Becoming Angelic - A Reappraisal
I.
So innocence, then. What a terrible idea.
The fantasy of standing in the midst of life and somehow remaining untouched by it. The dream of moving among humans and non-humans, landscapes and skyscapes, and speaking each of their languages so perfectly that no pain would be caused, no wound inflicted. The belief that life’s coils and turmoils are simple enough that there is always one right thing to do — one choice that might spare us from participating in the brokenness of the rest of creation.
The central idea of innocence — to have participated in no wrongdoing — is the idea of a species without sharp edges: humanity imagined as stereotypically alike, so perfectly fitted to one another that we interlock like the links of a chain.
As the term remains deliberately ill-defined and morally charged, most of us apprehend it as a constellation of meanings: the virtue of non-participation in a world of contradictions; the fantasy of perfect harmlessness; a posture of moral absolutism; and the imagined freedom from tragic complicity.
The thorn of all of these ideas lies not in their juvenile naivety: in that original longing to be shielded from a world of blade, blood, fur, and ticks. That is, the real world, after all, not some fantasy born from religious orthodoxy. No, the deeper problem with this superficially innocent idea is that it fundamentally misunderstands what in our experience of the world gives rise to hurt, sorrow and refusal.
Members of a species are bonded in alikeness on the outside, just as much as they stray in radical differences on their insides. One person’s joy is another’s boredom. Two people are touched upon the neck: one purrs, the other flinches. One human’s knees grow strong as trees, made to carry a body across continents; another’s hands grow soft and agile, made to hold a brush for thousands of hours. We discover not our gifts but our actual nature over a lifetime of wonder and wandering, dreams and dead ends.
What clouds this journey most is the social demand that we be far more alike than we genuinely are. We are asked to resemble one another as parents and employees, in the rituals of birth, marriage and burial, in what we imagine happiness to be and what we are willing to fight for. This socially constructed pull toward a single centre of gravity — toward sameness — lies at the root of our invented religions, invented nations, and elected governments. For a horde of singular beasts is terribly hard to rule.
As soon as we cannot uphold ourselves alone, we all depend on conventions. Solidarity is among the greatest gifts of our species. Yet, it should not arise from the mistaken belief that we are alike, that we were bound in flesh and spirit to one another. It should arise from the opposite recognition: that we are radically divergent in our realities, our needs, and our natures, and that despite these difference — or perhaps because of them — we retain the choice to extend ourselves toward one another when the ground gives way beneath the feet of one of us.
All moral distinctions stretch along a continuum, from relatively inconsequential failings to those of grave consequence. We can agree to bind ourselves at the far end of that continuum — to refrain from killing, stealing, or inflicting certain kinds of harm — while leaving one another vast freedom to stray and wander in different directions across the less consequential terrain: one might divorce five times, shun family gatherings, refuse to have children, choose a life of solitude, abandon a lucrative career for obscurity, refuse to forgive, or devote one’s life to prayer while another devotes it to bars.
It’s precisely in this sphere — not that of grave legal offenses, but the ordinary realm we inhabit from sunrise to sunset, shaped by the thousand preferences and inclinations of daily life that my so-called wrongdoing may be your right-doing. Here my vice, may be your virtue. As such, the religious halo of these words fades, judgement loses ground, and all we are left with, is a horde of humans, each straying to find their own way of living and expressing, of resting well and relating well.
If this is true already of people of two people from the same village, how much more so when we widen the circle to include the many humans and landscapes, languages and customs, cultures and ways of being that fill the full horizon of existence?
As we can begin to see, the idea of innocence and the reality of lived diversity are almost mutually exclusive; at the very least, the space in which they genuinely overlap is vanishingly small.
There are, of course, truths that hold across our differences. We call them scientific facts, and they offer rare clearings in the wild forest of wonder and loss that is life among human and other-than-human beings: a hammer on the nail hurts us all; birth is painful in every culture; death awakens the fear of our own mortality; sex, for better or worse, is a consequential pastime. The list could go on. Beyond the realm of science, we tend to call such truths existential: truths bound not to custom, culture, time, or place, but to the simple ontological fact of being alive in this world as members of our species. How I take my coffee, why I hate your parties, whether I choose the church or another nap in bed are a very long cry from such existential ground…
And yet, remarkably, these are precisely the territories over which we have spent centuries constructing moral codes, raising eyebrows, declaring heresies, and killed the occasional “outlier” with the serene conviction that our own likings had somehow acquired universal authority.
II.
Now, if you are wondering what Acher is going on about here, let me invite you to shift the perspective: what if we replaced the religiously charged term innocence with the Zeitgeist-hyped term integrity?
Is our contemporary obsession with maintaining integrity — that is, refusing to stray from the path of our self-chosen virtues — not, in some sense, the modern activist’s and influencer’s attempt at redemption, a way of returning to a state of somewhat less-stained innocence? Seen through this lens, is integrity not simply old wine in new skins: the same impulse, relocated outside the religious arena, to transform a horizontal dimension of human diversity into a vertical one of moral judgment? Are these two sentences not, at heart, siblings: I have committed no sin and I have remained true to myself? Only the divine reference point has been exchanged — from the tablets of the Ten Commandments to the tower of personal identity.
I think integrity may survive this suspicion; and yet, it serves us well to face it so sharply. The coherence of my life, of course, makes no statement about the correctness of yours. That is, as long as I can keep the temple gates of my mind sufficiently open to realize that they are not temple gates at all, but merely mosquito screens in a large apartment block — not even in the best part of town — where I establish the centre of nothing, save perhaps for the thin membrane separating my apartment from those of my neighbors, human and otherwise.
III.
The direct magical implications of the above are no more important than their communal. In fact, they are one and the same, and pointing this out might deserve its space.
I once wrote two books on “becoming alike to the angelic mind”. One is a reader of Rosicrucian-inspired essays and source-material; the other is a book on Johannes Trithemius who made this very statement the explicit motto of his spiritual life.
Here is the relevant passage, drawn from the magical manuscripts Trithemius wrote under the guise of the hermit Pelagius. Such literary games of concealment seemed necessary to the Black Abbot, who regarded these insights — those that bind the dealings with daemons to the dealings with humans — as belonging among the most secret arts of the grimoires.
But if man wants to achieve this, he must unite himself with the angelic mind and become alike. Now I want to announce, such a man, who aims to unite with the angel, who wants to gain experience and knowledge thereof, either through visible appearance of your good angel that is leaning towards you, or through dreams caused by intuition of the angel, or through lengthy secret experience. Whoever wants to attain such, he has to lead a chaste life, be without grief, live without strife and quarrel, not gorging and boozing, but live by themselves, not be desirous, not be niggardly, live God-fearing, and be a pious and holy man who avoids sin and prays diligently every day. Who thus holds [to these things] and aspires to practice in the manner described below, he can of present, past and future things be knowledgeable to explain everything. [1]
All books are snapshots in time, written from the biographical vantage point at which we happen to stand when the pen touches the page. This is true of Johannes Trithemius, and of course it is true of me. I sometimes wish, in 2020 I had already gathered the practical goêtic experiences that have since broadened my perspective. Had I done so, I would have woven the following into the book on Trithemius and into my Rosicrucian Reader.
As humans we will never stand for long among the angels. No matter how virtuous our lives; no matter how meticulously we shave the fur from our bodies, drape ourselves in clouds of expensive perfume, or keep our prayer chambers immaculate. We are rooted deeply in Olympic and Elementary Spirits, which together form the scaffold of our fleshly existence. They do not surround us like comets tracing their distant paths around us, influencing us from afar. They are the flesh upon our bones, the skin over our muscles, the very current in which our thoughts flow. We partake of them not metaphorically, but directly. In the flesh. In the inescapable fact of being alive.
No degree of integrity, no reconstructed innocence, will ever alter the fact that a hare lives within me, and a pig, and a wolf — and that each of them wants their own things, and that the place of their experience, their urges and desires, is not somewhere beyond me, but in my heart, beneath my skin, within my waking and dreams. As human we are legion, a goêtic horde, an Olympic torch. And so we carry fractures within us, everywhere — gaps and edges, corners and cracks. A landscape can never return to the idea from which it was once born. It remains forever landscape, cast into change, flowing onward through the current of time, further and further from the moment that first gave it birth…
Over the last six years, my understanding of what it means to actually “become alike to the angelic mind” has changed profoundly. I would gladly weave this distinction retrospectively into my earlier work on the subject. Since I cannot, I will do so here.
Becoming alike to the angelic mind, means that we succeed in building a bridge between our landscape and that of the angels. It does not mean that we become angels, or even that we come remotely close to resembling them. Becoming alike to the angelic mind, must never become an act of suppressing or dressing up, or — worse still — of judging either ourselves or others by standards other than human.
Consider Marco Polo, whose account became one of the most influential medieval European descriptions of China. He travelled through the territories of the Mongol Empire, spent years in Yuan China, and described a world radically different from the one known to his European readers. In much the same way, I invite us to think about “becoming alike to the angelic mind.” The phrase contains an invitation to travel outward and inward, into a realm of existence different from our own, and to encounter something radically other-than-human. Contact with it, communion with it, will alter us. And yet we remain human throughout: some part animal, some part angel, many parts idiot, and everything in between.
The idea of innocence is not a prerequisite for this journey. In fact, it might be its greatest obstacle. Let us be hairy then, sniffing, grunting, filthy — and at the same time loving, vulnerable and tender, magnificent, pompous and ridiculous. Let us be all of it, knowing full well that we will regret, that we will grieve, that we will miss what is gone.
For what the angels most want to know of us is not how closely we can approach them through abstinence from a life of wonder and torment, but what it is truly like to live such a life.
Footnote
[1]Johannes Trithemius, aka PELAGII EREMITAE, II Books Of knowledge and name of one's good angel, quoted after: Frater Acher, Black Abbot · White Magic, London: Scarlet Imprint, 2020.
