The Dead Bodies of Angels
(Part 6) The Lost Language of Imagination: Icons Not Idols
This essay series is an attempt to deepen my inquiry into imagination within various worldviews and schools of thought. My exploration was propelled by my recent postgraduate studies in the Poetics of the Imagination with mythologist Martin Shaw and poet Alice Oswald, and I have since been writing this series.
The western world has lost its angels. Don’t get me wrong, they appear all over religious iconography in depictions of impossible innocence in immortalised gold leaf. But they have become enshrined. Confined. Untouchable and exiled from the places of worldly things. We have set them apart. And we are now so far away from them.
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