"World creation is friggin’ complicated. In Crowley’s Thelema, we learn the magick number is always 11. That’s seven planetary spheres and four elemental ones. Every magical act that we perform takes the intricate layering of the seven planetary forces around an idea before turning it over to the elemental forces to make the Idea manifest materially where we can experience it.
Think of the possibilities! Think of how many different things we can create! Think of all the steps in the process! Imagine how many ways there are to screw up! Now remember how piecemeal the grimoires are, and the likelihood of finding anyone who understands this well enough to pass on more than warning stories and really crude techniques!
Sure would be cool if we had an awesome teacher, eh? Someone who could introduce us to the spirits we need to meet to learn how to materialize our desires… someone who could train us, teach us, help us, someone who loved us, and was intimately invested in our personal ascension… Someone to protect us from our own ignorance, who would provide the wisdom we needed when we needed it to help our struggle to become creator gods pass without so much gods-damned drama… Someone like the Holy Guardian Angel!"
- Rufus Opus, from "Never Again Alone" in the soon-to-be-released Walking with the Angel anthology.
As you've no doubt noticed, if you travel in the local blogosphere, the "Walking with the Angel" anthology is about to hit the streets! I'm very excited. It's my first time being officially published by an actual publishing house, Nephilim Press*. They're my favorite publishing house on the planet right now, and not JUST because they are popping my published product cherry.
So this is totally a PIMP MYSELF post!
RO's first time in official print is about to hit the streets! Incredible insights into the Holy Guardian Angel! How I did it! How you can too! What to look for! What if you're wrong! What to expect when you're expecting! How to get paid to get laid with no money down!
Ok, not the last one.
But even without getting paid to get laid, I'm pretty proud of this work. I put together a compendium of my experiences and ideas about the HGA, and then polished and buffed it down to fit in as an essay in an anthology. It's been such a trip, god knows my notes on it could fill volumes.
But the greatest thing about this book isn't (only) that I'm in it. It's a survey of the Holy Guardian Angel as it manifests to people across a broad spectrum of beliefs and practices. My views from a traditional Hermeticist with an attitude towards GD and GD-derived folks (the irony of me being an initiate in both the OTO and the A:.A:. now is NOT LOST ON ME) are presented right alongside the views of Aaron Leitch and Kevin Abblett** in their Golden Dawn- and OTO-based perspectives.
And you get to see the harmony and the conflict in our experiences, which I think is the most useful aspect of this book. It gives you a broad spectrum of experiences so you can identify the things that are the same with everyone, and the things that are different, so you can put together your own metric, your own HGA-barometer as you progress.
One more thing before I wrap up this plug...
The HGA is an amazing ... phenomenon. It's not just what I thought it was when I wrote my piece. My relationship with it has continued to evolve as my practices have evolved. I know more about it than ever, and less than I ever will again. All at once.
Ok, the wrap-up:
See more posts about the anthology by other authors:
And finally the close-out:
Buy this book!
* Who is also working on getting my first full-length published book into print even as we speak! It's going to be a text-book like thing based on the results of the Gates series of workings and the Seven Spheres in Seven Days experiment from a year or so ago. They've been printing some really consistently potent magical tomes lately, including Frater Ashen's Gateways Through Stone and Circle book based on (and totally inspired by my results from) Trithemius' Art of Drawing Spirits into Crystals. His first edition has sold out, but I bet they print another edition.
** I had the honor of meeting Kevin at NOTOCON last year. Dude did a presenation on Hermeticism that was just awesome, I loved it. He's part of a movement within the 93 current that is focusing on bringing the magic back, fo' realz, and it gives me chills to see what folks like he and Tau Polyphilus are up to. I'm really glad to be a part of that.
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