THE ANGELS OF GOD

The original Hebrew word translated as “angel” in the Genesis passage above is malakh, which means “messenger,” a term commonly applied to the Hebrew prophets and sages. Hence, a more literal translation would have the enlightened prophets—the messengers of God—ascending and descending the divine ladder.

This is consistent with the fact that the earliest known school of Hebrew mysticism was merkabah mysticism. Although the original doctrine has been lost, this school supposedly taught that the soul could become immortal by ascending the divine ladder into the infinite bosom of God.

Although the concept of angels has become an integral part of our modern mythology, the common depiction of an angel as a spiritual being with wings is symbolic. The winged symbol is based on the notion that the enlightened soul can ascend through the heavens like a divine bird. The English word angel can be traced back to the Sanskrit Angiras, the name of a great Vedic seer who was credited as being the first to teach the science of immortality (brahma vidya) to mortal human beings on earth. Although the myth of Angiras is little known in the West, his name has been preserved in Indo-European languages all around the world: Linguistic scholars have argued that in Old Persian, the original Sanskrit word angiras became angiros; in ancient Greek it became angelos; in Latin it became angelus; and in English it became angel. It can be said, then, that Angiras served as the mythical prototype for what we now call an angel, or a messenger of God.

According to the Vedic texts, however, Angiras was no spiritual being with wings. He was a seer who was first born as an ordinary human being on earth and then was reborn as an immortal seer of the Veda. After this, he became liberated from the scale of human awareness; his awareness was free to expand and contract over the entire spectrum of consciousness. In the process, he cognized the science of immortality, which he then taught to his fellow human beings on earth. In this sense, he was viewed as a messenger of God who was free to ascend and descend the divine ladder at will.