Helpful to remember, lest one confuse contextual representation with reality when parsing the intricacies of the incorporeal and ineffable. Angels don't have blond hair because angels don't have hair; angels don't have blue eyes because they don't have eyes (or they have dozens of them). There is nothing wrong, of course, with imagining angels in the form of humans, only with mistaking a small segment of examples for the universal standard. Which is what's so fascinating about the earliest representations of such beings, which flout the conventions of the angelic as they've been transmitted in Western culture, or for that matter the response from those who suffered under colonialism and imagined angels as appearing like themselves. In the contact zones of early modern colonialism, beginning in the sixteenth century and continuing until the modern era, and with a particular zenith during the so-called Age of Reason, people developed syncretic religious traditions between Christianity and their own indigenous faiths, in which divine intermediaries often played an integral role. From Africa to Latin America, India to North America, artists often depicted angels in the visual idiom of their own cultures.
amor fati next human
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