Scrambled Angels

My Guardian Angel

The following thoughts are quite unclear, but my hand was guided by my confusing Guardian Angel:

As the stomach turns, watching the reality show of current world affairs, some people seem fascinated again by the possibility of angels, looming in the woodworks of old houses or at the loom of the fabric of life, spinning out of control.

We accept that neither politicians, nor party leaders of all colors, nor market bosses are angels. After all, being selfish is the source of all goodness in our “highly competitive, rapidly changing world.” Even for those who congregate at halls of the new Apple religion, to get their latest big Mac served on a pad, it is clear that their new god, Tim Cook, had to grease his own palms with an annual salary of $378 million for the year 2011, in order to preach the gospel of I-whatever… And while the Pope ordains in his ornate garments that consumerism is against the interests of Catholic salvation, his Vatican Bank is trying to whitewash itself of accusations of money laundering, with assets supposedly in the billions of dollars.

So we look perhaps at some midlevel management types of goodness: angels. Now, it has to be admitted that, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the verb “to angel” refers to “financing or backing an enterprise.” But then this surely is blasphemous slang, unless the financiers of the long and the shorts of sales are to be seen as the true angels of our economy. Can you even imagine anymore a world without “financing or backing of enterprises?” It surely would be pure hell, if hell is ever pure.

But what about these angels? In the biblical traditions, many as they are, angels are men. It is only a modern form of praise to say to an energetic male “you are such a devil!”

Or is it? Lucifer, one of the many forms of the devil, was an angel, a fallen one, overcome by the laws of gravity in heaven, apparently. To add to the confusion, “lucifer” comes from the Latin “lūcifer adj., light-bringing; used as proper name of the morning star, Venus.” But Venus is no angel, lusty female goddess that she is. And how can the devil be light-bringing, when he is the prince of darkness?

Four Angels

The only way out of this is to acknowledge that true angels are women and true women are angels. As Romeo exclaims hopefully to Juliette:
O, speak again bright Angel: For thou art as glorious
as is a winged messenger of heaven…”
- so we usually mean a woman when we say “you are such an angel.” And most people that I have asked about their guardian angel sooner or later admit that she has a rather female personality. Yes, religious authorities can protest that angels are without gender, sexless, etc., but does that not substantiate the fact that they must be good women?

New translations do not even put an angel anymore at the gates of Eden, it is just a flaming sword, a hot waving member protecting the tree of life from the not-so-innocent.

There apparently is only one reference to female beings with wings in the Bible and that refers to two women who have wings like a stork, who between them carry of a lead-lidded container in which sits a woman “The woman’s name is Wickedness” – all this being pointed out be a true angel, in Zechariah 5:5-9.

Where then can we look for angels to guide us, protect us against male Lucifers, lusty swords, god-created princes of darkness who are too complex to be the mere product of natural selection?

It has taken us a long time to mature from male angels to female angels. Perhaps our world of economic machismo will slowly mature enough to be guided by good women without wings, Margaret Thatcher, Michele Bachman, et al. not to the contrary?