Finding My Revelations

This novel started with two inspirations which quickly became intertwined.  The first were stories about the Babylonian temple harlots.  The second was the idea of using superheroes as my main characters.

Religions have always fascinated me.  There is a huge variety in beliefs and cultural attitudes out there, all with people equally devoted to them.  I believe humans may be drawn to different religions but begin their search for the same reason, to explain their personal experiences and sense of something beyond themselves.

I first learned about the Babylonian temple harlots in high school.  They were initially presented as prostitutes, a way for corrupt priests to make money.  However, as I started doing my own research and learned more, it became clear that this was a perfectly socially acceptable form of worship.  The French refer to the moment of orgasm as le petit mors, the little death.  It is implied that it is a moment of spiritual and emotional transfiguration and awareness.  The temple harlots were trained to help worshippers achieve that moment.

The idea of sex as something sacred which could be pursued openly intrigued me.  It is such a radical difference from our “don’t ask, don’t tell” social policy.  More research led me to the myth of the succubus, a demon which comes to virtuous men and has sex with them in their sleep, causing them to sin and lose their souls to the devil.  The two ideas became paired in my mind.  Many pagan beliefs and deities became demonized by the Roman Catholic Church (such as the Celtic god of the woodlands, Cernunnos, who was remodeled as the devil).  I wondered, could the temple harlots have been demonized as succubi?  There’s absolutely no evidence for it, but the idea stuck with me.

The second part of my inspiration was to use a superhero as my heroine.  I grew up in during the revitalization of comics, when stories moved out of childhood and into maturity.  I devoured stories plumbing the depth of the human/superhuman experience, such as Chris Claremont’s Phoenix and Dark Phoenix sagas and Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns series.  Heroes weren’t infallible, they made mistakes and questionable moral decisions.  I wanted to create a heroine who felt the weight of her supernatural gifts, who didn’t want the life of sacrifice which was required of a hero. 

Dani was born out of a mixture of defiance and desperation, ready to go down fighting to her last breath but still denying there was anything good or worthwhile about her.  She would be descended from the temple harlots, able to open her lover’s mind to the infinite majesty of the divine cosmos.  But what would that kind of awareness do to someone’s mind?  People are quite happy in their delusions most of the time.  Those without self-sustaining delusions are the clinically depressed.

Dani needed an appropriate hero to match her, which let me explore another idea of mine.  A hero who was not more badass than his heroine but who inspired her instead.  It’s a bit of a flip on the traditional match of the romance hero and heroine, where the goodness of the heroine inspires the aggressive hero to become more than he has been.  While Dani emerged as a full-fledged (and opinionated!) character in moments, Michael took a little more time to come fully to light.  I had to coax him to share his secrets with me.

He began his fictional existence as a youth counsellor, but that didn’t quite sit right, no matter how I tried to make it work.  Then one day I met a little boy with an attendant in tow.  His parents explained that the boy had severe autism and the attendant was his therapist, who worked with him every day.  Lightning struck and I suddenly understood Michael’s true role.  He was a developmental therapist who worked with children and he had psychometric gifts which allowed him to peer into otherwise silent children and find out what they were feeling.  Like discovering that the previous half-hour’s tantrum was because of an itchy clothing tag.  His big-hearted kindness and optimism came into focus and I finally understood how he fit into the story.

After I had my hero and heroine, then I needed an appropriate villain.  Someone who was the antithesis of them both, combining their worst qualities and fears.  André deigned to explain it to me.  Some people are given supernatural gifts, and those people have the god-given right to rule over the non-gifted.  Ruthless, driven and sociopathically practical, he is simply doing what anyone else would do, given the opportunity: making sure he is not out-gunned in the drive to acquire people with special gifts.

The three of them quickly took over the story and pulled me into a new world filled with strange powers and secret societies.  I’ve only begun to scratch the surface in Revelations and I’m looking forward to telling many more stories of the lalassu, the hidden people.