Excerpts from The Holy Guardian Angel: Exploring the Sacred Magick of Abramelin the Mage by Aaron Leitch
https://kheph777.tripod.com/art_HGA.html
The foundational mythos contained within Abramelin is similar to that of the Goetia and other medieval grimoires. The infernal spirits are said to be the Angels cast upon the earth after Lucifer’s failed rebellion. As part of the chastisement for their assault upon God’s Throne, they were destined to live among and serve the will of mankind.
The Guardian Angel, From Patron God to Genius
There are mentions of "Guardian Spirits" in written history as far back as ancient Babylon. There are even Sumerian royal seals that depict kings in the protective arms of their Patron Gods. In fact, it was likely in Mesopotamia that our modern concepts about the Holy Guardian Angels were born. However, the Guardian Spirit is not unique to Middle Eastern agricultural civilizations. In fact, a global exploration of tribal shamanic cultures reveals that the idea of the Guardian Spirit may be one of the oldest religious ideas on the planet.
In Shamanism, Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, Professor Eliade suggests that all categories of Shamans possess helper (familiar) and tutelary (guardian) spirits. The helper spirits are usually earth-bound creatures, at the direct command of the Shaman. The Guardians, on the other hand, tend to be celestial spirits, and are very often Messengers of Father Sky Himself.
In some cases, these tutelary spirits are seen as feminine (or masculine in the case of female Shamans)- and the Shaman is literally married to this spirit during his initiation. Afterward, it is through his new celestial spouse that the Shaman will work his miracles for the rest of the tribe. She- and not other Shamans- will teach him the secrets of magick and healing, and She will provide him with familiar spirits. (A dynamic that has not changed one bit in the Book of Abramelin.)
Not only is this entity a companion and teacher for the Shaman, but also a protector. It is because of his Guardian that the Shaman is spear and arrow proof, and why his endeavors are successful. When the Shaman ascends the heavens during his ecstatic trances, it is his Guardian or Spirit Wife who carries him aloft and shows him around. Even more importantly, it is She who will claim his soul at the time of his passing, to carry it home to the stars. For these reasons, it is imperative to develop a real working relationship with the Guardian, and to follow the instructions and lifestyle it dictates.
Compare this to the Abramelin Rite described above- which simply places the period of purification before the seven day ceremony. In Mathers’ version, the aspirant only has to endure six months of such isolation and ritual work. Yet, the original German seems to preserve a full year and a half of the same- making it even closer in spirit to the year-long Ocha process. Even the aspect of putting the Guardian to the head is not lost in Abramelin- because the aspirant, during the "convocation of the good spirits", is told to lay with his head at the foot of the Altar for a very long period of time. This Altar is where the Presence of the Angel has been drawn down for many preceding months, and the ritual-death posture taken at this point suggests the Angel is moving into the head/intellect of the aspirant.
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While the tribal Shaman was exclusive in his ability to marry Celestial Angels, the ancient Sumerians (and possibly the Egyptians) developed the idea that everyone has a personal Patron who can be appealed to in times of need. (This is likely due to the advance of astrology- which provided everyone with their own natal chart, and therefore their own governing Deities.)
In The Republic, Plato relates a rather detailed account of the function served by the Deity:
Upon preparing for re-incarnation, each soul must approach the Spinning Wheel of the Goddesses of Fate (Lachesis, Clotho and Atropos). In Plato’s view, the Wheel of Fate is composed of the Zodiac as its outer wheel, and the Planetary Spheres as its inner spokes. Therefore, the Fates who spin, measure, and cut the threads of life upon this Wheel are directly concerned with the influences of the stars upon each individual. First of all, the soul must approach Lachesis, who will give unto it a chosen Personal Deity to be its guide and protector during the next life. This Deity, then, will lead the soul to Clotho (Zodiac) and Atropos (Planets)- who will each establish the fate of the individual. During the physical incarnation of the soul, the Deity is silent and invisible to most humans. However, a select few (such as Socrates) have possessed the ability to commune and converse with their own personal Deity.
Of course, Plato meant all of this allegorically. He refers to the Personal Deity as the "Daemon", which might also be translated "Intelligence" or "Genius." All of these are terms that indicate human consciousness- something that preoccupied men like Plato and Plotinus. As we see in the above, these men saw the Genius as a director and manifestor of the astrological forces of one’s natal horoscope. The horoscope, in turn, was viewed as an indicator of the destiny and personality of the individual. Thus, the Genius was the embodiment of this destiny and personality- one’s Fate.
By the time we reach the Neoplatonism of the medieval era, and such Hermetic texts as Agrippa’s Three Books of Occult Philosophy, we begin to see a highly refined concept of the Guardian Genius. Agrippa goes into detail on the concept in Book III, chapters 20-22. He describes the Genius as we have seen in Plato’s Republic, and refers to it as the "Spirit of the Nativity." It descends "from the disposition of the world, and from the circuits of the stars which were powerful in one’s nativity." Agrippa discusses at length the necessity of seeking out one’s Genius via astrology, and doing everything possible to make one’s life sympathetic with its nature. He even gives detailed instructions for finding the name of this Angel using one’s own natal chart.
However, Agrippa also chose to present a more elaborate entity than Plato described. Holding to the threefold symbolism he uses throughout the Three Books, he postulates that there is a "Threefold Keeper of Man." The Genius of the Nativity is merely one of three Angels assigned to every human to guide and regulate their life. The Nativity Angel is the secondary keeper, followed by the "Angel of the Profession." This latter Angel changes each time you change professions. One’s career will advance if the Angel of the Profession is in sympathy with the Genius, and it will flounder if the Angel of the Profession is in conflict with the Genius.
However, Agrippa takes a major departure from all of this when describing the first (and presumably highest) Keeper of the Soul:
The Holy Daemon is one, according to the doctrine of the Egyptians, assigned to the rational soul, not from the stars or planets, but from a supernatural cause, from God Himself, the president of Daemons, being universal, above nature.
The rest of the description of the Holy Daemon fits well enough with Plato’s ideas. It directs and guides the life of the soul, and often goes unnoticed by the human it protects. It can be contacted via purification and living peaceably (I am reminded here of the six months described in Abramelin). Socrates is even mentioned as an example of one who has accomplished such a feat.
According to some teachings, every Gnostic soul (Spark) here on earth has an Angelic double in the Fullness. This double is a kind of lesser Aeon, to whom that spark of Divine Light belongs. Using the language of classical philosophy, the Gnostics regarded the soul as a feminine being. It was the promised Bride to the masculine Angel above, each one waiting anxiously for the (re-)Union. (In modern terms, we would recognize the soul as the "Self" and the Angelic double as the "Higher Self.")
All of these elements come together to form a kind of mystical drama. The separated lovers, the hostile captors, and the quest to find a way home again. Yet, there is one final player in this drama- the one player who most directly relates to our own exploration of the Holy Guardian Angel. All at once He is the hope of the lovers, the redeemer from the captors, and the guiding light homeward. He is called the Christos.
The Christos is a most fascinating figure. It is the embodiment of the consciousness- or Intelligence- of the Highest God. While its home is within the Fullness, it does not manifest naturally from any of the Aeons. Instead, the Christos arises (unborn) from the Highest Source Itself. It rules over the Aeons, and is in fact credited with teaching Them the necessity of Repose. Even the Angelic "Higher Selves" in the Pleroma are the children of the Christos and the Aeon called Wisdom (Sophia).
Most importantly, however, the Christos is the Redeemer. It is His job to journey into the imperfect created realm, awaken the soul and remind it of its home, and finally to lead the soul to its reunion in Heaven. Therefore, the Christos alone enjoys the special ability to cross at will the Great Barrier between the Fullness and the created world of the Archons.
Modern Hermeticism usually interprets the HGA as the Higher Self. Many ceremonies intended to establish conversation with the Guardian Angel are designed as Qabalistic invocations of the Supernals. By opening the Supernal Spheres within one’s own aura, it throws open a line of communication between the Neschemah and Ruach- allowing the Higher Self to speak to the Self. Because it is indeed the function of the HGA to transmit the True Will from the Higher to the rational soul, this "HGA as Supernals" formula works in a practical sense.
However, based on what we have learned previously, we know that the Higher Self- or Angelic Double- resides always in the Fullness in perfect Repose. Even the Qabalah preserves this- because the Supernals (Neschemah) do not cross the Great Barrier to enter the lower Spheres of the Tree. Meanwhile, the spiritual aspirant possesses a Divine Spark that belongs to the Higher Self, and the two long for reunification with one another.
Meanwhile, , it is just as common to see the HGA associated with the Solar Sphere of the Tree- called Tiphareth (Majesty). Here once again we see the common relationship assumed between the Guardian Angel and the Sun. Even the Abramelin Rite, especially with its death-rebirth ritual drama, might be classed as a Tipharethic initiation ceremony. Hermetic rituals for the HGA often focus upon Tiphareth, because this is the heart of the Ruach and the specific point where contact is made between the Higher Self and the rational soul. From this perspective, the HGA might seem to "live" in Tiphareth. To be more specific, however, the Solar Sphere is merely where one first encounters the HGA. Tiphareth represents within the Qabalah the mid-point between gross and spiritual, where man and Divine meet as one. It is merely one station in a longer journey.
As we can see, the concept of the HGA tends to be a bit slippery in Hermetic philosophy. Our predecessors like Crowley and Mathers tended to jump from one extreme to another when discussing the subject. In one place, the Guardian is described as a metaphor for the Higher Self, and in another the author insists the HGA is an objective Intelligence. Sometimes there is no distinction made between the Genius and the HGA. Other times the entire Guardian Angel concept is dumped into the sphere of Tiphareth and forgotten about entirely.
None of this is helped by the fact that no literature has ever definitively established the Guardian’s membership in any Angelic Order. The closest we have are references to the "Guardian Angels" (such as in Abramelin) or other inferences that the HGAs form an Order of Their own. It also seems that Plato and Agrippa hint at the same thing- as if the Guardian Angels are held in reserve somewhere awaiting assignment to human souls. Add to this the Guardian’s special relationship to the force of the Christos, and we are left with an entity that truly stands outside of the hierarchies of nature. He is under the authority of no Archangel- presumably answering to God alone. He is, in fact, a direct manifestation of the Divine Spark within each of us- the Shekinah (Presence of God).
The Holy Guardian Angel is a dynamic creature. He is the Redeemer who travels freely between Heaven and Earth to guide the soul to the place "which has been prepared." He is the Messenger bearing the news of the True Will from the Neschemah to the Ruach, and our prayers from the heart to the Supernal Fullness.
Excerpts from Aaron Leitch interview “O Ritual de Abramelin”
Marcelo Del Debbio O Ritual de Abramelin - Aaron Leitch
Oh, very misunderstood, that's what it is. For a long time here in the West, it was, and this was largely thanks to Aleister Crowley and McGregor Mathers kind of had a hand in this too, but they presented Abramelin as like the be all and end all, like no one should attempt Abramelin unless they are an adept magician, and once you attain this knowledge and conversation of the holy guardian angel, that is in the West what enlightenment is in the East, so once you've done Abramelin, now you're a guru, now you are a master. However, that's not what the book says, and if you read the book, Abramelin, who is writing to his son Lamech, states this is for beginners. I have taught your older brother the secrets of the Kabbalah, so because I can't teach those secrets to you, because Lamech was his second son, I'm going to give you this, so this is where you start, this is your initiation, you will not even states you will not be an adept after this, so it is the starting point. One thing that became clear to me as I studied and performed it at the same time, talking to Ashani Lele and getting input from him, he was telling me certain things. Now of course, I'm not an initiate, he couldn't tell me all the mysteries, but he looked at Abramelin and he said, yeah, we do this, we have a thing like this, it's called Ocha, and so essentially what he saw in Abramelin, and I fully agree with him by the way, is that Abramelin is a crowning ritual. Your guardian angel is your patron god; it is your, you have to have this put to your head, and part of the Abramelin process is putting the guardian angel to your head, so once you have been crowned with the guardian angel, now you have a teacher and now you have a guide on the path forward who will teach you all the mysteries and guide you to the right teachers and the right sources. It is a beginning, but here in the West, somewhere along the way, we lost that, we lost the head spirit concept, and it still exists in so many indigenous traditions, but your white Western traditions just got rid of an entire, it doesn't even appear in the Golden Dawn, there's no talk of a head spirit there, even when they talk about your higher and divine genius, that's considered to just be you on a higher level, there's no idea, there's no concept of an independent outside spirit that you have to be crowned with in order to protect you, to grant you spiritual authority to work magic and miracles through you, but Abramelin is what preserved that. Abramelin is the one single grimoire that is actually about how to be crowned with a head spirit, so it really is the first step, it is the initiation that should be taken really before anything else, because anything else you're going to do, you need the permission of and the guidance of and protection from your crown holy guardian angel in order to do those things, so I never go so far as to tell anyone that well if you don't do Abramelin then just throw everything else away, but I will say that I do think the concept has been neglected for a very long time, and I do believe that I would not have achieved what I have if I had not started there as well, so it is something I very strongly recommend, no matter what, no matter what one's opinion may be on it, I will always strongly recommend doing it first.
Okay, well when I performed it, I was still using a book that had been translated by McGregor Mathers from a French edition. There is an older original German edition that has been more recently discovered and translated into English, and so we've learned a lot more about it from since when I performed it, so when I performed it, it was presented as a six-month ritual, and it involves seclusion, dietary restrictions, and fasting, a lot of abstinence, basically you have to cut off as much as you can from the world around you, you can't go out into social events, and you can't travel, and there's also a lot of protocols, you can't touch anything dead, you can't eat anything that comes from a dead animal, so there's all of that kind of thing, but you have to do this for six months while you engage in an intense prayer every single day. It starts out slow, just twice a day, and then as you go further into it increases to three times a day. Now the German original, it was exactly the same except they did it for 18 months, so they do a full year and a half instead of just six months, and at the end of that, and this is kind of the reverse of what I learned about Ocha and Lukumi in Lukumi, you do a seven-day ritual where you're cut and the your crowned, and then you go into seclusion and fasting and you wear white for a year, this is the opposite, so for either six months or a year and a half, you do your seclusion and fasting and prayer, then there's the seven-day ritual, and during the first days of this ritual, you basically dress like you're going to your funeral and you lay in front of your altar with your head at the altar where you've been calling this angel down for six months, and you have to lay there for hours allowing the angel to move into your head, and after the angel is after your crowned, you get a day to talk to your angel as in so far as it can or will talk to you, and then for the final days, the final three days of the entire rite, you now with your angel on behind your back, you turn and you call the princes of hell, Lucifer, Satan, Leviathan, Belial, the big guys, and from each one of them with your angel's authority behind you, you have to get an oath from each one of them so that you are no longer subject to them. These entities, these chiefs of hell, they don't represent what fundamentalist Christianity says they do, they don't represent evil and everything bad, what they represent is nature, they represent the natural forces of the world which can be very dangerous, volcanoes, tsunamis, storms, sicknesses, these very natural things they're in charge of, so you get oaths from them that they are no longer in charge of you, you're in charge of them, and once you have oaths from them, that's the end of the ritual, you have to rest for another week, and after that you can actually begin putting the magic into practice with under the guidance of your guardian angel, and also I don't want to say you can immediately work with your spirits, in my case my angel made me wait for something like 10 years or more before she would let me work with the spirits, but eventually you'll work magic through your angel and you will work magic through the Catholic the underworld spirits as well, so that's what this, it's basically the method by which a prophet is made, once you're done with this, you're now a prophet, you have a direct phone line to God through your angel, and that angel will now be in charge of everything you do.
When you just put your head on your head in some traditions, you have blood from animals that you put in your hair or there's a sacrifice of a bird or the other end, yes to feed the crown, I mean it's the same word, just the crown, and then you get out, but you have now your own Orisha that is the one that will guide you, but it's the same concept, but that makes you officially a priest of the tradition.
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In their own way, they all three said the same thing. Chic Cicero said, well now that you've done it, you and the angel are now babies again, so don't expect much right now until both of you grow together. I went to Oshaneele, and he was the one that told me in the Ocha ritual that once they put the Orisha to your head, that's why you then go into the year of purification because the Orisha will sleep for that year, and then after that year, they'll feed it again and wake it up. Then my other friend, my personal friend, just did a tarot reading, and the tarot reading he got was that things are quiet now, but a great awakening is coming, and when this awakening happens, it's going to be magnificent. So having gotten the kind of the same answer, but in different ways from three entirely unconnected sources, I just put it all out of my head and decided to just keep doing the prayers. I would talk to her every day, if I was in the shower, if I was driving to work, just whatever, I would just talk to her, I would pray.
It was about a month later, maybe a month and a half, I attended a public salon ritual that a local neo-pagan group was putting on. They put it on at the local Unitarian church; this was still in Orlando when I lived there, that's where I did the operation. I decided to attend, and they told me, anyone who is a tarot reader, bring your deck, and we're going to bless your deck in the ritual, and then you can give readings afterwards, so I decided I'd take my deck and show up. I did, they brought us into the center of the ritual, lots of people there, this again is the late 90s, so neo-paganism was huge, especially in the states, so there were just a couple hundred people there, and they brought the readers into the center, called down this light on us and blessings, and then sent us off to go read, and that was the night she woke up. I could, I was literally just, people would come to the table, and I didn't even need the cards, I could just tell them about themselves and tell them what was going on, and if I did lay down cards, I could just tell their whole life story from just a few cards laying in front of me, and I ended up having the longest line of people wanting readings from me of anyone else that night because I was just boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, and I'd never experienced anything like that, and it was that was the night she woke up.
And like I said before, my whole life kind of went nuclear, and I found myself out of my apartment, girlfriend broke up, I did hold on to my job, but just barely, you know I was laying sick as a dog on my friend's couch, that all happened after she woke up, and it just tore through my life, and I started having situations where like I would smoke, and she would shove me aside, and I would find myself talking that it wasn't me talking, and I could actually make out what I was saying, but it was like I was standing down a long tunnel listening to my voice echoing to my own ears, and she would just say these really prophetic things to whoever she happened to be talking to, and then I would come back in, so and that's what it was like. So it wasn't like an angel stepped up in front of me and said, you know here I am, but it was more of a this spark had been planted in my head, the seed had been planted in my head, and the further I got away from completing it, and of course you don't complete it, you keep doing Abramelin for your whole life, I mean this behind me is my oratory, my Abramelin oratory, and so you will do it forever, and I just kept doing it, and it just grew. It was like at first it was like there was this alien presence that would shove me aside sometimes, but then the shoving aside got less and less forceful until she wouldn't shove me aside at all, and then the stark difference between her thoughts and mine, which really freaked out my friends by the way because I said some wacky stuff back then that was just her talking, but the difference between her thoughts and mine began to kind of blend a little bit, so it wasn't so alien anymore, and yeah, it was just this slow progress of growth and building this relationship with her, and anytime other than that, it's just been following her advice. If she teaches me something, if she directs me to go somewhere, I joined the Golden Dawn because she said go there, you know there's something there you need, go talk to those people, and she was right, so anytime I follow her advice, it's always spot on, and that's just what it's all about is that relationship, so don't, if you do ever mellow, don't expect fireworks at least not at first, they may come, and they may come in a way you're not expecting that you don't like very much, but it's going to grow, you start out as babies, and it grows.
Really do Abramelin is the most boring, monotonous thing you will ever do. You will sit in a room by yourself, you will read a Bible, you will make prayers two to three times a day, and I mean it is boring, it will, it is intended to be boring, it isn't that, it goes back to that sensory deprivation and stimulus deprivation, you know there isn't supposed to be anything exciting happening, so it'll actually break you. You'll get to a point where you're so bored you want to just tear your own hair out or go screaming naked out of the house or something because that's what is supposed to be happening. It's supposed to be breaking your old habits, breaking your social contacts, especially if they're bad social contacts, it's supposed to basically just remove you from the world as far as possible because, like I said, it's a myth that you have to be completely secluded, but you have to give up a lot, and it just wants you to break all of your way of life and all of your habitual patterns and get on this new course, this new path.
This all goes all the way back to Plato, and he wrote a story called the Myth of Er where he describes a soul going through the process of reincarnation, the person has died, now he's on the other side, and it goes on his journey to rebirth, and part of that journey is he meets the three Fates, and the three Fates' spinning wheel is the wheel of the zodiac, and he watches the Fates spin his thread, measure his thread, cut his thread at the point where he's going to die, and then weave it into the tapestry, and while they're doing this, they call an angel from the stars, from your birth chart, the angel that is in charge of what they wove in your tapestry, and that angel is your guardian angel.
Abramelin is different; Abramelin is more of a Gnostic text, it's written by a Jewish person, but the figure, whether he's real or mythical, Abramelin wrote that the master Abraham lived out in the Egyptian deserts, he was basically living out where the Gnostic sects were hiding out, and he was literally just a few miles from where the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered, so it's a very Gnostic influence text, and Abraham makes the point again and again in his work that the angel he's describing is not from the stars, it doesn't come from the created realm, it doesn't come from any of the celestial choirs, any of the planetary spheres, it doesn't answer to any of the archangels. The holy guardian angel, as described by the book of Abramelin, comes from the plurema, the highest realm, the spiritual realm, it's hardly separate from God himself. To put it in a very simple way that's easy to understand, the guardian angel is one in the same with the Holy Spirit, it is the Spiritus Sanctus, but it's your personalized version of the Holy Spirit, it is the child of Sophia and the Christos, it is their combined power, so this angel only answers to God himself, no archangel, it's not part of any hierarchy, so it's very different than getting in contact with your natal angel who rules your stars, he's actually a separate entity than your holy guardian angel.