Ozryel was one of the Archangels created by God. Following his demise, he became the progenitor of the Ancients, and thus of the vampire race.
History[]
Ozryel was one of the three archangels sent down to Earth by God, to punish Sadum and Amurah (Sodom and Gomorrah). All three angels - Ozryel, Gabriel, and Michael - began their work by taking shelter in a nearby city, to observe their target cities before striking. While being sheltered and washed by the family that had welcomed them, Ozryel became fascinated by their blood, the substance that carried life through their bodies, and thus was a little piece of God's divine power.
Entering Sadum in disguise as a human, Ozryel was called to by a brothel madam, who he attacked and bit on the throat, drinking her blood from her jugular vein.
After Sadum and Amurah were destroyed, Ozryel was overcome with bloodlust and attacked his brother, Michael, drinking his silvery blood as he had drunk the human's. As punishment, God ordered the other Archangels, Gabriel and Raphael, to impale Ozryel to the ground with a beam of divine light, and then cut his body into seven pieces and scatter them across the Earth. Over time, Ozryel's accursed parts seeped into the dirt of the burial sites and spawned the Ancients. His name became anathema and was not mentioned in traditions regarding the fall of those cities:
- "The third Archangel is deliberately omitted. Hidden. Lost." (from 'The Night Eternal')
The Master was spawned last, and is thus regarded as the "youngest" of the Ancients. He came from Ozryel's throat, and so personifies the Angel's "thirst" and insatiable ambition more than any of the others.
The manner of Ozryel's death is directly linked to the weaknesses of the Strigoi:
- Ozryel was pinned to the earth by divine light between the two rivers that flowed from Sadum and Amurah, and so his descendants cannot cross running water unless invited by a human;
- Sunlight is the closest manifestation of God's "face" on Earth, which is why it is lethal to vampires;
- Silver is the color of angelic blood, which Ozryel drank from Michael and thus earned God's wrath.
Abraham Setrakian explained that the number of bodily features of Ozryel found in traditional representations corresponded to the number of souls upon the earth. This is symbolic, in 'The Strain' story-verse, of the boundless contagion contained within the Ancients and unleashed by the Master against all of humanity:
- "[Ozryel] has as many eyes and as many tongues as there are men on earth. But you see, that only speaks of how he can multiply, how he can spread…" (from 'The Fall')
Ozryel is also referred to by the Ancients as "Sariel" (with whom they collectively identify) among themselves through their shared consciousness. When the last of the Ancients, the Master, was vanquished, his remnants merged with those of the other Ancients gathered by Quinlan as they had instructed him. Finally released from earthly bonds and reconstituted as a single entity, he was reclaimed by heaven.
Trivia[]
- Azrael the Angel of Death became conflated with the fallen angel Sariel in certain traditions such as Enochian mysticism. Sariel is also identified as a primordial Power and, in the apocryphal Book of Enoch, taught humans to interpret patterns in Nature such as regulating time. Intriguingly in 'The Fall', the Ancients credited themselves with facilitating human development towards its own demise; this ultimately proved to be a phyrric victory for the Ancients, in large part due to the rash acts of the Master.
- The rending of Ozryel, who contained in tradition as many bodily features as there are souls on earth, could be related to the shattering (shevirah) in the Kabbalah of primordial man, Adam Kadmon, who contained every soul who would ever be born on earth.
- The Oz and Henson film, 'The Dark Crystal' (1982), comparably ends where the splintered races of Mystics and Skeksis were brought together and merged in a great cataclysm of light. These formed another race, the UrSkeks, which ascended to a higher realm of being.
