Transgressing angels, entangled bodies

‘And the women also of the angels who went astray shall become sirens.’

From the descent of the rebel angels in the Enochic traditions to John Dee and Edward Kelley’s angelic conversations, to William Blake’s erotic visions and the angelic speculations of Luce Irigaray and Michel Serres, angels unite the empyrean realm and the terrestrial, the material and the imaginal, the infinite and inconceivable to the indefinite, shifting realm of creation, from its conception to its end.

Here I explore the enmeshing of earthly and celestial bodies, taking as the point of departure the myth of the transgressing angels, or stars, of 1 Enoch with a specific focus on the transformation of bodies in 1 Enoch 19:2, ‘And the women also of the angels who went astray shall become sirens.’ Drawing from my artistic and magical practice, situated within a world and bodies in crisis, I will examine the phenomenology of a dynamic bodymind entangled with its environment and others in an angelic space that extends from the tiniest atom or subatomic particle to living organisms to the furthest reaches of the cosmos.

To close, I speculate on the future of the flesh – the body beyond the body – through the metamorphoses of mortal, siren, angel and machine.

A lecture given for the Astro Magia conference on 18th September 2021, in which I present material from my work-in-progress Antimony, on the angelic, alchemical transfiguration of the body.