Azazels Manifesto

Author: Oscar Wilder

Creative non-fiction of a queer Christian’s struggles

'While they were eating, Jesus took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and gave it to his disciples, saying, “Take and eat; this is my body.”'

-  Matthew 26:26

'Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your bodies.' 

-  Corinthians 6:19-20

I was baptised before I could speak by a priest I never knew in a far-flung land that was colonised by a dozen forces before it itself began the conquest of 72 other nations. The land where my blood came from, they said, importing me there like cargo to be blessed before being shipped back out to a desert outpost where once again, there was no God.

They did not dip me in the river. In a two-hundred year-old graveyard on what might have been an ancient pagan site deliberately erased by the construction of a Christian church, the golden hair on my heavy baby head was sprinkled with holy water. I have been back to that church exactly once at sixteen years old, where the Pastor who was not the one who baptised me showed me into the tiny backroom where the priest hid survivors of previous conflicts. A single bed, single window 20 centimetres wide, through a crawl space in a wall.

As a tiny child, an elderly woman would come into our class and tell us stories about Jesus. Gave us colouring pictures with Bible verses. We enjoyed those stories alongside the ones of other gods, ancient Egypt and Greek and things much closer to home. At the end of the year, she each gave us a Bible. It was the thickest book I owned, and for that, I knew it was magic, as all books are. I tried to read it and I did not understand it; words too complex for six-year-old eyes and they blended like cyphers and runes, ancient script. Only some words coherent. ‘And’. ‘Too’. ‘Was’. I cast my eyes over it, uncomprehending, willing its meaning into my brain before I could read.

The next time I was back in church was when I was twelve for Christmas carols. I could feel my thighs start to flatten out when I sat down; I practised taking off my white wireless bra without taking off my shirt so as not to see my growing breasts. Awash in the sound of hymns and my own thoughts, my feelings crawled up the stained glass windows into the arched rafters and clung there, slipped out into the starry night, the waning moon, the chains on the black metal gates in the alleyway by the church. Pulling me back to the black metal bunk on camp; how my fingers crept towards my thighs and the aching that was new in my stomach, but whenever I moved the bunk creaked and I seized my muscles still and couldn’t sleep.

I became familiar with sleeplessness. With the pull of my hands towards my flesh, and the proverbial creaking bed that stilled them. With God’s eyes watching my pale milky white skin, daring me to touch. I forgot the way I used to listen to my heart and my stomach with a stethoscope when I was little, fascinated. That was where I first comprehended what was meant by ‘sacred’. The mysteries were within, they were in darkness, they were in motion, and they were in everyone else. That personality was skin-deep; and in the riot of the blood and the warmth of flesh and the functioning of organs, that was the same heartbeat in us all. It made me feel connected to the divine. To everything and everyone. Something too holy to be seen with our own eyes: what was within could only be known through emotions, feelings, touch, listening, sharing: taking in, and casting away. You could only know something by making it a part of you. It was a risk; like taking drugs, knowing it would change you. It took commitment. And that’s why I understood witchcraft from such a young age.

But by then I could comprehend the Bible, and this miserably translated Eurocentric version they gave me said this: filthy. Filthy. Filthy humans, filthy bodies, filthy love, especially if it’s queer. Your body is for God because He made it. What was He going to do with it, I wondered – wait for it to die, in perfect condition, just to leave it on earth while my immortal soul went to heaven? There are people just like you, and they are filthy, the Bible said. Female people like you, with your breasts and your thighs that God has given you and is now punishing you for; curves you never asked for. Queer people like you – you know you love a girl, you love her to death and after death and she is what you think of when you think of heaven – but she is not God, and neither are you. You do realise that everything you are is a flawed creature warped by the Devil? Something is wrong with you. But don’t worry, God made you like this, and made you perfect. So make sure you love everyone, everyone, but never yourself.

So perhaps I didn’t comprehend it after all. Who could wrap their brains around such an oxymoron? But the church, where my feelings still dripped on the ceiling and hid in the bed in the priest’s backroom, is like sleeping gas: forced me into compliance, unquestioning doublethink. It became part of my subconscious, the watching eye of God; I hid my body under clothes to make them holy in the darkness just like my organs. I began to refuse myself food, then consume too much at once, sugar became my saviour. They told me my teeth were ugly and glued metal brackets onto them, dragged my teeth around in my gums with no anaesthetic, pulled my extra ones out while I was awake. ‘Humans don’t have this many teeth,’ my dentist said. But he didn’t speculate as to what I was; just forcibly made me human again. Banned me from sugary drinks, told me to wash my mouth out after every meal should I disturb my human façade. ‘We wouldn’t want to have to pull more of your teeth out.’  The beast within me stirred as I lay in the chair and watched my teeth be pulled, it writhed in my belly as I finally became a chronic insomniac, the hunger gnawing at me. God watched me even in my dreams.

I wanted to be holy so bad. But when I was far from the Church of England that had supposedly blessed me, a church made purely to break its own rule of divorce by a rich old man, I had to attend the Catholic church. Red brick. Red dirt. Australian gothic. Because I was not theirs, even within the same religion, they would not feed me the bread and wine. Made me cross my arms across my chest as a reminder I was already dead to them, as the Priest whispered words I didn’t understand in my ear. I didn’t want him; I wanted the bread, the bread, the bread, the wine, the flesh, the blood, THE BREAD, I was HUNGRY. But they would not give me the flesh and blood of Christ though I craved to be one with Jesus. I wanted to taste him on my tongue. I never went back.

The beast was strong and it was hurt and it was hungry to the point of danger now. They took my braces off, praised how perfect I looked, and my teeth grew back. Sharper. Bigger. Longer. My tongue grew longer, my claws sharper, and I went to the dietician and learnt how to eat again. Learnt how to moan for the first time. When I felt desire, I felt pain, but I felt it anyway. I looked God in the eyes as I slowly touched myself, and He held my gaze like a lover. My body began to heal, and my mind, though He watched me, and I realised that He was watching out of love. Adoration. That the apple was a gift and a challenge, that temptation is a tool so you can decide when you are ready for the truth. I was, and had always been, an angel. But there were some wounds that still oozed, and some of their brainwashing still stuck. The church is so beautiful. Look at it. The stained glass window light falls on my curls.

Just as it did when I returned to church when I was twenty-three, when I sat in that light and as the pastor asked the congregation whether they should allow same-sex marriages in their halls, I stood up and said I was queer. The silence was like an apotheosis. I felt like Lucifer; like light made manifest. Like it hurt their eyes to look at me, but like an angel, they could not look away. Fear not, I whispered. But this was a lie. I had been gazing into God’s eyes; I moaned into His mouth. I had gone closer to the sun and burned for it. I had walked on the scalding ground of hell and seen years of insomnia that turned my brain hollow. I was a man in the body of a woman just as Jesus was spirit in the body of man.

And in that moment, the congregation did something I had stopped expecting from the church: they loved me. Feared me, yes, disagreed with me, yes, but they all nodded wide-eyed, as if at a bedraggled and haunted graveyard Grimm washed up onto the steps of their church in a bad storm. God help this poor, dangerous, strangely pretty inhuman creature; God save this Devil’s victim that has straggled into the light from the depths of hell; God wash away the taint on this fucked up horned hairy but horribly beautiful demon. The anti-Christ is in our church and it is begging to be loved. And like a stray dog, they promised to love me once again. Even like this. Even like this.

Part of my heart believed them; part of it did not. It split itself in two, my body writhed and warped between Lucifer the Lightbringer, stunningly beautiful, tall and pretty, and the Grimm, dark-eyed and wounded, ugly and bloodied, muscles rippling and hair growing, werewolf form, crawling to eat out of their hands. The hunger was there, and partly out of love and partly out of rage – which as the protestors say is but the same emotion – I oozed back down the Church walls and coalesced into the Inner Sanctum, and then the possession was complete. They loved me. And I was ready to love them back, with all the hunger for revenge in my cold dead heart.

So I took the Priest first. I would never go for the low-hanging fruit; never prey on the weak of their flock like they had. Cornered him in the confession box, asked him to confess himself. He refused: so above the rest of us. The man behind the curtain, just like the Wizard of Oz; a projection, a figurehead, a lie. And when he refused to confess, I showed him my true form and he begged for mercy, and being the merciful being that I am, I consumed him, body and soul. Heaven is not out there, it is not beyond us: it is within us.

I waited until more priestly men with titles and vestments were sent to exorcise me: and I consumed them, too. They tied me down and did not know, I suppose, that the endless nights of torment they subjected me to in the first place made pain a pleasure and perversity holy to me. Their chains around my wrists only reminded me of the wounds of Jesus; the burning of their brands licked like tongues of flame from the hell I was born in, up my thighs, against my ribs. The hymns of exorcising sounded like the call of my fellow angels and I slipped into a perfect dream; their hands around my throat trying to choke the life out of me just saw the whites of my eyes. As they fawned upon me, in awe and terror of my beauty, I couldn’t help but grow, morph, my engorged body snapping their chains, pulsing and alive. The beating of my heart became an earthquake; the tremble of my fluttering wings the breath on their cheeks. As I crawled off the altar into their horde of waiting arms, trying to hold me back or trying to embrace me I know not, dripping ichor and gold saliva, they licked the spit from my mouth, the blood from my wounds, all accusations of unholiness forgotten as they too found their hunger that the hivemind of the church denied itself. The beast they warned us about is within. God is within. All of it, within us all, and chaining the beast only trains its muscles.

In the end, when they saw my true form, they fell to their bruised knees and swallowed, throats swollen around the lies they refused to confess to me though their lips would taste sweeter for it, then begged me to take them. I am too beautiful, too terrible. But that is how angels are. We are divine messengers, and humans struggle to comprehend the difference between a demon and an angel when they see one. We both work for the higher power. Fear not, I whisper as they scream. Because even though they tortured my mortal form and the forms of those like me with electric chairs and daggers and scripture, even though they carried out psychological torture upon my forming mind as they watered the seeds of self-hate and brought my own hands against me, I am here to try to love them back. I do.

They live on in me. Their hands writhe in my belly, arms wrap around my lungs, blood pumps through my veins, their organs squashed inside mine. They are inside me and it is every bit as erotic and orgasmic as being inside a lover. They become my flesh and blood. God will make you live forever... I am eternal. Becoming part of me means we will never die.

Cannibalism is the ultimate form of desiring another human, gluttony, craving flesh. I am the church's horny craving for bodily pleasure they tried to replace with the flesh and blood of Christ; that feeding us ritually from infants on the body of God would only teach us that consuming another is what love is. Now my acts of pornographic greed play out in my head as the church calls me filthy for being hungry for the thing they starved me from, for accepting the most human urges of my body they taught me to be ashamed of. Unholy, they said, everything natural about you. I only wanted to love and be loved. Part of me knows what I do is monstrous. Part of me knows what I am is pure and holy and part of me is hurt and the part of me that wants revenge loves them in a way that hurts them back. So I think about this, I think about them as they whisper inside me, as I lick their blood from my fingers and groan, warm and filthy and panting in the corner under the pews. Did they ever love me at all? Was their pity love or hate? Did they ever love me for me, or for what they could get out of me? My stomach roils with them, my soul grappling with theirs; the tussle makes me feel like perhaps this is how to relate to people.

Now I feel too full; my stomach stretched beyond its limits, a new form of pain, skin tight. I fight with them in death and I fear I am losing. Ungodly sounds gurgle in my intestines, I hug myself, I hug them, and try to comfort us all from our ordeal. I rub my stomach and belch loud, followed by a pleasure-filled moan. But release means nothing when the beast is within. Sickness wells up and I vomit their remains back out all over the church floor. I tried to stomach them, to be like them; and for a moment my hunger was sated. I believe we are all the same, but part of them rejects part of me. Am I made of stuff too different? I am an angel, my blood is made of stardust, my flesh of marble. And all I wanted was to be one with them.

Now I become their worst enemy: they call me evil greedy selfish disgusting filthy anti-Christ queer demon, and I am that because they made me so. Desperate for flesh. Now, tearing into something bloody with my teeth makes me feel not starving for the first time, the juice running down my arms makes me feel alive, my lips against skin of fruit or another human is my saviour, the swell of my stomach assuages the hunger and states my constitution, the release of the gas that builds there is surrender to my disgusting humanity and a reminder people will love me despite my filth, the way my intestines squirm and stretch is testament to sacredness your inner sanctum could only pray for, and you can watch me devour your whole fucking world and beg me to stop and I will say no, because you starved me, shamed me, made me inhuman, for failing to be a saint in a world full of sinners.