30.06–02.07.2026
As I have been blessed with what could only be called a spotty memory (perhaps a learned coping mechanism, but I don’t really remember, so I guess it works). As I result, I can’t recall any of what my years of Sunday school and catechism actually taught. Over the years, this has led be to explore my own philosophical studies, which gradually wound their way back around to the books of the Bible.
What struck me upon revisiting Genesis about 10 years ago, was how little of it has seeped into the general zeitgeist. I am pretty sure I would have been fascinated with the mention of a race of giants, the product of forbidden union between humans and angels. Hold on, could there have been allusions to Bigfoot in the Bible? I’ll make sure and circle back on that.
When I wrote my second novel, Burn Your Starry Crown, I envisioned the creator as a distant CEO, the head of a Byzantine organization that hasn’t been seen around in years, but everyone fears could be back at any time. Whenever angels, members of the Upstairs Agency, referred to their chief, they used the term He/She/Them, a term I meant to indicate universal totality as well as poke a little fun at the pronoun culture wars that were raging at the time.
The first thing that struck me upon rereading Genesis, was as God was first creating humankind in Genesis 1:26, it was written as, “Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.” From the perspective of the second decade of the second millennium this seems to denote an inherent plurality in the creator, which to me makes perfect sense. He/She/Them surely embodied the original encompassing spirit, the OG, that Walt Whitman much later envisioned when he wrote in Leaves of Grass, “And of these one and all I weave the song of myself.”
However, as anyone can tell you, it is no fun at all to hang out with people exactly like yourself. (Do not get me started on the white supremacists.) There is nothing like a living mirror to point out the things in your own personality that drive you crazy. As the creator must, by definition, embody every conceivable notion or state, can fallibility be off the list? Of course not. It is rude to think so.
Fortunately, He/She/They quickly sees the remedy to what could have ended up as humankind’s eternal insufferability, at least from a godhead’s perspective; split up the prototype, it would certainly be more entertaining. And so we are, for better or worse.
Román Leão 