destroying angel

plural destroying angels

1. Any of a group of four deadly toxic mushrooms in the Amanita genus: Amanita bisporigera, Amanita ocreata, Amanita verna, and Amanita virosa.

   You might survive if you eat a destroying angel or death cap, but you’ll probably need a liver transplant.

   2015 November 6, Helen Macdonald, “Sex, Death and Mushrooms”, in The New York Times, →ISSN

   1 more example

   The doctors ran some tests and confirmed I'd eaten the destroying angel. I was the third person that year to be admitted after eating one. The two before me hadn't survived.

   2010 November 13, Richard Eshelman, Sophie Haydock, “Experience: I nearly died after eating wild mushrooms”, in The Guardian, →ISSN

   Synonyms: angel of death, death angel

2. biblicalIn the Hebrew Bible, an entity sent out by God on several occasions to punish opponents.

   He unleashed against them his hot anger, his wrath, indignation and hostility— a band of destroying angels.

   2011, Biblica, Holy Bible: New International Version, Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, →ISBN, 78:49

   3 more examples

   Again, I wonder with a sudden fear whether it is likely that our good old clergyman can be wrong, and Mr. and Miss Murdstone right, and that all the angels in Heaven can be destroying angels.

   1849 May – 1850 November, Charles Dickens, chapter 4, in The Personal History of David Copperfield, London: Bradbury & Evans, […], published 1850, →OCLC

   It was terrible, indeed; but so was death, the universal law. And even if the talk should wax still bolder, full of ominous silences and nods, and I should hear named in a whisper the Destroying Angels, how was a child to understand these mysteries.

   1885, Robert Louis Stevenson, Fanny Van de Grift Stevenson, “Story of the Destroying Angel”, in More New Arabian Nights: The Dynamiter, London: Longmans, Green, and Co., →OCLC, page 23

   Hundred-ton guns were toys compared with the micro-organic projectiles hurled from the laboratories, the messengers of death, the destroying angels that stalked through the empire of a billion souls.

   1914, Jack London, “The Unparalleled Invasion”, in The Strength of the Strong, New York: MacMillan