The Sacred and The Profane (the songs not the fic)

The Sacred and The Profane has been a long-time favorite fic of mine. I came across it by recommendation, as most people did at the time, and me, who ate angst for breakfast during that period in my life, just clicked the link immediately and I loved it. And I saw why the concept was a hit with the fandom - Aziraphale and Crowley’s alignments and personalities are so important to the way Good Omens goes that a reversal would have to be a complete overhaul. And a complete overhaul The Sacred and The Profane was - Aziraphale’s Fall had to be something so unfair and so violent in the way it shattered him, and Crowley’s depression at staying someplace where he clearly had differing opinions with the people there was vital to the way he turned out. 

Zirah, especially, was a character that always spoke to me because his Fall was so largely unjust, since his mistake was literally asking, “Why?” Which - hey, I’m one of those people who question everything to the point where people get pissed about it, so I read about him and went, “Ah. Kin.” but in like, early 2000’s language. (And he also inspired a whole OC - and is probably an inspiration for surviving out of pure spite and being terrifying about it. Not everything else, just the spite part and the being terrifying part.)

Caphriel just always made me sad. He was always so...subdued, I think is the word for it. Subdued because of the fact that he’s unhappy where he is, as a person (angel lmao), and because of how I think he always knew that his relationship with Zirah would never lead to anything good. (Also, I thought he had the prettiest name ever.)

So then, years later after I’ve read it, I made two songs about it. 

Originally, I thought to name Zirah’s song The Profane, as he’s the demon, and Caphriel’s The Sacred for him being the angel. But I thought it would be ironic and funny if I switched it, and there’s always something sacred about righteous revolution, and there’s definitely something profane about loving outcasts almost blindly and whole-heartedly. And a huge basis of the subject of the songs came from that too.

The Sacred is about Zirah himself, rather than focusing on Zirah and Caphriel’s questionable love story. Zirah as a person can almost not be separated from how he approaches his relationship with Caphriel. He was always unhinged, but there was always that underlying current of him knowing exactly what he was doing underneath it. There was always that anger simmering beneath every action and that feeling that the universe owed him for what it had done to him. And as for his relationship, he cared for Caphriel and saw only Caphriel as literally the only other person he could really talk to because everybody else didn’t count. 

I tried to express this the best I could with the lyrics. The first part for how he questioned Heaven and the fact that they had to go to war against each other, how he didn’t question to be uplifted as some sort of saint but because he was genuinely confused as to why this had to happen, which then resulted in him getting kicked out of Heaven and getting what made him an angel ripped out, so now he’s not uplifted as an angel, but damned as a ‘warning to those who I’ll outlive’ (as he’s canonically terrifying and sadistic enough to scare other demons). ‘The death of a third of Heaven’s stars’ is a reference to biblical canon, where it is said that when Lucifer fell, he took a third of the stars with him, which I think has been interpreted to be a third of the angelic host. 

The second part is addressed to Caphriel, the only other creature he seems to consider an equal. He’s showing Caphriel the parts of him that others don’t see, he’s venting some of his frustrations to him, but he too, knows, that their love story is not ending anywhere good. One part with fan interpreteation is where he does accept that it would be preferable if Caphriel would be the one to kill him (I hope I die with a halo of blood beneath me, and you send me off with a kiss) as in the fic, he feels a surge of hatred for Caphriel right before he dies. 

The end of the song connects to The Profane (the piano at the end is the beginning of The Profane), and Zirah expresses that Caphriel, for all his good intentions, can’t save him, but he thinks that Caphriel knows that this is exactly a fool’s errand. 

Both songs are in the same key, so that it’s more obvious that the ends of them lead to the beginnings of the other. The Profane begins with the ending of The Sacred, and Caphriel, as he knows that this is a lost cause, is already contemplating grief before Zirah is even dead. As the chorus ends, it becomes clear exactly when the song is in the story’s timeline, which is when Caphriel is about to kill Zirah. He laments at how if only he could have known that there wouldn’t be any pardon for what Zirah did, he would have taken his place because he would have been able to take it, but that didn’t happen, so now he’s going to kill him because Zirah is a danger to everybody. Caphriel expresses that no matter how many years they’ve spent together, he feels he’ll never truly now Zirah outside of this moment right before he dies (I can trace my fingers against your face, but I’ll never know you outside this embrace and the stain of your blood on my hands as we part ways). 

A huge influence of this song is my own opinions on grief, especially the opening line (When the grief takes what it wants from you, then where does the rest of you go?) and a couple of lines from the second verse (When my knees have bruised and my time is through, I wonder if you’d ever know? When I’ve finished here and I’ll follow you, I wonder where I’ll even go?), and how, in the canon Good Omens universe, there’s not really a place where angels and demons go when they die. In the epilogue of TSTP, it’s implied that Zirah, who wakes up as Aziraphale, is in a purgatory state where he’s going to reclaim his sanity and true identity, but this is not something that Caphriel knows. While humans have Heaven and Hell and they can say that their loved ones are watching them from Heaven all they want, Caphriel has no idea where Zirah goes, or if he’s watching from anywhere. To him, there’s a possibility that he’s just gone and there’s not even the consolation of them reuniting after death, which adds to the cruelty of TSTP. 

For the end of the song, which of course is the opening piano of The Sacred, there’s a mention of inevitability there. Good Omens has always had a theme of ineffability, but also a theme of things happening just because they’re supposed to happen. It’s the Plan. It’s how things should be. The angels and demons follow things to a tee because it’s supposed to be like that, and only Crowley and Aziraphale are the outliers. In this, Caphriel is terrified of inevitability, which is a doctrine that the other angels follow, but he’ll blame it because he’s scared to add on to all the guilt he’s already holding onto. 

They were both super fun to write! Super angsty, but still very fun. The opening drums of The Sacred was inspired by a friend warming up on the drums when I was still writing the lyrics and I thought it was great because it reminded me of war drums. I do have an idea with a similar drumbeat, but it’s still for Zirah, and I like The Sacred and The Profane songs to stay a pair, because they’re supposed to function like a pair and sound incomplete because they’re supposed to hint towards the other song. 

If I do complete the other Zirah song, you’d all definitely know, though.