Angels are the REAL Guardians of the Galaxies...

Somewhere in one of his Space Trilogy novels, CS Lewis dabbled with the idea of angels directing the "heavenly bodies".

At one point Professor Ransom, the central character in the trilogy, met an angel.

Ransom's character was based upon Lewis himself - an Oxford don specialising in literature who loved hiking, although he walked with a limp from "a sound Blighty" - World War I wound from an artillery shell.

He wrote that the physical surroundings seemed to revolve around the angel, and not vice versa.

Granted it is only fiction, but he used the idea.

I managed to find a section of the second book "Perelandra" in the Space Trilogy which related a trip made by Ransom to Venus (these days we know too much about the solar system and any similar trilogy would have to be set much further afield). This passage indicates that this world took its bearing from the angels and not the other way around.

If you haven't read the books, some terms will need clarification - "Perelandra" was Venus; "sorns" were tall skinny Martian creatures aka intellectuals; "eldila" were angels; "Oyarsa" were archangels in charge of planets. I think they are the main terms for this passage.

To be honest I sometimes wonder if Lewis had the occasional meeting with an angel but rather than try to convince a sceptical public of the fact, he inserted it in fictional form in his trilogy hoping that people would read and reflect on the possibility of spiritual beings. But of course that is conjecture on my part.

Anyway the passage goes -

"... And suddenly two human forms stood before him on the opposite side of the lake.

They were taller than the sorns, the giants whom he had met in Mars. They were perhaps thirty feet high. They were burning white like white hot iron. The outliine of their bodies when he looked at it steadily against the red landscape seemed to be faintly, swiftly undulating as though the permanence of their shape, like that of waterfalls or flames, co-existed with a rushing movement of the matter it contained. For a fraction of an inch inward from this outline the landscape was just visible through them: beyond that they were opaque.

Whenever he looked straight at them they appeared to be rushing towards him with enormous speed: whenever his eyes took in their surroundings he realised they were stationery. This may have been due in part to the fact that their long and sparkling hair stood out straight out behind them as if in a great wind But if there was a wind it was not made of air, for no petal of the flowers was shaken. They were not standing quite vertically in relation to the floor of the valley: but to Ransom it appeared (as it had appeared to me on Earth when I saw one) that the eldil were vertical. It was the valley - it was the whole world of Perelandra which was aslant...."

Click to expand...

Incidentally the angels aren't bound by gravity so to keep up with us in our frame of reference they would need to move 300kms per second throught the Milky Way, and that doesn't take into account the movement of the Milky Way itself through the universe, which is apparently another 2.1 million kilometres per hour. That's combined total of about 3 million kilometres per hour, or 900 kms per second.

I've often stated my father appeared in my room the night he died. He spent most of the time around the foot of the bed, but he also drifted a bit from side to side.

Being pure spirit (since he was dead and his body was miles away) gravity would have been useless in keeping him in position. Something else was keeping him there. But if he was travelling at 900kms per second with me through the Universe, or about 3 million kilometers per hour, what's a couple of feet of slow sideways drift?