Earth Angels

 

Somewhere during the 19th century, something strange happened that nobody else seems to have noticed. 

Before this time, angels in art were almost always shown as male. After this time, angels are always female. This can be confirmed by a quick Google image search for “18th century angels,” then “19th century angels.”

This seems to me to show a tectonic shift in our cosmology, in our sense of the sacred and the good. It corresponds to a shift from a spiritual religion to materialism. Women represent the physical world, the world of being born and dying. “Earth” is always a mother goddess, in every culture, “Gaea” or “Mother Earth.” “Nature” is always portrayed as a woman: “Mother Nature,” “Artemis,” “Demeter.” In the East, “Maya,” the mother illusion of diverse things, and “Mae Toranee,” Mother Earth.

This reflects and expresses the turn to Scientism during the 19th century, to putting our faith in “reeking tube and iron shard.” The turn to materialism is as well a turning away from moral values, represented by the “sky father,” the eternal order of the celestial spheres, the father within the family.

With it comes the worship of “nature,” “ecology,” “the environment.” Our eyes are directed downward.

With it also comes an elevation of women to leadership within civil society. Hence “first-wave feminism” and all that has followed.

Although “first-wave” feminism would hardly have predicted it, with it inevitably comes a breakdown in “conventional morality,” the many gentlemen’s agreements on which society peacefully functions. Nature knows no moral law; it is red in tooth and claw. Science takes no account of values or morality. Angels are just nice, and carry no swords nor trumpets. Like indulgent mothers.