Ineffable, invisible, inscrutable angels are enduring creatures acrossJudaism, Christianity, and Islam, and human experiences of the divine asmediated by spiritual emissaries are an aspect of almost every religioustradition. In popular culture, angels are often reduced to the most gauzy,sentimental, and saccharine of images: fat babies with wings andguardians with robes, halos, and harps. By contrast, in scripturewhenever one of the heavenly choirs appears before a prophet orpatriarch, they first declare Fear not! for terror would be the mostappropriate initial reaction to these otherworldly beings. Angels are oftennot what we'd expect, but it's precisely in that transcendent encounter thatsomething of the strangeness of existence can be conveyed. Elysium: AVisual History of Angelology is a follow up volume to Pandemonium: AVisual History of Demonology, and like the earlier title, this book offers anaccount of the angelic hierarchies as they've been understood acrosscenturies and cultures and of the individual personages, such as thearchangels Michael, Gabriel, and Uriel, who have marked the mythology ofthe West.