I love me some HGA talk!

Acher’s recent publication of his initial research on the origins of the HGA has sparked more discussion on one of my favorite topics. You’d better not go Gordon and be all, ““meh, I’ll catch it next time around. Might have something new to say then.”

This is important to you personally because you’ve been fed a line of total bullshit about the HGA all your occult life, and if you’re going to understand it and be able to work with it the way god intended, you’d damned well better be reprogramming yourself by reading these discussions when they come up.

I’ll try to keep it entertaining, and interesting though, I know how you are.*

So Rose wrote a post today about the HGA and her take on it. She expressed concern about potential blogosphere backlash for expressing her belief that the published rites and rituals aren’t required to gain K&CHGA, and I feel her pain.**

Rose is right on when she says the HGA is there from birth, it says
so clearly in the Abramelin manuscripts. Check Mathers and Dehn, if you
don’t believe me. See Chapter thirteen of the Mathers version,
it’s online and handy so I can look it up. Look at what happens on the
7th day, what he tells you about your life with him that you’ve never
known. Couldn’t happen unless Rose is spot on accurate about the spirit
being there all the time from birth.

It’s there working with you and for you whether you know
it or not. All the rite provides is conscious interaction with it, and
the ability to see it.

Rose expresses her thoughts on the relationship between trauma and spiritual experiences, gifts, and insights, and how sometimes they can serve to kick off the ability to see, hear, and interact with spirits. I think that’s not only accurate, but a key insight into understanding what actually goes on in these HGA rites anyway.

The rites and rituals that are designed to put you into contact with the HGA in modern times are functionally designed to induce a traumatic event so intense that you are able to see, hear, and interact with your HGA. You spend your six months or eighteen months ritually creating the circumstances necessary to instigate a psychic breakdown, to create a reframing experience that allows your whole perception to be altered. You use special oils and perfumes to put your brain into a particular state, and there’s some speculation that you get high to help. Aaron Leitch very carefully doesn’t mention that he uses Marijuana as a psychoreagent in his Work with the Holy Guardian Angel. He also carefully doesn’t show it in a picture on his blog.

In my experience with gaining K&CHGA, I started doing Liber Samekh, minus the GD line dancing, and two weeks later I had the experience that indicates contact has been made. Two weeks! That’s not 6 months, or 18 months. It’s not even close!

But it happened after 2 fucking years of spiritual hell. I’d been pure fundy, pouring my heart out to god, literally in tears in his presence on a daily basis looking for answers, help, peace, succor. I was on an ecstatic mystic’s journey to the heart of the Sun for years before hearing a still small voice telling me to go back to the occult and looking at it through the eyes of a born again new creation in Christ. The framework was laid, the pump was primed, I’d spent years enflamed in prayer, systematically destroying my psyche through the well-intended but spiritually bereft advice books of the modern Charismatic-Puritan movement in the Church. I mean, I was basically living like a Plymouth Brother, Crowley’s home religion. It makes perfect sense that his rite would work for me, when you think about it.

But the trauma is the key. You’ve got to get yourself all hyped up, all psyched out, and maintain it for a while to hit that moment of breakthrough when you smell that smell and say, blessed is the day of the Lord! It’s not a once-and-done kind of thing. It’s a full on rebirth experience that drives you a little bit crazy to make you a little bit more sane.

It’s just exactly like the Shamanic Death Trip, at least as far as I understand it. The shamans were ritually buried and hopped up on psychoactive drugs to get through to the spirit world, receive a vision and an ally or two, and return able to cross the bridge between the realms to fight spiritual battles for their community. I’m sure that’s not exactly historically accurate, but that’s basically the understanding I have. The Masons recreate the Death Trip as part of their initiations too. You go through something traumatic.

But here’s the thing. These rites and rituals create specifically designed traumatic experiences. Think about it. How did they figure out they needed to artificially create trauma to establish conscious communion with the spirit realm? From real life trauma.

They saw that when someone got hit in the head and started seeing spirits and speaking in tongues. Yeah, maybe it was brain damage sometimes, but other times the weird shit they said came true. Putting a leaf in a fire under the right stars and mumbling gibberish made the hunts more successful, and when that guy died, they had to figure out how to replace him. Physical trauma didn’t always work, but drugs and ritual death seemed to, and next thing you know, a few thousand years later, we have Abramelin and Liber Samekh.

They’re artificial recreations of real life trauma events, modified, toned down, but geared towards the same result. And anyone who’s been through attaining K&CHGA will tell you, it comes after pain. Solar initiations are represented by the Cross for a reason in Rosicrucian symbolism. Death and resurrection, man. Death hurts, even when it’s temporary.

Meanwhile, in the rest of the world, the things that caused trauma didn’t go away. As technology improved and populations grew and spread, new forms of psychic-vision-producing trauma evolved. Severe emotional and physical trauma ranks pretty high up there in the list of things that bring visions of angels to this very day. In a lot of ways, they’re actually the more natural method of obtaining K&CHGA. Less predictable, less reliable, but still effective in creating re-framing experiences that allow you to see things that no one else can see.

So I’m with Rose. I think the rites and ceremonies are a much more preferable way to induce the trauma that results in the Vision and the Voice, but they aren’t the only way at all.

* Tiny little attention span, pressed for time, and hungry for something fun and useful at the same time. Like me.

** I don’t write up a whole lot of stuff that goes on in my practice
and life because the results of the Traditional Grimoire and
Aggrippinian Neo-Platonic Hermetic Magical Practice(TM) looks a
WHOOOOOLE lot like the kind of stuff I’ve made fun of when it happens to
New Agers and Paranormal Investigators. And we’re supposed to be a
dignified bunch, who are above that kind of poppycock. No pre-17th
century documentation? It’s bullshit!

That’s the law.

I
realized I had boxed myself into a prison of my own creation recently
when I found myself jealous of Ian for being a neopagan who can just
make shit up and get away with it, as long as it works. I make shit up
all the time, and it works great, but I don’t write it up or talk about
it or sell it from the blog because it’s damned hokey, and I’ve got an
image to maintain or some shit.

Yeah, fuck all that shit.

When someone tries to figure out the history of the Holy Guardian Angel in the Western Occult traditions, it’s a lot like trying to excavate the Valley of Kings with a spoon. I tried it a few times over the years, but I never felt confident going back any further than Plato’s Timaeus dialogue. I really felt completely out of my depth going back any further.

Fr. Acher started looking into it after some comments we exchanged about the HGA and Evil Daimon on this post back a few months ago. After much research, he’s begun to publish his results. If you’re an HGA aficionado, it’s a very good read so far. I’m looking forward to future installments.

I had a little trouble figuring out that you click the morphing image to get to the articles at first, so here’s some short cut links for technofeebs like myself:

• Preface/Overview
• Introduction
• Part 1: Among the Chaldeans

A couple commenters on the Family Harmonics post asked some specific questions that I thought deserved their own post.

Mike Sententia writes:

Hi RO, love seeing case studies like this. Could you comment on the results of this magick? Also, I’m curious, how much does your family know of your magick, of this work in particular, and did they participate?

The results have been consistent with the kinds of results I’ve seen over the years when I conjured a spirit directly to help with an issue. The issue gets resolved, and the stress goes away. For example, my son was having issues with stress from his school work load, and a general request for assistance to all the spirits represented brought that right down to manageable levels.

The results aren’t necessarily any different than any other method of involving the Spirits of the spheres in your life, it’s just easier to light a candle and say a quick prayer in a stressful time. There’s a passive aid that’s being applied by the spirits as well, all the time, but how do you quantify that? There’s more cheer, less jeer. Clearer communications, more self-control under pressure. People are nicer and happier, it seems. But it’s not a make it all perfect all the time rite. It just makes things better, and it’s more convenient to tap into the influence of the spirits represented.

My family is aware that I do magic, I don’t hide it from them, but I raise my kids Catholic and explain it’s something I do in addition to the core faith that is not necessary for everyone else to do. I don’t include them in the rites, they’re kids. Their brains aren’t finished growing yet. I prefer to lay a foundation in the core tenets of the Faith, and then provide advanced lessons as they get older and start showing signs of interest, or a calling. I’m not going to force my weird on them. They’ll have to get their own weird.

Anonymous writes:

Great post! Are the consecrations general or do they differ according to the seal? Can you post an example? It would be appreciated.

The consecrations I used were based on the type of rite that I always do, modeled on the Art of Drawing Spirits into Crystals. I conjured each of the archangels of the planets in the appropriate hour of the appropriate day, and asked them to bring their influence and guidance of the powers they represent to benefit the individual members of the family in their daily lives, and the unit as a whole as we make our way from cradle to grave, and beyond.

The rites recorded in the Gates series of ebooks would be appropriate.

Running a household is a complicated thing. I have to manage the budget, child development and education, extracurricular activities, transportation, communications, facilities maintenance, interior decorations, landscaping, sanitation, supply logistics, laundering, entertainment, and weekly menus. My spouse “manages” most of that stuff. I make sure the money’s there to pay for it all, and do the husband-father things as necessary.

But it’s an intricate and complex thing with many moving parts on complicated schedules, and keeping it all running smoothly and harmoniously is a real chore, and by the time it’s warm enough, we’re ready to hit the beach and unwind, work out frustrations wrestling with the sea, and recharge the brain’s supply of negative ions produced by the pounding waves of the never-ending tide upon the land.

As Priest-King/God-Emperor of the Opus Estates, I consider it my job to make sure the spiritual forces that are manifesting in all these aspects of my life are working together in harmony. I use magic to help keep things running smoothly, and to deal with interruptions in the flow of processes before they can propagate across all the systems, bringing production and operations to a complete stand-still.

My first attempts at family support magic focused on Working specifically with Anael of Venus. Venus gathers together people around a common cause or idea. Family is an idea, a concept that unifies the Opus household every bit as much as the genetic ties. It’s crucial that all the members of a family have a shared idea of what being a member of the family means. Everyone will have their own take and interpretation on that core idea, but they should all be harmonious.

So I started by drawing the seal of Anael on the back of a picture of our family, and performing a conjuration and consecration of the photo as a talisman to bring harmony. And it worked out really well. Ongoing conflicts and resentments were resolved, and the whole system began to run more smoothly. The family was more expressive of compassion in the form of service to one another, for love’s sake. It sounds a lot cooler when I write it out like that. No one seemed to be conscious of the effects, not even me for a while. The kids quit the constant bickering, my spouse and I got along better for a while, and everyone helped each other out more with a lot less complaining. I realized one day that things had gotten better, and I was happy with the results.

But then over time, I realized that it’s not just our family that affects us. Outside forces have a lot of influence. Social groups, school politics, the global economy, traffic patterns, and communications issues impacted us all the time. We dealt with it better than some people, more harmoniously as a group, but we still had to deal with external disruptions to our plans and processes.

So I expanded the talisman. The issues that come up in everyone’s life run the spectrum of planetary forces. Every sphere on the Chain of Manifestation, from Saturn to the elemental kingdoms has a role in all the processes of our daily lives.

To get all these forces harmonized, I drew an image based on my altar glyph on the back of a family photo, and took the time to consecrate it in each sphere, the same way I performed the Gates Rites in each sphere to aid in Kingdom Management. I wish I could say that we’ve never had any problems again, but that’s just not how life works. It doesn’t make everything perfect all the time, but it does make it a lot easier to get the spirits working together and in harmony to resolve the issues when they arise. I go to the framed photo with the seals on the back and burn the appropriate incense, light a consecrated candle, and ask the appropriate spirits to aid in the resolution of whatever situation has come up.

I added the names and seals of the planetary archangels to the outer sphere, didn’t mention the elements, and eliminated the names of the demonic kings offensive in the elements in the center circle when I sketched it out on the back of the photo, but here’s the basic layout of the Altar Glyph:

I started putting seals of the archangels on the backs of photos of people to help my sister in law deal with a nephesh she had acquired. It worked so well I used it on a client’s family in dealing with some spirits that were plaguing their children. The key is not the seal drawn on the back of the photo as much as it is the consecration rite that draws the forces of the planets down into the sphere of the people pictured. The seal helps a great deal in creating the physical link between the spirit and the subject of the rite, but the seal alone won’t do much.

Below is an image of the names of the spirits and their seals:

Over on the Spiritus Mundi yahoo group, the topic of the dangers of magic has reared its fearsome head. It started with an Algol talisman, which Chris Warnock discusses in this post. To summarize, someone used a rootworker’s technique with a traditional astrological talisman, and it backfired. They made an Algol talisman to ward off any magic worked against them, and then buried it where they ran into their main enemy the most. After this, they experienced a run of bad luck, and it was determined that the spirit of the talisman was upset because the magician had used the talisman wrong. (You’re supposed to wear the talisman, not bury it.)

The analysis of the problem seems legit to me. It passes the book-check (sources support that the use was altered) and it passes the common sense check. (Medusa can be a touchy spirit to work with. She’s got snakes for hair, you know.) And screwing around mixing up traditions and approaches can be dangerous. You get unwanted effects. You suffer maladies. You get ill, you lose your job, your relationship hits the rocks, your car breaks down, and your kids talk back, with intent.

This experience prompted a Palero on the list to point out that MAGIC IS NO JOKE! and that is why you follow the instructions. Magic is real. It does stuff. It’s not all pretend make believe that doesn’t really change anything but your feel-feels. Magic works. That’s important to remember.

John Michael Greer then wrote a post full of wisdom and common sense, exhorting people to follow the instructions we are given in traditional resources. He made an analogy between electronics and magic. You would follow the warnings and recommended techniques of an electrician when wiring a circuit, wouldn’t you? It’s your best bet to avoid electrocuting yourself or burning your house down. (I’m paraphrasing, except that last bit, that’s a direct quote.)

I agree with him. Speaking as someone who burned their house down using demon magic that went wrong, I have an informed opinion on this subject. You really can burn your house down using magic. My house fire was the result of a really poorly phrased statement of intent, though, not a poor technique. The technique worked great, honestly.

The statement was fucked. “Get me the money by any means necessary, just as long as no one in my family gets hurt.” That’s a TERRIBLE way to do magic. It (probably) wouldn’t matter if I’d said that to demons or angels, but the fact that the spirit I was Working with at the time happened to be from the lower spheres certainly didn’t help. Angels seem to have a higher perspective based on living at a bit more distance from the hands-on material world than Bune does, but that doesn’t mean they won’t burn your house down to get you an insurance check, and prove a particular point about your use of magic at the same time.

But whenever people start talking about how dangerous magic is, I feel compelled to say, yeah, it’s dangerous… but do it anyway! Burnt fingers are our primary teachers as we explore the books and figure out how it all works. There is no real life Hogwartz to attend. Some lodges may offer a curriculum that trains you in magical practice, but most are based on post-1899 magical theory. The only Order I know of that taught medieval alchemy and traditional Hermetics is pretty much defunct, and even they were open and honest about how they were experimenting and figuring out what the grimoires were all about on their own. They passed on the information that worked, and warnings about mistakes they made, but they were still front-line soldiers, pioneers exploring the wilderness with faulty maps and compasses that didn’t always point North.

Modern magicians interested in learning how to do the magic recorded in the Picatrix and Agrippa’s Three Books are going to, by necessity, have to explore and cover ground that hasn’t been covered in recent history. Even the most comprehensive and detailed grimoires have gaps. The context of some of the manuscripts we’ve received is lost to history, and we’re left to argue over whether all the spirits of a manuscript are called into Triangles of Art, or only the ones that specifically mention the Triangle.

Personally, I’ve never done anything with magic that messed up my life so badly that it couldn’t be fixed with magic. It’s dangerous, yes, but that’s what makes it an adventure. Have courage, be bold!

Just be rational about it. Heed the warnings of those who have been there and done that, follow the instructions.

But don’t be afraid to have fun.

[Edit: After seeing a couple of the comments so far, I want to make it clear up front in this post that I’m not intending this post as a criticism of Ian’s project, it’s an observation of my own hypocrisy.]

I’ve been following Ian Corrigan’s development of his “Court of Brigid” rites with a great deal of interest. He describes it as an “effort to develop a ritual spirit arte that applies the general principles of Euro-Grimoiric methods using the Druidic Order of Ritual and inside a pre-Neoplatonic, Indo-European mythic cosmos.“

I’ve got conflicting perspectives on the whole thing. Intellectually, it’s fascinating to see what he’s doing and to read his results. I’m very interested to see what happens when he gets to the conjurations of the spirits of the “Courts” he’s identified. In my opinion, the proof of his concept will be demonstrated in his results in that specific aspect of the rites.

But personally, I find the whole thing fundamentally distasteful. In the ’80s and ’90s, it was really popular to make up your own flavor of Wicca. Faery Wicca, Dancing with Dragons Wicca, Lord of the Rings Wicca, it didn’t matter what theme you picked, you just took the basic novice-grade GD-derived rites and substituted the God-Names and Elemental Representatives with whatever you wanted. As recently as 2008, Raven Grimassi published a book on how to make up your own Wiccan tradition. It’s a standard practice in Neopaganism, with roots going back to Gardner, as far as I know.

Ian’s up to the same old mischief, only he’s gotten rid of the GD stuff and went back further to the approaches of the grimoires. I’ll admit it, I’m a bit territorial when it comes to the grimoires, and the appropriation of techniques I happen to use by others. I see in his list of published books a lot of the techniques and approaches to magic explored by Jason Miller, Jake Stratton-Kent, and Aaron Leitch. I see a neopaganized version of the kinds of things I’ve been blogging about for the last six years, and I feel a bit used, and uncompensated. (That may be code for jealous, but I’m not entirely sure.)

I don’t know if my issues with the approach are based on anything valid or not though. We all adapt stuff to suit our needs and desires. I’m fascinated with Jake Stratton-Kent’s efforts to revitalize the Goetic traditions of the past and turn the Magical Revival into a living tradition in our culture. I see my own work with Hermetics to be an effort in that direction, with less emphasis on the roots of Goetia, but still focused on practicing a practical living tradition that helps people today using the magical techniques that have been around for at least the last 10,000 years.

We’re all creating new systems based on the old ones, to varying degrees, but never exactly as performed at any stage in history. We make adjustments, include pieces of different approaches according to our own personal intuition and input from our glorified spirit guides about what needs to go where. Frater Ashen is the most traditional magician I know and work with, and even he makes adaptations as he sees fit. His adaptations all come from traditional sources, and make sense, and look really good, but they are still adaptations.

Hell, I don’t think any two magicians have ever performed the exact same rite, honestly. There’s always variance.

But there’s something about neopagan adaptations that rubs me the wrong way, in the same way that the worst kinds of Chaos Magic rubs me the wrong way. It just has an air of fraudulence, an aroma of flatulence. The Court of Brigid? Really? What Bardic epic points to Brigid ever having a court of spirit assistants that were ever conjured and worked with the way a grimoire magician works with the rank and file of angels and demons? Wasn’t she a Warrior Queen or something? Boudica, the Celtic Warrior Princess? Trapped in a tower by an evil Fairy who used her hair for magical purposes, but it could never be cut with iron shears, and then one day she let an errant prince into her tower with her hair, and he raped her while she slept, and the twin babies were lost in a forest when the ravens ate their trail of breadcrumbs or something?

I’m not real sure what she did, but I’m pretty sure she never had a Court of Servant Spirits, or responded to any conjurations.

But at the same time, it’s a logical conclusion he’s made, Powerful Dead spirits who get worshiped after their death usually would, in theory, accumulate a gaggle of assistant spirits over time, as adherents and dedicants died and went on to whatever functions they might have in the afterlife. That’s how several of the pantheons in ATRs came into being, if I understand the process correctly.

And as far as mixing systems in our adaptations goes, I’ve included Orphic Hymns to the gods of the Planets in my planetary rites with Archangels, Intelligences and Spirits. It’s effective. It’s powerful. It’s an adaptation based on sound theory that has useful results.

So I just don’t really know what to think about the whole thing he’s got going on in the depths of that Mound he’s always going into. If he managed a visible manifestation that changed his world entirely, and demonstrated the 16 or so sub-spirits of the system were at least as potent as the saints of the Catholic tradition in meeting the needs of the incarnate, it would go a long way towards convincing me that he’s onto something real, something big, and something effective.

But ultimately, he doesn’t have to prove anything to me. He has to prove its effectiveness and applicability to no one but himself. Regardless, I’m watching what happens because I want to delve into some of the stuff Jake talks about in Geosophia, and I want to do it using the Modern Angelic Grimoire techniques, talk to the Heroes and Sibyls in a Crystal like God intended.

Apparently, my eBook page was acting up and the PayPal buttons
weren’t working. After hacking into the code, I discovered some missing
form fields. No idea how that happened. They were working fine up until a
month or so ago.

But it’s fixed. You can now order my stuff using both PayPal and Google Checkout, whichever you prefer.

If anyone runs into any problems purchasing eBooks, Red Work Courses, or any Applied Hermetics services, please let me know.

In my lifetime, the Moon will be colonized.

This is awesome. Ever since I was a child reading Science Fiction genre books, I’ve been watching the hard truths of reality overcome the aspirations of countless humans who took it for granted that some day we would be living on the Moon. I’m almost 40 now, and after the 90s and the first decade of the 21st century, I’d about given up on it. The last 20 years have seen some of the biggest boom times of our history, and even with all that money, we weren’t living on the Moon.

But at last, they’re starting to make the strides necessary to get us off the planet. It’s important to us as a species. The planet’s a temporary home, at best. And I don’t mean spiritually, though that’s true enough.

I don’t know how far we’ll get. We’ve got a lot of issues as a species that need to be worked out. What good is spreading the hatred and violence we lavish on one another to the stars going to do the universe at large? And who says we’re even smart enough to manage it?

The path of Hermetics that I follow leads to joining in the choirs of angels that live beyond the terrestrial sphere. It’s all about taking my place in the brotherhood of trans-material entities who travel freely between the planets. I focus my efforts in the spiritual realms, but I’m proud of my human brothers and sisters who are taking it to the material plane as well.