In Other Worlds - Margaret Eleanor Atwood [13]
In the Judeo-Christian tradition, messengers from the divine realm are called “angels,” which is simply the Greek word for “messenger.” The Hebrew word has the same meaning. In the Bible, angels are not often described as having wings; more usually they appear as human beings, though the seraphim in Isaiah: 6 have six wings and some New Testament angels evidently have the power of flight and/or instant teleportation. For their appearances in later art, the two-winged angel images most likely filched their wings from Nike or Iris, or, for the young cherubs, from Eros, the boy-god of love. But whether wingless or not, angels certainly illustrate the troubling nature of messengers. How much fun is it to be told that your hometown is about to be destroyed by fire and brimstone, or that you, an unmarried virgin, are about to get pregnant? The expressions on the faces of Renaissance Virgin Marys are usually ones of apprehension, not joy. A visit from Iris or Hermes or any Judeo-Christian angel messenger was as likely to be bad news as good.
Thus the fact that such divine beings can fly should not necessarily make us trust them. Like the utterings of oracles, the messages they bring are often deeply ambiguous.
TRANSFORMATIONS AND TRICKS
Hermes, the wing-enabled flying messenger, is not only the god of communication, he is also the god of thieves, lies, and jokes. That’s another interesting thing about many airborne non-humans—their odd sense of humour, the delight they seem to take in misleading human beings and playing tricks on them. In the plays of Shakespeare, there are, as I’ve mentioned, two notable non-human flying beings: Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Ariel in The Tempest. Both are messengers and servants, carrying out the plans and delivering the decrees of Oberon and Prospero, respectively; and both are disguise artists and trick-players. Do they have their origin in winged Eros (or Cupid), the notoriously practical-joking boy-god of love, messenger of the goddess Venus? Cupid may bring boxes of chocolates today, but formerly he shot his wounding arrows of desire into people who then went crazy with lust and obsessive longing while he himself laughed. The djinni of One Thousand and One Nights tales are similar messenger-servants, as are the winged monkeys in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz: airborne, powerful, hard to control except through magic. The morally dubious fairies of English folklore bear a family resemblance: disguising themselves and fooling people are what they seem to take most pride in. Puck is strongly of this lineage, thinking it great fun to turn himself into a stool and then whisk out of the way just as someone is about to sit down on him. Making fools of already foolish mortals is his main game.
Come to think of it, such predilections are shared by the early comic-book superheroes. They weren’t as a rule crude joke-players, but their transformations certainly involved deception—no one was supposed to know that Clark Kent was really Superman, and vice versa. The episodes of most interest to us child readers were not the maiden-rescuing or the parts where Gotham City gets saved from destruction, or even the hand-to-hand sock-bam-pow battles with villains, but the moments of transformation. First, the bespectacled weakling or crippled newsboy, with all the humiliation implied by that role; then off came the disguise, and the true, strong hero sprang into view like a husband shooting out of a closet in a Feydeau farce—surprise!—and the bad folks quailed, and the bullies could no longer kick sand in your face at the beach. It was the notion of deceiving people that we really liked—the idea that you could walk around among unsuspecting adults—the people on the street in the comic books—knowing something about yourself that they didn’t know: that you secretly had the power to astonish them.
In this respect, the 1940s superhero Plastic Man was the champion. His