Angels-HINDUISM

One religious tradition that has been of special importance for
researchers studying angels is Hinduism, which has its roots in Brahmanism,
the earliest historic religious tradition of the Indian subcontinent.
Lacking a central religious body empowered to judge what is or
is not proper belief and ritual, a complex variety of sects, movements,
and practices find their place under the umbrella of Hinduism. Traditionally,
only movements that explicitly rejected the nominal authority
of the Vedas (India’s most ancient layer of extant religious literature)
and refused to follow caste guidelines were regarded as outside
the fold (e.g., Sikhism, Jainism, and Buddhism). One trait of the
Hindu tradition is that earlier strands of spiritual expression such as
the Rig Veda and the Atharva Veda have been retained and absorbed
rather than discarded as new religious forms emerge. This practice
resulted in the transformation of the original vedic deities into angelic
devas of modern Hindu mythology.
Between 1500 and 1000 B.C., a group of aggressive pastoral peoples
from central Asia invaded India through the northern mountain
passes, destroyed whatever records might have remained from the
original civilization, and settled in northern India. The worldview of
these Aryan invaders has been preserved in the Rig Veda (ca.
1200–900 B.C.), a collection of 1,028 hymns to the Vedic deities. The
Vedic religious vision was quite different from what later became Hinduism.
In addition to other changes, the principal gods of the Vedic
pantheon were supplanted by new gods. However, because of the tendency
of Hinduism to keep earlier layers of its own tradition, the
Vedic gods were retained in the form of lower-level demigods, referred
to as devas.
As embodied in such classical mythological texts as the Puranas,
devas are far more complex beings than are Western angels. Nevertheless,
some devas occasionally performed messenger tasks for the higher
deities, making them comparable to angels in certain respects. Contemporary
studies of angels have particularly noted two types or classes
of devas, apsaras and gandharvas, as embodying certain angel traits.
Partially because of the association of some devas with the forces of
nature, the term deva was adopted by nineteenth-century Theosophy
for the class of spiritual beings they viewed as forming and controlling
the manifest world. Theosophists further asserted that the devas of the
East corresponded with the angels of the West. Thus, despite the wide
variance between traditional southern Asian devas and Western
angels, deva and angel are interchangeable terms in Theosophical circles,
as well as the larger metaphysical/New Age subculture influenced
by Theosophy.