Angelology: Reasoning with Abaddon

Photograph Francesco Ungaro

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by Phil Hall

The Enochian tradition is based on the 16th-century works of Dr. John Dee (1527–1608) and his Irish scryer, Edward Kelley. It is named after the biblical patriarch Enoch, who “walked with God.” Dee and Kelley claimed to have been given a language and an outlook by angels. Dr. John Dee’s ambition was to reunite Christianity and recover lost wisdom from antiquity through conversations with angels. To do so, he used a crystal ball, and an obsidian mirror for scrying. The conversation was initiated and conducted in the angels’ own language, requiring these beings to be called up by their names, to which they would answer, if imprecated sufficiently.

There are 49 invocations in Enochian. The idea is, of course, that at some level the universe was created by the ‘word’. Dee imagines the angels were structured in the ranks of an Elizabethan court. To a herd of horses the gods are a herd of horses.

This magical system was regularised by the botanically minded Victorian classifiers later on in the spirit of Hesiod’s Theogony. The science of magic was, in fact, poor anthropology and cheap and amateurish scholasticism. The praxis of magic that followed was the result of experimental Eastern fusions involving breathing, music, dance, sex, death, exercises to foment detachment, and silly wet dreams about siddhis.

Of course, the results, much like brain peels with mescaline, acid, and ayahuasca, were variable and frequently disastrous. The irreligiosity and squittering experientialism of this approach ignored the question of the existence of God, which is odd because all the angels they evoked were, presumably, emanations from the One. Victorian magic was demonic and not angelic, using lengthy invocation rituals like the Abramelin, the idea being to harness the emanations of God as if they were some kind of electricity or gas.

Gabriel, as a key messenger from the One, quickly gets demoted because, as in Sodom and Gomorrah, the Crowleyites were literally violating the innocent in order to precipitate (Rasputin-like) a divine response, any response, from the great beyond.

The magical order of the Golden Dawn (so-called), in fact, were revolting Luciferians who believed in illumination by whatever means necessary. But who cares about them? They are just a smell we need to clear from the room first by flinging open the windows of Boleskin manor.

Blake claimed to have had visionary experiences throughout his life, beginning in childhood. At age four, he saw God “put his head to the window.” Around age nine, he saw “a tree full of angels” while walking in the countryside. None of these beings said a word. They flashed at the boy with their lights and bodies, and were, presumably, naked. Look at me!

Blake, ascribed authoritarianism to creatures like Gabriel and extended revolutionary solidarity to the fallen angels. He saw his reflection in them: a small, unrecognised, histrionic man with bold and glorious dreams. Blake read the Book of Enoch avidly, because that was the creative focus of his imagination: to commune with the energies of the world around him hidden under London grime and covered in country mire. Samuel Palmer, his disciple, painted differently, illuminating the landscape of southern England, not only the landscape of the imagination.

Blake, projected promiscuity and transgression onto his angels which he felt were both seducible and seducing, succubi and incubi. Angels for Blake were intertwined with human passion and creativity, not separate from it. For Blake, an angel was in fact just a being in a certain state or under conditions of consciousness that humans can occupy, pass through, and transcend. For Blake subjectivity is all: “The Imagination is not a State: it is the Human Existence itself.”

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But if subjectivity is all, then we must deal more straightforwardly with the actual condition of subjectivity.

For the Quakers, with their testimony of equality angelic mediation, on the whole, is to be dispensed with. Christ, the all-human and all-divine, is the person whom George Fox found most inspiring and who facilitates, through his example, the inner light of the soul in attaining feelings of loving effulgence. Though it is true that people like Fox, very much in the spirit of Blake, felt themselves to be in states of grace that were sometimes described as ‘angelic’.

Orthodox doctrine is the most famous doctrine that fully embraces the Angelic Celestial Hierarchy of: Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones, Dominions, Virtues, Powers, Principalities, Archangels, Angels, reflecting the order of divine love and the structure of spiritual reality.

If we are being generous, we can interpret Christian Orthodoxy not merely as a reflection of the social structures, but in a more Pythagorean and mathematical way, and in the spirit of Anaximenes and Anaximander, where spiritual reality can be disassembled in an orderly fashion into its component parts. This is being overgenerous to Orthodoxy.

To its credit, Orthodoxy owes less to Darwinism red in tooth and claw and Malthusianism than modern magic does, and Orthodoxy is better at pointing towards the source of all. Angels are central to Orthodox worship. The liturgy is seen as a joining, a conjunction of earthly and heavenly worship in tandem with angels depicted in illuminated icons or mosaics, especially the Archangel Michael and the Archangel Gabriel, ever-present. Christ himself pre-incarnate is named the “Angel of the Great Council”.

Superstitiously, for all their burning of witches, the Puritans thought of angels as protective ministers primarily focused on shielding believers from demonic attacks, and though angels are not to be thanked, or prayed to, they are expected to fetch and carry the obnoxious Puritans’ spiritual water like badly treated servants.

In Islam, belief in angels (mala’ika) is one of the Six Articles of Faith, making it a central, non-negotiable part of islam. For Muslims, because they believe in the source, all angels are there to help people orient to the source— starch in a linen shirt, signs that point and say: One way! This way! in functional arrangments that imitate desert hierarchy and social organisations like the majlis. Angels like Jibril (Gabriel), Mika’il (Michael), Azra’il (Malak al-Mawt: the Angel of Death), Munkar and Nakir, and Kiraman Katibin all have their specific God-assigned jobs to do.

The more modern view is that Angels are powerful archetypes; universal, primordial patterns of the collective unconscious that manifest in dreams, art, religion, and personal experience. Jung proposed that beneath our personal unconscious (forgotten memories, repressed desires) lies a deeper layer shared by all humanity. Why? Well, just because he could. He had no evidence whatsoever for his theories apart from the patterns he projected onto the entrails and messed up leavings of dreams.

Ignoring the fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc, Jung argues that angelic encounters and states of grace and psychological integration are indicated by the experience of synchronicities. There, in synchronicity we can find restorative meanings and reassurance. All this is far-fetched, but, believe it or not, Africans and Asians, it is a life-operating philosophy for millions of fools in Europe alone.

In modern pop culture, when it comes to angels, Alan Moore has an influence. He is a thoughtful conjurer and yet also a commercial man, a carpet bagger of ideas plying his sexy Wiccan, blue-ringed, bearded trade, giving us a foretaste of the mumbo jumbo we will soon no doubt all be taking seriously after the final apocalypse of ignorance arrives. British people may go back to wearing woad, having sex in groves, worshiping trees and stones, and burying their loved ones in the bogs and marsh.

For Moore, an angel is not a being that exists independently of the human mind. Instead, it is a “personified idea” or a “symbol-form” that becomes real because a human imagines it. In Moore’s book Promethea, the title character herself is a “living story” or “idea” that becomes physically real when a person (a “vessel”) uses their imagination to summon her, typically through writing or art. Here’s Moore, in a stale echo of subjectivist philosophy writes: “The only reality we can ever truly know is that of our perceptions, our own consciousness, while that consciousness, and thus our entire reality, is made of nothing but signs and symbols.”. There is nothing but language, language between us and the sun.

In this philosophy, even God needs language before conceiving the Universe: ‘In the beginning was the Word.'” Under this framework, when someone “invokes” an angel, they are not contacting an external being but activating a powerful idea within their own consciousness—an idea that becomes real precisely because it is imagined with sufficient intensity and belief. Nothing new or interesting in that, really.

If you believe something hard enough, it will happen. You will fly, become rich, walk on water. It is a sophisticated version of the ideas coming from the dregs of the US self-help movement. I don’t want to mention names for fear that I might invoke those heavy breathing, microphone wielding quacks.

Dante’s view of angels is prismatic. “The nature of each angel sees God’s light / according to its worth, in varying measure.” (Paradiso XXIX, 73-74). The orders—Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones, Dominions, Virtues, Powers, Principalities, Archangels, Angels—are not ranked by ambition or political authority. They are ranked by closeness to the source of love.

The Seraphim, closest to God, burn with the most intense love; the Angels, who interact with humanity, reflect that love at a further remove. They are lenses through which we can understand the world.

What would Gabriel say about this cake? THINK OF THE CHILDREN OF GAZA! What would Michael say about it? THE COCOA WAS PRODUCED BY SLAVE LABOUR IN GABON! Chamuel, the Archangel of Peaceful Relationships, Comfort, and Unconditional Love, asks: Will you share this cake with the person sitting next to you, with everyone on the train? 

For Dante, the hierarchy is not a restriction but a way of seeing and acting in a slightly disco-ball, giddymaking, whirling dance of light. Each to his own. 

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The angelic should be intelligible. Plato’s cosmos is divided into two fundamental orders: the Intelligible Realm (the noētos topos), the realm of eternal, unchanging Forms or Ideas (the Good, the True, the Beautiful)—this is reality; and the Sensible Realm, the world of becoming, change, decay, and illusion—this is the shadow of reality. For me, in fact, everything Plato does and says is a mere extrapolation of Pythagoras’s ideas; let us not stoop to calling them neo-Pythagorean.

Reality should be intelligible, and any angel, real or imaginary, should be able to hold up their end of a decent conversation. If reality is intelligible, if angels are real and not fictional, they should make sense.

If God has a mind, S/He intends, wills, judges, and decides. S/He has beliefs about what humanity deserves, desires about how history should conclude, and intentions that S/He acts upon.

Angels too then, must have minds. They understand God’s commands, recognise the significance of what they are doing, and choose to obey (or, in the case of fallen angels, to rebel). They have beliefs about God, about humanity, and about the cosmos. Human beings have minds. They believe, disbelieve, think and reason.

These minds are mutually intelligible. God can communicate his or her will to angels. Angels can communicate it to humans. Humans can understand what is being asked of them. The entire spiritual architecture depends on shared intelligibility. Enough intelligibility to have a conversation with the voices in our heads at the very least.

Pure Faith would be God’s insult. It would be God saying, I will not explain. Accept what you cannot understand. And yet if we use our intelligence we can actually understand.

In the film Nostalgia by Tarkovsky, after the nuclear announcement, Alexander retreats to his room, falls to his knees, and prays to a God he doesn’t believe in: “If only it can be undone, I will be silent. I will give up all I love. I will destroy my house. I will leave my family. I will be silent.” There is no discussion with God or the angels about his choices.

In the film Nostalgia, Tarkovsky, is proudly inchoate, and has Alexander threaten Maria by placing a gun to his own head shouting: “Don’t kill us, Maria.” Where Maria doesn’t respond to reason she does, however, respond to childish blackmail and outbursts. She soothes him. They have intercourse floating above the bed, weightless, suspended in the air. The next morning, Alexander wakes in his own bed and the nuclear crisis has vanished.

Alexander, the ‘holy fool’ then burns his house to the ground and is taken away to an asylum. Apparently, no one with a clear head, can save humankind. Tarkovsky’s God responds well to unintelligible cries of anguish that are supposed to rescue the world, and so it would be right back to animal Eden with all of us.

Jesus talks, and if angels existed, they wouldn’t ghost us; they would talk to us too. In the actual sacred texts, angels are talked to. Abraham argues with the angels about Sodom. He bargains with the angel about the number to be saved: Fifty? Forty-five? Forty? Ten? And the angels listen.

In Genesis, Jacob wrestles with an angel all night and demands a blessing. He gets injured and still refuses to let go until he gets what he wants. In Genesis 32 Moses talks to the angel in the burning bush and he argues. “Who am I that I should go?” “What if they don’t believe me?” “I’m slow of speech.” In Exodus 3-4 Hagar, abandoned by Abraham in the desert, is found by an angel and she talks to it. Mary at the Annunciation is told she will conceive. She asks a question: “How can this be, since I have no husband?” and the angel answers her.

In the strong tradition of Angelic conversation angels are presented as beings who can be reasoned with. Perhaps even now, as American wars rage, we will be able to reason with the approaching angel of the apocalypse, Abaddon. Abaddon stands at the doorstep, polite enough to knock, polite enough to come in, sit, accept a cup of tea and talk.