Over at Runesoup, Gordon White's wizarding school on the Isle of Roke we will be embarking on an Angels 101course for Q1 next year. This has followed on from a period of intense working by Rune Soup Premium Members in the U.K. and in the U.S (there has also been a toe-in-the-water from NZ) using Dr Thomas Rudd's material on the Solomonic Angels and Demons published as part of the Keys to the Gateways of Magic series by Skinner & Rankine.
Some of the US members Bré & Rev. Janglebones have already published their own reflections on the workings by the U.S. group and this has tipped my elbow to attempt the same for the work I took part in as part of the U.K. group.
Usual caveats apply, this record is of my own musings and may not reflect the impressions, thoughts and opinions of other members of the same group.
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What I will do is cut and paste a few extracts from the journal I kept of the workings we did and perhaps add a few comments:
Just to preface these by saying I had been using this material for a while on my own before entering lockdown, which was when we started doing this together as a group. I feel quite proud to say that should anyone ask "What did you do in the lockdown?", instead of reeling off a list of boxsets on Netflix I can hold my head up and say that "We were too busy bothering angels!"
To add, that although we called it the U.K. group we also included people from the rest of Europe, the U.S. and N.Z. too. Not everyone attended every session and some people were also flying solo in-between group session.
Rudd's angel hierarchy follows the Tree of Life and we started with Yesod/Moon/Gabriel and worked our way up to Methratton/Kether and finished off with the 'Choir of Angels' for Malkuth.
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To begin with this was my first vision from the first group working summoning Gabriel:
"I first saw a dream machine and then it became exploded matter by Cornelia Parker. I saw a handsome male figure with piercing blue eyes who smiled and was very friendly. I asked for a message but there was no verbal response. Instead I had an impression of something being opened up or unbuttoned or initiated.
The other group members had quite a bit of energetics like it was trying to manifest. Themes were of aliens, blue-eyed robot, light and shadow.
Cornelia is the ancient Roman female form of Cornelius, believed to come from cornu meaning horn. Gabriel is, by tradition, to be the angel who blows the horn to announce the Day of Judgement at the end of the world. It is he who is pictured on the RWS Tarot card of Judgement XX. I would take that as a confirmation of contact.
The piece by Parker is a play on the Big Bang so we have a reference to creation - a beginning which suggests the formation of this group. If we assume the others were sensing an unlocking of new energies and clearing channels of communication then it ties in too."
This gives a flavour of the type of visions that came with the scrying. Just to say that although I used a 'stone' I generally just see it in the imaginal - the space between my eye and the stone that appears when I slightly defocus & the quality of consciousness can be described as 'open'.
I was in the habit of doing some speed research after a session and had multiple experiences of synchs often in the form of quirky connections between visionary material and material fact.
e.g. Exploded matter = Cornelia Parker = cornu = horn = Gabriel blows his horn on the Day of Judgement.
These sort of things then nest in: Big Bang = Exploded Matter = beginning these group angelic conversations.
The other group members also had impressions of something "coming through" or being established, congruency with the notion of initiatory activity.
Another point of interest was that the angels could surprise us and confound our expectations on the nature of a particular angel because of planetary associations. This was the case with Samael, angel of Mars.
"Although we were expecting power and blood, because of the associations with this name, in fact that energy was gentle and completely benign for just about all of us.
My first image was the Sacred Heart of Jesus and then the white dove of the Holy Spirit. The ‘darkest’ image was of a cloaked figure in the distance between two hills with a large planet Mars overhead. I noticed that the energy of the last few angels appears during the invocation which gives a portent of the experience to follow.
This all generated quite a lot of discussion about the nature of what we are doing and what the angels are doing with us."
This question of 'What are we doing this for?" as well as the question from the angelic perspective "What do they want from us?" surfaced many times and I'm not sure that we ever really answered it to our own satisfaction.
The 'messages' received were often cryptic, archtypal, suggestive without being necessarily precise, yet somehow they do seem to capture the zeitgeist of the times we are living in. The following is the extract from the group scrying session with Raphael, angel of ☿. In this vision, I had the impression that the angel's message linked together the planet of time ♄ with change ☿ and planet that rules deceit, bargaining and emergence.
"I saw the boy I first saw from many years ago on the beach. He is about 4 years old with a nappy on. His fringe is long and it hides his eyes. His back is to the sea (probably on XXX beach). He holds two fistfuls of sand in his hands through which he allows the grains to run through his fingers. I’m reminded of the sand falling through an hour glass and I get an impression of senex-puer a ♄ and ☿ connection."
The following morning my partner woke from a dream in which our neighbour (female), adopted a beautiful baby boy.
In my mind the Saturn-Mercury conjunction linked to the archetype Senex-Puer written extensively about by the archetypal psychologist James Hillman.
Following the session I found the following extract that seemed to click with the vision/message:
"“But it is rather time,” saith she, “to apply remedies, than to make complaintes.” – Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy We are living in what the Greeks called the kairos – the right moment – for a “metamorphosis of the gods,” of the fundamental principles and symbols. This peculiarity of our time, which is certainly not of our conscious choosing, is the expression of the unconscious man within us who is changing. Coming generations will have to take account of this momentous transformation if humanity is not to destroy itself through the might of its own technology and science. – C. G. Jung, The Undiscovered Self Our special problem today is just this: we are essentially primitive creatures struggling desperately to adjust ourselves to a way of life that is alien to almost the whole past history of our species … the transition from primitive to sophisticated technology must be made swiftly – the resource problem demands that this be so. Today we are living at a unique moment, neither in the long primitive era nor in the better adjusted prosperous future. It is our century, our millennium, that must perforce take the maximum strain, for it is our fate to live during the transitional phase. And because we live in this special phase we find social difficulties, pressures, situations that defy even the simplest logical processes. We find ourselves in no real contact with the forces that are shaping the future. – Fred Hoyle, Of Men and Galaxies”"
The following extract is for the Angel Sachiel angel of ♃. I include it to show how I would test the vision for validity.
"My vision started quickly using the original clouds and triangle with light shining through it. There was a young clean shaven man with a long face. He was smiling and jovial. I tested with the God name ‘El’. He persisted but there was no communication. Later on a similar figure in white also with bright light appeared he was older with a beard and longer hair with grey in it. He turned and went through the triangle and I followed. He gave me a chalice and I drank from it. "
Another point that came over to the group quite early on was the importance of the space weather, this is from the scrying of Anael, angel of Venus:
"That aside, there was fragmentary images from all and some frustration, plus a couple of dropouts during the invocations.
My imagery had a connection to coronavirus, creeper movement, some kind of psychedelic black cube trans-dimensional energy and image.
There was one other coronavirus image from another person, some snaky movement, multiplicity and geometric diamond shapes. But what we discovered is that at the moment Venus is retrograde. So it looks like we might need to take into account the space weather. "
Sometimes the energy of the session would affect our mood, such as this when we called the angels of ♄ Caphriel & Zaphkiel.
"Very little imagery for me, but a sombre mood for all the group. We had, collectively, plenty of saturnine imagery and associations. The one stand out thing was a vivid blue that several members experienced."
For Raziel, who governs the 'Starry Firmament' the impressions were not messages in the general sense more abstract about the nature of reality from that 'great height'.
"Indra’s net, the Avatamsaka one in all and all in one, diamonds and the nesting of the immense into the smallest were themes that came clearly through in this session from many of the participants."
The word 'height' I feel in this sense is not suggestive of hierarchy in our usually accepted sense rather in the sense of 'distance' from our daytime consciousness. However, given the 'nested' quality of the information given this 'distance' is not removed from the objects that express the symbol (see below). I think this gives us some sense (rather than knowledge - which is again tied to our earthly way of understanding), of the angelic perspectival vision. Words such as holographic, nested, perspectival and co-dependent come to mind. There was a lot of 'eye' imagery from both groups as well as a lot of abstract geometric symbols as if we are at the most fundamental level of ordering of phenomena.
eye= a perspective
eyes = multiple perspectives nested together
And I think this is what I will take away from this with regard to the question of "What exactly are/am angels?' My answer to this, which was inspired by a post vision bit of research is:
Angels is what animism looks like in a transcendental cosmology.
Angels are the will of God on earth and in the universe, when Jacob wrestles with an angel in the Hebrew Bible, the angel is sometimes referred to as 'God' himself. This implies either a vehicle for an absent God but manifesting in the world. Hence the role of 'messenger' traditionally (and etymologically) ascribed to angels. There is a Kabbalistic view that all the sephiroth and paths are nested one inside the other Malkuth being the outer immediate visible layer.
The other take away, came from two other members of the group in a discussion following a vision that seemed to tie together 'environment' and 'imagination'.
It gave me the impression that our world is the dream of angels and our dreams are the angelic reality; there is a reciprocity to the interaction of these two realms. Again, these two realms are 'not-two'.
So, there are my thoughts for now, and looking forward to Angels 101.
In case you are interested there is fall-out work from this too. Some of us moved onto the Arthur Gauntlett work from the U.K. work and some experimentation is currently going on with the practical application of the AG method of cunning work.
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Image: By Gustave Doré (1832-1883) - http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/dore/, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3000589
