The concept of the Holy Guardian Angel makes its first appearance as a goal of magickal attainment, described in the book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage, a fifteenth century magical text ascribed to one Abraham the Jew and written to his son. This concept has often been compared to the Theosophical Higher Self, The Kabbalistic Ruach, the Greek Genius or daemon, and the augoeides. How this idea found its way into modern orders like the Golden Dawn and the A.A. may be worth looking in to.

In the late 1800’s in England a group of three Master Masons who were also members of the Masonic Rosicrucian society in England, headed by S.L. “MacGregor” Mathers founded the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. They claimed to have secured permission form some continental authority to do so after finding the address of one Fraulein Sprengel of Germany on some cypher manuscripts from the library of London. The manuscripts were used as the basic teaching format of this new initiatory order, which quickly grew to include the who’s who of 19th century occultism. the grades of the order followed the ascent of the spheres of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, one grade per sphere. Initiates of this order climbed the Tree of Life ceremonially in the initiation ceremonies admitting aspirants to the grades of the order. Personalities like A.E. Waite, Aleister Crowley, and Israel Regardie, all were members of the Golden Dawn at one time or another.

The Abramelin text was said to have been translated into English from the original French first by S.L. Mathers. In the early history of the Golden Dawn, the concept of the higher self became associated with the Adeptus Minor grade, the grade associated with the Kabbalistic sphere of Tiphereth, and the first grade of the inner Rosicrucian order. It is not clear whether this occurred before or after the translation of the Abramelin text, but eventually the grade of Adept, and the concepts of the Higher Self, and the Holy Guardian Angel (HGA) became completely intertwined.

The book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage details the arrangements, preparations, requirements, and instructions for a six month magical retirement wherein the aspirant invokes her HGA. The HGA is said to certainly appear provided all the the instructions in the book are carefully followed. The entire operation makes for a work of continuous devotion to the HGA with increasing intensity for the entire six months, so that by the end of the period the magician is spending most of each day in continuous prayer. It is proposed that it is by this intensity of aspiration that the HGA can be drawn neigh and invoked to a state of Knowledge and Conversation.

When Aleister Crowley left the Golden Dawn to form his own Thelemic Movement, the A.A., he began to emphasize the attainment of the Knowledge and Conversation (K+C) of the HGA, as possibly the single most important goal of every aspirant to magick. Crowley preferred the term HGA above the other wordings, for its simplicity and ambiguity, which allows each magickian to develop her own understanding of the phenomena. Having attained this, the magickian had guidance in all things and required little further assistance, and without it, she remained in utter darkness. The attainment of the K+C of the HGA became the primary focus of many western occultists from that time foreword.

Over the last century there has been much speculation regarding the actual nature of the HGA. Crowley insisted that this was a strictly personal matter and that one adept should not so much as discuss with another the method by which she invokes her angel. Some have chosen to think of this angel as a psychological construct, other feel it may be an archetype from Jung’s Collective Subconscious, others still think it some kind of hallucination, or that it has actual objective existence outside the mind of the magician. In the end each of us must decide for ourselves, through experience, what exactly our HGA is, if it is definable at all.