a quick & dirty roadmap to dialogue with your Fate / Holy Guardian Angel / Agathosdaimon
For centuries in Hermeticism, magicians have had a central pre-occupation with gaining Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel…
…. i.e., communion with their larger Selves, also known as “individuation” in Jungian psychology.
Famous 20th-century magicians like Aleister Crowley …
… regarded the process as a very long-term one that required extended retirements from daily life in ascetic prayer and contemplation.
But as we know, life in the 21st century has sped up wildly…
….and I’m here to offer you the radical notion that gaining Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel doesn’t need to take several years or decades.
In my experience and that of many people I've worked with, vast progress can be made within one year, while in the midst of regular daily life and responsibilities.
By “vast progress” I mean the ability to tune in, at will, to the wisdom of that larger Self through divination and dreams.
Here’s the quick & dirty essence of what you need to do:
1. Reconcile 4 sets of polar opposites within your own being.
And by “reconcile” I mean “learn how to internally hold both poles as equally valuable and lovable without clinging to one pole and rejecting another.”
The ordinary human tendency, which one can easily observe in oneself, is to fiercely value only one side of a polarity while devaluing the other.
The work of alchemy involves applying the principles of solve et coagula in order to dismantle our false attachment to one side of a polarity (solve)..
… and open up to embracing a new, more evolved relationship to the whole polar spectrum (coagula).
When we do this, we balance our small self (microcosm) so that it can accurately perceive and receive communications from more of our larger divine Self (macrocosm).
Of course, there’s vast range of polar opposites here in the realm of duality: hot / cold, up / down, etc…
… but there’s 4 primary polarities that seem central to the alchemy of the psyche:
A. Pleasure & Pain
(the level of Sensation in Jungian theory, corresponding to the Earth element in Hermeticism)
How often do we seek to give ourselves only pleasure and avoid pain?
And how much does that pleasure-only attitude prevent us from taking uncomfortable actions — risks, efforts, etc. —that would greatly enhance our long-term joy in life?
When we learn to find the pleasure in pain and in the pain in pleasure - as with Existential Kink practice …
… and also as with good ole fashioned “doing the hard stuff that needs to be done”…
… we expand our horizons of possibility and become served by our pleasure rather than limited by it.
B. Creation & Destruction, or, Thesis & Antithesis
(the level of Thought in Jungian theory, corresponding to the Air element in Hermeticism)
We walk around thinking a bunch of stuff that we habitually identify as “true.” These are our “theses” about life.
A powerful experiment is to practice finding ways that the opposite of what what we usually believe is equally as true, our “antitheses.”
The Work of Byron Katie offers a great format for practicing this.
Why would you want to practice thinking the opposite of what you usually think?
Because by learning to hold both thesis and antithesis, we come closer to reality, which tends to be far less judgmental and rigid than our habitual ways of thinking about it.
As a side-effect, we become able to have genuine connections with people who hold “scandalously wrong” ideas, and it’s through heartfelt connections, not through being badgered with arguments, that people tend to actually evolve their views.
C. Good & Evil
(the level of Feeling in Jungian theory, corresponding to the Water element in Hermeticism)
You might tend to think of “good and evil” as absolute conditions rather than feeling states, but if you think about it for a minute, everything we regard as “good” we see that way because we feel it benefits us or something we care about.
Sometimes we turn out to be wrong about what’s “good” for us, because we don’t have absolute knowledge, only the relative feeling.
Likewise, things that feel downright evil while they’re happening to us can decades turn out to be defining events in our lives that became the motivating fountain of every worthwhile thing we do.
Do this: write down something “evil” you experienced and make a list of at least 50 “good” things that eventually came out of this terrible experience.
This practice isn’t about “finding silver linings” so much as it is about realizing that evil is stinky, disgusting, powerful shit:
And it can fertilize nourishing, beautiful stuff that never would have grown without it.
Would you really want to live in a world with no shit, no evil?
Apparently the divine doesn’t, because it’s always incarnating here where we have plenty of it.
D. Projective & Receptive (in old-skool gendered terms - Masculine & Feminine)
(the level of Intuition in Jungian theory, corresponding to the Fire element in Hermeticism)
Do we “create our own reality” as in the popular New Age parlance, or do we simply receive a Fate that’s created for us, a set of conditions we need to humbly surrender to?
Well, it’s simultaneously both.
We both have a projective, active role in our experience and a receptive, passive role.
We have to learn how to open ourselves up to receive intuitions from our true Self, and also how to act on them.
We gain reliable, repeatable access to this intuition only when we first balance our relationship to our existing sensation (earth), thought (air), and feeling (water) by learning how to inhabit paradox.
Again, through reconciling these 4 primary pairs of opposites within yourself and your experience of the world…
…(and by the way, you need to reconcile the first 3 pairs before you can fully access the 4th)…
… you organize your ego’s (microcosm) relationship to the Self / Divine (macrocosm) in a symmetrical manner.
You turn your usually chaotic experience into a lovely mandala.
This creation of inner symmetry and perception of profound Beauty in the “external” world (called “Tiphareth,” Beauty, in the Qabala’s Tree of Life map of consciousness) …
… constitutes the crystallization of the Philosopher’s Stone, the first goal of the alchemy of the psyche.
2. Internalize a traditional symbol set
By “internalize” I mean memorize and study deeply.
The Self speaks in symbol, image, poetry.
If you’ll notice, the gods don’t issue prose essays.
This means: in order to broaden the channel of communication between our conscious ego and our previously-unconscious Self, we need to learn deep, subtle symbol sets.
What kinds of traditional symbol sets?
Well, in Hermeticism we rely mostly on Tarot, Astrology, and Qabala along with Greek, Latin, Babylonian, Egyptian, Christian, and Hebrew mythology.
Of course there’s plenty of other profound traditional symbol sets from around the world — the I-Ching, the Runes, vèvès, and animal totems spring to mind, along with all the earth’s mythologies.
Why a traditional symbol set, why not a purely personal one?
Because traditional symbol sets offer access to what Jung called “the collective unconscious” or “the objective psyche” - the wealth of knowledge accessed by many generations of ancestors, who crystallized their understandings into coherent forms.
When we memorize and internalize traditional symbol sets, we give our unconscious Self an expanded vocabulary by which to communicate with our conscious ego.
This means we become much better able to access communications from our Self via divination (for example, a Tarot reading), via the interpretation of dreams and of synchronous happenings (omens) in our daily life.
These traditional symbol sets carry very rich meanings and can all absorb a person for a lifetime of study, but with dedication you can learn a great amount about a chosen symbol set in a year, enough to greatly expand your ability to receive and decipher messages from the bigger part of You.
So, there you have it, a quick and dirty map to achieving Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel.
Of course all of this is much easier said than done.
Which is why my husband Taia and I created WEALTH: the alchemical community where leaders come into their full power via the Hermetic Arts.
In WEALTH, we use the power of communal commitment, proven tools, skilled mentorship and coaching, and super-fun alchemical socializing to keep us on track so we can accomplish these very challenging integrations and become the people we know we're meant to be.
best,
Carolyn Elliott
author of Existential Kink: unmask your shadow and embrace your power
P.S. You can click here to learn more about WEALTH and apply. Please remember, if you don't make your first month's payment when you apply, your application can't be considered (the payment will be refunded within 7 days if you are not accepted into the membership).
The membership includes a variety of monthly virtual mentorship, practice, and social events with Tarot and Zodiac themes, all explained in depth here.