Can Angels Survive in a Disenchanted World?
This Jungian Life Podcast
Joseph Lee, Deborah Stewart, Lisa Marchiano
4.7 • 2.1K Ratings
🗓️ 1 January 2026
⏱️ 70 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
DREAM WITH US, and we’ll teach you how to interpret them!
Angels persist in dreams, scripture, and art, while modern institutions psychologize them into coincidences or flatten them into greeting cards. In this episode, we explore angels as autonomous psychic facts, reimagined from age to age but always carrying meaning across the unconscious threshold to the ego’s surprise and benefit. When we learn to welcome the sacred messengers and “…fear not, for behold…” they bring tidings that can right the course of our conscious life.
What is gained, and what is lost, when angels are interpreted as natural law rather than moral ideals?
How does discernment work when a message arrives with certainty and sweeps us into obedience?
When the angel archetype constellates images of UFOs, aliens, or AI, what is it announcing about accountability and authority?
Deb, Lisa, and Joe approach angels as symbolic forms, clarifying how Psyche can engage awe, fear, and meaning.
They discuss:
- Angels as mediating symbols bridging the ego and Self
- Why angelic figures must be morally ambiguous rather than purely benevolent
- Guardian angels and the daimon as images of destiny
- The difference between dreams and incursions, like premonitions
- The wisdom in Jacob wrestling the angel
- Archetypal inflation and its political analogs
- The archetype’s modern costume changes from winged angel to technological evangelist
Mentioned:
It’s a Wonderful Life
Genesis
The Book of Jonah
Exodus
The Book of Psalms
Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies
The Man Watching
Hemi-Sync Gateway tapes
Read along with the dream HERE.
LOOK & GROW
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If you’ve been struggling in the dark, trying to find the keys to unlock your dreams, help has arrived. Order your copy of Dream Wise: Unlocking the Meaning of Your Dreams from the hosts of This Jungian Life podcast and open the secret door.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | That's an incredibly comforting idea, that there is some transpersonal entity out there that is watching over you. |
| 0:08.3 | I mean, the Jungian analyst James Hillman likens the Ardiaman, which we've talked about, to a guardian angel, that we each have a kind of transpersonal counterpart that has some responsibility for us. |
| 0:26.0 | Welcome to this Jungian life. |
| 0:28.5 | Three good friends and Jungian analysts, Lisa Marchiano, Deborah Stewart and Joseph Lee, |
| 0:33.9 | invite you to join them for an intimate and honest conversation that brings a psychological |
| 0:39.1 | perspective to important issues of the day. |
| 0:43.6 | I'm Lisa Marchiano, and I'm a Jungian analyst in Philadelphia. |
| 0:47.6 | I'm Joseph Lee, and I'm a Jungian analyst in Virginia Beach, Virginia. |
| 0:52.6 | I'm Deborah Stewart, a Jungian analyst, on Cape Cod. |
| 1:07.4 | Today we're going to talk about angels from a historic perspective but with a Jungian lens. |
| 1:14.9 | They are ubiquitous, they show up in people's dreams, they show up in religious texts, |
| 1:20.3 | they show up in art all over the place. |
| 1:23.8 | But angels from a purely Jungian standpoint are symbolic figures that transmit unconscious content into consciousness. |
| 1:33.3 | They're often mediators when meaning has to cross a boundary that the ego can't cross by itself. |
| 1:40.3 | Their wings and luminosity express psyche's experience of thought and spirit as mobile, autonomous, and transpersonal. They belong to a psychic polarity rather than a kind of moral idealization, which often they fall into in our ideas. So they are necessary counter forces, and they confront |
| 2:03.8 | consciousness with what must be faced no matter how uncanny. So let's grab our own angels, such as they are, |
| 2:15.9 | and wade into the divine waters. |
| 2:19.3 | I love that. And for those of you who are on Instagram, Joseph, you mentioned angels in art. |
| 2:26.0 | I took the liberty of collecting many angel images on a recent trip that I took, and I welcome you to check out that post. I think I posted |
| 2:38.1 | 16 or 17 angel images. And by the way, if you want to take a guess about where any of those |
| 2:43.7 | were taken, I'll entertain your your guesses. It was more than one place in the same city, though. So. |
| 2:51.8 | Fun. But, but yes. I mean, and of course, angels are very cross-cultural. We think about them |
... |
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