Angel Folk

Angels are difficult to write about. For many people the idea of angels is intensely personal: they can be protective spirits, ethereal presences, the source of religious and prophetic insight, or even a means of communicating with divine forces.

Theologians and philosophers since Augustine have also found the nature of angels difficult to to pin down. Of what are angels made? Where do they live? Do they have material form? How do they communicate with us? Only Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael are mentioned by name in the Bible (in Revelations, Luke, and the apocryphal Book of Tobit). In Revelation, however, we are told at least seven angels exist:

And I saw the seven angels who stand before God;
And to them were given seven trumpets. (Rev. 8:2)

And the Koran names four more. There is Iblis, the chief jinn, and counterpart to the Christian Satan; Malik, the principle angel of Hell; Harut and Marut, both fallen angels; and Azrael, the angel of death. But are these four the same four as named in Revelation?

As it turns out, and as Gustav Davidson points out in A Dictionary of Angels, much of the information we have about the unnamed angels comes from extra-canonical writing. Some of it is from pseudepigrapha, or falsely attributed works, like The Books of Enoch; most of it, however, is from hierological writings, grimoires, necromantic texts, and black magic manuals. There the writings on angels abound, and it is difficult to keep track of them all (especially as their names change and each angel takes on several guises). Michael, for example, is known to have passed as Sabbathiel, Shekinah, the Logos, Metatron, and, insofar as he is a slayer of dragons, as a prototype for St. George; Raphael is also called Labbiel, Apharope, Raguel, Ramiel, Azrael, and Raffarel. When there is such confusion regarding who the angels are--and when this information comes not from canonical texts but from goetic practices (that is, from the ritual invocation of spirits)--it becomes doubly difficult to discover what angels are, and how they operate.

Davidson's Dictionary gives a good summary of the diverse functions angels have performed:

Preeminently they serve God. They do this by the ceaseless chanting of glorias as they circle round the high holy Throne. They also carry out missions from God to man. But many serve man directly as guardians, counselors, guides, judges, interpreters, cooks, comforters, dragomen, matchmakers, and gravediggers. They are responsive to invocations when such invocations are properly formulated and the conditions are propitious. In occult lore angels are conjured up not only to help an invocant strengthen his faith, heal his afflictions, find lost articles, increase his worldly goods, and procure offspring, but also to circumvent and destroy an enemy. There are instances where an angel or troop of angels turned the tide of battle, abated storms, conveyed saints to Heaven, brought down plagues, fed hermits, helped plowmen, converted heathens. An angel multiplied the seed of Hagar, protected Lot, caused the destruction of Sodom, hardened Pharaoh's heart, rescued Daniel from the lions' den, and Peter from prison. (Davidson xviii)

In strength, angels rival the pagan gods of antiquity, and are known to have moved mountains and smited stars. They are immortal, but not eternal (for only God is eternal), and thus they will live till the end of days. They cannot procreate, but they can, however, be slain (and in fact God himself has slain quite a few).

And to get back to Earl's post, it seems that angels also were given genders. Even though many sources indicate that angels are bodiless (and by default without sex), poets and prophets have embodied angels for a long time. The majority of angels are in fact male (though their images are, as Earl observes, androgynous, and to modern eyes quite feminine in appearance). There are female angels, however, including Shekinah and Sophia, and certainly angels have come to have a maternal dimension in popular present-day depictions. Some poets, however, were quite strict on the subject:

For Spirits when they please
Can either Sex assume, or both; so soft
And uncompounded is thir Essence pure,
Not ti'd or manacl'd with joynt or limb,
Nor founded on the brittle strength of bones,
Like cumbrous flesh; but in what shape they choose
Dilated or condens't, bright or obscure,
Can execute thir aerie purposes,
And works of love or emnity fulfill. (Paradise Lost 1.423-31)

And, a few years earlier, John Donne makes a similar claim in "Air and Angels," a poem which compares his love to an angel's bodiless presence:

Twice or thrice had I loved thee,
Before I knew thy face or name;
So in a voice, so in a shapeless flame
Angels affect us oft, and worshiped be:
Still when, to where thou wert, I came,
Some lovely glorious nothing did I see.
[...]
Then as an angel, face, and wings
Of air, not pure as it, yet pure doth wear,
So thy love may be my love's sphere;
Just such disparity
As is 'twixt air and angels' purity,
'Twixt women's love and men's will ever be. ("Air and Angels", ll. 1-6, 23-28)

None of these writings, however, are meant to limit what we understand angels to be. Part of the fascination we have with angelic presences lies in their ability, as Milton suggests, to be all things to all people: they are as ever-changing and unfixed as God is permanent and eternal. This is why you see them invoked in an endless array of poetic similes. How many times have we heard that a voice is like an angel singing? That something is as sweet as heavenly choirs? Though many people could only name two or three angels if asked--though fewer would have to hand theological opinions as to what angels are, where they live, or how they speak--their presence is detectable, universally, metamorphically, within our culture. It's that universality which makes them nearly impossible to write about authoritatively ... but (in my humble opinion), it's also what makes them worth writing about at all.