Angels

Praise this world to the angel…
Show him something simple which, formed over generations,
lives as our own, near our hand and within our gaze.

Tell him of Things…
Rainer Maria Rilke, Dunio Elegies, 9.
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Can two things occupy the same space simultaneously?

What are angels made of? Are they composed of “spiritual matter”, some have suggested that good angels have bodies of fire and evil angels bodies of air, Islamic angels are made of light while demons or djinns are of fire.
Angels are “all intellect,” an observation of Thomas Aquinas, a statement that leaves us wondering if our perceptions of angels are simply reflections of our own strengths and desires.
Pure intellect, he said, without matter, or animals without bodies, angels assume other bodies at will, and eat.
Are angels eternal? As the stars are born and die do angels have a similar fate. Do they evolve and ascend to different stages of angels? If they are intellect, do they think with the capacity of logic and reason?
Do they have free will; can they choose an evil path? Some theologians believed that angels like humans, live and die, they are subject to the laws of karma and evolution over repeated lifetimes that they evolve to higher and higher states, but that they can fall once they’ve chosen God.
These beings, since they first were gladdened by the face of God…have never turned their vision from that face, so that their sight is never intercepted by a new object, and they have no need to recollect an interrupted concept.
-Dante, Paradise

Angels are individual’s personalities each one is a distinct substance in itself, a species entity.
How many angels are there? An uncountable number. They are spoken of as armies. Legions. Hosts
Christ asked his Father for more than twelve legions of angels, Daniel in one vision saw that “thousands of thousands ministered to him and ten thousand times a hundred thousand stood before him.”

Ancient Babylon
Zarathustrian influence.

Zoroaster / monotheistic deity are introduced, transformed Babylonian and Assyrian gods into arc angels.
In Zoroastrianism the good is ruled by one Supreme God, Ahura Mazda, the “Wise Lord,” the supreme Pure Light.
Against him is ranked the evil spirit Angra Mainyu or Ahaitin (Satan), the spirit of darkness, surrounded by his demons or daevas. But Ahura Mazda is helped by seven amesha spenta, archangels or holy spirits, emanating from him and representing seven fundamental moral ideas. These seven angels have various names, but one grouping translates them as Good Knowledge (or Wisdom), Truth (or the Way), Piety, Salvation, Immortality (or Delight in Beauty), Obedience, and Deserved Good Luck, and each protects something: Wisdom is the protector of Earth; Truth the protector of fire; Delight in Beauty the protector of Plants, and so on. Ashi the Good is the Angel of Bless ions, she being the feminine form of Asha, who is Truth, Justice, Virtue, Holiness, Cosmic Law and Order. Ahura Mazda bestows His abundant blessing (Ashi) on those who follow Asha, His Truth, and His Divine Law. Ashi is protected and mothered by Armaiti, the Angel of devotion or Love of God in our hearts. Her three brothers and playmates are Sraosha, the Angel of Divine Intuition, Rashnu, the Angel of Justice, who weighs the good and evil deeds of the soul at death, and Meher, the Angel of Light and Mercy who sustains and comforts the should during this terrible time.

YAZATAS / other angels
Psycho pomp / the “Celestial Escort, “Lord of the material plane.
Vata / who rules the Air and Winds.
Mithra / of ten thousand eyes, who later became the Persian God of Light, a god in his own right. In Zoroastrianism, Mithar is the angelic mediator between heaven and earth, the judge and preserver of the world.

Zoroastrians migrated to India in the tenth century where they became known as the Parsees.

SHEN

In Malaysia freckles are called angel kisses. Taoists give no official place to angels as we know them, but if by angel is meant a ministering spirit, a spiritual being are a constant theme in Chinese and Japanese religions told. They are the Immortals, originally human beings who have attained such heights of spiritual clarity that they never die. They are classified as “gods” (in Chinese, shen), yet are subordinate to them, in close relationship to the human world. Like angels, they appear in human or animal form to aid and advice, and like angles they are themselves the message. But all these things are done by saints as well….

DAKINI

Under Buddhism, the bodhisattvas, the holy Buddha’s-to-be, are also likened to angels, for them, too, like the Immortals, have chosen to come down to guide and lead us to Enlightenment. But in each of their bodies resides the energy of God, which is called a dakini or angel.

KINPURU’S

The winged beings kinpuru’sh, who hovers worshipfully about the gods and these, may be angels, of a kind. They live in the same place as the gods, but on another plane of consciousness. They are also the apsaras, the beautiful geishas who pleasure the gods with music and dance and adoration and sexual and erotic bliss. Apsaras were created for lovemaking. They are the perfect dispensers of amorous bliss, copulating endlessly with their beloved. Apsaras adore adoring, and adore having their adoration adored. They adore giving pleasure, which comes in all divine and loving forms and without troublesome bodily fluids or menstruation or pain or pregnancy, birth, or nursing.

HEAVEN & HELL

After God created the angels, He created humans and told the angels to bow down to humankind, revere and care for them. By some accounts, it was this that brought about the Battle of Heaven and the fall of Satan, who out of pride or jealousy refused the task. By other accounts the demonic was already alive and well long before Adam and Eve awoke.

BATTLES IN HEAVEN

The Battles in Heaven are mentioned in the Book of Revelation of St. John, then living on the island of Patmos (12:7-9), tells of the war in heaven in which Michael and his angel soldiers fought against the dragon, Satan, and his evil horde, and how the serpent, which deceives the whole world, was cast out into the earth, an army of angels raining from the skies.
Jesus mentions the battle in the Book of Luke: “I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven,” he said.
Five hundred years later, it was transformed under Islam into the poignant love story. In the Persian account, God created the angels to praise and worship God. Then God made humans, man and woman, and told the angels to serve his newest creations. But Satan, or Iblis, loved God best of all the angels, and he refused to bow to humans, but only to the God who had created him.
God said, “Get out of my sight,” and instantly the angel was cast into hell, for to be out of sight of one’s Beloved-to be sent away – is hell. And how does he stand the pain of separation from the Beloved? By the memory of the echo of God’s voice saying,
”God to hell.”

Thus we are to understand that the Evil and Good Angels dwell near one another, and yet there is the greatest immense Distance between them. For the Heaven is in Hell and the Hell is in Heaven, and yet the one is not manifest to the other; and although the Devil should go many Millions of Miles, desiring to enter into Heaven, and to see it, yet he would be still in Hell and not see it.

-Jakob Bohme, Mysterium Magnum

Dante, depicted angels as “sparklers of circling light.”

Raphael sat down with Adam and Eve, who were naked as the day is warm and innocent as babes, and ate heartily what was fed him.
Then he told the humans how angels have sex. For spirit, Milton wrote, can at will assume either sex, for both, so “uncompounded” is their pure essence. Moreover, “without love no happiness,”.

Raphael explains sex.

Love demands that it be shared. How they do it is by interpenetrating each other’s bodies in an impulse of mutual desire, mixing like two wines.

Whatever pure thou in body envoy’s
(Said Raphael)…we enjoy
In eminence, and obstacle find none
Of membrane, joint, or limb, exclusive barrs:
Easier than Air with Air, if Spirits embrace,
Total they mix, Union of Pure with Pure
Desiring: nor restrained conveyance need
As Flesh to mix with Flesh, or Soul with Soul.

-John Milton, Paradise Lost, VIII

Pseudo-Dionysius
The three highest angels are the Old Testament
Seraphim, cherubim, and thrones.
The three groupings of angels by Pseudo-Dionysius.
1. Seraphim, cherubim, and thrones
2. Dominions, virtues and powers
3. Principalities, archangels, and angels

*
The seven angels that are known by name.

The four archangels.
Raphael, Michael, Gabriel, and Uriel:
And
Simiel, Oriphiel, and Zachariel,
Or sometimes called Chamuel, Jophiel and Zadkiel:

Oh sovereign angel, Wide winged stranger above a forgetful earth,
Care for me, care for me. Keep me unaware of danger, and not regretful,
And not forgetful of my innocent birth.

-Edna St. Vincent Millay….
A spirit or angel, not being composed of material substances, cannot reflect the sun’s rays to be visible.

A mystic goes into himself in contemplation and meditation to find the essential unity of things.

Differentiation by investigating the world of physical substance to develop a conscious and discriminating model of a spiritual world. Thinking as a scientist, as if we stood at the opening of a new age, where mysteries were no longer to be held in the hands of hierophants and priests of secret societies but known by all.

Angels are spirits, but it is not because they are spirits that they are Angels.
They become Angels when they are sent. For the name Angel refers to their office, not their nature. You ask the name of this nature, it is spirit; you ask its office, it is that of an Angel, which a messenger is.
-Saint Augustine….

There’s a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we will.
-William Shakespeare
Hamlet, V. ii….

*When the gods were young, they created people to play with. Except the people refused to play.
They remembered where they had come from and all they wanted to do was to throw them back into the bliss of God. So the gods destroyed that batch.
Then the gods sat down together to figure out where they could hide so that humans wouldn’t find them and upset the game. They thought and thought. They couldn’t come up with a perfect hiding place. If they went to the moon, mankind would build rockets and follow them. If they hid in the bottom of the oceans, people would dive in bathyscaphs. The top of Mount Everest….the core of the earth…no place was safe from human search.
Then the goddess of wisdom spoke. “Hide in the hearts of Man,” she said.
“They’ll never think of looking there.”

And Theo became one as light! Though darkness was all round: Faith is “true”, and Theo came to passover
as all are carried by the angels to heaven: as the angels connect time
“as-is” with time “to-be”.
A Zenaura’ (spiritual light) overcometh death with life. Is, is in the act of “being” while transcending.
Every angel has a duty to life! - R.Williams.

Are the angels not all ministering spirits, set forth to minister for them who shall be heirs of salvation?
Heb. 1:14.
For he shall give his angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all thy ways.
Ps. 91:11.