For the A to Z Blogging Challenge 2019, Punch the Rabbit delves deep behind the scenes with a series of Author's Notes related to the Stone Soldiers, Spectral Ops, and Shadow Detachment series.
You don’t have to watch the CW’s Supernatural to notice that a lot of
angel names end in “el”. Even the word Angel
has an el in it. I never gave this
much thought, until I had to do research on fallen angel names for the main
villain of Stone Soldiers #13, Shadow
Raiders—a fallen angel ruling the alternate reality Earth of the book.
In the course of reading about
angels and those named both in the Bible and in Judiasm and Kabbalah, I
stumbled across something, really, really interesting: El.
To back up a moment, the first
time I ever heard “el” was the car-truck hybrid of the 1970s: the el camino, which
translates to “the road”. The Biblical “el” is considerably different.
Michael, Gabriel, Uriel,
Raphael.. so many angels, all with “el”. The answer is really simple: “el”, in
this context, means “of god”.
Now, not all angel names have “el”
in them; Samyaza, Armaros, Mastema are
examples of el-less names. And then, there’s Kal-el.
Whoa, wait… what?
That’s right, the last son of
Krypton comes from the House of El, the same as his father, Jor-El.
Is this a coincidence? Well, if
we look at Superman’s creators, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, we learn that Mr.
Siegel was the son of Jewish immigrants who had fled Lithuania. Mr. Shuster
also came from a Jewish family.
I’ll note, at this point, that “El”
means “God”. Meaning that the House of El, is the House of God, and that
Superman, perhaps in the eyes of his creators, was a servant of God.
I’d say “Holy Moly!”, but that’s
Shazam’s line.
You can read about the Fallen Angel Aurg-El and the alternate reality Asgard in Stone Soldiers #13, Shadow Raiders, available now on Kindle.
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