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=> A short history of angels: from fate to.

A short history of angels: from fate to.
Posted by Tiglath (Guest) davidchibo@hotmail.com - Monday, March 15 2004, 0:05:14 (EST)
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A short history of angels: from fate to freedom (human and divine)

As numerous commentators have observed, the idea of angels in general and that of the guardian angel in particular did not originate with Christianity or even with the Hebrews, though angels figure prominently in the mythologies of both of those traditions. If, however, we confine ourselves to those pre-Hebraic Mesopotamian cultures which provided the fertile soil for the Judeo-Christian (or, following Oswald Spengler, the Magian) tradition, the idea of angels can be traced back at least to Ancient Assyria (Babylonian and pre-Babylonian civilizations). In his classic study of this period, Ancient Mesopotamia: Portrait of a Dead Civilization (1964), Professor A. Leo Oppenheim of The University of Chicago describes the lamassu as, roughly, a guardian angel who is charged with protecting his or her ward within the constraints dictated by an impersonal structure, a fixed, deterministic cosmic order, which is to say, Fate (istaru). The lamassu was thus associated with the individual's simtu, the latter being the term used to denote one's individual share of fortune and misfortune. Thus, notes Oppenheim, "It is in the nature of the simtu, the individual 'share,' that its realization is a necessity, not a possibility." In other words, the lamassu was essentially conceived of as the administrator of one's personal destiny.



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