Sandalphon: The Weaver of Prayers, Twin of Metatron, and the Transformed Prophet
Sandalphon by Florence Freeman — a sculpture at the Longfellow National Historic Site in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's 1857 poem "Sandalphon" brought this angel to wide literary attention, inspiring this portrait of the weaver of prayers. Of all the great angelic beings in the mystical traditions of Judaism and beyond, Sandalphon is perhaps the most quietly intimate — the one whose work is not the drama of cosmic warfare or the revelation of eschatological secrets, but the patient, tender, infinitely attentive act of listening to human prayer and carrying it upward. He stands at the lowest point of the celestial hierarchy while simultaneously reaching its highest — a being of extraordinary paradox: earthbound and transcendent, humble in function yet cosmic in stature, the transformer not of enemies into the defeated but of human longing into celestial music. Sandalphon is known in Jewish mystical tradition as the twin of Metatron : as Meta...
