Musings Concerning Guardian Angels

[sdi]

After reading a few accounts of people's mystical experiences, I wonder two things:

1. If the nature of one's mystical experiences are determined by one's guardian angel. For example, a mystic with a Mercurial guardian angel might experience a dissolving of boundaries—becoming one with this or that thing—while one with a Venereal guardian angel might experience an overwhelming sensation of love and beauty.

2. If the type of thing that one does after leaving the cycle of rebirth is governed by one's guardian angel. For example, perhaps a soul with a Mercurial guardian angel tends towards becoming a psychopomp or a soul with a Jovial guardian angel tends towards governance.

Comments

[boccaderlupo]

Interesting speculation. I think there's something to this, particularly the first point. Then again, my particular experience is that this may be your "aspect," as it were—your initial inclination—but that encounters with different divinities has a balancing/harmonizing/mitigating effect on this initial inclination. The equivalent of traveling through the spheres of Dante's imagining of Paradiso...

Axé!

[sdi]

Good question, there. I had been operating under the assumption that the guardian angel is "fixed" across all incarnations (being, y'know, divine, timeless, and above the soul) but I suppose that assumption isn't necessarily justified.

[boccaderlupo]

Then again, that could just be me speaking about the Mercurial nature of my particular spirit...!

[sdi]

You might find something of interest in Sophy Burnham's A Book of Angels and The Ecstatic Journey. I'm convinced she's got a Mercurial angel, herself, and indeed this musing took shape after reading the last chapter of the first (where she gives a very speculative account of post-human life) and the first chapter of the last (where she gives an account of her own mystical experiences).

[boccaderlupo]

Thank you for the recommendation!

[sdi]

Macrobius mimics my speculation:

"If, as Virgil declares, even the more trivial things in which men indulged during life occupy them after death—"The selfsame pride in chariot and arms that was theirs in life, the selfsame care in keeping sleek steeds, attends them when hidden beneath the earth"—then much more surely do the former rulers of cities retain in the sky their interest in ruling men." [Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, IX]