"The Man Who Walked Through Cracks" (1974/1978)
- Jon Nelson
- 4 days ago
- 19 min read
Updated: 1 day ago

They wrote the story on a column, And on the Great Church Window painted The same, to make the world acquainted How their children were stolen away; And there it stands to this very day . . . So, Willy, let you and me be wipers Of scores out with all men — especially pipers: And, whether they pipe us from rats or from mice, If we've promised them aught, let us keep our promise. — Robert Browning, The Pied Piper of Hamelin (1842)
“It's Gabriel's horn!” John Michael Anwalt shrieked. “But how has he become prince before me? If he is here, then this is the end of things.”
Is Peter Piper Peter Poper now To change the rules and banished things allow?
Advanced Laffety.
I have written before about how grateful I am to own the Centipede Press edition of Lafferty’s stories, but here is some real ingratitude for you. Get a load of that jerk. Titling the volumes the Man . . . was dumb. I understand the gimmick. Who wouldn’t? Lafferty wrote a bunch of stories in the “The Man Who . . .” formula, and on that level, the choice has a superficial warrant. But like several other decisions in those beautiful volumes, it makes little sense. It was an ad hoc organizational principle, one designed to disguise a critical failure to perceive order and to move too quickly into an unguided scooping up of Lafferty stories. Why so dumb? Dumb because most of the "Man . . ." stories are minor. Dumb because no one understands Lafferty better for having the stories in the Centipede arrangement. Dumb because one could devise any number of half-clever ways to unify the presentation of his collected stories had one been so inclined, and dumb because Lafferty readers would have benefited from someone being half-clever. Dumb because the order does not prepare one for the novels, a bridge that needs to be crossed.
It pales in comparison to the truly foolish decisions in those volumes, most notably ones like the decision to break apart the four Green/Life stories in The Men Who Knew Everything sequence, thereby creating a hermeneutic difficulty that need never have existed, as well as the truly lazy decision to include no apparatus for story variants preserved in different published versions.
Even so, three stories in the Man . . . pattern are major expressions of Lafferty’s deepest poetics, so it is not all bad in the realm of dumb editing. Get a grip on two “Man Who” stories, and one has a leg up. Those are "The Man Underneath," "The Man Who Lost His Magic," and "The Man Who Walked Through Cracks." The last, in particular, offers an especially interesting variation on Lafferty’s appropriation of Valentinian Gnostic ideas and is propaedeutic to some of the hardest climbing in his work. With that monstrous act of bitchy ingratitude over, thank you, Centipede, for doing something.
“The Man Who Walked Through Cracks” is Lafferty’s version of the Pied Piper legend. At Hamelin College, we meet a group of faculty members who secretly serve as wardens of consensus reality, charged with preventing humanity from escaping the narrow, mundane, spiritually deadening confines of the reality-scripted world. Their order is disrupted by the eccentric Professor Thomas Cromwell, who begins teaching his students about the vast, unapproved spaces—or “cracks”—that lie between the narrow frequencies of ordinary human perception. Called the “crooked man” and the “Rat-catcher” by the Hamelin faculty, Cromwell teaches what any good teacher does teach: how to perceive and enter hidden dimensions. The wardens move to stop him before he can lead a mass exodus out of accepted reality.
Because Cromwell threatens controlled reality, Dean John Michael Anwalt and six other professors convene a secret nighttime “kangaroo court” to erase him from existence, the kangaroo being one of Lafferty's images of Gnostic imprisonment. It is nice that Anwalt is a dean. Deans usually are the enemy. But these sorry academic faculty are on the dean’s team. During the hearing, the faculty speak of their elite duty to keep humanity confined, and we are introduced to two weird glass hemispheres in the room: one contains vast, empty green meadows; the other holds tormented miniature people trapped like genii in a bottle. Yet despite the wardens’ magical barriers and alchemical potions, Cromwell and his wife, Catherine, at one point slip easily through the physical restrictions of their cell while Cromwell plays a soundless alto flute that alters the room’s reality. Alters is wrong. He discloses it, apocalyptically.
This is a Lafferty story with a great climax. In a better world, it would be loved. It explodes from a massive sonic and spatial breach: Cromwell’s flute-playing summons a pageant of opulent manifestations and escape vehicles, including a flaming train called the Crack-jack Express. A crowd of students and others then use these vehicles to enter the unapproved dimensions. The Nudnik faculty thinks it has trapped the escapees inside the second glass Hemisphere, but Cromwell is not finished. In another of my favorite moments in Lafferty, Professor Cromwell summons a chorus of legendary horn-blowers whose blast shatters the trap and opens the way to the boundless green meadows that are so often in Lafferty a figure of the realized eschaton. In the aftermath, the seven wardens find that they themselves are the tormented figures imprisoned in the first glass Hemisphere; as punishment for failing the rules of Hamelin College, they must teach by day and shrink back into their glass prison every night.
As I said, this is wonderful stuff, with many familiar elements arranged in a fascinating way. It is fun to have Cromwell and Diller back, far from their origin. One of my working assumptions is that Lafferty’s story-worlds have an open spin or a closed spin, and the closed-spin stories are usually the ones that most reward thinking through his variations on Gnosticism. “Snuffles” and “Continued on Next Rock” are examples of closed spin. “The Man Who Walked Through Cracks” is the exception that proves the rule. It is radioactively Gnostic and yet, unlike the usual Lafferty pattern, it has open spin. The rest of this post will try to explain what that means. Because the subject is complex and this is a blog post, I am going to move quickly and offload some thoughts on tools at the end. Expect this to be overclocked.
Let’s start at the beginning.
The story opens with a denial worth keeping in mind because it is about people who want to control us through information management. The denial of Big Reality, the true Prime, is so blatant that it effectively confesses what it negates. “The events weren’t real,” says Professor Dorothy Mandel. Mandel is the Hamelin faculty member who can only understand events through the pseudo-discipline in her experimental psychology class. She embodies what Lafferty most disliked about psychological reductionism. She is an Edmund Weakfish type. Then we hear it again, a rabbit punch: “The events weren’t real.” This time it comes from Professor Rosemary Thumbsdown. She, too, is a Hamelin faculty member determined to exhaust the meaning of the events. Her method may be even worse, since she teaches analytical mythology and speaks of recurring myth-person events. Lafferty detested this. As he told Sheryl Smith in 1978: “What does that girl say in the letter that came before the card? That Christ was a fertility deity and that there were earlier stories about fertility deities and that therefore none of them can be true? . . . The notion that a story can't be true because something like it was told previously reminds me of my own short story ‘Rainy Day in Halicarnassus.’” The joke was he hadn’t written that story yet. Smith’s provocation inspired it.
So that is our opening. Two faculty members of Hamelin College deliver identical disclaimers in consecutive sentences, each claiming professional jurisdiction over the events in order to contain meaning and significance. That is, in short, Hamelin College’s role in the story. It closes off reality through intellectual self-congratulation and epistemic arrogance.

What is being denied is a cosmological claim: that the reality human beings inhabit amounts to roughly one-thousandth of what exists; that the remaining nine hundred and ninety-nine thousandths lie hidden in the cracks between approved frequencies of sound, light, taste, and experience; that attending to this fact is spiritually important; and that a conspiracy of institutional powers maintains reality impoverishment as the only permissible condition of existence. This is conspiratorial Lafferty. One can imagine a surface reading of the story as merely an academic comedy about an absent-minded professor who wanders into the wrong classrooms and blows a flute nobody can hear. That would not be wrong. But on the story’s own terms, it would amount to approximately one-thousandth of what is there.
To see what else is going on, I think one ought to place the story within Lafferty’s interest in Gnosticism, because the remaining nine hundred and ninety-nine thousandths are theological and Gnostically inflected. More precisely, they belong to the strain of Gnosticism that seems to have most interested Lafferty, a point that Gene Wolfe seems to have intuited. Valentinianism, with its signature elements, is present. I have written at length elsewhere about these signature elements, so I will not do so here; the relevant pieces include the Pleroma, the Kenoma, the Demiurge, the Archons, Sophia, the descending Redeemer, and so forth.
What makes “The Man Who Walked Through Cracks” so strange is that its intensely Gnostic architecture does not lead to a Gnostic nightmare of the kind one finds in well-known Lafferty stories, such as “Snuffles.” Instead, the story arrives at something orthodox and parousia-like while keeping Gnostic elements in play fictionally. That is both weird and brilliant. Put another way, Lafferty is going to mount a Catholic critique of Gnosticism from within Gnostic imagery to affirm the soteriological.
At the same time, that claim needs some careful qualification. Writing in the mid-1970s, Lafferty’s available sources for Valentinianism were primarily Irenaeus’s Adversus Haereses and Hans Jonas’s The Gnostic Religion. It was an understanding of Valentinianism as preserved and refuted by the current tradition of interpretation, or by what has been recovered by modern scholarship. That fact makes Lafferty more difficult than he otherwise would be, because readers really need to see how his own dated understanding of Gnosticism informs the fiction. Needless to say, that is unlikely to happen. In “The Man Who Walked Through Cracks,” the Catholic corrections are responses from within the defunct tradition of understanding Gnosticism that shaped Lafferty’s intellectual formation, not impositions upon a system encountered through modern scholarship.
A quick review of the Gnostic background helpful for reading Lafferty. In Valentinian cosmology, the Pleroma—divine Fullness, the totality of Aeons in perfect mutual repose—is opposed to the Kenoma, the Deficiency produced when Sophia, seeking to know the Father apart from her consort, Christ, falls into error. From that deficiency comes the Demiurge, who fashions the material world as an unintended prison for the divine sparks that descended with Sophia into matter.
Lafferty gives the story this same three-tiered structure. At the top are the green meadows: “all green meadows and game-parks and cities and oceans, unoccupied, but waiting for visitation.” In the middle is the narrow world of approved frequencies, the one-thousandth of reality that institutional humanity inhabits and mistakes for the whole. At the bottom are the Hemisphere as refractions. Once a single sphere, they are now divided, a concrete image of the fall as the sundering of wholeness. Lafferty writes:
One of them was crammed with creatures, rats, rat-faced people, proper people; but their faces were bigger than their bodies and the eyes were bigger than the faces. They seemed alive and avid to burst out. Most of the bodies and faces and eyes were cracked and shattered (you know that it was done by an eye-cracking sound), broken like glass and the pieces falling out of them. Yet they seemed alive and flexible, not rigid . . . The other spherical hemisphere was all green meadows and game-parks and cities and oceans, unoccupied, but waiting for visitation.
As Lafferty notes, they only look like spheres; what matters is that they were once one. In classic Valentinian fashion, the pneumatic spark survives imprisonment intact, though distorted by the conditions of its confinement. Lafferty gives us that image in the first, distorting Hemisphere.
For me, the confirmation of this reading comes from Thumbsdown, the smartest of the Archons. She states the condition of the Kenoma outright: “We do not live in the world itself. We live in shallow scratches, in a refined and judicious sampling of the world. I thought everybody in the top one-thousandth of one percent knew that.” This shows that, first, she knows that the narrow world is not Prime; and, second, that she treats that knowledge as the privilege of an elite charged not with transcendence within Prime but with reality management. She knows the prisoners are in a sub-Prime prison. She knows Hamelin College is a Gnostic prison house. To her, that knowledge is a privilege. This is gnosis as control. It is the kind of thing Irenaeus accuses the Valentinian teachers of doing to their followers:
And committing many other abominations and impieties, they run us down (who from the fear of God guard against sinning even in thought or word) as utterly contemptible and ignorant persons, while they highly exalt themselves, and claim to be perfect, and the elect seed. For they declare that we simply receive grace for use, wherefore also it will again be taken away from us; but that they themselves have grace as their own special possession, which has descended from above by means of an unspeakable and indescribable conjunction . . . On this account, they tell us that it is necessary for us whom they call animal men [rats], and describe as being of the world, to practise continence and good works, that by this means we may attain at length to the intermediate habitation, but that to them who are called "the spiritual and perfect" such a course of conduct is not at all necessary. For it is not conduct of any kind which leads into the Pleroma, but the seed sent forth thence in a feeble, immature state, and here brought to perfection. (I.6.4, Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses)
Moreover, it is what the Special Studies faculty does to every student who arrives at Hamelin College:
"We cover the wide spectra in everything, but we pick out samples at approximately every thousandth interval. We do not live in the world itself. We live in shallow scratches, in a refined and judicious sampling of the world. I thought everybody in the top one-thousandth of one percent knew that."
It is how they see us, the readers, the rats.
It would not be a Valentinian cosmos without a Demiurge, and unsurprisingly, Lafferty gives us one in Dean John Michael Anwalt. Yet Anwalt departs from the Valentinian Demiurge in the form Lafferty would have known in a theologically significant way. Irenaeus’s Valentinian Demiurge does not know that a Pleroma exists above him. He is like Snuffles: his malevolence is somehow inseparable from his ignorance, and his blindness makes him tragic rather than simply villainous. Lafferty often modulates this from tragedy to tragicomedy; Snuffles may be his finest image of the tragicomic Demiurge. Anwalt is different. Anwalt knows what Snuffles does not know. Lafferty writes:
“Then Cromwell is right?” asked Professor Diller. “The cracks that we ignore are a thousand times as wide as the world that we inhabit? . . . Well, why wouldn't it be better to venture into those cracks and enjoy the real spaciousness of the world itself?” “Because our nature tells us to be wary of that,” Dean Anwalt said. “Our fallen nature tells us that we don't want the wideness, that the narrowness is a superior thing. And our exult-in-its-fallenness nature tells us that the wide ways are the extreme danger: It tells us to ban or interdict them when we cannot imprison them.”
That passage shows that Anwalt has developed a theology of fallenness that turns the Kenoma into a principle and the interdiction of the wide ways into a sacred duty. At that point, he ceases to resemble the ignorant Demiurge and begins to resemble a Catholic fallen angel: an intelligence that has knowingly chosen the wrong side. Lest that seem overstated, consider his explicitly Luciferian panic: “It’s Gabriel’s horn!” John Michael Anwalt shrieked. “But how has he become a prince before me? If he is here, then this is the end of things.” The moral stakes, therefore, differ from the Valentinian mold. We are dealing not with tragic inevitability but with culpability; not with blindness but with chosen evil. And that culpability carries with it a possibility unavailable to the Demiurge in a closed Valentinian world.

At this point, it is worth pausing over the gunky stuff of the Kenoma. The vials of Hyena Scruff and Entrail Gore that Anwalt opens at the kangaroo court are not, contra Valentinian logic, the cause of the Archons’ evil. The Hamelin faculty is not evil because it has fallen into matter. It is evil because it chooses to manipulate others into full commitment to the narrow world. Professor Diller makes this especially clear. Before the vials reach him, he says, “I like Tom-Crom, he is harmless”; afterward, he says, “I say get rid of the spacious devil.” Professor Sanger feels the amnesia “snapping at my heels like a long-toothed fog” and still retreats into procedural questions while the walls come down. These are not beings trapped against their will. They are beings who refuse to return.
With all that in place, we can turn to some obvious points. Hamelin College takes its name from the town in the Pied Piper legend that defaults on its payment, and Lafferty twists the legend in a way that can be reconstructed. The most theologically significant change concerns that payment. In Browning’s version—the one most of us know—the mayor refuses the agreed thousand guilders and offers fifty instead. That is a conscious act of bad faith. In Lafferty’s version, the payment is forgotten. Lustlife can barely remember “that each of us was assessed one seventh of his pay to go to this Rat-catcher,” one-seventh from each of seven faculty members, the debt distributed so that no one escapes implication. The forgetting is maintained by the same mist that prevents Anwalt from reading the date of Cromwell’s arrival in the college record. It is an Archonic operation: the kind of amnesia that preserves the narrow world by suppressing the unapproved. Here, it suppresses the institution’s own transaction with its Redeemer, Tom Cromwell. The faculty cannot really acknowledge the debt because doing so would require acknowledging everything the debt authorized.
The rats of the original legend are vermin to be drowned. In Lafferty’s version, they are what the first Hemisphere contains: souls imprisoned in the narrow world, their proportions distorted, pressing against the glass. They are people like us, living inside our consensus realities. The Rat-catcher’s role is therefore liberation, not extermination or kidnapping. The second epigraph makes this especially clear. It names the faculty as “Garden Guards.” They want to deny admittance to the green meadows forever, which identifies the Piper’s hidden realm as unfallen creation rather than as an underground kingdom. From that point, it becomes hard to miss the soteriological force of Lafferty’s Piper figure. I will come back to that, but first I want to talk about Catherine Cromwell, Tom Cromwell’s wife.
Catherine is the story’s most theologically complex figure, and her prayer deserves quotation because of the role she plays. Her petition:
“Wide meadows of my heart's desire, how I pray that it will work!” she said. “It will all be so much more spacious when we have gone through, and then I may get the things that I have always wanted... A roomy townhouse (oh, fifty or a hundred rooms, we might have company), clothes enough to cover me modestly and elegantly . . . And dependable servants and aides, and my personal publisher and producer and senator and cardinal. And let us have game-parks as wide as realms . . . Oh, by the Prized Hemispheres, defend us from them! Be good to the Rat-catcher: so many are bad to him. These things I pray for.”
Yes, this is comic, but the categories—castles, game-parks, a personal cardinal—are the narrow world’s vocabulary for abundance, the Kenoma speaking as if it were the Pleroma. What makes Catherine a Sophia figure is precisely that inadequacy. She is not being satirized for wanting too much. She is reaching toward the fullness of creation through the only vocabulary the Kenoma has given her. The poverty of that vocabulary is evidence for the legitimacy of the desire, not for its corruption.
Because this is such a deep Lafferty story, one more distinction is helpful. Identifying Catherine with Sophia needs a caveat. She is not a one-to-one allegorical rendering of the Valentinian Aeon whose desire precipitates the cosmological fall. Nothing in the story suggests that she generates the Demiurge or the deficient world. The correspondence is role functional rather than one-to-one allegorical. She is, instead, one more of Lafferty’s Sophia figures. She is Wisdom as bride to Godhead. Catherine occupies the Sophia-placement in the story’s cosmological drama: blinkered desire for plenitude, a position at the hinge between Kenoma and Pleroma, the Redeemer-consort dynamic, and the Archonic misreading of her desire as mere materialism desire would be catastrophic. Set Catherine’s desire against Thumbsdown’s response to real plenitude: “It is not the cornucopia, not the Horn of Plenty. It is the cornucalamitatis, the horn of calamity or trouble.” Thumbsdown has the Greek, she has the mythology, she can name the kerakibotion. She only sees an analytically recurring mythperson, a Pandora. And she is wrong. We know she is wrong because the story immediately refutes her judgment. Catherine says, “Oh, let’s some of us go by boat,” and “there was a boat then, quickly filled with intrepid people, and there was a waterway for it to run on.”
Now, this would not be much of a retelling of the Pied Piper legend without a pipe, and what Lafferty does with it is wonderful. The horn, of course, is one of his major symbols (for example, think of the trumpet in "Gray Ghost: a Reminisce"). Here it appears as Cromwell’s alto flute, blown “with a happy puffing of cheeks and mugging of mug.” It produces no audible sound, only “an uneasy sensation” in those nearby, because, we are told, it sounds at the unapproved frequencies. It cannot be heard because hearing is calibrated to the approved band of consensus reality; it cannot be unfelt because the pneumatic soul beneath institutional conditioning responds to those frequencies, whether the approved consciousness registers them or not. This is not just horn imagery but wind and Holy Spirit imagery. We are in the territory of pneumatology. “Stop blowing on that damned flute, Cromwell!” Anwalt orders. “The sound of it, no, not the sound, the something of it is driving us all crazy.” “Can you hear my flute?” Cromwell asks. “No, of course we can’t,” Anwalt replies. “But whatever is coming out of it is driving us crazy.” In terms of Valentinianism, this marks a crucial difference between Lafferty’s soteriology and Valentinian gnosis: salvation comes through concrete participation in a shared act rather than through the pneumatic’s private intellectual illumination. The Crack-jack Express—a locomotive and a hundred howling, flaming, material cars—carries everyone willing to board, regardless of pneumatic certification. In Lafferty’s private symbol system, Carackjack is one of the figurations of Christ, though explaining this would take us too far afield; for some background, see “Hands of the Potter.”
Notice what happens when the horn reaches full power in the faculty lounge. Each Archon identifies it differently. Lafferty writes:
“It's Josue's horn!” Professor Diller moaned, “and all the walls are going down.” “It's Gabriel's horn!” John Michael Anwalt shrieked. “But how has he become prince before me? If he is here, then this is the end of things.” “It's Triton's horn,” Lustlife warned, “and it roils the deepest waters. If it wakes up some of those things, then we are dead.” “It's Peter Piper's horn-pipe,” Under-professor Quickshanks jittered. “Are Gabriel and Duke Josue and Cromwell and Peter Piper all the same? Is Peter Piper Peter?” “It's the Horn of Plenty,” said Catherine Cromwell simply. “Even smart people should be able to see that.”
The parenthetical that soon follows—“no, none of these were the same, they were all different fellows”—is typological in the Catholic sense. Each figure is a historical or mythological type whose horn action foreshadows and partially instantiates the horn’s pleromic fulfilment, which only the antitype fulfills. Typology preserves the distinctness of the type, with the connection to the antitype being one of foreshadowing rather than mere resemblance. Their convergence at the Rat-catcher Ramble, planted in the opening scene when the ruddy young man “whistled a few bars of Rat-catcher Ramble soundlessly” before Cromwell has even spoken, shows these earlier manifestations gathering toward fulfillment at the moment of climax when all the horns sound.

Anwalt’s breakdown is narratively significant. When he hears the horn, he identifies it with the horn of Gabriel. That is the cluster of images that draws on the Lord descending from heaven with the trumpet of God from 1 Thessalonians 4:16, the angels blowing trumpets in Revelation, and Gabriel's association with end-time messages, grounded in the Book of Daniel. In short, Anwalt recognizes that the entire basis of the commission is in danger. Hamelin College’s authority was always derivative and provisional. It was part of the Powers and Principalities that exercised over a Kenoma and was always both temporal and temporary. The eschatological moment makes that provisionality obvious. Catherine, by contrast, hears the Horn of Plenty, and she does so with zero theological sophistication. She is Sophia restored. She is just happy with the in-rushing fullness of the Pleroma. Her response is available to anyone not invested in the narrow world’s categories: the horn of judgment is the horn of abundance, is the horn of the piper calling one to salvation, is the horn of battle, and so forth.
So, a big question. Who is Cromwell? Impossible to say for certain, but part of the answer, I think, can be assembled from Anwalt’s attempt to diminish him. “Crom means crooked in all the old tongues, so Cromwell is the well-crooked man. He blows the crooked horn, the cromie horn, the crumbled horn of child-scripture. His journey into the infinite is no more than a crooked mile.” In the Celtic languages, crom means bent, stooped, crooked. It appears in Crom Cruach, the pre-Christian Irish idol, and in place names across Ireland, wherever the land curves. Cromwell is the crooked well: it reaches water by an unapproved route. A well is a crack in the earth’s surface, driven down to the aquifer below. The name, therefore, describes what he is: the crack through which what lies beneath the narrow world rises. Those cracks lead to the waters of salvation.
There is room for debate about whether Cromwell is a firguation of Christ (I think he is on one level), but I more strongly incline to the view that he is a version of St. Peter. Quickshanks’s question—“Is Peter Piper Peter?”—is never answered. The he that Anwalt fears (“end of things”) is an amphiboly: it is Gabe blowing the trumpet, but it is also Christ come to judge. We aren’t there yet. But if the apostle entrusted with the keys of the kingdom becomes the horn-blower who pipes people through the cracks, then the institution whose proper role is liberation is the Church. Hamelin College is a counter-Church, a corruption: the Garden Guard commission co-opting the Church’s institutional role in time, the arrogation of Truth, something like the church of the world, what the story calls Guardianship, connected to the Powers and Principalities. Anwalt sees himself as its prince, with the full implications of that.
There is much more to say about this intricate story, but this post is probably already testing your patience, so I will close by saying where I think it leaves a reader.
By the story’s end, the pseudo-Archons (pseudo because this story is open spin) are living with the consequence of what they chose, fitted to the shape of that choice: they bottled others, and now they are bottled. Lafferty writes:
There are seven persons who instruct in the Special Studies School of Hamelin College. They instruct all day, and they try to do it well, they have so much to make up for (they proved to be inept guards on one assignment). But when the day is over, they do not go to their proper homes and families. Instead, they must shrink themselves and go into the narrow glass prison of the first Hemisphere, and they must stay there ‘til morning light. They do not have happy home lives.
It is an ironic ending for those who do not escape the Gnostic prison house. They remain in the institution, still teaching, still trying to do it well. This is adjacent to the tidy Valentinian ending in which the pneumatics ascend, the Kenoma is sublimed, and the Demiurge is abandoned to the deficiency he made, though there is some of that. What we get is monitory. The Archons can still make us think the world is smaller than it is, even if they are punished like fallen angels, frozen into what they are by what they chose.







