Castiel and his vessel.
I'm no good with fics so I write these instead. =)
By 'these' I mean theories and attempts to explain how things work - stuff like that.
(Much like this. <-- This links to nothing SPN-related so no need to click it, really. =P If, however, you love Harry Potter, you might find it interesting at least. =) )
This post (or posts - I'm pretty sure this will be just the first of several) is an expansion of a comment to comments that I wrote in this post.
In the end, I hope you do not end up leaving too confused. =P
To start, I'll paste that comment here:
The way I see it, an angel's grace is not exactly the same as a human soul is to a human. The relationship between a human and his soul is less detached than that of an angel to it's grace. (I'm sure I'm not making sense, I'll try to illustrate shortly.) An (extreme) analogy would be that an angel's grace is it's battery. But it's probably more than that too. The relationship is somewhere in between.
To illustrate:
When I think of a human (body) and his soul, the identity of the human lies more in his soul, instead of his body. So when we saw soulless Sam, there was something off about him. Because the greater part of his identity lies in his soul. If I put someone else's soul into Sam's body, it just wouldn't be the same, right? Absolutely different. Would not work at all.
If I think of an angel's grace as a battery (as in the extreme analogy above), then anyone's grace would certainly work with any angel. But I don't think that's the case either. It's somewhere in between.
Using the same phrasing as above: when I think of an angel (body) and his grace, the identity of the angel lies more in his (body), instead of his grace. It's the other way around. So when we see graceless Cas, he's still the angel we know (personality), but powerless. Because the greater part of his identity lies with him, and not his grace. However, the grace is probably still more than just a battery that contains no part of an angel's identity and so can easily be replaced by any other. It mostly provides the power, yes, but it still contains a part (albeit a lesser part) of his identity. So Cas may use someone else's grace as a power source, but it's probably not the same as if it was his own. There will be a few things off. We'll probably see this in future episodes. In fact, I think I saw one little thing already in the promo for the next.
As for the other issue about Sam or Dean possibly becoming angels if they wanted. I think not.
An angel, as Meg put it, is a species. =P Sam and Dean are humans. I don't think humans can turn into angels simply by swallowing angel grace. Neither do I think that angels can turn into humans simply by losing their grace. (A line from Metatron puts a kink in my theory, but I'll disregard that for now. =P )
Having said that, I don't think Cas ever became completely human. He became human-like, but not human. He was still an angel - a graceless angel.
Also, I don't think it is the angel's grace that actually burns out human eyes. It's looking upon an angel's true form that can do this. (And the burning out of eyes due to smiting is a whole different thing too. =P )
I can go into these last two more but I think I've already written a lot. =P Apologies, please. I really tend to write very lengthily. You might be very annoyed already if you're still reading this. (I hope not.) But if you are still reading this, thanks for your patience. =) Might have been better if I just wrote a post on this but... (yeah, I might do that eventually. =P )
And so here I am. =)
There are several issues... I think I'll start with:
Castiel and his vessel
I like Jimmy Novak. =) Do you like Jimmy? Well, I do. I think he's very nice. =) Sad, though, that he and his family ended up going through what they did, and sad that in the end, he kind of lost faith... =\ Because I'm pretty sure Castiel didn't mean for all that to happen. Not really. He's not like the other angels who couldn't care less...
Anyway, on the subject of angels and their vessels, this is what I think:
An angel's true form
An angel is, for the most part, a multidimensional wavelength of celestial intent. Castiel didn't enclose this phrase in air quotes when he said it so it must be an accurate description. =P Don't actually know how to picture this as an angel's true form but, in any case, that must be it. A more easily imagined description would be one drawn from, or similar to, real world traditions, for example, Zachariah's description of himself in Heaven - I have six wings and four faces, one of which is a lion. Whatever it looks like, it's probably about the size of the Chrysler building. =P This true form can be seen by 'special people', but for most humans, it can be overwhelming and burn out the human's eyes.
The angel in its vessel
And so, to manifest safely to humans, an angel must take on a human vessel. These humans are special in that it is in their blood that they are able to safely contain an angel. Jimmy Novak is one such special human. He, as well as his daughter, Claire, can serve as vessels to the angel Castiel.
Now, if I were to look at the scene from The Rapture wearing, say, special glasses that will enable me to look into the human body and see the human soul and the angel, I imagine I'd be seeing something like this:
Jimmy Novak is standing in front of his house wearing his suit and tie and overcoat looking up and praying. There he is, I see, a human body with a soul inside. Above him, seen as a bright light shining down on Jimmy, is the angel Castiel. Now, after Jimmy says 'yes' and Castiel enters, what I see (while he is standing there flexing his fingers, turning to look at Jimmy's daughter, Claire, tilting his head, turning around again, saying 'I am not your father', and walking away) is a human body filled mostly with a very compact form of angel (just imagine that Chrysler building size crammed into roughly six feet of human), and a human soul flattened to one side (poor Jimmy, no wonder he felt like being chained to a comet =P ).
The famous spanner in the works
Fortunately (for us who love him hehe =P ), Castiel is apparently 'the famous spanner in the works'. According to Naomi, he has never done what he was told, not completely, and doesn't even die right.
His first death (we didn't see) was when he stayed with Chuck Shurley to hold off the archangel Raphael while he sent Dean to stop Sam from killing Lilith and breaking the last seal and freeing Lucifer. According to Chuck, Castiel 'exploded like a water balloon of chunky soup'. But God resurrected him.
So I suppose what happened was: the human body of Jimmy, along with the human soul and angel within, all exploded together. Then for whatever reason, God put them all back together - body, soul, and angel.
Within the season that followed, we still see evidence of Jimmy's presence - his appetite for red meat was touched by Famine's effect.
His second death we did see was at Stull Cemetery when Lucifer (in Sam) killed him with a snap of his fingers after he threw a molotov cocktail of holy oil at Michael (Adam). Here we witnessed what Chuck must have seen the previous year - Castiel exploded like a water balloon of chunky soup. But once again, God brought him back ('new and improved').
Question is: was Jimmy still around?
I'm not human
There was no mention of anything indicating Jimmy's presence after this. In fact, there is this, that I find intriguing:
Castiel: Now I need your blood.
Dean: Whoa, whoa, hey! Ahh. Why don't you use your own?
Castiel: It wouldn't work. I'm not human.
Here, Castiel performs a ritual to locate Balthazar similar (but maybe slightly different?) to one he performed to locate Anna. (see appendix below) If it is the same ritual, he did not get any blood from the boys the first time... In any case, this time, he declares he cannot use his blood, as he's not human.
But isn't Jimmy human? Unless, Jimmy isn't around anymore...
But how can that be? The two deaths seem very similar. Why would Jimmy return after the first, but not the second?
They thought I was braindead
Maybe it has nothing to do with these deaths but with something that happened before the second death...?
When Castiel cleared out the angels guarding the green room in Van Nuys, California where Adam was being held, he carved an angel banishing sigil into his chest instead of painting it on a wall with blood, banishing not only the four angels in range but also himself.
Afterwards, he apparently appeared bloody and unconscious on a shrimping boat off Delacroix. He was brought to a hospital where the doctors thought he was braindead. He woke up there three episodes after the Van Nuys incident with his 'batteries' drained.
Perhaps it was during this time that Jimmy died. (Jimmy... ='( ) Castiel effectively powered himself down when he banished himself and so (probably) was unable to heal Jimmy from his injuries in time.
So maybe from this point until Lucifer's snap, we only have the (human) body with a (powered-down) angel inside. The human soul has moved on and is gone. =( And then perhaps when God brought Castiel back after the second chunky soup, He just gave Castiel a reconstructed body (not really human?) for a vessel.
Something like that. Maybe. =P
Appendix:
References:
s4e20 The Rapture
s6e03 The Third Man
s5e16 Dark Side of the Moon
s6e07 Family Matters
s4e01 Lazarus Rising
s8e21 The Great Escapist
s4e22 Lucifer Rising
s5e01 Sympathy for the Devil
s5e02 Good God, Y'all
s5e14 My Bloody Valentine
s5e22 Swan Song
s5e13 The Song Remains the Same
s5e18 Point of No Return
s5e21 Two Minutes to Midnight
And that's it for now. =)
I started typing this out around 2 weeks ago(?) but then got too busy in RL to finish it. =P Now, however, I find that I cannot make a new Merry Christmas post unless I publish it because I don't want to discard the (almost finished) draft that I get to restore every time I click on the post link hahaha. =P Plus I just came from youtube earlier and commented on a video that made me think of these SPN things again. =) So I thought it best to get this finished now.
And I guess I'd better just add the greeting here as well...
Hope you all had a MERRY CHRISTMAS!!! =)
By 'these' I mean theories and attempts to explain how things work - stuff like that.
(Much like this. <-- This links to nothing SPN-related so no need to click it, really. =P If, however, you love Harry Potter, you might find it interesting at least. =) )
This post (or posts - I'm pretty sure this will be just the first of several) is an expansion of a comment to comments that I wrote in this post.
In the end, I hope you do not end up leaving too confused. =P
To start, I'll paste that comment here:
The way I see it, an angel's grace is not exactly the same as a human soul is to a human. The relationship between a human and his soul is less detached than that of an angel to it's grace. (I'm sure I'm not making sense, I'll try to illustrate shortly.) An (extreme) analogy would be that an angel's grace is it's battery. But it's probably more than that too. The relationship is somewhere in between.
To illustrate:
When I think of a human (body) and his soul, the identity of the human lies more in his soul, instead of his body. So when we saw soulless Sam, there was something off about him. Because the greater part of his identity lies in his soul. If I put someone else's soul into Sam's body, it just wouldn't be the same, right? Absolutely different. Would not work at all.
If I think of an angel's grace as a battery (as in the extreme analogy above), then anyone's grace would certainly work with any angel. But I don't think that's the case either. It's somewhere in between.
Using the same phrasing as above: when I think of an angel (body) and his grace, the identity of the angel lies more in his (body), instead of his grace. It's the other way around. So when we see graceless Cas, he's still the angel we know (personality), but powerless. Because the greater part of his identity lies with him, and not his grace. However, the grace is probably still more than just a battery that contains no part of an angel's identity and so can easily be replaced by any other. It mostly provides the power, yes, but it still contains a part (albeit a lesser part) of his identity. So Cas may use someone else's grace as a power source, but it's probably not the same as if it was his own. There will be a few things off. We'll probably see this in future episodes. In fact, I think I saw one little thing already in the promo for the next.
As for the other issue about Sam or Dean possibly becoming angels if they wanted. I think not.
An angel, as Meg put it, is a species. =P Sam and Dean are humans. I don't think humans can turn into angels simply by swallowing angel grace. Neither do I think that angels can turn into humans simply by losing their grace. (A line from Metatron puts a kink in my theory, but I'll disregard that for now. =P )
Having said that, I don't think Cas ever became completely human. He became human-like, but not human. He was still an angel - a graceless angel.
Also, I don't think it is the angel's grace that actually burns out human eyes. It's looking upon an angel's true form that can do this. (And the burning out of eyes due to smiting is a whole different thing too. =P )
I can go into these last two more but I think I've already written a lot. =P Apologies, please. I really tend to write very lengthily. You might be very annoyed already if you're still reading this. (I hope not.) But if you are still reading this, thanks for your patience. =) Might have been better if I just wrote a post on this but... (yeah, I might do that eventually. =P )
And so here I am. =)
There are several issues... I think I'll start with:
Castiel and his vessel
I like Jimmy Novak. =) Do you like Jimmy? Well, I do. I think he's very nice. =) Sad, though, that he and his family ended up going through what they did, and sad that in the end, he kind of lost faith... =\ Because I'm pretty sure Castiel didn't mean for all that to happen. Not really. He's not like the other angels who couldn't care less...
Anyway, on the subject of angels and their vessels, this is what I think:
An angel's true form
An angel is, for the most part, a multidimensional wavelength of celestial intent. Castiel didn't enclose this phrase in air quotes when he said it so it must be an accurate description. =P Don't actually know how to picture this as an angel's true form but, in any case, that must be it. A more easily imagined description would be one drawn from, or similar to, real world traditions, for example, Zachariah's description of himself in Heaven - I have six wings and four faces, one of which is a lion. Whatever it looks like, it's probably about the size of the Chrysler building. =P This true form can be seen by 'special people', but for most humans, it can be overwhelming and burn out the human's eyes.
The angel in its vessel
And so, to manifest safely to humans, an angel must take on a human vessel. These humans are special in that it is in their blood that they are able to safely contain an angel. Jimmy Novak is one such special human. He, as well as his daughter, Claire, can serve as vessels to the angel Castiel.
Now, if I were to look at the scene from The Rapture wearing, say, special glasses that will enable me to look into the human body and see the human soul and the angel, I imagine I'd be seeing something like this:
Jimmy Novak is standing in front of his house wearing his suit and tie and overcoat looking up and praying. There he is, I see, a human body with a soul inside. Above him, seen as a bright light shining down on Jimmy, is the angel Castiel. Now, after Jimmy says 'yes' and Castiel enters, what I see (while he is standing there flexing his fingers, turning to look at Jimmy's daughter, Claire, tilting his head, turning around again, saying 'I am not your father', and walking away) is a human body filled mostly with a very compact form of angel (just imagine that Chrysler building size crammed into roughly six feet of human), and a human soul flattened to one side (poor Jimmy, no wonder he felt like being chained to a comet =P ).
The famous spanner in the works
Fortunately (for us who love him hehe =P ), Castiel is apparently 'the famous spanner in the works'. According to Naomi, he has never done what he was told, not completely, and doesn't even die right.
His first death (we didn't see) was when he stayed with Chuck Shurley to hold off the archangel Raphael while he sent Dean to stop Sam from killing Lilith and breaking the last seal and freeing Lucifer. According to Chuck, Castiel 'exploded like a water balloon of chunky soup'. But God resurrected him.
So I suppose what happened was: the human body of Jimmy, along with the human soul and angel within, all exploded together. Then for whatever reason, God put them all back together - body, soul, and angel.
Within the season that followed, we still see evidence of Jimmy's presence - his appetite for red meat was touched by Famine's effect.
His second death we did see was at Stull Cemetery when Lucifer (in Sam) killed him with a snap of his fingers after he threw a molotov cocktail of holy oil at Michael (Adam). Here we witnessed what Chuck must have seen the previous year - Castiel exploded like a water balloon of chunky soup. But once again, God brought him back ('new and improved').
Question is: was Jimmy still around?
I'm not human
There was no mention of anything indicating Jimmy's presence after this. In fact, there is this, that I find intriguing:
Castiel: Now I need your blood.
Dean: Whoa, whoa, hey! Ahh. Why don't you use your own?
Castiel: It wouldn't work. I'm not human.
Here, Castiel performs a ritual to locate Balthazar similar (but maybe slightly different?) to one he performed to locate Anna. (see appendix below) If it is the same ritual, he did not get any blood from the boys the first time... In any case, this time, he declares he cannot use his blood, as he's not human.
But isn't Jimmy human? Unless, Jimmy isn't around anymore...
But how can that be? The two deaths seem very similar. Why would Jimmy return after the first, but not the second?
They thought I was braindead
Maybe it has nothing to do with these deaths but with something that happened before the second death...?
When Castiel cleared out the angels guarding the green room in Van Nuys, California where Adam was being held, he carved an angel banishing sigil into his chest instead of painting it on a wall with blood, banishing not only the four angels in range but also himself.
Afterwards, he apparently appeared bloody and unconscious on a shrimping boat off Delacroix. He was brought to a hospital where the doctors thought he was braindead. He woke up there three episodes after the Van Nuys incident with his 'batteries' drained.
Perhaps it was during this time that Jimmy died. (Jimmy... ='( ) Castiel effectively powered himself down when he banished himself and so (probably) was unable to heal Jimmy from his injuries in time.
So maybe from this point until Lucifer's snap, we only have the (human) body with a (powered-down) angel inside. The human soul has moved on and is gone. =( And then perhaps when God brought Castiel back after the second chunky soup, He just gave Castiel a reconstructed body (not really human?) for a vessel.
Something like that. Maybe. =P
Appendix:
References:
s4e20 The Rapture
s6e03 The Third Man
s5e16 Dark Side of the Moon
s6e07 Family Matters
s4e01 Lazarus Rising
s8e21 The Great Escapist
s4e22 Lucifer Rising
s5e01 Sympathy for the Devil
s5e02 Good God, Y'all
s5e14 My Bloody Valentine
s5e22 Swan Song
s5e13 The Song Remains the Same
s5e18 Point of No Return
s5e21 Two Minutes to Midnight
And that's it for now. =)
I started typing this out around 2 weeks ago(?) but then got too busy in RL to finish it. =P Now, however, I find that I cannot make a new Merry Christmas post unless I publish it because I don't want to discard the (almost finished) draft that I get to restore every time I click on the post link hahaha. =P Plus I just came from youtube earlier and commented on a video that made me think of these SPN things again. =) So I thought it best to get this finished now.
And I guess I'd better just add the greeting here as well...
Hope you all had a MERRY CHRISTMAS!!! =)