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Chapter 10 Immortal Messengers: Angels, Gender, and Power in Early America Elizabeth Reis There areThousands of Thousands, yea Myriads of Myriads of them. This we are sure of. —Increase Mather, Coelestinus. A Conversation in Heaven (1713) Angels adorn headstones in cemeteries across America. Their association with death and heaven is conventional. In early American religious history, however, the notion that such supernatural beings could appear on earth was complicated by questions of gender and claims of authenticity. Belief in angels took various forms, reflecting the shifting power of individuals and groups in American life. Though various religious traditions confirm angels in their theology, Americans have gradually incorporated personal angel encounters into their popular beliefs and practices. This chapter explores the phenomenon of angel belief with particular attention to early Americans' changing ideas about death and personal salvation. The revolutionary Swiss clericJohn Calvin emphasized the centrality of God in heaven and contested the power and significance attributed to angels in the medieval world. In Calvinist New England, not surprisingly, angels appeared rarely in the lives or writings of either ministers or lay people. Certainly angels were part of the biblical panoply, and Puritans hardly ignored the supernatural; Satan and devils regularly intruded into their spiritual lives. Puritans worried about the fate of their souls after death and searched constantly for providential signs that would reveal God's final decree, but this searching did not invite benevolent angel appearances that might have foretold their future. In fact, ministers and laity alike were much more apt to interpret providential signs as evidence of God's displeasure. The rare angel appearance was regarded with skepticism , especially if it was received by a woman. For New England ministers, women's encounters with angels in the seventeenth century were invari- 164 ElizabethReis ably suspect, likely delusions conjured by the evil angel Satan rather than visitations authorized by God. Just as women's bodies were weaker than men's, so, too, were their souls considered more fragile and vulnerable to satanic attack.1 By the time of the Great Awakening, when popular revivalsspread across the American colonies in the 1730s and 1740s, angel sightings had become a more common feature in believers' writings.Angels appeared to encourage people with regard to their prospects after death. Nowcarrying happy news of assurance, angels were no longer seen negatively. As Christians became more comfortable in their hope of heaven, angels increasingly (even up to the present) confirmed ordinary people's intimate and favorablerelationship with the divine,while making salvation more tangible. Greater optimism about salvation at once empowered and constrained female believers. What better wayfor women to prove their spiritual legitimacy , to make their voices heard, than by the intercession of an angel—an event formerly associated with biblical miracles?But in the eighteenth century , a woman's ephemeral spiritual authority was rarely translated into worldly power because a sighting was too often a deathbed vision thatwas followed by death. An angel sighting might confer power,but it offered no long-term institutional gain in legitimacy if the empowered female host was to be physically diminished or shortly dead. By the early nineteenth century, as attitudes toward death, dying, and the afterlife shifted and heaven seemed to become more accessible,believers continued to use angel visitationsto relieve anxietyabout the hereafter. At the same time, these visitations became a way to distinguish beliefs and practices, or to advance religious objectives. Shakers, Spiritualists, Catholics, and NativeAmericans all wrote about angelic intercessions that often contradicted traditional Protestant teachings but which, nonetheless, comforted those who were facing loss or confronting their own mortality. Such encounters provided a greater measure of legitimacy and power to the viewerthan wasthe case earlier. At their seances, for example, Shakers invoked angels who revealed the nature of heaven to participants. But only those who conformed to the Shaker program of celibacy were told they could experience that heavenlyblisswhich angels announced. Increasingly in the nineteenth century, angel visitations were disassociated with proximate death. Not only did sightings become more common, one could converse with these heavenlybeings and live to tell the tale. Representative of this change was the radical proposition of Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772)—as voiced by his nineteenth-century interpreters—that death could wait, that one could see angels in this world. Moreover, comporting with a growing sentimentalization of religious culture, departed loved ones could stay near or could return as angels. This transformation of deceased family members into angels allowed believers to reconstruct families beyond the grave...

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