The Ascension Meta from Hell Part Deux - the Belly of the Beast and Sympathy with the Devil
There are so many things happening in Abyss that I really, as I began to write, I was wondering less if, and more how, I was going to get everything covered. Since then I have had a misbehaving USB drive, had to resort to Linux to find the lost file and then had a major virus scare at work knocking out my workstation and all three of my work USB backups ... and I fixed it without any of our technicians touching my computer either.
Anyway, I personally find this episode is very frustrating. When analysing what is going on it brings in one set of mythemes and folklore tropes and it runs with them. All this, while we are nodding at what they are saying and thinking we get it, but we are being mislead. It does a sharp turn in another direction throwing us off and confusing us. This is bad enough when done once one has to say, after it happens several times it makes you want to tell the writers " for goodness sake, Guys, at least try to be consistent ! "
My job in this meta is to try and make some sense of this maze and lead you through it. I hope I make some sense, if not don't blame my powers of analysis, blame the people who put it together.
Oh and yes ... I feel very bad about what I said in the previous meta about Jack not being important in this episode. Having looked again at Abyss I realised I was rather wrong in what I was saying. Jack, and his journey, are a very important part of what is going on. He is a catalyst of many of the events that happen here and although I may be wittering on long and loud about Daniel in this meta Jack certainly has a big part to play. It's just that I have to witter to, well ... explain everything.
There is even a little bit of Greek Mythology in all of this. Colonel O’Neill has been dragged far from his home planet by the symbiote Kanan and in trying to find his way home is visited by his ascended friend. He is like Odysseus, stuck on a ten year journey and who went down to Hades to speak to Tiresias the dead prophet to find out why the gods wouldn't let him get home. For some reason my head seems to equate Tiresias and Daniel although I can’t actually at this point in time tell you why … perhaps I will have to get back to you on that ...
I know that it was said by TPTB (Brad Wright in the Martin Wood Director's mini-doc on the Season Six DVD) that they didn't want Daniel popping up like Clarence in A Wonderful Life in this episode going 'Hi guys' although he is doing a pretty good impression of that to me! It also seems a very popular Sci Fi Fantasy trope to get one's dead friends to come back to give advice. I felt a little let down when I found out how many times it had happened actually. I thought Stargate was doing something different and important here.
When I first watched this episode I was reminded of Hercules the Legendary Journeys when I somehow caught one episode of when it was on British terrestrial TV. Iolaus, Hercules' friend and travelling companion, seems to have had a similar habit to Daniel in getting killed repeatedly. This show did a similar discussion-after death-with-his-friend in the episode I saw. This was despite Iolaus being elsewhere and very dead and embalmed at the time. Then there is Farscape where according to magnavox_23, Zhaan comes back in the episode John Quixote to talk to John Crichton when he is in sticky corner. Even Star Wars has this trope - Obi Wan Kenobi comes back after death to give a warning to Luke Skywalker saying if he goes into battle with his father in the wrong frame of mind all will not go well.
Now, in my previous meta on Meridian I was explaining how the ideas of Joseph Campbell and his analysis of myth had given me a structure to understand the slightly confusing events of Daniel's ascension. I was saying that from doing a little research his experiences fitted in to a pattern that is found in many other world myths and stories and that these experiences are commonly known as The Hero’s Journey. In Meridian we saw how he began this journey by Crossing the Threshold, aided by Oma and this is where the story left us. Apart from the possible puff of air which was blown in Jack’s direction in Revelations we didn’t know anymore. Now in Season Six, in Abyss, we will be looking at what has happened to Daniel and the next stage along his journey through Ascension.
(2.0) Where Up is really Down ... and where Down is actually more a state of mind ...
Although in Meridian it was very clearly shown visually what Ascension meant physically - going glowy and rising upwards - I am going to explain that what happened to Daniel is actually totally the opposite.
If we think about what the word Ascension actually means, " the act of rising to an important position or a higher level" (Oxford English Dictionary) and the significance various myths, legends and modern religions give to it, taken from a Stargate perspective things can get a bit confusing. Its the up/down dark/light religious dichotomy that we often find in religion these days.
In Shamanism for example (I will be talking more about this in a great deal of detail later) Shamans ascend to the higher plane, or a lower world, to do battle with evil spirits. In the Jewish Torah we hear how in the book of Daniel Isaiah ascends to Heaven after being sawn in half, and Enoch ascends in a story in the Apocrypha. Christianity has Christ, his mother Mary, and various saints ascending into heaven from where they listen to the prayers of the faithful and help out with acts of mercy. Buddhist souls which are enlightened head off to Nirvana, aided as I explained in my meta on Maternal Instinct about by their Oma, Kwan Yin, and for all I know, go glowy too like she is. Even the Miraj of Mohammed within Islam tells of how he rode a white horse with wings to Heaven.
You see where I am coming from when I am producing this list. What myth and legends suggest (and what Daniel from his anthropological studies would have come to expect) is that persons who have ascended in Judeo-Christian religion, done so in the Buddhist faith, or even as part the most ancient Shamanistic practices, get to be able to do something in that state. He does say to Jack in Meridian, ‘I can do more this way’ and it seems pretty sure he was expecting to be doing that when he joined Oma and her merry band of Ancients. What happens in reality is Daniel finds his lot - powerless hanging around watching his friends suffer and not being able to interfere - is quite a bit different from what he thought was likely to happen.
Now, when I was first looking at the whole ascension thing I did a lot of hand wringing about Daniel’s plight. I was frustrated partly at the lack of good story-lines they could have produced from this event (we never really DO know what Daniel was up to off-screen do we?) and partly at the frustrations I saw our poor glowy archaeologist going through. Then I looked at it in another way however, through the lens of myth, and realised that actually the whole glowing, rising up, white light etc. was just a smoke-screen being thrown around the salient facts. If I looked at it from the proper perspective what seemed to be a pretty glowified holiday in the clouds actually turned into something darker and deeper and more profound for the character to experience.
If we look at what is happening here not as Daniel flying off somewhere into the ether, but as him entering a psychological time of trial things make a little more sense. That day I was thinking in the shower and I had that bit of a eureka moment I was thinking of Abyss, Jack being held a prisoner in Ba'al's fortress and specifically about the clever shots showing the varied gravity fields in the prison cell. Jack is there despairing and stuck in a very dark place as a prisoner. He is mentally, but more importantly as he is a man of action, physically stuck in a hole. The director, actors and designers for that episode couldn't have rammed the point home more clearly (or literally) either, and it certainly makes me chuckle when I think about it.
Daniel is also in this hole with Jack even if he is not actually physically there. He is suffering too, but in a different manner. He has to stand by and watch that friend repeatedly tortured to death and brought back to life. He can't do anything about it and has to explain why that is to Jack - for him it’s very much an intellectual problem - just as things always are. If the effects of Ascension are actually viewed as reverse to being enlightened and powerful - and instead seen as a descent to a place of limbo and powerlessness - the whole scheme of things, and specifically these events in Abyss, seem to make a little more sense. At this point on his journey - the Hero's Journey - Daniel is in fact about to experience what in myth is the Decent to the Underworld theme.
In this situation Daniel is visiting a place that in many different myths has many different names. To the Greeks it was known as Hades, in the Teutonic world and to the Vikings it was Hel and in Ancient Egypt it was known as the Am Duat. Our Ascended Hero has actually gone to The Underworld to learn things and to be initiated.
What I have to say at this point is this Underworld is not necessarily the Hell as depicted in Judeo-Christian, Buddhist and Muslim religion. It can be (and yes, we will talk about that viewpoint on this episode later) but actually at this point it is somewhere else entirely we are talking about. It is the place where, before these religious ideas arose, the dead remained after death, and is not a place of punishment. Those who go there, and are not dead themselves yet, often have an ordeal to deal with, but they are usually there to learn something rather than be imprisoned.
'In Christian symbolism, the Horned One was set, correctly, to rule over Hell. The Orthodox Hell is merely a rather childish subterfuge, a mask to disguise the true nature of the Underworld and to frighten the seeker from looking beyond dogmatic external experiences. The nature of the Guardian is not to capture souls for damnation, but to liberate them from self-imposed restrictions.' (Stewart 1988)
There are various myths and legends about what happens to heroes who make this journey to the Underworld and because of that we can use them inform us about what is happening in Abyss.
The earliest version of an underworld visit is found in the Sumerian myth of the goddess Inanna, who is paralleled in the Babylonian goddess Ishtar. In their different myths both ladies go down to the underworld for specific reasons and get trapped there so preventing the growth of vegetation on earth. The gods have to find a way to get them out and bring life back to the earth have to arrange special creatures to go on a rescue mission. This, of course, is a proto-version of the Demeter/Persephone myth because Sumeria and Babylonia were both agricultural societies.
Then there is also the Greek/Roman myth of Orpheus who goes down to the underworld to save his wife Euridice which has an interesting parallel with the story of Daniel and Shau're. I shall talk about that when I get to do meta in Season Seven for Orpheus and it also merits a mention of Jean Cocteau in Season Eight and Threads as I have said before.
Various other legendary heroes and figures, Odysseus who we compared to Jack earlier, Persephone who we have already met in my previous meta on Meridian and Hercules (not he of the 'Legendary Journeys' although I have mentioned him here) go down to the underworld for their own reasons. Even Aeneas in Virgil's Aenead goes there to speak to his dead father and receive a vision of the founding of Rome.
What I am saying here is these characters gain something from their trip to the Underworld; initiation into new insight and knowledge to aid in their personal development, the way to get home when they were lost or just a get-out of a binding contract. Although Daniel seems trapped by his Ascended state when Jack is captured in Abyss it is a learning experience for him too. It's a pretty awful one - another name for the Underworld Journey is being stuck in The Belly of the Beast. This refers of course to the Biblical story of Jonah and how he ended up for three days in the belly of a 'great fish'.
Being in a trapped and contained state is a motif which turns up many times as a theme in myth. The hero often has his back against the wall and is forced by his incarceration to think about how he got to where is now, and consider his past actions before he moves on. In the story of Jonah the Biblical character refuses God's will. He tries to escape by boat but throws himself overboard to save the sailors [familiar actions here I think] when God stirs up a storm. God then sends a large fish to swallow the errant prophet who is left to sit in its belly for three days to cool his heels until he decides to do what is being asked of him. It is also interesting to consider the use of the name Jonah in Stargate. Jonas is carrying a variant name of the Biblical character this season, and Jack was given the personality stamp of 'Jonah' in the 'belly' of the Machine Room 23 of Beneath the Surface. The writers are familiar with this trope, obviously.
Jonah, as shown in the 14th Century Antiphoner from Ranworth Church, in the Norfolk Broads in the UK.
Medieval monks creating the manuscript did not know about whales so they depicted the ‘big fish’ as a Pike,
the largest and most vicious British freshwater fish which they had probably eaten on Fast Days!
Now in various religions various saints and spiritual figures have often put themselves voluntarily in this position too and gone off to thin . To mention three, Christ went into the desert for Forty Days (remember singing a hymn at Primary School about that …) the Buddha sat beneath the Bhodi Tree and even Mohammed would seclude himself in a cave apparently. Several of these figures also have their resolution tested by one event or another. Seclusion gives Doubt (which certain religions use as a metaphorical or actual visit from the devil) a chance to make itself known.
To make things more clear about Abyss in this sense, Daniel has been left, to use both a mythological term, and a psychological one, in limbo. In the belly of the beast, sitting there in the dark, like someone in depression, or having a life crisis, alone with his problem. He is suddenly realising that this new glowy existence of his isn't exactly what he thought it was. He may be all light and energy but he is still in a dark place psychologically.
As I have said this could, and does, all look very bleak for Glowy!Daniel's future. If he can as Jack says, make the wind blow and throw lightning around, what is the point of having these powers when he can't use them to help those he cares about? It hurts just watching the explanation that Jack's only option in that prison is to join him in his powerless glowy state, or even worse to die an actual death. So how can a positive slant be put on these things? How can the story be seen to be moving forward, and how does it fit in with the whole journey that the hero?
In Dark Nights of the Soul Thomas Moore, a practising psychotherapist, talks about the place the hero and Daniel have found themselves at this point in their story'
'The whales' belly is, of course, a kind of womb. In your withdrawal from life and your uncertainty you are like an infant not yet born. The darkness is natural, one of the life processes. There may be some promise, the mere suggestion that life is going forward, even though you have no sense of where you are headed. It's a time of waiting and trusting. My attitude as a therapist in these situations is not to be anxious for a conclusion of even understanding. You have to sit with these things and in due time let them be revealed for what they are.' (Moore, 2004)
The way I read this, is that things are actually happening in Abyss. I think that even though we are only in episode six of this season there is a metaphorical light at the end of the tunnel if you look hard enough. In this situation Daniel is being made to take decisions - like the one to help Jack, and I know the writers claimed he did nothing but I just don't believe this. Rather than sitting on a cloud, or turning his back on his old life, he is realising how much he is missing it and thinking about helping in the way that he is able. He is going through trials, having to make choices, realising what is important to him. As he says; “I see things, I understand things, in a way I never could have before.” These are the thoughts which will bring him back to his friends and descended to the human plain of existence.
(2.1) ... how 'gate travel and travel on the astral plane have several points in common we should really know about ...
I want to take a few moments out of talking about the Hero's Journey to mention something my partner garienos brought to my attention a while ago. He was doing his usual running to catch up with my fan interests -- watching the original Stargate film so he knew who people like Daniel Jackson and Scary Aliens impersonating Gods were when I mentioned them -- and then he pointed something out to me. While I have an interest in Comparative Mythology he has an interest in all things more occult and esoteric. The first thing that came into his head when he saw Stargate travel was ... well ... Shamanism … and he rang me up to tell me about it too.
That isn't quite as daft as it sounds, in fact it makes a lot of sense if you look at it a bit more closely.
What is said to happen in this belief system that their healers learn to leave their body and ascend smoke of the fire to a hole in the roof of their hut, or descend through a hole in the earthen floor, to fight the evil spirits afflicting the tribe. garienos pointed out that the use of the 'gate to transport SG1 to other planets could be seen as metaphorical for the out-of-body journey a Shaman goes on. In fact, once I had done some research in his library (I am professionally trained in this discipline so can confirm correctly he has enough books to open a small branch to the public) I soon saw what he was saying.
'Entrances … commonly lead down into a tunnel or tube that conveys the shaman to an exit, which opens upon bright marvellous landscapes. From there the shaman travels wherever he desires for minutes or even hours, finally returning back ... to emerge at the surface, where he entered.' (Harner 1990)
If that is not a pretty good description of a trip through the wormhole, then I am much mistaken. Further researching gave me a bit of a shock. garienos wasn't wrong in his suggestions, and in fact he pointed the way to understand Daniel's character and what happens to him over ten seasons a little more clearly. My reading around about Pre-Christian Mystery Religions had alerted me to a few ideas and these were only confirmed when I did further research into Shamans and Shamanism. Let me give you a few quick quotations to prove what I am saying …
'Although to be a shaman [or female shamanka] was in a sense a privileged position, it was not usually sought. Rather it seized one, and often arose for a threatening experience such as sickness, assault, or 'near death' experience ... Shamanic journeys were dangerous, involving magical dismemberment and rebirth, and possibly one might not return from the spiritual world.' (Moorey, 1996 p75)
'Frequently, initiation involves an encounter with a divine or semi-divine being. This spirit appears to the candidate in a dream (or during illness or other situation), indicating that the candidate has been chosen and urging him or her to pursue a new life.' (NicMhacha p33)
'Shamanic Cosmology almost invariably involves the perception of three sacred realms: the Sky Realm (or Upper World) the Middle Realm (or Earth), and the Lower Realm (or Underworld) ... The Shaman specializes in an altered or ecstatic state in which his or her soul is perceived to leave the body and either ascend to the Sky Realm or descend to the Underworld ... Shamans are also credited with magical abilities, including mastery over fire and magical flight.' (Ibid p32)
This covers playing with fire on Kheb, molecular level damage by Naquaria radiation, Oma and Ascension, going glowy in the Infirmary and the events of Abyss. The effects even this stage are pretty far reaching but they will impact on the team and Daniel right up until dealing with Adria and the Ori in The Ark of Truth. Our archaeologist is, whether we like it or not, even though we see him being dragged there literally kicking and screaming, turned by his experiences into the SG1 mystic. He is tried and tested through Kheb and Shi'fu and initiated during Meridian. From then on we see what the effect of this change has on him.
What I see in Ba'al's cell in Abyss is Daniel, as an initiated like those who passed through the Eleusinian Mysteries I talked about in the previous meta, offering Jack initiation into this mystery too. The problem here is that Jack isn't as mystically minded as Daniel being the grounded, practical, soldier, of the team. Being snaked (twice) is bad enough for Jack - this he knows leads to loss of control and handing his body over to someone else - but Ascension would, on top of non-interfering mean loss of his actual physical form. He would rather die than for that to happen.
Daniel is, even if Jack isn't helping, still fulfilling the traditional Shaman's role of fighting for those he protects. His' family' is SG1 and the extended 'tribe' is the SGC and Earth.
'It is said that the shaman alone can ''see the soul'' or know its form or destiny. Indeed, shamans are specialists in those areas of religious life involving the soul, including illness (which is related with loss of the soul), death or misfortune (which may require spiritual guidance or intervention), and sacrificial rites involving a mystical journey of the soul to the Otherworld.' (ibid)
When Daniel says 'This is not your life we're talking about, Jack! This is your soul!' he really means this. If you notice Daniel doesn't shy at even handling the 'destiny bit' of his shamanic role seeing the 'future' of both Jack, and later in Changeling Teal'c's prognosis when spending time with them in the infirmary after their ordeals. He tells them both not why; 'you'll just have to trust me on it' but he promises them (and us) the fact they will be fine.
(2.2) ... and finally how our writers in Stargate seem to have both an enthusiasm about, and sympathy for, writing devils into their shows.
Now, I am not talking about Apophis here (who in Egyptian mythology actually was a serpent and was killed each night by the miw wr the Great Cat) nor Sokar who played at setting up Hell as his home planet and dressed all his Jaffa up in little red devil costumes. What I am talking about is Ba'al and the fact that his name, and the fact that Jack's snake came along with the name Kanan (they way they spell it doesn't change the way it’s said) had alerted me to what was going on in Abyss even before the show had begun.
Ba'al is yet another devil in Stargate, they certainly present him as one in this too (there are many ways to depict a devil after all) but the name of his character comes from religions in the Levant area near where Judeo-Christianity later developed. Baal actually just means 'lord' in the local language and there were plenty of gods with that name around that area, which is probably where the writers got the idea to clone our Ba’al. There was certainly a Baal in the land of Canaan and in Kings 1 & 2 Elijah has a lot to do with them. My parents have always been in choirs and there has been much singing at home of 'Take all the prophets of Baal, let none of them escape you' from Mendelssohn's Oratoria over the years... Even the rock group Queen mentions this in their song Bohemian Rapsody when they use the line 'Beelzebub has a devil put aside for me ... for me ...'.
Baal came to Britain via the Phoneticians where he became Bel and was associated with the sun, fires and fertility. There are plenty of Bell Hills where fires were traditionally lit at Midsummer and in Whalton, a small village in Northumberland near where I grew up, there is still a Bale Fire on July 4th (Old Midsummer's Day) with Morris Dancing et al. This fits in rather neatly with the orange/yellow fiery decor of Ba'al's torture chamber, even if it was a little too Louis Comfort Tiffany for my taste.
To get back to the subject in hand, another reason I am pointing to Baal as devilish is appearance and a sort of hangover-inheritance from 1960s BBC TV Classic Dr Who. Another god which the Christians demonised was the Greek God Pan, who, like many nature gods had horns and was depicted as a goat. This is of course why some devil depictions get cloven hooves. Our Ba'al didn't get that, but he did get the goatee beard … as did The Master in a couple of his classic incarnations fighting Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker's Doctor. In fact polite villains of fiction, TV and film with impeccable dress sense, clipped accents and little beards are probably aiming for a similar ‘devilish’ slant.
Roger Delgado, the original Master from classic Dr Who has an uncanny resemblance to our Ba'al I think ...
But what also interests me is the tattoo on our Ba'al's Jaf'fa ...
because the way I see it ...
it sort of (to me anyway) includes both horns and wings in the design .....
In any case, when we are dealing with the Biblical Hell in Abyss and comparing it to the Underworld we were talking about earlier we have to look at the subject a bit more closely. How did what in classical times and antiquity was just a place for the dead to dwell in turn during the last decades of the first millennium into a place of punishment for the wicked? You have to understand to explain that would require a whole essay which I do not have the time or space to write. The (abbreviated) way I look at it is this; when monotheism takes over the realm of the gods, and the one in charge takes those who please him upstairs with him, everywhere else (and everyone else) which isn’t amongst the blessed ones, an angel or a saint becomes an opposing force and automatically bracketed as being in league with the devil.
We can see this occurring in this 15th Century illustration by Robinet Testard. Although it ostensibly depicts the Underworld with Persephone and Hades and even with Cerberus the three headed dog, we also see devils behind them torturing souls obviously sent there by a Judeo-Christian deity.
Now of course all of what I am writing in this section points to poor Jack in Abyss as being trapped, literally, in Biblical Hell. The writers for Stargate are themselves, and writing for an audience, who are very familiar with this Western European Judeo-Christian theme after all. Even if you look the episode title word up in a dictionary it says we are in Hell. The Oxford English Dictionary says the word abyss comes from the Greek word abussos which means ‘bottomless’ but in the New Advent online Catholic Encyclopedia it points out that in the New Testament it is only used as a word for 'the abode of evil spirits, hell'.
So, as Jack is ‘in Hell’ literally or figuratively and having an ascended being as a visitor - dressed in the nearest thing to Angel Chic I can think of with the fluffy Ascended!Sweater -- this has a few interesting connotations. This is where, as I said, I put Daniel, Jack and Jesus Christ in the same sentence. Daniel did offer his life up to save the planet full of Kelowans yet was accused of sabotage, died pretty horribly due from Naquadria poisoning and with his friends keeping vigil at his bedside ... Compare this with the Easter Story (which I will handle in more detail in Fallen) and I think we get a few familiar parallels.
If we are talking about religious themes where dead saviours (and Daniel in both Abyss and Changeling is definitely saving people) turn up to talk to friends there is a precedent set here. In the New Testament Jesus, after his resurrection [in talking about resurrection/ascension here the terms are different but the effects are similar] appeared to various followers especially on the road to Emmaus. T.S.Eliot uses this event in What the Thunder Said, part three of his poem The Wasteland.
'Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded'
This could actually be said to possibly be Daniel in Full Circle or even Orpheus but to me it just has the theme of the one who has been lost hanging around and even returning, as he says to Teal'c in Changeling 'I haven't left your side Teal'c. And I'm not going to. That's a promise.'.
This theme is used again by the same poet in Little Gidding of The Four Quartets;
'The eyes of a familiar compound ghost
Both intimate and unidentifiable.
So I assumed a double part, and cried
And heard another's voice cry: 'What! are you here?'
So, in Abyss as we are definitely talking about the Judeo-Christian Hell in this section I have to talk about Savours who go there to save people I can't miss out of this quoting part of the Apostle's creed which I have heard many times in church: 'He [Christ] suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried. He descended into Hell. On the third day He rose again. He ascended into heaven ...'. Christians know this as the Harrowing of Hell where Christ released Hell's captives, particularly Adam and Eve, and the righteous men and women of Old Testament times.
The Harrowing of Hell, depicted in the 14th Century Petites Heures de Jean de Berry
Now being saved from hell isn't a purely Christian theme. In Buddhist myth, Kwan Yin, in her form of Princess Miao Shan, is executed by her father. In one version of this legend, a supernatural tiger takes her to one of the more hell-like realms of the dead. However, instead of being punished by demons like the other inmates, Kwan Yin plays music and flowers blossom around her. The story says that Kwan Yin, by merely being in that hell, turned it into a paradise and the demon in charge of that hell had to let her and its occupants free before she could carry on causing mischief.
The nearest religious story to the events of Abyss however comes from Biblical sources again. In the New Testament, St Peter is being held in prison on the orders of Herod Agrippa. Here we have an angel helping free someone who is held captive, and that person even thinking they are hallucinating too.
Peter was sleeping between two soldiers, bound with two chains, and sentries before the door were guarding the prison. And behold, an angel of the Lord stood next to him, and a light shone in the cell. He struck Peter on the side and woke him, saying, "Get up quickly." And the chains fell off his hands. And the angel said to him, "Dress yourself and put on your sandals." And he did so. And he said to him, "Wrap your cloak around you and follow me." And he went out and followed him. He did not know that what was being done by the angel was real, but thought he was seeing a vision. When they had passed the first and the second guard, they came to the iron gate leading into the city. It opened for them of its own accord, and they went out and went along one street, and immediately the angel left him. When Peter came to himself, he said, "Now I am sure that the Lord has sent his angel and rescued me from the hand of Herod and from all that the Jewish people were expecting." (New Standard Version, Acts 12)
The Liberation of St Peter by Gerrit van HONTHORST
----------------- End of Part Two ------------------
Questions …
(1) If Michael Shanks hadn't decided on the break in Season 6, and he and RDA hadn't had to do dad duty to take time off too, do you think we would still have had such interesting storylines?
(2) I am a little sad they forgot about the 'Mother Nature' element of the Oma storyline from Maternal Instinct. What do you think they might have done with this in Season Six if they had used it, and how might we have seen Daniel portrayed?
(3) Why, apart from in Meridian, did we not see Daniel do the 'glowy octopus' bit of being an Ascended Being? Why all the traditional way of doing it as Martin Wood described rather than a few CGI tricks?
---------------------------------------------------------------More on The Ascension Meta from Hell coming up when we get to Fallen …. we will be following Daniel further on his Hero's Journey; we have reached another threshold, the one he has to cross to come home, and we will be looking more closely at some more Judeo-Christian themes.
The bibliography for this research is here as usual, and has been updated to include the new texts mentioned in this section.
Many thanks to magnavox_23 for holding my hand through this helping me with the knotty problem of getting inside Jack's mind and garienos for providing thee research material and talking stuff through with me.
Anyway, I personally find this episode is very frustrating. When analysing what is going on it brings in one set of mythemes and folklore tropes and it runs with them. All this, while we are nodding at what they are saying and thinking we get it, but we are being mislead. It does a sharp turn in another direction throwing us off and confusing us. This is bad enough when done once one has to say, after it happens several times it makes you want to tell the writers " for goodness sake, Guys, at least try to be consistent ! "
My job in this meta is to try and make some sense of this maze and lead you through it. I hope I make some sense, if not don't blame my powers of analysis, blame the people who put it together.
Oh and yes ... I feel very bad about what I said in the previous meta about Jack not being important in this episode. Having looked again at Abyss I realised I was rather wrong in what I was saying. Jack, and his journey, are a very important part of what is going on. He is a catalyst of many of the events that happen here and although I may be wittering on long and loud about Daniel in this meta Jack certainly has a big part to play. It's just that I have to witter to, well ... explain everything.
There is even a little bit of Greek Mythology in all of this. Colonel O’Neill has been dragged far from his home planet by the symbiote Kanan and in trying to find his way home is visited by his ascended friend. He is like Odysseus, stuck on a ten year journey and who went down to Hades to speak to Tiresias the dead prophet to find out why the gods wouldn't let him get home. For some reason my head seems to equate Tiresias and Daniel although I can’t actually at this point in time tell you why … perhaps I will have to get back to you on that ...
I know that it was said by TPTB (Brad Wright in the Martin Wood Director's mini-doc on the Season Six DVD) that they didn't want Daniel popping up like Clarence in A Wonderful Life in this episode going 'Hi guys' although he is doing a pretty good impression of that to me! It also seems a very popular Sci Fi Fantasy trope to get one's dead friends to come back to give advice. I felt a little let down when I found out how many times it had happened actually. I thought Stargate was doing something different and important here.
When I first watched this episode I was reminded of Hercules the Legendary Journeys when I somehow caught one episode of when it was on British terrestrial TV. Iolaus, Hercules' friend and travelling companion, seems to have had a similar habit to Daniel in getting killed repeatedly. This show did a similar discussion-after death-with-his-friend in the episode I saw. This was despite Iolaus being elsewhere and very dead and embalmed at the time. Then there is Farscape where according to magnavox_23, Zhaan comes back in the episode John Quixote to talk to John Crichton when he is in sticky corner. Even Star Wars has this trope - Obi Wan Kenobi comes back after death to give a warning to Luke Skywalker saying if he goes into battle with his father in the wrong frame of mind all will not go well.
Now, in my previous meta on Meridian I was explaining how the ideas of Joseph Campbell and his analysis of myth had given me a structure to understand the slightly confusing events of Daniel's ascension. I was saying that from doing a little research his experiences fitted in to a pattern that is found in many other world myths and stories and that these experiences are commonly known as The Hero’s Journey. In Meridian we saw how he began this journey by Crossing the Threshold, aided by Oma and this is where the story left us. Apart from the possible puff of air which was blown in Jack’s direction in Revelations we didn’t know anymore. Now in Season Six, in Abyss, we will be looking at what has happened to Daniel and the next stage along his journey through Ascension.
(2.0) Where Up is really Down ... and where Down is actually more a state of mind ...
Although in Meridian it was very clearly shown visually what Ascension meant physically - going glowy and rising upwards - I am going to explain that what happened to Daniel is actually totally the opposite.
If we think about what the word Ascension actually means, " the act of rising to an important position or a higher level" (Oxford English Dictionary) and the significance various myths, legends and modern religions give to it, taken from a Stargate perspective things can get a bit confusing. Its the up/down dark/light religious dichotomy that we often find in religion these days.
In Shamanism for example (I will be talking more about this in a great deal of detail later) Shamans ascend to the higher plane, or a lower world, to do battle with evil spirits. In the Jewish Torah we hear how in the book of Daniel Isaiah ascends to Heaven after being sawn in half, and Enoch ascends in a story in the Apocrypha. Christianity has Christ, his mother Mary, and various saints ascending into heaven from where they listen to the prayers of the faithful and help out with acts of mercy. Buddhist souls which are enlightened head off to Nirvana, aided as I explained in my meta on Maternal Instinct about by their Oma, Kwan Yin, and for all I know, go glowy too like she is. Even the Miraj of Mohammed within Islam tells of how he rode a white horse with wings to Heaven.
You see where I am coming from when I am producing this list. What myth and legends suggest (and what Daniel from his anthropological studies would have come to expect) is that persons who have ascended in Judeo-Christian religion, done so in the Buddhist faith, or even as part the most ancient Shamanistic practices, get to be able to do something in that state. He does say to Jack in Meridian, ‘I can do more this way’ and it seems pretty sure he was expecting to be doing that when he joined Oma and her merry band of Ancients. What happens in reality is Daniel finds his lot - powerless hanging around watching his friends suffer and not being able to interfere - is quite a bit different from what he thought was likely to happen.
Now, when I was first looking at the whole ascension thing I did a lot of hand wringing about Daniel’s plight. I was frustrated partly at the lack of good story-lines they could have produced from this event (we never really DO know what Daniel was up to off-screen do we?) and partly at the frustrations I saw our poor glowy archaeologist going through. Then I looked at it in another way however, through the lens of myth, and realised that actually the whole glowing, rising up, white light etc. was just a smoke-screen being thrown around the salient facts. If I looked at it from the proper perspective what seemed to be a pretty glowified holiday in the clouds actually turned into something darker and deeper and more profound for the character to experience.
If we look at what is happening here not as Daniel flying off somewhere into the ether, but as him entering a psychological time of trial things make a little more sense. That day I was thinking in the shower and I had that bit of a eureka moment I was thinking of Abyss, Jack being held a prisoner in Ba'al's fortress and specifically about the clever shots showing the varied gravity fields in the prison cell. Jack is there despairing and stuck in a very dark place as a prisoner. He is mentally, but more importantly as he is a man of action, physically stuck in a hole. The director, actors and designers for that episode couldn't have rammed the point home more clearly (or literally) either, and it certainly makes me chuckle when I think about it.
Daniel is also in this hole with Jack even if he is not actually physically there. He is suffering too, but in a different manner. He has to stand by and watch that friend repeatedly tortured to death and brought back to life. He can't do anything about it and has to explain why that is to Jack - for him it’s very much an intellectual problem - just as things always are. If the effects of Ascension are actually viewed as reverse to being enlightened and powerful - and instead seen as a descent to a place of limbo and powerlessness - the whole scheme of things, and specifically these events in Abyss, seem to make a little more sense. At this point on his journey - the Hero's Journey - Daniel is in fact about to experience what in myth is the Decent to the Underworld theme.
In this situation Daniel is visiting a place that in many different myths has many different names. To the Greeks it was known as Hades, in the Teutonic world and to the Vikings it was Hel and in Ancient Egypt it was known as the Am Duat. Our Ascended Hero has actually gone to The Underworld to learn things and to be initiated.
What I have to say at this point is this Underworld is not necessarily the Hell as depicted in Judeo-Christian, Buddhist and Muslim religion. It can be (and yes, we will talk about that viewpoint on this episode later) but actually at this point it is somewhere else entirely we are talking about. It is the place where, before these religious ideas arose, the dead remained after death, and is not a place of punishment. Those who go there, and are not dead themselves yet, often have an ordeal to deal with, but they are usually there to learn something rather than be imprisoned.
'In Christian symbolism, the Horned One was set, correctly, to rule over Hell. The Orthodox Hell is merely a rather childish subterfuge, a mask to disguise the true nature of the Underworld and to frighten the seeker from looking beyond dogmatic external experiences. The nature of the Guardian is not to capture souls for damnation, but to liberate them from self-imposed restrictions.' (Stewart 1988)
There are various myths and legends about what happens to heroes who make this journey to the Underworld and because of that we can use them inform us about what is happening in Abyss.
The earliest version of an underworld visit is found in the Sumerian myth of the goddess Inanna, who is paralleled in the Babylonian goddess Ishtar. In their different myths both ladies go down to the underworld for specific reasons and get trapped there so preventing the growth of vegetation on earth. The gods have to find a way to get them out and bring life back to the earth have to arrange special creatures to go on a rescue mission. This, of course, is a proto-version of the Demeter/Persephone myth because Sumeria and Babylonia were both agricultural societies.
Then there is also the Greek/Roman myth of Orpheus who goes down to the underworld to save his wife Euridice which has an interesting parallel with the story of Daniel and Shau're. I shall talk about that when I get to do meta in Season Seven for Orpheus and it also merits a mention of Jean Cocteau in Season Eight and Threads as I have said before.
Various other legendary heroes and figures, Odysseus who we compared to Jack earlier, Persephone who we have already met in my previous meta on Meridian and Hercules (not he of the 'Legendary Journeys' although I have mentioned him here) go down to the underworld for their own reasons. Even Aeneas in Virgil's Aenead goes there to speak to his dead father and receive a vision of the founding of Rome.
What I am saying here is these characters gain something from their trip to the Underworld; initiation into new insight and knowledge to aid in their personal development, the way to get home when they were lost or just a get-out of a binding contract. Although Daniel seems trapped by his Ascended state when Jack is captured in Abyss it is a learning experience for him too. It's a pretty awful one - another name for the Underworld Journey is being stuck in The Belly of the Beast. This refers of course to the Biblical story of Jonah and how he ended up for three days in the belly of a 'great fish'.
Being in a trapped and contained state is a motif which turns up many times as a theme in myth. The hero often has his back against the wall and is forced by his incarceration to think about how he got to where is now, and consider his past actions before he moves on. In the story of Jonah the Biblical character refuses God's will. He tries to escape by boat but throws himself overboard to save the sailors [familiar actions here I think] when God stirs up a storm. God then sends a large fish to swallow the errant prophet who is left to sit in its belly for three days to cool his heels until he decides to do what is being asked of him. It is also interesting to consider the use of the name Jonah in Stargate. Jonas is carrying a variant name of the Biblical character this season, and Jack was given the personality stamp of 'Jonah' in the 'belly' of the Machine Room 23 of Beneath the Surface. The writers are familiar with this trope, obviously.
Jonah, as shown in the 14th Century Antiphoner from Ranworth Church, in the Norfolk Broads in the UK.
Medieval monks creating the manuscript did not know about whales so they depicted the ‘big fish’ as a Pike,
the largest and most vicious British freshwater fish which they had probably eaten on Fast Days!
Now in various religions various saints and spiritual figures have often put themselves voluntarily in this position too and gone off to thin . To mention three, Christ went into the desert for Forty Days (remember singing a hymn at Primary School about that …) the Buddha sat beneath the Bhodi Tree and even Mohammed would seclude himself in a cave apparently. Several of these figures also have their resolution tested by one event or another. Seclusion gives Doubt (which certain religions use as a metaphorical or actual visit from the devil) a chance to make itself known.
To make things more clear about Abyss in this sense, Daniel has been left, to use both a mythological term, and a psychological one, in limbo. In the belly of the beast, sitting there in the dark, like someone in depression, or having a life crisis, alone with his problem. He is suddenly realising that this new glowy existence of his isn't exactly what he thought it was. He may be all light and energy but he is still in a dark place psychologically.
As I have said this could, and does, all look very bleak for Glowy!Daniel's future. If he can as Jack says, make the wind blow and throw lightning around, what is the point of having these powers when he can't use them to help those he cares about? It hurts just watching the explanation that Jack's only option in that prison is to join him in his powerless glowy state, or even worse to die an actual death. So how can a positive slant be put on these things? How can the story be seen to be moving forward, and how does it fit in with the whole journey that the hero?
In Dark Nights of the Soul Thomas Moore, a practising psychotherapist, talks about the place the hero and Daniel have found themselves at this point in their story'
'The whales' belly is, of course, a kind of womb. In your withdrawal from life and your uncertainty you are like an infant not yet born. The darkness is natural, one of the life processes. There may be some promise, the mere suggestion that life is going forward, even though you have no sense of where you are headed. It's a time of waiting and trusting. My attitude as a therapist in these situations is not to be anxious for a conclusion of even understanding. You have to sit with these things and in due time let them be revealed for what they are.' (Moore, 2004)
The way I read this, is that things are actually happening in Abyss. I think that even though we are only in episode six of this season there is a metaphorical light at the end of the tunnel if you look hard enough. In this situation Daniel is being made to take decisions - like the one to help Jack, and I know the writers claimed he did nothing but I just don't believe this. Rather than sitting on a cloud, or turning his back on his old life, he is realising how much he is missing it and thinking about helping in the way that he is able. He is going through trials, having to make choices, realising what is important to him. As he says; “I see things, I understand things, in a way I never could have before.” These are the thoughts which will bring him back to his friends and descended to the human plain of existence.
(2.1) ... how 'gate travel and travel on the astral plane have several points in common we should really know about ...
I want to take a few moments out of talking about the Hero's Journey to mention something my partner garienos brought to my attention a while ago. He was doing his usual running to catch up with my fan interests -- watching the original Stargate film so he knew who people like Daniel Jackson and Scary Aliens impersonating Gods were when I mentioned them -- and then he pointed something out to me. While I have an interest in Comparative Mythology he has an interest in all things more occult and esoteric. The first thing that came into his head when he saw Stargate travel was ... well ... Shamanism … and he rang me up to tell me about it too.
That isn't quite as daft as it sounds, in fact it makes a lot of sense if you look at it a bit more closely.
What is said to happen in this belief system that their healers learn to leave their body and ascend smoke of the fire to a hole in the roof of their hut, or descend through a hole in the earthen floor, to fight the evil spirits afflicting the tribe. garienos pointed out that the use of the 'gate to transport SG1 to other planets could be seen as metaphorical for the out-of-body journey a Shaman goes on. In fact, once I had done some research in his library (I am professionally trained in this discipline so can confirm correctly he has enough books to open a small branch to the public) I soon saw what he was saying.
'Entrances … commonly lead down into a tunnel or tube that conveys the shaman to an exit, which opens upon bright marvellous landscapes. From there the shaman travels wherever he desires for minutes or even hours, finally returning back ... to emerge at the surface, where he entered.' (Harner 1990)
If that is not a pretty good description of a trip through the wormhole, then I am much mistaken. Further researching gave me a bit of a shock. garienos wasn't wrong in his suggestions, and in fact he pointed the way to understand Daniel's character and what happens to him over ten seasons a little more clearly. My reading around about Pre-Christian Mystery Religions had alerted me to a few ideas and these were only confirmed when I did further research into Shamans and Shamanism. Let me give you a few quick quotations to prove what I am saying …
'Although to be a shaman [or female shamanka] was in a sense a privileged position, it was not usually sought. Rather it seized one, and often arose for a threatening experience such as sickness, assault, or 'near death' experience ... Shamanic journeys were dangerous, involving magical dismemberment and rebirth, and possibly one might not return from the spiritual world.' (Moorey, 1996 p75)
'Frequently, initiation involves an encounter with a divine or semi-divine being. This spirit appears to the candidate in a dream (or during illness or other situation), indicating that the candidate has been chosen and urging him or her to pursue a new life.' (NicMhacha p33)
'Shamanic Cosmology almost invariably involves the perception of three sacred realms: the Sky Realm (or Upper World) the Middle Realm (or Earth), and the Lower Realm (or Underworld) ... The Shaman specializes in an altered or ecstatic state in which his or her soul is perceived to leave the body and either ascend to the Sky Realm or descend to the Underworld ... Shamans are also credited with magical abilities, including mastery over fire and magical flight.' (Ibid p32)
This covers playing with fire on Kheb, molecular level damage by Naquaria radiation, Oma and Ascension, going glowy in the Infirmary and the events of Abyss. The effects even this stage are pretty far reaching but they will impact on the team and Daniel right up until dealing with Adria and the Ori in The Ark of Truth. Our archaeologist is, whether we like it or not, even though we see him being dragged there literally kicking and screaming, turned by his experiences into the SG1 mystic. He is tried and tested through Kheb and Shi'fu and initiated during Meridian. From then on we see what the effect of this change has on him.
What I see in Ba'al's cell in Abyss is Daniel, as an initiated like those who passed through the Eleusinian Mysteries I talked about in the previous meta, offering Jack initiation into this mystery too. The problem here is that Jack isn't as mystically minded as Daniel being the grounded, practical, soldier, of the team. Being snaked (twice) is bad enough for Jack - this he knows leads to loss of control and handing his body over to someone else - but Ascension would, on top of non-interfering mean loss of his actual physical form. He would rather die than for that to happen.
Daniel is, even if Jack isn't helping, still fulfilling the traditional Shaman's role of fighting for those he protects. His' family' is SG1 and the extended 'tribe' is the SGC and Earth.
'It is said that the shaman alone can ''see the soul'' or know its form or destiny. Indeed, shamans are specialists in those areas of religious life involving the soul, including illness (which is related with loss of the soul), death or misfortune (which may require spiritual guidance or intervention), and sacrificial rites involving a mystical journey of the soul to the Otherworld.' (ibid)
When Daniel says 'This is not your life we're talking about, Jack! This is your soul!' he really means this. If you notice Daniel doesn't shy at even handling the 'destiny bit' of his shamanic role seeing the 'future' of both Jack, and later in Changeling Teal'c's prognosis when spending time with them in the infirmary after their ordeals. He tells them both not why; 'you'll just have to trust me on it' but he promises them (and us) the fact they will be fine.
(2.2) ... and finally how our writers in Stargate seem to have both an enthusiasm about, and sympathy for, writing devils into their shows.
Now, I am not talking about Apophis here (who in Egyptian mythology actually was a serpent and was killed each night by the miw wr the Great Cat) nor Sokar who played at setting up Hell as his home planet and dressed all his Jaffa up in little red devil costumes. What I am talking about is Ba'al and the fact that his name, and the fact that Jack's snake came along with the name Kanan (they way they spell it doesn't change the way it’s said) had alerted me to what was going on in Abyss even before the show had begun.
Ba'al is yet another devil in Stargate, they certainly present him as one in this too (there are many ways to depict a devil after all) but the name of his character comes from religions in the Levant area near where Judeo-Christianity later developed. Baal actually just means 'lord' in the local language and there were plenty of gods with that name around that area, which is probably where the writers got the idea to clone our Ba’al. There was certainly a Baal in the land of Canaan and in Kings 1 & 2 Elijah has a lot to do with them. My parents have always been in choirs and there has been much singing at home of 'Take all the prophets of Baal, let none of them escape you' from Mendelssohn's Oratoria over the years... Even the rock group Queen mentions this in their song Bohemian Rapsody when they use the line 'Beelzebub has a devil put aside for me ... for me ...'.
Baal came to Britain via the Phoneticians where he became Bel and was associated with the sun, fires and fertility. There are plenty of Bell Hills where fires were traditionally lit at Midsummer and in Whalton, a small village in Northumberland near where I grew up, there is still a Bale Fire on July 4th (Old Midsummer's Day) with Morris Dancing et al. This fits in rather neatly with the orange/yellow fiery decor of Ba'al's torture chamber, even if it was a little too Louis Comfort Tiffany for my taste.
To get back to the subject in hand, another reason I am pointing to Baal as devilish is appearance and a sort of hangover-inheritance from 1960s BBC TV Classic Dr Who. Another god which the Christians demonised was the Greek God Pan, who, like many nature gods had horns and was depicted as a goat. This is of course why some devil depictions get cloven hooves. Our Ba'al didn't get that, but he did get the goatee beard … as did The Master in a couple of his classic incarnations fighting Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker's Doctor. In fact polite villains of fiction, TV and film with impeccable dress sense, clipped accents and little beards are probably aiming for a similar ‘devilish’ slant.
Roger Delgado, the original Master from classic Dr Who has an uncanny resemblance to our Ba'al I think ...
But what also interests me is the tattoo on our Ba'al's Jaf'fa ...
because the way I see it ...
it sort of (to me anyway) includes both horns and wings in the design .....
In any case, when we are dealing with the Biblical Hell in Abyss and comparing it to the Underworld we were talking about earlier we have to look at the subject a bit more closely. How did what in classical times and antiquity was just a place for the dead to dwell in turn during the last decades of the first millennium into a place of punishment for the wicked? You have to understand to explain that would require a whole essay which I do not have the time or space to write. The (abbreviated) way I look at it is this; when monotheism takes over the realm of the gods, and the one in charge takes those who please him upstairs with him, everywhere else (and everyone else) which isn’t amongst the blessed ones, an angel or a saint becomes an opposing force and automatically bracketed as being in league with the devil.
We can see this occurring in this 15th Century illustration by Robinet Testard. Although it ostensibly depicts the Underworld with Persephone and Hades and even with Cerberus the three headed dog, we also see devils behind them torturing souls obviously sent there by a Judeo-Christian deity.
Now of course all of what I am writing in this section points to poor Jack in Abyss as being trapped, literally, in Biblical Hell. The writers for Stargate are themselves, and writing for an audience, who are very familiar with this Western European Judeo-Christian theme after all. Even if you look the episode title word up in a dictionary it says we are in Hell. The Oxford English Dictionary says the word abyss comes from the Greek word abussos which means ‘bottomless’ but in the New Advent online Catholic Encyclopedia it points out that in the New Testament it is only used as a word for 'the abode of evil spirits, hell'.
So, as Jack is ‘in Hell’ literally or figuratively and having an ascended being as a visitor - dressed in the nearest thing to Angel Chic I can think of with the fluffy Ascended!Sweater -- this has a few interesting connotations. This is where, as I said, I put Daniel, Jack and Jesus Christ in the same sentence. Daniel did offer his life up to save the planet full of Kelowans yet was accused of sabotage, died pretty horribly due from Naquadria poisoning and with his friends keeping vigil at his bedside ... Compare this with the Easter Story (which I will handle in more detail in Fallen) and I think we get a few familiar parallels.
If we are talking about religious themes where dead saviours (and Daniel in both Abyss and Changeling is definitely saving people) turn up to talk to friends there is a precedent set here. In the New Testament Jesus, after his resurrection [in talking about resurrection/ascension here the terms are different but the effects are similar] appeared to various followers especially on the road to Emmaus. T.S.Eliot uses this event in What the Thunder Said, part three of his poem The Wasteland.
'Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded'
This could actually be said to possibly be Daniel in Full Circle or even Orpheus but to me it just has the theme of the one who has been lost hanging around and even returning, as he says to Teal'c in Changeling 'I haven't left your side Teal'c. And I'm not going to. That's a promise.'.
This theme is used again by the same poet in Little Gidding of The Four Quartets;
'The eyes of a familiar compound ghost
Both intimate and unidentifiable.
So I assumed a double part, and cried
And heard another's voice cry: 'What! are you here?'
So, in Abyss as we are definitely talking about the Judeo-Christian Hell in this section I have to talk about Savours who go there to save people I can't miss out of this quoting part of the Apostle's creed which I have heard many times in church: 'He [Christ] suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried. He descended into Hell. On the third day He rose again. He ascended into heaven ...'. Christians know this as the Harrowing of Hell where Christ released Hell's captives, particularly Adam and Eve, and the righteous men and women of Old Testament times.
The Harrowing of Hell, depicted in the 14th Century Petites Heures de Jean de Berry
Now being saved from hell isn't a purely Christian theme. In Buddhist myth, Kwan Yin, in her form of Princess Miao Shan, is executed by her father. In one version of this legend, a supernatural tiger takes her to one of the more hell-like realms of the dead. However, instead of being punished by demons like the other inmates, Kwan Yin plays music and flowers blossom around her. The story says that Kwan Yin, by merely being in that hell, turned it into a paradise and the demon in charge of that hell had to let her and its occupants free before she could carry on causing mischief.
The nearest religious story to the events of Abyss however comes from Biblical sources again. In the New Testament, St Peter is being held in prison on the orders of Herod Agrippa. Here we have an angel helping free someone who is held captive, and that person even thinking they are hallucinating too.
Peter was sleeping between two soldiers, bound with two chains, and sentries before the door were guarding the prison. And behold, an angel of the Lord stood next to him, and a light shone in the cell. He struck Peter on the side and woke him, saying, "Get up quickly." And the chains fell off his hands. And the angel said to him, "Dress yourself and put on your sandals." And he did so. And he said to him, "Wrap your cloak around you and follow me." And he went out and followed him. He did not know that what was being done by the angel was real, but thought he was seeing a vision. When they had passed the first and the second guard, they came to the iron gate leading into the city. It opened for them of its own accord, and they went out and went along one street, and immediately the angel left him. When Peter came to himself, he said, "Now I am sure that the Lord has sent his angel and rescued me from the hand of Herod and from all that the Jewish people were expecting." (New Standard Version, Acts 12)
The Liberation of St Peter by Gerrit van HONTHORST
----------------- End of Part Two ------------------
Questions …
(1) If Michael Shanks hadn't decided on the break in Season 6, and he and RDA hadn't had to do dad duty to take time off too, do you think we would still have had such interesting storylines?
(2) I am a little sad they forgot about the 'Mother Nature' element of the Oma storyline from Maternal Instinct. What do you think they might have done with this in Season Six if they had used it, and how might we have seen Daniel portrayed?
(3) Why, apart from in Meridian, did we not see Daniel do the 'glowy octopus' bit of being an Ascended Being? Why all the traditional way of doing it as Martin Wood described rather than a few CGI tricks?
---------------------------------------------------------------More on The Ascension Meta from Hell coming up when we get to Fallen …. we will be following Daniel further on his Hero's Journey; we have reached another threshold, the one he has to cross to come home, and we will be looking more closely at some more Judeo-Christian themes.
The bibliography for this research is here as usual, and has been updated to include the new texts mentioned in this section.
Many thanks to magnavox_23 for holding my hand through this helping me with the knotty problem of getting inside Jack's mind and garienos for providing thee research material and talking stuff through with me.