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In religion, myth, legend, and above all in the arts there is an imaginary space populated with messengers: It is the world of angels, of placeless mediators between heaven and earth. The study of angels (‘angelology’ ¹ ) is an epiphenomenon of monotheism: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have added a more or less extensive army of angels to the statuary isolation of their God; the constitutional invisibility, unrepresentability, and remoteness of God is therefore supplemented with the offer of something holy that is visible, representable, and close, which takes on an allegorical form in angels. Angels are not simply there, but rather they are active, as Augustine notes: ‘angelus enim officii nomen est, non natura’. ² ‘Angel’ is therefore the name of an office, a function. The Greek word ‘angelos’, the Hebrew word ‘malakh’, the Arabic word ‘malak’, and the Persian word ‘fereshteh’ all denote ‘ambassadors’. ³ The primary duty of angels is thus to serve as holy messengers. In addition – as Siegert points out – the Greek word ‘angeloi’ is derived from the ‘angaréion’, the attendants of the Persian relay post system. ⁴ As Horst Wenzel notes laconically, ‘The establishment of the postal system preceded the heavenly messenger.’ ⁵ In the word ‘angel’, therefore, a predictor becomes a name, which is the process of allegorical formation par excellence. The following considerations focus on the angel as an allegory for the office of the messenger and question whether this form can shed an interesting light on the mediality of the ‘messenger’s errand’.