“See that you despise not one of these little ones: for I say to you, that their angels in heaven always see the face of my Father who is in heaven.” (Matthew 18:10)

I.

If you’re like me, then you might think that the single most significant factor in why you haven’t won the Mega Millions is the subconscious certainty that you’d be terminally bored if you were a multi-millionaire and never had to work an honest day again [1].

I don’t mean bored in a mundane sense, because obviously you’d have that year-long jaunt around the world planned minutes after matching the numbers on your card to the numbers on your TV screen, and you’d have that lifetime supply of your favorite wines/beers/liquors/liqeurs planned out, as well as the mansion needed to store it all, which would probably be located on the island you’d buy; and if you’re particularly ambitious and disciplined you’d have that doctorate in (x) sketched out in your mind not too long after, and therefore you’d also possibly seize on the idea of the donation to your grad school alma mater in order to have a department named after you (something which would survive even your death, after all)… etcetera.

No, I mean boredom in the sense of terminal ennui; I mean that sense of complete futility which afflicts those who attach an ultimate sense of achievement to a materially-realizable end, and then attain that end—or alternately that sense of futility which afflicts those who recognize that, in an absolute sense, all materially-realizable ends are of equal worth, and are therefore all equally worthless in the face of the absolutely ever-changing, utterly insubstantial nature of things. Let’s face it: existentialism is for poor people.

Watching those winners being presented those enormous checks, one almost has the sense that one is witnessing the Rapture enacted on an individual scale: “Poof! there goes someone else who’ll never have to work another day in their life.” We’re watching someone being literally lifted up out of the stream of the only life most of us ever know, that of living five days out of every seven around someone else’s schedule, all in order to make a living. Those people will never again be on the clock. This monkey’s gone to heaven.

The problem is, no amount of money can buy purpose. And moreover, it seems a sufficient amount of it will actually rob someone of purpose, if the sole purpose of one’s life has been to… make money. And life without purpose is, at best, a simulacrum of life, to which death might well be preferable.

II.

There is one possible exception of which I’m aware to this otherwise iron-clad rule, and it concerns the price of a book written in the 15th century, which purports to set out a ritual system—a spiritual technique—designed specifically to acquaint one with one’s purpose in a truly transcendental sense. Specifically, the stated goal of the ritual outlined in the book is the actual invocation to perceptible form of one’s objective higher “Self,” a “Self” that has collected a long list of names from different cultures throughout history: augoeides, daemon, atman, genius, tutelary spirit, arda fravaš… to name a few. In this book, The Book of Abramelin, it’s called the “guardian angel” or “Holy Guardian Angel,” and this Being, according to modern mystics and occultists such as Aleister Crowley and the adepts of the Golden Dawn, is supposed to vouchsafe unto oneself one’s “True Will,” or, as might be articulated in a Christian context, that portion of the Divine Plan entirely and specifically apportioned by God to oneself.

Far from being merely a fairytale object designed to comfort children, the guardian angel has had a long and attested history, as mentioned, woven like a glowing silk thread throughout the writings of Plato, Porphyry, Pseudo-Dionysius, the Neoplatonists, the Zoroastrian Yasna Avesta, the Old Testament, the Upanishads… While in antiquity this influence seems to have been more readily felt as another actual person, nowadays a case could be made that the phenomenon of intuition or insight, that nagging feeling or tug at one’s conscience which has been responsible for everything from the improbable checkmate to the saving of lives, could well lie on the same continuum that once produced the experience of the Divine Doppelgänger, much like the electromagnetic spectrum produces both the phenomenon of visible objects and the invisible sensation of heat against one’s skin.

Many people who have survived life and death struggles have come forward to describe encounters with an incorporeal being who provided them with companionship, encouragement, guidance and hope, helping them to live.

Then again, even nowadays this presence is still prone to be felt with some force if we’re to believe numerous testimonies of the Third Man Phenomenon, among them the words of early Antarctic explorer Earnest Shackleton. As John Geiger writes in The Third Man Factor: The Secret to Survival in Extreme Environments:

Many people who have survived life and death struggles have come forward to describe encounters with an incorporeal being who provided them with companionship, encouragement, guidance and hope, helping them to live. A good number of these cases involve people in extreme and unusual environments, such as the polar regions, alone at sea, or when climbing at high altitudes. However, other people, when confronted with personal stress under certain conditions, also encounter an unseen presence.

The blog entry containing the above book excerpt goes on to observe:

… there doesn’t seem to be a correlation between having this experience and religious conversion; people tend to draw an explanation from their background to make sense of it. There exists a scientific explanation based in stimulus between the two hemispheres of the brain, which suggests that it can be artificially stimulated, and that people having this experience are able to solve problems “beyond themselves”. It doesn’t follow, however, that scientifically-minded people will draw a psychological or physiological conclusion to explain it rather than a spiritual one. Although many theories exist, there is no definitive explanation. [Emphasis added.]

If it is indeed true that, as an empirically-replicable phenomenon, it might be possible to “artificially stimulate” the same response which generates these experiences, then it follows that such a technique could be documented and presented as instructions for others to follow… which leads us back to The Book of Abramelin.

In this book, in lieu of the extreme and random life-threatening situations responsible for the Third Man Phenomenon, we’re prescribed a rigorous and exacting set of daily exercises and practices, which are to last a total of eighteen months. And the ritual is not only demanding in terms of duration, but exacting in terms of setting as well, involving the use of multiple rooms with a specific orientation with respect to one another and with respect to the cardinal directions, river sand strewn across the floor “to the depth of two fingers at the least,” an Altar made of stones  “which have never been worked or hewn, or even touched by the hammer,” and so forth.

…the literature of modern mysticism and occultism is tragically lacking in accounts of the successful outcome of this operation, and strewn instead with corpses and madmen…

Of course, nobody said it was supposed to be easy. Indeed, the price of failure does purportedly include insanity and death; the main difference between this method and the haphazard and purely accidental experience of the Third Man Phenomenon is the presence of a rigorous structure in the case of Abramelin. The lack of a formal “introduction” to one’s Higher Self, such as provided by the Abramelin ritual in gradual steps, might also explain why, though often life-changing, the encounters reported in the Third Man literature don’t seem to dwell on themes such as True Will and Divine Purpose, at least as explicitly as The Book of Abramelin. But either way, “the gate is small and the way is narrow that leads to life, and there are few who find it” (Matthew 7:14), which might explain why the literature of modern mysticism and occultism is tragically lacking in accounts of the successful outcome of this operation, and strewn instead with corpses and madmen (and, perhaps even worse, those to whom nothing happened).

Another likely reason for this sad state of affairs is the fact that, until recently, everyone attempting it was working from a degraded and incomplete version of the ritual, the one translated from a French manuscript by Golden Dawn founder S. L. MacGregor Mathers in 1900 (one of the original four books was missing from this version, and among other discrepancies, the time required for the ritual was given as six rather than eighteen months). However, in 1995 a new version, using a more complete set of German manuscripts, was published in German, and in 2006 this version was published in an English translation. One can hope that with the circulation of  more reliable material we’ll begin to see a break in the trend of failure.

There is one notable exception to this trend, being the diary of a man—a couple, actually—who undertook this spiritual operation among the Saharan Berbers in North Africa during 1976. Georges Chevalier’s The Sacred Magician: A Ceremonial Diary, is actually the work of William Bloom, a pioneer and very successful proponent and teacher of modern holistic health.

III.

The current Mega Millions jackpot in California is estimated at $36 million. That would easily be enough for my wife and I to budget the “price of purpose” on the Abramelin plan, to buy a plot of land on which to build the requisite Apartment containing the requisite Oratory and Terrace, and all the ritual accoutrements described in The Book of Abramelin. If we agree beforehand to stave off the potential for terminal boredom (after the world trip, the philanthropy, the musical), and instead opt to risk our lives and sanity performing a ritual out of a 15th century grimoire in order to meet and talk to our personal emissaries from God, I think we’ll be okay.

In life—as has been pointed out, since Nietzsche, by Simmel—humans have a strange and almost incredible power to reach certain existential peaks at which “living more” (mehr leben), or the highest intensity of life, is transformed into “more than living” (mehr als leben). At these peaks, just as heat transforms into light, life becomes free of itself; not in the sense of the death of individuality or some kind of mystical shipwreck, but in the sense of a transcendent affirmation of life, in which anxiety, endless craving, yearning and worrying, the quest for religious faith, human supports and goals, all give way to a dominating sense of calm. There is something greater than life, within life itself, and not outside of it. This heroic experience is valuable and good in itself…

—Julius Evola, Meditations on the Peaks

Art credit: all work Copyright © Michael Lujan. All rights reserved.

[1] The odds against winning, at least in California, are 175,711,536 to 1—too large a numerical factor to be conceptualized by the human brain, and thus rendered insignificant by the ghost of Douglas Adams wielding a very dull Occam’s Razor.

Tags: aleister crowley, angels, boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience, christianity, death death goose, existentialism, golden dawn, guardian angel, higher self, holy guardian angel, magic, mysticism, occultism, third man phenomenon, william bloom