Why Real Biblical Angels Are Creepy, Beastly, and Hardly Angelic

in History, Religion | October 15th, 2025

Nearly 70 percent of Americans believe in angels, at least according to a statistic often cited in recent years. But what, exactly, comes to their minds — or those of any other believers around the world — when they imagine one? Personal conceptions may vary, of course, but we can be fairly certain of one thing: most of them will bear no resemblance to the angels actually described in the Bible. Here to give us a sense of their appearance is Tommie Trelawny, creator of the YouTube channel Hochelaga, whose video above explains “Why Bible Accurate Angels Are So Creepy.”

Far from the winged, white-robed embodiments of gentleness we might know from greeting cards, says Trelawny, the angels of the Bible, and specifically the Old Testament, are “horrifying abominations” who would be more at home in an H. P. Lovecraft novel. Angel, from the Greek angelos, which itself comes from the Hebrew mal’akh, means “messenger.” That implies an innocuous-enough set of duties, but then, you may recall the story of Passover, with its angel who slaughtered the Egyptians’ first-born sons; or the angel who “struck 70,000 Israelites to death”; or the angel who “singlehandedly killed 185,000 Assyrian soldiers in one night.”

The Bible doesn’t say anything about those angels having wings. “In fact, they look like any ordinary person,” as do even the most famous examples like Gabriel, Raphael, and Michael. In the grand heavenly scheme of things, such humanoid angels, or Malakh, don’t rank particularly high. Still, they’re one rung above the Cherubim, who turn out to be less like Cupid and more like “the mythical beasts of ancient Mesopotamia, especially the Babylonian Lamassu, which has the wings of an eagle, the body of a lion, and the head of a king” — with a more-than-passing resemblance to the Egyptian sphinx or the Hittite griffin. Even the popular image of the pudgy, flying cherub, which emerged much later, seems to have been imported from Greek and Roman myths.

Ranked above the Malakh are the six-winged Seraphim, or “burning ones.” The origins of these “caretakers of God’s throne” are suggested by the Hebrew word Saraph, meaning “a venomous serpent in the desert,” much like the cobra whose image adorned the head of the Egyptian pharaoh. As for the Ophanim, it’s anyone’s guess where they come from. Taking the form of a wheel within a wheel floating in the sky, its rims lined with eyes, an Ophan would make for an intimidating sight indeed: perhaps a representation of the wheels of God’s chariot, perhaps the result of “the prophet ingesting a psychedelic plant,” and perhaps — according to a fringe theory — visitation by a spacecraft. Whatever the evidence for those explanations, it’s safe to say they’re not quite as comforting as all those placid celestial harpists.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The Horrifying Paintings of Francis Bacon

in Art, History, Religion | September 12th, 2025

Mention Francis Bacon, and you sometimes have to clarify which one you mean: the twentieth-century painter, or the seventeenth-century philosopher? Despite how much time separated their lives, the two men aren’t without their connections. One may actually have been a descendant of the other, if you credit the artist’s father’s claim of relation to the Elizabethan intellectual’s half-brother. Better documented is how the more recent Francis Bacon made a connection to the time of the more distant one, by painting his own versions of Diego Velázquez’s Portrait of Innocent X. We refer, of course, to his “screaming popes,” the subject of the new Hochelaga video above.

As Hochelaga creator Tommie Trelawny puts it, “no image captured his imagination more” than Velázquez’s depiction of Pope Innocent X, which is “considered to be one of the finest works in Western art.”

Bacon’s version from 1953, after he’d more than established himself in the English art scene, is “a terrible and frightening inversion of the original. The Pope screams as if electrocuted in his golden throne. Violent brushstrokes sweep across the canvas like bars of a cage, stripping away all sense of grandeur and leaving only brutality and pain.” In many ways, this harrowing image came as the natural meeting of existing currents in Bacon’s work, which had already drawn from the history of Christian art and employed a variety of anguished, isolated figures.

Unsurprisingly, Bacon’s Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X inspired all manner of controversy. The artist himself denied all interpretations of its supposed implications, insisting that “recreating this papal portrait was simply an aesthetic choice: art for the sake of art.” In any case, he followed it up with about 50 more screaming popes, each of which “embodies a different facet of human darkness.” These and the many other works of art Bacon created prolifically until his death in 1992 reflect what seems to have been his own troubled soul and perpetually disordered life. His style changed over the decades, becoming somewhat softer and less aggressively disturbing, suggesting that his demons may have gone into at least partial retreat. But could anyone capable of painting the screaming popes ever truly have lost touch with the abyss?

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Hear the Long-Lost Chants of English Monks, Revived for the First Time in 500 Years

in History, Music, Religion | August 29th, 2025

Listening to music, especially live music, can be a religious experience. These days, most of us say that figuratively, but for medieval monks, it was the literal truth. Every aspect of life in a monastery was meant to get you that much closer to God, but especially the times when everyone came together and sang. For English monks accustomed to that way of life, it would have come as quite a shock, to say the very least, when Henry VIII ordered the dissolution of the monasteries between the mid fifteen-thirties and the early fifteen-forties. Not only were the inhabitants of those refuges sent packing, their sacred music was cast to the wind.

Nearly half a millennium later, that music is still being recovered. As reported by the Guardian’s Steven Morris, University of Exeter historian James Clark found the latest example while researching the still-standing Buckland Abbey in Devon for the National Trust.

“Only one book — rather boringly setting out the customs the monks followed — was known to exist, held in the British Library.” But lo and behold, a few leaves of parchment stuck in the back happened to contain pieces of early sixteenth-century music, or rather chant, with both text and notation, a vanishingly rare sort of artifact of medieval monastic life.

Just this month, for the first time in almost five centuries, the music from the “Buckland book” resonated within the walls of Buckland Abbey once again. You can hear a clip from the University of Exeter chapel choir’s performance just above, which may or may not get across the grimness of the original work. “The themes are heavy — the threats from disease and crop failures, not to mention powerful rulers — but the polyphonic style is bright and joyful, a contrast to the sort of mournful chants most associated with monks,” writes Morris. For listeners here in the twenty-first century, these compositions offer the additional transcendental dimension of aesthetic time travel. The only way their rediscovery could be more fortuitous is if it had happened in time to benefit from the nineteen-nineties Gregorian-chant boom.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Animated Map Shows How the Five Major Religions Spread Across the World (3000 BC — 2000 AD)

in Religion | August 27th, 2025

Hinduism, Judaism, Buddhism, Christianity, Islam.… Claims to ancient origin and ultimate authority notwithstanding, the world’s five major religions are all of recent vintage compared to the couple hundred thousand years or more of human existence on the planet. During most of our prehistory, religious beliefs and practices were largely localized, confined to the territorial or tribal boundaries of individual groups.

For people groups in the British Isles a thousand years ago, for example, the Levant may as well have been another planet. How is it that Britain became a few hundred years later one of the most zealously global evangelizers of a religion from Palestine? How is it that an Indian sect, Buddhism, which supposedly began with one man sometime in the 5th Century B.C.E., became the dominant religion in all of Asia just a few hundred years later?

Answering such questions in detail is the business of professional historians. But we know the broad outlines: the world’s major religions spread through imperial conquest and forced conversion; through cultural exchange of ideas and the adaptation of far-off beliefs to local customs, practices, and rituals; through migrant and diaspora communities moving across the globe. We know religions traveled back and forth through trade routes over land and sea and were transmitted by the painstaking translation and copying by hand dense, lengthy scriptures.

All of these movements are also the movements of the modern globalized world, a construct that began taking shape a few thousand years ago. The spread of the “Big 5” religions corresponds with the shifting of masses of humans around the globe as they formed the interconnections that now bind us all tightly together, whether we like it or not.

In the animated map above from Business Insider, you can watch the movement of these five faiths over the course of 5,000 years and see in the span of a little over two minutes how the modern world took shape. And you might find yourself wondering: what will such a map look like in another 5,000 years? Or in 500? Will these global religions all meld into one? Will they wither away? Will they splinter into thousands? Our speculations reveal much about what we think will happen to humanity in the future.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2018.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC.

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

The Origins of Satan: The Evolution of the Devil in Religion

in History, Religion | August 25th, 2025

The Devil, the Beast, Beelzebub, Lucifer, Satan: whichever name we happen to call him, we know full well who the guy is — or at least, we think we do. In fact, the images and evocations of that embodiment of (or perhaps metaphor for) sin, deceit, and temptation that many of us have encountered in popular culture have little, if anything, to do with Biblical scripture. Here to explain Satan’s real textual origins is Religion for Breakfast creator Andrew Mark Henry, who in the video above goes all the way back to the ancient Israelites and the Hebrew Bible — in which “the notion of a singular, supreme evil entity and opponent to God is completely absent.”

Henry mentions that the Hebrew term śāṭān, which means “adversary or accuser,” does appear early in the Bible, but it “simply refers to human adversaries.” Only in later texts, like the Book of Job, does the word take on the meaning of a “divine job title, kind of like a prosecutor” or “legal adversary in a divine court.”

We’re still far from the current Christian concept of Satan, which may eventually have arisen, according to some scholars, out of centuries of cultural exchange between Christianity and Zoroastrianism. The ancient Middle Eastern religion proposes a perfectly good divine being Ahura Mazda “locked in battle with a wholly evil being named Angra Mainyu.” This encounter between civilizations would explain something about the emergence of the now widely acknowledged idea of “a cosmic struggle between good and evil.”

As one ancient text is layered atop another, “an evil leader of fallen angels or evil spirit in general becomes a recurring character,” and in the New Testament, “the chief adversary of God” is called by the name Satan — or by the Greek word diábolos, which gave us Devil and all its related words. In reference to the origins of Satan, the Book of Isaiah offers the line “How you are fallen from heaven, O Day Star, Son of Dawn!” The term “Day Star,” which refers to the planet Venus, was rendered in the Latin Vulgate translation as Lucifer, which has become another common name for this ever-more-charged figure. Whether we fear him, condemn him, deny his existence, or even — depending on our musical genres of choice — imagine that we worship him, our culture does, in some sense or another, seem to need him.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

What Is Kabbalah? An Introduction to the Jewish Mystical Tradition

in Religion | August 15th, 2025

Though the pop-cultural moment that gave rise to the association has passed, when many of us hear about Kabbalah, we still think of Madonna. Her study of that Jewish-mystic school of thought in the nineteen-nineties has been credited, at least in part, with the sonic transformation that led to her hit album Ray of Light. A few years later, when she recorded the theme song for the 2002 James Bond movie Die Another Day, she managed to include in its music video such Kabbalistic imagery as the Hebrew letters lamed, aleph, and vav — which come, as Religion for Breakfast creator Andrew M. Henry says in the video above, from one of the 72 names of God according to Jewish tradition.

But what, exactly, is Kabbalah? That’s the question Henry takes it upon himself to answer, attempting to separate the real thing from the pop-cultural ephemera that’s come to surround it.

This entails first going back to the earliest Kabbalists, “Jewish teachers, theologians, and philosophers” among “the educated elite of medieval Europe, living in Spain and France, writing new and innovative studies on Jewish texts and concepts about mystical contemplation of the divine realms, the nature of God, the purpose of humanity, and the creation of the universe.” They searched, and their successors have continued to search, for secret divine wisdom originally vouchsafed to Moses at Mount Sinai.

The word kabbalah can be translated as “that which has been received,” but that may make the enterprise sound simpler than it is. Henry frames Kabbalah as a series of traditions “encompassing several modes of reading, a library of texts, a series of concepts, and a range of practices within Judaism that is concerned with mystical contemplation.” But whatever their differences, most Kabbalists revere concepts like Ein Sof, “an infinite impersonal god or supreme entity or supreme entity that we cannot describe with our own human faculties,” and vast works like the novelistic Zohar, or “The Book of Radiance,” in which “even the search for mystical knowledge becomes sexualized”: an aspect that, given the skill with which she’s crafted her provocative pop-icon image, Madonna could hardly fail to appreciate.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

An Introduction to Aleister Crowley, History’s Most Infamous Occultist

in History, Religion | July 30th, 2025

“Do what thou wilt”: as the central principle of a worldview, it may not sound like much, but at least there are always a great many people ready and willing to hear it. So discovered Aleister Crowley, the early twentieth-century Occultist now remembered not just for his unconventional religious practices, but also for his knack for gathering cults around himself. It was in Liber AL vel Legis, or The Book of the Law, the central text of his religion Thelema, that he instructed his followers to act directly on their own desires, ideally with the aid of some ritualistic black magick.

You can learn more about the life and pursuits that eventually got Crowley dubbed “the wickedest man in the world” from the Hochelaga video above. After living most of his childhood under a Biblical-fundamentalist preacher father, who died when Crowley was eleven, he was sent away to various boarding schools, then turned troublemaker. At Cambridge, where he went to study English literature, he fell for the Romantics, then for the occult. After leaving without his degree, but with a considerable inheritance, he enjoyed the freedom to travel the world, climbing mountains and attempting to master the dark arts — not to mention taking drugs and having affairs.

As he went from country to country, Crowley never met an ancient religion he couldn’t adapt to his own ends. But no gods made as much of an impact on him as those of ancient Egypt, specifically Hoor-paar-kraat, or Harpocrates in the Greek; Crowley claimed to have been contacted by the voice of Hoor-paar-kraat’s messenger Aiwass, from whom he took the dictation that became Liber AL vel Legis. Styling himself as an Egyptian prophet, he preached one way for humanity to push through to a post-Christian age: “Whatever you feel like doing, go and do it, regardless of popular opinion or conventional morality.” After all, it seemed to work for Crowley himself, though the work of a notorious occultist certainly isn’t for everybody.

Nor could even the world’s wickedest man keep it up forever: “Eventually all the traveling, drug-taking, and libertinism had caught up with Crowley.” His inheritance dried up, and his addictions worsened. But he didn’t give up on Thelema, even going so far as to establish a commune in Sicily. Alas, the “responsibility-free lifestyle” advocated by the religion soon drove its headquarters to chaotic dilapidation. But just a couple of decades after his death in England in 1947, Crowley’s glowering visage popped up again, on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. He became the subject of pop-music reference not just by the Beatles, but also David Bowie, Iron Maiden, and the late Ozzy Osbourne. “Genius? Insane? Visionary? Fraud? Freethinker? Cult leader?” We might grant Aleister Crowley all these titles, and that of proto-rock star besides.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Paradise Lost Explained: How John Milton Wrote His Epic Religious Poem from Satan’s Perspective

in Literature, Poetry, Religion | July 8th, 2025

“Paradise Lost is one of the books which the reader admires and lays down, and forgets to take up again,” Samuel Johnson wrote in the late eighteenth century. “None ever wished it longer than it is. Its perusal is a duty rather than a pleasure. We read Milton for instruction, retire harassed and overburdened, and look elsewhere for recreation; we desert our master, and seek for companions.” These nearly two and a half centuries later, how many of us attempt to seek out the instruction of Milton in the first place? What was a literary hit in 1667 has become a work read mostly by specialist scholars — but will, perhaps, become a favorite among viewers of the YouTube channel Hochelaga thanks to its new video above.

The first thing to know about Milton’s epic poem, says Hochelaga host Tommie Trelawny, is that it “tells the story of the Biblical fall of man — but, curiously, from Satan’s perspective.” Even if it’s never occurred to you to set eyes on Paradise Lost, you’ve almost certainly heard one of Satan’s most memorable declarations: “Better to reign in Hell, then serve in Heav’n.”

There’s a decent chance you’ve also run across another, “The mind is its own place, and in it self. Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n,” perhaps without knowing which character speaks it. But if you hear enough of his quotable quotes, you might start to think that this Satan fellow makes some good points after all.

Paradise Lost had a similar effect on some of its God-fearing early readers, who suspiciously started to wonder whose side Milton was really on. What the poem seems to glorify, when read today, isn’t Satan, and it’s not even so much God or man as language itself. Now as then, Milton’s baroque grammar and heavily Latinate vocabulary constituted a good portion of both the work’s challenge and its appeal. Equally notable is his obvious conviction that language is up to the task of addressing the most fundamental truths, questions, and contradictions of existence. Satan may not emerge victorious — and certainly doesn’t at the end of the sequel, Paradise Regained — but if he happens to have the best lines, that just reflects our greater, and thoroughly human, fascination with the bad guys more than the good ones.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Why Real Biblical Angels Are Creepy, Beastly, and Hardly Angelic

The Horrifying Paintings of Francis Bacon

Hear the Long-Lost Chants of English Monks, Revived for the First Time in 500 Years

Animated Map Shows How the Five Major Religions Spread Across the World (3000 BC — 2000 AD)

The Origins of Satan: The Evolution of the Devil in Religion

What Is Kabbalah? An Introduction to the Jewish Mystical Tradition

An Introduction to Aleister Crowley, History’s Most Infamous Occultist

Paradise Lost Explained: How John Milton Wrote His Epic Religious Poem from Satan’s Perspective

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