My Angel

Plaster angel, gouache and watercolor, 2025. by JD.

Angels were not allowed in our house. Period. No loophole for kitsch, no side door of sentiment, no slipping in through illustrated books except, perhaps, Paradise Lost and The Divine Comedy where such apparitions were excused on the grounds of their historical status. Ours was a serious household in which science prevailed, superstition was avoided (not walking under ladders excepted by virtue of common sense), and a rigorous attachment to reason prevailed. No wonder I eventually rebelled by reading Carl Jung and dabbling in various other quasi-psychic practices. But that was later…

At the time this angel figurine came into my life I was in my teenage hell years, trying to negotiate many difficult dimensions to my life within the confines of a family environment. The request to own an angel, receive one, came at the holidays as part of modest bids for gifts within the limited financial realities of our household. Money was not abundant, and frivolous expenditures were few and far between. Christmas, Hanukkah, and birthday presents needed to fill necessary holes in the wardrobe or shoe rack, or support intellectual development, not supply useless objects. An angel?

Angels were utterly suspect because of their affiliation with religious beliefs. Dryads, nymphs, spirits of streams, trees, and rocks were a different story. In fact, anything associated with Greek mythology was simply treated as natural science. The ancients, according to our cosmology, were merely explaining the world, not making up another one filled with fictions of heavenly beings. Guardians and saviors were also off the table, completely, beyond consideration, while black cats were welcome and abundant among us.

Somehow, in spite of the harsh and usually inflexible taboos that prevailed, I managed to persuade my mother that an angel, single, solitary, aloft and bland enough to pass for something generic rather than cultish, could find its way into my holiday gifts without bringing down the full scaffolding of the secular reality to which we adhered so strictly. I did not believe the little figure was imbued with anything beyond formal values and iconographic virtues, did not address its white plaster image with requests or beseech it to intervene on my behalf in any matters. But I loved the minimal precision of the cast plaster, the definition of fingers and toes, the curves of curls and cheeks, sway of the back and belly. Bland though it was, the figure drew on an aesthetic lineage that showed in its manufacture, stopping short of kitsch and excess. It embodied something beyond the mundane.

This angel, really, was a putti, a childish figure held aloft on the breeze of fantastical play, not the ghostly figure of someone dead or an attendant to a deity or other religious icon. In my mother’s pagan pantheon, a putti might almost be devoid of attachment to the major religions of the world, free-floating in a non-orthodox space without allegiance to any faith. The idea of an angel’s existence outside of such worlds of belief has a charm to it, a kind of spontaneous emergence from the aether, sneaking past the gatekeeping principles that kept our precincts tightly guarded against spiritual fictions.

The figure was not a starter drug. I didn’t go from this one gift to acquire an inventory of angels or even knowledge thereof. I did not seek out information about the various traditions of the world in which such beings appear in many forms and for many purposes. I did not trouble myself much with the gender of angels, that complex topic, given my own confusions. Nor was I aware of the hierarchy of angels, their classification according to authority and power, the number of wings they possessed, or other features. Only later did I discover that in the Jewish religion, ten different groups of angels are identified, with their varied names—seraphim and cherubim and malakim among the more familiar. Some were messengers, others were guardians, or beings closely resembling God. Or that within Christian theology Thomas Aquinas tried to organize the bureaucracy of angels into nine orders, only some of which ever appear to humans while others remain cloistered in Heaven. And that the Islamic system had even more orders and higher degrees of specialization among these divine figures, even including some whose task was to look after the disposition of thunder and other worldly matters (a weather angel?). And among the other religions of the world? The Devas in Hinduism live on an astral plane and aid on the path to enlightenment, while in the Buddhist belief system angels are incarnated beings with more evolved consciousness. And among indigenous peoples or early human culture, belief in spirits is widely manifest.

So, angels proliferate, everywhere, as beings, until we circle back to the basic notion of presences in the world, the living spirits of rivers and streams, mountains and places. By contrast, my cast plaster figure was banal, a mere trifle, a decorative rather than powerful entity, hung by a simple single hook and thus suspended between justified skepticism and unsustainable belief.

Improbable to imagine that it has persisted unscathed and undamaged, sixty years in my possession, carried across the continent and back several times in the transits of moving and transport of miscellaneous goods. Now it has a niche in the bathroom, as a familiar, a presence for daily encounters, whose benign expression feels infused with more potential animism than in earlier eras. The statue has no memory but mine, and so I project the recollections of the moment in which it appeared, that difficult period of adolescent tension in which the choices I was making were not the ones my mother wanted me to make. The angel was meant to be an instrument of concessions, a lightening of strictures and criticism, a sign that not all judgement was absolute, some sanctions and rules could be suspended, exceptions made. I still feel these concessions as well as the circumstances that provoked it.

The outcome of those negotiations is another story, but the angel remains, like other objects, floating free of its original context and yet never free of those associations. We celebrated Christmas, and Hanukkah, and other Christian and Jewish holidays throughout the year, but with a careful distance between the rituals and the faith, performing the first and eschewing the latter in a delicate dance. Belief systems leave their imprint. I cannot cross the divide between reason and faith with any leap to angelic beings. But the spirits of the natural world in full animate reality remain a constant presence. A living universe? How could it be otherwise? The angel smiles, but its fixed expression never alters.