So..why angels, and what are they supposed to be?
At this time of year, we see the popular image of a woman
with wings and a harp of some sort wearing a
voluminous nightie and hovering in space.
In songs, we hear about thousands of them, which
suggests quite a racket, celebrating the birth of
a god and promising eternal peace and goodwill.
All this should give anyone pause for thought…
If one of us were pretty sure we’d experienced
such an apparition we would probably ask around
about a good therapist.
Historically, the general reaction to seeing an angel is
fear and self-doubt.
(Now I’m going to consider the Bible for a bit, because that’s the
ultimate source of our holiday card art and tree ornaments,
and to a huge body of beautiful Western art and music for
which I am very thankful.)
To Moses, the angel of the lord appeared in a flame of fire out of the
middle of a bush which burned with fire but was not consumed, and
Moses looked away, because he was afraid to look at God. (Ex 3:2)
Jacob dreamed he saw a ladder reaching from heaven to earth,
with the angels of God going up and down it. When he
woke up, he was frightened, and deciding he was in a holy
place, he saw “the gate of heaven” , and he set up a shrine.
Angels, though, came with promises…either to obliterate the enemy, and
paradoxically bring about an age of peace, and there’s plenty of that in the
Old Testament, or to promise to stay around for emotional support and,
especially to ensure LOTS of descendants forever and ever.
So angels were seen as messengers from God, and they were often
the inspiration, or justification for, direct action in the world.
They were not physical, and they appeared in times of stress,
and humans experienced them in different ways.
Visions were one way…God came to Abraham in a vision.
So were natural phenomena:
Noah saw a rainbow as the symbol of a covenant with God.
(The rainbow, by the way, is also the symbol of Isis, the
Egyptian messenger of the gods.)
Dreams are often the way people saw messengers, as in the
story of Jacob’s ladder. Dreaming was such a frequently
reported way of getting important messages from the
divine that the gift of dream interpretation
was valuable in the ancient world.
Sometimes, there was simply a Voice, as in the story of Samuel,
as a child, being called three times by God.
The action of the natural world is a vector:
Samuel saw the spirit of God in thunder and rain.
(Thunder was also an important vector for god in
Norse and Hindu legend.)
Other religions have similar stories:
In the Bhagavad Gita (4:8) the angel says
“For the protection of the good, for destruction of
evil, and for the establishment of righteousness,
I come into being from age to age.”
Jacob’s dream is important in Islam, the ladder being
called the “straight path” in ethical conduct.
Histories of Mohammad before the Quran tell the story
of the angel Gabriel coming to him “while I was asleep,
with a coverlet….on which there was writing, and Gabriel said
“Read!” Mohammad protested that he couldn’t read,
but the angel commanded him three times to read
“in the name of the Creator”. Mohammad thought himself
possessed, “like a poet”, and began to climb a mountain
to throw himself off, die , and get some rest. He stopped when
a voice from heaven told him: “thou art the apostle of
God and I am Gabriel” and he learned to read.
And we heard in our Prelude about Gabriel bringing glad news
to the Virgin Mary….
Gabriel features in many legends and has many functions, but
there were other angel stories in the OT, too…sometimes
people were blessed with two angels, as in the story of
Lot being warned about the destruction of Sodom, or in
stories of two mysterious travelers who come hungry
to the door…stories which still inspire hospitality to
strangers in many cultures.
Hinduism has a huge number of avatars. The word avatar
means to descend, to appear, and stands for the appearance
of a deity in another form. They are not incarnate, and they
appear in tough times.
A popular Vedic deity was Indra, who could assume any form,
was the king of heaven, and was the god of storms and rivers.
Avatars of the Lord Shiva are very important in Hinduism
as they destroy evil in the world.
The Hindu god Indra is a guardian deity in Buddhism and the
King of Heaven in Jainism.
The angel described in the Bhavagad-Gita was an avatar of Vishnu,
a super god.
Angels, avatars….these beings connect earth and heaven in some way
and often mediate between God and man. God appears,
man is stunned, God explains, reassures, promises…and man obeys.
for the most part, these visions are thought to come into action
to destroy evil in the world.
There is the uncomfortable and ancient idea of Satan, an angel and
an ancient adversary of God who brings destruction, but Satan
is usually ultimately under the control of and used by God.
I’ve never understood Satan, except perhaps
In terms of a human psychological need for him.
Something that amazes me is the surety of people who have Angel
experiences.
What is it about people that makes us believe in the supernatural?
Why does the imagination extend to other worlds when we are
in the presence of nature?
What is the frisson which makes us feel we have experienced
something outside of ourselves?
Why do we need a belief in a superior intelligence and reassurance
that it has any interest in us?
These questions seem to apply to all peoples.
I personally think we have, like many creatures, a species awareness
as well as senses for phenomena in the natural world
which we experience subconsciously, that we are part
of the natural world and surprised when something jolts
our awareness. Our brains are complicated. We know
a lot that we don’t know.
God may be the natural world itself, which is the idea in earth
based spirituality.
So…angels? Avatars?
Are the messages of justice, vengeance, reassurance, warning, etc.,
all created in response to our own template for meeting
tribal needs, or are we responding
to things we sense physically in the world?
Of current interest is the Celtic idea of “thin places” , which are spots where
heaven and earth are closer than in most places, or even collide. You can Wiki
this one and read quite a lot.
Some of the angel stories I referred to before have elements in them of
the importance of place, bits of which are embedded in very old
Christmas carols.
Moses was told that the place where he saw the fire in the bush was
Holy ground.
When Jacob woke up from his dream, he knew he was in a holy place.
Sara met the angel of the Lord by a fountain in the wilderness,
and God made Hagar see a well.
The holy well is featured in a lot of folk lore, of the Anglo-Saxons,
relating to springs at the sites of Neolithic monuments in England,
and for Romans, ancient Greeks, and in Turkey.
Every major religion has sacred sites, but how do they get that way?
From astrology to celestial cartography to alchemy to huacas to ley lines to
song lines, people have created explanations.
Are dousers sensitive to electromagnetic forces? Do some people,
like birds and dogs, actually feel the P waves of an earthquake?
There’s a traditional relationship between the sense of the unknown and the sense of place,
something in humans which causes the response of visions of, say, angels.
I like the Hindu idea that a sacred place is where you say it is. The rock in the road
in front of a house, a special rock with some flowers and an herbal paste gift
on it is a personal shrine. A Holy place is what you bring to it…what is in you…
and these personal holy places are accepted and respected. I loved the tiny
flower offerings on trees in an Italian woods…someone experienced something
holy to them there.
There are branches of the field of psychology which study the association of imagery
with thought patterns. Jung had a field day studying people who dreamed
of ladders. There’s a field of psychology called pareidolia, which studies
the way in which we see familiar patterns in unrelated
images…like the man in the moon or the virgin Mary in an omelet… or a human
physique in light patterns….ghosts? angels?
Back to holy messengers..many of their attributes connect here and up there.
The holy spirit came to Noah and John the Baptist in the form of a dove…with wings.
There are lots of bird legends in English mythology and songs.
Rainbows, ladders, lightning, rain….I suppose the ultimate Christmas card
would feature a harpy in a multi-hued dress standing on a ladder in the rain.
The metaphor of an angel is pretty good, though, when it comes to the friend who goes
beyond the expected, by the anonymous donor, by the needed hug. Gabriel did
hold Mohammad tightly when he was afraid…
but he just talked to the Virgin Mary.
May we all have a kind Other, in ourselves or quite mysterious, when we need it.
