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An article by Tara
Kathleen Murphy (from the blog)
MELVILLE’S “ART” (1891)
In placid hours well-pleased we dream
Of many a brave unbodied scheme.
But form to tend, pulsed life create,
What unlike things must meet and mate:
A flame to melt—a wind to freeze;
Sad Patience—joyous energies;
Humility—yet pride and scorn;
Instinct and study; love and hate;
Audacity—reverence. These must mate,
And fuse with Jacob’s mystic heart,
To wrestle with the angel—Art.
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.
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