On the creation of Archangels
Nosce te Ipsum.
In my last post I mentioned that I'm balls deep in meditation and visualization exercises. Up until today I'd been playing a conservative game. I would put on that Tratakam YouTube video and run the whole nine minutes before descending into a hypnotic state and toying with the state of my unconscious mind. Today I kicked things up a notch and did a bit of experimentation.
I set up a small mediation space in my living room, the two candles, a bit of incense and a small 2" crystal ball. The ball would be my spiritus loci while the other stuff helped to establish a more magical setting than the room I play Dark Souls in. I lit the candles and incense, performed the LBRP and then got down to it.
After some time gazing and pranayama (I think I'm doing 4-4-4-4 right now. The goal is 6-6-6-6), I began to notice visual distortions around the edges of my vision as well as around the ball. There seemed to be billowing clouds of smoke gathering around it. The character of the ball's reflection began to move a bit, as well. There were no distinct shapes, just the sense of something happening. After some time, I closed my eyes and lowered myself down with a countdown from 10.
The OTA lessons have me playing small mind games to aid in visualization but I've already done a good deal of that. Chic Cicero's book, Self-Initiation Into the Golden Dawn Tradition, outlines a pretty good exercise that has you playing with "astral clay" and it engages most of your senses. So I'm most of the way there. The objective is to train your mind to see astral beings.
Some time ago, when I began experimenting with concepts learned in Phil Hine's excellent Chaos Magic field manual, Condensed Chaos, I found myself deep in a meditative state that led to a full-sensory experience at a cabin surrounded by a dense and threatening forest. Inside the cabin was a wing-back chair situated adjacent to a roaring fireplace and a table that held a single book. A book I could not open no matter how hard I tried. Outside was circle of stones surrounding a granite altar with standing stones at the cardinal points. There was an objective for this place and it evolved over time, it eventually became a safe place for the entity that stalked the forest, a horrifying vision of myself that concealed a severely damaged version of myself at age 3 beneath the disguise but during that evolution, every trip to this place was a vivid sensory experience where I could feel the soft grass beneath my feet, feel the warmth of the fire, hear the rustling of leaves as the breeze passed through the forest. I can still see it in my mind's eye. Flags gently blowing in the breeze, bearing my Astarte Sigil. Meetings with Hindu gods: the friendly and helpful Ganesh and the fierce Devi, Durga, who gave me the strength to face my demons. A living embodiment of Baphomet sat quietly, a visual representation of the Hermetic principles that I was chasing and the mysterious Egyptian god, Khonsu, who protected me during my trials outlined by the Moon card of the Major Arcana.
I seem to have a jump start on a lot of these neophyte excercises since I've been toying with first degree initiation exercises for other Golden Dawn current traditions and the hermetic qualities of Chaos Magic in the past. It's been easy to apply those lessons to these OTA lessons. In the current context, I've begun the process of actually seeing the four Archangels of the quarters. This is an important part of lesson 3, as I've said.
The Archangel Raphael appeared to me yesterday during the LBRP. He appears to me as a fierce looking man with narrow features and golden hair in the style that you typically see Julius Caesar represented with. He wears a yellow robe with a white stripe down the middle, bearing the elemental symbol of air in yellow and carries a golden sword.
Today I was presented with the Archangel Gabriel. She appeared to me as a beautiful black woman with dark bushy hair tied up high with blue ribbon and a blue robe draped over her shoulders that is open up the sides with a white stripe up the middle and the elemental symbol for water in blue on her chest. She presented a golden cup and greeted me with a gentle and compassionate expression. The facial expression surprised me a bit. All the reading about angels that I've done assures me that while you want them on your side, they tend to be alien and unknowable. They maintain their position in the divine hierarchy and move with the rest of the gears in the machinery of the universe but are not necessarily friends of man. They're more like the angels on Supernatural. So to see her in such a gentle light took me by surprise.
The two angels appear to me as fully realized beings with mass and volume. They haven't spoken yet. I'll work on that after I receive visions of Michael and Uriel.
Tu es Deus