What Are Angels in World Religions? Messengers, Guardians and Terrifying Wheels

The Greek word that gives us the English one simply means messenger, and the Hebrew term it translates means the same. That is the core function in all three Abrahamic traditions: a being that carries communication between God and people, which solves a specific theological problem, since a transcendent deity who cannot be approached directly needs an intermediary. Beyond messages, the roles include guarding, executing judgement, worshipping continuously, guiding individuals, and commanding armies. They are generally understood as created beings rather than divine, without free will in most formulations or with a limited form of it, and not as the souls of the dead, which is the most persistent popular confusion and has no scriptural basis in any of the three traditions.

The imagery in the source material bears little resemblance to the greetings-card version:

• •The cherubim of Ezekiel have four faces, those of a human, a lion, an ox and an eagle, four wings and calves' feet, and are accompanied by wheels within wheels rimmed with eyes
• •The seraphim of Isaiah have six wings, using two to fly, two to cover their faces and two to cover their feet, and their voices shake the doorposts
• •Most biblical appearances are of figures who look like ordinary men, so that Abraham and Lot entertain them without initially realising
• •Wings are not mentioned for most of them, and the winged human figure familiar in Western art derives substantially from classical victory figures absorbed into Christian iconography from the fourth century
• •The recurring opening line telling the witness not to be afraid appears in Hebrew and Christian scripture repeatedly, which is a consistent signal about the nature of the encounter

In Judaism, angels appear throughout the Hebrew Bible and are elaborated considerably in later rabbinic and mystical literature, with named figures including Michael, Gabriel and Raphael entering through post-exilic and apocryphal texts. Maimonides, the great medieval rationalist, interpreted them philosophically as the intelligences governing the spheres rather than as personal beings, which illustrates how contested the literal reading has been within the tradition. In Christianity they carry the annunciation, the nativity announcement and the resurrection message, and a sixth-century text attributed to Dionysius the Areopagite organised them into nine ranks in three triads, which is where seraphim, cherubim, thrones, dominions, powers and archangels come from as a system. In Islam, belief in angels is one of the six articles of faith and is not optional: they are made of light, have no free will, and include Jibril, who transmitted the Quran to the Prophet over twenty-three years, Mikail, Israfil who will sound the trumpet, and the two recording angels assigned to every person. The devil in Islamic understanding is not a fallen angel but a jinn, a different order of created being made of smokeless fire and possessing free will, which is why he could disobey.

The intermediary category is not confined to these three. Zoroastrianism has the Amesha Spentas, six or seven beneficent immortals embodying qualities such as truth and good purpose, and the yazatas, a larger class of venerated beings, and there is a reasonable scholarly case that Persian ideas influenced the development of Jewish angelology during and after the exile. Hinduism has the devas, who are gods in their own right rather than messengers, along with apsaras and gandharvas who serve a court-attendant function, and Buddhism has the devas of its cosmology, long-lived beings still subject to rebirth and therefore not saviours. Chinese folk religion has a celestial bureaucracy of officials with defined jurisdictions, reporting to a heavenly emperor, which is an intermediary system modelled directly on imperial administration. What recurs is the structural need: a distant or abstract ultimate reality with a populated middle ground between it and ordinary life.

The most widely held popular belief, that each person has a personal guardian, has thin scriptural support and deep traditional roots. It rests on a handful of verses read together, was developed by early Christian writers, is formally taught in Catholic and Orthodox Christianity, and appears in Islam through the recording angels and protective ones. Surveys consistently find belief in angels far higher than belief in most other supernatural claims, including among people who describe themselves as non-religious, which suggests the category does something other than straightforward doctrine. The visual tradition has drifted a long way from the texts, through medieval painting, Renaissance putti derived from classical cupids, Victorian sentimentality and greeting cards, into an image that is benign, feminine, winged and harmless. The scriptural versions are none of those things, and the gap between the two is one of the clearer examples of how an idea can be transmitted for two thousand years while its content is replaced entirely.

Angels are created intermediaries whose primary scriptural function is carrying messages between a transcendent God and people, and the texts describe them as multi-faced, many-winged and frightening far more often than as winged humans, an image that came largely from classical victory figures. Judaism developed them through post-exilic and mystical literature with rationalist dissent, Christianity organised them into nine ranks in the sixth century, and Islam makes belief in them a required article while classing the devil as a jinn rather than a fallen angel.