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So I figured out how angelic possession in SPN works. It’s simple and elegant, really. As a caveat I am not a physicist so I could well be talking out my ass here. Just bear with me.The problem with possession is that it seems to defy the principle that no two objects can occupy the same space at the same time. There are exceptions to this principle and the solution here is that angels aren’t technically objects.We think of ourselves as solids but really that’s only true to a certain degree. On a sub-cellular level – molecular and below – we’re a collection of particles moving together in sync. There are of course gaps in between, sort of like the inverse of a froth. We exist on four dimensions: three planes of physical space and a tangent point in time.Angels, on the other hand, are comprised of wavelengths of pure energy without mass, likely without particles (and if they are particulate I’d imagine it’s still massless particles, eg photons), that simultaneously exist on multiple planes of existence – more than four dimensions (see 6.03). Since we’re talking metaphysics here it’s pretty clear that they extend beyond the known electromagnetic spectrum and may also be composed of an unknown parallel spectrum of energy. This explains a freaking lot about them.It explains why the human mind isn’t really equipped to conceive of their true form: they exist in a state of being unlike that of any documented life form and extend well beyond the visible spectrum. It explains why looking at a “naked” angel burns out the eyes: part of their radiation is harmful, to say nothing of the sheer intensity. It explains how they read minds, hijack TVs, and listen in on police radio: that’s “all waves”, as Castiel pointed out in 8.08. It explains how they make themselves invisible: a simple matter of withdrawing from the visible light spectrum, which for an angel must be something like a human sitting on her own feet.But the most relevant to this great heap of blather is possession. The massless, non-particulate nature of angels means that they can occupy the spaces in between the particles of a solid living being (read: human) without disrupting those particles – if the frequencies at which the human’s particles vibrate and those of the angel don’t clash. This explains why only certain humans are fit to be vessels. The more powerful the angel, I’d imagine, the more precise the match has to be. If angel and vessel aren’t properly matched the former ends up bashing up against the latter and causes the body to start unraveling or combusting from the atomic (or even subatomic) level up, as seen with Lucifer’s possession of Nick.The fact that an envesseled angel is a conscious collection of energy waves occupying the interstitial space of a human’s atoms gives it the ability to manipulate the body’s particles: moving through the dimensions on which an angel naturally exists (flight [assumed by humans to be teleportation], time travel, alternate reality travel), healing, imperviousness, superhuman strength & reflexes, etc.Now there’s actually a third element at play here: the human soul. As quarterclever points out here, we’ve yet to see an angel take possession of a soulless body (braindead, corpse, etc); there’s enough proof (Lucifer in 5.03, Michael saving Dean in 5.13 – though really he was saving Mary to make sure the boys would be born) to state that the body has to be alive, at least, and able to give definite (if not necessarily well-informed) consent, though it’s still unclear as to whether SPN’s mythology considers this consent to be an action of the human’s consciousness as an extension of the physical self or of the soul.In any case, I posit that souls occupy a spectrum of energy parallel to the electromagnetic one (occupied at other “frequencies” by corrupted forms of the human soul such as demons, ghosts, etc, and likely also parallel to angels’ Grace), so that’s a third set of vibrations that have to match that of the angel – an extra level of compatibility necessary for possession. In SPN, human souls are potent power sources, so the probable trade-off here is that the soul acts as both a buffer between the physical body and angel’s potentially-deleterious radiation (as previously discussed), and as a battery of sorts for the angel itself.
Now if all this is true, why don’t demons and ghosts have to worry about compatibility?
That’s a pretty simple answer too: they were once human. In fact they are literally just human souls gone wrong. They’re smaller than angels and ostensibly inhabit the same range of planes as living people while on Earth. All told they’re far more compatible with the human body already – far less alien than angels who were never human to begin with. This means they fit in much more easily; but it also means they’re not capable of the same level of sub-cellular manipulation.
How do Grace and the Fall work, then?
I don’t bloody know. ¯\(°_o)/¯ Actually I do have a vague notion but I’m a little fried and still have just under two hours of workday left so it’ll have to wait. If and when I figure it out fully I’ll post about it.
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No, you’re on to something there. The going theory is that angels are nonparticulate though so instead of molecular breakdown we’re looking at wavelength decay – entropy bringing them down to the level of human souls, depowered and no longer fully divine (but not yet profane).The tricky part I’m struggling to account for is that Grace is part of the angel analogous to the human soul, not the whole – they’re bipartite like humans, consisting of a body (albeit a nonparticulate one) and an animating force that contains a portion of their consciousness and all of their power.As a sidebar, I’m intrigued to note the difference in memory storage between Grace and soul. When Grace is separated from the angelic body the angel suffers retrograde amnesia; memories of the angel’s life prior to the Fall either stored within the Grace or suppressed while the body can still create and store new memories. By contrast when a soul is separated from the human body the memories remain intact in the body’s consciousness. It could be due to the rebirth process though.In any case, the problem with which I’m now presented is that it isn’t only an angel’s Grace that enters and synchronises with the human body during envesselment, but the angel’s body as well. If I was to draw up a model in which the body of a being is simply a physical emanation of the animating force adapted to its home environment that would resolve the issue of Grace and body existing along the same spectrum, since the human soul and body obviously don’t either (given the body’s solid particles, not wavelengths), but it opens up the problem of figuring out where the angelic body does lie (on what spectrum and where).As another aside, that’s also by necessity an animistic viewpoint, unless there’s an explicable distinction between sentient and non-sentient life. It also necessitates the idea of life beginning at conception and generally gets dicked with pretty hard by syngamy so it’s really not practical at all.The most reasonable solution I can come up with at the moment is this: An angel’s body is a photon-bearing conglomeration of EM wavelengths animated by Grace, which is a nonparticulate energy form occupying the same parallel spiritual spectrum as the human soul, ghosts, and demons (wherein rather than high to low frequency the spectrum is divine to profane). During envesselment, the angel’s Grace harmonises its body to that of the human it’s possessing, using the vessel’s soul as power source and quantum metronome.Coming back to your original question, that makes one form of the Fall easier to explain and another more difficult. The gradual Fall of which the fandom seems so sadistically fond would then be explained as the angel’s body and Grace decaying while the vessel’s body was still shielded by the soul: essentially the angel itself grows weaker and weaker until it dies and rots out. The same would hold true for a sudden Fall while envesseled, the fate Castiel suffered in “The End”; it would just happen a lot quicker. Killing an angel wearing a vessel, then, produces flares and burns the impression of wings into the ground because at the moment of the vessel’s death, the human soul is no longer keeping the angel from burning up the body, and there’s only just enough time for a small light show before the angel dies as well.The type of Fall that Anna put herself through is a trickier beast. Perhaps without Grace, an angel’s body begins to unravel and weakens (decays) to the point that it can enter and possess a human zygote without tearing it apart, even without a soul. That part merits more consideration.
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That’s delving further into the explanation gap than I’m equipped to go. Where does consciousness reside? How do the electrical impulses ferried across neurons become awareness, then sentience, then sapience? How does a sequence of chemical signals become personality? How much of our preferences, thoughts, and behaviours are genetically coded? Angels have perception, consciousness, personality, sentience, and sapience, but they predate the very foundation of carbon-based life by billions of years, so what does that indicate about the nature of an individual consciousness in the SPN world? For that matter, if they were designed to be perfectly-obedient servant-warriors, why were they created with individual personalities, or the potential for them?It could be that consciousness is so intangible because it is literally ineffable: the spark of divine will, the breath of god so to speak. If we consider consciousness (specifically, identity) to be another part of the being that makes three parts to a human and an angel both: corpus (the body, either particulate or nonparticulate), animus (animating force & power source, either soul or Grace), and genius (consciousness and identity). The tricky thing is that one or two can be removed or altered to varying effects; eg:
body & soul minus consciousness = coma
body & consciousness minus soul = intelligent corporeal undead or Robo-Sam Situation
soul & consciousness minus body = Heaven dweller
corrupted (wave-decayed) soul & consciousness minus body = intelligent incorporeal undead
corrupted (wave-decayed) soul & consciousness minus body = vengeful spirit, demon, or Purgatory dweller
corrupted soul minus consciousness & body = unintelligent incorporeal undead (poltergeist, etc)
corrupted soul & body minus consciousness (plus necromancy usually) = unintelligent corporeal undead
An animus on its own can experience things but can’t, I think, really process them without a genius to make sense of things. So as far as experiences and memories go, the soul/Grace is like an eye and the consciousness is the neural cluster that translates the captured light emanations into images and assigns significance to those images.That’s a really awkward simile. Sorry. It’s three in the morning. ._. (or at least it was when I wrote this a few days ago)Ripping out her Grace wasn’t what made Anna lose her memories anyhow. If you’ll recall she was said to’ve gone on about her “real family” as a small child until she was effectively brainwashed into forgetting (angels seem to be prime brainwashing targets for some reason, man, they just get their hard drives formatted left and right). I think a likely explanation for what goes on with an angel that Falls via removing its Grace and being born as a human is that it binds to a human late (ETA: early, as I’ve been reminded Anna was born 9 months after her Fall; this suggests that the human soul attaches at or shortly after conception in the SPN world) in utero after a soul has attached to the body but before the human gains a consciousness, basically claiming the soul for its own. This isn’t so much “stealing a body & soul” as it is jumping queue to get them. Without its Grace as a power source, the angel’s body decays to a point that it won’t destroy the vessel, but the consciousness remains, albeit damaged by the trauma of the Fall and thus easily impressed upon by those around it. So I guess that’s a very circuitous way of saying yes kind of, though the fact that reclaiming one’s Grace can reignite the angelic body means that it doesn’t die or disappear – just withers.(This is hard for me to wrap my head around in part due to my own personal spiritual hypotheses. Ah well. That’s what speculative fiction is all about.)