Gods, Myths and Heroes - Part 42

Angels 

You may be surprised to learn that, despite all the pictures of female angels you've seen, there are no female angels in the Bible.  None.  They're all male.  Three angels are named in the Bible, the angel Michael (above, by Mendarkson) ...

the angel Gabriel (above, Archangel Gabriel by Hugh Irvine (1783-1829), said to be a self-portrait of the artist) ...

and the angel Raphael (above, The Archangel Raphael and Mephistopheles by Jean-Paul Laurens, 1885).

Other angels are mentioned in the Bible, but not by name.  For example, two angels visited Lot in Sodom, where the local men wanted to have gay sex with them (so clearly these angels were male) shortly before God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah.  Above, Two Angels at Lot's House in Sodom by Harold Stevenson, 1986.

Another Biblical incident was Jacob wrestling with an angel, depicted in the rather homoerotic sculpture above by Hendrik Christian Andersen, 1909-1911.

Except the Bible doesn't say that Jacob wrestled with an angel.  It says that he wrestled with a man all night, and in the morning the man told him that from now on Jacob's name was Israel.  Then Jacob said he had seen God, so perhaps he was wrestling with God, not an angel.

In any case, how could Jacob have wrestled all night?  Nobody can wrestle all night.  Above is a 1940 sculpture Jacob and the Angel by Jacob Epstein, and if you lay the sculpture down horizontally, it might show what Jacob and the man, who I suggest was no angel, were really doing all night.  Then Jacob's orgasm was so good that he said he had seen God.  Hey, if homophobic fundamentalists can interpret the Bible, I can interpret the Bible, too.

Other artists have their own ideas of angels.  This is the 1950 sculpture The Angel of the Citadel by Marino Marini at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles.

This 1974 sculpture of an angel on a tricycle has had a checkered history.  It was made by 25-year-old artist Mark Jacobsen on commission for the Merle Hay Mall in Des Moines, Iowa.  The angel is naked and definitely male.

Not surprisingly, some people in Iowa objected to the naked angel.  In 1990, after 16 years, the statue was removed from the mall and put in storage (apparently these things take time in Iowa).  In 2001 it was purchased by collector Jerri Scott, who put it in her yard.  Above is a closeup of the statue in Scott's yard, including its dangling penis.

But the statue had a few surprises.  From another angle, the angel's penis has a face (above).

In 2021, Scott donated the sculpture to the city of Johnston, Iowa, where it now resides beside a bike trail near City Hall.

A 1995 statue by Wim Delvoye atop a fountain in Knokke, Belgium is called Rose des Vents (Compass Rose), but it is popularly known as the pissing angel.

We end with another kind of angel – a short video of a guy making a snow angel.