PGM VII.505-28: Meeting With Your Own Daimon

Inspired by Sfinga and Key (authors of withcunningandcommand.com), I decided to try my hand at PGM VII.505-28: Meeting With Your Own Daimon. The purpose of the rite is as the name says— it is a rite that allows you to meet your own personal daimon.  If there is something I wish I did before attempting to performing the rite, however, it is to actually read through Holy Daimon by Frater Archer, for not only does the book includes an adapted version of the PGM rite with detailed guidance on how to perform it, but within it is also a very thorough explanation of what constitutes a daimon, to which the author draws a parallel between Socrates’ view of the daimonion with the occult view of the holy guardian angel. I wholeheartedly suggest that those who wish to attempt the PGM rite read over Holy Daimon before attempting.

Regardless, the rite is a relatively simple week-long ritual. Prior to performing the rite, at the suggestion of Sfinga and Key, I infused some myrrh resins into edible ink and used the ink to write the required holy names onto fourteen eggs. During the first dawn of the rite, I rubbed an egg all over myself, licked the names on the egg clean and then cracked it over a bowl to be discarded. Once that was done, I took another egg and raised it to greet the sunlight streaming through my window and spoke the required prayer seven times over the egg. Finally, I cracked the egg and swallowed its content. Admittedly, I found the yolk to be much tastier than the egg whites. When sunset came along, I spoke the required prayer seven times and repeated the rite again at the next dawn until seven says was over.

It was around day six that I realized something was wrong.

One thing I neglected to mention was that a few nights before I began my week-long ritual, I went clubbing in a classic university student fashion. Since that night out, I had been feeling a bit tired and sick, probably due to the sleep deprivation and the alcohol and the stress of working on my dissertation. Hence, by the time I was almost done with the PGM rite, I found that my body was exhausted and I felt incredibly weak compared to my usual baseline.

On day six of the ritual, I received a brief image in my head of a figure who seemed to be made up of lightning and storms. The energy I felt from the figure was wild and volatile, and this was a huge contrast to what I saw on the final day of the ritual. Instead, what I saw after I have completed the rite was a corpse-like figure shrouded in shadows. Due to a sense of dread I felt after seeing this figure, I decided to ask two of my trusted friends for advice: Red (@witchcraftinred on Instagram) and Lucas (@geopythia on Instagram). Both of them agreed that something wasn’t right.

In essence, the spirit felt as if it was dematerializing. One of the purposes of the rite is to ‘birth’ it into being, but due to some mistake I made — perhaps caused by the weakened state of my physical body which prompted a lapse on concentration and focus when performing the final days of the ritual — the spirits’ form failed to remain stable and it failed to remain anchored to me or the realm I am in. I wondered too if this could’ve been caused by how body was ‘impure’ due to the state of sickness that I was in, which led to the daimon being affected when I rubbed the egg all over my body and swallowed the other egg, thereby imbuing my ‘impure’ essence into the daimon’s own.

Thus, I swiftly devised a way to stop the daimon from dematerializing.

After performing some additional divination myself and cross-checking my divination with Red’s tarot readings, I concluded that a simple way to keep the daimon from dematerializing is to strengthen it and give it something to act as its anchor. A way to do this is to get some kind of object (in my case, a piece of jewelry) and consecrate it in the name of the daimon using PGM IV.1596-1715: Consecration For All Purposes; Spell to Helios.

Through this consecration process, both the jewelry and the daimon itself (NN, in the text) is blessed with ‘strength and honor’ by the faces of Helios, among other blessings. I used Digital Ambler’s version of the rite where the rite is carried out in a single operation during the day and hour of the Sun after sunset. I adapted the rite further to use burnt bay leaves to act as the herb that fumigates the jewelry. Additionally, prior to the consecration, I also called upon the Aldebaran, Regulus, Antares and Fomalhaut as Watchers of the Cardinal Directions to bless and safeguard the ritual space. I also asked that my own patron, as the Lord of the Starry Ocean, assist me in the rite.

To my relief, the consecration was a success.

It took me a while to familiarize myself with the daimon, but it is not long before I dreamt of a figure made out of flames and when I performed my own divination regarding the daimon, I received confirming cards of Ace of Wands, Eight of Wands and King of Wands. The fiery nature of the cards seemed to match the fiery nature of the daimon. To triple check that everything was going alright and that I wasn’t making all of this up (self-doubt and the fear of delusion, as they say, can be a bitch), I reached out to Alex (@the_hexdoctor on Instagram), a dear friend and mentor of mine, who agreed to performed a reading to clarify some of the weird occurrences that had begun to happen since I made contact with the daimon.

Without delving into too much detail, it is accurate to say that the daimon will bring about upheavals in my life. If anything, the upheavals has already begun— the internal ones, at least. Information had come to light about the reasons I was born (not my metaphorical life purpose, but the literal reason behind the decisions my parent had to birth me). Likewise, I had something between a mental breakdown and a mental breakthrough wherein I realized that my childhood was, in fact, a troubled one. Hence, it made logical sense why I still felt so wounded deep inside.

It just never really hit me truly how hurt I still feel.

I believe that the daimon has led me to accept that some things in my childhood that happened actually happened, and that even if it happened years ago in the past, it doesn’t mean that I am not affected by it to this day. I wasn’t weak, because no child should need to be strong. It is human to be fragile and be breakable.

There is no shame in shattering, sometimes.

Furthermore, I think the nature of the daimon one receives from the rite will also depend on who you are as a person and where you are on your spiritual journey. To quote Lucas during his reading on the daimon: ‘this spirit is a reflection of your many spirit pacts and contains multitudes to be unraveled. In part, it represents the fear and the severity of each pact which must be faced for the power and personality within it’. Confrontation, reflection, fear and growth seems to be the theme of this daimon so far. I feel like I wasn’t quite ready to work with this daimon so directly yet. Hence, the daimon is working to get me to that state where I can confront whatever lies in wait for me.

All in all, I do think that the rite has the potential to genuinely be life-changing. Yet, the fact that the rite is literally the last rite written in the Holy Daimon book also speaks to the life-altering power within the rite, one that shouldn’t be attempted haphazardly. Therefore, if anyone else is curious about performing the rite, I suggest that they divine thoroughly on the consequences of doing so beforehand.