Charleene's name for the music she brought through for each archangel in this 2023 series: the tones she heard as each angel's song, brought down a few octaves into the range of the bowls. It is a devotional, intuitive practice, not a measured frequency.

Because inspiration has always run ahead of explanation. People sang to the heavens long before anyone could measure a sound wave, and many great scientists describe the same order of things. Einstein, a lifelong violinist, told an interviewer in 1929, "If I were not a physicist, I would probably be a musician," and called the mysterious "the source of all true art and science." A 2008 study of the pastimes of Nobel laureates in the sciences (Root-Bernstein et al., Journal of Psychology of Science and Technology) found them almost three times as likely as typical scientists to practice an art or craft, and many times more likely to write, perform or make visual art. Charleene holds the angels in that spirit: as a language for inspiration shared across Jewish, Christian and Islamic traditions, and an invitation to listen before explaining. As she puts it, knowing precedes knowledge. The sessions make no scientific claim about angels; they make room for the feeling that so often comes first.

More than you might think. The word angel comes from the Greek angelos, "messenger," which translates the Hebrew mal'akh. In the 13th century, Thomas Aquinas gave angels one of history's most rigorous treatments in his Summa Theologiae: angels, he argued, grasp what they know all at once rather than reasoning step by step as we do, and can move from one place to another without passing through the space in between. In The Physics of Angels (1996), the theologian Matthew Fox and the biologist Rupert Sheldrake set Aquinas, Hildegard of Bingen and Dionysius the Areopagite in conversation with modern cosmology. Sheldrake asks whether the organizing fields he proposes in nature, which he calls morphic fields, might be what older traditions called angelic powers, and both ask whether consciousness reaches beyond the human. These are open questions, offered as questions. That is the spirit of Songs of the Angels: curiosity across traditions, held with an open hand.

No. Charleene draws on Jewish, Christian, Islamic and esoteric traditions and treats the archangels with respect and an open door. Come with your own beliefs, or simply for the music and the stillness.

You can. The series begins with Gabriel (September 8, 2023) and ends with Uriel (October 27, 2023), and later sessions add new elements, like the eighth energy center above the head that first appears with Raziel. Each one also stands on its own.

Sandalphon, the angel of music, is the most-watched of the eight. For protection and courage, choose Michael. For a light, joyful session, try Barachiel.