The Psychology of Angels

Angels have fascinated human consciousness since  the beginning of time. The angel is a recurring archetype within many civilisations, and is  present in religion, literature, philosophy, and esotericism, as well as in art, movies  and games. The word angel derives from the Greek angelos, which is the default  translation of the Biblical Hebrew term mal’ākh (literally “messenger”).

The angel  is a messenger between God and mankind. Angels are often depicted as human beings  with wings. In biblical scripture, however, angels do not have wings and appear as ordinary  men, sometimes with shining garments.

In fact, scripture mentions to be hospitable to strangers,  because we could be in the presence of an angel without knowing it. Another class of biblical  angels do have wings, but are depicted as inhuman and frightening, striking fear in anyone  who witnesses them, and as we will see later, are at the top of the angelic hierarchy. The idea of representing deities as winged figures dates back many thousands of years.

The  ancient Egyptians portrayed the sun god Horus as a winged disk, and many other winged beings  can be found in ancient Greek and Roman art. The ancient Greek god Hypnos, the god of sleep,  and Thanatos, the god of death, have wings. In ancient Mesopotamia, the anthropomorphic gods  exuded a brilliant and visible glamour (melam), the effect of seeing it caused both fascination  and terror in humans, they experienced paresthesia, a tingling and pricking sensation on  the skin.

The sun-God Ra appears with a solar disc above his head. The Zoroastrian deity of light  Mithra has a radiant crown resembling sunrays, as well as the Greek sun-God Helios, and Buddha  (“the awakened”). This divine radiance displayed in deities across the world anticipates  the halo of Christ and his apostles, as well as saints and angels.

The halo became  the universal religious symbol of divinity. Before delving into the psychology of angels,  and how they shape human behaviour and emotions, we’ll first explore their archetypal images  across the world, as well as their role in the creation of evil, their purpose and  motivation, and the hierarchy of angels. One of the oldest depictions of angels can be  found in Zoroastrianism.

This faith portrays a cosmic battle of good and evil, whereby good  is predicted to triumph over evil. Ahura Mazda (Lord of Wisdom) is the Creator and Lord of the  Light, and Ahriman or Angra Mainyu (Evil Spirit) is the Lord of Destruction, Chaos and Darkness. Besides the Supreme Being, there are various classes of angels.

The amesha spentas (literally,  “beneficent immortals”) are the emanations of the uncreated Creator, the six divine sparks that  personify the abstract qualities of Ahura Mazda, rather than distinct divine beings. These  all have their antitheses, called daevas, gods that are unworthy of worship. Truth  stands in opposition to falsehood and deceit.

The other class of angels are the fravashi, which  are guardian angels. Each person is accompanied by a personal spirit which is assigned at birth,  and watches over each individual. Finally, we have the yazatas (literally, “worthy of  worship”), angels that protect us from evil.

The ancient Egyptians believed that man had many  souls, both physical and spiritual. They spoke of the Ba-soul, which is represented as a bird with  a human head, and symbolises one’s uniqueness or what we call “personality”. This is not merely  a part of the person, but the person himself.

The idea of a purely immaterial existence was  foreign to Egyptian thought. On the other hand, the Ka (vital essence), is what distinguishes the  difference between a living and a dead person, with death occurring when the Ka left the body. Normally one would only meet one’s Ba-soul after death and be completely unaware of its existence  before.

In the ancient Egyptian papyrus, The debate between a Man and His Soul,  a world-weary man who is overcome by the hardship of the world contemplates about death  and looks forward to the afterlife. Suddenly, his Ba-soul appears and speaks to him, advising  him to continue his religious practices, but not to wish for the end of his life before its time. In ancient Roman mythology the genius would not only inhabit each person, but also places (genius  loci) and things.

It was important for the Romans to propitiate the appropriate genii for making  the land fertile, protecting the home and family, and any other major event of their lives. The  genius also represents a man’s temperament, virility, energy, personal fortune, and destiny.  Today we use the word genius to refer to a person endowed with special gifts, talents or  knowledge beyond that of ordinary humans.

The ancient Greeks spoke of the daimon (not  to be confused with demon). It was believed that when one’s inner daimon was in a state  of good order, one experienced eudaimonia, a state of good spirit and fulfilment.  The daimon can be good (agathodaimōn), evil (kakodaimōn), or even morally ambiguous,  that is, beyond good and evil, a force of nature.

In Plato’s Symposium, the priestess Diotima  teaches Socrates that daimons interpret and transport human things to the gods and divine  things to men. Socrates is well-known for his relationship with his daimon, and claimed  to hear, since childhood, a daimonic sign, an inner voice that warned him against  mistakes, but never told him what to do. During the trial that would condemn Socrates to  death, his daimon made no sign of opposition, unlike most of the times when it would inform him  if he was doing the wrong thing.

Socrates trusted his lifelong invisible companion and concluded  that his death was not something to be feared, but rather something good, for death is merely  a transition into another form of existence. In The Republic, Plato describes the myth of Er,  the story of a man who died in battle and came back to life, describing his journey in the  afterlife. Just like energy cannot be created or destroyed, but only change from one form  to another, so too the soul is immortal.

The choices we make and the character we develop  will have consequences after death. The man describes how the good souls went into the sky  and experienced bliss, while the immoral souls were directed underground and cried in despair  recounting their awful experiences in life, as each were required to pay a tenfold penalty  for all the wicked deeds committed when alive. The most wicked, however, were doomed  to remain underground, unable to escape.

Afterwards, the souls reached The Spindle of  Necessity which regulates the whole cosmos and governs the lives of all of us. Each  soul chose a new life, human or animal, and was assigned a daimon to fulfill what one  had chosen. The souls were required to drink water from the River of Forgetfulness,  so that they would forget everything, and shot away like a star into their birth.

In his book, The Soul’s Code, American psychologist James Hillman talks about the  acorn theory. Just as the oak’s destiny is contained in the tiny acorn, so does each person  bear a uniqueness that asks to be lived and that is already present before it can be lived. In  other words, essence precedes existence.

Thus, the daimon was sent to help us humans to fulfill  our destiny and to remind us of our true purpose as spiritual beings having human experiences. Whereas the Judaeo-Christian tradition generally divides angels into good and evil, Islam  makes a further distinction with djinns, beings who may be either good or harmful, and can  take the form of animals. Just as human beings, they are also subject to God’s judgment.

In Celtic faith, there are fairies. One theory surrounding their origin is that they were the  neutral angels who did not partake in the war in heaven, and thus neither remained in heaven, nor  were sent to hell, but rather caught in-between, left to roam the earth. Fairies can be  good or evil, and sometimes the term is used to describe any magical creature,  such as goblins, leprechauns, imps, elves, etc.

The Swiss physician and alchemist Paracelsus  wrote about four nature spirits or elementals: gnomes, undines, slyphs, and salamanders,  which correspond to the four elements: earth, water, air, and fire, respectively. Whether we talk about angels, daimons, djinns, fairies, or any other of such  beings, they all hold something in common, despite their difference in appearance,  namely, they are all archetypal images of the same fundamental pattern, the archetype of  the ethereal being. These spirits coexist with us; they just exist at another level of reality.

The  archetype in itself cannot be seen, only when it has been brought into consciousness through  ritual, myth, and the culture of each country, does the ethereal being take on a particular  personified form, and gains a specific purpose. Ethereal beings are also referred to as subtle  bodies, that is, as existing in-between the corporeal and the incorporeal realms. We too have  subtle bodies, as we exist both on the material and spiritual levels.

The difference is that  ethereal beings experience reality primarily on a spiritual level, while we experience  it on a material level, but that does not exclude the possibility of them interacting in  our realm, nor us interacting in their realm. In his book, The City of God, Saint Augustine  describes the creation of angels at the moment God said, “Let there be light; and there was  light. ” On the first day, God also divided the light from the darkness, which is symbolic of the  fallen angels.

Before the creation of mankind, angels underwent a trial in which all had the  opportunity (by their free will) to remain in their original state of holiness. Those  who failed became fallen angels. This is portrayed in the Book of Revelation.

Lucifer, the  bearer of light, desired in his pride to be God, and convinced one third of the angels to rebel  against God, starting the war in heaven. They are defeated by the archangel Michael and  the rest of the angels, and are thrown out of heaven. Lucifer becomes the Devil, and the rebel  angels become demons.

Thus, the universe becomes divided into three parts: heaven, earth, and hell. Satan, who refuses to bow down to the inferior man, appears as the ancient serpent in the  Garden of Eden, in order to trick Adam and Eve to disobedience by the promise of increased  conscious knowledge, in order to “become as gods” When they eat the forbidden fruit of the tree of  the knowledge of good and evil, they experience guilt and anxiety and hide themselves. God  directs them out of paradise into the wilderness, and places cherubim and a flawing sword that  turned every way to guard the way to the tree of life, lest man reach out his hand and eat  also of its fruit, and live forever.

Thus, the first sin which leads to the fall of mankind  from paradise is pride, to become like God. God’s light permeates all of existence, and  heaven is the enjoyment of divine light, which even reaches down to hell. But  whereas the angels rejoice in its holiness, the demons cannot stand the light, it burns them  and torments them, for it is an eternal reminder of their choice to rebel against God.

Hell is  separation from love. Angels only had to commit one sin to be eternally damned, because once they  choose, they have to go all in and there’s no going back. They experience no salvation.

Due to  their nature, however, angels possess far greater knowledge about reality than human beings,  and can easily discern between good and evil. Whereas we have free will, angels are created for  a specific purpose, but had a chance to go against their assigned role in creation. They basically  have no essence, but they have a purpose, which is always inseparable from God.

The  Christian mystic Meister Eckhart writes: “[T]he soul at its highest is formed like  God, but an angel gives a closer idea of Him. That is all an angel is: an idea of God. ” Angels are created to serve God’s purposes, which includes delivering messages, waging  spiritual battle, executing judgment, etc.

, angels are “ministering spirits sent to serve  those who will inherit salvation”. There is also the angel of hope, the angel of faith, the angel  of humility, etc. , as well as angels created for a specific task, such as joining the triumphant  place of God at The Day of Judgment.

Therefore, when the angels rebelled, their purpose became the  opposite of what God created them as. This is the perfect act of self-hatred and desire to hurt  oneself, a characteristic of the demonic. Each demon has his own Achilles’ heel, which is the  reminder of the original purpose of his creation.

The battle between good and evil continues to  this day, and will remain so, until the angels blow the trumpets announcing the kingdom of heaven  on earth and The Day of Judgment, when all people, living or dead, will be judged by God. Regarding angelic motivation to engage in encounters with mankind, one reason may be that  angels interact with man because they are merely obeying the will of God. Another reason may be  that angels are emotional creatures who experience joy during these interactions with people  because such interactions manifest the glory of God, and that is their primary motivation.

Though angels may have been created before man, God created them because of man. Even though  man may not have been present at the moment of creation in actuality, he existed as potentiality,  as a pattern to be unfolded (the Anthropos or Primeval Man). Adam was created out of the earth,  the name derives from adamah, which is Hebrew for earth.

God breathed into his nostrils the  breath of life, and man became a living soul. The heavenly realm descends into the earthly  realm, and man becomes part of both. As above, so below.

Man, the microcosm, is part of the  universe as a whole, the macrocosm. Thus, truths about the nature of the cosmos may be inferred  from truths about human nature, and vice versa. In the Christian celestial hierarchy put forward  by Pseudo-Dionysius in the 5th or 6th century, angels are divided into three hierarchies  each of which contains three orders, based on their proximity to God,  corresponding to the nine choirs of angels.

The first group angels serve God directly; they  are God’s servants. These biblically accurate angels give us a glimpse into a realm where human  eyes rarely access. They appear in a frightening and inhuman form, which may be why their very  first words are: “Do not be afraid.

” In the Book of Isaiah, the Seraphim are six-winged fiery  beings; two wings cover their faces, two cover their feet, and with the final two they fly. They  are described as being forever in God’s presence praising him day and night, crying “Holy, holy,  holy, is the Lord God Almighty. ” In Ezekiel’s vision, he describes seeing the Cherubim, winged  chimeras that have four faces: that of a lion, an ox, a human, and an eagle.

They are beneath the  Throne of God, and are the moving forces of the Ophanim (or Thrones), which appear as four wheels  within wheels in constant motion, and covered with eyes - they are the wheels of God’s fiery chariot. In the apocrypha, the highest rank of the Seraphim is Seraphiel, the protector of Metatron. The  latter is a figure mentioned in the Book of Enoch, in the mystical Kabbalistic texts, and the  Talmud of Rabbinic Judaism.

He is known as God’s first angel, and is the only figure allowed  to stand alongside God. It is said that his glow is so strong that it seems that there are two  authorities in heaven, God and Metatron. He is also called “the little Yahweh”, and is believed  to have once been the human Enoch, one of the two only men chosen by God to escape death.

The second group of angels are those that make God’s will happen, they are the heavenly rulers.  The Dominions keep the world in proper order, regulating the duties of the angels, and  making known the commands of God. The Virtues assist with miracles and encourage  humans to strengthen their faith in God, they are also known as the spirits of motions,  governing all nature, including the seasons, stars, and planets.

And finally, the Powers are  the warrior angels that fight against evil forces. In the final choir are the angels  that are closest to humans, and carry out the orders from above. They are the earthly  messengers.

The Principalities are those who protect and guide nations, groups of people, and  institutions such as the Church. The Archangels, have a role as God’s messengers to  people at critical times in history, and are unique as they are identified by name. Biblical canon only mentions the archangel Michael (which translates to: “who is like  God?

”). Michael is the chief ruler and leader of the angels. In the Book of Enoch, however, the  archangel Gabriel is mentioned alongside Michael, suggesting that they stand on an equal footing. 

Gabriel translates to “God is my strength”. All archangels have theophoric names, that is,  they contain the name of God, El. There are seven archangels mentioned in total.

In the apocryphal Book of Tobit, Raphael (meaning “God has healed”) reveals  himself as one of the seven angels who stand in the glorious presence of the Lord, and  interestingly, in the Book of Revelation, there are seven unnamed angels who stand before  God, and have seven trumpets. These and other mentions in non-canonical works, have given rise  to the popular conception of the seven archangels. Finally, at the bottom of the hierarchy, we  have the common angels, who deliver messages from the two realms.

In this group we also have  the guardian angels. In the Book of Matthew, we find direct reference from Jesus of Nazareth  that everyone who comes into the world has a guardian angel. Scripture always depicts  angels as if they were male.

As spirits, angels were created to live for eternity, and  do not experience death. This suggests that the angelic population far exceeds that of  human beings, and are too numerous to count. Saint Teresa of Ávila once saw  an angel who was most beautiful and seemed to be burning in fire, she wrote: “Their names they never tell me; but I see very well that there is in heaven so great a difference  between one angel and another, and between these and the others, that I cannot explain it.

” Angels do not just exist in a detached realm or another dimension, on the  contrary, though they remain unseen, they have a direct influence on us. Swiss  psychiatrist and psychologist Carl Jung writes: “It is remarkable that the angels are always in  the plural, a choir of angels. With the exception of Lucifer, and the archangels Gabriel and  Michael, the angels are not individuals, they appear in choirs and multitudes. 

They are essentially collective beings. ” The Swedish scientist and Christian mystic Emanuel  Swedenborg experienced a spiritual awakening in his 50s. In a dream, the Lord revealed to him the  spiritual meaning of the Bible, and he began to experience strange dreams and visions, and could  freely visit heaven and hell to converse with angels and demons.

Some of these are documented  in his Journal of Drams. Contrary to Christian belief, he states that every angel and demon  are from the human race. They too have the same activities as we do, their only difference to us  is that they are not clothed with a material body.

Those who allowed themselves to be  filled with divine love became angels, while those who immersed themselves in physical  pleasures or refused to let go of their egos, chose to go to hell because they are attracted to  it; hell is the place where they can indulge in everything that gives them pleasure. When  we turn away from our self-centred ego, it is like a weight is off our shoulders, as  if we could fly. As G.

K. Chesterton wrote: “Angels can fly because they  can take themselves lightly. ” The visionary artist William Blake  was an acute reader of Swedenborg, and had visions of angels since childhood.

On  his deathbed, he gloriously sang of the sights of angels in heaven. Blake became critical of  Swedenborg’s view of heaven and hell as separate, and proposed the marriage of heaven and hell. Both  are necessary for human experience, for without contraries is no progression.

Jung writes: “The angels are a strange genus: they  are precisely what they are and cannot be anything else. They are in themselves soulless  beings who represent nothing but the thoughts and intuitions of their Lord. Angels who  fall, then, are exclusively “bad” angels.

” Jung describes the fall of angels as a  premature invasion of the human world by unconscious contents. The book of Enoch depicts  the interaction of the fallen angels (called “the watchers”) with mankind. They transgress  the boundary between heaven and earth after begetting children with women, giving birth to  the Nephilim, mysterious great giants briefly mentioned in Genesis.

They threaten to devour  mankind, and God sends a great flood to rid the earth of these giants, warning Noah to build  an ark, so as not to eradicate the human race. Jung compares the fallen angel motif to the  effect of “inflation”, which can be observed, for example, in the megalomania of dictators. As an archetype, the angel emerges from the deep timeless portion of the psyche, the collective  unconscious.

The idea of archetypes is an ancient one. It is related to Plato’s concept of ideal  forms or patterns already existing in the divine mind that determine in what form the material  world will come into being. However, we owe to Jung the concept of the psychological archetypes  – the characteristic patterns that pre-exist in the collective psyche of the human race, that  repeat themselves eternally in the psyches of each individual, and determine the basic ways  that we perceive and function as human beings.

When an angel “appears” to a human being, it is a  liminal event occurring at the threshold between the known and the unknown, the conscious, and the  unconscious. It is the constellation of what Jung calls the transcendent function, which relieves  the tension of opposites and unites them as the third element. As such, the angel is a reconciling  symbol.

The angel unites the ego with the Self, the individual with the cosmos, the soul with God. Apart from a religious or metaphysical sense, angels can be seen as archetypal  symbols of guidance, instruction, hope, and protection. The encounter with angels  or demons can represent projections of one’s psyche.

We must be wary, however, of calling all  such experiences transpersonal, they may also be of a psychopathogical or delusional nature -  which largely depends on one’s mental health. Generally speaking, the former has a positive  effect, while the latter has a negative effect. Angels and demons, positive and negative  emotions, are in constant battle within us, and some emotions are more powerful than others,  just as there are more powerful demons and angels in the hierarchy.

Sometimes despair triumphs over  hope, other times chastity prevails over lust, etc. We cannot fake genuine emotions; they  come to us. Telling a person who is sad to “be happy” proves to be ineffective, as such  a person has become enveloped by that which contains the entire pattern of that emotion,  which can be low or high in intensity.

To experience the entire spectrum of an emotion  in the fullest sense is rare and overwhelming, it can only be experienced temporarily, for it  is akin to being fully possessed by an archetype, and thus one is no longer human. Whether this  is experienced naturally or artificially, we ultimately have to come back  to what is humanly possible, and it can be difficult to readapt to our  daily duties after witnessing “the other side”. We all have a positive “right” conscience  depicted in our daimon, guardian angel, heart, inner voice, etc.

, and a negative “false”  conscience called the devil, seducer, tempter, evil spirit, etc. Everyone who examines his  conscience is confronted with this fact, and he must admit that the good exceeds the bad  only by a very little, if at all. Jung writes: “We ought to avoid sin and occasionally we can;  but, as experience shows, we fall into sin again at the very next step.

Only unconscious and wholly  uncritical people can imagine it possible to abide in a permanent state of moral goodness. But  because most people are devoid of self-criticism, permanent self-deception is the rule. A more  developed consciousness brings the latent moral conflict to light, or else sharpens those  oppositions which are already conscious.

Reason enough to eschew self-knowledge and psychology  altogether and to treat the psyche with contempt! ” The quest for self-knowledge is a task for the  few, for the path that leads to salvation is like that of a sharp razor, it is hard to tread  and difficult to cross. The way to destruction, however, is easy to cross and  broad, and many enter through it.

There are multiple cases of people having a close  encounter with the angel of death, but survived or “cheated death”, so to speak. You may have a hunch  that gives you a bad feeling, which motivates you to walk on another path, only to find out later  that a deadly accident had occurred in the exact same place. Or you may be driving on the road  and feel an urge to stop, when suddenly a child runs across the street.

Angels can protect us  from attacks, or assist us when we are in need. The idea of angels generally comes from miraculous  experiences where one feels that some intelligent agency beyond us has helped us. One feels a  presence.

It is as if something more intelligent and greater than your ego is alive in you and  makes you do things or arranges your fate against your own will, and against your own planning. The angel guides a human being in life, and sometimes breaks through with a message  that has the power to transform one deeply, usually at crucial points in one’s life. Our lives  continually pass through periods of crisis and stages of transition, in which we become more  susceptible to the angel’s call.

Therefore, during the dark night of the soul, the  angel may be encountered, if God “opens our eyes” to them. Whenever a man consciously  encounters a divine agency, which assists, commands, or directs, we can understand it  as an encounter of the ego with the Self. In Dante’s Divine Comedy, Dante the protagonist  experiences a midlife crisis and finds himself in a dark wood, threatened by wild beasts. 

Suddenly, the Roman poet Virgil appears as the angel archetype or psychopomp, guiding Dante  through a journey of hell, and purgatory. Later, Beatrice (an anima figure) ascends with Dante  to the nine spheres of paradise, reaching the Empyrean, the highest point in heaven. Each of us has an invisible guide to accompany us on our journey through life.

Whether  it manifests itself in a dream, vivid intuition, an inner voice, or an actual entity, we all have a  telos (end or purpose), which is unique to our own soul’s journey. Angels are often invisible, yet  their presence is felt, and their voice is heard. Those who ignore their inner voice can  feel a sense of emptiness or uneasiness, and be unable to understand why they are in such  a bad mood, because outwardly everything may appear to be going well.

It is as if one is going  against one’s nature, giving rise to a feeling of inherent wrongness. It is important for a person  to meditate and contemplate on these feelings, then, perhaps, the inner voice will clarify  one’s problems. The unconscious, after all, is the master-pattern of one’s life.

Angels can help us to experience moments of clarity when conditions suddenly appear just  right for the accomplishment of one’s action. This is known as kairos, an opportune and decisive  moment in one’s life. The angel can also cause one to experience a sense of intense excitement,  or inspiration, an urgency that one should do whatever it is has inspired one, and that it  is personally very important for one to do so.

The angel’s call can also appear through  synchronicity, a meaningful coincidence that cannot be causally linked, which occurs  when an image of one’s inner life is seen to have correspondence in external reality.  As the archetypal image of the call, the angel initiates individuation, the journey  towards wholeness of personality (the Self). Angels not only help bring the often-neglected  world of the unconscious into consciousness, but also guide us on our journey towards theosis  (union with God).

Therefore, angels can help us both psychologically and spiritually. The person embarking on self-realisation, although he might not subscribe to any recognised  creed, is nonetheless pursuing a religious quest, following the footsteps of a higher power than  himself. On the one hand we have the soul, our innermost self or our true essence;  and on the other hand, we have the spirit, our relationship with God.

These are necessarily  linked together. He who knows himself knows God. We reach God through the Self, but God is not  the Self, for he transcends it.

This is part of the old adage, “know thyself”, for the ultimate  tragedy is ignorance or “the neglect of oneself”, that is, to not find out about the nature  of the soul and of our true purpose in life. Our guardian angel awaits with divine  patience until we choose, by our own accord, to begin our process of soul-work, to fulfill  our destiny. Know thyself, heal thyself.

This is a difficult endeavour as it may  require one to step outside one’s comfort zone into unknown territory. However, there  comes a time in everyone’s life, when one must question if they are being true to their own  nature, which is expressed by the inner voice, the voice of a fuller life, and of a wider  and more comprehensive consciousness. The voice awakens us from our deep slumber, and  beckons our soul upwards to our true home.

The angel is sometimes shown waking a  sleeper with a trumpet. The unawakened state is unconsciousness and the awakened  state is wholeness. To venture causes anxiety, but not to venture is to lose oneself.

“Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels’ hierarchies? and even if one of  them pressed me against his heart: I would be consumed in that overwhelming existence. For  beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are barely able to endure, and it  amazes us so, because it serenely disdains to annihilate us.

Every angel is terrifying. ” The Austrian poet Rilke states that, “Every Angel because of its beauty is terrible. ”  Angels are of a numinous nature which totally fascinate and overwhelm an individual.

The  angel moves, compels, awes, overpowers, and constellates urgency. Angels are terrible because  one has to go through a painful transformation, and beautiful because they transform one’s entire  existence, like the phoenix who rises from the ashes. The devils are as necessary as the angels,  as Rilke stated, “Don’t take my devils away, because my angels may flee too.

” When we turn  contradiction and opposition into paradox and unity, we turn inner conflict into inner  peace, understanding the duality of our nature. The ancient instructive words to invoke the  angel was “enflame thyself with prayer. ” The Neo-Platonist philosopher Iamblichus was one of  the first to formally ritualise the invocation of the angel.

By invoking and consuming  (integrating) the angel, one could achieve the status of a spiritual being, and finally  achieve the knowledge of the gods. Purity is the defining factor for success or failure in the  operation for conversing with one’s holy guardian angel. The more pure the soul, the greater the  affinity to the angel.

In the Lexicon of Alchemy, Martin Rulandus describes meditatio as an internal  talk of one person with another who is invisible, as in the invocation of the Deity, or communion  with one’s self, or with one’s good angel. Fasting is also an important ritual, because  it brings one further away from the material, and closer to the spiritual. In the Book of  Matthew, after Jesus spent 40 days fasting in the desert and the Devil failing to tempt Him,  angels came and ministered to him.

This is often interpreted as the angels feeding Jesus. There is, however, also a dark side, as is seen in the practices of necromancy and the  study of demonology in the Middle Ages. Similarly, there are modern occult practices in which people  seek to capture spirits and ask for favours, or use them to act upon the world.

As the Faustian  myth teaches us, the attainment of knowledge that far exceeds the humanly possible, can come  at a high price, at the cost of one’s soul. Demons can disguise themselves as  angels of light. In his solitude, Saint Anthony sometimes encountered devils who  looked like angels, and other times he found angels who looked like devils.

The only way he  could tell the difference was by the way which he felt after the being had left his company. Angels are sometimes depicted as messengers of dreams. They show the dreamer, and then the angel  bringing down the dream from heaven.

The angel was understood as being the personified essence of  a dream. There are dreams that sometimes warns us and can even save our lives. If we attend  to them, we can avoid all sorts of disasters.

If the unconscious takes the trouble to give  us a warning dream, one should attend to it. Though it remains unexplainable, it is a  fact that the unconscious knows more than we know. It is as if the unconscious of the  human being is expanded into outer nature, and has information which we cannot have, and  therefore in dreams you sometimes get warnings or information about things you cannot possibly know.

The appearance of an angel in dreams announces a healing possibility, a link to the Self that would  ease neurotic dysfunctions. The Bible references hundreds of dreams or visions. The dream of  Jacob’s ladder is one of the better-known dreams, which depicts angels uniting heaven and earth.

Jacob dreamed that there was a ladder set up on the earth and the top of it reached  to heaven; and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it. This is known  as a god-sent dream, or an archetypal dream with theophany (an encounter with a deity).  Jungian analyst Marie-Louise von Franz states: “[T]he ladder symbolised a continuous,  constant connection with the divine powers of the unconscious.

We could say the dream  itself was such a ladder. It connects us with the unknown depth of our psyche. Every  dream is a rung on a ladder, so to speak.

” Jacob did not know that the place he slept  in was a holy place, he concluded it from his dream. One of the oldest beliefs of mankind  was that in the landscape there are certain places where one has either communication  with the good deities or evil deities, such as a crevice being the entrance to the  underworld, or mountaintops being areas of special communication with the gods above as is seen in  many myths across the world (Moses on Mount Sinai, Zeus on Mount Olympus, Shiva on Mount Kailash,  etc. ).

There seems to be a whole soul geography in the world where man projected his soul into.  We naturally feel that there are places we go to where we feel at peace, and others that are  somehow unnerving and we prefer not to stay in. Without wishing it, we are placed in  situations which entangle us in something, and we usually don’t know how we ended up there. 

A thousand twists of fate all of a sudden land us in such a situation. When we are faced against  a wall, and all seems lost, it is not unusual to have an encounter with the Self. This is  symbolically represented in the biblical motif of Jacob wrestling with the "dark" angel, and while  he dislocated his hip, his struggle prevented a murder.

That is how one grows: by being defeated  decisively by greater beings. In a sense, Jacob wrestles with himself, and afterwards  becomes reborn, receiving the new name, Israel, he who wrestles with God. Jacob finds his identity  by wrestling with his dark side, and discovers the light.

There are four features of this story,  an encounter with a superior being, wounding, perseverance, and divine revelation, that together  form the theme of “the encounter with the Self. ” Jung writes: “[The God] appears at first in hostile form, as an assailant with whom the hero has to  wrestle. This is in keeping with the violence of all unconscious dynamism.

In this manner  the god manifests himself and in this form he must be overcome… The onslaught of instinct then  becomes an experience of divinity, provided that man does not succumb to it and follow it blindly,  but defends his humanity against the animal nature of the divine power. It is “a fearful thing  to fall into the hands of the living God”, and “whoso is near unto me, is near unto the  fire, and whoso is far from me, is far from the kingdom”; for “the Lord is a consuming fire. ”” Jung knew that God's messenger is the stronger force, therefore he never turned away from the  struggle.

When he was once asked how he could live with the knowledge he had recorded  in his controversial book, Answer to Job, he replied ''I live in my deepest hell,  and from there I cannot fall any further. " The integration of the angel archetype allows  us to examine the nature of our essence or soul, the uniqueness that asks to be lived in each of  us, and that unfolds itself during our lifetime. Thus, angels carry our true vocation, which is a  calling, towards the meaning of our life.

If we pay attention to our inner voice through dreams,  contemplation, prayer, etc. , the angel’s call towards fulfilling our purpose on earth becomes  clearer. This is not just the call of our personal destinies; it is a cosmic call that aligns us to  the Anima Mundi or World Soul, which all living beings form a part of.

Every blade of grass  has its angel that bends over it and whispers, “Grow, grow. ” The word animal derives from anima,  which is breath or spirit. Humans are the highest of animals, as we are made in God’s image.

Man is made a little lower than the angels; yet God crowned him with glory and honour, and  put everything under his command. Jung writes: “A life without inner contradiction is either  only half a life or else a life in the Beyond, which is destined only for angels. But God  loves human beings more than the angels.

” Though hierarchically we remain lower than  the angels, we are loved more by God. It is out of love that God made our bodies in the  image of Himself, and why he became Christ, who was crucified and died for our sins.  Christianity is a unique religion as it is God that comes directly to man, and not vice versa.

While angels are created in heaven and stay there, or were thrown out of heaven when they rebelled,  we human beings are created on Earth and are capable of moving upwards to heaven or downwards  to hell. Only that which can fall is capable of salvation, this is the felix culpa (happy fault  or fortunate fall). We have the freedom to choose between good or evil, something that even angels  cannot interfere in.

This is our blessing and our curse. We are the protagonists in this world  of spiritual warfare, and no matter how many difficulties and trials we must overcome, we  are all equally capable of uniting our will with that power that is higher than ourselves,  and to rejoice in our journey along the way. “A thought transfixed me: for the first time in  my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom  by so many thinkers.

The truth — that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which  man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and  human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love… For  the first time in my life I was able to understand the meaning of the words, “The angels are lost in  perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory.