Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/12/29/the-monstrous-truth-about-angels.html
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video link from the article
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I’ll be honest, if this had been explained in Sunday school, I might have paid a bit more attention.
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“Be not forgetful to turn away strangers, lest thy entertain horrifying creatures unawares.”
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Really, seeing them as Great Old Ones and eldritch horrors instead of bland beautiful white people with wings might have kept more weird and geeky kids in church.
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That particular archetype always creeped me out way more than eldritch horrors and abstract personifications. And don’t get me started on the Christian appropriation of the Greek Cupid archetype.
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As a kid I read about this mentalist act that would travel around and pretend to read minds. There was some sort of code involved -I didn’t track the details- but when someone from the audience passed up an object to be “read”, the entire illusion depended on that object being accounted for in the code.
(It was probably along the lines of, “tell me what I’m holding in my hand” being one object, and “what am I holding?” being another.
Anyway, in one town during a performance, some smartass in the audience had the bright idea to pass up a false moustache to then be identified. And there was no such code in the performer’s bag of tricks for that, so they encoded “comb” instead. And the same moustache was passed around the audience so that every single time, the guess came out, “comb”.
Anyway, that story is what came to mind when I read about the life of Joan of Arc. She was exposed to something completely outside the realm of her experience, and so she winged it as best she could (wung it?) using the most vivid religious language available to her.
Same idea applies to these sightings, whatever they really were. People today might call these critters aliens or UFOs, but that doesn’t really explain anything either, it’s just today’s version of a “comb”.
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As a kid in church the priest would mention cherubim and seraphim during the Orthodox liturgy as “six winged many eyed creatures born aloft”, and that used to weird me out. Later I saw icons/paintings that basically depicted them as a head with wings (which still didn’t explain the whole “many eyed” part.)
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Speaking of Michelangelo and eldritch horror, he did create at least one Lovecraftian/Cronenbergian horror – his statue of Moses, which he gave horns to due to a mistranslation in the Vulgate Latin translation of the Bible.
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Now I’d love to see a movie where these proper old testament angels come down and create total major havoc.
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Don’t know of a movie, but I can offer you a short story by Ted Chiang, author of the short story on which Arrival was based.
Available in this collection…
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Well it’s not strictly old testament, but there’s always Evangelion for us anime nerds. Got some pretty trippy angels in that one.
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Well yeah, i have played (and completed) Bayonetta so i recognise a few of those. Tricky bastards if you don’t know your combos.
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Have to cogitate on “truth” being used in a headline concerning mythological beings…
The monstrous truth about angels
(‘angel’ just means ‘messenger’ - so either WWI-helmeted Hermes or god’s own SMS)
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If anyone read Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wind In the Door, her description of the cherubim Proginoskes is very much biblical: a ball of smoke, flame, wings and eyes. Progo himself says he is ‘practically plural’.
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That is so cool!
(I keep aspiring to do an art project that’s all historically-accurate - and therefore Lovecraftian - versions of all the weird divine entities of various religions based on the fundamental descriptions, stripped of the centuries of depictions trying to make them look more familiar. Treating them like real entities that someone had clumsily described by using familiar references that aren’t quite accurate.)
Although Christianity is far from alone in having these kinds of crazy fever dreams as religious figures, so it might keep kids interested in some religion, anyways…
It’s not really a “mistranslation” - it just isn’t interpreted that way, now. I’ve read scholars suggesting that “horns” is exactly what was originally meant, as the god (or one of the gods) of Moses was (Bull) El, whose symbol, representing strength, was literally a set of horns.
But that’s hardly the most Lovecraftian horror to have erupted out of the faith, given that in some strains of Judeo-Christian religions, this was their idea of god, a chicken-snake-scorpion dude:
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