Reichu: This is the face of the 3rd Angel, Sachiel (with a glaring inaccuracy I'll moan about later). As a symbol (including the "long-beaked" variation), it has come to represent the Angels as a whole, even though this visual motif recurs in very few. I don't know whether or not Sachiel's face is borrowed from actual religious iconography, although it does look an awful lot like a stylized owl face: disc-shaped, two large forward-facing eyes, “beak”.
What do owls have to do with anything? Well, Lilith, maybe. In some of the extremely convoluted folklore surrounding her, Lilith is a demon of the night and her patron animal, appropriately, the owl. The Hebrew word lilith even appears in Isaiah 34:14 from the Bible, where is it often translated as “screech-owl” or another “nocturnal animal that inhabits desolate places”. There is also the possibility that it refers to Lilith herself, a “female goddess known as a night demon who haunts the desolate places of Edom”.*
Of course, that could well be completely irrelevent. Oh, the perils of overinterpretation!!
* Note that the demon is the precursor of the "Lilith as first wife of Adam" who first appeared in the Alphabet of Ben-Sira. I'll attempt to add refs for all this crap eventually, but it's not high on the priority list.
thewayneiac: So,... "The owls are not what they seem"...?
