A gloriously illustrated overview of angels across art, religion, and literature

Ineffable, invisible, inscrutable – angels are enduring creatures across Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and human experiences of the divine as mediated by spiritual emissaries are an aspect of almost every religious tradition. In popular culture, angels are often reduced to the most gauzy, sentimental, and saccharine of images – fat babies with wings and guardians with robes, halos, and harps. By contrast, in scripture whenever one of the heavenly choirs appears before a prophet or patriarch they first declare "Fear not!" for terror would be the most appropriate initial reaction to these otherworldly beings. Angels are often not what we'd expect, but it's precisely in that transcendent encounter that something of the strangeness of existence can be conveyed. Elysium: A Visual History of Angelology is a follow-up volume to Pandemonium: A Visual History of Demonology, and like that earlier title, this book will offer an account of the angelic hierarchies as they've been understood across centuries and cultures, of the individual personages like the archangels Michael, Gabriel, and Uriel who have marked the mythology of the West.

About the Author:

Ed Simon is staff writer for literary site The Millions and has contributed his characteristically engaging cultural criticism to almost every major American literary publication, including The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Paris Review Daily, The New Republic, and The Washington Post. With a PhD in English, Simon is an expert on the literature and religion of Renaissance Britain and early America, but he has developed a reputation among editors, critics, and readers for introducing complex subjects in an accessible manner. In fall 2021, Abrams Books released his latest book, Pandemonium: A Visual History of Demonology, which has since become the standard text on the subject for popular readers.

Pandemonium: The Illustrated History of Demonology presents — for the first time — Satan’s family tree, providing a history and analysis of his fellow fallen angels from Asmodeus to Ziminiar. Throughout the book, there are short entries on individual demons, but Pandemonium is more than just a visual encyclopedia. It also focuses on the influence of figures like Beelzebub, Azazel, Lilith, and Moloch on Western religion, literature, and art. Ranging from the earliest scriptural references to demons through the contemporary era, when the devils took on a subtler form, Pandemonium functions as a compendium of Lucifer’s subjects, from Dante’s The Divine Comedy to John Milton’s Paradise Lost, and all the points in between. Containing rarely-seen illustrations of very old treatises on demonology, as well as more well-known works by the great masters of Western painting, this book celebrates the art of hell like never before.

About the Author:

Ed Simon is a staff writer for The Millions, which the New York Times has called “the indispensable literary site." A widely published and prolific freelance writer who holds a PhD in English from Lehigh University, his work has appeared in most major American literary and journalistic sites. He is also the author of several published books, including Furnace of This World: Or, 36 Observations about Goodness and Printed in Utopia: The Renaissance's Radicalism, both released by Zero Books. In April of 2021 Belt Publishing will be releasing his short An Alternative History of Pittsburgh and Broadleaf Books will be releasing his co-edited anthology The God Beat: What Journalism Says about Faith and Why it Matters in June of 2021. He lives in Washington, D.C.

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A captivating artistic and philosophic exploration of humankind’s complex moral codes

A companion piece to Pandemonium: A Visual History of Demonology and Elysium: A Visual History of Angelology, Seven Sins and Seven Virtues will complete this moral trilogy and finally consider God’s most enigmatic of creations: None of the conundrums of metaphysics are as baroque as the motivations of the human soul. Unlike the devils condemned to perdition and the angels compelled to paradise, humans are divine creatures that house within them warring impulses.

Seven Sins and Seven Virtues will examine the literary, philosophical, theological, and most of all artistic expressions of the seven deadly sins and their respective seven cardinal virtues, drawing upon millennia of history to gather a compendium of humanity at its best and its worst. As a volume, the book will explore the Manichean nature of the human animal in all of its grandeur and canker, motivated by the faith that tales of damnation and salvation are the only stories that are ultimately worth telling.

About the Author

A staff writer for the Millions, which the New York Times calls the “indispensable literary site,” as well as the editor of Belt Magazine, Ed Simon has contributed his characteristically engaging cultural criticism to almost every major American literary publication, including the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Paris Review Daily, the New Republic, and the Washington Post. Simon’s articles have covered everything from the intersection of robotics and religion to the heretical origins of the sonnet, from Thomas Morton’s forgotten pagan settlement in colonial New England to a cultural history of the color black. Simon is the author of several books, including the top-selling An Alternative History of Pittsburgh, Pandemonium: A Visual History of Demonology, and, in fall 2023, Elysium: A Visual History of Angelology, which promises to be the standard text on the subject for popular readers.: