Los alados : Criaturas divinas y otros mensajeros

A poetic and personal essay whose gallery of winged protagonists—mythological, divine, and earthly—reminds us, in their various forms, of the powerful bond between human nature and the transcendence of the spiritual world. Since we first learned to paint, humans have depicted birds: in the prehistoric caves of Europe, in African burial sites, and in the frozen tombs of the Arctic. Birds have embodied gods and inspired shamans. They—and by extension, all winged mythological beings—have served as the link between our world and the sacred. Literature and art have employed winged creatures as poetic imagery, as metaphors for freedom, or as objects for the contemplation of pure beauty. Symbolically, these winged beings are messengers between the divine and the human—a connection that descends from spirit to flesh, or, conversely, one that helps us take flight from the earth and propels us toward transcendence. In this lyrical essay, the author follows an invisible thread—one already sensed by philosophers, anthropologists, artists, and poets—to map out, amidst dreamlike boundaries and mythological imagery, the landscape of the world of dreams and ideas: a universe of wings.