The Sphinx's Heart and the Lion of St. Mark

I originally posted this on Patreon a couple weeks ago, but I recently decided to narrow down my community-building efforts in order to make the best use of my time. For now, I have put my Patreon on pause. (New members can still get all existing benefits for only their initial charge, but I will not be creating any new content for Patreon for the foreseeable future.)

Starting today, I have decided to put up a series of posts over the next few months that let you peek into my research and cool things I’ve learned while writing my Rise of the Grigori series, a young adult epic historical fantasy set in the late 18th century which incorporates ancient religions, multiple cultures, and countries all over the world (including one I made up that’s inspired by Atlantis).

I mean, c’mon, the research and learning this stuff is part of what makes it fun for me. I figured that seeing the things that led me to make the decisions I did in the books would be kind of cool for you, too.

Right? Right?

I posted this on Patreon on Friday, September 4, and the quote came from my first draft words that morning. In case you’re not 100% familiar with the story because you haven’t read any of the books yet (and, ahem, you can get started with a free standalone prequel for free if you want to remedy that), several of my main characters are shapeshifters.

The world uses the idea that the Creator made multiple races at the beginning of time, including seraphim, cherubim, humans, and, erm, undines.

Okay, so the undines, a.k.a. merfolk, were where I jumped off into the “fantasy” aspect of the cosmology. Hey, my job is to make stuff up. That’s what makes it so fun. (And mermaids might be real. There’s lots of stuff about the ocean we don’t know yet. ☺)

However, not only can my undines appear in both half-fish and fully human form, but so can the other races (except humans. Poor clay-based humans, we’re too stuck in the material plane to shapeshift).

I didn’t come up with all that out of nowhere, though. I’ll let my original post take it from here.

“Darkness conceals the truth, and light reveals it. Choose the light. The rest is moths and rust.” - from The Sphinx’s Heart by Talena Winters.

From Patreon, September 4, 2020:

“Cox, you have so much potential, but you worry far too much about what matters little, and not enough about what matters most. Darkness conceals the truth, and light reveals it. Be sure you, too, always choose the Light. All the rest is moths and rust.”

— Eduardo Romero speaking in The Sphinx's Heart, Rise of the Grigori Book 2

It's been a good couple of weeks for my Sphinx’s Heart project. I've added almost exactly 20,000 words in the last two weeks, and I'm hoping to sneak in a few more today and this weekend. It's getting real, folks.

Yesterday, I planned out my publishing schedule for the next year, and if I can keep on track like this, I should be able to publish by the end of March 2021.

PLUS! AND!

I should also get another side story novella written and published in January, and a contemporary romance published in May, if all goes well.

It's crazy how much time it takes to write one of these long fantasy books, especially when you compare how quick it is to produce something much shorter.

Why my Cherubim are Sphinxes and Lumasi Shapeshifters

In the biblical book of Ezekiel, the eponymous prophet has a vision of four strange creatures. Here is how he describes them in Ezekiel 1:

I looked, and I saw a violent storm coming out of the north – an immense cloud with flashing lightning and surrounded by brilliant light. The centre of the fire looked like glowing metal, and in the fire was what looked like four living creatures. In appearance their form was human, but each of them had four faces and four wings. Their legs were straight; their feet were like those of a calf and gleamed like burnished bronze. Under their wings on their four sides they had human hands. All four of them had faces and wings, and the wings of one touched the wings of another. Each one went straight ahead; they did not turn as they moved.

Their faces looked like this: each of the four had the face of a human being, and on the right side each had the face of a lion, and on the left the face of an ox; each also had the face of an eagle. Such were their faces. They each had two wings spreading out upwards, each wing touching that of the creature on either side; and each had two other wings covering its body. 

Later in chapter 10, these creatures are called cherubim and again described as having four faces, as well as human hands.

Cherubim make a few other appearances in the Bible. There were cherubim woven into the curtains of the Israelites' desert tabernacle, and later into the curtains of Solomon's Temple, with their lion face pointing one direction and their human face pointing the other. I imagine these images in relief, as a single colour, against another solid background, so they were only able to show two aspects of the cherubim at once.

In Ezekiel 41, the prophet gets to visit the heavenly tabernacle of which the others were only a copy, and cherubim are also woven into the curtains there.

The four Living Creatures (cherubim) also make an appearance in the book of Revelation.

And, of course, the most famous location of cherubim is the cover of the Ark of the Covenant—you know, the one made famous by Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark, wherein they depicted them much like the ones in this c. 1900 painting by James Tissot:

For some unknown reason, in that movie and in so many other illustrations, cherubim are always depicted as how we now visualize "angels"—men or women with wings on their backs, stretched forward rather rigidly. No hints of lions, bulls, or eagles (unless you count the wings).

In this 1728 woodcut, they look more like soft Greek putti than the fierce guardian warriors of ancient times:

I don't know about you, but I feel sorry for the models who had to stoop for ages in those postures!

No wonder so many of us modern folks grow up picturing angels as soft, feminine beings who spend most of their time floating on clouds playing harps and eating cream cheese... wait. That last part was probably just in an ad campaign. (But, as someone who is lactose intolerant, I sincerely hope that I can eat cream cheese in the afterlife. It's amazing.)

However, the cherubim of the ancients were portrayed a lot in near eastern culture of all religions. They weren't just guardians and chariot-bearers in the Hebrew religion, but were often portrayed guarding the gates of other holy places.

Only, they often looked like this:

Or this:

Or this:

Yep. Griffins and sphinxes and lamassu are all versions of the same creatures described multiple times in the Bible as cherubim.

But why the shapeshifting?

A long-popular illustration of Ezekiel's vision of the cherubim described above was created in the 17th century by Matthaeus Merian, and has graced pages of illustrated Bibles ever since. Check out this tortured representation:

I know, right?

Now, in Matthaeus's defense, this was long before the Internet, and travelling to the Middle East was done, but with great difficulty. So he'd probably never seen a lamassu, and may not have even heard of the Great Sphinx.

And yet, this scream-inducing representation of cherubim has fueled some truly nightmarish variations. (Okay, I'm not going to lie—that particular description in Ezekiel is weird, yo. I mean, eyes and hands everywhere. I think a lot of that is probably figurative, though, not literal. But who knows? I wasn't there. It's just that cherubim are never described or portrayed that way anywhere else.)

Fortunately, other artists since then have come up with something more reasonable, and much closer to where I landed—that these are either four different creatures, all with wings, or they are one creature with the possibility of different attributes at different times.

Think about it. If you were trying to weave a shapeshifter into a temple curtain, or, say, represent one on a temple wall (I'm thinking of the entire pantheon of Egyptian gods here), how would you do it?

After all, there are sometimes conflicting descriptions of the same "living creatures" who are actually cherubim, or weird variations like hands showing up out of nowhere. Even in Ezekiel, they are described as having two distinct sets of four heads. (There's overlap, but what was a bull the first time is described as a "cherub" in chapter 10. *cough* Lamassu *cough* anyone?)

In addition, spirits in both biblical and extra-biblical sources are often described as having variations in appearance.

Do I know for certain that cherubim are shapeshifters? No. Just like I don't know for certain that the "wheels within wheels" that they use to propel the chariot of God around are gyroscopes.

But I'm sure having fun thinking of them that way. And no one knows that they aren't, so why not?

By the way, in the early Christian church, the four attributes of the cherubim in Ezekiel's vision were eventually ascribed to the four apostles who wrote the gospels in the New Testament. (Somehow, ancient scholars weren't confused about the separate natures of the cherubim characteristics. What happened with you, Matthaeus?)

The winged lion was ascribed to St. Mark, and later adopted as a symbol of the Venetian Republic. There are several rather striking statues of this sphinx, and I used an image of one in the quote card above.

I hope you enjoyed this peek into the world of my Grigori books. If you liked it, please leave a comment below. I would love to share more of my research with you and the reasons why I made the decisions I did in my books... as long as this kind of thing doesn't bore you to tears, haha.

Happy Friday!

(Note: The header image is licensed through 123rf.com, and the rest of these images are either under a Creative Commons license or in the public domain.)