What are your thoughts on doing the Abramelin operation just to the point of contact and conversation with your HGA and stopping there. I’m not sure I particularly want to do the rest from there on. Would it just be unfinished as completing it is the goal, or could that be the operation in itself?
Besides which, I rather think that the Bravery required to stand up to all the demons of Hell and command their obedience is the final test. KCHGA gives you that bravery, but you still have to go through with it otherwise you can’t actually use the Abramelin system thereafter.
In any event, just about every system of spiritual development I know – Abramelin, the Golden Dawn itself, Elus Cohens, and even the Individuation process in Jung’s analytical psychology – involving facing up to the “dark forces” and not banishing them but integrating them to play nicely with “higher authority” – whether that be the HGA, the Higher Self, the Repairer, or “the Self.” You can’t get away from it.
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Alex’ answer:
Hi, I actually did the Abramelin Operation during the lockdown in 2020, and subsequently wrote a book about it.
I know that all experiences are subjective to the practitioner, but I still think hearing about others experiences will still be very informative.
How did you prepare to do the ritual?
The superficial answer was that I didn’t. The lockdown began in March 2020, and Abramelin Season began a couple of weeks later on Easter Monday, 10th April. As I found myself obliged to work from home on full pay for the then foreseeable future, I decided pretty quickly “Fuck it, it’s now or never.” However, the more fuller answer is that when I did start Abramelin, I found that having practiced ceremonial magick and meditation in general for over twenty-five years before starting the operation proper proved invaluable to me. In that sense, I had been preparing for it for over a quarter of a century.
What did you experience when you summoned the demonic powers?
It felt nerve-wracking at the time. However, the Demons are conjured on the last three days of the Ritual: the HGA is invoked on the three days prior to that. It helped enormously that on the evening of the Third Day of Convocation of the Good Spirits I believe I actually experienced my Holy Guardian Angel manifesting, which meant I went into the subsequent demonic conjurations with confidence. Ultimately, the biggest demon which I conquered was my own fear of completing the ritual.
What was it like to summon the holy guardian angel?
Satisfying – not unlike deep, intense, meditation. Incidentally, I found that KCHGA doesn’t just happen suddenly at the very end of the operation, but starts to manifest during the course of the operation itself. The final Convocations of the Good Spirits is just the culmination of the thing.
Do you have any advice for those that are looking to perform the ritual themselves?
Yes, it’s actually a lot easier than you probably think. For the most part it consists of performing a simple ritual twice or three times a day every day for six months. What’s more, nowadays we live in an age when it is easier than ever to perform Abramelin: delicious vegetarian food is available from every supermarket, and technology, especially the internet, means that an Operand has more support for his/her efforts than at any time in the past.
The only really difficult part is in the final third, when you have to do the ritual three times a day – morning, noon, and night – the noon-day ritual really gets in the way of holding down a proper job, so ideally one ought to find a way to go on sabbatical for that time. The final seven days I booked off completely.
What does your HGA even do? What’s the point of connecting with it? Why would anybody even bother? If it’s for protection, why not just use protection magick? Anyways, super confused.
I remember when I first believed I made contact with my HGA.
Before then, I had been taking magick on faith. When the Angel appeared, it made me feel “ecstatic” in the literal sense. I realized now this was the first time where I had definitively experienced the presence of an angel.
This permanently and irrevocably altered the paradigm upon which I had framed my whole beliefs. In one moment I abandoned the psychological theory of magic, and instead believed that angels in particular and magic in general was in fact real. Before then I had been taking other people’s word for it, but now I knew.
As regards what you do with the HGA when you find it, the benefits are several. Communing with the HGA has by itself a benevolent healing effect. If this were not enough, I find that my HGA often gives me insights as to how to improve my spiritual practice. I do not share these with other people because I believe these are only meant for me and are only relevant to me, unless my HGA actually says they meant for other people, which is a rare event.
Then of course there is the Abramelin system which teaches that the HGA is necessary to summon and bind all the spirits by whom the practical effects of ceremonial magic are accomplished. moreover, the HGA enables one to innovate new forms of practical magic so that one is not bound to the magic of the past.
I’m not saying the two are connected, but… I thought I’d just post my appreciation of my HGA, and Oriens and all his servant spirits, who rule over the Squares of Chapter XXVIII. 😊
From Reddit: “How is a pagan supposes (sic) to do the abramelin?”
By the power of Metaphor.
You go into it assuming that “YHVH,” “Tzebaoth” and “Adonai” are all metaphors for whichever god(dess) that you do worship, so that when you invoke them you are really invoking your patron deity by another name.
Dion Fortune
Remember, Dion Fortune once said that all gods are but one God, and all goddesses are one Goddess. Indeed, the Hermetic Qabalah was formulated so that people of different religions could all share in one magical tradition: participants were actively expected to translate the, for example, Egyptian symbolism they encountered in a Golden Dawn ceremony into concepts that made sense to them in the context of their own religion, via the Qabalah.
The modern fancy that you have to stay within the ghetto of your own religion, no matter what, goes against the history of why the western magical tradition was created in the first place.
From Reddit: Are ceremonial magic rituals such as the Abramelin acceptable in Gnosticism?
One of the most popular rites used to invoke the Holy Guardian Angel as part of the Abramelin process – viz., The Bornless Ritual – is an actual Gnostic Ritual. Certain key words and phrases in the ritual only make sense if understood from a Gnostic context, the most obvious one I can think of being the line, “I am He, the grace of the world.”
The original Greek is η χάρις του αιώνος – “He Charis Ton Aionos” i.e. the Grace of the Aeon. Quite aside from the point being that the “world” referred to in the ritual is the Pleroma or spiritual world, not the material one, “Charis” is a title in Valentinian Gnosticism for the consort of the first aeon (the same word crops up throughout other systems of Gnosticism).
One Abramelin practitioner told me he believed the Holy Guardian Angel was a messenger from the Pleroma to the individual – like a “personal Logos,” if you will – but I digress.
For quite a while I have thought about doing the Abramelin ritual, but been hesitating because of the dreadful things I’ve read about the consequences of the ritual going wrong. Crowley wasn’t the same after he tried the ritual, some of his disciples, so I’ve read, even killed themselves after trying the ritual and failing. And then there’s that really spooky description in Dion Fortune’s Psychic Self Defense… Obviously this ritual is really powerful, done right or done wrong even.
How dangerous is it really? Any firsthand experiences?
I did not experience any of the horror stories, but then again, that is probably because I researched everything Crowley did, saw where he went wrong, and made a deliberate effort not to make his mistakes myself. For example, by only dealing with the word-squares within sacred space, so that the demons didn’t turn before time and cause havoc, as they apparently did with Crowley’s local butcher.
On the whole, my experience of Abramelin was overwhelmingly positive. Not only was I pleased with the way it ended, but I found the discipline of doing what is essentially a simple ritual two (or later, three) times a day every day for two hundred days rewarding in itself.
The final seven days was nerve-wracking, but it made me realise that the real key to success was overcoming my own fear.
Because I enjoyed Abramelin so much, I would encourage more people to give it a go, by saying it is worthwhile and is probably easier that you think.
BTW – you better hurry up if you want to do it, as the start of Abramelin season is coming up in just ten days time – MONDAY 10TH APRIL 2023 (Easter Monday).
This post originally referred to a question on Reddit which I thought so interesting I would share it here… but then the OP deleted his post a few days later! Any how, the context was a discussion about this Abramelin Square:
Alex’ answer:
This is Square number 2 from the third chapter of Book 3 of the Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage – “To make [any spirit] appear in the shape of any animal,” although Mathers in his translation speculated that this should be to make a spirit appear in human form.
Usually with such squares, at least one of the lines refers to the Spirit who is responsible for making that square work. Alternatively, the top-line gives an indication of the meaning of the square.
This is actually an unusual square for two reasons. “Lucifer” is the name of one of the Kings of Hell, and although he figures prominently in the Abramelin system, he is far to high up the hierarchy of Spirits to preside over an individual magic square.
Moreover, most of the words in the magic squares (the ones which are words are not arbitrary letters to make up the acrostic pattern) are Hebrew words written phonetically in German. “Lucifer” by contrast is not a Hebrew word, but a Latin one (i.e. “Light-Bearer”).
However, it so happens the name “Lucifer” in Hebrew is Helel, which is also the name of one of the servant spirits, which do rule over this particular magic square (the servant spirits of Oriens, Paimon, Ariton and Amaymon). What I believe has happened is that the magician who first channelled this square came into contact with the spirit Helel, who told him to create a square using its own name but translated into Latin, hence rather cheekily making it look like its more famous namesake.
“Mercury Retrograde holds no terrors… when all the unlucky stuff happens to other people.”
Mercury went Retrograde on December 29th 2022, and will station Direct again on January 18th 2023, in approximately three weeks time.
I find it supremely ironic that a no-mark of whom I had never heard before two days ago, chose the first day of Mercury going Retrograde to attack Greta Thunberg on social media. His reward consisted of not only being pilloried by the internet in general, and Ms Thunberg in particular, but his actions led to the Romanian Police detecting his presence in their country and arresting him. If you had doubts about the devastating power of Astrology, doubt no longer!
However, unless you really are a vile specimen of a human being, Mercury Retrograde need not necessarily be all bad: and indeed Hermeticism teaches us that by ascending to the right state of enlightened consciousness, we can survive the curveballs that this time of year throws at us. Furthermore, we ought to know that Mercury turns Retrograde around three times a year: thus because it happens with predictable reliability, we each can and ought to develop our own strategy or strategies for dealing with it.
As I wrote in my account of my own Abramelin Operation, 16th October 2020:
I had not paid much attention to the current stars and planets in the past few days, but I happened to remember that Mercury had just turned Retrograde (it had done so three days ago). It would not station direct until after I had finished the Operation. For one moment I felt uneasy that this had to happen now : would I have begun my Operation if I had realised ? But then I dismissed the thought. Given that it occurs three or four times a year, one inevitably cannot perform the Abramelin Operation without it turning Retrograde once during that time. Perhaps I had done well not to pay too much attention to the astrology of the situation, as otherwise I might have let superstitious dread cause me to miss this opportunity.
A lot of people fear this time of year, but as I discovered once after a supermarket cashier forgot to ring up a bottle of whisky in my shopping, Mercury Retrograde holds no terrors so long as all the unlucky stuff happens to other people. A sort of Schadenfreude view of the phenomenon. Besides which, I interpreted the message of Hermeticism to mean that ultimately one ought to develop oneself spiritually so that one can learn to stand apart from the influence of the planets, instead of remaining passively affected by them. This, I supposed, formed the whole rationale of the planetary magick of the Golden Dawn. Adverse astrological conditions might disquieten the great unwashed, but they should merely present a challenge to an Adept worth his or her salt.
Sumner (2022), p477 – see below for full bibliographic citation.
However: although practicing the Hexagram Rituals of the Golden Dawn, and by otherwise rising on the planes and raising one’s vibrational state does work, it only goes so far! The Curse of the Adept is that one has to continually deal with people who aren’t familiar with high Hermetic magic. E.g. as I recorded a few days later:
Later that morning : work continued awfully and threatened to spoil my day. Despite me being fastidiously careful, people tried to blame me for things which went wrong anyway. In other words, I had managed to transcend the effects of the Mercury Retrograde today, but my managers and co-workers had not, so I had to deal with their bullshit, nonetheless. In effect, I suffered from Mercury Retrograde by Proxy.
Ibid., p487.
In conclusion, my top tips for surviving Mercury Retrograde: DO
Spend time in meditation, and introspection. When a Planet is Retrograde, its energies are directed inwards. Hence although it is a bad time for outward expressions, it is a very good time for applying the power of Mercury to the inner life – through contemplation and cultivating one’s intuition.
Make plans for what you are going to achieve when Mercury stations Direct. The Retrograde period is a bad time for starting new ventures, however: it only lasts three weeks. Hence, this fact coupled with the idea of spending time on one’s inner life mentioned above means that it is an excellent time not for starting ventures, but for planning what you are going to start in the near future.
Try to remain calm: be compassionate and forgiving. Remind yourself that people who tick you off during this time are probably suffering themselves, and try to be as merciful towards them as you would want them to be towards you if you were in the same situation.
DO NOT
Start new ventures recklessly. Instead, if you can’t avoid putting it off, make an extra effort to make sure you have been especially careful. It would be foolish to say “never start something during a Mercury Retrograde” because that’s never entirely possible, so instead you should take this time to act cautiously.
Celebrate your return to social media by attacking the most popular climate change activist on the planet, disclosing public details when you are wanted by the police, or both.
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Abramelin thoughts
From Reddit:
I wouldn’t know – I completed the whole thing, KCHGA, demons, and all.
Besides which, I rather think that the Bravery required to stand up to all the demons of Hell and command their obedience is the final test. KCHGA gives you that bravery, but you still have to go through with it otherwise you can’t actually use the Abramelin system thereafter.
In any event, just about every system of spiritual development I know – Abramelin, the Golden Dawn itself, Elus Cohens, and even the Individuation process in Jung’s analytical psychology – involving facing up to the “dark forces” and not banishing them but integrating them to play nicely with “higher authority” – whether that be the HGA, the Higher Self, the Repairer, or “the Self.” You can’t get away from it.
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