Authors’ Note: This post is based on a presentation we, Judy McAllister and Mary Inglis, gave together during the Community Gathering 2025, where we had one hour to give a glimpse of what is a vast subject. We touched on how two presences that we talk about a lot in the Community, the Landscape Angel and the Angel of Findhorn, came into our history and conveyed our own personal understanding/perception/experience/observations.

We value knowing our history and knowing our origins so that we can honour that, respect it, and build on it, as we feel strongly that what we create needs to have some congruency with that founding impulse.

We both had the privilege of knowing all three of our Founders, and Judy in particular had the privilege of working very closely with Dorothy for about 20 years.

History and the Founding Impulse by Judy

Dorothy Maclean ©Findhorn Foundation

Dorothy in the office

The Beginning: Dorothy Maclean and the Pea Deva

It was always very important to Dorothy that people understood that she, Peter, and Eileen had worked together for ten years before they ever got to Findhorn. It was in those ten years that they trained their different ways of listening and how they learned to trust in each other’s ways of listening.

So it was, that when they arrived at the Findhorn Bay Caravan Park, jobless and homeless, and were trying to feed their families and themselves, they started a garden as a way of supplementing their diet. One day Dorothy’s morning meditation indicated that she had a job to do, and that job was to connect with the intelligence of nature. That everything had an ensouling intelligence, whether it was a bee or a stone or a plant or a flower, an ensouling intelligence behind that form, and that she was to find ways to harmonise with that.

To which her response was: “Don’t be ridiculous. Cabbages don’t have brains! How can they have intelligence?” However, because she had learned to trust that inner prompting, that inner wisdom, she started looking for ways to be able to do what was being suggested to her by her own inner Divinity.

A couple of weeks later, she felt herself in a stream of power. And in that stream, she felt like, “I can do anything here, even talk to plants.” She used a mechanism that she had used in other sorts of situations: “What do I know about? What plant do I know all about?” The pea was a plant that had been in her father’s garden. She had planted the seed; she’d seen the seedlings, experienced the blossom, picked and eaten the peas. It was her favourite vegetable.

So, she knew a lot about it, and she had love for this particular plant and also understood that love is a powerful bridge. She took everything that she knew about the plant and distilled it down into an essence, into a pearl, and sought, with love, to connect with that pearl in the same manner that she followed when she was connecting with her Divine Source.

She took a metaphorical deep breath and she was astonished when there was an immediate and clear response. And that was the message from the Deva of the Pea. Basically, it said it had been surprised to make contact with her. It wished that we humans went about our work the way that they went about their work, that is, without diversions, no sidestepping. And that if we did learn to do that, we could work together.

Landscape Angel Drawing by Brian Nobbs

Landscape Angel Drawing by Brian Nobbs

The Landscape Angel: The Mentor

Very shortly after making that first contact, Dorothy felt there was another presence that was somehow wider and present in the field or space she was connecting with. She began to engage with that, and she called that presence the Landscape Angel.

It became her mentor, her guide, her teacher, her companion, her friend over the next few years as she began to explore this connection with what eventually she came to call the devas.

It acted as her intermediary and introduced her to other aspects of those subtle worlds. At one point, it said that there was a queue backing up, that what was happening here in the garden was of such interest to those realms that they were queuing up to converse with this human being who was engaging with them.

Dorothy brought her unique gifts to these conversations – she was an extremely intelligent, very well-read, and very inquisitive human being. She had studied -many of the world’s religions and spiritual traditions. She was constantly in a space of inquiry and approached her engagement with these beings from a place of trust, but also from a place of curiosity and a willingness to explore and experiment.

The Angel of Findhorn: A Crossbreed Angel

Not long after she met the Landscape Angel, Dorothy began to have a sense of another presence, and she described it as like a “Sleeping Beauty” presence. It was there, and she could be aware of it, but she couldn’t engage or converse with it.

It was a few years before she was finally actually able to make direct contact with it. And when she did, she came to understand that this was a being in formation. It was a being that was being activated or awakened, somehow brought out of a dormant state and into an active one.

She had been told by the Landscape Angel that the human beings present were part of its awakening and that this was unusual as normally, Angels come into being purely from the spiritual realms. This Angel was different because it was being fed, to some degree, by human consciousness, as it was being formed and shaped.

The first time it communicated with Dorothy, it referred to itself as a “crossbreed angel”, a new kind of being, a kind of hybrid in the inner worlds, and that we humans were a part of its awakening.

Devas vs. Angels: Dorothy’s Understanding

Dorothy used the word “Deva” because she didn’t want to call them Angels when she first encountered them. Angels, for her, were “harps and haloes and wings and all that”, and that was not how she experienced the Devas or the Landscape Angel – she experienced them as formless energy fields. She didn’t see anything; she didn’t hear anything; she just knew. So, she would often refer to her experiences as “telepathic”. She had to clothe the information with language.

In Dorothy’s understanding, Angels almost always have a human component (angels of cities, angels of countries, angels of organizations, Guardian angels, etc.), whereas the Devas are always connected to some form in the natural world. In her view that was not about a hierarchy, rather that there is differentiation.

Clarifying the Two Presences

At one point I went into the sanctuary and asked to really understand the difference between the Angel of Findhorn and the Landscape Angel. I very quickly was given two images.

  1. The Landscape Angel: The first image was of a being sitting in the ground, in the earth, with most of its legs embedded in the earth. In its lap, it had this big dome. Inside the dome were the things that I associated with our community, with the Findhorn Foundation, and our work further afield. The dome was filled with a kind of sparkly, glittery, viscous substance. I understood that along with the land and nature around us, the Landscape Angel was also somehow holding us, holding the purpose of this Centre.
  2. The Angel of Findhorn: Then into the image came another figure, kind of tall and elongated. I understood that to be the Angel of Findhorn. It took what looked like a large hose, stuck it into the dome, and at the other end of the hose was a spray attachment. It was drawing out from the dome all this sparkly, glittery energy and disseminating it across the planet. This took me right back to Dorothy’s very first message from the Angel of Findhorn, which was that it wished not to be held it in limitation, that it was an evolving presence, and that eventually its work would involve the four corners of the world.

This is how I understood the difference: The Landscape Angel is involved in what happens here, and the Angel of Findhorn is more interested in the Consciousness that we create that then gets disseminated.

This helped me to understand when people would ask Dorothy, “What’s the purpose of Findhorn? Why does Findhorn exist?” She would say: “We have two purposes.”

  1. To promote the idea that each and all of us can have a direct and personal relationship with the Divine – no intermediary required. That was the key element for her, that we could all do it directly.
  2. Because we can do this first one, we can then also have a direct and personal relationship with the forces of nature, with the intelligence of nature (not necessarily the forms, but the intelligence).
    And our work here was to promote and embed those ideas, those notions, into human consciousness.

The Collective Field of the Angel of Findhorn by Mary

As Dorothy said, in general Angels have a human component. So to follow up with that, my understanding is that they are engaged, not just with humans, but they engage whenever human beings are working together in some way. In those situations one or more Angels are connected with the collective field that those humans generate. They’re seeking to generate, support and nurture the wholeness, the spiritual well-being, the development of this collective field, as well as the humans within it.

The Angel as a Zygote

David Spangler shares that, when he first came to the Community in 1970, his sense was that the Angel of Findhorn was a simple presence, the equivalent of a zygote in the development of a human being.

A zygote is the single cell that’s formed when sperm and egg come together. At that point, it’s just one cell, which then starts to divide, subdivide, and become more complex. David says that Angels come fully blown, but they need time to develop, to become more complex. The initial zygote holds the patterning for the unique identity, work, and contribution that a particular human collective is effecting. And over time, they evolve and become more complex.

The Planetary Expansion

The Angel initially was very connected and still is here in this particular locality: this Community, these humans, this nature, this landscape. That’s a local aspect of the Angel that we can connect with.

But as more and more people have visited the Findhorn Foundation and Community, and more and more people have heard of it and connected with its energy, it has become a planetary angel, as there are now lines of connection with humans all around the world. This means that we can connect with it personally, or locally, or planetarily.

Emerging Angels

When I first came to Findhorn in 1973, the Angel of Findhorn was already quite a developed presence, well beyond the ‘birth’ phase. I was not present at its birth! I did, however, experience something like the birth of an Angel with the Transformation Game.

The Transformation Game Mary Inglis © Adriana Sjan Bijman Findhorn Foundation

Mary Inglis and Judy McAllister

In the late 1970s we were test playing the Game. We did a couple of short workshops and then for the first time we did what we then called “the Big Game” with 20 participants around a path laid out on the floor. (This later became the Planetary Game.) As we came out of that experience, those of us facilitating the process had a clear sense that there was a presence working with us that hadn’t been there before – or at least we hadn’t been aware of it.

That is the presence that we now call the Game Deva, a collective energy field that we have worked with since then.

As another example, a few years ago, just before the pandemic, I was doing a Game Facilitator training in Russia with our colleague there, and we were also training two new trainers. So the field and potential of the Game in Russia was expanding. At one point we all became aware again of another presence that was working with us. It was new, it had a similarity to the Game Deva, but it was something different as well. Like another family member. We realised it was a new aspect of the Game Deva that was working specifically with Russian-speaking territories.

There is another story which David tells about emerging Angels. Some years ago, one of his daughters wanted to go to McDonald’s. As they were waiting in line, he had the sense of the roof opening up and of three Angelic presences, huge, filling the place, and overlighting not just this particular McDonald’s store, but actually the McDonald’s corporation overall. It had Angels working with it because it was a human collective endeavour, and they were supporting it and fostering wholeness and sacredness.

The angels were surrounding a smaller, younger-looking being, and they said they were about to enter the world stage and take on a new engagement with humanity. A week later there was an announcement in the news that McDonald’s were opening a restaurant in Moscow, the first in Russia.

Conclusion

Angels are appearing everywhere. Each Angel has its own presence, its own self. We humans are also part of it; it’s a presence we can share. The more we can be in connection with an angelic energy and presence, the more its work of fostering wholeness and sacredness can become manifest.

The key to partnering with any non-physical presence is coming into resonance with it, coming into resonance with its function, its work, its energy.

The function of the Angel of Findhorn is to support and nurture the health and well-being and life of this community on physical, subtle, and spiritual dimensions. The more we are connected with this work, and actually doing it ourselves, the more the field can be deepened, even exponentially expanded.

Love and appreciation for this Community, blessings, and wishes for its well-being are part of what brings us into connection and alignment with the Angel.