Angels & Daimons

Hope Macdonald describes, in When Angels Appear (1982), an incident in which a young mother sees that her three-year-old daughter, Lisa, has escaped from the garden and is sitting on the railway line beyond.At that moment, a train comes around the bend, its whistle blowing. "As she raced from the house screaming her daughter's name, she suddenly saw a striking figure, clothed in pure white, lifting Lisa off the track with an arm around the child… When the mother reached the daughter's side, Lisa was standing alone."Not many tales of guardian angels are as dramatic as this one, but a surprising number of people attest to some experience or other that they ascribe to the actionof a guardian angel, whether it's a single word of warning or, as is commonly reported, a simple touch on the shoulder or tug on the sleeve. According to a US poll in the 1990s, 69 per cent of Americans believe in angels; 46 per cent claim to have their own guardian angels and 32 per cent have felt an angelic presence.

Nor does the pre-millennial craze for angels seem to have abated, if the number of Internet references to them is any indication. While Lisa's angel conforms to our expectations - a white, possibly winged, powerful and protective being - they are not always thus. A clergyman's widow told her friend, folklorist Katharine Briggs, how she suffered from an injured foot and had been sitting one day on a seat in London's Regent's Park, wondering how on Earth she'd find the strength to limp home, when suddenly she saw a tiny man in green wholooked at her very kindly and said: "Go home. We promise that your foot shan't pain you tonight." Then he disappeared. But the intense pain in her foot had gone. She walked home easily and slept painlessly all night.

Angelic Origins The origin of angels is not easy to unravel. They do not feature greatly in the Old Testament but seem to have returned with the Jews from their Babylonian Captivity, where the angelology of Zoroastrian Persia was probably influential. Although the Zoroastrians had a well-developed doctrine of guardian angels, the angels who became dominant figures in the Jewish apocalyptic writings from the third century BC onwards were impersonal rather than personal. As Harold Bloom reminds us in Omens of Millennium (1996), far from being sweetness and light, angels were highly ambiguous,awesom......