The speech of the celestial angels abounds in the vowels A (ah, as in father), and U (as u in rule). One may often determine from the Hebrew vowels in a passage which words belong to the class of celestials and which to the spirituals — i.e., whether they involve good or truth. The former use more frequently the sounds of O and U, for they have a full tone, and also occur oftener in the Third Heaven. (Heaven and Hell 241; True Christian Religion 278;, Spiritual Experiences 5112, 5620, 5787)

239. The language of angels is also full of wisdom, since it flows from the deeper levels of their thought and their deeper thought is wisdom the way their deeper affection is love. Their love and wisdom unite in speech. As a result, it is so full of wisdom that they can in a single word express what we cannot say in a thousand words; and the concepts of their thinking can encompass things the like of which we cannot grasp, let alone articulate. This is why the things that have been heard and seen in heaven are called inexpressible, such as ear has never heard, nor eye seen.

[2] I have been granted knowledge of this through experience as well. At times I have been conveyed into the state in which angels are and have talked with them in that state. At such times I understood everything, but when I returned to my original state and therefore into the normal thought processes of physical consciousness and wanted to recall what I had heard, I could not. There were a thousand things that would not fit into natural ideas and were therefore inexpressible except by subtle shifts of heavenly light, and not at all, then, in human words.

[3] The individual ideas of angels that give rise to their words are also variations in heaven's light; and the affections that give rise to the sounds of the words are variations of heaven's warmth. This is because heaven's light is divine truth or wisdom and heaven's warmth is divine good or love (see above, 126-140), and angels receive their affection from divine love and their thought from divine wisdom. ¹

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241. Angels who live in the Lord's heavenly kingdom talk much the same way as angels who are citizens of the Lord's spiritual kingdom. However, heavenly angels talk from a deeper level of thought than spiritual angels do. Further, since heavenly angels are attuned to the good of love for the Lord, they talk from wisdom, while spiritual angels — being attuned to the good of thoughtfulness toward their neighbor (which in its essence is truth, see 215)-talk from intelligence. For wisdom comes from what is good and intelligence from what is true.

The speech of heavenly angels is like a gentle stream, soft and virtually unbroken, while the speech of spiritual angels is a little more resonant and crisp. Then too, the vowels U and O tend to predominate in the speech of heavenly angels, while in the speech of spiritual angels it is the vowels E and I. The vowels stand for the sound and in the sound there is the affection; for as already noted (236), the sound of angels' speech is responsive to their affection, and the articulations of the sound, or the words, correspond to the individual ideas that stem from their affection. For this reason, the vowels do not belong to the language but to a raising of its words, by means of sounds, toward various affections according to the state of each individual. So in Hebrew the vowels are not written and are also pronounced variously. This enables angels to recognize what someone's quality is in respect to affection and love.

Further still, the language of heavenly angels lacks any hard consonants and rarely puts two consonants together without inserting a word that begins with a vowel. This is why the little word and is inserted so often in the Word, as can be determined by people who read the Word in Hebrew, in which language that word is soft and in either pronunciation is a vowel sound. We can also learn some of this from the vocabulary of the Hebrew Bible, since the words belong to either a heavenly or a spiritual category. That is, they involve either what is good or what is true, with the expressions involving what is good making ample use of the vowels U and O and to some extent A, and the expressions involving what is true making use of E and I.

Since affections are expressed primarily through sounds, words that use U and O are well loved in human language to express great matters like heaven and God. Musical sounds tend in this direction as they rise, when they are dealing with such matters, but not when they are dealing with lesser things. This is why the art of music is so adept at expressing various kinds of affection.