Why I want to believe in angels - and thousands do

I've never seen a real angel - a living, breathing being, with feathered wings - but I like the idea of them; the stories of their capacity for flight, these messengers between heaven and earth. The New Age angels seem less mysterious, and therefore less interesting - reduced, in reports of sightings, to the mundane, finding parking spaces and loitering around shopping malls - and so an altogether different species to the dark angels of death and Old Testament destruction.

Rather unfairly, angels of all descriptions have been deemed superstitious flim-flam by many serious contemporary commentators; but Susan Garrett, formerly of the Yale Divinity School, and currently professor at Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, has just published a scholarly book that places a host of angels centre-stage in the fundamental questions of life (How did we get here? Where are we going? What does it all mean, anyway?). As a practising Christian, she does not claim to be neutral, but her comparison of biblical accounts of angels with medieval and modern testimonies is immensely thorough, though lacking in the magic of William Blake's vision of a tree filled with angels in Peckham Rye ("their bright wings covered the tree boughs like stars").

A third of Americans say that they have felt an angelic presence in their livesNo Ordinary Angel (Yale University Press £18.99) - Garrett's title refers to her interpretation of Jesus as the best messenger from God - also reports the proliferation of angel sightings in the US since the 1990s; a phenomenon which she does not quite explain, though it is clear that as a nation, America tends to think that an angel is not just for Christmas.

According to a recent survey, 71 per cent of Americans believe in angels, though only 47 per cent in Darwin's theory of evolution. In other surveys, a third of Americans say that they have personally felt an angelic presence in their lives; a belief made manifest in even the briefest trawl through the internet, which reveals a modern ether, where angels proliferate, as if emerging through a gap in Jacob's ladder between heaven and earth.

There are photographs of angels said to have been visible in the smoke clouds of the falling Twin Towers; stories of angelic voices warning of impending danger, invisible hands guiding the lost to safety, and winged warriors saving the innocent from muggers or rapists. You'll find websites advertising angel healers and angel therapists, angel fortune-telling cards and angel rejuvenation spray, angel earrings and angel crystal essences.

It is as if the world-wide web has reinvented medieval Angelology; conjuring up a multitude, like 14th-century scholars, who calculated that there were precisely 301,655,722 members of the celestial hierarchy (all of them classified into three strict divisions: the first choir, of Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones; the second choir of Dominions, Virtues and Powers; and the third of Principalities, Archangels and Angels).

And in this, as other matters, where America has already gone, Britain follows; though of course, the 21st century angel craze has historical precedents here, too. There are several flourishing websites about an angel that guards the River Thames, including YouTube footage alongside 19th century etchings, and a photograph taken in London during the Blitz, which apparently shows an appearance by the Thames angel to firemen in November 1940. Rather disappointingly, the YouTube clips are just as blurry as the old photograph, though believers can see angel wings where others might only see a trick of the light. 

As it happens, latter day angels are generally depicted as creatures of light, beautifully golden like a vision of Botticelli's. But the Hebrew word for angel is "mal'akh", which originally meant the shadow side of God, though it came to be translated as messenger. Thus the Old Testament Angel of the Lord was an ominous, sombre spirit who went forth at night "and slew a hundred and eighty-five thousand in the camp of the Assyrians"; and, when God wanted to punish the Israelites, He sent forth an avenging angel, bringing pestilence and destruction; presumably not the sort of angel to ask for a parking space, but a being amply equipped to do battle with Richard Dawkins, or to scythe down the sons of Mammon on Wall Street and daughters of Babylon on Bond Street.

All of which might seem entirely fanciful; as irrelevant to the realities of these troubled times as the debased angels of New Age merchandising (those plastic figurines and china knick-knacks that are the equivalent of the medieval trade in rosaries and relics). Even so, our world still has space for angels within it, as Garrett implies - guardians against malignancy, vivid emblems of flight and freedom and liberation, reminders of otherness and magic, of the vast sky above us, even as the ground gives way beneath our feet. ·