Religious angels
The word "angel" comes from the Greek word "anglos," which means "messenger" in Hebrew. Angels can take many forms, usually appearing as human or a glowing light or aura. Often — especially in cases of averted tragedy or disaster — angels will not be seen at all, but instead their presence recognized by their actions. If something good, unexpected, and seemingly inexplicable happens, it's often assumed to be the result of divine or angelic intervention.
The angels most people are familiar with today are the Christian angels, which originated from the Hebrew Testaments. The Catholic Church devoted considerable effort to describing and developing an extensive hierarchy of angels. There were many different types of angels, archangels, seraphim, and so on, with an official census of nearly half a million.
In his book "A Dictionary of Angels" (The Free Press, 1967) researcher Gustav Davidson devotes nearly 400 pages to identifying and listing angels. Many angels were created (or endorsed) by religious authorities, but others were fabricated by quasi-religious scholars and laypeople. As Davidson notes, "To invent an angel, a hierarchy, or an order in a hierarchy, required some imagination but not too much ingenuity. It was sufficient merely to 1) scramble letters together of the Hebrew alphabet; 2) juxtapose such letters in anagrammatic, acronymic, or cryptogrammatic form; and 3) tack on to any place, property, function, attribute or quality" using the suffixes "-el" or "-irion." Thus, according to Davidson, "Hod (meaning splendor) was transformed into the angel Hodiel." In this way, just as the ancient Greeks essentially created a pantheon of gods to worship, angel enthusiasts created a pantheon of angels—some more historically legitimate than others.
In Christianity and Islam, angels function mainly as God's messengers (mostly announcing births and deaths), but in modern times they function more as guardians. Indeed, the word "angel" has come to describe any hero or benefactor. Though angels, by their nature, serve God, they also serve mankind directly. Angels perform a wide variety of tasks, from healing the sick and finding lost keys to smiting enemies and, of course, winning football games. Many believe that angels come when summoned, and there is a long tradition of people using magic spells and charms to bring angels to them.
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