One angel believer said if you want it to be biblical, that’s how it should be — complete with pink, blue and gold feathers.
advertiseIt was during the pandemic that Pastor Kira Austin-Young and her puppet-maker husband Michael Schubach came up with the idea in a bit of a frenzy. Instead of putting a star on the Christmas tree or some stylized humanoid angel, why not create a biblical angel?
The result is a pink, blue and gold-feathered creature with six wings and dozens of eyes, somewhat like a virus.
“I think, especially in the time in the world that we’re in, things seem a little scary and weird, and there’s a scary and weird angel talking to people,” she said.
Austin Young, associate dean of St. Mary’s Episcopal Church in San Francisco, said many different types of angels appear in the Bible. For the most part, we don’t have much description of them, but the Book of Revelation at the end of the Bible and some of the prophetic books in the Old Testament describe strange creatures surrounding the throne of God.
“Some of them have six wings and eyes covering the wings,” she said. There, it might look like this.
About 7 in 10 U.S. adults said they believe in angels, according to a poll last year by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. Still, there’s still no agreement on what they look like, or even what they actually are.
Social media is awash with interpretations of “biblical angels,” who appear not only in treetops but also in paintings, tattoos, and even makeup tutorials. This multi-eyed creature rejects traditional depictions of angels in Western art, where they often look like winged humans, often white, often blond or very fair.
Esther Hamori, a professor of Hebrew Bible at Union Theological Seminary, draws a distinction between angels and other “supernatural species” in the Bible, such as seraphim and cherubim, but she said she Love the biblical angel trend, even if it conflates them.
“This suggests that people are thinking that the Bible contains things that are much stranger than is often taught,” the author of “God’s Monsters: Vengeful Spirits, Deadly Angels, Hybrid Creatures, and Divine Killers in the Bible” said in an email wrote.
“The skies of the Bible are filled with strange, scary characters. In the Bible, God has a bunch of monsters.
One of Austin-Young’s favorite depictions of the Annunciation, a favorite subject of Christian art, is by Henry Ossawa Tanner, which depicts the Archangel Gabriel appearing to Mary to announce her Will give birth to the Son of God. It imagines Gabriel as a vague, human-shaped beam of light.
“It makes you think again, ‘What would it be like to be approached by an angel?'” she said. “If it’s someone you don’t know, or a strange creature, or just a manifestation of this message from God to you. … That could be anything.
