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By examining your natal chart, based on the time, date and place of your birth, traditional astrology provides a way to determine the name of your Holy Guardian Angel, aka personal guardian angel, genius or ruling spirit.
There are a number of methods that the Renaissance mage Cornelius Agrippa mentions in Three Books of Occult Philosophy, Bk III ch 26.
Of the method I use, Agrippa says, "There are also the Arabians, and many others, and some Hebrews, who finde out the name of a Genius by the places of the five Hylegians, and making projection alwayes from the beginning of Aries, and the letters being found out according to the order of Hylegians with the astrologers, being reduced into a known order, and being joyned together, make the name of a good Genius:"
So we take the 5 Hylegical places in the chart that is the degree of the Sun, the Moon, the Ascendant, the Part of Fortune and the Prenatal Syzygy, that is the degree either the Full or New Moon previous to birth. Starting with 0 Aries as Aleph we give a Hebrew letter in alphabetical order to the 360 degrees of the Zodiac, then match up the 5 Hylegical place degrees with the appropriate Hebrew letter.
Here is an example of how to determine the name of your personal guardian angel/spirit from Cornelius Agrippa's Three Books of Occult Philosophy, book III, chapter 26.
First of all, as for all natal chart questions, you need the accurate time, date and place of birth. For our example, I will be using the birth chart of King Henry VIII as provided in John Gadbury's Collection of Nativities at page 8.
Gadbury lists Henry as being born at 10:40 am on June 28, 1491 (Old Style) at Greenwich, England, giving him an Ascendant of 27 Virgo. Using modern astrological software, 27 Virgo gives a time of 10:42 am. Close enough! For convenience sake I am going to use the modern software for the calculations which are close, but not exactly the same as given in Gadbury.
Agrippa gives several methods for finding the name of the spirit or genius associated with a particular chart. We will use the method described as being that of the Arabians. For this we use the 5 hylegical places, which are the Sun, Moon, Ascendant, Part of Fortune and the prenatal sygygy (the Full or New Moon immediately previous to the birth). We then determine the degrees that these places fall on in the natal chart.
We use a table of the Hebrew alphabet, starting with aleph at 0 Aries and proceeding in alphabetical order throughout the degrees of the Zodiac. We consult this table and note the letter corresponding to the degree of each of the hylegical places.
Let's look at Henry VIII's chart. Sun 14 Cancer, Moon 11 Aries, Ascendant 27 Virgo, Part of Fortune 24 Gemini, Full Moon 8 Capricorn.
These degrees correspond to Hebrew letters as follows:
14 Cancer Peh
11 Aries Lamed
27 Virgo Beit
24 Gemini Qoph
8 Capricorn Samekh
Agrippa advises that we should then add El or Iah which are divine names.
So the guardian angel of Henry VIII is PeLaBeQaSiel
If you find these instructions difficult I provide the name of your personal genius/guardian angel/spirit with all of my natal readings, including:
the Astrological Checkup
Spiritual Path Reading
Full Natal Reading.
Of interest to astrological magicians, in my natal readings I also provide the Almuten Figuris or chart ruler according to the rather complex calculation of Ibn Ezra, plus a description of individual image for your rising degree from Johannes Angelus.
11 comments:
Hello Mr. Warnock,
Can you please tell me what is your source or reference for determining the Hylegical places?
Thanks
Josephus
My first source for the use of the Ascendant, Sun, Moon, Part of Fortune and Prenatal Syzygy as hylegical places for the guardian spirit/daimon name was my magic teacher Robert Zoller.
While Ptolemy lists the Ascendant, Sun, Moon, Midheaven and Part of Fortune as the hylegical places, the use of the prenatal syzygy is also found in traditional sources, ie John Partridge's Mikropanastron at 83.
Christopher Warnock
I have found this system very useful as well as the others. Agrippa's book is very very very interesting. Many other websites are clueless on finding the name of the Holy Guardian Angel, this was the first step in the right direction. Those who are willing to go this far should also do the Rite Of The Bornless One as well.
Both the name and the rite are one of the deepest experiences you will gain in life.
But what if your degree is above 50 seconds? For example if the sun was at Aries 13 degrees 56 seconds - would that count as 14 degrees or 13 degrees in calculating the genius name?
Ok, I can see that this is confusing, but we are not talking about some special degree measure for spirit names, but the difference between the 1875 and the 18th century. 13 Aries 0 to 13 Aries 59 is the 14th degree of Aries, thus 13 Aries 56 is in the 14th degree of Aries.
Zoller is certainly something.
Zoller made some really key contributions to the revival of traditional/medieval astrology, but has an incredibly messed up personal life. I keep trying to reconcile with him, but to no avail.
How is it you assigned the vowels to the letters that way? Hebrew has no written vowels?
I know absolutely nothing, nada, zilch about Hebrew. But then clients really, really want to know the Hebrew, so I get in this sort of twist. I suppose I should stand on my principles and refuse to do anything except in English, but then I'd be getting questions about why I wasn't doing Hebrew. [Heavy sigh]
I have two problems with this method:
1. Given that Ascendant moves by a degree every 4 minutes (and Point of Fortune even faster), and very few people can say they know their time of birth down to 4 minutes or less. So results are going to be wildly inaccurate for most people.
2. How do you pick the degree for the most recent full/new moon before your birth? Again, moon moves rather fast, so it stays full or new for many degrees.
The possible lack of accuracy of natal birth times is a problem for all natal astrologers. It's one of the reasons I like horary! The degree of the prenatal syzygy (ie New or Full Moon previous to birth) is straightforward because this is the degree when the conjunction (New Moon) or opposition (Full Moon) was exact. This is something that an astrologer can determine.
Obviously this is not the only method. Speaking directly to your guardian angel, if you can, is clearly an excellent method as well and I am sure that there are others.
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