Other Traditions

New Age | Zoroastrianism | Swedenborg | Mormonism (LDS) | Lunacy

New Age

New Age / Astrological FAQs.

"Each of these guardian angels in turn occupies 5 degrees days of the zodiac and is responsible for all those born within those degrees, as their guide, tutor and protector. Each guardian angel transmits specific powers to us, depending on the degrees of the zodiac he is bound to, as well as the power that flow from his own archangel and choir."

Angelic Morning Meditation. Flash movie. Feel yourself held gently, safely, snugly…

New Age: Sarah's Archangels is a large and popular New Age angel site. Highlights include a collection of Angelic Poetry. Her Angel of the Day is a long, mostly-unsourced list of angels. Along the same lines are her Angelic Properties, beginning with the "Angel of Abortion" "Kasdaye".

New age book-machines Sherry and Brad Steiger (National UFO and Unexplained Phenomena Conference Lifetime Achievement Award recipient) have a lengthy section of Frequently Asked Questions on BeliefNet. Some highlights:

What Do Angels Look Like? Authors believe that angels adapt their appearance to the viewer's beliefs and "level of spiritual evolution," and therefore range from the terrifying Mesopotamian lamassu to the today's comely social-workers. Therefore, they advise:

So forget those stories of angels being ugly creatures with beautiful souls and hearts of gold, and focus on the gentler, more attractive image of angels as depicted in our religious and cultural traditions. You'll be happier meeting a smiling angel than a scowling lamassu.

I'm going to meditate long and hard on one of Bouguereau's pneumatic beauties…

Angels vs. Jesus? "Does belief in angels weaken your faith?"

Testing the Spirits on telling good angels from bad."… efforts to communicate with heavenly or enlightened beings will always contain more of the lower vibratory realm than of the higher, and thus we attract more astral masqueraders who seek to deceive us to achieve their own selfish goals."

What! No Halo!? No Wings!? on whether people become angels. (No, but maybe souls are trapped on earth for a while, or angels pretend to be people.) Arabic linguistic travesties.

A Message from the Angel Akasha. Peace, love and high vibrational energies. The site also encourages you to display the following star glyph to remove your post-Atlantis parasitic DNA mutation. FDA approved.

The Pagan Path: Angels Explained.

"The Divine force is like a major Nuclear power plant and you are a wonderfully constructed crystal chandelier. If you were to plug directly into the core of the power plant, you'd probably be overwhelmed with energy and you just might explode. For those who have not yet learned how to build their own sub-station to handle the massive energy flow from the power plant and filter it into their personal filaments, the Angels step forward to assist."

A Christmas Message from the Angels by Brad and Sherry Steiger. Blah blah blah. I like the subtitle, though—"The angels bless and guide us, but how do they really feel about us?" Do you suffer from cryptomisangelophobia, the fear that angels secretly dislike you?

Susan Prout's "Angel Drawings." Through meditation Prout draws "an angel portrait" of an individual's angel. She also fashions angelic mirrors, "gently reminding you that you are surrounded by your angels."

Invocation of the Angels. With soothing music, Joan Borysenko calls upon Uriel and Michael facing east and South. Reminiscent of a Jewish prayer, but I'm not sure where west and south, Raphael and Gabriel went. (BeliefNet)

Interview with Borysenko by Rex Hauck. Sure enough, the original invocation includes all the angels.

Angels on the Increase by David Lawson. Angel your way rich! (BeliefNet) Similar techniques are used in Angels of Healing and Compassion.

Angel Therapy. The website of Doreen Virtue, clairvoyant and angel-contacter.

Christian or New Age. Probably both.

Zoroastrianism

The Zoroastrian-Jewish angels link is everywhere on the internet in ill-informed, polemic contexts (for and against), and never in others. Help me out.

The Theological Aspects of the Avesta by l. C. Casartelli, from the 1911 Catholic Encyclopedia. Includes a long section on angelology. From this:

"Around Ahura Mazda is a whole hierarchy of spirits, corresponding very closely with our 'angels'. There is, however, this to be noted, that in the Zoroastrian system many of these creature-spirits are demonstrably old Aryan nature deities who have been skilfully transformed into angels, and so fitted into a monotheistic framework, frequently enough, in hymns and other passages, by the simple interpolation of the epithet Mazdadata (created by Mazda), before their names."

Swedenborg, [1]

The Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772) held some rather unorthodox ideas, for example that the Last Judgment took place in 1757. He also believed that angels and devils are physical beings and that they were formerly human.

Heaven and its Wonders and Hell From Things Heard and Seen by Emanuel Swedenborg. Complete text, with much on angels. Here on the speech of angels.

"Angels talk with each other just as men do in the world, and on various subjects, as on domestic matters, and on matters of the civil state, and of moral, and spiritual life. And there is no difference except that their talk is more intelligent than that of men, because it is from more interior thought. I have been permitted to associate with them frequently, and to talk with them as friend with friend, and sometimes as stranger with stranger; and as I was then in a state like theirs I knew no otherwise than that I was talking with men on the earth."

"Emanuel Swedenborg's Heaven and Its Wonders and Hell" by Thomas L. Long, places Swedenborg in his Enlightenment context, for a World Literature Course at Thomas Nelson Community College.

"Swedenborg's elaborate angelology is also of interest. … Seventeenth-century England witnessed a flourishing angelology; in addition to Milton, John Donne's poetry, sermons, and meditations including imaginings of angels, and even a History of Angels (by Milton's mentor Henry Lawrence) were products of the age."

Emerson's "Swedenborg, the Mystic" from his Representative Men (1850). Emerson explores Swedenborg's odd marriage of poetic vision and prosaic expression:

"These angels that Swedenborg paints give us no very high idea of their discipline and culture: they are all country parsons: their heaven is a fete champetre, an evangelical picnic, or French distribution of prizes to virtuous peasants. Strange, scholastic, didactic, passionless, bloodless man, who denotes classes of souls as a botanist disposes of a carex, and visits doleful hells as a stratum of chalk or hornblende! He has no sympathy. He goes up and down the world of men, a modern Rhadamanthus in gold-headed cane and peruke, and with nonchalance and the air of a referee, distributes souls. The warm, many-weathered, passionate-peopled world is to him a grammar of hieroglyphs, or an emblematic freemason's procession."

Amazon. Conversations With Angels: What Swedenborg Heard in Heaven by Emanuel Swedenborg. A collection of his writings on the topic.

Swedenborgian site offers Swedenborg quotes on Angels, compiled and introduced by David Lomax, who notes "It has been said of Swedenborg that he spoke almost nonchalantly about angels." Some assertions include: angels are of both sexes; marriage occurs in heaven; angels are constantly being perfected. I rather like the image here:

"People who are in heaven progress steadily towards the springtime of life. In a word, growing old in heaven is growing young."

Selected passages from Swedenborg on Angels. From a U.S. church site.

Canadian Swedenborgian site with more quotes.

A. S. Byatt's discusses her novella "The Conjugial Angel," the second half of her book Angels and Insects. (The first novella, "Morpho Eugenia" was made into the movie Angels and Insects.) "The Conjugial Angel" is based on the experiences of Emily Tennyson, the poet's daughter and eventual Swedenborgian.

What the Bible Says About: Where Angels Come From. New Church author argues the plausibility of Swedenborg's angelology from a plain reading of the Bible (without recourse to mystical meanings or Swedenborg's personal revelation). Separate creation? Their creation is never mentioned. Spiritual beings? He shows how often they were refered to as people, or mistaken for people. This is an unexpected line of argument, argued persuasively but not stridently. To my mind it is a reductio ad absurdum of Protestant sola scriptura. If, using the Bible alone, you can make a strong case for something at total variance with millenia of Jewish and Christian theology, perhaps you need something more than the Bible. You need the "containing envelope" of the Bible's intellectual context, and how it's been understood and used.

See also What Angels Do. There is something attractive and oh-so Scandinavian in Swedenborg's belief that in heaven you do useful work. Well, it's 19th century Scandinavian anyway; a modern Swedenborg would conjure a heavenly welfare state, with free celestial nannies.

Ex-mormon compares Swedenborg and Smith on heaven, noting many correspondences.

For some info on Swedenborg see Wikipedia, Catholic Encyclopedia.

Mormonism (LDS), [2]

Official LDS: Guide to the Scriptures, on Angels keyed to references in the Bible and Mormon scripture. Some highlights for those unacquainted with Mormon theology.

• "Michael, the archangel, is Adam"
• "Angels are resurrected personages, having bodies of flesh and bones"
• "Moroni, John the Baptist, Peter, James, John, Moses, Elijah, and Elias all ministered to Joseph Smith as angels"

Is the Angel Moroni a Resurrected Being? answered by About.com Mormon guru Rachel Woods. Apparently he is.

Mormons discuss Guardian Angels, on the The Nauvoo Forum.

Four short articles on Angels from a Mormon perspective.

Of 119 operating Mormon temples 11 do not have an angel Moroni. You learn something new every day…

Angels and Humans by Bill McKeever, from the Mormon Research Ministry (anti-Mormon Evangelicals). Challenges Mormon angelology.

"As with many other doctrines unique to Mormonism, there is no biblical justification for the claim that angels were once humans. In this area, as well as others, Joseph Smith seems to reflect the folklore of his day and not that of a true prophet of God."

Lunacy

The Bible UFO Connection summarizes Biblical passages in aid of the notion that angels are UFOs. To be precise, there are two main alien races, Elohim and Angels. (Cherubim and Seraphim are machines.) But what we really want to know is What are they flying? The answer is "clouds," "thrones," "pillars," "dark objects," "chariots," "dwellings," "lights and fire," "spinning ojects," "Nahum's Freeway" and—the cosmic garage filleth up—"Other Vehicles." As the site's motto goes, "The truth IS out there. The evidence of that truth is in here."