They are by far the most fascinating creatures in Christian mythology: they have bodies made of air, they fly, and they are divine only by participation. But above all, angels belong to the oldest society in the cosmos according to myth, the one to which everything must return at the end of history. The name theology reserved for their community was "hierarchy": a neologism literally meaning "sacred power", the measure of the fusion of divinity, power and sociality. Divinity was not a quality of their being, but the purely social experience of beings superior to others. Power, for its part, was not about performing actions, but about becoming divine.

The essays in this volume trace the history and logic of these myths, and show how they continue to inform Western political and social thought in modern Europe.