About Crowley's angel name and why it's not that important
Ok hear me out here, I know there are a million speculations about Crowley's angel past, who he was before the fall, what was his name etc...but I don't think we'll ever fully know the answers to these questions.
The reason I believe so is mostly because, as Crowley pointed out numerous times, he's not that angel anymore. Aziraphale, as far as we've seen, only knows him as Crowley, we as the audience know him as Crowley, that's his name and it will continue to be his name. His former angel colleagues don't call him his old name when he goes to heaven at the end of season 2, they call him Crowley.
His angel name is a dead name (as Neil Gaiman pointed out when he talked about Satan/Lucifer in an ask here on tumblr), so yeah, given that Crowley seems very secretive about his old name (he doesn't tell Aziraphale when they meet and he almost seems bothered when Aziraphale refers to his past) I don't think we'll ever know. We had many chances to know what his name was in season 2 but we still don't know and yes it was clearly on purpose but not because it's important, it's because it's not, It's not relevant to the story.
What I do think is relevant is his status, or more precisely what his status was. I'm a firm believer of the Archangel Crowley theory but even if that ends up not being true we know for certain he was a high ranking angel:
- he confidently says to Shax that he could have performed a miracle that only "the mightiest of Archangels could have performed",
- he built parts of the universe both alone and with Saraqael
- he can stop time and seems overall more powerful than Aziraphale
- he can access Gabriel's files in heaven
- he seems to relate to Gabriel's lack of memories
So yeah, very powerful former angel who probably got their memory whipped who knows exactly what Aziraphale is getting himself into. THAT is the important part of the story, not his name. They leaned so much into Crowley's past in season 2 that it's pretty obvious that it will be relevant in season 3 at some point but I feel like we mostly already know what we need to know. Crowley is Crowley, I don't think a name could give us that many clues about his past.
I hope it won't be that important because what should matter is who he was for Aziraphale: the whole point is that despite being a demon he is not bad, that things aren't only black and white etc THAT is the point. If they lean too much into the "you are a different demon because you were a specific kind of angel" I would be a bit disappointed not gonna lie, because that's not the point. Crowley chose who he wanted to be, that's the main thing he keeps telling Aziraphale and that is what I want them to focus on.
So yeah, speculating is so much fun but in the end I don't think I care about Crowley's angel name.
Hiya :) Can we guess what Crowley's sigil means or stands for?
Hiya :),
from the book we know it’s Crowley’s real name:
“No. Not A. J. Crowley. Your real name.”
Crowley nodded mournfully, and drew a complex, wiggly sign on the paper. It glowed redly in the gloom, just for a moment, and then faded.
David was not told to make a specific symbol just make something up (to me is seems like he’s starting to draw a treble clef :)) - from the DVD commentaries:
Neil Gaiman: And there’s a weird little pattern made. People have asked if that’s the same pattern as the snake and not, that’s just…
Douglas Mackinnon: That’s just David making it up on the night.
Neil Gaiman: David making it up and wiggling his finger around and us following it with fire, so if it has become a snake-like pattern that is the glorious coincidences of Good Omens once again.
Aziraphale had never dared to ask the question in all their centuries of easy-uneasy friendship. Even now, he might not have dared to ask it if they weren’t lying in the dark, Crowley’s head pillowed on Aziraphale’s chest, his fingers playing lazily through the demon’s long loose curls, both of them soft with pleasant tiredness and the hormones and neurotransmitters that their human-like bodies insisted on producing, despite the fact that their owners certainly did not need them.
They didn’t need to breathe, either, any more than they needed to eat or needed their hearts to pump blood, but their bodies did it anyway, as a sort of default setting, the way they produced oxytocin, dopamine, and adrenaline. So Aziraphale noticed when Crowley’s slow contented breathing caught and stilled.
Stupid angel, he started thinking immediately, now you’ve done it. He hasn’t wanted to talk about it in 6000 years, why would that change just because you’ve started—canoodling…
But Aziraphale only got about 2 seconds into his spiral of self-rebuke before Crowley answered softly: “I remember everything.”
It was Aziraphale’s turn to catch his breath. There were so many things he was desperate to know… or so he had thought. Now that the knowledge was within reach, did he really want to lose the mysteries, to close off all those gleaming possibilities?
“What were you like, as an angel?” Aziraphale asked hesitantly. His voice sounded very small, shaky, embarrassingly higher in pitch than usual.
“Not that much different than I am now,” Crowley said. “Less cynical, though. And less… wiggly.” There was a bit of a smirk in his voice, a halfhearted attempt to sound casual and cavalier, but he mostly sounded sad.
“So… if I had met you before, I would have recognized you.” Aziraphale tried not to sound disappointed.
“Unless they wiped your memories, yeah. But I didn’t recognize you, so…”
“We probably never met.”
“Not sure why we would have. Different departments, weren’t we? You were… security, I was an engineer.” He paused. “S’pose I still am… or was, until very recently.”
“The M25,” Aziraphale said knowingly.
“Bit of a comedown, though, isn’t it? From galaxies and nebulae to cursed motorways.”
“You engineered the Fall of man,” Aziraphale offered helpfully.
Crowley snorted. “Given that three-fifths of engineering is throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks, sure.”
They both fell silent for a time. Aziraphale resumed stroking Crowley’s hair, doing what little he could to soothe the pain he had reawakened.
Crowley was the first to speak again. “You wanted to know if we could have met in Heaven before the War.”
“Silly, isn’t it? I don’t know why I thought…”
“No, I get it. It would make the whole thing seem less… random. Star-crossed lovers tragically parted, reunited against all odds because they were destined to be together…”
“You make me sound like such a hopeless sap,” Aziraphale protested.
“Well, you are, aren’t you? A hopeless sap who’s read too many 19th-century novels. And I love you for it.”
Aziraphale felt himself blushing in the dark (another irritating and completely unnecessary habit of human bodies). “What else was I to do, when you spent the century napping?”
“You mean other than learn the gavotte and seduce Oscar Wilde?”
Aziraphale’s cheeks grew even hotter. “That wasn’t until… later.” After their fight. After Crowley woke up from an unexplained decades-long hibernation, sent a message asking Aziraphale to meet for the first time in 60 years, and proceeded to ask for the one thing that could destroy him permanently. Then, when Aziraphale (obviously!) refused, he ran off to God-knows-where, and Aziraphale had no way of knowing whether he was even alive until he turned up 80 years later to sweep heroically to the rescue once again, as if nothing had changed except that he had tacked on a couple more names…
“Do you mind if I ask— and you don’t have to answer if you don’t want to…”
“Spit it out, angel,” Crowley drawled with good-natured amusement.
“What was— what was your name, before? I understand if you don’t want to say it, I know all about ‘dead-naming,’ and forgive me if I’ve overstepped—”
“Caralael.” The accent was on the second syllable, the first vowel reduced almost to nothing.
“Oh.”
“Yes. ‘Crawly’ was a nickname. A cruel one, intended to mock.”
“But you kept it anyway.”
“More or less, yeah.”
“Why?”
“Because of what my old name means.” It was an invitation to Aziraphale: You know Hebrew; figure it out.
“Caralael,” he murmured. “Spelled with a quph?”
“Mm-hm.”
“‘He cried to God.’”
“Yes.”
“I’m not sure I understand,” Aziraphale said apologetically.
Crowley fell silent again, and Aziraphale feared once more that he had offended him. But after a few moments he took a long breath and said heavily: “I never fought in the War, you know. I never wanted to overthrow God and take over, or install Lucifer in Her place. I never stopped loving Her. But I had questions.”
Aziraphale wasn’t sure whether Crowley’s statement should be understood as framed from the past—that he never stopped loving Her before he Fell—or from the present: “I love Her even now.” But he knew that was a question he couldn’t ask. So instead he asked, “Questions? What questions?”
“About Her Plan for creation. Especially for the humans—they were central to the Plan from very early on. And as an engineer, I had access to some of her plans. Just bits and pieces, mind, but enough to raise doubts, which Lucifer was only too happy to prod at.”
Aziraphale still felt cold and slightly nauseous at the thought of putting doubt and God in the same sentence; they both knew too well the fate of those who did. “Doubts about what?” he asked, fighting his panicked urge to change the subject immediately.
“Why she was making them mortal, so they would have to watch their loved ones die. Why she was planning to give them free will when odds were they would misuse it. Why she was putting them in a tiny garden and making a whole world of beauty and wonder that they would never see.”
“I suppose you were the answer to that last one,” Aziraphale ventured with a shaky laugh.
“Ironic, innit? Anyway, Lucifer encouraged me to go to Her with my questions.”
Aziraphale’s jaw dropped. “You could just… go up to the Throne and ask?”
“Things were different then, I guess.”
“Not if you were just ‘security.’”
“Aw, angel, I didn’t mean—”
“No, you’re right. It’s why we would never have met back then.” He tried not to sound too bitter.
“Maybe it’s lucky I listened to Lucifer, then.” Crowley tilted his head back to look at his angel. Aziraphale could see nothing but his yellow eyes gleaming in the dark, but he knew Crowley could see perfectly well all the emotions that passed over his face in quick succession: shock, disbelief, perverse pride, fierce possessiveness.
“You can’t possibly mean that,” Aziraphale protested weakly.
“I can mean whatever the Heaven I want. You’re not the boss of me.”
“Oh, nonsense. You know I am.”
“Can’t get anything past you, can I?” Crowley said with a flash of pointed canines.
Aziraphale patted his head fondly, then sobered. “What did She say when you asked your questions?”
Crowley’s smile faded and he lowered his head again. “‘So you think you can make the world better than I can?’ She seemed… irritated, rather than properly angry. ‘No, of course not,’ I said. ‘I only want to understand.’ ‘You will,’ she said. ‘And you’ll play your part.’ And that was all.”
“She didn’t cast you out right then?”
“No. I wasn’t satisfied, but I thought I’d be all right. I told Lucifer what she’d said and he tried to use my disappointment to convince me to join his rebellion. I passed, but I didn’t rejoin Heaven’s hosts, either. When the War started, I hid, like the fucking coward I am.”
“Oh, my dear. You weren’t a coward; you were a… a conscientious objector. Just like me, this last time.”
“Then how do you explain the Alpha Centauri thing?”
“You wouldn’t really have gone.”
“Not without you,” Crowley agreed, and Aziraphale felt pride and love swelling warm in his chest again, making his optional breathing more difficult (though that might just have been Crowley’s shoulder pressing on his sternum).
“Anyway, it did me no good,” Crowley continued. “You can hide from Lucifer and Michael, but you can’t hide from God. I found myself boiling in sulphur with the rest of them. And let me tell you, they never let me forget that I didn’t fight with them. They made clear that I’d have to make it up in a really spectacular way… and in the end, I did. I played my part, just like She said I would.”
“And you think your questions were the reason you Fell, not your… conscientious objector status?”
“I’m as sure of it as I am of anything. ‘You’ll play your part’: She knew what She would do, and what I would do, as soon as I voiced my doubts about the humans.”
“But if that’s true… why wouldn’t she have known it even before? Why would you have had a choice to ask or not, if you didn’t really have a choice about the apple business?”
Crowley didn’t respond right away. If Aziraphale’s pointless heartbeat seemed unbearably loud to him, he could only imagine how it sounded to Crowley, with his ear right on top of it.
“D’you think that’s why she named me what she did?” Crowley asked after what felt like about a quarter of an eternity.
“Hard to say,” Aziraphale said with a hesitant smile. “Her ways are notoriously…”
“…ineffable?” Crowley filled in with an air of resignation.
“I was going to say ‘mysterious.’”
“Of course you were.”
“Would it make you feel better, or worse?”
“What?”
“Knowing that she gave you that name because you would ask questions… with all that entails.”
“Hmm.” Crowley paused to consider. “Makes me feel even more like a hamster on a wheel than I usually do… but I got off easier than some. This is the God that drowned a whole country, flame-broiled a couple cities, and had Her own son tortured to death to make a point when She could have just forgiven the debt without the whole song and dance if She wanted to. Oh, unclench, angel, you won’t Fall just from listening to me.”
“But what if I…” Aziraphale began in a small voice, then brought himself up short.
“…agree? Ah. Well.” He turned his head so that he was looking straight up at the ceiling. “You leave him alone, you hear?” he barked. “Don’t make me come up there. Again.”
“Crowley! Shhh!”
“What? ‘He shouted at God’ is as good a translation as any. ‘He had a sharp word with God.’”
All the Kingdoms of the World - Good Omens Fanfic by Raphaela Crowley
This is a gift fic for @lady-wallace by Raphaela Crowley.
I think Raphaela did such a beautiful job with my request, and I hope you guys will enjoy this fanfiction. Also, Raphaela really appreciates reviews so if you feel inclined to do so, please give her your feedback. :-)
Lady-Wallace, hope you will enjoy this story. <3
All the Kingdoms of the World
This angel was not Crawley. Not quite. But it was somebody Crawley had once been. Somebody long dead.
And this – what he was seeing as if from another pair of eyes – was that angel's death.
And what actually happened is it hurt. Outside and inside, it hurt.
The first water to fall from the eyes of man followed the rain over Eden, it followed the temptation of the apple, it followed human failure, but where had the tears of angels – the tears that tormented the red-haired angel – come from?
From the rebellion. The first mistake.
The Heart of Heaven torn apart, shattered like a mirror in millions of shining pieces. Pieces which, one day, would be called shooting stars.
The red-haired angel felt every moment of it. Not just the burn, but the change in his heart, the dimming and cracking and finally the breaking of his halo.
Why? Why go on existing after something like that?
You can't – at least not in the same way.
The angel who would be Crawley couldn't.
The stars – seen through his tears – were a foothold after all. Of a sort. He looked up at them, unable to turn his head or close his eyes, holding on against the dizzying pain as he sank down into the fire.
The angel was like an amputee, but what he had lost was so, so much worse than any mere limb.
I don't know if anybody else has done this (they probably have), but I looked back on episode 1 of Good Omens and I think this is how Crowley's name is written. I put a little arrow just to show where it starts, feel free to use this information as you will haha
So I've been thinking about this because it's fun and good omens consumed my life.
So.
First there was Crawley which is a demon's name, and he just tempted humans to sin of course he is a demon. And centuries pass, and he is a demon and he doesn't want to be reminded of the fact.
So he changes it.
It's still demonic and it's almost the same, but he doesn't think about the snake, he doesn't get a reminder of his fall every time it's said. It's good because he can forget that he is the reason why humans live in this cruel world instead of a garden full of trees and flowers and so much green.
(it doesn't matter that in his opinion they would have tasted the apple anyway, he just made the process faster. Humans always were more creative and disobedient than demons, and they sure were kinder then angels)
So it's Crowley now, and time passes again.
There is the Arrangement, capital letter and all that, and he tempts and blesses and makes reports that are so wildly untrue he isn't actually sure how he gets away with it.
And then he and the Angel are fighting, because he wants insurance and he is reminded again that they are on the opposite side. He is reminded again that he is a demon and he doesn't want to be.
So he changes his name again. It's Anthony J. Crowley and this time it doesn't sound demonic. It's entirely human.
It's everything he wants to be.
He doesn't want to be a demon and he wants to be an angel less than that. The only thing remaining is human, and that would be so perfect. Humans don't need to be just good or just bad, they are both and neither and so is he.
(humans could question all they want, and that's the only thing he did before his fall)
(And yeah he can't be an angel, but maybe he could be Aziraphale's something as a human.)
So he gets a name. A human one of that, and maybe that's when he chooses a side. Not when the apocalypse started, he did it long before that. Even if he isn't aware of it.
(also isn't it interesting that the demons all call him Crowley and the trial is mostly about him killing Ligur. Yes it's not really a trial. Yes it's predetermined. But demons were always so much better at accepting differences than angels)
