Whereas Shemyaza is a fundamentally masculine, manly and solar character, Daniel Cranton only is a seventeen-year-old youth, reserved and clumsy (and even virgin) at the opening of Stalking Tender Prey, the first book in Storm Constantine's Grigori Trilogy.

The first glimpse the reader is given of Daniel is somewhat contradictory. Perceived through Verity's point of view, there is an implication that Daniel is not a very pleasant character, yet this is the first contact between the reader and Daniel. Then, when Daniel actually appears, the first direct narrative comment about him is:

"Daniel was a slender, graceful boy."¹

This immediately sets the image for what Daniel incarnates all throughout the trilogy: the beautiful boy ("boy" in comparison with Shemyaza, since during the course of the story Daniel is so much younger and passes from the state of teenager to that of young man). In this, he fits the archetype of the "beautiful boy "described by Camille Paglia:

"The beautiful boy is an androgyne, luminously masculine and feminine. He has male muscle structure but a dewy girlishness... The adolescent male, one step over puberty, is dreamy and removed, oscillating between vigour and languor. He is a girl-boy, masculinity shimmering and blurred, as if seen through a cloudy fragment of ancient glass."²

Daniel is the son of Louis Cranton, a crippled man physically handicapped following an accident and suffering from a great affective loneliness since the children's mother died. Daniel is the brother to Verity, an uncaring and cold girl. She barely tolerates him until Peverel Othman springs into their lives. From this initial position Daniel really catapults into becoming the central character of the trilogy. Shy and lacking self-confidence, Daniel's psychic powers nevertheless are the means which are going to allow him to face and fight Peverel.

In fact, in the final book of the trilogy, Stealing Sacred Fire, it is Daniel, again, who becomes vizier to Shemyaza-Azazel, the Angel-King, and who then suffers the most traumatic fleshy ordeal, the tearing of his human skin to regain his Grigori essence. Before this, at the beginning of the book, when he meets Shemyaza after the latter's five-year sleep, Shemyaza immediately sees that time flew and that Daniel, once the beautiful boy, has changed a lot:

"The ethereal beauty of him appeared to have solidified. He was a very attractive young man, but hardly fey. The leather jacket, combat trousers, scuffed army boots and surly demeanour conveyed an entirely different image to the one Shem kept fondly in his memory."³

This change is something that comes about during the course of events in the second book, Scenting Hallowed Blood. In Stalking Tender Prey, Daniel knows his first sexual experience with Owen Winter, then is carnally possessed by Peverel, but then in Scenting Hallowed Blood, there is a passage into Taziel Levantine's arms (Peverel's former lover) and he ends up being Shemyaza's minion. Daniel's initiation into the drama of the Grigori is much more complete than Shemyaza's, since the latter already has reached sexual maturity when the trilogy starts and given that his aura definitely is masculine.

Furthermore, and despite all his affairs, Shemyaza definitely remains attached and in love with Ishtahar. However, since he and she have not been able to get together since the Fall, he enjoys sensual pleasures mainly with Daniel, on a regular basis, without Daniel being jealous of her or of Shemyaza's other casual partners (but the opposite is not true since Shemyaza inflicts a penance upon Daniel when he witnesses Daniel's love-making with Taziel).

Becoming A Man, Yet Privileged With Women

Daniel becomes a man on Ishtahar's injunction, so he possesses Taziel, which disturbs Shemyaza. Prior to this, sexually speaking, it could be said that Daniel plays a "female "part; i.e. he is passive, before he becomes active, thus asserting himself in Shemyaza's eyes; nevertheless, he is homosexual, therefore mainly sexually passive most of the time -- only with Taziel does he behave "like a man." This part is highly symbolic, as Camille Paglia would say, as she expresses her views on sodomy:

"Sodomy is imagined as ritual entrance to the underworld, symbolized by man's bowels."⁴

This is not surprising if we know that Daniel is Shemyaza's vizier. He comes out as soon as Stalking Tender Prey⁵, when he goes for a night out in Cresterfield with Owen. As a good Goth, he applies make-up to his face (most symbolically feminine gesture) with the clear intention of seducing Owen:

"In the attic room Daniel dressed carefully, outlined his eyes in black, messed up the hair he was not allowed to dye or grow. The house was quiet around him; not even Verity was at home. Perhaps she'd gone out with Louis. Daniel left a note on the kitchen table, paused to stroke Raven's head, plucking up the courage to go back outside. He felt that by donning his other-life attire, he was making some kind of obvious invitation, which Owen would scorn."⁶

Daniel befriends Letiel, a girl he meets at the disco. She too has suffered disillusions with a man. This is the first example of the way that, thanks to his assumed femininity, Daniel has privileged contacts with women. Later, in Scenting Hallowed Blood, he is accepted into the Pelleth as an oracle even though he is beyond the age for the task. He takes on functions traditionally reserved to women and he is mostly helped by women when he finds himself in a position of vulnerability. While Daniel is still human, Ishtahar comes to help him out whenever he and Shemyaza need help. Verity cannot but show her sisterly love which she repressed for so long. Gadreel comes to comfort him when he last meets Ishtahar and thus feels at a loss. After Salamiel ritually executes Shemyaza, Gadreel and Pharmaros come to comfort him. It is Gadreel who advise him to go to Giza after this event.

Still it is Letiel who first sees the truth of Daniel: he openly comes out to her and tells her about his psychic abilities. Feeling she's ready to listen to his love disappointment with Owen, he starts telling her about it and then reveals he is psychic. This is how he embarks upon this road to change as, like it is revealed in Stealing Sacred Fire, Daniel is, at heart, Grigori. But, as Shemyaza's disciple, he is punished (having to live this human life) and can thus be considered an "evil angel". To reinforce this idea, and relative to the question of gender, John Broadbent, in his study of Paradise Lost, raises the point that:

"Bad angels are never female, in any period; but they may in a monster period be perversely androgynous, homosexual and so on."⁷

In short, Daniel is like the ugly duckling: he unfolds his wings throughout the trilogy before realizing he is a majestic swan.

Daniel the Discoverer

Daniel possesses psychic abilities and therefore is critical to the interpretation of much of the supernatural activity in the trilogy. Like his sister Verity, he senses things, experiences visions and it is thanks to him that events take a certain turn. Besides, it is during his first love-making with Owen, when he loses his virginity, that he has the sheerest visions. But he is instinctively aware that, as a psychic, he should remain secretive about his gift. Although he feels attracted to the young human-angel (or Grigori) hybrid Owen, he nevertheless attempts to keep it secret to start with:

"Daniel had been sure Owen had recognized something in him, and this made him feel ashamed. He'd always been chastised by his parents for his peculiarities and dreaded anyone else becoming aware of them now... Why he couldn't tell Owen about his odd premonitions and feelings, he didn't know. Surely Owen would be deeply interested? Yet Daniel feared scorn and punishment and kept silent, repressing the unbidden feelings as much as he could. In private, he could indulge himself and dream strange, new realities, but he had learned at an early age that this indulgence was not to be shared."⁸

This feeling of guilt does not surprise the reader once it's revealed that Daniel too is originally a Grigori, i.e. a fallen angel. He bears no memory or awareness of it whatsoever. He is truly born into human flesh and no other Grigori recognize him as their kin of any sort. This is why Daniel is much more deeply human than any other Grigori. This is what binds him so closely to Ishtahar, the woman turned into a Goddess. It is therefore not surprising to realize that he is her counterpart and that together, they are the keys to Shemyaza's power.

If the latter acts on Daniel's advice, he is a rather idle character. But when Shemyaza finds advice good or useful, he takes action. In fact, Daniel is the genuinely active character of the trilogy. It is no coincidence if Daniel is wholly human and takes a long time to recover his angelic essence. He must earn it through various ordeals. Paradoxically, Daniel, who hasn't got the messianic aura Shemyaza has, is of a crucial importance in the ways events develop. He is the one who opens the way for Shemyaza.

Daniel of the Lion

This importance incidentally shows in his nickname, "Daniel of the Lion," a direct allusion to the biblical Daniel⁹. Besides, Daniel's singularity lies in that he is the only Grigori suffering such a punishment: that of being deprived of his very essence. The similarity with the biblical Daniel consists in that the latter is thrown into the fire with his friends, but he stands alone with the lions. Moreover, the link between Daniel and the lion also shows in the priest-vizier Mani's words thanks to whom he recovers his angelic essence. Going back even further in references, Mani associates him to the Egyptian Goddess Sekhmet:

"Your soul has a long affinity with the lion. An ancestress of yours once worked in the house of Sekhmet, She of the Eye of Fire."¹⁰

Sekhmet is known to be a very fierce Goddess and her fury is famous:

"Sekhmet: lioness Goddess incarnating the flaming eye of the sun. Her function is to annihilate the enemies of the creator with her fire. She rules over various feared spirits. The dangerous forces that she incarnates are set free during the last five days of the year. During this period, humans seek to appease her with prayers so that her destroying fury does not shake the balance of the world."¹¹

It is therefore rather strange that Daniel should be associated with this goddess. He really isn't similar to her. He certainly is as useful to Shemyaza as Sekhmet is to Ra, but not in the same fashion. He seldom gets angry and his anger is not remarkable. On the contrary, he undergoes Anu's anger following Shemyaza's sin. If Anu punishes the Grigoris, the treatment he inflicts upon Daniel is unique. Perhaps, in imagining what would befall Daniel, Storm Constantine was inspired by the short story written by Tolstoy, "Mikhail," in which an angel who disobeyed God, is sentenced to live a human life the time necessary for him to expiate his sin. However, there is a difference: Daniel was not Anu's favourite and he did not have Shemyaza's aura in Kharsag.

Likewise, one may find a fallen angel called Dan'el or Danjal in the Book Of Enoch. He is in charge of all that touches the law. Therefore, the reader can view Daniel Cranton as the guarantor of order and tradition and he is indeed Shemyaza's vizier. His name meaning "God is my judge," Daniel can also be seen as a holy angel:

"Daniel is a high holy angel (one of 72) who bears the name of God Shemhamphorae."¹²

In this name, Shemhamphorae, we can find that of Shemyaza and so therefore the link between the two characters is not surprising. As Shemyaza also bears the name Azazel, the angel Daniel can also be known under the name Shemamphorae, even though never does Storm Constantine do so.

Daniel Discovers His Power

Daniel, able to see beyond appearances as he is still caught in the maelstrom of his schoolboy's life, starts feeling very strongly when he faces Peverel for the first time. At that moment, he has no idea what the importance of this man will be or what his direct connection with the Grigoris is either.

To start with, Daniel is the sacrificial victim, a sort of male Iphigenia saved by Ishtahar at the last minute, who accepts his fate. This can be perceived as another aspect of Daniel's feminine side. Daniel is trapped in a real demon's claws: Peverel rapes him and tries to kill him:

"The thrill of terror is passive, masochistic and implicitely feminine. It is imaginative submission to overwhelming superior force. The vast audience of the Gothic novel was and is female. Men who cultivate the novel or film of terror seek sex-crossing sensations. Horror films are most popular among adolescents, whose screams are Dionysian signals of sexual awakening... Horror films unleash the forces repressed by Christianity -- evil and the barbarism of nature. Horror films are rituals of pagan worship. There western man obsessively confronts what Christianity has never been able to bury or explain away."¹³

Here Camille Paglia sums up what must constitute a wide portion of Storm Constantine's readers. The character Daniel, not as flamboyant as Shemyaza, is most interesting. Just as Anne Rice makes Louis the introvert in her Vampire Chronicles, Storm Constantine makes her hero Shemyaza, like Lestat, a figure for a wide readership. It is because of this that the character is somewhat trapped by the readers' expectations. This is what a critic said about Storm Constantine's work:

"Anne Rice did a very similar thing in Memnoch The Devil, albeit with a different emphasis and far less wit, and fell into the same trap this material always lays out -- it quickly becomes clear that there's only one place you can go if you want to remain true to your interpretation of the story. Any obstacle you put in the way must betray expectations if it should succeed in derailing the inevitable denouement."¹⁴

If Shemyaza loses a little bit of his interest after Peverel disappears, other characters, and Daniel in particular, manage to maintain a high level of interest and curiosity in the reader. Daniel evolves in the shadow of this solar and luminous hero: Shemyaza. But because Shemyaza is so solar and luminous, he becomes a bit painful to behold. Which makes Daniel a more subtle character and therefore more interesting. Besides, in this duel of light and darkness (to use the mazdean Gods Ahura Mazda and Ahriman) the first light is not always necessarily a conveyor of light in that light comes from divinity, such as it is perceived from manicheist or mazdean perspectives. Back in 1757, Edmund Burke actually said:

"But darkness is more productive of sublime ideas than light."¹⁵

If indeed Daniel is not a saviour or a solar hero, he undeniably contributes to Shemyaza's blossoming so he can then accomplish his destiny, just like Shemyaza does not illustrate himself as he is only Peverel Othman and then Azazel since his deeds are fundamentally evil to other characters in Peverel's case and are potentially so subsequently to Azazel's lack of action.

Flight at High Crag

For Daniel, everything starts in High Crag after his affair with Taziel, when he returns to Shemyaza and asks him to give him knowledge. In this scene, Storm Constantine clearly refers to fallen angels. The words she uses ("fruit of eternal knowledge... fruit of the tree... the fatal apple"¹⁶) are quite explicit. Here again, Daniel takes on a feminine attitude: he is facing the fallen angel, associated with the Serpent on countless occasions throughout the trilogy and asks him to give him knowledge. In this scene, Daniel is put in a like position to Danae (daughter to Acrisios, King of Argos, who locked up by her father receives Zeus's visit in the guise of a golden rain and whose union Perseus was born) and to Semele (mother of Hermes, who died for having wanted to behold her divine lover, Zeus, in all his glory) when Shemyaza, like Zeus, tells him:

"This is what you asked for... I came to you as a shower of gold, yet you asked to see my true face. Now you see it. Are you dying, Daniel? Are you burning up?"¹⁷

This precise moment of the story is practically the middle of the trilogy and it is precisely at this moment that Daniel takes the first step on the path to regain his original essence. Which is quite unexpected since, contrary to traditions, humans cannot turn into angels, neither can angels turn into humans (despite the unique case of Enoch become the angel Metatron). In contrast to Eve, tempted by the Serpent, Daniel is the one who asks Shemyaza to give him knowledge. Once the thing has been agreed between the two of them, Daniel cannot go back. Shemyaza seizes him and hurls him into the air. Then Daniel too falls, exactly like if Shemyaza was repeating Anu's gestures, taking on Anu's part¹⁸. Daniel is not the fallen angel but his fall, due to Shemyaza's sin or his will, is terrifying all the same:

"As if in response, the stars of Orion grew blindingly bright, and Daniel felt himself being repelled by an invisible thrust of force. It sent him plummeting downwards, and as he fell, his body filled up with liquid fire. His feathers were scorched away. He could feel his vitals burning, devoured by the caustic fluid.

Daniel screamed and fell. Stars rushed by him, and the mocking laughter of invisible entities rang through the void. He saw blazing angels rise up, shrieking, in a maelstrom of oily wings, and then the great deluge engulfed the world.

He sank into the fiery flood and his head hit the stone. He closed his eyes, roaring with pain and fear. Light. Flames. Screams. Darkness.

Silence."¹⁹

We may wonder why Shemyaza inflicts such a cruel ordeal on Daniel as this scene renders the passing on of knowledge and Daniel's human life-extension by Shemyaza. His human life is precisely altered by the ordeal: Daniel's perceptions for instance are sharpened and he has a different view on the world from then on, just like Anne Rice's vampires²⁰.

Recovering His Essence

Daniel experiences this again in his serpent form when he recovers his Grigori essence. This scene is highly symbolic: Daniel falls into the water and sinks deeper and deeper. He gets close to a great and terrible snake which swallows him before he finds himself facing his older brother, lover and master, Shemyaza, who turns into one of the Elders and tears his skin off him thus making him bleed. Then Daniel falls again. All the elements are there: rebirth through water, femininity (and homosexuality), through the tempting Serpent standing for Shemyaza, the fallen angel or the almighty God (Malak Tawus or Quetzalcoatl), blood representing the rite of passage from one status to another and the new fall to come to a full circle. Isn't Daniel's mistake to have blindly been Shemyaza's follower? This would explain the punishment inflicted upon him and this path he has to walk to recover his original essence:

"...a quest that can be perturbed by successive reincarnations -- gilgul -- that the soul must undergo when it has not fully accomplished the will of God or when it has sinned. The soul's destiny, through the process of transmigration which can happen not only in a human body but also in an animal or angelic one - all depending on the degree of perfection of the said soul -, is of fundamental importance in kabbalistic writings."²¹

This is exactly what befalls Daniel. Of angelic essence in illo tempore, he becomes human following his "sin", i.e. having remained loyal to Shemyaza. If changes of nature between humans and angels are rarely mentioned, the Kabbala does not exclude them. Storm Constantine certainly studied her sources to give an account of Daniel's experience.

After having learnt from Mani what his role must be, Daniel is ready to endorse it. He has fully become what he must be. This is precisely why Ishtahar is no longer going to appear to him, except on one occasion in the guise of a snake. Also, this is why during this last meeting between them Daniel realizes he has become Ishtahar's rival again:

"He had become the person with whom she'd once had to compete for Shemyaza's affections."²²

Footnotes

1. S. Constantine, Stalking Tender Prey, op. cit., chap. 2, p. 23
2. C. Paglia, Sexual Personae, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1990, chap. 4, pp. 110, 115
3. S. Constantine, Stealing Sacred Fire, op. cit., chap. 4, "A Dream of the Garden," p. 55
4. C. Paglia, Sexual Personae, op. cit., chap. 8, p. 246
5. S. Constantine, Stalking Tender Prey, op. cit., chap. 19, p. 326 Ibid., p. 323
6. J. Broadbent, Paradise Lost - Introduction, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1972, p. 64
7. S. Constantine, Stalking Tender Prey, op. cit., chap. 2, pp. 24-5 Daniel, VI
8. S. Constantine, Stealing Sacred Fire, op. cit., chap. 11,"The Keeper of the Key", p. 144
9. D. Meeks & C. Favard-Meeks, La vie quotidienne des dieux égyptiens, Hachette, Paris, 1993, p. 347
10. F. Barrett, The Magus, Lackington, Allen & co, London, 1801
11. C. Paglia, Sexual Personae, op. cit., chap. 9, pp. 267-8
12. J. Robson,"Stranger Angels: Storm Constantine's Grigori Trilogy," Nova Express, Austin, winter/spring 1998, vol. 4, p. 29
13. E. Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry Into The Origin Of Our Ideas Of The Sublime And Beautiful, London, 1757, part II, section XIV
14. S. Constantine, Scenting Hallowed Blood, op. cit., chap. "Learning to Fly," p. 180 Ibid., p. 182
15. Ibid., chap. 23, " Fall, Sweet Sacrifice ", p. 239
16. Ibid., chap. 19,"Learning to Fly", p. 187
17. A. Rice, Interview With The Vampire, op. cit.
18. C. Mopsik, "La Kabbale," Actualité des Religions, Paris, avril 2001, n° 26, pp. 58-9
19. S. Constantine, Stealing Sacred Fire, op. cit., chap. 17,"The Jewelled Serpent", p. 219