The Order of St Michael and St Raphael Healing, Teaching and Chivalry Angels and Archangels : Michael and Raphael If you were to attend a New Age or mind and body festival the chances are that you would find several exhibitions that display models and pictures of angels, have angels as part of their teaching and a general acceptance of the reality of such entities. The Christian church has also accepted angels as part of their ethos but in fact tell us little about them as there are limited accounts of them in the Bible, although if you look into the non-canonical scriptures you will find the work of angels is given a full expression. But who or what are angels? The concept of God for most peoples on the planet is that of a transcendent being that is unknown and unknowable to ordinary people and therefore the angels act as intermediaries bringing the Divine down to the mortal. This concept of angel is seen in all myths and legends and they are represented in different ways according to the culture in which they reside. In some traditions the demi-gods hold the same role as the angels but ultimately we are left with a simple definition of messenger: someone who interprets the things of God for the life of the people and the messenger may come as a prophet or teacher, priest or king. Within the Greek Orthodox Church, Bishops were known as Angels - Aggelos. One of the most accessible pseudepigraphical books that tell us about angels is the Book of Enoch and it is in there that we find the names of the seven archangels: Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, Uriel, Chanuel, Jophiel and Adkiel. You probably know of Michael, Raphael and Gabriel and may have heard of the others but they do not figure very prominently within the Christian tradition. Before the present century other individual archangels had feast days only in local Western calendars. Gabriel, the angel of the annunciation to Mary, and Raphael have long been venerated liturgically in the East, and are now commemorated with Michael on 29 September that is known as the Feast of All Angels. It could be said that the angels represent the different principles, powers and energies that emanate from the One Central Source, and through the process of permutation the powers are made accessible to us so that we are sustained by them, and are able to assimilate them and through this process ultimately return to our Source. In the Book of Jubilees, chapter 2, we read:
On the first day he created the heavens, which are above, and the earth, and the waters and all of the spirits which minister before Him: The angels of the presence, And the angels of sanctification, And the angels of the spirit of fire, And the angels of the spirit of the winds, And the angels of the spirit of the clouds and darkness and snow and hail and frost, And the angels of resoundings and thunder and lightning, And the angels of the spirits of cold and heat and winter and springtime and harvest and summer, And all of the spirits of his creatures which are in heaven and on earth. In describing his vision, Enoch says: I saw countless angels a hundred thousand times a hundred thousand, ten million times ten million encircling that house. Michael, Raphael, Gabriel, Phanuel, and numerous other holy angels that are in heaven above, go in and out of that house. 1 st Book of Enoch, chap 71 These passages illustrate the concept of the angels being the manifestation of life throughout all regions of the cosmos: the creative principle and carriers of the powers through all time and space. We sometimes speak of the angels with regard to a specific happening or event the angel of death, the angel of peace and there is a whole hierarchy of celestial beings from cherubim and seraphim through a whole range of beings whose role is to express God s life in all regions. At the levels nearest to this world you will find the sprites and faeries who are more closely involved in the maintenance of the natural world. So there is no place where God is not expressed through the vast reaches of space, and within the densest forms of matter. All the names of the angels contain the element el, that is divine being, thus indicating their nature. We sometimes echo this when we speak of someone being an angel, meaning that they have embodied, for example, some form of kindness, or rendered a service service being the very essence of the angelic expression being born to fulfil this function within the whole realm of nature. The basic difference between men and angels is that the angels have never lost conscious awareness of the Source of Life and their Divine Nature and Being, whereas man has. By seeking the experience of living in matter, man appeared to be cut off from the rest of life and has by his journeying through this realm had to rediscover the Divinity that is hidden from him. In the initial stages of his sojourn on earth he lived by instinct, as we see in much of the animal kingdom, and it was the work of the angels to assist in this function, but over time this instinctual nature was outgrown and humanity had to learn to think for himself and with newly awakened faculties begin to serve the region in which he lived, taking responsibility for Life, not only his own but also that of the lesser creatures in mineral, plant and animal form. Having gained the knowledge sought in the farthest reaches of the manifested universe the journey back to Source could begin with the dissolution of the belief in the concrete form of matter. Geoffrey Hodson gives a beautiful description of this in The Angelic Hosts: The angel evolution, in its capacity of conveyor of power, does not regard matter so much as substance, as a fixed mode or permanent condition, but rather as an illusory appearance produced by the rapid travel of energy. Man sees the illusory and ever- 2
changing appearances caused by this continual flow, while the angel perceives the flowing force of which they are the result. To him, all form is spectral, unsubstantial and impermanent; he thus completely reverses the human attitude in which the lifeforce is spectral, unsubstantial and impermanent. To mankind, the soul of man, animal or vegetable is ghostly and unreal. This difference results quite naturally from their divergent methods of evolutionary progress. Both angel and men, from their own point of view, are equally correct. Matter is an unconscious conveyor and manifestor of life, power and consciousness. The angels are conscious conveyors and manifestors of the same triplicity of ensouling attributes; their function is to increase and maintain by virtue of their intelligent cooperation the ensouling, vitalising and spritualising action of that power; the whole of their activities are concentrated upon the life or spirit side of manifestation. Man touches the extreme limits of the system. Man takes the power, of which he is an intelligent conveyor and manifestor, downward to the lowest depths and himself completes the circuit, bearing with him that power with which he was sent forth. He undertakes the task of intelligent conveyance and manifestation of the three aspects of the Supreme through out all the levels of Nature down to the densest physical. He deliberately identifies himself with matter, voluntarily submitting to the suffering and limitations which such a process inevitably involves in order that both the life and the matter of the system may fulfil their respective functions with increasing perfection. Many of the scriptures refer to fallen angels, and this basically is a way of saying that the spiritual idea of man became trapped in the world of manifestation and these fallen angels would have to stay locked in an experience of physical matter until they complete the cycle upon which they had embarked. In the Book of Revelation an account is given of Michael contending with the fallen angels and this allegorically is the tension that continues to exist between the Divine Image of God and the separated and isolated ego identity of the one trapped in matter, until the attachment to matter is desolved and the cycle to perfection is completed. It is interesting to note that scripture records that Michael durst not bring against him [the devil] a railing accusation, but said, The Lord rebuke thee. Meaning that the great reality itself, by its very nature and presence radiating into all parts of its being, will in time reveal the limitation to which the world is subjected and the grandeur of the Life itself will be revealed. As human beings we have to move away from the idea that the life we experience in form is all that there is to know, and that through this experience of matter we will find out the answers to the origin of life and our reason for being here. Modern science is slowly lifting the veil on matter and realising that there are whole other realms to be found firstly through the microscope to the minute and through the radio-telescope focused on outer space. Perhaps the most startling to them has been that in the final analysis light and mind are the substance of the universe. If then Mind is the crucible, angels could rightly be described as God s thoughts passing to man; spiritual intuitions, pure and perfect; the inspiration of goodness, purity, and immortality, counteracting all evil, sensuality, and mortality, thus putting the reality of life back firmly in the realm of spirit, the unseen, un-quantifiable nature of That Which Is. Mind and what we think are the energies by which things come into being and the more subtle and abstract the ideal the more powerful they prove to be as they are permanent. 3
The archangels are the higher permutations of these ideas and manifest as energies and forces that emanate from the One Source. Within this Order we are particularly concerned with the two archangels designated as Michael and Raphael, their nature and what they represent as an energy of service to mankind as a whole. Michael The name Michael from the Hebrew means who (is) like God, that is the image of God. He has in many traditions been named as the most senior of the angels, being most like God, or the first emanation. In iconography Michael is often depicted as a knight in armour slaying a dragon and this image of dragon slayer means that he is often aligned with St George who also is illustrated in this way, the difference between them being that St George slays the dragons on earth, and St Michael the dragons in heaven (or the mind). The well-known passage in the Apocalypse (Rev xii 7-9) about the war in heaven contributed to Michael being honoured in the West as the captain of the heavenly host and protector of Christians in general and soldiers in particular. In the East, Michael was looked upon as special guardian of the sick: outside Constantinople there was a church bearing his name from the time of Constantine. Veneration for Michael was intensified by the vision of him said to have been seen on Monte Gargano in southern Italy between 492 and 496. This almost certainly gave rise to the legend of Mont-Saint Michel in France; later there were vague local legends of a vision on St Michael s Mount in England, at the Stranberg near Stuttgart, and elsewhere. A great impression was also made by the story that, during a plague in Rome, Pope St Gregory I saw the archangel sheathing his sword above Hadrian s mausoleum (now called the Castle of St Angelo.) All over Christendom chapels of St Michael were built on top of hills and mountains: one on the Skirrid Fawr near Abergavenny was resorted to even after the Reformation. The tower of the church of St Michael remains on the top of Glastonbury Tor. The popular American Negro spiritual Michael row the boat ashore, Alleluia seems to incorporate a reminiscence of the very old tradition of Michael as the receiver of the souls of the dead. Raphael The Archangel Raphael has long been venerated in the East. The word Rapha is the Hebrew for to heal and with the suffix of el means that Raphael means God Heals or God has healed. He is mentioned by name in the book of Tobit and it is assumed that Gabriel was the angel who troubled the water at Bethesda (John 5 v 2-4). In the Book of Tobit he acts as a guide for the young Tobias on his trip to Media, and upon their return home, Gabriel cures Tobias father, Tobit of his blindness with the oil of a fish. Only then does he reveal his true identity. I am Raphael, one of the angels who stands ever ready to enter the Presence of God. By the incorporation of St Michael and St Raphael in the name of The Order we commemorate a long tradition of recognition of the great spiritual power that protects, heals and governs the affairs of mankind. When we align ourselves to the principles represented by these great Archangels we gain victory over our lower nature, and by our understanding of the spiritual nature of humanity offer an alternative lifestyle. ---ooooo--- 4
Recommended additional reading: The Angelic Host by Geoffrey Hodson P.05/2005 5