Start from the beginning Last instalment in case you missed it Uncovering Christianity through the Internal Logic of Liber Iuratus Honorii
Part of the challenge in understanding the Christian nature of Liber Iuratus Honorii is knowing what to take at face value and what may be a blind, something to throw an unwanted reader off track, such as hiding a non-Christian text in Christian imagery. To do this we must consider the text as falling into one of two major possibilities: either it is a highly unorthodox Christian text, or it is a non Christian text that uses Christian elements as a disguise to protect the owner in case someone managed to read the text. Remembering the church’s attitude toward magic, and the supposed judgement of the pope, it makes sense that a non-Christian magical text would pretend to be Christian in an attempt to protect the owner. Consider the name and nature of the text. It is called Iuratus or Sworn, because the book was to be held and received under an oath. According to the introduction, it is included in the oath that the text would only be passed on when the previous owner is dying, to a man who has been tested for a year and found holy. No copies can be made save for those passed on at the deathbed, the owner should die rather than betray the person who gave him the text, and if no worthy man is found, the text is to buried either by the owner while still alive or with him at the time of death. Considering the pope’s condemnation and “judging [practitioners] to death” it seems that between the oaths and the fear of execution anyone who owned a copy of Liber Iuratus Honorii regardless of its religious origin would be unlikely to share the text.
If this is assumed to be the case, then the inclusion of very specific Christian prayers —from priestly prayers like the Blessing of the Salt, to prayers more likely to be known to the laity like the Hail Mary, the Actiones nostras, the Athanasian Creed, and many others— would seem to be a sincere inclusion. If this was a non-Christian text, under the same oaths and restrictions there would still be the same threat of execution and thus need for secrecy, therefore there would be no need to reframe it in Christian contexts. If Liber Iuratus Honorii was really passed on at death, and under the oaths and threats, then it is not unreasonable to assume that the Christian elements are not there as a disguise, but are part of the system. If no one would ever read the text, save whom the owner approved of and passed the text to at death, then there is no need to disguise the text in Christian theology and language for protection. Under such conditions the Christian nature of Liber Iuratus Honorii would be genuine. Continuing to look at the internal logic of the text, we must look at the framing narrative, which explains the supposed reasoning for the book being written down and oath bound. The text says the pope and his cardinals , having decided this art is of the Devil, must “pluck up and utterly to destroy this deadly root, and all the followers of this art.” The text has to be hidden and protected because the pope and the Church has decided it is evil. While this is not shocking nor inflammatory the author of Liber Iuratus Honorii continues to claim that “wicked spirits were gathered together, intending to send devils into the hearts of men… sowing hypocrise [sic] and envy, and rooting bishops and prelates in pride, even the pope himself and his cardinals” and this is what led them on this quest against books of magic and spirit conjuration. It was not because the texts were unholy, but because the pope and his cardinals have been coerced by demons, or “wicked spirits,” to this end. Returning to the idea that Christian prayers and symbolism were added to protect the owner if the book was ever accidentally discovered, as a palatable disguise, then the first paragraph would not accuse the pope of being under a demon’s influence and remove that palatable disguise. This again shows the sincerity of the Christian elements. If the text is oath bound and no one will read it there is no need to hide it in Christian terms, and if the Christian terms were a disguise they wouldn’t attack the pope, so it suggests that the text really was Christian.
There are other aspects of the text which support this reading of its internal logic. For instance, divine vision is the goal of the first book, yet several other effects happen in the course of the ritual, either as steps along the way or “side-effects” and one of them is the “forgiveness of sins.” One of the prayers used in the working itself says “this prayer aforesaid … doth obtain remission of sins” and later prayers continue to request and attest that “inward sins may be washed away.” At this time the Church was seen as the sole source of forgiveness, that through confession to a priest and their recommendations and blessings a sin could be washed away. Yet here the text is offering the practitioner the chance to do just that without the intervention of a priest. This should not be read as anti-Christian or non-Christian, but anti-Church as an establishment. The text is asserting the power of an individual to be forgiven through other means than the Church, even if it is a complex ritual. So while still Christian it does display some issues with the hierarchy and policies of the Church.
See the initial post of the series The last instalment in case you missed it
Non-Christian elements are not always as easy to locate as Hebrew, Greek, and Chaldaic names, or Islamic ritual pattern: they are sometimes subtle and easy to pass over. For instance, the text begins with a set of oaths (which will be addressed more later) indicating that if the book cannot be passed on to a suitable man it was to be buried to protect the practitioner and the person who gave him the text. When put into context this seems unusual. The context in this case is the dominance of Christianity and the criminalization of magic and witchcraft and loosely related ideas. Liber Iuratus Honorii was written at a time just preceding the witch trials of Europe, when charges of magic were common and dangerous. According to the introduction of the text, the pope and his cardinals have made statements condemning “the art” (as the practice of these rituals is called within the text) and “judging [practitioners] to death.” A text as “dangerous” to the owner as Liber Iuratus Honorii would be better off destroyed, in a fire for instance, since a buried text can be recovered or discovered which would go against the spirit of the oath. Burying the text could allow a practitioner to be discovered, or an unworthy person to find the text. If the text was really to be protected the only real method would be its destruction. While this might seem odd, interpreted from a Jewish perspective it makes sense as it is a Jewish tradition than any holy text, or text containing the name of God, cannot be destroyed. When a text is no longer useful or usable it is to be buried in a cemetery rather than destroyed in any other way. While there is not enough said about burying the text in Liber Iuratus Honorii to conclusively say it is borrowing the Jewish custom of burying texts with the name of God in it, it does seem to be a parallel especially when contrasted with the issues of burying a text for reasons of security and secrecy.
These non-Christian elements could be seen as detracting from the argument that Liber Iuratus Honorii is really a Christian text, but I think it is more useful to interpret them as supporting and supplementing the text. At this time there is no real parallel to the form of angel communication of Liber Iuratus Honorii in Christian mystic traditions. On the other hand a great deal of the Qabalah at the time was centered on divine communication (despite Honorius’s protest otherwise ) so it is reasonable that the author of Liber Iuratus Honorii would borrow and steal from that tradition. The gaps existing in Christian mysticism could be filled in with Jewish mysticism to make a complete system, in an analog to using frog DNA to complete the sequence of dinosaur DNA in Jurassic Park. Taking from Jewish and Islamic sources doesn’t detract from the Christian nature of the next, but instead is merely evidence of the author seeing an element lacking in his system and deciding to appropriate the elements from another in order to make a more complete and potentially functioning system.
Start with the initial post of this series The last instalment in case you missed it.
A case has been made by Katelyn Mesler that there is even some evidence of Islamic thought running through Liber Iuratus Honorii. In a later part of the text, when the practitioner is to summon spirits related to the planets and the days instead of conjuring them as before, it is done in a question. “Where is Barthan the king? where are Thaadas, [Caudas], and Yalcal his ministers? Where is Formione the king? where are Guth, Maguth, and Guthrin his ministers?” This is a very different tone from standard conjurations in Liber Iuratus Honorii and other grimoires. Earlier in the text when calling an angel, the oration is given “I humbly invoke and beseech you, that you may condescend to come down and appear here before this circle … I order you through the virtue of that one, whose name is marked.” This is a more traditional conjuration; the iron hand in the velvet glove, a humble call to the spirit backed up by spiritual authority from God. This questioning call is not something that appears in Christian systems, nor is it something that appears in Jewish systems, but as Mesler states it is “found with some frequency in Islamic magical texts.” While it is a minor point, amidst a complex combination of Christian and Jewish influences, this does seem to indicate that the author of Liber Iuratus Honorii had some familiarity with, and access to Islamic texts related to conjuring spirits, making the religious combination of the text just a little more complicated.
There is another reference in the text that is neither Jewish nor Islamic, it is either Greek or evidence of a pre-existing grimoire system drawing on Greek mythology. It only appears once in the text, like the Islamic questioning, so cannot be considered a major part of the thought behind the text, but can again suggest the broad base of traditions that the text was built from. When discussing the appropriate incenses to use, the author explains what Solomon suggests. This is not surprising as Jewish and Christian grimoires often validated themselves claiming connections to Solomon, but it then also contains the suggestions of Hermes that disagree with what was previously said by Solomon. This may be a reference to a person, coincidentally named Hermes, or more likely a reference to the god himself. A form of Hermes, known as Hermes Trimegistus (The Thrice Great), is a similar figure to Solomon in the grimoire system and Judeo-Christian magic systems with a variety of grimoires, alchemical texts, and magical books attributed to him. This section is unusual for this is the only time Hermes is mentioned in Liber Iuratus Honorii, and the inclusion of him disagreeing with Solomon on what incense to use only confuses the matter, rather than clarifies. It would seem that this is an extrapolation from another text; another grimoire or magical book that was patched into Liber Iuratus Honorii without much effort to synthesize or harmonize the texts. The fact you have two figures disagreeing in this way serves no purpose within the text, and the only plausible reason is scribal errors in the creation of the text; adding in different elements without bringing them into line with each other. This shows that this text was part of a tradition; it wasn’t a standalone creation written in solitude by Honorius, but part of something more, an evolution of something within a tradition.
See the preceding part of the essay if you missed it Analysis of Non-Christian Elements and Their Integration with Liber Iuratus Honorii
Though I argue for the Christian nature of Liber Iuratus Honorii, I will first address the obvious non-Christian references and elements that exist in the text. I propose that they do not take away from the Christian standing of the text but support the text and ritual system as a whole, as well as reflect the complex nature of religious thought at the time.
The majority of non-Christian elements in Liber Iuratus Honorii are drawn from Jewish sources; some of these elements are borrowed and adapted, while others are taken completely without any effort to synthesize them into Iuratus. One such element includes that the fact that in order to obtain divine vision the creation of a seal is required, on which the operator writes the “Shemhamphoras” around the edge . The Shem ha-Mephorash is a Jewish name for YHWH that is recognized as being in 72 parts. To get the name one must read Shemot (Exodus) 14:19-21 in a special way which reveals 72 three letter names of God . This name was very important in the study of the Jewish Qabalah so it initially seems an unusual inclusion in a supposedly Christian text. The use of seals and god names were a prominent part of Judaism, specifically Qabalistically inspired branches. The seal also includes other god names, some that are Christian such as Christos, Alpha and Omega; but others are Jewish again like El, Adonai, Saday, and On . Some names are even Greek like Sother, and a variety are from no easily identifiable source . If the names came from Greek or Hebrew roots then, by the time they have reached the manuscript they have been corrupted beyond my ability to decipher, and others assert the names are “deformed Greek and Hebrew” though some appear to be “pure gibberish.” This use of Hebrew names is a pattern that continues throughout the text. In one case a Hebrew name is used, and then clarified “IF ADONAY, that is to say, almighty God ” which is an unusual moment, as if the inclusion of Adonai (Adonay) was important, but the reader being Christian, and not Jewish, would not understand the use of the name.
Seal of the Angels of Saturn. All images taken from http://www.esotericarchives.com
The integration and use of Jewish sources is more complex than just the use of names of god. The text is perfused with angels. The Qabalah had a large proliferation of angels and angel names; in fact the Shem ha-Mephorash is sometimes interpreted to be 72 angel names. While the Catholic Church at that time recognized very few named or individual angels, and as Liber Iuratus Honorii mentions well over three hundred , it is reasonable that the author would have to borrow some angels to have such a large amount. It is more than just angel names that are borrowed; when the months are listed they are given Hebrew names instead of their Latin names, as are the planets. In Christianity at the time angels were largely conceptualized as impersonal and interchangeable, with no distinguishing features between each other (save Michael, Raphael, and Gabriel), and they were undeniably good. Yet not only are a great variety of angels addressed by name in Liber Iuratus Honorii, but there are also differences recognized between them. For example the angels of Saturn in Liber Iuratus Honorii are “long and slender, pale or yellow” and angels of the Sun are “great and large, full of all gentleness.” The angels of each planet —of which several are named— are distinct from each other, they perform different tasks, their personalities are different, and they appear differently from one another. This was not a conceptualization of angels that had root in Christianity yet, but was a common factor in Jewish views of angels. The angels of the Sun are said to “give love and favor and riches to a man, and power, also … to give dews, herbs, flowers” which could be seen as the “positive” actions one might expect from an angel, but the angels of Saturn “cause sadness, anger, and hatred” while the angels of Mars “cause and stir up war, murder, destruction, and mortality of people.” War, hatred, murder, and sadness are not the commonly accepted sphere of angels from the Christian perspective, and seems contrary to the view of angels as wholly good. Though once more if we look at the Jewish tradition we find a view of angels that fits; angels were not seen as good or evil, but their alignment was more neutral and ambiguous in many cases. Some were good, some were malicious, and many were in-between. Having angels who could do what we would consider good and evil is more in line with the contemporaneous Jewish viewpoint than the Christian one, showing where some of the framework or inspiration of the text came from.
The Construction of Christianity through Conjuration: An Exploration of the Christian and Non-Christian Elements and Nature of Liber Iuratus Honorii
Medieval Europe has an unusual class of texts known as grimoires. These books claim to grant the reader power over their material and spiritual world, by instructing how to summon angels, demons, and a variety of other spirits. What makes these texts more compelling is that they are apparently Christian in nature; their symbolism, their language, and their purpose all claim to be Christian and appropriate within the religion. Yet the concept of these books –conjuring demons and commanding them to do the bidding of the reader– seems to be non Christian. Considering the witch trials that took place in this period, religious and secular laws against the practice of magic, and the pre Christian religions of Europe, it would not be unreasonable to consider the grimoires may not have been truly be Christian. Liber Iuratus Honorii, or The Sworn Book of Honorius is one of earliest surviving grimoires, and like the rest claims a Christian heritage. This paper analyzes Liber Iuratus Honorii using links with other texts and traditions, the internal Christian elements, and the internal logic and narrative of the text to show that Liber Iuratus Honorii is a genuinely Christian text likely written by a member of the clergy who disagreed with the establishment of the Church, but not Christianity. Historical Background of Liber Iuratus Honorii Liber Iuratus Honorii attributes itself to Honorius of Thebes, son of Euclid. It is unlikely that such a figure ever existed, as grimoires are often pseudopigraphical in authorship and the name seems designed to make the reader associate the text with Euclid of geometric fame. Regardless for ease of reference, I will refer to the author of Liber Iuratus Honorii as Honorius. The earliest surviving copy of the text dates to the fourteenth century, but dates as early as the first half of the thirteenth century have been argued . Dating the text is difficult as it may actually have been composed in parts, some dating to the thirteenth century, and some to the fourteenth. Though six copies of the manuscript survive, in slightly different forms, when compared to each other and by their list of chapters it seems there is not a complete copy surviving. These manuscripts are all written in Latin, and only one critical edition of a manuscript has been produced currently by Gösta Hedegård in 2002. This paper will focus on the only version of the manuscript that has been translated into English, Royal MS 17Axlii, translated around the sixteenth century, though the modern compiler notes textual deficiencies and variant readings from three other manuscripts. The text itself is divided into three or four books (depending on the manuscript), which include: a complex ritual to attain vision of the divine, rituals to attain knowledge in many fields, instructions of specific spirit conjuration, and more conjurations respectively. Other academic works have focused on the textual and religious relationships of Liber Iuratus Honorii, what influenced it and what it influences. Though these works highlight what is and is not Christian in origin in the text, they all assume the Christianity of Liber Iuratus Honorii as certain without challenging that assertion. While I do not disagree with their final position, in this paper I seek to examine and prove the Christian nature of the text, thus further supporting the study and interpretation of Liber Iuratus Honorii as a Christian document.
As some of you know I have a degree in History from a University one of the top three History programs in North America. My final thesis was on Liber Iuratus Honorii, an early grimoire.
The next several posts will be that essay. I could post it all at once, but I know how attention spans on the internet work, so I’ll break it down into more reasonably sized chunks and post it over several days. Unfortunately due to the nature of academic writing there are long thoughts and paragraphs, so there isn’t always a good place to break the essay down. Some entries will be 500 words, others a 1000. I tended to break it along themes whenever possible.
Due to being on this blog, I’ll be removing the footnotes, because they’re a pain in the arte to put onto wordpress, but I will include all the texts I reference in the final post.
My paper is on whether or not Liber Iuratus is a Christian text or not. It claims it is, and I agree (as I’ll say in the intro), so it might seem odd to write a paper on it, but that’s how the historical process works. We can’t just accept at face value a claim in a text, so we have to evaluate it. So the paper is me breaking down the grimoire and looking for clues that really confirm or deny the Christian nature of the text. If you’re not familiar with the process it might seem odd to prove a text is telling the truth. As a historian we can’t just look at what a text says, we have to understand why it would say that, who benefits from it, why has it survived, and what does it tell us. The most fascinating element of history is taking something minor, and fleshing it out to see what it means. Sure, Liber Iuratus is a Christian grimoire, but what can we learn from it, what does it tell us about Christianity at the time, the view of the Church, the social structure of society? That’s the fun, teasing out the information.
Also, as it’s an academic paper written for a general audience of medieval historians, some of my points and explanations will seem really simple and obvious to magickal folks familiar with grimoires, but they have to be said for everyone else.
So that being said over the next several days I’ll be rolling out my posts on it.
And before it begins, since I know someone will be curious. I got an A on the paper, and my professor only challenged one of my assertions, as she felt it was too biased. It was probably my second favourite history paper to write. (My first one being the creation of the lesbian identity in Western culture due to the World Wars.)
This entry has been stewing in my head for a bit, but reading Davies’s Grimoires really brought it out to the surface.
I’d call myself a Solomonic magickian, a lot of my work revolves around the communion with spirits from grimoires in that style. Yet unlike many I don’t think I’m really “bound” to one text. Granted most of the grimoire spirits I use are from Book I of the Lemegeton, the Goetia, but my summoning circle is based on a design from the Heptameron, using Angel and Godnames I spent over two years skrying, my robes are adorned with the Shem ha’mephorash around the edge, and a variety of angelic and demonic seals on the chest and sleeves. So even though I’m Solomonic, my practice in that regard is all over the place a little.
Why? Because it works. There are some people that this boggles greatly, grimoire-purists. We’ve all seen them, people who are convinced that grimoires can’t and don’t work unless you perform everything exactly to the letter. (These are most notably though people who despite this claim lack the fame, fortune, and harem of King Solomon.)
Now, do not get me wrong, I believe grimoires should be used by the book, or as close to as possible until you are proficient with them. I wouldn’t say everything in them is absolutely necessary, but until you know how they work (and that takes experience, not educated guesses based on other systems or your intuition or lack of drive) I recommend keeping as much of the system intact as possible when you use it. Some things are most definitely symbolic I’d say, others are more relative, others might not be important at all, and some are crucial. If I gave you a recipe for amazing cookies, you shouldn’t make substitutions until you’ve made them my way and think I like my cardamom a bit too much. Follow the recipe the first several times, then you have a sense on what can be shifted.
This is where I get trapped in the middle ground. On one hand “Follow the book” on the other hand “Don’t be a slave to it.” What I wanted to address through was some of the issues with the notion of Grimoire-Purists.
Basically, why do you assume the text is right? Just because King Solomon (didn’t) write it, doesn’t mean it’s perfect. How many of us would pick up any modern occult book and say “The author is 100% right, and we have to do everything as they say or it won’t work”? If you’d do that with any magickal text I think you should re-evaluate your critical thinking skills.
As a subset of that issue, just because it is right, doesn’t mean it’s the only way it can be right. Sure, frankincense might be the right incense to summon a King of the Sun, but that doesn’t mean copal wouldn’t work, wouldn’t work just as well, or even better. Right does not have to be this binary exclusive category. Tied into this is the realism of it being 100% exclusively right. Just because my cookie recipe is awesome doesn’t mean you couldn’t make awesome cookies using a variation on my recipe. Good cookies are good cookies. One thing that came up recently in a discussion group around Solomonic magick is the necessity of wearing a belt made of lion skin. People battled back and forth on why it was or wasn’t necessary, names were called, it was the internet. I made a comment, which largely got glossed over though. Lions are going extinct, and while they’re doing better than they were 15 years ago, they’re still endangered. What happens when the last lion is killed? What happens when the last piece of lion fur deteriorates with use and age? Will these spirits then be forever beyond our ability to communicate with? It seems silly, but that’s the way some people think about it when they go hardcore grimoire-purist.
Lastly I want to question the idea of the texts being 100% right from a historian’s perspective. One of the first things I was ever taught as a historian was “Cui Bono” meaning “To whose benefit?” or “Who benefits?” Thousands, and millions of documents have been lost since humans started writing, and each one that survives there is a reason. The first question a historian asks is “Cui Bono” who benefits from this text still existing? Why was this text preserved when others weren’t? In the case of magickal and religious texts you can say belief, divine intervention, or because it works.
The trouble with this notion is not all texts were preserved on purpose, and not all were lost on purpose. For instance the autohagiography of Christina of Markyate was preserved by chance. The only known copy was in a house that caught fire, and it was one of the few texts near the window that the owner saved by throwing it out before having to flee the fire. If not for its random placement in the library we would have lost the first example of Self-Insert Biblical Fanfiction.
Did grimoires survive by luck or human choice? Well, according to Davies they survived by sheer volume. Why were there so many grimoires though? Because they were big business, forbidden texts that teach you to find treasure and get laid, who wouldn’t want that. The trouble is twofold though, not every person who manually copied the texts, or later every printer, had access to the grimoires, and eventually if there are only two or three or whatever grimoires, soon enough everyone who wants them, will have them, or know how to do what it is them. What is the solution to these problems? Make up grimoires, and that’s exactly what happened. As an idealist you can look at the similarities to grimoires and say that shows a continuation of thought and practice, and to some extent that might be right. What it probably shows more often is plagiarism. You own two grimoires and a book on herbs. Well include the prayers and circle from one text, the spirits from the second text, and mix in the herbs from the third, then make up a story about how some great mystic wrote it, it was found somewhere amazing, and boom, next grimoire craze.
Now the tricky part is, just because its random stuff cobbled together doesn’t mean it doesn’t work (doesn’t mean it will either). Here is the thing though, we know virtually nothing about these grimoires and their creation, we have myths, and ideas, and historical theories, but we don’t know. For all we know the Heptemeron or the Lemegeton were just forgeries crafted by a bored innkeeper looking to make some extra money, and by fluke they became popular, printed in large numbers, and got preserved.
So if you’re considering being a grimoire purist, think about the issues, rationally and historically with that, and see where it takes you. Remember, I do advocate trying to be as much by the book as possible, especially until you’ve worked with the system, but don’t assume that everything in it is 100% right, and that right information is exclusive of all other.
Grimoires: A History of Magic Books – Owen Davies
Oxford, 2010, 368pp., 9780199590049
If you’re an academically and/or history driven ceremonial magickian, then Grimoires is a book you really need for you collection.
After reading a few reviews about this book, I feel I have to make one point clear: This is an academic text, this is not a book about magick, it is not how to understand or use the grimoires, it is a look at the texts, the social influences on them, historical documents, and how they have changed over time. If you want an overview of grimoires for your magickal practice, look elsewhere.
Davies covers the history of grimoires, going as far back as we can and still understand the texts as grimoires, arguably sometime around the BCE/CE crossover, up until the present day. Along this journey he touches on a variety of factors that influenced the grimoires. It would be too easy to conceive of them as something isolated in the field of magick, but they’re not. Grimoires grew and were shaped by pressures from the Church, by popular fiction, by technology, cultural exchanges, and perhaps something spiritual. “They not only reflected the globalization of the world but helped shape it.” (5) Davies doesn’t write as a magickian, doesn’t write as a believer, but as a historian analyzing the texts and the histories, and that’s to the benefit of this book, otherwise it would be too easy to assume lines of thought persisted only due to magickal reasons.
When we think of grimoires we tend to think of the same handful over and over, but what really intrigued me was how many grimoires were identified and created in the Middle Ages. All of the text was interesting, but the interplay of the grimoires and the medieval Church were really fascinating. Davies covered how various grimoires survived, but more importantly why they were used, and how they were viewed. You could see some of the push and pull around the Church and the grimoires, as both an organization threatened by their existence, and yet obviously making use of them. In that same period Davies makes a case for the “democratizing” magick through the printing press.
Another plus for the book is that lot of magickal histories tend to drop off in the Renaissance, pick up with the Golden Dawn, maybe address the OTO, and then jump to the present. Davies on the other hand covered all that time between, as grimoires flowed into North America, becoming pulp books sold everywhere, in mail order catelogues even, and how they were a part of rural American cultures right up into living memory. This type of continuous thread of thought and practice is just what he traced from the earliest records, through the Dark Ages, into the Renaissance, to the present.
The data itself in this book is amazing, unfortunately Davies has a habit of throwing in random knowledge which seems less to illustrate a point, and more to illustrate his knowledge of something obscure. At first these little side-trips were interesting, but by the end of the book these details felt like they were detracting from the big pictures. When discussing an interesting text, there will often be an inclusion of one of the more unusual spells, even when it is irrelevant to the discussion of the text itself.
As someone who recently finished a university degree in History, with my final paper on Liber Iuratus Honorii, I found this book an excellent resource for creating the context and background for my paper. As a ceremonialist magickian I find this book invaluable to help me centre my practices both in their own magickal tradition, as well as a historical reality.
If you missed the first and second part of this discussion/rant you can find Part 1 here and Part 2 here.
I have looked over what I’ve written several times, and sadly I can’t find anywhere to divide this post, regardless of trying to make it two, three, or four sections, the ideas are just all too connected on the final point. So my apologies for a long post, the TLDR version is “If everyone who did it one way gets one set of results, and everyone who didn’t doesn’t have the same results, then maybe they’re not achieving the same thing.”
So having discussed some of the reasons on why I think we should entertain the possibility that HGA may be a system specific term and some of the reasons why it might matter I want to cover one more reason why it might matter, but it’s less supported hence separating from the others. Not necessarily what I believe, I’m agnostic on this point, but just giving another piece of the puzzle perhaps.
People ask “Why does it matter?” and specifically frame it in the terms of “Well they’re not hurting anyone, and if they’re wrong then they’ll find out eventually.” Here I jokingly hear in my head Helen Lovejoy screaming “Won’t someone please think of the Abyss?”
Now this idea comes not from the Abramelin text, and I don’t know if it really came up in the later writings on the HGA (that I don’t remember currently) but it did come up in some of my earlier magickal training, and while I haven’t had any revelation from my Angel to say if it is right or wrong, it is something I’ve pondered on. If we were to frame the HGA and K&C in Qabalistic terms we can say perhaps that the HGA resides in Tiphareth, or at least our connection to them does, more likely they’re something of Kether (I also use a Jacob’s Ladder Tree, so this sometimes conflicts with other systems), and to achieve K&C we have to travel the Third Path to Kether, but what’s along that Third Path? Everyone’s favourite dumping ground the Abyss of Da’ath. If you go from Tiphareth to Kether you must pass over(around/under/through/whatever) the Abyss.
No, not this Spirit of the Abyss.
Now in the system I came from I was taught two things in this regard, first off people that fail to get Knowledge and Conversation with their Holy Guardian Angel end up communicating with a spirit of the Abyss, who claims they are the HGA, acts as them, and lives with the person, while they never see they’re being subtly misled. The second thing is that apparently people who get trapped in the Abyss are stuck there for this incarnation. The second part I have more trouble believing, but I can’t say for sure. If these are both the case, then to me that’s another reason why the way people discuss K&C and the HGA should be reconsidered, but as said, I don’t know what I think about them, and my Angel didn’t give me anything about that idea one way or the other.
Moving on I’d also like to touch on a good point from Polyphanes (he is full of them); it’s hard in many ways to generalize about Knowledge and Conversation. Yet on the other hand I feel the phrase/understanding of Knowledge and Conversation is becoming so generalized as to be useless (oddly makes me think of copyright saturation). I’m not generalizing here based on my experience, I’m drawing on it most definitely, but I’m also drawing on conversations with other people who have done the Abramelin, or written works by such people. So while I can’t generalize, there are patterns that have shown up in the lives of these people and myself, but I see nothing similar from the majority of people claiming Knowledge and Conversation through non-Abramelin means. The revelations will always be different, mine was heavily focused on the marvels of the physical universe. The encounters will always be different, I don’t know anyone else whose HGA decided to play “Moses on the Mount” with them and gave them vitiligo to prove their existence after badgering. (You know what would be better proof? Giving me my pigment back.) But when patterns show up for everyone who did it one way, and they don’t show up when being done another way it makes me question if we’re really talking about the same thing. To go back to the analogy from my earlier post about taking a trip to the beach, if everyone who follows the directions gets to the beach and describes a beautiful sunset, and a person who took a different set of directions say the sunset was nice but the trees were in the way, and no one else mentions the trees, then why would they assume they reached the same point on the beach?
The Abramelin ritual is not just about establishing contact with a specific spirit, it’s about Knowledge and Conversation with the Holy Guardian Angel. (Yes, I know the phrase Knowledge and Conversation was termed by Crowley, but Abraham didn’t give a term for the entire operation. I’ll end up using some of Crowley’s language for a lot of this because he did create a good lexicon for discussing the entirety of it. Even though he himself failed to do the ritual.) What’s the difference? Contact with your Holy Guardian Angel is easy. I was in contact with mine in the first trimester of the ritual, and Abraham says in the text itself that you may even have contact with the HGA before starting the ritual as it “will secretly stand by your side and place suggestions in your heart on how you should organize your life and how to follow everything that is written in this book.”
So what is Knowledge and Conversation then? That’s the result of the entire ritual, it’s not just about chatting, it’s about transformation, and not superficial transformation, not life hiccough transformations, it’s about shaking the very foundation of your identity, core, and understanding. “The Guardian Angel will remind you what he has done for you and how you have insulted him in the past. He will tell you how you please him in the future. He will also explain to you about what is the true wisdom, where it comes from, if-and how- you fail in your work, what you lack, how you should behave to control the unredeemed spirits, and how to achieve all you desire.”
“How you have insulted him in the past.” This is a great example of how Knowledge and Conversation differs from simply contact. I have never or heard anyone who achieved Knowledge and Conversation through Samekh (for instance, but insert any non-Abramelin form of supposed K&C here) talk about this. Sure, they may discuss confessions and humbling themselves, but there is a difference between confession and being told every time you have insulted your HGA. While I don’t want to personalize this with my experiences, I feel it’s the only way to make some points. During my Abramelin experience I ended up reliving times I lied before I even started school and having to apologize for those. Confessions and visionary experiences guided for months with hours poured into them a day, and you’re going to experience pretty much every time you failed. I had done confessions and humbling with Mother for years daily before the Abramelin, but they were nothing like what the Angel led me through over that period. This is something I don’t see mentioned by any other method, and I can’t see how you could have the depth of this upheaval and confession in something that takes less time (either per day or in terms of months and years). This isn’t about contact, this is about coming to terms with your nature, your failures, and past. This is showing you the ground from which you grew and where the transformation will be born from.
To turn more Thelemic in language looking at the last part of the quote, Knowledge and Conversation is about having your True Will revealed for you. Now obviously True Will is a really complicated concept, to say it’s what you are to do in the world is an oversimplification. True Will is about being in your perfect place, your Orbit within the Cosmos. This isn’t just about what you do, in terms of a job, this is about everything: your outlook on life, your view of the world, your understanding of cosmology, your ethics and your relationship with external morality, your connection and interaction with other people, your habits, your True Will is everything in your life and all parts of you.
When many people say they’ve achieved Knowledge and Conversation, it’s amazing how little has changed, in fact this observation is what inspired this rant, not a desire for dogmatic adherence to a strange German text. Again being a bit Thelemic about this, I was listening to an episode of Thelema Coast to Coast, when Keith418 was discussing magick as escapism and people being unwilling to do the hard work of transforming the self, and he said something to the effect of “If your HGA isn’t transgressive to your life you probably don’t know them.” This was a moment that if I were in a workshop with Keith418, I might have clapped. Sure most people talk about disruptions that happen as they work towards meeting their HGA, but these are superficial issues that come and go quicker than a Mercury Retrograde. External disruptions are nothing, they often occur with any major Solar working, and any initiation. In fact, while not as widely observed, I’d argue that the Abramelin working tends to cause more internal disruptions than external.
If your HGA isn’t disrupting you to the core, I think it might be questionable, at best. My experience, and essentially every record of the Abramelin I’ve read, talks about this. So when someone says they performed Samekh twice a day for two months, got the same result, and lost a job at the same time, I can’t help but think “Uh…no.” Heck, I magicked myself out of my job by summoning the Angel of Earth. That’s not a major disruption. (In fact, that tends to be a cliche in magick) Remember the HGA brings true wisdom, how you fail, and how to act. These aren’t simple things, remember that list? Your outlook on life, your view of the world, your understanding of cosmology, your ethics and your relationship with external morality, your connection and interaction with other people, your habits, it’s everything. For this ritual not to shake you to the core, to not destroy you and remake it requires one or two things. First, that our modern culture has all of this right, and second, that whatever isn’t right you’ve already worked out for yourself.
I would explain the Abramelin ritual as a massive undertaking in Social De-conditioning. Your outlook on life, as much as you want to think you decided on it with free will, you didn’t, you were given it piece by piece through every TV show you’ve ever watched, every book you’ve read, every song you listened to, everything your parents told you. You took all this, and you incorporated it, you rejected it, you negotiated with it, you synthesized it, you made it into something new and you weren’t aware of it, it’s all unconscious. Think of all the times you say or do something and suddenly realize “Oh my gods, I’m my mother/father” but really most of our thoughts and personalities are shaped by our social conditioning and what we slowly accept and reject over our lives. Now I will not claim I have overcome this, not by a long shot, but my Angel showed me how much of this is there, and has been giving me tools to work on this. Years after the ritual was complete and my Angel is still making me do things to change this world view.
Now I would also like to point out that if you’re thinking “Oh, that makes sense, but I have already dealt with that, noticed it, and my world view is my own” I would like to point out the third-person effect which states that people always think that these things apply to other people but not them, and generally (but here, not always) the people who are more sure that it doesn’t apply to them are actually more likely to be victims of it. So maybe you, or these people actually have actually dealt with this stuff, but never underestimate the human mind’s ability to deceive itself, and this is something I keep right in the front of my mind whenever I think about this stuff. (Actually that’s a good thing to always keep in mind with magick in general)
Okay, maybe this got close.
This goes for everything. Your ethics, they’re made up of everything you’ve seen, done, experienced, and if you think the Angel is going to reveal that you won the jackpot and just by chance those 80s/90s (or whenever) cartoons actually instilled the perfect balance of compassion and wisdom and strength into your personality, again, I’m going to doubt it. Your magickal world view, your mundane worldview, your personality is constructed (or shaped) by all of these things. This is what the ritual begins to break down, especially in the last trimester. This is the metamorphosis of the ritual, this is the point, not having a voice/presence stuck with you for the rest of your life, or until it fades away.
These are the types of things I’ve never seen addressed by people who have “achieved Knowledge and Conversation” by another means. Their disruptions are losing jobs, lovers, moving, periods of bad luck, illness, etc., and while all of these can be part of the Abramelin experience, they’re the window dressing to what is going on inside the ritualist. In fact, now that I typed it, everyone I know who lost a job or lover, or had to move, it wasn’t due to external factors, but internal ones. They realized they couldn’t work in that field anymore, they realized they didn’t love their partner, they realized they were attached to the wrong place and had to move, all of these disruptions were due to the internal upheavals. There are major internal upheavals as you go through it, I joked in a surreal way that the soundtrack of the Abramelin should be “Everything you know is wrong” by Weird Al. (Everything you know is wrong / Black is white, up is down and short is long / And everything you thought was just so important doesn’t matter) In my case my HGA challenged everything from my view on alcohol (I think I’m the only person who was told by their Angel to start drinking), to money and the poor, to how reincarnation operates, to how I treat my literal neighbours, to the very words I would use to define myself, those little labels we all think of as “Me.” Years later and I’m still unpacking all of this, years later and I’m still given whispers on things to do to break all these socially conditioned ideas and habits and attitudes so that my “true wisdom” as Abraham calls it, and how I am to succeed shine through. To use a phrase Polyphanes brought up in our discussion, these changes might be sunrise slow at times, but their triggers that break that self are as bright as stepping from Plato’s Cave. To use an unfortunate parallel it’s like being in a car accident while drinking, that incident shows you that you have a problem, but it will take you months, if not years, to come to terms with your alcohol issues.
Now granted, some people might be closer when they start to being in their Orbit, following their True Will, achieving Knowledge and Conversation, so maybe they won’t need as much work, or have to experience the same type of disruptions. Well, as above that’s exceedingly unlikely. Now if I were to completely interject my personal understanding on what Knowledge and Conversation is and does to you, if you came into this life in such a way that Knowledge and Conversation was not a challenge to achieve, and it didn’t or barely disrupted your life or your self, then you came into this life in your Orbit in the way that I would suspect only Bodhisattva/Enlightened figures do, and that just adds again to the unlikeliness to me. (Note: I do not conflate Enlightenment with Knowledge and Conversation, Enlightenment is something far beyond it. What I mean is that for a person to be able to reach their Orbit so easily that K&C isn’t disruptive is something on the level of mythic in my framing, though I admit that might be bias.)
So to bring this all back. I want to reiterate, when I say the Holy Guardian Angel and other potentially similar spirits are different, it’s not a value judgment it’s just a statement. Zomp isn’t better than seafoam (okay, the name is better) it’s just different. I also don’t think that people who have contacted their tutelary spirit aren’t undergoing interesting and great spiritual and personal revelations, I know I went through great things and upheavals when Mother came to me. Though (and here is where the egotism comes into it a bit) I don’t think most of these experiences compare to Knowledge and Conversation based upon the comparisons of these experience. It doesn’t mean they’re not great, but they’re definitely not the same and shouldn’t be labelled as such.
If you missed what is the lead up to this post, catch it here.
A friend complained that my last post didn’t live up to my warning of it being controversial or egotistical, I hope this post or the next one will live up to that a bit more. As is, what I thought was going to be a two part post, is going to be at least three parts. I’d put it all up at once, but I know almost no one would make it through such a post, without the hit of cocaine required for some exceptionally verbose bloggers.
So I already made a basic case for my issue around people saying they established contact with their HGA, but before I continue I’d like to clarify some points as they came up with discussion with Rachel Izabella.
She raises the very good point that she isn’t sure if it is possible to really distinguish between the Holy Guardian Angel, and potentially similar figures like the Supernatural Assistant. I agree; if it is possible, it’s very tricky, these figures/terms aren’t clearly defined, and honestly when you get “up there” in the magickal realms things start to vague up a bit, but just because they’re hard to tell apart doesn’t mean we should label them the same thing.
Zomp. Now you know.
It’s very hard to distinguish between seafoam green, aquamarine, sea green, and zomp (yes that’s a colour name) and their related colours, but that doesn’t mean we should consider them the same. If we can’t look at these colours and immediately tell them apart, the best way to know which is which is to mix it, and that way we can explain the differences. I can tell you how many drops of what colours to make any of these colours or on a computer I could give you the Hex code for it, and that is how we can tell the difference, when it might not be possible or easy with the naked eye. If it is made this way it’s seafoam, if it is made this way it’s zomp. So while I can’t say how these magickal tutelary assistant spirits are different, and I doubt anyone can that easily, it goes back to the idea that we can only tell them apart if we know how they’re made, the ritual process involved in establishing contact. This isn’t to say one is better than the other, I’m not implying that in the slightest, it’s not my Angel is Bigger/Has More Wings/More Eyes/Is More Fiery than your Angel, it’s just that I think they might not be worth conflating, especially when the experiences are so different…but maybe that’s more about contact than whom you reach?
Now contact is the basis of my secondary argument with people saying they’ve achieved Knowledge and Conversation with the Holy Guardian Angel, and while I somewhat had this idea boiling in the back of my head, I have to thank Polyphanes for his conversation on this which helped clarify the issue.
Even though it’s cutting to the end of the argument he brought up the good question of “What does it matter if people misuse the terms?” Why care if their Knowledge and Conversation experience isn’t like mine or that their “HGA” is a different class of spirit from mine? Well a couple of reasons. First, but not the most important, is it is insulting to go through something that takes up so much of my life, and have someone say “Oh, I did 15 minutes of ritual a night for a few weeks and got the same result.” I should note this isn’t just about magick stuff though, think about your careers and have someone saying they could do it just as well cause they read a book on it, or could figure it out themselves. And granted in both cases some amazing people might actually be able to just step up and do it, but they are far far far in the minority that to give them a percentage would be overestimating them. Think about any achievement or training you’ve taken, and the inevitable “I could do that” or “I did that” statements come up. “Wow, you spent 12 years getting your black belt? I just taught myself watching Bruce Lee movies, I’m just as good as you.” It’s an insult, but it also shows how absurd some of the claims are in comparison.
The second reason is that it weakens the traditions. Now, this is always been a problem, people could make the same claim to spiritual/magickal realization and there isn’t anything you can necessarily do about it. In the past though these people were more the town charlatan (this implies a level of conscious deceit that I don’t think is there for most people claiming K&C) so their claims didn’t spread. Sure, the inept witch made witchcraft look silly for the village, but that was it. But now on the internet when anyone can blog or post on forums people who used to be the sole misguided person can now spread their misinformation to dozens and hundreds of people, and if they come off as reasonable/intelligent (and many can and do), people can buy into the idea that they can achieve with little effort too, and it becomes a cycle. Eventually Knowledge and Conversation becomes something that can be achieved in a weekend, and yes, I’ve actually seen descriptions for doing just that. So I think it’s important to clarify the potential differences between the spirits we contact and the mode and result of the communication.
Pretty much like this
I parallel it to the way Reiki has “degraded” in the West. Traditional Japanese Reiki requires work, study, and practice, it took me six years to be ready to start my “third degree” (technically not called that, but whatever). Now on the other hand you can go from Zero to Reiki Master again in a weekend, because what Reiki was and meant in the West has shifted; people deemphasized the bulk of the system and practice. It became about energy healing, not about personal growth and attaining Satori.
Related to that, there is just respect for the tradition. We don’t conflate other spiritual ritual experiences as being the same thing. Initiations into a Greek Mystery Tradition are different than initiations into a Tantric Buddhist practice, and we keep them that way. If people want to argue and make a case for how their initiations are doing the same thing, and getting to the same result, I would support that discussion, but I wouldn’t be a fan of someone outright declaring they are the same. That is part of the problem, people don’t seem to discuss it in terms of “My experience might be similar or comparable to Knowledge and Conversation” they say that they have Achieved it. Granted I have seen a few people who take that sceptical link, and I appreciate that, but pretty much all of them seem to fall short of the ritual results of people who performed the Abramelin, which again leads back to the question of why consider them the same? Reiki lost that respect for the tradition. What was a beautiful and elegant system of meditation with some energy work involved, was diluted and repackage to be a newage rainbow chakra plug-and-play energy healing system. Why? Well, there is a lot of stuff about Takata and what she did to Reiki, but you could say that what Reiki is or was, wasn’t held to any standards, and eventually anything with a basic similarity (Mikao Usui, Japanese, Energy Work) was allowed to be labelled Reiki and no one questioned why dissimilar elements and ideologies were working their way in.
I see Knowledge and Conversation going the same way as Western Reiki, people are deemphasizing the bulk of the system and focusing on what is arguably a minor part of the working, contacting the Angel.
Continuing to look at the internal logic of the text, we must look at the framing narrative, which explains the supposed reasoning for the book being written down and oath bound. The text says the pope and his cardinals , having decided this art is of the Devil, must “pluck up and utterly to destroy this deadly root, and all the followers of this art.” The text has to be hidden and protected because the pope and the Church has decided it is evil. While this is not shocking nor inflammatory the author of Liber Iuratus Honorii continues to claim that “wicked spirits were gathered together, intending to send devils into the hearts of men… sowing hypocrise [sic] and envy, and rooting bishops and prelates in pride, even the pope himself and his cardinals” and this is what led them on this quest against books of magic and spirit conjuration. It was not because the texts were unholy, but because the pope and his cardinals have been coerced by demons, or “wicked spirits,” to this end. Returning to the idea that Christian prayers and symbolism were added to protect the owner if the book was ever accidentally discovered, as a palatable disguise, then the first paragraph would not accuse the pope of being under a demon’s influence and remove that palatable disguise. This again shows the sincerity of the Christian elements. If the text is oath bound and no one will read it there is no need to hide it in Christian terms, and if the Christian terms were a disguise they wouldn’t attack the pope, so it suggests that the text really was Christian.
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Grimoires: A History of Magic Books – Owen Davies
