Someone recently asked me what the Holy Guardian Angel is. To answer that question, we have to wade through a variety of concepts and ultimately emerge into the unknown.
Is the Angel "The Higher Self"?
“Is it like the Higher Self?” she asked. It depends on what you mean by the Higher Self.
Multiple uses attach to the term “Higher Self.” Most share the idea that the Higher Self is the highest, perfected, godlike, or at least more divine version of you. Some look at it as a spirit guide.
Thelema holds that the HGA is a guide of some sort. However, the idea that the Angel is perfect or even good may be too rosy. See the section on the Daimon below this one.
In Theosophy, the Higher Self is Universal, completely impersonal. It’s the One Spirit, the Supreme Reality common to All. This is not the Thelemic idea of the Angel.
In either case, the Thelemic Angel is not the Higher Self. It is neither personal nor universal, but something in between. It is the “you” who takes incarnation after incarnation.
The Daimon
J. Edward Cornelius emphasizes that the Holy Guardian Angel is ultimately part of a neutral entity–the Daimon assigned to us when we choose this incarnation. The Daimon comprises two aspects–the Angel and the Demon.
The Angel is that part of us aligned with the Universal Will in Chokmah-2. The Demon is that part of us aligned with Wants on Malkuth. Both are necessary, he says.
Thelemites should not choose the Angel and forsake the Demon. Rather, they should balance the two, controlling the Demon and allowing the Angel to control you:
The Demons are creators of all reality and matter; not the Angels. This is why they can effectuate change in us or our surroundings so quickly, so easily and without our notice; it’s their World. We’re just visiting. And long after we’re dead, they will still be here. … The key to success is always rooted in the phrase ‘one you control, while the other controls you.’ … this is the END goal. Both must be perfectly balanced in the ‘circle squared.’ –J. Edward Cornelius
For a longer discussion, see “An Open Epistle on Guidance: Angelic or Demonic?”
Yet even the Angelic part of the Daimon is only that part of the Angel we can know. The Angel also has an objective part we can never know in Itself.
For example, Aiwass, the Holy Guardian Angel of Thelema’s founding prophet, Aleister Crowley, dictated The Book of the Law and acted as an independent entity in doing so.
“[M]ost magickal schools emerging in Victorian
times, or shortly thereafter, all adhered to the notion that the HGA
and the Higher Self were one in the same; Crowley admitted that he
was a victim of this folly. The great misconception of the period
being that the HGA communicates out of the Qabalistic sphere of
Tiphereth, but, in truth, it is your daimon which has been guiding you
since birth, whispering in your ear, leading you towards the
realization of your Higher Self and True Will. In the later part of his
life Crowley recognized that the Angel and the Higher Self could not
be one and the same. He began to see the Angel as a completely
objective phenomenon and he believed if it wasn’t, then who dictated
the Book of the Law? He wrote, the Angel ‘is not, let me say with
emphasis, a mere abstraction from yourself; and that is why I have
insisted rather heavily that the term ‘Higher Self’ implies a ‘damnable
heresy and a dangerous delusion’… If it were not so, there would be
no point in the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage… remember
this, above all else; they are objective not subjective, or I should not
waste good Magick on them.’” –J. Edward Cornelius, “On the Holy Guardian Angel”, Essays 1 (any edition), p. 136
“The Mind is the Great Enemy.”
To grasp the Thelemic Holy Guardian Angel, it’s necessary to leave ordinary knowledge behind. It’s necessary to use language, not in a literal way, about what exists, but as a scaffolding to your own direct, religious experience.
Aleister Crowley chose the term Holy Guardian Angel specifically to dissuade Thelemites from engaging in metaphysical speculation. He intended that Thelemites would use the term HGA as a handhold by which to pull ourselves up in to a higher state.
He wrote that he decided “to teach man The Next Step, the thing that was immediately above him.”* In doing so, he avoided terms such as “God” or “Higher Self” that had already accumulated metaphysical baggage. He reasoned that his term The Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel was so “patently absurd” that no one would dare build a system around it. Instead, “it would be accepted as a convention.”
On the one hand, he denies that the Holy Guardian Angel exists. Out of context, this may sound as if Crowley is some kind of materialist, but he isn’t. In fact, he denies that any seeming thing exists. Rather, any given object is but a momentary manifestation of the Absolute Nothingness. It can be destroyed through Samadhi, the union of subject and object. (See his “Berashith” and his 0=2 equation.) The dualistic mind too often fools us into thinking that things exist.
“The mind is the great enemy; so, by invoking enthusiastically a person whom we know not to exist, we are rebuking that mind.”
On the other hand, he created the term in order to give us something higher than our fixed ideas of “self” to aspire to. The Angel is part of the Magickal Hierarchy that we place upon the convenient filing system known as the Qabalistic Tree of Life.
“[We] should accept the Magical Hierarchy as a more or less convenient classification of the facts of the Universe as they are known to us. … At the same time there is a certain definite consensus of experience of the various beings of the hierarchy with the observed facts of Magick.”
By thinking about the Angel Qabalistically, we can reverse the polarity of the mind, from “thing-making” trap to Holy Grail. Yes, it is important to devote oneself to a Beloved non-Self. Whereas believing or disbelieving kills, Loving connects us to the immortal Tao. We should Love the Angel, but use the term as a place-holder for something our small minds can never know directly.
*All quotes in this section are from Magick in Theory and Practice, Chapter 2, “The Formulae of the Elemental Weapons”
“It is only by means of approaching the final attainment, edging closer to the summit of Mount Abiegnus, where the realization that ‘there is no soul’ because “‘I’ do not exist and never have” manifests as a wonderful and transcendent experience–despite the fact that this experience is nullified by one’s awareness of the continuity of consciousness and the unreality of the ‘I’, which nevertheless persists….”
–Christopher Reed Johnson, “On the Soul in Buddhism and Thelema,” The Joy of Dissolution, p. 120