Hesher as the Holy Guardian Angel

             “I will view every circumstance of my life as a working of God upon my soul.” ~ Paul Foster Case

            “And Jacob was left alone; and there wrestled a man with him until the breaking of the day.” ~ Genesis 32:24

            The movie Hesher outlines the induction of what Aleister Crowley refers to as the “knowledge and conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel”. Of prime importance to the occultist is this engagement of which Crowley writes in Magic Without Tears:

“It should never be forgotten for a single moment that the central and essential work of the Magician is the attainment of the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel. Once he has achieved this he must of course be left entirely in the hands of that Angel, who can be invariably and inevitably relied upon to lead him to the further great step—crossing of the Abyss and the attainment of the grade of Master of the Temple.”

            This “Knowledge and Conversation” is an ongoing relationship with a high guiding spirit through the medium of life and life’s contents. In it one experiences one’s own voice ministering to him through all mouths. It is seeing a single agent of God behind the many masks of the phenomenal world, and relating to that agent as a holy guide through the unknown into perfect understanding. Hesher shows us how to not only integrate this heightened state, but also the way in which this relationship contributes to the congealing soul.

            As the movie begins, the socially stunted T.J. furiously peddles his bicycle after a red wrecked car being towed to a garage. We begin well along the path of the aspirant represented by T.J., who, at the death of his mother, has entered into “the Abyss”. This Abyss is a stage of spiritual unfolding as a sort of circumstantial free fall. Reference points are wrested one by one until one is bereft of castle or crutch, and must learn to swim in consciousness as consciousness. In this most vulnerable state, we become the unfettered ward of the Holy Guardian Angel. To the extent that contact, knowledge, and interface with this inner Genius is attained, one navigates the Abyss with grace and poise.

            The wrecked car is a symbol of outmoded power, or, more accurately, a power that has been released and is now at work in T.J.’s inner life. This power is the Mars force in residence at the interior star below the navel. His mother’s death represents a severing of the umbilicus, and T.J.’s ripeness for the abysmal plunge. He is, of course, unwilling to let go, and his hot pursuit of that old vehicle, is demonstrative of the clinginess to dead forms that often accompanies transition. This is common amongst mystics, who remain entrenched in a religious system, or even occultists, who adhere too rigidly to the doctrines of their school. T.J. is depressed, and it is this inertia, which must be eradicated before the transcendental may be actualized.

            The rift between T.J. and his father, Paul, is a symptom of the dissolution of the son’s old power. In the dark night of the soul, tools fall away, and one’s relationship with God must be reestablished within a new context. Indeed the very meaning is stripped from God as one beholds one’s projections upon Divinity for what they are – glittering costumes wrapped around nothing at all.

            The divide between father and son is only a portion of T.J.’s predicament, for the real rift that must be sown is his relationship with his grandmother, Madeleine. In qabalistic terms, T.J. is Tiphareth (beauty), the son; Paul is Chokmah (wisdom), the father, and Madeleine is Binah (understanding), the mother, and the sephirah associated with the grade of Magister Templi (Master of the Temple). It is the role of the Holy Guardian Angel to lead the mature ego into a firm fluency of the forces of nature housed in Binah. To be cogent, the “Temple” is the individuated soul. This is the work of alchemy, and the true alchemist is the Holy Guardian Angel.

            These gaps between T.J. and mother, father, grandmother, and peers are all part of the invoked effects, which Crowley states is partly for the purpose of “separating them so completely that his soul is stripped of its sheaths.” One must become empty and sensitized before engaging with the Holy Guardian Angel.

            Our processes will not allow us to hold too long to outworn tools. We are allowed only so much sentimentality before our inner evolutionary urges drag us onward. T.J.’s encounter with Dustin at the car lot is everyone’s encounter with decay. His refusal to allow things to run their course, and his injuring of Dustin by rolling up the car window on his arm, puts him at odds with decay, and, as such, decomposition becomes his fierce adversary. The conflict between integration (beauty) and disintegration becomes the field into which Hesher, symbolic of the Holy Guardian Angel, is called.

            T.J. rides his bicycle and flips over the handlebars at the construction site of a house. He angrily hurls a stone through the window of the house, shattering the glass and arousing the hesher squatting within it.

            On invoking the Holy Guardian Angel, Crowley writes,

“It is impossible to lay down precise rules by which a man may attain to the knowledge and conversation of His Holy Guardian Angel; for that is the particular secret of each one of us; a secret not to be told or even divined by any other, whatever his grade. It is the Holy of Holies, whereof each man is his own High Priest, and none knoweth the Name of his brother's God, or the Rite that invokes Him.”

            In T.J.’s case, he is divorced and vexed. He is laid low. He hurls a stone through the window of a house under construction. Hesher appears.

            Now the bicycle may be regarded as an insufficient vehicle of mediocrity. He is less than his peers by nature of this sad way. Moreover, his insufficiency turns on him, and he is cast down into the dust, a poignant testimony to his own decrepitude. His ire is kindled, and he casts a stone (his thusfar coagulated soul) through the window (his logic) of the unfinished house (his mercurial mind). This rebellion of the subconscious mind against the lower aspects of the self conscious mind summons the Holy Guardian Angel, for the risk of madness is great here, and indeed a guardian is required to ferry the aspirant across that stretch of epigenetic mire that lies between Tiphareth and Keter; the king and his crown, respectively.

            Hesher drags a terrified T.J. into the house. Hesher begins to threaten T.J., but they are interrupted by a police officer. “You just fucked me,” Hesher states, revealing that the Holy Guardian Angel, though powerful beyond human measure, is still subject to the laws of equilibrium and justice. Though subject, he is infinitely resourceful and has complete understanding of how to alter his response to those laws to mitigate their effects. He tosses an explosive out the window disrupting the officer. Hesher then flees the construction site.

            T.J.’s life now goes into high gear, and a series of events ensue that irritate the depression that has settled on his world like a blanket of numb. A specific effect of Crowley’s invocation given in Liber Samekh is “to keep them so busy with their own work that they cease to distract him”. It is through this excitement that the radical changes that will open T.J.’s inner ear begin to tumble into place.

            At school the next day Dustin confronts T.J. in the hall pouncing upon him, spitting on him, and taunting him with the words, “Suck my dick!” T.J. sees Hesher watching the entire affair. He does not intervene. Later, T.J. sees Hesher outside his classroom window. Hesher places a finger to his lips indicating that he is that “Silent Self”, representative of T.J.’s truest divine nature. He then throws a marker at T.J. 

After school, Dustin finds his yellow car vandalized by an obscene drawing with a marker pen. The words, “Suck my dick” are scrawled on the side of the car. This mantra is part of Liber Samekh, the invocation prescribed by Crowley for “knowledge and conversation with the Holy Guardian Angel”: “Thou, the Savior! Silence! Give me Thy Secret! Give me suck, Thou Phallus, Thou Sun!” 

Dustin assumes T.J. vandalized his yellow car and goes after him. Nicole, a local supermarket clerk, defends T.J., chases away Dustin, and gives T.J. a ride home.  Nicole represents the Abyss itself. She is the 13^th path running between Tiphareth and Keter on the Tree of Life. She is the great mystery, the unknown, along which T.J. must travel to become whole. Nicole and Hesher enter T.J.’s life almost simultaneously. Problems and solutions always emerge at once.

At T.J.’s house Hesher walks in and proceeds to make himself at home. “Have you ever been skull-fucked?” Hesher asks a resistant T.J. Here Hesher offers to return the favor T.J. granted him at his squat earlier. T.J. “fucks” Hesher at Hesher’s house. Hesher “fucks” T.J. at T.J.’s house. This is an allusion to the “knowledge”, in the classical sense, of the Holy Guardian Angel.

            “Behold I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me.” ~ Revelation 3:15

            “Who am I?” ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi

            T.J. is disconcerted but unsure what to do about Hesher’s intrusion. Hesher sits on the couch and smokes a cigarette, and when T.J. asks him to put it out, the angel agrees to put it out in T.J.’s mouth, bringing to recollection Isaiah 6:6-7, “Then flew one of the seraphims unto me, having a live coal in his hand, which he had taken with the tongs from off the altar: And he laid it upon my mouth, and said, Lo, this hath touched thy lips; and thine iniquity is taken away, and thy sin purged.” Hesher then notes that their television has only four channels, and remedies this by climbing the telephone pole outside, making some mysterious adjustments to the box, and then falling to the ground calling out his expletive of choice. The television now has a variety of channels including porn, vulgar, though acute, demonstration of alchemy. “Now you have more channels,” says Hesher. He is expanding their receptivity.

          Madeleine and Hesher get along well. “Hello, Young Man,” says Madeleine to Hesher. “Hello, Old Woman,” says Hesher to Madeleine. This immediate rapport between the Holy Guardian Angel and the Elohim of Binah is instantly explicable. The Elohim are the creative powers or angels that spoke the universe into existence, according to the Hebrew tradition. Elohim is God the many and the mother.

Later that night during dinner, Madeleine remarks that she would like T.J. to walk with her. This is significant in light of Genesis 5:24, which says, “And Enoch walked with Elohim: and he was not; for Elohim took him.” Here is T.J.’s golden opportunity; however, he responds that he has to attend school. Hesher is irritated by T.J.’s refusal, and attempts to goad T.J. into that excellent pedestrianism that makes stars of men, and galaxies of stars. He growls that T.J.’s priorities are mixed up and uses a lie about “granny rapists” to convince T.J. of this worthy undertaking. T.J. is unconvinced, and here begins the work of the Holy Guardian Angel to break the boy into that stellar stroll.

The next day at school, Dustin attacks T.J., forcing him to eat the soap cake at the bottom of a urinal. Hesher appears, but he does not defend him. If T.J. will not walk in the sky, he must grovel in the dirt. Feeling betrayed, T.J. confronts Hesher about this, and the Holy Guardian Angel accommodates his ward’s desire for revenge. However, after torching Dustin’s car, Hesher abandons T.J. When the two meet up again later, Hesher hits T.J. with his van, and T.J. kicks Hesher in the genitals. Hesher responds with aplomb in a sort of congratulatory appreciation for the anger stirring within T.J. He is successfully arousing a requisite intensity within the youth.

The next morning, the police arrive to bring T.J. in for questioning, but no charges are filed due to lack of evidence. As Paul drives T.J. home from the police station he asks him, “Did you do it?” To which T.J. replies, “Not really.” “Not really?” Paul questions, “Did you or didn’t you do it?” “No,” T.J. answers. This echoes the words of Christ Jesus, who says in John 5:30, “I can of mine own self do nothing: as I hear, I judge: and my judgment is just…”

            Man is his own star; and the soul that can

Render an honest and a perfect man

Commands all light, all influence, all fate.

Nothing to him falls early, or too late.

Our acts our angels are, or good or ill, 

Our fatal shadows that walk by us still.

 ~ John Fletcher

The following day, T.J. goes to the supermarket where Nicole works to observe her. Unbeknownst to T.J., Hesher has followed him there, and begins to loudly extol the virtues of “poking”. “There’s nothing to be ashamed of!” Hesher cries out, turning heads and shaming T.J., who runs from the supermarket humiliated. We are ashamed at our desire for union, for it makes us feel our incompleteness.

After Nicole has finished her shift, Hesher and T.J. follow her in Hesher's van. Now they are on the 13^th path. Hesher celebrates their journey by slapping out heavy metal beats on the steering wheel. Up ahead they see Nicole rear-end another driver, who angrily steps out of his car and begins to brow-beat and denigrate her. Hesher menacingly approaches the furious driver stripping off his shirt and revealing his tatoos; a stick figure committing suicide on his front torso and a giant middle finger hand gesture on his back torso. The tattoos are demonstrative of the right and left hands of the Holy Guardian Angel. These are the tools that that great spirit uses to accomplish our temperance. They are, namely and respectively, Death and Hell, as illustrated by Tarot Keys 13 (Death) and 15 (The Devil), marking paths 24^th and 26^th on the Tree of Life. Their respective intelligences are those of the Imaginative and the Renewing. Hesher himself represents the 25^th path of wisdom, the Intelligence of Probation or Trial, occultly associated with Tarot Key 14.  Of the 25^th path, the Sepher Yetzirah (Book of Formation) says, “It is the first test whereby the Creator tries the devout.” This trial is for the readying of the soul to serve as a vehicle for self-consciousness into immortality.

After scaring off the other driver, Hesher drives Nicole and T.J. to his “uncle’s house”. They all swim together in the backyard pool for a while, before Hesher initiates them both in a sort of Erisinian chaos ritual, wherein he begins dumping all manner of lawn ornaments into the water. He then lights the diving board on fire, runs the length of it, and tosses his body into the pool. He crawls out on the other side before stating that he must leave for a doctor’s appointment of gonorrheaic import.

Here another method proposed by Crowley is utilized, and that is “to concentrate the necessary spiritual forces from every element, and fling them simultaneously into the aspiration towards the Holy Guardian Angel.”

The ritual is functionally pivotal to T.J.’s orientation. It serves to seal T.J. and Nicole’s friendship, and while honoring her true nature as the teeming sea of pure being completely adaptable to self-conscious suggestions. Hesher clutters the pool with lawn furniture to illustrate the receptive nature of subconsciousness. He lights the diving board to show the fiery deck from which superconsciousness propels itself into that space. His parting comment, “It burns when I pee”, provides another poetic metaphor for this profound principle.

After T.J. and Nicole realize Hesher lied about it being his uncle's house, they walk back to Nicole's car. Nicole finds a parking ticket on her car, which upsets her very much: she has a part-time job and is not allowed to work full-time, and therefore does not earn enough to pay her bills, let alone a parking ticket. She reflects in this moment the mundane concerns of T.J. When she is with Hesher such trivialities don’t surface, instead it is lush creative anarchy. When she is with T.J. the conversation becomes inane and fixated on decay. She is ever a reflection of the consciousness she is subjected to. This is why Hesher is needed to help T.J. cross these waters. 

“It becomes, therefore, the most important of all considerations with what character we invest the Universal Mind; for since our relation to it is purely subjective it will infallibly bear to us exactly that character which we impress upon it; in other words it will be to us exactly what we believe it to be…” ~ Judge Thomas Troward

T.J. uses Madeleine's credit card (symbolic of sown karma) to withdraw money from her account at ATMs, and tries to use it to buy the wrecked car back, but the owner of the garage tells him (as he did before) that it is not for sale. The motion of the universe is only forward. We cannot go back. We cannot recreate. Our modus operandi must be to let it go and move on. 

Later that night, T.J. and Paul argue over dinner. With Hesher between them, T.J. smashes his plate to the ground. Paul does the same. Of this Crowley delights, “to arouse in him an enthusiasm so intense as to intoxicate and anaesthetize him, that he may not feel and resent the agony of this spiritual vivisection, just as bashful lovers get drunk on the wedding night, in order to brazen out the intensity of shame which so mysteriously coexists with their desire.” Thanks to Hesher’s influence, they are both becoming activated. Until this activation, however chaotic it may appear, there can be no progress toward understanding and mastery.

Madeleine is saddened that there is 'nothing she can do', and goes to her room. It is important to note that as powerful as Binah and her composite Elohim are, they are also responsive and receptive. The same principles apply to the grandmother as do to Nicole and even T.J.’s dead mother, for they are all simply different expressions of the same aspect of cosmic life – the divine feminine, the High Priestess of the Tarot.

Finally, that stage comes wherein, by Crowley’s estimation, there is motion “to attract the Angel by the vibration of the magical voice which invokes Him”. Hesher teaches Madeleine how to smoke her medical marijuana from a bong, and promises to go on a walk with her in the morning. Of special note is that T.J. is not present for this movement, meaning that it happens beyond his conscious awareness. The pieces have been set by past actions and the subtle work of the Holy Guardian Angel in secret places. Hesher’s promise is fulfilled when Madeleine dies. He disappears for a time, presumably to walk with her where angels fear to tread. Her death is an internalization of those principles, which she represents. In the words of Christ on the cross, “It is accomplished.” However, this shift has yet to express in T.J.’s personal life.

T.J.’s growing affection for Nicole sends him to her apartment to give her the stolen money from the ATM. He walks in on Hesher and Nicole having sex. Only when one is in mastery of subconsciousness may this holy congress happen. T.J.’s jealousy is predictable, but he has only projected sadness onto Nicole, whose desire is unto Hesher and his appreciation for her anarchic substance.

T.J. lashes out at Hesher. He vandalizes Hesher's car, threatens him, calls Nicole a 'fat prostitute', and rides away on his bike. He returns home and after destroying all Hesher’s possessions goes to Dustin’s house with a pair of cutting shears bent on another assault against decay. T.J. seems perpetually torn and is still unable to reconcile his past with his present. While this angst seems to drag on, it is, in truth, all part of T.J.’s essential transition. It is succinct despite its messiness.

T.J. threatens to cut off Dustin's toes if he does not disclose the location of the wrecked car. Dustin informs him that it is in the junkyard, and then pins T.J. to the ground. However, Hesher won’t allow decay to take T.J. and finally acts specifically to defend T.J. from his own malign creation. Swooping in with guardian deliberation, he rescues T.J. and cuts Dustin’s nose with the shears. T.J., still bitter at Hesher, runs off, saying he never wants to see him again.

T.J. spends one last night with his mother in the wrecked car. He dreams of his happiness with her, and he dreams of her accidental demise. He is rudely awakened in the morning by the car’s magnetic ascent and its sure journey to compaction. T.J. falls through the windshield and watches angrily as it is crushed. He stalks away defeated and faithless.

 A few hours later, T.J. and Paul attend Madeleine's funeral. It is a sad and moping affair, and T.J. is unable to say anything of value about his grandmother’s demise.  The scene his ripe for Hesher’s beer-swilling entrance, whereupon he relays to the audience a crude parable:

 “I pulled this gas tank from an old Chevy. I wanted to blow it up, so I did. What I didn't think about was all the little bits of metal that were going to fly out in every direction. I almost killed myself. I woke up in this hospital and this doctor was like, ‘Son...’ and I said, ‘Don't call me son, you fucking cunt.’ And he was like, ‘You blew off your nut.’… I just lost my nut, like that. I went fucking crazy. I assaulted a nurse or a doctor, I don't really remember. I got arrested. I went to juvee. All I could think about was my fucking nut, man. I'm missing a nut. What am I going to do? I had to go looking for it, right? So I busted out of juvee and I went searching. I couldn't find my nut…

“Well, there was this one night I was sitting there and I was taking a shit and I was looking at my balls and I was staring at this little piece of flabby sack where my left nut used to be. And then I saw my right nut for the first time. I was like, ‘FUCK MAN, MY NUT!’ Look I have one, I still have a nut. Right? It's a good nut, it works. God or the fucking devil or whoever the fuck it is you know he left me with one good nut. I still have a fucking nut and it works. And my fucking dick works too…

”Okay, you lost your wife. And you lost your mom. I lost my nut.”

Hesher then wheels Madeleine’s casket outside and down the road. Father and Son join him, and together they walk with the Elohim amidst starlight and shadow, irreverent, irrelevant, and in a sacred slow motion, etching unadulterated love and appreciation into the walls of time and space. It is this shift into appreciation that stabilizes both T.J. and his reality. Gratitude is the only signature of success we need concern ourselves with. It is the end, the beginning, and the tempo of every lofty song.  

The next day, Paul shaves and apparently is done with his depression inspired by Hesher's story. He shows T.J. the block that was his mother's car left by Hesher in their driveway. Father and Son are now at peace and in new union. That metal block is the Cube of Space, and T.J.’s new vehicle for flight into the heavens.

Hesher has vanished for he has fulfilled his obligation and safely forded the Abyss with T.J. intact. However, T.J. will be forever marked by their journey as evidenced by the endearing graffiti left on the roof of his house:

"HESHER WAS HERE."