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A guardian angel is a type of angel that is assigned to protect and guide a particular person, group or nation. Belief in tutelary deity can be traced throughout all antiquity. The idea of angels that guard over people played a major role in Ancient Judaism. In Christianity, the hierarchy of angels was extensively developed in the 5th century by Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. The theology of angels and tutelary spirits has undergone many changes since the 5th century. The belief is that guardian angels serve to protect whichever person God assigns them to. The Memorial of the Holy Guardian Angels is celebrated on 2 October.
The idea of a guardian angel is central to the 15th-century book The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage by Abraham of Worms, a German Cabalist. In 1897, this book was translated into English by Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers (1854–1918), a co-founder of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, who styled the guardian angel as the Holy Guardian Angel.
Aleister Crowley (1875–1947), the founder of the esoteric religion Thelema, considered the Holy Guardian Angel to be representative of one's truest divine nature and the equivalent of the Genius of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the Augoeides of Iamblichus, the Atman of Hinduism, and the Daimon of the ancient Greeks. Following the teachings of the Golden Dawn, Crowley refined their rituals which were intended to facilitate the ability to establish contact with one's guardian angel.
In Genesis 18–19, angels not only acted as the executors of God's wrath against the cities of the plain, but they delivered Lot from danger; in Exodus 32:34, God said to Moses: The story of Tobias concerns the angel Archangel Raphael guiding and aiding its primary character. Psalm 91:11 reads: (Cf. Psalm 33:8 and 34:5 — 34:7 and 35:6 in Protestant Bibles).
The belief that angels can be guides and intercessors for men can be found in Job 33:23–26, and in Daniel 10:13 angels seem to be assigned to certain countries. In this latter case, the "prince of the kingdom of Persia" contends with Gabriel. The same verse mentions "Michael, one of the chief princes".
Lailah is an angel of the night in charge of conception and pregnancy. Lailah serves as a guardian angel throughout a person's life and at death, leads the soul into the afterlife.
Chabad believes that people might indeed have guardian angels. For Chabad, God watches over people and makes decisions directly with their prayers and it is in this context that the guardian angels are sent back and forth as emissaries to aid in this task. Thus, they are not prayed to directly, but the angels are part of the workings of how the prayer and response comes about.
In the view of Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz:
In Judaism, there are references to angels with specific protective functions. An example of this can be seen in the birth protection rituals practiced among others by Ashkenazi Jews Jews in parts of Alsace, Switzerland and Southern Germany. Pregnant women and newborn children would be given text amulets bearing the names of the angels Senoi, Sansenoi and Semangelo. These angels were supposed to protect pregnant women and newborn children from Lilith. This can be traced back to the story of Lilith, in which God sends three angels to bring Lilith back to Adam. They are unsuccessful in this task, but Lilith admits to having been created to harm children. She promises to spare children who carry the name or likeness of the three angels with them. (2025). 9783796546075, Schwabe Verlag. ISBN 9783796546075
Samael was identified as the guardian angel and prince of Ancient Rome and the archenemy of Israelites. By the beginning of Jewish culture in Europe, Samael had been established as a representative of Christianity, due to his identification with Rome.
The first Christian theologian to outline a specific scheme for guardian angels was Honorius of Autun in the 12th century. He said that every soul was assigned a guardian angel the moment it was put into a body. Scholasticism augmented and ordered the taxonomy of angelic guardians. Thomas Aquinas agreed with Honorius and believed that it was the lowest order of angels who served as guardians, and his view was most successful in popular thought, but Duns Scotus said that any angel is bound by duty and obedience to the Divine Authority to accept the mission to which that angel is assigned. In the 15th century, the Feast of the Guardian Angels was added to the official calendar of Catholic holidays.
In his 31 March 1997 Regina Caeli address, Pope John Paul II referred to the concept of guardian angels and concluded the address with the statement: .
In his 2014 homily for the Feast of Holy Guardian Angels, 2 October, Pope Francis told those gathered for daily Mass to be like children who pay attention to their "traveling companion". , the Pope said. During the Morning Meditation in the chapel of Santa Marta, the Pope noted that oftentimes, we have the feeling that This, he said, "is the voice of" our guardian angel. The Pope instructed each, The Pope urged that this "doctrine on the angels" not be considered "a little imaginative", as it is rather one of "truth": it is .
Pope Francis concluded with a series of questions so that each one can examine their own conscience: Each one of us can do so in order to evaluate He reiterated this in a homily on 2 October 2018: The Congregation for Divine Worship and Discipline of the Sacraments discourages assigning names to angels beyond those revealed in scripture: Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael. Congregation for Divine Worship and Discipline of the Sacraments, "Directory on Popular Piety and the Liturgy", §217
The Opus Sanctorum Angelorum is a public association of the Catholic Church that Christians can join as members in order to promote Within the Opus Sanctorum Angelorum is the Confraternity of the Holy Guardian Angels that one becomes eligible for after entering a two year formation period.
Saint Gemma Galgani, a Roman Catholic mystic, stated that she had interacted with and spoken with her guardian angel.Rudolph M. Bell, 2003 The Voices of Gemma Galgani: the Life and Afterlife of a Modern Saint University of Chicago Press pages 47 and 185 Saint Pio of Pietrelcina was known to instruct his parishioners to send him their guardian angel to communicate a trouble or issue to him when they could not travel to get to him or another urgency existed.
As such, before the Eastern Orthodox liturgy of the Communion of the Faithful, a Christian prayer asks
In May and June 1743, Methodists experienced persecution in Wednesbury and Walsall and the founder of the Methodist Church, John Wesley, was threatened with death by a mob who dragged him in the rain; however, and he .
In his earlier writings, Crowley states that the Holy Guardian Angel is the "silent self", the equivalent of the Genius of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the Augoeides of Iamblichus, the Ātman of Hinduism, and the Daimon of the ancient Greeks. In his late sixties, when composing Magick Without Tears, he states that the Holy Guardian Angel is not one's self, but rather a discrete and independent being, who may have been previously human.
Guardian angels appear in literary works of the medieval and Renaissance periods. Later the Anglican English physician and philosopher Thomas Browne (1605–1682), stated his belief in Religio Medici (part 1, paragraph 33):
By the 19th century, the guardian angel was no longer viewed in Anglophone lands as an intercessory figure, but rather as a force protecting the believer from performing sin. A parody appears in Lord Byron's 1819 poem Don Juan: (Canto I, xvii).
In Cardinal Newman's 1865 poem The Dream of Gerontius, the departed soul is met by his guardian angel. J. R. R. Tolkien talks of a Guardian Angel in several letters to his children. He described the Guardian Angel as "God's very attention itself, personalised". Mullens O.P., Bede. "Quodlibet 38: Guardian Angels", February 4, 2020
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