Angels: An Insight into their Existence

Angels: An Insight into their Existence

Ian McCoy

Copyright 2012 Ian McCoy

Smashwords Edition

Table of Contents

Preface

Introduction and Overview

Chapter 1: A Short History of Angels

Since the dawning of civilisation angels have been with us. From the first Sumerian society through ancient Egypt, Persia and Israel to the modern New Age - angels have always been an integral part of human belief systems

Chapter 2: Angels in the Bible

The Holy Book is saturated with angels who adore and carry out the will of the Almighty. But why have most of them had their wings clipped?

Chapter 3: Superstars and Bad Guys

The Seven Archangels are discussed in relation to the Abrahamic faiths and depiction in art. Gabriel and Michael may be the super stars - then of course there is the ultimate baddy – Satan – a very beautiful angel indeed!

Chapter 4: Encounters with Angels

Many people have had experiences of angelic encounter. Here we examine some cases – letting the people touched by an angel – speak for themselves.

Chapter 5: Are Angels Real?

The author gives a reasoned argument examining ideas from quantum mechanics and Jungian psychology. His conclusion? You may be surprised.

About the Author

Other Books by Ian McCoy

Preface

In It's a Wonderful Life, Frank Capra spun a tale of a bumbling helper of humans. In a more recent movie Nicolas Cage is one who falls in love with a lady. A famous pop singer is loving them instead. The Book of Genesis depicts them as doing strange things--mating with the daughters of men to spawn giants, for example, and wrestling with Jacob for no apparent reason. In Wings of Desire, Wim Wenders told of one who wished to be human. Then there are the numerous testimonies of people who have encountered them in times of need and crisis. To what are we referring? They are angels, of course, and they have fascinated us since recorded history began.

Since the dawning of civilisation angels have been an integral part of human belief systems. In this fascinating study, Ian McCoy takes a serious look at these celestial beings, examining their role throughout history. He then looks at their place in the Bible – Gabriel and Michael maybe the superstars, but the Holy Book is saturated with angels.

Next Mr McCoy examines people who have been touched by an angel. Angelic encounters have been widely testified to and we hear directly from some of these people. Finally he discusses the reality of angels – speculating on the strange science of quantum mechanics and the Jungian idea that angels could be real – as an extension of the human psyche. His conclusion? You may be surprised.

Angels

Introduction and Overview

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The word angel (Greek angelos) means messenger. Malakh – the Hebrew word for angel, also means messenger. These also coincide with the Persian word for angel, angaros, which means courier.

Generally in Western religions, angels are spirit messengers who bring messages of truth to mankind while conversely fallen angels bring messages of untruth to lead people astray and wreak havoc on earth.

In modern times angels have taken on another role as comforters or helpers in times of need or danger. Thousands of documented cases talk of encounters with benevolent beings – usually referred to as angels.

Traditionally then, angels are believed to be supernatural beings who act as mediators between man and God. They have authority over the natural world and are organized into classes or hierarchies.

Angels or similar spirit beings are found within cultures around the globe. As well as the three key monotheist religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) angels are also found within Sumerian, Babylonian, Persian, Egyptian and Greek writings. So although we see the origins of our knowledge of angels from the Hebrew writings (Old Testament) which were then shared with Christianity and later Islam, in fact, the Sumerian civilisation pre dates the Hebrew. So it seems angels have been with us from the beginning of our known history.

Benevolent spirits quite similar to angels can be found within other religions, mythologies and lore. The Greeks wrote about daemons and other spirit beings similar to angels, Guardian spirits and spirit guides, have been taught by tribal cultures while Hinduism has avatars and Buddhism devas and bodhisattvas. They all have a similar function – as helpful spirit messengers or angels.

Many people today believe in demons and that they are fallen angels led by Lucifer (angel of light!) who was cast out of heaven with one third of the angels following him to earth. Of course it was Lucifer who became known by another name – Satan.

When we think of angels we think of magnificent winged beings of light, sometimes fearful to behold due to their tall stature, purity and sheer power. Interestingly in the Hebrew (Old Testament) angels were usually depicted as beings – human like - without wings or halos. Our picture of angels in fact is a result of Christian art being influenced in later times by ancient Greece who often had wings on their deities. Similarly Islamic artists from the seventh century AD were inspired by ancient Persia. And so our modern picture of angels is largely influenced by ancient pagan cultures.

In modern times many people look to angels for assistance or even intervention during crisis. There are thousands of documented stories of helpful, but mysterious strangers who come during a time of need, providing help of some kind and then mysteriously disappearing. Often, during these experiences, the helper or messenger is indiscernible as an angel (in the popular sense) – but appears as a loving, caring human being. We will be sharing some of these heart warming angelic encounters.

Similarly, spirits who come to comfort and lead dying people through the transition from this world to the next are often described as angels – and are sometimes seen as deceased family members or friends of the one about to pass.

And so angels have a close association with human beings. Summing up angels described within history, religion and within personal experiences as a whole – angels are benevolent spirit beings that bring messages, help and comfort, aiding humankind during their time on planet earth.

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A Short History of Angels

Sumer – the First Civilization

Sumerian culture flourished around 3,000 BC between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in present-day Iraq and is the oldest society that has left us clear evidence of the use of a winged human motif. This evidence is in the form of stone carvings, either in the form of three-D statues or relief carvings that provide the illusion of three-dimensionality.

The religion of these people was complex, embracing a wide variety of spirits and gods, but of particular interest was their belief in ’messengers of the gods’, angelic forces who ran errands between gods and humans.

The Sumerians also believed that each person had a ’ghost’ of some sort (that we would now probably label as ’guardian angel’) with this entity remaining a constant companion for a person throughout their life. Altars that appear to be dedicated to guardian angels have been found in the excavations of ancient Sumerian homes, along with stone engravings and temple wall paintings of human figures with wings. After the polytheistic Semitic tribes had conquered the Sumerians around 1900 BC their mythical cosmology borrowed the notion of angels from the vanquished Sumerians.

These Semitic peoples developed the idea of a corpus of angels split into groupings answerable to each of the many Semitic gods, further subdividing these groups into vertical ’ranked’ hierarchies, a notion which persisted into Zoroastrianism and monotheistic Judaism and beyond, as we shall see.

Although it is difficult to be clear about the detail of such cross-cultural influences. Sumerian ideas probably set the scene for the development of Egyptian theology as well, Sumerian domination of the Middle East came to an end around 2,000 BC, when Sumer was defeated militarily and the overlapping Assyrian and Babylonian cultures took over. Winged figures can also be found among the icons of ancient Assyria and Babylonia.

Almost certainly, the motif of a winged human figure goes back much further than Sumeria even, in fact the motif almost certainly goes back into the shamanic mists of time.

Egypt

The forms of some of the most enduring Egyptian gods can be traced back to the first few dynasties, that is, to around 2,500 BC. In many cases these gods took the shape of some animal, which was regarded as the soul (Ba) of the god. Horus, god of the sky, for instance, was represented as a falcon, whereas Thoth, god of the moon and patron of writing, learning and the sciences, was often represented as a man with the head of an ibis.

Isis and Maat were often represented with wings

The Egyptian Book of the Dead lists 500 gods and goddesses, and it is possible to identify at least 1200 more deities in later ancient Egyptian writings. Some of these deities were undoubtedly closer to our concept of an angel rather than a god, however: for instance there was at one time a cult dedicated to invoking the help of the Hunmanit, who were a group of entities connected with the sun, portrayed as rays of the sun, rather like the Christian representation of the angel choir of the seraphim.

The Hunmanit had a responsibility to look after the sun, such that by looking after the sun, they were also indirectly fulfilling a responsibility to look after humanity at the same time. Insofar as they were guardians, and angels, it does not seem unreasonable to characterize them as early versions of the guardian angel.

As with the Sumerians, Egyptian iconography includes ’winged humans’ of one sort or another also for instance Isis, queen of all the Egyptian goddesses, is often represented as a woman with wings. The flowering of Sumerian culture was contemporaneous with the first few dynasties of the great culture of ancient Egypt, around 2,500 BC, and archaeologists incline to the view that there was a traffic not only of artefacts, but also of ideas and iconography between Sumeria and Egypt before the time when Sumerian influence declined (around 2,000 BC).

However archaeologists are apparently not in a position to say clearly whether the winged human motif was imported into Egypt from Sumeria, or vice versa, or whether it arose spontaneously and separately in each of the two cultures

The Indo-European Migration

Beginning at the end of the fourth millennium BC, there was a movement of people, whose distinct ethnicity we have come to call ’Indo-European’, from Europe to Central Asia, and even as far as North India. This movement is still shrouded in a degree of mystery, but it would appear that there were probably a number of migratory ’waves’ in an easterly direction up to and including the first millennium BC, reaching a peak around 2000 BC. Among other things this migration helps explain the similarities between the ancient Greek and ancient Sanskrit languages. Modern Tajik is a linguistic relative. But how does this relate to our history of angels?

Well, when we look at the extent of these Indo-European migrations, across thousands of miles of Asian landscape into the mists of time, it helps to underline the fact that there MUST have been a dissemination of both objects and ideas between Central Asia and Europe that was fairly widespread even in extremely ancient times. A look at a map of the (later) Persian empire also helps underline the extent to which artefacts and culture could travel from India on the one hand to Greece on the other (and vice versa).

And just as we find the god Mithras (for instance) popping up in Greece and Central Asia (see next section), so we find his counterpart Mitra in the Rig-Veda, the most ancient of all Hindu ’texts’ (that possibly goes back in spoken form to 3,000 BC).

Mithraism

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Mithras was a light-bringer god, whose cult flourished between 1500 BC and the time of Christ, in lands as far apart as India and Great Britain, with a basis in what was then known as Persia.

Although