A Review of Frater
Acher: Holy Daimon (Scarlet Imprint: 2018)
As I read
through the first pages of Frater Acher it became evident that this book was
written by a kind soul, the kind of person that had his soul’s mirror to
reflect kindness through the constant polishing and beating by Lord Saturn. As
he writes on page 6:
“Flawlessness
is for tyrants and the mythical dead. As living humans, our hands are always
stained. We mess up, we clean up, and mostly are blissfully ignorant of the
damage or good we have done… This Platonic idea of who we are meant to be is at
one with, and yet entirely separate from, our mortal personalities. It is
waiting for us within our holy daimon.”
And it is
exactly this imperfection I found interesting in his work. The daimon, no
matter if we analyse it from the philosophy of Zoroaster, Plato, Plotinus or
the Chaldeans it appears that this daimoinic element is something of breath,
something of fire, something good that enters us at birth is elegantly treated
by Frater Acher in the first part of the book. And perhaps we can summarize all
this in the search for the nobility of the soul…
The daimon
has been a subject of personal interest for me since I was a teenager and
started studying magic, I saw the daimon as akin to the holy guardian angel, as
that force that was within and without as the adept ready to fail, fall or
cross the abyss had some notion about. I made Goetic adaptions of the Abramelin
operation (9 months I tell ye! Would never do that again….) just to understand
this mystery better. Frater Acher is inviting in impressive Saturnine
dimensions in the work of uncovering the daimon and I see that in the past I
did this as well, austerity, isolation, darkness, the accumulation of sufficient
sufferance… And clearly this is an avenue towards the daimon.
Yet I feel I
want to add to Frater Acher and his daimonic work a small fragment of my own
realization. Yes the daimon speaks the language of intuition and yes it is an
idea, a spiritual gnosis of sorts that define us that joins us at birth. It is
our memory that we are all born good and blessed – but then life happens… and
our hands becomes stained always…
In the
philosophy Ifá we find the concept of orí and iwá, ori means consciousness and
iwa means character. Iwa is in the myths represented to be a young maiden
curious on life, someone that learns by mistakes and that is always attracted
by something – and very often it is ori, consciousness. Yes, it is very similar
to Eros and Psyche and in the philosophy of Ifá it is this connection between
iwa and ori that enables the daimonic to take force as a spirit within. In turn
we see on peoples character whether they have a connection with their ori or
not and it is as Frater Acher says in the beginning of his book, it is about
our imperfection, of being flawed, about a battle between curiosity, kindness
and hubris…
Frater Acher
gives in the third part of the book several suggestions on how to polish our
own mirror, how to use the Saturnine vapours to bring out our own nobility and
it is beautiful to see how you feel you gained a friend in reading his book.
Holy Daimon
is a book that reminds us all that we all have still work to do. It is a work
of kindness, of sharing one’s burdens with others so you and me can also find
better ways through the thicket of dark phases in our life. It is a message of
starting to listen to your self, to wage war on all those impulses that makes
the nefarious holy and peel of our own pride and fear so we can stand naked in
truth and shine with the light of beginnings…
You can get
your copy here: https://scarletimprint.com/publications/holy-daimon