The Higher Self and the Holy Guardian Angel

Our page on the Great Work names its first great goal as a conscious relationship with the deepest and truest part of oneself. The tradition has many names for that part and has said many things about it, some of them wise and some of them dangerous. This page sets out the names, the claims and the methods, and the cautions that experienced practitioners attach to them.

Many names for one idea

The idea that each person is accompanied or inhabited by a guiding presence is very old, and it has been described in the language of every age.

The daimon

Socrates spoke of a divine sign, a voice that had come to him since childhood and warned him against what he was about to do, though it never urged him on. Plato, in the Timaeus, calls the highest part of the soul a daimon given by God to each person, which lifts us toward our kin in heaven. Plotinus wrote a short treatise on the guardian spirit allotted to each soul, and Iamblichus devoted a book of On the Mysteries to the personal daimon and how the theurgist may come to know it.

The genius

For the Romans, the genius was the guardian spirit born with each man and honored on his birthday, the companion and representative of his particular nature. The word survives in our phrase for a person's characteristic gift, and the Renaissance magicians used it in something close to the old sense.

The augoeides

A Greek word meaning shining or of the form of light, used by the later Platonists for the luminous body of the purified soul. A nineteenth century novel brought it into English occult writing as a name for the higher self, and it has been used in that sense since.

The holy guardian angel

The phrase comes from the Book of Abramelin, a German book of magic that claims to have been written in 1458 and survives in later manuscripts. It prescribes a retreat of many months, growing steadily in prayer and withdrawal, at the end of which the operator receives the knowledge and conversation of the holy guardian angel. An English translation published in 1898 made the phrase the standard modern term for the goal of the work. Its austerities are not part of the practice described on this site.

The higher self

The plainest of the names, and the one this site uses most. It was popularized in the late nineteenth century and is the least committed: it says only that there is more to a person than the everyday personality, and that the more is also the better.

What the tradition claims

Under the different names the claims are remarkably consistent. Each person has such a center. It knows what the person is for, the course of life that would express their real nature, which later writers call the true will. The everyday personality is ordinarily out of touch with it, governed instead by habit, appetite and fear. Conscious and lasting contact with it is the turning point of the whole work. On the Tree of Life it is placed at Tiphareth, the sphere of the Sun at the center, and some modern systems define the grade of adept by its attainment.

Those who report such contact describe it variously: as a presence, as an inner voice, as a sudden and unarguable clarity about what to do, as a steady sense of being accompanied. The old texts insist that it is not dramatic in the way beginners expect, and that it is known less by what it shows than by what it changes.

Inside or outside?

There are two main ways of understanding all this, and the tradition has never chosen between them. On the first, the higher self is the depth of one's own mind, the integrated whole of which the everyday self is a fragment, experienced as other only because we are so unfamiliar with it. On the second, it is a distinct being, an angel or a god, assigned to a person and caring for them. Iamblichus held the second view. Many modern writers hold the first. Aleister Crowley, who made the knowledge and conversation of the holy guardian angel the central goal of his system, described it for years as the silent self within, and later insisted that it was an independent intelligence.

A student does not need to decide. The practices are the same on either view, and so is the test. Whatever leads you toward greater honesty, steadiness, generosity and usefulness is worth following. Whatever leads you toward self importance, isolation or contempt for others is not your higher self, whatever it calls itself.

The center and the will

Modern writers connected the higher self with the definition of the Great Work itself. Eliphas Levi called the work the full conquest of a person's faculties and the emancipation of the will. Crowley, who took much from him, put it as the joining of opposites.

The Great Work is the uniting of opposites. It may mean the uniting of the soul with God, of the microcosm with the macrocosm, of the female with the male, of the ego with the non ego.

Aleister Crowley, Magick Without Tears

The two definitions meet in the higher self. To know it is to know one's true will, the course that is not chosen from a list of preferences but discovered as the expression of what one is. To follow that course is to unite the everyday self with its center, which is the first and greatest of the unions the definition names. Everything else in the training, the meditation, the ritual, the diary and the long work on character, prepares the ground.

How the center is approached

The old books agree on four conditions, and none of them is a technique that can be performed once and finished.

Aspiration

A sincere, repeated turning of the whole person toward what is highest in them. Crowley reduced his advice on the subject to two words, invoke often, and the stress falls on the second. Daily aspiration, brief and honest, does more than occasional ceremony.

Purification

The clearing of the ground described on our page on the Great Work: the training of attention, the facing of the shadow, the balancing of the elements of the character. A clouded glass cannot show a clear image.

Discernment

The habit of examining every inner prompting before acting on it, and of keeping the record that makes examination possible.

Patience

The Abramelin operation asks for months of withdrawal, which we do not recommend, and the tradition speaks of years of ordinary work. Contact cannot be forced, and attempts to force it are the usual cause of the counterfeits described below.

Counterfeits

Because the claim is so large, its imitations are common and some of them are harmful.

The surest sign of the real thing is undramatic. It is the same as the sign of progress in the Great Work as a whole: a change in conduct that the people around you can see. The tradition has always said that the angel is known by its fruits, and the fruits are ordinary goods.