One of my favorite works of scholarship regarding the PGM is Eleni Pachoumi’s monograph The Concepts of the Divine in the Greek Magical Papyri. It’s a great overview and analysis of…well, exactly what it says on the cover, breaking the various texts in the PGM down according to three major sections: the personal daimōn, the paredros, and the concept of deity and divinity itself as it might present through Hēlios, Erōs, some variant of the God of Abraham as fundamental creator-deity, Aiōn, Osiris, Hekatē, Typhōn-Sēth, and the like. It’s a great resource to get a better handle on how the gods show up in the PGM, how they’re reckoned, and how they’re approached (and which I’ll eventually refer to more as a starting-off point for some post at some point regarding Aiōn in Hermeticism, specifically). I bring her up because I want to draw attention to the notion of the πάρεδρος paredros, a particular kind of spirit we find in the PGM (and, for that matter, in any other number of texts before and after the PGM across all sorts of magical literature and traditions). The word literally means “sitting beside”, and is generally translated in English as “assistant”. In some contexts, like in religious compositions of shrines, a paredros can refer to a kind of attendant-deity or ancillary-entity, like a primary deity accompanied by one or more consorts, children, or servant spirits associated with that primary deity.
Pachoumi in her monograph goes through this idea of the paredros and traces it to earlier ideas in Hellenic mystery cults or temple religion, and then picks up on all the ways the idea of paredros pops up in the PGM. However, she takes special issue with how Betz characterizes the term:
Assistant Daimon (paredros): Hellenistic magic knows of a special type of daimon called paredros (“assistant” or “attendant spirit”). The name refers to a deity who has been summoned as a servant to carry out any number of specified magical tasks.
Responding to this after a survey of the literature at hand, Pachoumi concludes:
…Betz’s characterisation of πάρεδρος as “a special type of daimon” and his definition of it as “an assistant daimon” are unnecessarily restrictive.122 Even within the general category of daimones, πάρεδρος may be applied to various types of daimones, such as the Good daimon, the holy Orion, the powerful arch-daimons, or to the resurrected spirit and body of the dead who suffered a violent death. But the term can be used of other categories as well. It can refer to various entities. These include: a god, as the god Eros that is presented as the master of forms, a divine factor of cosmic dimensions, or as Osiris and Harpocrates, a god or a goddess, revealed to the magician as an angel, the image of Kronos, or in the form of an old woman. The term also can imply the concept of the assistant, or even the actual process of conceptualising the divine, or the spell which activates the assistance. In another sense, πάρεδρος may also describe the divine assistance provided by some verses, as in the verses from Homer. In some instances the divine assistant functions as a medium in the relationship between the magician and the god while the magician is ascending to the god. In these cases, the πάρεδρος can be identified both with the god (in his or her ambiguous god/angel form) and with the magician. The fact that, whether as a noun or an adjective, πάρεδρος can be either masculine or feminine, makes it an enormously flexible term in magic.
Thus, the term illustrates the important role the assistance of the divine fulfils in practically all its various transformable forms. The divine epiphanies of the gods and their various transformable manifestations have been examined in comparison to the epiphanies of the gods in heaven and their visible forms of stars of the Corpus Hermeticum and the epiphany of the Gnostic Jesus as a “[likeness] with multiple forms” of the Coptic Nag Hammadi Library. In this sense, “assistance” represents an aspiration to create unity out of apparent diversity. This is parallel to the tendency towards henotheism and the notion of the “one and many” according to the Neoplatonist philosophers in the larger religious and philosophical conceptualisation about the assimilations of the gods. Hence, these magical texts are engaged in a religious and philosophical sense with the issue of the divine, described as a god and its “many” transformable forms.
The divine “assistance” also serves as a vehicle for the internalisation of the divine. The magician receives the πάρεδρος through a ritualistic process of reciting spells and practicing rituals. Receiving the πάρεδρος and associating with it even becomes an internal process of the magician’s mystical transformation, which culminates in divine identification between the magician and the assistant/god. In this sense, the magicians’ analogy between magic and the mystery religions underwrites an important religious claim.
What’s neat about Pachoumi’s approach is that she doesn’t consider the paredros to be equivalent (strictly speaking) to the personal daimōn, which she treats in an earlier chapter. Her summary of her views of that specific concept are that:
…the PGM spells examined in this chapter [VII.505, VII.478, III.612, VIII.1] reflect a tension towards ritualising religio-philosophical concepts including that of the personal daimon, or even of abstract notions associated with it, such as Tyche, Time, Hour, the encompassing or the eidolon; but, more precisely, they reveal a tension towards ritualising the connection (systasis) between the individual and the personal daimon. The connection is accomplished in the spells through a series of ritualistic processes. This should, however, not prevent the existence of the opposite process, in which Neoplatonic philosophy reflects a tension towards philosophising ritual texts. Nevertheless, in all these instances it is evident that both magic ritual and philosophical theory draw on the same source of theological and cosmological concepts. The personal daimon in all four examined spells is presented as an internal entity associated with the personal shadow and soul, or even with a god who is identified with the magician as the initiated with the divine in the mystery cults.
Given the flexibility of the term paredros, it’s certainly not inconceivable that one’s personal daimōn can be one’s paredros, and it’s in that sense that some modern occultists blend the two concepts together—myself included, I should note. I got this idea of establishing one’s personal daimōn (one’s agathos daimōn, in other words) as one’s paredros ultimately from Rufus Opus, who in his Red Work Course (RWC) and older blog posts talked at length about the “supernatural assistant” (SA). In one of his RWC texts, RO talks about the conceptual similarity between the Holy Guardian Angel (HGA) of the Abramelin operation and the SA of the PGM:
In the earlier German manuscript, the Holy Guardian Angel is revealed to have traits more closely resembling the Supernatural Assistant of Papyri Graecae Magicae I.54, a fragment of a spell in the collection of the Greek Magical Papyri surviving from around the first century AD. The spirit obtained by the magician had powers attributed to it that are found attributed to the spirits of the Lemegeton’s Goetia, a book that details working with the terrestrial spirits, even though it attributes them to infernal realms. The book itself included spells and remedies that looked more like a root worker’s Receipt Book or a witch’s Book of Shadows than any stoic grimoire of demon magic. He brings food, wealth, and favor. At the same time, the book contained a process of calling all the Kings of Hell and all their legions through the power of the HGA. This all hinged on the person’s ability to go through the process of initiation, which consisted of daily prayers for a long time, and then an oration to conjure the spirit.
RO then goes on to associate both the Abramelin’s HGA and the PGM’s SA with the “threefold keeper of man” according to Cornelius Agrippa’s Three Books of Occult Philosophy (book III, chapter 22), basically lining out how Agrippa’s “threefold keeper” has all the same aspects and functions as both the HGA and SA, but broken out into three distinct roles (a holy daimōn proceeding from God, a daimōn of the nativity i.e. the natal genius that proceeds from the powers of the stars and planets on watch at the time of one’s birth to construct one’s destiny and guide the native to the same, and a daimōn of one’s profession that functions in terms of our activities and career and livelihood). Although RO cites PGM I.42 for information about the SA, he uses the Headless Rite of the Stele of Jeu from PGM V as the main method of coming in contact with this entity (based on modern occult practice attributable to Crowley’s Liber Samekh), which…well, works as well as anything else, I suppose, when applied in the right way with the right rubric.
Of course, regardless of how one eventually encounters their paredros (I prefer the term as a classier and shorter alternative to “supernatural assistant”), it’s never really intended to be a one-time thing. As an assistant and companion (and sometimes a rather intimate one at that, as in PGM I.1 where the paredros is a spirit who eats and sleeps with you and whose mythical functions are described using explicitly sexual imagery where the ceremony is akin to a wedding feast), one is expected to maintain an ongoing relationship with the paredros—and why not? As a helper and attendant to accomplish all sorts of things, what good is going through a ritual to achieve such a spirit if one doesn’t actually call on them for help, to bring spirits to the table of conjuration and communion, to clear the way for ritual efficacy, to obtain information and to protect oneself? The powers of such a spirit are endless and can’t be understated, and to avail ourselves properly of such powers requires us to call upon such a spirit frequently and reverently. Heck, even in the Abramelin operation, after the grueling six (or eighteen) month process of coming in contact with the HGA, besides invoking them prior to any major work to ensure its efficacy (and your own protection) during it, you’re also supposed to commemorate the anniversary of your coming into contact with the HGA with “feasting, praying, and honoring your guardian angel that day with your whole strength”.
It was thinking on these ideas that I recalled something from when I was younger, well before I was heavily into magic (but still surrounded by various and sundry esoteric ideas). My older sister was always heavily into Tibetan Buddhism, eventually going on to receive a number of empowerments, and when I was younger she told me about the 100 Syllable Mantra of Vajrasattva, a common feature of many preliminary practices in Tibetan Buddhism to purify the defilements of the mind. It’s a super common mantra to recite before pretty much any major working, building on a relationship with this bodhisattva of diamond-lightning clarity of the mind to protect us, purify us, uplift us, and establish us in our practices for success and progress. I won’t wax at length here regarding the specifics of this mantra or how it’s used (you can read more of that plenty elsewhere, as well as find endless versions of it being performed online), but in some ways, thinking about how Tibetan Buddhists use the 100 Syllable Mantra reminded me of similar practices of calling on one’s guardian angel in Western esoteric stuff (like that in the Ars Paulina which I’ve recommended for my approach to the Arbatel) that got me thinking: “why don’t I do more along these lines?”
I admit, I really like the 100 Syllable Mantra, but not wanting to intrude too much on practices that I’m not heavily engaged with, I instead opted to compose an invocation to the paredros-agathodaimōn that I’m so intimate with based loosely on it. After studying what I could of the mantra itself in its original context, I took some of the basic themes and ideas that were applicable to the notion of the paredros in the contexts I’m more comfortable working with, and instead of relying on endless invocations and confessions like what one might find in lots of Solomonic grimoires (and after checking in with a few of my experienced Tibetan Buddhist friends and colleagues for appropriateness and sensefulness), I settled on the following as my own prayer to the paredros taking influence from a number of other spiritual practices, experiences, and insights I’ve engaged with in the past:
O my companion, o my genius, o my angel!
Honor our bond, honor my destiny, honor God’s will!
Manifest yourself to me as my Agathos Daimōn!
Be faithful and steadfast for me!
Be loving and passionate for me!
Be my complete contentment!
Be my total nourishment!
Grant me every success and all attainment!
Make my mind lucid and bright in all things!O neverborn crown of the powers of divinity!
O holy one, mighty one, immortal one,
do not abandon me!
O my friend, my savior, my protector,
reveal yourself kindly to me as Truth!
Join yourself to me that I may join myself to you
as One, in One!
Short, sweet, and succinct; besides, those who are familiar with the 100 Syllable Mantra will see the similarities immediately, but also the differences in goal and intent, too. As a quick thing to say to formally ask for the presence and assistance of one’s paredos, I’d think that such a prayer is good on its own, or as an initial prayer to start off a longer invocation beseeching them for the same; after all, as not just an assistant but a companion, dwelling and abiding with one’s own paredos (especially if one considers this to be their own personal daimōn as I do) is itself a beautiful and intimate spiritual practice that leads one to very subtle places. Having some sort of prayer that’s regularly-said and easily-memorized as a sort of hook-up is something useful, I think, although one could also certainly customize such a prayer, too, especially if one already has the name of their paredos-daimōn.
I’ve had this prayer lined up to be discussed on my website for a good long while now (I think I had the original idea for it back in October 2022), and so I’ve had a tab open for my browser since then lingering in wait to be developed more; it feels good to be done with this, and I’m happier still to share it publicly after letting it cook for long enough (and then some). Whether you already have an established contact with your own paredos or are working towards such a goal, I hope that such a prayer as this might help you in your own works, and that this discussion helps remind us all about the power and utility of having such an attendant-spirit is for our well-being, protection, and development across nearly all forms of spiritual practice. For ease of reference, like many of my other prayers, I’ve made a separate page on my website for it for easy reference here.