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Angels as Archetypal Mediators
Jung’s symbolic attitude helps us understand Angels as symbols that carry messages, offer mediation, and demonstrate contact. They cross a boundary the ego cannot tolerate. Jung tells us that angels symbolize transmissions; he said that if angels “are anything at all,” they are “personified transmitters of unconscious contents” (Jung, 1967). He respectfully relocates angels from religious doctrine to Psychic mechanisms. Angels enter our dreams when the Self needs a courier that arrives with autonomy, urgency, and numinous power. In other words, it makes sure you get the message. The angels’ anthropomorphic form helps us relate to it rather than being flooded by the uncanny energy it carries. Their presence, as emissaries of the Self, signals that a powerful correction is needed, so it makes sense they often arrive in crisis. Its arrival demands that our modern ego accept a larger order of intelligence. Many religions provide a hierarchy of the heavens that Jungians hold as a kind of map of transpersonal and archetypal influences. Angels are consistently depicted as boundary figures that enlarge our responsibilities and perceptions.
Wings, Polarity, and the Risk of Inflation
To understand the image and influence of the Angelic archetype, we can track its appearance in dreams, fantasies, and the cultural imagination. Their wings symbolize the mobility and independence of thought. Jung tells us wingedness signals content that can move between levels, rather than remaining trapped in symptoms or affect (Jung, 2008). He rejects flattening angels into moral mascots and reminds us they carry light and dark aspects. Ancient scripture and myth depict avenging angels capable of leveling a city. Jung calls angels a “strange genus,” “soulless beings” who represent “nothing but the thoughts and intuitions of their Lord” (Jung, 1961/1989). Psychologically, their soulless quality is natural to their impersonal character, since angels symbolize a function rather than a personal relationship. Their impersonality increases the sense of power, thus danger. If the ego identifies with the Angel, feeling it has joined their ranks, inflation follows, and Jung explicitly links “fallen angels” to inflationary megalomania in collective life (Jung, 1961/1989). Referencing the biblical character of Jacob, Jung suggests that Psyche at times requires us to struggle with the transpersonal messenger to earn the blessing of a new attitude and/or character trait. In Jungian analysis, we are admonished to work with the symbolic angels and discern their message, welcome its affect, and discover a way to welcome the transformation it demands.
Idealization, Superego, and Defensive Uses
Psychodynamically, we can wonder how the Angel regulates Psyche. Images of the Guardian Angel can shore up a flailing ego plagued with uncertainty or separation anxiety. As a defense, it might represent idealization; that Angel becomes an all-good protector to stabilize affect and preserve ego strength under threat (Freud, 1936/1966). They can represent the ego ideal that longs to become pure, faithful, steady, benevolent, courageous, or obedient. The symbol can represent the superego as a surveillance, judgment, or command function, especially in cultures that prioritize moral constraint. That split, the guardian versus judge, maps on our human oscillation between longing for safety and fear of punishment. Kohut’s suggests an angel may function as a selfobject representation, an idealized presence that helps regulate self-esteem and reduce fragmentation when the person cannot internalize those functions (Kohut, 1971). That lines up when angelic imagery intensifies during narcissistic injury, shame states, or collapse of vocational meaning. As mentioned in our TJL episode, when the grieving man is saved by a single phrase: “You are loved.” We see how an idea experienced as coming from the spiritual realms can arrest suicidal momentum by restoring relational values and a vision for the future.” The Angel often carries an internal voice of care that the patient cannot access yet. Some caution is warranted when an angelic visitation reinforces spiritualization as a defense to bypass grief, conflict, or accountability. The effect of angelic imagery will help us find the right orientation to it. Does the symbol increase agency, reality contact, and ethical specificity, or does it support entitlement and avoidance?
Angels as Internal Good Objects and Transitional Phenomena
Object relations theory might view a protective angel as a symbol of an internal good object, the felt presence of a reliable caregiver. When this is so, we might feel calmer or more adventurous. Using attachment theory language, the Angel represents a secure base and a haven that remains psychologically available when external attachment figures fail or disappear (Bowlby, 1969/1982). This explains why angelic images often appear in children’s art, prayer, and folklore, including the ubiquitous “angel hovering over two children” illustrations popular in the 1940s. Angels also align with Winnicott’s concept of transitional objects, which bridge inner experience and outer reality without imposing premature literalism (Winnicott, 1971/2005). People often encounter angels in this “in-between” space, where we need comfort and orientation under stress. Von Franz notes that guardian angels in fairy tales symbolize the parents’ unconscious, meaning the child’s protection depends on the emotional field created by caregivers, not only on the child’s ego resources (von Franz & Boa, 1988). The Angel depicts the holding environment. The motif can also show splitting under stress; angels may carry idealized goodness while devils carry hated aggression, leaving the person with little capacity for integration. In those situations, persecutory angels may appear as rigid, punitive internal objects. In this case, we might consider the Angel an avatar of the parent and ask whether its face, voice, demeanor, expectations, and behavior connect to our personal history and to our need to be protected by our parents.
From Messenger to Modern Revisions
In the Hebrew Torah, mal’akh refers to a messenger, sometimes human, sometimes divine, and complex angelologies emerge in later writings of Torah and Second Temple literature (Collins, 1998; Newsom, 2014). Angels appear more prominently in later Old Testament material, and they intensify across Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions. Second Temple texts associated with Enoch expand angelic hierarchies, names, and functions, and introduce the fallen angels linking illicit transmission of knowledge to catastrophe (Reed, 2005). Late antique and medieval Christianity systematizes angelic orders and integrates Pseudo-Dionysius’ hierarchies, which shape Western iconography and theological imagination for centuries (Pseudo-Dionysius, ca. 500/1987). Islam preserves angels as messengers and as moral accountants, including the recording angels who monitor and report on our deeds, suggesting the externalization of conscience into cosmic administration (Qur’an 50:17–18). With modern secularization, angels migrate. Jung’s analysis of UFO imagery offers a concrete example of migration; he argues that when older symbols lose collective efficacy, the same archetypal energies re-clothe themselves in new images consonant with the era’s plausibility structures (Jung, 1958/1978).
We can observe this in current projections onto AI, polarizing the public into two camps: one is sure AI will save them, and the other is sure AI will destroy them. From this, we can see that the Angel is a stable archetype that changes its appearance across epochs: comparative Myth and Cultural Functions, Guardian, Warrior, Scribe, Psychopomp, Judge. Cultures assign angels a limited set of roles that address universal psychological needs. Guarding angels prevent collapse when vulnerability peaks, especially at night, at thresholds, or in exile narratives (von Franz, 1993). They engage in warfare and boundary enforcement. The archangel Michael is depicted restoring order when chaos threatens life (Eliade, 1991). Angels also act as scribes, documenting our deeds and adding moral weight beyond immediate self-justification (Eliade, 1991). They also act as psychopomps, escorting souls into death; the Angel of Death is common in folklore. Most famously, angels announce and reveal destiny. In this, they can evoke awe, fear, and reorient one’s inner life. Myths describe angelic objects, horns, trumpets, spears, and vessels, which function as instruments of announcement, discernment, and transformation (Bane, 2020). Even angels need tools. Across cultures, angels appear when a system, inner or outer, needs intermediaries between the transcendent order and outer life. The titles of the beings change, but they universally make moral demands, demonstrate threshold crossing, and arrive in our lives without our permission.
Meaning in Crisis, Ethical Reorientation, and Life Calling
The most practical effect of angelic symbolism is its capacity to organize meaning in times of crisis. When someone faces a catastrophe, overwhelming grief, moral rupture, or vocational crisis, Psyche activates forms to carry transpersonal authority. The angelic authority can arrive in dreams, intuitive irruptions, or synchronistic events. It helps a person hold an impasse until a third position emerges that the ego did not manufacture (Jung, 1957/1960). In relational terms, the Angel can restore a felt sense of being profoundly held, which interrupts spirals of despair and self-attack. Angels can personify conscience in a way that increases accountability, because the message carries the weight of the divine. Angels often arrive with summons; they announce a task, a direction, or a demand for sacrifice that reorganizes priorities. Rilke’s angelic tradition frames angels as terrifying because they call the person beyond ego comfort, toward a larger truth of being (Stein, 1998). Hillman’s instruction to greet the Angel demands a disciplined stance: receive the message as a soul event, then interpret what it asks of life (Hillman, 2009). Angels do not violate free will; they deliver essential information, but the ego still must decide how to respond. They do not require passive submission or cynical dismissal. Both extreme misses the mark. We should treat angelic imagery as psycho-spiritually real and try to discern its function. Is it protecting, warning, judging, guiding, or confronting? Its seeming function is more useful than its aesthetic.
Living with Angels in a Modern Life
As moderns, we are likely to encounter angelic images in a very crowded symbolic marketplace. Our imaginations are flooded with images informed by religion, politics, technology, and popular media. More than ever, we must accept the discipline of the symbolic attitude and track every nuance and context within which the archetypal image appears. The same image can support growth, avoidance, or even destabilization depending on ego strength. Jung cautioned us about inflation, especially in cultures that reward exceptionalism. And mightn’t any of us feel exceptional after an angel visits us? Some Jungians believe people can be wounded by inviting angels into their psyche too often, overexposing them to the numinous, which can overwhelm their ability to contain (Stein, 1998). Contemporary cognitive science reminds us that the mind’s predictive and affective systems generate mysterious feelings of knowing, especially under threat, which Psyche then personifies through culturally available forms. Perhaps it’s best to treat angels as symbols of mediation, then wonder what gets mediated within, what boundary gets crossed, and what ethical or relational demand emerges. This attitude makes room for the underlying archetype to migrate so modern angelic equivalents can appear as aliens, algorithms, or uncanny technologies. Yet, the underlying function remains mediation and announcement (Jung, 1958/1978). In our modern life, angelic symbolism remains useful because it frames inner events as communications that require response rather than consumption. That is a psychologically mature angelology, and it does not require naïve literalism or defensive disenchantment.
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Here’s The Dream We Analyze:
I am in a defensive tower that is part of a medieval- or Roman-era city wall. I am in the defensive turret with an old boyfriend. We are looking together at a slit in the tower masonry, identifying artifacts in the space, pulling them out carefully, and examining them. We find things that look like bones, and then a scroll of paper that, when I pull it out and unfurl it, reveals an anatomical drawing of the human skull with levels in the drawing that, when lifted or pulled aside, reveal deeper and deeper layers of the brain. These are illustrated in black-and-white ink in the style of a medieval or early Renaissance medical text. We look at it together and decide we will take it with us when we leave the tower. Then I arrived at a new school and met classmates and teachers. I am hesitant but friendly and hope that they will like me and that I will like them. I have brought documents or work to share that I hope they will appreciate. I go into one of the classrooms off the main reception area or lobby. I joined an MS Teams call. I am leading the discussion and telling the participants to put on their cameras for the meeting so we can see each other. One participant has not turned on their camera, and I click on their screen, which unexpectedly turns the participant’s camera on. It is Eckhart Tolle sitting at a desk. I am surprised to see him on the call and apologize for turning on his camera without his permission. I did not expect the software to give me access to turn the camera on in this way.
