"Gone...But Not Forgotten" documentation pages 3

Did the pagans of olden times have angels,
too?
Of course. Ancient religions had hordes of
minor godlings greater than mortals but less than
bonafide deities.

For example, guardian angels would have their
parallel in ancient Rome's Lares - protective
household gods who were offered food at every meal.
The head Lar was the spirit of the family's founder.

Angels of death, escorting the newly dead to
the beyond, do the work that a Viking would expect of
the valkyries.

These horse-mounted supernatural maidens
scooped up slain warriors from the battlefield and
hauled them up to head god Odin's beer hall in the
clouds, Valhalla.

In a curious parallel to dying persons who often
spot angels or deceased relatives in their last mo-
ments - legend has it that a warrior's sighting of a
valkyrie on the battlefield meant his imminent death.

As for the messenger angel, one of many paral-
lels is the Greek god Hermes, flitting to and fro on
winged sandals.

SOME OF THE CULTURES WITH ANGELS OR OTHER WINGED BEINGS IN ART AND LITERATURE

1. Sumerian/Baylonian
2. Greek
3. Assyrian
4. Islamic
5. Aryan
6. Manichae
7. Zoroastrian/Parsees
8. Judaism/Kaballah
9. Balinese
10. Japanese
11. Buddhism
12. Christian
13. Persian
14. Taoism
15. Vikings
16. Mesopotamian

Angel (Hebrew, "malakh")--the word derives
from aingiras (Sanskrit), a divine spirit; from the
Persian angaros, a courier; from the Greek angelos,
meaning a messenger. In Arabic the word is
malak (a Jewish loan word.) In popular usage an
angel denotes, generally, a supernatural being
intermediate between God and man (the Greek
"daimon" being a closer approximation to our
notion of angel than angelos). In early Christian
and pre-Christian days, the term angel and daimon
(or demon) were interchangeable, as in the writ-
ings of Paul and John. The Hebrews drew their
idea of angels from the Persians and from the
Babylonians during the Captivity. The 2 named
angels in the Old Testament, Michael and Gabriel,
were in fact lifted from Babylonian mythology.
The 3rd named angel, Raphael, appears in the
apocryphal Book of Tobit. "This whole doctrine
concerning angels" (says Sales in his edition of
The Koran, "Preliminary Discourse," p. 51)
"Mohammed and his disciples borrowed from the
Jews, who borrowed the names and offices of
these beings from the Persians." While Enoch, in
his writings dating back to earliest Christian times

and even before, names many angels (and demons),
these were ignored in New Testament gospels,
although they began to appear in contemporaneous
extracanonical works. They had a vogue in
Jewish gnostic, mystic, and cabalistic tracts.
Angelology came into full flower in the 11th -13th
centuries when the names of literally thousands
upon thousands of angels appeared, many of
them created through the juggling of letters of the
Hebrew alphabet, or by the simple device of
adding the suffix "el" to any word which lent
itself to such manipulation. An angel, though
immaterial, that is, bodiless, is usually depicted as
having a body or inhabiting a body, pro tem,
and as winged and clothed. If an angel is in the,
service of the devil, he is a fallen angel or a demon.
To Philo, in his "On Dreams," angels were
incorporeal intelligences. He held that the rabbis,
on the contrary, thought of angels as material
beings. In Roman Catholic theology, angels were
created in the earliest days of Creation, or even
before Creation, tota simul, that is, at one and the
same time. In Jewish tradition, angels are "new
every morning" (Lamentations 3:23) and continue
to be formed with every breath God takes.