Heavenly bodies descending
Perhaps in line with the claim that God created man in His image, man rendered angels in his.
The Good and Evil Angels, William Blake
We’ve long been acquainted with messengers of all kinds: airy voices over the telephone, transient words over text, knotted handwriting inside birthday cards. Messengers play a vital role in acts of communion within the Western imagination, most aptly envisioned through angels. As the intermediaries between gods and men, humanoid iconography of angels haunt corners of our cultural canon: think round-faced Cupid aiming his bow, perched upon the clouds. Several art movements also reflect this. Adorning the walls of the Art Gallery of New South Wales are vivid illustrations of winged angels with impassive eyes obscured in shadow, robes billowing in wild winds. It’s strange that we prescribe such otherworldly figures with the attributes of mortal men. Perhaps in line with the claim that God created man in His image, man rendered angels in his.
Across the Abrahamic religions, descriptions of angels share common denominators. They are not made of flesh, but immaterial substances such as blazing fire: the case for seraphim in the Tanakh and Talmud. Though they’ve been described as serpentine on occasion, they typically possess human heads and torsos in visual depictions. Angels in Islam have been portrayed in masculine veneers, dressed in ornate robes and extending “two, or three, or four” multicoloured wings, heralded as mighty beings of blinding light. Perhaps the most familiar are Christian angels, “they had human likeness, but each had four faces, and… four wings”. Pre-enlightenment, human likeness in angels symbolised a theological ideal of humanity, an unreachable paragon of moral perfection.
In 1399, Theophanes the Greek insisted upon the human form before Gabriel’s wings in Icon from the Deesis Tier, highlighting the connection between the human and the angelic. Primarily human figures serve as an eternal touchstone, a narcissistic projection of humanity as God’s purest creation. During the 1600s, Matthew Merian created copperplate engravings to accompany passages of the Old Testament in Frankfurt. Through the crosshatched shading in Chariot vision from the Book of Ezekiel, one can spot a human head among the heads of a lion and eagle in the illustration of a cherub. The hybridisation of the human body, namely the addition of wings, represents the sublime — the kind of transcendence that is not possible with merely two arms and legs. More painstakingly, it represents the yearning to forsake our true nature as creatures of sin.
The Enlightenment saw the rise and fall of kings, the separation of empires, and years of ecclesiastical thought upturned. The pursuit of reason ushered in considerable changes to how spirituality was depicted. Most striking is John Milton’s description of angels in Paradise Lost, a precursor to the Enlightenment movement. This offered an alternative perception of angels as they were no longer presented as perfect beings. Milton’s angels suffer the same pitfalls as mortal men, often succumbing to hunger and being afflicted with physical pain. They echo the limitations of man in an effort to appear more dimensional.
From 1757-1827, poet and painter William Blake experienced visions of angelic beings and translated them to watercolour. The first occurred in 1765 when he spied “a tree filled with angels, bright wings bespangling every bough like stars.” His angels are unrelentingly human, take The Good and Evil Angels as prime examples. Both figures are wingless and boast muscular frames as if subjected to hard labour — something that should not exist for them in Paradise. Though they are sexless, their most evocative features are their grim expressions of horror. Here, Blake proposes the possibility that angels, like man, are also the victims of internal moral conflicts. In a note about the painting he claimed, “active evil is better than passive good”, perhaps calling into question the true virtue of beings deprived of free will, fated to remain in servitude to their maker.
As science dominates modern thought, elements of sci-fi have trickled into interpretations of angels. Though pop culture retains the centuries-old imagery of feathered wings and white robes, the advent of New Age religions have pushed the realm of holy beings into the extraterrestrial. Some New Age movements revere alien civilisations, such as the Arcturians, as quasi-divine beings.
The imagery associated with extraterrestrials is distinctly neo-futuristic in its utilisation of geometry and shape language. The 1995 anime Neon Genesis Evangelion embodies the stark aesthetic contrast which sets it apart from earlier illustrations of angels. Despite drawing inspiration from the Dead Sea Scrolls, angelic beings are positioned as enemies of humanity, somewhat parallel to the rising secularism and scepticism in the late 20th century.
Among the seventeen angels in the show, three in particular embody the visual ethos of futuristic — and sometimes borderline absurd — design. Ramiel, named after the angel of thunder, is sinister in its simplicity with its sleek, octahedron shape of overwhelming size. It has the ability to fold outwards to morph into various origami-like shapes, betraying previous design ideologies that dictated angels demand anthropomorphism. Sahaiquel continues this thought. Translating to “Ingenuity of God”, the figure’s design draws more inspiration from biological processes than geometric figures. It resembles a disfigured eye, its odd shape not unlike an amoeba, and its ability to divide into smaller organisms mirrors binary fission. Armisael, the penultimate angel in the series, is markedly more abstract, appearing first as the double-helix of human DNA before transforming into a writhing string-like entity. The increasingly bizarre designs signal a divorce between angels and humanity, a firm rebuttal against any metaphysical connection between the two.
The angel's strange designs reveal a more poignant purpose. Director Hideaki Anno subverts the role of angels to explore the amorphous nature of "enemies" as a whole. During a period of social and economic turmoil in Japan that had no identifiable causes, the definition of what constituted an "enemy" had reached its vanishing point. This seems to be a larger symptom of a secularist society: conflicts and quandaries can no longer be immediately understood through a theological lens. As a consequence, our understanding of these issues become far more ambiguous, as do our visual representations of them.
Many things change across time; many things remain stagnant. Our angels do both. In the landscape of religious art, the depiction of angels continues to reveal glimpses into the divine realm and the nature of humanity. As modernity forces us to innovate tried ideas, I can’t help but wonder, what will they become in the future? And what will become of us?