to hear me say that the Old Testament profile of the Messiah was deliberately veiled” (241). In the rest of the chapter, he proceeds to read the New Testament back into the Old. “It couldn’t be emblazoned across the Old Testament in transparent statements.” Yes, we know. After Jesus rose, He said, “These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you, that everything that is written about me in the law of Moses and the prophets and psalms must be fulfilled.” Then he opened their minds to understand the scriptures. (Luke 24:44 – 45, quoted by Heiser on page 242) Yes, we know. The New Testament Christians could not see the significance of the Old Testament passages until Jesus (and, later the Holy Spirit) opened their eyes to see it. In fact, they spent the rest of their lives making “So that’s what that was about!” discoveries. Perhaps some modern Christians don’t realize this, but I think most people do who have spent years doing Bible study. In fact, many of the doctrines that we take for granted had to be worked out by the church through history.
Similarly, Heiser has a whole chapter about why God’s plan included making beings with free will and how this necessitated evil and how He couldn’t just erase everything and start over as soon as we messed up. Heiser is not a fan of Calvinism. Like most Arminian arguments, he seems to have a shallow understanding of what “free will” means and a shallow understanding of Calvinism as a sort of dystopian vision wherein people (and gods) are mere sock puppets directly controlled by God. I am willing to accept that God is sovereign, and that beings other than Him exist in the universe (human and supernatural), which make real choices that are in some sense free. I get that these two things should not go together, but that we have good evidence for both. So it is a paradox. I don’t need to choose between sovereignty or free will to understand the idea of a divine council.
What We’re Not Told
After reading Heiser, I am convinced that it is a biblical idea that there are spiritual “divine” beings that exist in an unseen realm. (Heiser points out that the word for these beings, elohim, is a place-of-residence word. They live in the unseen realm, therefore they are elohim. The word itself says nothing about their moral status.) Their existence plays a role, though I would still say not the major role, in God’s plan of salvation for humankind. In some ways, they are relevant, especially in their role as rogue gods of the nations. In other ways, a lot of what goes on in the unseen realm is none of humankind’s business.
Perhaps this is why the Bible does not tell us — and thus, Heiser does not tell us — the sort of details about the elohim that a researching novelist would naturally want to know. Here are a few unanswered questions:
Are there really only seventy of them? What happened when the seventy nations multiplied into many more?
There appears to be a hierarchy in the unseen realm, but what is it like? How many levels?
Are the beings on the different levels different species/different in appearance (if that question even means anything)? Does the unseen realm have the equivalent of animals?
We know some elohim rebelled against God, but how many? When? Was there more than one rebellion? Are all the rebel spirits organized under Satan, or are there rogues and factions?
How does or did this divine council even work? In almost all of the glimpses we are given of it, it’s basically just God announcing His intentions and the council members just watching.
There is a well-established association between the gods and the stars or constellations, but how does this work? Are they the same or symbolic? Is it a one-to-one correspondence?
This is the kind of thing that a really good novelist would get all nailed down before writing a book like, say, This Present Darkness … but it’s impossible to nail down because we are not told this stuff. Again, this is probably because it is none of our business. So if you are going to write a novel that includes gods, I would recommend you just delve into the mythology of one particular nation (Ugarit, say, or Greece as many authors have done to great success), accepting that you are riffing off of one particular nation’s interpretation of all of this, an interpretation that is based on something real, but is definitely not going to be accurate in all its details.
General consensus is that the steppe-dwelling kurgan builders were the ancestors of the Indo-Europeans. (They later moved west into Europe and east into India.) So I could call her Grandma.
But, the specific group this burial is thought to be from, lived there from 800 B.C. to 300 A.D. That’s well after the dispersal of the Indo-Europeans to Europe, though some of them were still apparently hanging around in central Asia.
Hence, “auntie.”
Other things to love about this article …
She’s an older woman, about 50, buried with a toddler. Could have been Zillah from my books!
Her crescent pendant shows that archaeologists don’t know squat, and the headlines are even worse. The subheader says “a 50-year-old woman was buried with a unique ‘male’ pendant.” Reading down in the article, we find that “She was buried with this artifact that we had believed to be a sign of male burials,” because similarly shaped pendants had previously been found in men’s burials in kurgans in southern Siberia. So, because we had never found this type of pendant buried with a woman, we assumed it was a male artifact. We should be careful about making extrapolations based on what we haven’t yet found. And then putting them into headlines.
The Scythians are cool! Many of them were red-haired. When living in Asia, they made very tall hats out of felt (you can find reconstructions on Pinterest). Bill Cooper, in his book After the Flood, shows that the ancient Irish believed themselves to be descended from the Scythians, and that the word Scot comes from the same root (pp. 110 – 111).
Dr. Doug Petrovich identifies the pre-Uruk-dispersion city of Eridu as the original site of Babel. It is in southern Mesopotamia, farther south than the later city which was also called Babel.
His own translation of the Hebrew word usually rendered as “tower” notes that this is a word that can also mean temple or platform (such as a platform where ceremonies would be performed). In fact, what we find at Eridu is an Ancient-Near-Eastern-style temple that was torn down and rebuilt bigger a number of times, then had a massive platform added in front of it that dwarfed the temple itself. This was then abandoned abruptly, sat there for about 1000 years, and then Sumerians from the city of Ur attempted to add to or restore it.
That is what I remember from the video after having watched it a few days ago. I don’t believe I got any details wrong, but you can check by watching it yourself. Dr. Petrovich has a much dryer style of delivery than the inimitable geologist Dr. Kurt Wise.
Obviously, Dr. Petrovich’s interpretation of the “tower” of Babel differs from the treatment I gave it in my own books: it is farther south, and though big, it is not an actual skyscraper-type tower. Still, I can’t get over the coolness of the idea that archaeologists might actually have found it. I dealt with this problem in The Long Guest by having a year of heavy rains almost completely destroy the tower (made of mud bricks) after it was abandoned. If I had followed Dr. Petrovich, I need not have bothered.
Everyone has to have their 15 minutes of appearing on video, right?
My wonderful sister, who has a YouTube channel, graciously offered to interview me about The Scattering Trilogy. Here, you can watch us chat about genres, languages, and paganism, and how it all fits in.
Pilgrim’s family climb over the stile to call him back. From Dangerous Journey.
This is why I love home schooling. I learn so much.
I can’t say the 1600s (also known as the Seventeenth Century) were covered very well in my own education. I heard, dimly, of one or two events, like the First Thanksgiving and the Salem Witch Trials (which took place near the end of the century, 1692). I was exposed to a kids’ version of Pilgrim’s Progress. In other contexts, unconnected from history lessons, I heard the names of a few notables from the century such as Bach, and saw a picture of a Cavalier or two. But all these things were floating around without any context. I had no idea of how they were connected to each other, or even that they were happening around the same time. They were, frankly, all mixed up with things from the following century.
Now [this post written in 2019], studying it in chronological order with my kids, I have to say that I like learning about the 1600s. A lot of really horrible things happened, like the beginnings of colonization and of the Atlantic slave trade. But many really interesting things were happening too. Some of them, like the English Civil War, I had barely heard of. Also, this was an amazing century for music and art.
And the clothes. My goodness, the clothes! Long curly wigs, big white collars, hundreds of buttons! They must have been so inconvenient to wear (and to wash. Especially in brackish water. After you’d been on the Mayflower and hadn’t washed for three months). But they look so cool, so dignified, in illustrations! And there is the contrast between the colorful, swashbuckling Cavalier look and the restrained, clean-lined, monochromatic Puritan Sunday best.
The pictures in this post are taken from Alan Parry’s 1985 illustrations of Pilgrim’s Progress in the children’s book Dangerous Journey. I love the 17th-century clothing and the way that the illustrations suggest etchings, which were being done in the 17th century by the likes of Rembrandt.
Pilgrim, still wearing the burden on his back, meets Mr. Worldly Wise.
A few highlights of the 17th Century:
The founding of Jamestown, Virginia (1607). Jamestown was first run along communist lines, and it was a disaster. In order to get the ne’er-do-wells there to actually build a fort, grow their own food, etc., they needed John Smith to whip them into shape, plus a boatload of mail-order brides (really!), plus allowing private property.
The founding of Plymouth, Massachusetts (1620). Interestingly, the Massachusetts colony also tried communism. Their contract with the London Company stipulated that for seven years, the products of the colony were to be put in a common fund to be shared by all the colonists. But after only three years they had to stop this arrangement and give each family their own plot of farm land.
The English Civil War (1642 – 1651). Cavaliers (Royalists) vs. Roundheads (Parliamentarians). The English got rid of their tyrant (Charles I), only to have him replaced by an ideologue (Oliver Cromwell). When Cromwell died, they were relieved to go back to just a regular tyrant (Charles II).
John Bunyan (1628 – 1688). Bunyan was a traveling tinker, yet he wrote one of the world’s top best sellers, Pilgrim’s Progress. He also wrote his spiritual autobiography, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners. (Is that a great title for an autobiography, or what?)
The Great Fire of London (1666). It burned for three days. Four-fifths of London burned down. “Hundreds of people fled to St. Paul’s Cathedral. But the flames swept up the walls, burning timbers and melting the lead in the roof until it ran down toward the river like molten lava. The stones in the walls themselves began to explode from the heat!” (Wise Bauer 126).
Rembrandt van Rijn (1606 – 1669). Art!
Vivaldi (1678 – 1741), Bach (1685 – 1750), and Handel (1685 – 1759). I might be sort of cheating, including Bach and Handel in this century, since they were only 15 when it closed. But both these geniuses were born and educated during the 1600s.
Sources
Bauer, Susan Wise. The Story of the World: History for the Classical Child, vol. 3: Early Modern Times: from Elizabeth the First to the Forty-Niners. Well-Trained Mind Press, 2004.
Demar, Gary, et. al. Building a City on a Hill. American Vision, 1997, 2005.
Hannula, Richard. Trial and Triumph: Stories from Church History. Canon Press, 1999. “Chapter 30: John Bunyan,” p. 181 ff.
Hunkin, Oliver, ed., & Alan Parry, illustrator. Dangerous Journey. Text copyright 1985 Yorkshire Television Ltd.. Worldwide coedition by Lion Hudson plc, Mayfield House, Oxford. US edition by Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, MI, 2012.
Stebbing, Barry. God & the History of Art I. How Great Thou ART Publications. “Rembrandt van Rijn: A Man of Sorrows,” p. 65 ff.
For a tag, you are given a series of prompts around a particular theme, and you answer the prompts, usually with the names of books you’ve read.
Para que lo sepas, I had to restrain myself from naming one of my own books for almost every one of these prompts. After all, the Scattering Trilogy is multigenerational; life-affirming; about rebirth; includes a fair amount of food, etc. Anyway, that’s en mi opinion. But I will do this tag like a normal person and name books by other people.
Photo by Chait Goli on Pexels.com
The Day of the Dead is all about remembering and honoring past generations.
Name a book with an intergenerational cast or a strong focus on family.
Pavilion of Women, by Pearl Buck. Buck is a master at sliding seamlessly through time in her stories. In the opening scene, Madame Wu is sitting in her chamber on the morning of her fortieth birthday. Her maidservant comes in to comb her hair, and suddenly we are in this same bedroom twenty-four years ago, on the morning after Madam Wu married Mr. Wu, and the same maidservant has come in, and she is nervous as a cat around her new mistress, because she knows that she just had sex for the first time. Now, twenty-four years later again, the servant is much more at ease with Madam Wu, but she does not know that her mistress has decided that as of her fortieth birthday, she will stop living to keep the Wu household running smoothly, and start living for herself. She just has to get through the party.
Dia de los Muertos is an important Mexican holiday. Name a book that takes place in Mexico or includes Mexican culture.
I’ve been slo-mo bingeing on books about the archaeology of Mesoamerica. Of course, with books like these, which are about as old as I am, you need to supplement them with current articles, since new discoveries and analyses keep being made.
This holiday is often celebrated with vibrant, colorful imagery and sugar skulls. Name a book with a cover as visually-interesting and colorful as a sugar skull.
I will never stop promoting the art of Trina Schart Hyman.
Food is an important part of the Dia de los Muertos celebration. Food is set out on altars for the spirits of departed family members.
Tell us a book where food really makes the story!
The No. Ladies’ Detective Agency books. These are written from multiple perspectives, but arguably the main character is Precious Ramotswe, founder of the No. Ladies’ Detective Agency, the only female-run detective agency in Botswana. Mma Ramotswe is fat (“traditionally built”), and while not unusually greedy, she does enjoy her food and thinks about it fairly often. She always likes to visit the formidable Mma Potokwane, who runs an orphanage, because although Mma Potokwane is sure to ask for some kind of favor for her orphans, she always serves Mma Ramotswe a generous piece of cake, sometimes two.
“Some people very clearly and obviously would like to eat more cake. It might as well be printed on their forehead: Greedy person.” Ah yes, that would be me.
Dia de los Muertos is not only celebrated in Mexico, but also in Central and South America. Name a book that takes place in Central or South America or has a Central or South American author.
I’ve read a lot of missionary stories, but Bruchko is one of the most remarkable. It takes place among the Motilone, who live in the jungle somewhere along the border of Venezuela and Colombia.
In addition to sugar skulls, flowers and butterflies are also symbols of this holiday. Tell us a book with flowers or butterflies on the cover
Nailed it.
The Day of the Dead is about celebrating life. Name a book that celebrates life.
The book of Job, in the Bible.
You think I’m kidding? No, listen.
Job isn’t about Job patiently putting up with suffering, proving what a good person he is, and then God rewards him. That’s the caricature, but it’s almost the opposite of the real theme of the book.
The consensus in Ancient Near Eastern wisdom literature was that, since God is just, if anything bad happens to anyone, it must be their fault. This is still, by the way, the essence of human wisdom in many parts of the globe, especially in Hinduism. It is also many people’s instinct when we see a horrible disaster befall someone, to find some way that the unfortunate person brought it upon themselves, or “how this could have been avoided.” It makes us feel a little more in control.
The book of Job exists to subvert this universally accepted bit of “wisdom.”
Job starts out as a model of the good person in the Ancient Near East. He has seven sons (the perfect number!), and three daughters; he offers regular animal sacrifices to God. And he’s rich, as he should be. Everything is making sense, see?
Now we take this model Good Person and visit all kinds of punishments on him. And this must be an expose, right? It must be Justice Falling At Last!
Job’s three “friends” show up, and they proceed to preach some very reasonable, theologically sound sermons just like you could hear in any of the wisdom literature of the day. God is just. He rewards the righteous and punishes the wicked. Therefore you must have deserved this somehow. If you say you haven’t, you are defying God! Beat that!
Their logic is flawless. And God sides with Job against them. “You have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has.”
If that’s not life-affirming, I don’t know what is.
It is also a day of remembering loved ones who passed on. Name a book that was either given to you or reminds you of a loved one who passed away.
Let me tell you about Alice.
I can tell you all about her now, because she’s with the Lord. No privacy risk or anything like that. I’d post a picture if I had one, but I don’t.
By the time I knew Alice, she was in her late eighties. (I was in my late teens.) She mentored me for a few years before she got dementia. She was a sweet, little old German-American lady, with a sly sense of humor. She could do impressions, but used this skill judiciously. Once she said to me, “You want to know why I never married?” And then, for an answer, she quoted the King James verse, but with different punctuation: “I would not have thee, ignorant brethren.” Props to you if you get that joke.
The “brethren” that she “would not have” were certainly missing out, because Alice was a treasure. Perhaps they overlooked her good qualities because of a facial deformity. She had been bitten on the cheek by a horse as a child, and it wasn’t until she was an adult that she was able to afford corrective surgery.
Anyway, one day when I was at Alice’s house, I picked up the book The Holiness of God by R.C. Sproul. She encouraged me to borrow it. I expected it to be a dry, academic read, because it was on a lofty theological topic. But no, it was written for the layperson, and was very accessible. A page-turner, in fact. To this day I associate that book with Alice.
El flor del Muerto – The flower of the dead. Marigolds are used in massive quantities on the Day of the Dead. These flowers represent the sun and rebirth. Also believe to guide the spirits back home. Name a book about rebirth.
The Great Good Thing, by Andrew Klavan. Unfortunately, I have lent my copy out, so I can’t show you a picture. This is the story of how Klavan grew up as secular Jew on Long Island, ran away from home, lived as a hobo for several years, became a hard-boiled noir crime writer and a Hollywood success, and then became a Christian at the age of 50. He is now a Christian, Jewish, hard-boiled noir crime writer who also writes YA and fantasy.
If you want to read a novel about rebirth, try Identity Man, also by Andrew Klavan.
Colors are used as a form of symbolism in the decorations and sugar skulls. Some of the colors used in association with Dia de los Muertos are yellow (unity), white (hope and purity), red (blood and life), purple (mourning), and pink (happiness).
Take a photo of some book spines in the Dia de los Muertos colors!
And a happy Dia de los Muertos to all who celebrate ❤
P.S. Disclaimer about Memorializing Our Dead
If anyone feels uncomfortable with me doing this tag, because, you know, skulls and dead people and paganism, I get it.
Let me reiterate a point I have made before, that pagan practices (especially old ones with deep roots) often fulfill basic human needs that every society needs to fulfill, such as celebration, marking the seasons, etc. In this case, the basic human need is to continue to feel a connection to, and to honor, our loved ones who have died. In a way, it’s part of the mourning process. Modern American society is terrible at this, sorry to say. The only formal time to remember the person is during the funeral and burial, after which the mourners are expected to basically stop talking about the person except to very close friends or relatives. Bringing them up, or continuing to visibly grieve, causes that sin of all sins, social awkwardness. This is pretty harsh, and it does not match well with the way that grieving goes for most people.
There are ways to provide for ongoing grieving, honoring, and remembering that are not ancestor worship. For example, in Indonesia, the Muslims have memorial services at 30 days, 100 days, and a year after the death. The people groups of Kalimantan (pagan and sometimes Christian as well) have a second, larger, funeral ceremony, usually a year later, when they dig up the person’s bones and re-inter them in an ossuary with the bones of the family. The Christians will have about a week or so of viewing services while they wait for people to gather for the funeral; then the graveside service; then that night an additional “comfort” service. Most of these take place at the family’s house, and they mean the house is filled with people, songs, and food. The family is not left alone. The people who attend don’t have to say or do anything special beyond “we share in your grief.” They just have to be physically present. This is also a better social rule than having to come up with something to say.
Christians will also have a vigil at their relatives’ graves on the night before Easter. This might sound creepy – and maybe it is – but sometimes when facing something as awful as death, we have to embrace the creepy and it will actually haunt us less.
So all that to say, while I am not recommending pagan worship, and while Christians are definitely forbidden from trying to contact the dead, I think having something like a Dia de los Muertos is a good idea on a psychological level. And yes, I did get teary-eyed when watching Coco.
I’m sure you guys have been waiting for me to post about the “Dragon Man” skull recently* found in China.
*Actually found 85 years ago, hidden in an abandoned well by the finder, and recently recovered by his family. But what’s 85 years among friends?
What’s not to love about Dragon Man? He was found in Heilongjiang province, not too far from the Liao River, home of the “pig dragon” artifacts and visited by Enmer and friends in The Long Guest.
Also, he is suspiciously large. At least, his skull is. Giants interbreeding with humans, anyone?
Finally, because he is a “mosaic” (a specimen that combines characteristics from what are supposed to be different branches of the human family tree), he, once again, throws a wrench into the scheme of “hominin” families as evolutionary biologists have been attempting to lay it out. As does almost every find, all the time. D.M. has even caused some scientists to question whether we should be classifying all the different “hominins” as different species at all. Q.E.D.
Out of Babel Books 
