21st Century Mage: Bring the Divine Down to Earth
176
21st Century Mage: Bring the Divine Down to Earth
176Paperback
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Overview
Thought to be the simplest and most effective explanation of secret Western doctrine, The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage, a 15th century text, laid the foundation for the nineteenth century occult group, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and set young Aleister Crowley on his spiritual quest. This is the book that served as the cornerstone of Crowley's lifelong practice.
Newcomb's hip, nondenominational reinterpretation requires only openness to the universe and a yearning for understanding and transcendental knowledge. Describing himself as a skeptical and pragmatic mystic, Newcomb shows how drug abuse, sexual compulsion, overeating, fanaticism in all its permutations, are all misplaced yearnings for the "Knowledge and Conversation of Your Holy Guardian Angel."
Jason Newcomb combines ideas and exercises from writers through the ages with the Abramelin techniques he himself has used to lose weight and quit smoking.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781578632374 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Red Wheel/Weiser |
| Publication date: | 10/15/2002 |
| Pages: | 176 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.56(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
21st Century Mage
Bring the Divine Down to Earth
By Jason Augustus Newcomb
Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC
Copyright © 2002 Jason Augustus NewcombAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60925-701-9
CHAPTER 1
The Knowledge and Conversation of Your Holy Guardian Angel
This book is about a spiritual process that has been slowly developing for hundreds of years. This spiritual process is the inner purpose of the entire Western occult movement and is essentially a universal one known by many names: enlightenment, illumination, gnosis, samadhi, the oceanic experience, and cosmic awareness, to name a few. In truth, all spiritual paths lead to this same goal. I am exclusively interested in helping you achieve this goal. In this book, the goal is called the Knowledge and Conversation of your Holy Guardian Angel.
"The Knowledge and Conversation of your Holy Guardian Angel" is a rather strange phrase and you may wonder exactly why I insist on using it. Aleister Crowley originally coined the phrase, and no, I don't use it because I'm a big fan of his. I think it is extremely accurate and useful. Crowley defined the phrase in more than one way throughout his voluminous writings, and it's hard to tell exactly what he meant by it. So I'll just tell you what I mean by it.
* Knowledge: Intimate familiarity. In this context, I am using it to mean awareness of the reality of your Holy Guardian Angel.
* Conversation: The ability to communicate.
* Holy: Sacred, worthy of adoration.
* Guardian: Tutelary and protective.
* Angel: Spiritual Being. This being is not some shadowy reflection of your highest ideals; rather, you are a shadowy reflection of this being.
In other words, for me, "The Knowledge and Conversation of your Holy Guardian Angel" means quite simply the awareness of and ability to communicate with your highest spiritual being.
What Is the Holy Guardian Angel?
You may now be thinking that this Angel is just a metaphor, or you may still be holding on to the notion that a golden-winged being of light awaits you in some invisible realm. To tell the truth, directing your energy toward figuring out what an Angel really is will not bring you any closer to the Knowledge and Conversation. Having said that, let me make a few points of clarification.
You might hear the Holy Guardian Angel referred to as the Higher Self. This is not inaccurate, but it can be misleading. The Holy Guardian Angel is not you in any sense of your current concept of you. Many people think of their Higher Self as the best and most spiritual part of their personality. The Higher Self is their generosity, loving-kindness, intuitiveness, and so forth. None of this has anything to do with your Holy Guardian Angel. Your Holy Guardian Angel might encourage you to be generous, or may inspire loving-kindness, but it is not any part of your personality. It would be safe to consider it as a separate being, because it is so foreign that you may be unable to reconcile your Angel with your self, even though your Angel dwells in your own innermost center.
The reason for this is quite simple. You are not the product of your own being. You are currently an amalgam of family and cultural tendencies combined in a unique way, juxtaposed on top of a spiritual infinity. The real you is something of which you are, for the most part, unaware, although you may feel some faint cry of longing from this inner being as you wake up each morning to go, once again, to a job that you did not choose for love but rather for convenience, to work on projects that are not your own. This is certainly not to say that quitting your job is the key to spiritual unfolding. Spiritual unfolding takes place as you awaken to the karmic forces that have propelled you to where you are now and discover that you do not even know the real you.
Over the centuries, the Holy Guardian Angel has been called by hundreds of names, including the Logos, the Augoeides, the Genius, the Higher Self, the Inner God, Silent Watcher, Great Master, the Daemon, Adonai, Vishnu, Atman, The Great Person, and even the Qabalistic terms Neschamah, Chiah, or Yechidah. Abramelin the Mage and Aleister Crowley chose the name "Holy Guardian Angel." The name implies no particular theory of the universe, and it would be silly if not impossible to try to erect a cosmology around the name.
Don't confuse the Holy Guardian Angel with any aspects of your personality, for there is no direct relationship between any part of your personality and the Holy Guardian Angel. Your Holy Guardian Angel is not a human construct; it is beyond that. If you hear somebody talking about their Angel as an interdimensional being or that they are communicating with Atlantis through their Angel, they are talking about something other than the Holy Guardian Angel.
I want to share with you a really big secret: you already have the Knowledge and Conversation of your Holy Guardian Angel. You just don't know it. It's really strange, but once you experience this cosmic awareness, you realize that it's always been there. There is so much other stuff going on around you that it distracts you from the pure ecstacy of being that you're experiencing right now. The silent voice of your Holy Guardian Angel is always with you. It is not somewhere else in some distant, lofty, spiritual sphere. It is deep inside you. If you listen, truly listen, you can hear it beckoning even now. It is a soft voice, and you have to listen carefully. It is easy to mistake this voice for the many other voices inside your head. The way to tell that the voice is your Angel is that it will always be in favor of you, a quiet advocate. It is always encouraging you in and toward love.
These words from Aleister Crowley nicely sum up what the Holy Guardian Angel is: "The Angel is an actual Individual, with his own universe, exactly as man is.... He is not a mere abstraction, a selection from, and exaltation of, one's own favourite qualities.... He is something more than a man, possibly a being who has already passed through the stage of humanity, and his peculiarly intimate relationship with his client is that of friendship, of community, of brotherhood, or fatherhood."
Thou Shalt Have No False Holy Guardian Angels
There is a very popular "angel movement" going on in Western culture these days. Little "guardian angel" lapel pins, and workshops on "working with your angel guides" abound. One of the main reasons that I have written this book is to throw the floodlight of sanity upon this flim-flam that has been infecting the Western mind.
The main thing that I would like to get across on this subject is that each person has one Holy Guardian Angel, and only one. Many of the self-proclaimed angel experts these days assert that we each have many angel guides and we can work with them all and get just so much more angelic guidance that way. These "angels" certainly exist, and you can definitely work with myriad spirits, disembodied entities, totem animals, and archetypal figures. There is nothing wrong with doing this. In fact, it is quite useful in many ways. But these entities are not "guides." These entities are not yours. Most of them are unbalanced forces that are seeking to reach equilibrium through your perceptual system. Some of these entities exist inside of you and some outside of you. They are unconscious forces that you need in your life, forces that you are probably drawn toward or fascinated by, but you should not consider them your advisors.
Your Holy Guardian Angel is entirely different from these entities in every way. In essence, your Holy Guardian Angel is the center of your universe, the pivot point, the axis on which your consciousness revolves. To propose that there are many of these angels is to propose that we have more than one axis, more than one center of being. It is just not accurate. Your Holy Guardian Angel is the purveyor of your purpose in life, which is also singular. If you do this one thing—your purpose—you are unstoppable. If you try to do some other thing on the advice of some "angel spirit guides," disparate forces may eventually pull you to pieces.
Some people try to suppress all sorts of anger and despair beneath a love-and-light surface, which any psychologist will tell you, is unhealthy. There is a good reason why "New-Agers" are sometimes regarded as "spaced-out." By submitting to the power of unbalanced archetypes, people allow themselves to be vampirized. They ask the advice of the "blue angel" and then the "purple angel" and then the "lavender angel," and each one gives them differing and opposing instruction. They feel like they're becoming truly enlightened. On the contrary, these colorful guides are soaking up all the original and unique life-energy of these individuals.
One exception among the New Age literature is Edwin Steinbrecher's The Inner Guide Meditation. This book contains a method of contacting your "Inner Guide," a figure who is, in my experience, a personified symbol of your Holy Guardian Angel on the astral plane. The inner guide meditation is a simple way of contacting your Holy Guardian Angel through the subjective figure of an "Inner Guide." Using this system, you can speak with your inner guide and obtain advice and help on your spiritual path. The method is so lucid and useful that I recommend it highly to anyone looking for a truly easy and flexible technique. The inner guide meditation does have its limits, and may seem overly simplistic to anyone who is really steeped in the Western occult movement.
One of the most important things that I realized by using simple techniques such as Steinbrecher's is that your Holy Guardian Angel is always with you. You can have your Angel right this moment, if you want. The Angel is there, perched and waiting above and within you. You can speak now, and if you listen, you will hear an answer. Other voices may answer at the same time. Some of these other voices may say that you're being foolish, that there are no angels, and that this book is silly. Your angel's voice will actually be easy to recognize amid the throng. It may be loud, or it may be silent, but in it will be honesty and love. It will be a voice that is, in truth, more you than anything you've ever known of yourself. The voice is intimate, familiar, never lofty or full of itself. When you hear this voice, there is no question that it is your Angel. You may not be ready to hear what it has to say, but perhaps you can catch a whisper. I dare you to speak to your Angel right now. Ask. I double-dog dare you. The degree of bliss that you feel in response is the degree to which you are presently capable of communicating with your Holy Guardian Angel.
Many people think that enlightenment, gnosis, or the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel come like a cataclysm. They think that if they just keep doing some sort of technique over and over, one day, someday, they'll become illumined in some sort of divine thunderstorm. It is true that you will have peak experiences—explosive oceans of bliss that will change you forever—if you follow a serious practice. However, for the most part, spiritual growth is like cultivating a plant or garden. It grows little by little, season by season, until one day you realize that you have a beautiful and illuminated soul. Often this realization is as cataclysmic as any samadhi.
People have constructed many different models of the subtle realms beyond the physical plane. There is the Theosophical model, the Qabalistic model, the Vedantic model, the Taoist model, the neoshamanic other-realm model, and hundreds of others. You must remember that these are simply models. They do not represent truth. Whatever you experience is the truth, and the most that anyone can ever hope to provide you is a very blurry map.
For the purposes of this book, I will outline a very simple model so you have an understanding of the terms I use. Essentially, we can divide the experiential universe into four realms: the physical, the astral, the causal, and the divine. The world that we look at when our eyes are open is the physical realm. The world we look at when our eyes are closed is the astral realm. The source that generates the images in the astral realm is the causal realm, and the source of consciousness itself is the divine realm.
Your Holy Guardian Angel is your personal connection to the most subtle realm—the divine realm. This divine realm is beyond words, thoughts, feelings, or images. It is pure bliss. Any image that you "see" or words that you "hear" from your Angel are not truly the reality of your Angel. They are reflections coming to you and will be somewhat garbled and warped by your ego's whims and desires. This is why you will work toward attaining a complete silence and singular concentration on the essence of your Angel. It is only in this transcendental way that you can really experience the complete truth unedited by illusion.
So, in conclusion, you can work with many spirits, angels, and archetypes, but your Holy Guardian Angel is beyond these—a singular essence. These multiple spirits are not dangerous unless you confuse them for your Holy Guardian Angel. They can even be helpful assistants and bestowers of gifts. You can communicate with your Holy Guardian Angel this moment if you wish. However, it is only in the transcendental silence beyond images, words, and feelings that you can really know the truth of your Angel and your Self.
The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage
The seed for the spiritual process of the 21st-century mage is a book called The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage, which, for simplicity's sake, I will refer to as The Abramelin. Written in the 15th century, the book describes a six-month operation for obtaining communication with your "guardian angel," and thus magical powers over evil spirits. The Abramelin was translated into English by S. L. MacGregor Mathers, one of the founders of the 19th-century occult group, The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Mathers considered it to be a quaint commentary on the task of the "Adeptus Minor," who, as an initiate of The Golden Dawn, was supposed to achieve communion with his or her "Higher Genius." Many legends arose from The Abramelin while Mathers was translating it, including stories about accidents and injuries inflicted by its evil spirits upon those who possessed the book. When Aleister Crowley became a member of the Golden Dawn, Mathers was finishing his translation, and the rumors of curses and injuries were at their height. The legends and the lofty style of The Abramelin undoubtedly impressed the young and imaginative Aleister Crowley, and he made it a cornerstone of his spiritual world. It is Crowley who really puzzled over the process described in The Abramelin, and when he formed his own magical order, the A? A?, the whole purpose of the teachings was to accomplish the Abramelin Work. "The Grade of Adeptus Minor is the main theme of the instructions of A? A?. It is characterized by the Attainment of the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel."
Many experts believe The Abramelin to be the simplest and most effective explanation of the secret Western spiritual doctrine. Since S. L. Macgregor Mathers translated it at the turn of the 19th century, it has been a staple on the bookshelves of most serious students of the occult.
The author of The Abramelin is known only as Abraham the Jew, a wandering scholar who claims to have discovered the true secrets of magic and spirituality from an Egyptian magician named Abramelin, after whom the book is named. Abraham describes his adventures before and after meeting his magical mentor, but primarily focuses on the methods of performing an extended spiritual operation that eventually culminates in the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel.
Much of the advice in The Abramelin may seem somewhat strange to the modern mind. For instance, the book advises you not to sleep with your wife when she's menstruating (with no advice for you if you happen to be a woman!), that you should change your personal garment once a week (for the purpose of cleanliness!), and many other strange, archaic ideas. This aspect of the book can (and should) be safely ignored. In general, The Abramelin requires careful interpretation rather than blind adherence to rules that have little practical meaning in modern life.
Between the time of The Abramelin and today, modern adepts have added many improvements upon the basic plan of Abramelin. This book will share with you some of these improvements, so that you may benefit from them as well.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from 21st Century Mage by Jason Augustus Newcomb. Copyright © 2002 Jason Augustus Newcomb. Excerpted by permission of Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Introduction
Part I: Making Space for the Divine
1. The Knowledge and Conversation of Your Holy Guardian Angel
2. The Abramelin Program
3. Preparation for the Abramelin Operation
4. The Foundation of Your Spiritual Practice
5. Work on Yourself
Part II: Calling Down the Divine
6. Methods for the Attainment
7. Yoga Techniques
8. Ceremonial Magick
9. Astral Travel
10. The of Operation
11. Devotion
12. Sexual Techniques
13. Awareness and Zen
14. The Supreme Method
Part III: Communion with the Divine
15. The Full Program
16. Invoking Your Angel
17. Conquering the Four Evil Princes
18. The Abramelin Squares
Notes
Bibliography