Psychopomps and Angels

'Ye Watchers and Ye Holy Ones'

Respond, ye souls in endless rest,
ye patriarchs and prophets blest;
Ye holy twelve, ye martyrs strong,
all saints triumphant, raise the song.

In this piece, we attempt to clarify some misconceptions about angels that arise from a rather arcane field of study known as angelology, which is the theological discipline that studies the nature, hierarchy, and functions of angels within religious traditions, particularly Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.

Angelology, as a subfield of theology, seeks to account for the role of angels as spiritual beings who serve humanity as messengers, warriors, and ministers of divine will. Within Rational Spirituality’s cosmology, angels are understood as both spiritual beings and solitons — concepts we delve into in this post.

In quantum mechanics, solitons are special waves that keep their shape and maintain their stability. They can act as carriers of quantum information, maintaining integrity over time, which might be key for conscious experiences within our Quantum Coalescence framework.

Of keen interest to us is the role of angels in the End Times, a prophecy that fails to receive a great deal of attention. The hymn, “Ye Watchers and Ye Holy Ones,” written in 1906, is an exception. The lyrics implicitly address the role of angels in the End Times through its invocation of celestial beings and call for cosmic praise.

While the hymn does not describe apocalyptic events, per se, its overall structure and biblical allusions underscore the angels' eschatological role in judgment, veneration, and spiritual warfare.

This hymn, therefore, serves as both a present-day call to spiritual awareness as well as foreshadowing the eschatological victory where angels and saints join together to welcome a New Creation — the post apocalyptic Aquarian Age.

Synchronicity

Stephen King once noted that stories are like fossils that writers uncover rather than construct, and that characters often surprise their creators by saying or doing things the author didn't consciously plan. He describes situations where his characters made decisions that he hadn't anticipated, which led the story in unexpected directions.

This is a common experience many writers describe — the sensation that their characters develop autonomy and sometimes "speak" or act in ways that surprise even the author. King uses this as evidence for his approach to writing that relies more on intuition and discovery than rigid plotting.

This essay is case in point. Indeed, my posts often veer unexpectedly onto dusty, unmapped sideroads when synchronicity messes with my creative GPS system.

In this instance, a scene from a movie tapped me on the shoulder and hijacked the direction I intended for this piece. I believe the culprit was a short ‘reel’ on Facebook. Anyway, it was a brief video clip from a 2016 film titled, “Miracles from Heaven" starring Jennifer Garner. The story is based on the miraculous healing of the Beam family’s daughter youngest daughter Anna, who suffers from a rare, life-threatening digestive disorder.

As Anna's condition worsens, her mother Christy (played by Jennifer Garner) struggles with her faith, questioning how a loving God could allow an innocent child to suffer. This crisis of faith is a central theme, as Christy grapples with unanswered prayers and the seeming indifference of God to her daughter's pain.

The film juxtaposes Anna's journey with that of Haley, a young girl battling terminal cancer whom Anna befriends in the hospital. Anna shares her faith with Haley, giving her a cross necklace and assuring her that Jesus is always with her.

While Anna ultimately experiences a miraculous recovery after a near-fatal accident, Haley succumbs to her illness. However, Haley's father later reveals that Anna's influence brought his daughter peace in her final days, highlighting how suffering can give rise to love and compassion. This contrast between the two girls' fates underscores the film's exploration of faith, suffering, and the mysterious ways in which miracles may manifest.

The film’s tension lies in its anthropomorphic framing of divine love — a “personal God” who, like a cosmic parent, is expected to intervene in human suffering. This assumption collapses under deductive scrutiny: If God is omnipotent and benevolent, why does one child (Anna) receive a miraculous rescue while another (Haley) dies in agony?

The narrative inadvertently exposes the fallacy of scaling macro-level theological claims (“God is love”) to micro-level events. Divine favoritism —saving one child but not her friend — reduces God to a capricious monarch, granting miracles arbitrarily while ignoring systemic suffering.

Theological Critique

This mirrors the ancient problem of theodicy¹ — how can a loving God permit evil? The film sidesteps this dilemma by framing Anna’s survival as proof of divine love, but Haley’s death haunts the logic of this Sunday-school-driven worldview.

To argue that God chooses to save some while abandoning others is not only ethically indefensible but philosophically incoherent. If God is love as a universal principle, selective intervention contradicts that essence — love cannot be both unconditional and conditional.

Mystical traditions (e.g., Kabbalah, Advaita Vedanta) resolve this dilemma by rejecting anthropomorphism — God is not a being who acts in time but rather the ‘Ground of all Being’² (a.k.a. Quantum Consciousness Field), which is beyond human binaries of intervention/neglect. Anna’s survival reflects natural law (e.g., her fall dislodging intestinal blockages), not divine caprice.

To claim otherwise risks moralizing suffering — implying Haley’s death resulted from insufficient faith or worthiness, a notion implied by the film’s script. True transcendence lies not in seeking a micromanaging, personal deity but in recognizing universal divinity within suffering’s unanswerable mystery.

Thus, the film’s theology, though well-intentioned, perpetuates a harmful dogma — that love is transactional, and God’s rewards are earned, as is his punishment — a view that should be anathema to any mature and rational spirituality.

Having examined the theological implications of Anna's healing, let us now turn to the phenomenology of her near-death experience itself, which offers further insights into how divine encounters are filtered through personal consciousness.³

Anna’s Near-Death Experience (NDE)

When Anna tumbled into the hollow of an Texas cottonwood tree — her mind did what all human minds must do in the face of unthinkable terror: it reached for light. But light, to a child raised in the stained-glass glow of Sunday school and bedtime prayers, is not formless.

It takes shape as stories told and hymns sung — a man with kind eyes who walks on water, a kingdom where lions lie with lambs. So when her neurons flickered in the dark, starved of oxygen, they cast not abstract radiance but Jesus, not cosmic unity but Heaven — a splendid garden where she could run pain-free, her intestines no longer knotted like cursed rope.

I don’t want to diminish her vision. The mind is a prism, bending the ineffable into colors it knows. Anna’s psyche, steeped in the language of Christian parables and perhaps her mother’s lullabies about angels, translated the numinous into a figure who whispered, “You will be okay.”

Yet this translation, beautiful as it is, bears the fingerprints of her world: a world where divine love wears a human face and speaks in English. Haley, her hospital friend, to our knowledge received no such visitation in her final days — only Anna’s cross pressed into her palm, a tangible token of a hope that could not cure osteosarcoma.

Here lies the fissure in the film’s theology. By framing Anna’s NDE as a literal dialogue with a personal God — a deity who intervenes to spare one child but not another — the story unwittingly cages the infinite within the finite.

What if, instead, we saw her vision as the psyche’s fierce poetry? A metaphor for the body’s own will to live, or the brain’s final act of mercy before shutdown? The “miracle” then shifts — not God bending natural law, but Anna’s spirit, in its primal innocence, refracting trauma into a narrative that allowed her to return unbroken.

Her healing — medically inexplicable, ethically neutral — becomes not proof of divine favor but evidence of life’s stubborn grace. The true wonder is not that a girl fell from a tree and lived, but that she used the lexicon of her upbringing to clamber back from the edge, stitching meaning from chaos.

To reduce this to a transactional God (believe, and be spared) is to miss the deeper revelation — that divinity dwells not in the suspension of suffering, but in the human capacity to alchemize it into love.

Haley died. Anna lived. Neither outcome indicts or exalts God. But in the space between, a cross changed hands — a gesture that said, “You are not alone.” That is the miracle unbound by dogma, not validating a deity picking favorites, but two children, in their fleeting collision, reminding us that hope is a language we build together from the materials we’ve been given.

‘Where Angels Fear to Tread’

Alexander Pope's admonition that "fools rush in where angels fear to tread" is often wielded as a warning against hubris — a reminder that some mysteries defy human reckoning.

Yet Miracles from Heaven flips this axiom on its head, suggesting that angels, in their quiet audacity, do tread precisely where we fear to go: into the hollows of suffering, the voids where logic fails and hope flickers. The film's most striking metaphor for this lies not in its sunlit visions of heaven, but in the shadow of a dead Texas cottonwood tree — and the faint glow of a butterfly that guides Anna Beam through darkness.

This hollow tree becomes a liminal space where the finite brushes the infinite. Anna's fall into the tree's abyss becomes an accidental pilgrimage — a plunge into a crude, organic chapel where divine presence is felt not as a voice from the heavens, but as a whisper within chaos.

The butterfly, luminous and weightless, flutters into this void. It is here that the film's theology transcends its own anthropomorphic tendencies. This creature —no winged seraph with a human face, but a fragile, earthly being — becomes the angelic intermediary.

In Jewish mysticism, angels often manifest as natural phenomena. Ezekiel's chayot (living creatures) with wheels of fire, or the malakhim who appear as desert winds. Similarly, Anna's butterfly resists literalism. It does not speak, perform miracles, or promise salvation. Instead, it moves, trailing light through darkness — a silent testament to the belief that ordinary matter can channel the extraordinary.

Critics dismiss the film's heaven as a “pastoral allergy ad" (Roger Ebert), but this misses the point. Anna's vision is not a doctrinal map of the afterlife, but a child's psyche translating trauma into a language her world understands.

The miracle, then, lies not in the vision's content, but in its function — a neural survival tactic, yes, but also a theological subversion. By framing the NDE as interpretative ("you can interpret this… depending on your beliefs"), the film echoes a broader spiritual ethos — faith as a communal act of meaning-making, not divine quid pro quo.

When Anna is rescued healed, the film risks reducing God to a cosmic surgeon —a being who, as we’ve suggested, fixes some children while ignoring others. Yet her mother Christy's closing words reject this: "I don't know why Anna was healed while thousands of children still suffer."

Here, the movie aligns with a mature faith that acknowledges the persistence of mystery. True faith, it suggests, is not certainty in God's interventions, but humility in his abiding presence.

The butterfly, a symbol of transformation, is no deus ex machina. It is the film's subtle rebuttal to Pope: angels do tread where we fear to go, not to erase suffering, but to illuminate paths through it.

In Anna's fall, we find a theology stripped of transaction — a reminder that miracles are not suspensions of natural law, but collisions of grace and grit, where light persists, fragile and fleeting, in the darkest hollows.

And so, we have reinterpreted the traditional message that was the film’s apparent raison d'etre. It is an excellent movie (trailer below) and one that I highly recommend to those of all faiths or of no faith. There are valuable lessons to be learned for all.

One that resonated with me was Anna’s reply to her mother, who was struggling to understand and process Anna's experiences and the miraculous healing. Anna reassures her with the phrase, "It's all right, Mom. Not everyone's gonna believe. And that's okay. They'll get there when they get there.”

Psychopomps

In mythology and religious traditions across cultures, a psychopomp is a guide whose primary function is to escort souls to the afterlife. The term originates from the Greek words pompos (conductor or guide) and psyche (breath, life, soul, or mind). These entities serve as compassionate, non-judgmental companions for the deceased, helping them navigate the liminal transition between life and death.

In Miracles from Heaven, the luminous butterfly that appears to Anna during her near-death experience can also be interpreted as a psychopomp, a spiritual guide between worlds. This angelic creature embodies the archetypal guide that leads souls through the threshold between worlds.

Unlike more familiar psychopomps such as the Greek god Hermes, Charon the Ferryman, or the Egyptian Anubis, Anna's butterfly doesn't speak or offer explicit direction. Instead, the butterfly-as-psychopomp illuminates our understanding of Anna's experience, framing it not as a literal journey to heaven, but as an encounter with the liminal space between life and death.

The butterfly guides Anna not to a final destination, but through a moment of extraordinary spiritual awakening that allows her to return to life healed and with renewed purpose and insight.

Angels and Archetypes

In our theory of quantum coalescence, angels and archetypes are two substrates of quantum consciousness. The former are created by divine fiat, the latter are inspired by humans.

Jungian archetypes refer to universal, primal symbols and themes that reside within the collective unconscious of all human beings, as well as in the collective unconscious field.

Archetypes are not static or rigidly defined, they are dynamic, evolving patterns that arise autonomously from the unconscious, guiding personal development and psychological integration. Their self-organizing quality allows archetypes to influence an individual's life, their thoughts, emotions, and behaviors in ways that promote growth and balance..

In essence, Jungian archetypes are both universal and deeply personal, serving as innate psychological structures that help individuals navigate their inner and outer worlds while contributing to the ongoing evolution of the collective human psyche. In Rational Spirituality’s cosmology, both archetypes and angels are conscious and have free will as well as agency.

Concluding thoughts

In Gethsemane, one of Jesus’ disciples attempted to defend him with a sword.

Put your sword back in its place, Jesus said to him, for all who draw the sword will die by the sword. Do you think I cannot call on my father, and he will at once put at my disposal more than twelve legions of angels?

Matthew 26:52-53

The concept of twelve legions of angels further underscores this theology. These legions represent a cosmic architecture of divine governance, where each angel fulfills a unique function within a harmonious order.⁴ Angels are not passive observers but active participants in the unfolding of creation. Their interventions are not random acts of favoritism but deliberate actions rooted in divine wisdom and justice.

In conclusion, angels are not mere abstractions or relics of ancient belief systems; they are integral to a rational spirituality that seeks to bridge the gap between human experience and divine reality. Whether understood as solitons or psychoids, they embody the dynamic interplay between free will and divine order.

The butterfly in Anna’s story reminds us that miracles need not defy natural law to be profound. Instead, they reveal how grace operates through subtle interventions — revealing paths through darkness while respecting the complexity of creation. Angels tread where we fear to go, not to impose their will but to guide us toward light, hope, and spiritual transformation..

The image above depicts the seven archangels. In the center stands a commanding figure with red attire and a golden breastplate, holding what appears to be a flaming sword. The other angels carry various symbolic items: one holds a lantern, another carries a staff, and others display different emblematic objects.

To the lower right side is a smaller figure representing Tobias, who according to tradition was guided and protected by the Archangel Raphael during a journey. The entire composition presents a classical religious representation of the archangelic host, with their protective and guiding roles emphasized through their positioning around the young Tobias.

1. The attempt to reconcile the existence of evil and suffering in the world with the belief in an all-powerful, all-knowing, and perfectly good God. The term addresses the philosophical and theological problem of how divine attributes like omnipotence and perfect goodness can coexist with the reality of evil and human suffering.

2. The "ground of all being," a term coined by theologian Paul Tillich to describe the ultimate foundation of existence, is incorporated into physicist Federico Faggin's Quantum Information Panpsychism (QIP) theory, which proposes consciousness as fundamental to reality and intertwined with quantum phenomena.

3. In Rational Spirituality cosmology, near-death experiences (NDEs) involve solitonic consciousness decoupling from the brain. Solitons are self-reinforcing, stable waves that maintain their shape and energy while propagating through nonlinear systems (e.g., ocean waves [classical], optical fibers [classical], and quantum solitons in the quantum vacuum [nonlocal/quantum]). They emerge from a continuing balance between dispersion (spreading forces) and nonlinear focusing (compression forces). In quantum contexts, solitons’ topologically protected stability and nonlocal interactions in chaotic systems might model agency, avoiding strict determinism. These propositions align with Rational Spirituality’s quantum coalescence framework, which posits agency as an emergent property of nonlinear dynamic equilibria in consciousness-bearing systems.

4. The concept of 12 Legions of Angels (Matthew 26:53) represents a theological and cosmological framework for understanding divine authority, celestial order, and divine governance over creation. Rational Spirituality posits that the 12 Legions are yet another substrate of the universal field of quantum consciousness, which also includes the Collective Unconscious, Gaia, and Morphic Resonance substrates.