Symphony of Wills

The ultimate transcendent reality, the Absolute, manifesting in the potential reality as the Great Spirit, in the actual reality appears as the a drive toward being and awareness.

This striving, manifesting as the world-principle Will, finds its concrete expression in active differentiated agents, whose interaction constitutes the world process.

All these carriers of will are divided into two fundamental groups — the so-called Free and ministering spirits.

This binary arises from the most primordial duality of being and mind.

On the one hand, ‘pure’ being, the aggregate of energies, requires a formative influence provided by the hierarchy of logoi, and is directed by the Free spirits — gods, alvs, humans, etc. The freedom of a spirit springs from its source — the Monads — the differential aspect of the self-knowing Absolute.

On the other hand, the inner nature of the energies, rooted in the originating Will of the Great Spirit, manifests as their ‘inertia’, their own tendencies toward actualization or, conversely, disintegration, and is expressed in the aggregate of the ‘ministering’ spirits — Angels and Demons — whose source of Will is the uniform Will of the Great Spirit itself. In this, the formative, concretizing, revealing, and creative aspect of that Will — ‘Providence’ — finds expression in the Hierarchy of Angels, while the destructive aspect that de-actualizes — the ‘Spirit of Darkness’ — is expressed in the pseudo-hierarchy of demons.

Note that the very degree of freedom of the Free spirits can vary greatly depending on their position — gods are not free in the strict sense, since they have a certain range of functional duties from which they cannot deviate. Yet the fundamental independence of their will, grounded in their Monadic nature, allows them to err, to make wrong choices, and in general to find within themselves that potential difference which spares the world from monotonous mechanistic expression. In other words, the duality of the Free spirits is contained in their very being. They discover the possibility of creation within themselves; they find support and meaning in their own existence.

Angels and Demons have no choice. They actualize the currents of which they are part, emerging from the Dinur and dissolving back into it. Yet the absence of freedom in their Will does not imply the absence of Will itself. Every Angel or Demon possesses a mighty Will, free of doubt, resolute and irresistible. However, the source of that Will is not in its own individuality, but in the general impulse of the Great Flow, specifically in its descending or ascending portion. In other words, the duality of the ministering spirits lies outside their own being, and the difference in potential for action manifests only in the interaction of heterogeneous currents. Angels, as the positive pole of this binary, act only to restrain Demons, and Demons, as the negative pole, only to the extent that they succeed in undoing what Angels have created.

If a human, god, ás, or alv is a self-sufficient system, then an Angel or Demon is only a part of the general flow.

For a Magus, understanding these features is of extreme importance both from theoretical and practical perspectives.

As mentioned, historically, it was precisely the lack of such understanding that led to the expansion of demonic influence over the human mind.

Bringing heterogeneous forces together in a single Ritual or spell must be carried out with utmost care and meticulous discernment of their influences.

First, the duality or homogeneity of the nature of spirits dictates different methods of interacting with them — appeal or summoning; theurgy/goetia become clearer and less prone to error when this understanding and its conclusions are taken into account.

Second, the particularities of the interaction among the spirits themselves often escape notice. For example, few Magi can satisfactorily explain the nature of the interaction between the god of a planet, its Angel, and Demon. Yet understanding this interaction can significantly increase the effectiveness of working with those energies.

For example, the Solar god and Archangel Michael (in the solar aspect), though they ‘administer’ different elements of the ‘solar’ principle, stand in complex and sometimes antagonistic relations to one another. Since the Solar god, as a composite agent, brings about illumination and the unveiling of all aspects of being, including the negative — manifested in his dual aspects: warming and burning — and the Archangel guards the stable manifestation of particular aspects in their accord, preventing contradictions, their interaction can be described as the relationship, for example, of a king and a cardinal in a medieval country. For the king, the prosperity of the realm as a whole is paramount, while for the cardinal, spiritual unity is paramount. And in different situations, the general planetary principle manifesting in a given object or process is governed predominantly by the god or the angel, the Genius or the spirit, and sometimes — entirely by a Demon. It is mistaken to assume, for instance, any action of Michael is coordinated with the activity of Sorat, Nakiel, Okha, or Apollo.

To examine, ‘who stands’ behind a given influence of a principle and how its entire internal hierarchy is constructed in that influence can be extremely, and sometimes vitally, important for a Magus.