Written by David Caldwell · 14 June 2025

Are There Only Male Angels?

In 1905, long before he carved the presidents into Mount Rushmore, the American sculptor Gutzon Borglum stood before two of his own creations with a mallet in hand. He had just been told by the clergy of New York's Cathedral of St. John the Divine that the angels he had sculpted, radiant, winged, undeniably feminine, were unacceptable. The Bible, they argued, does not mention female angels. And so, in a dramatic act of protest or obedience (or both), Borglum destroyed his statues on the spot.

It was a moment that crystallised a centuries-old tension between art and doctrine, beauty and orthodoxy, image and scripture. And it raised a question few had ever thought to ask:

Were angels ever allowed to be women?

To answer that, we must look back, not to Bethlehem or Galilee, but to the temples of Rome and the hills of Greece. Before angels were angels, they looked suspiciously like goddesses. The classical world was full of winged female figures: Nike to the Greeks, Victoria to the Romans. These were not messengers but personifications of triumph, divine, winged, female, and everywhere, on coins, temples, and triumphal arches.

One of the most prominent cults in ancient Rome was that of Victoria. Her temple on the Palatine Hill, established around 294 BCE, stood at the heart of Roman political and religious life. Her image, winged, standing on a globe, holding a laurel wreath, became one of the most recognisable symbols of Roman imperial ideology. Coins minted under emperors from Augustus to Constantine bore her likeness, reinforcing Rome’s divine right to rule.

The temple of Victoria did not just house ritual. It also held the spoils of conquest: treasures looted from defeated peoples, artworks seized from foreign cities, and weapons taken from Rome's enemies. It was a visual archive of power, a sacred treasury where victory was not just honoured but displayed. In this, it functioned much like the British Museum would centuries later, where the Elgin Marbles and other imperial trophies were installed not only as cultural artefacts but as evidence of dominance. Both institutions made political theology tangible. The goddess of victory presided over the material proof of empire.

When Christianity emerged and slowly became the dominant faith of the Roman Empire, it did not begin with a clean visual slate. Artists of the fourth and fifth centuries borrowed familiar classical forms to represent unfamiliar theological ideas. Victory became angel. The globe or laurel wreath was swapped for a cross or scroll. But the wings remained.

Still, the early Church was cautious. Angels in scripture are always male or genderless: Gabriel, Michael, the two men in white at Christ’s tomb. In the earliest Christian art, angels are wingless and indistinct from saints: young men in togas, often without halos.

The frescoes in the Roman catacombs show a Christian community still fluid in visual language, unburdened by rigid dogma. Wings only appear around the late fourth century, and even then, they were symbolic, not anatomical, a visual shorthand for divinity, not feathers of flight.

Augustine of Hippo famously wrote that "angel" is not a nature but an office, meaning a role, not a species. "If you seek the name of their nature, it is spirit; if you seek the name of their office, it is angel." Later thinkers like Dionysius the Areopagite and Thomas Aquinas expanded on this, constructing elaborate celestial hierarchies and theological functions. This movement toward doctrinal precision gradually distanced angels from their more fluid classical roots.

A key visual turning point is the sarcophagus of Junius Bassus (359 CE), which contains some of the earliest surviving Christian reliefs showing winged figures in recognisably angelic roles. These artworks stand at the crossroads of pagan Roman and early Christian imagery.

As literacy declined after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, visual language became paramount. Churches needed art that could convey doctrine to the illiterate. Halos and wings became essential visual cues, a sacred grammar ensuring that even the uneducated could recognise divine messengers.

In Byzantium, angels began to appear more androgynous, often modelled, scholars believe, on imperial court eunuchs: silk-robed, clean-shaven, fine-featured, and powerful. These were men who existed in a liminal space between genders, making them ideal models for divine beings who stood between heaven and earth.

Yet a fear persisted: that a winged female figure might still resemble pagan Victory. For over a millennium, angels remained resolutely male, at least in official theology and church-sanctioned art.

But Victory never truly disappeared. Statues of her lingered in public spaces, museums, and monuments. Even into the 19th and 20th centuries, war memorials often featured figures that were, in all but name, the Roman goddess Victoria. The winged figure atop the Basingstoke war memorial, clutching a laurel wreath, is unmistakably her.

Then came the Victorian era, a period that reimagined death, beauty, and the afterlife through a lens of sentimentality and romanticism. In this cultural climate, the image of the angel, once a powerful male messenger, was recast as a gentle, feminine guardian. Graveyards filled with white marble angels with flowing hair, soft features, and feathered wings. These were comforters, mourners, protectors, not the fiery warriors of scripture.

The female angel, as we know her today, is largely a Victorian invention.

The Pre-Raphaelite and Arts and Crafts movements embraced this transformation, drawing on classical and medieval imagery to craft new spiritual icons. These angels, often inspired by muses, lovers, or lost children, reflected 19th-century ideals of purity, sorrow, and grace, rather than biblical accuracy.

And it is here that the return of Victory becomes unmistakable. As the British Empire reached its zenith, it sought symbols not from the Gospels, but from Rome. The Christian creed, with its meekness and humility, could not fully legitimise imperial conquest. So Britain reached back to a time when power was its own virtue and re-appropriated classical symbols.

Victoria, once a Roman goddess, now lent her name to a queen. She became not just a monarch but a living emblem of divine triumph.

Victoria was a political goddess who embodied Rome’s imperial power and right to rule, much like Britannia would later represent Victorian England’s mastery of the seas and empire. The association was made all the more potent by Queen Victoria herself, whose name revived the classical ideal of divine victory at the height of British imperial ambition.

The British Empire, aware of Christianity’s limitations as an imperial creed, created a civil religion in which Britannia and Victory served as symbolic overseers of conquest. Their roots were ancient, their message unmistakably modern.

A striking anecdote from Exeter Cathedral captures this entanglement perfectly: a Roman coin of Nero, bearing the figure of winged Victory, was discovered embedded in the cathedral spire. A pagan goddess, quite literally forming the pinnacle of a Christian house of worship.

And finally, a playful yet revealing moment in church history: when Pope Gregory I saw pale-skinned English slaves in the Roman marketplace, he reportedly remarked, "Non Angli, sed angeli", not Angles but angels, so beautiful were their features. It was a pun that helped inspire the Christianisation of Britain, but also a reminder of how easily beauty, power, and divine identity become entangled.

The irony? Today, most people picture angels as female. The visual language has overtaken the theological one. But the memory of Borglum’s destroyed sculpture reminds us how fiercely we once fought over who was allowed to wear wings.

Perhaps those who see and speak to female angels are not encountering messengers of the Christian God at all, but unknowingly reviving ancient goddesses. For angels need no worship, but goddesses thrive on it. And not all goddesses are gentle. Some, like Hera, remembered every insult. Others, like Inanna, descended into the underworld not for salvation but for power. To call upon them unknowingly is to stir forces older than scripture, forces that once shaped empires, demanded offerings, and punished those who forgot their names.