Peter Bruegel the Elder's painting The Fall of the Rebel Angels shows us there really is a force to subtraction: you subtract from an angel until you end up with a demon. If you download an image of the painting onto your computer, or better yet see it hanging in the Royal Museum of the Arts in Antwerp, you will notice how the rebel angels fall from heaven at the top left of the canvas to hell at the bottom right. Their wings are at first subtracted for the lesser wings of bats and dragons. Toward the earth they are reduced to moths, frogs, and other soft things. They are driven together by the golden angels of heaven armed with effulgent discs, lances, and swords, whose task it is to sanitize our world. You will see how the rebel angels continue to change their forms as they are driven into a sea, whose opening is an obscure drainpipe. They lose their legs, wings, all hope of surfacing and become fish, squid, spawn, and seeds of trees never to be planted. Underwater they continue to be subtracted from their former selves until they are at last incorporeal and see-through at the bottom.
from Submergence by J.M. Ledgard
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