Magick Without Tears

58 Do Angels Ever Cut Themselves Shaving? Cara Soror, Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law. A very witty way to put it! "Do angels ever cut themselves shaving?" Rem au tetigisti, again. (English: you big tease?) What sort of existence, what type or degree of reality, do we attribute to them? (By angel, of course, you mean any celestial-or infernal-being such as are listed in the Hierarchy, from Metatron and Ratziel to Lilith and Nahema.) We read of them, for the most part, as if they were persons-although of another order of being; as individual, almost, as ourselves. The principal difference is that they are not, as we are, microcosmic. The Angels of Jupiter contain all the Jupiter there is, within these limits, that their rank is not as high as their Archangel, nor as low as their Intelligence or their Spirit. But their Jupiter is pure Jupiter; no other planet enters into their composition. We see and hear them, usually (in my own experience) as the result of specific invocation. Less frequently we know them through the sense of touch as well; sometimes their presence is associated with a particular perfl me. (This, by the way, is very striking, since it has to overcome that of the incense.) I must very strongly insist, at this point, on the difference between "gods" and "angels." Gods are macrocosmic, as we microcosmic: an incarnated (materialised) God is just as much a person, an individual 362