I'll try to steer the discussion away from Crowley and back to the Abramelin here. In my opinion, Crowley first heard about guardian angels from some Catholic schoolmates of his, then read the Mathers translation of the Abramelin book, two years after it came out when he was still in the GD, then decided in a bout of youthful exuberance (he was 24 at the time) to try it. He was probably aware of his carnal appetites and hedonistic inclinations so he decided to isolate himself in a remote part of Scotland to prevent himself from backsliding, so to speak - which would have never worked anyway, Crowley being Crowley. It would have been different for a mature person who has long settled down and possessed a much more stable personality. Without having read the Mathers or the Dehn translation, I get the impression that the overall 'Abramelin workload' is not much more demanding (and less strenous) than that of an ambitious amateur athlete who gets up early in the morning for some roadwork and hits the gym or dojo in the evening after work. What Crowley most likely had in mind was a retreat, and by now us Westerners have heard about what e.g. Tibetan monks get up to in this respect, for example
living in a cave for twelve years, so that probably also played a certain role in creating the onerous and forbidding image of the Abramelin.
I personally wasn't aware of any 'RAW movement', I didn't even know that Wilson wrote about the HGA.
As to chaos magick, I'm under the impression that it arouse when some young wanna-be wizards in the early Seventies became frustrated with the sanctimonious high-magic rhetoric of Eliphas Levi, Crowley, Dion Fortune, W.E. Butler, etc. because they wanted to know how to, you know,
actually get stuff (I guess witchcraft and folk magic never had that problem). Then Pete Carroll chanced about Spare's sigil magic, and the rest was history. My impression is that chaos magic doesn't lend itself easily to high magic endeavours like Knowledge and Conversation with one's Holy Guardian Angel but it does one inspire to think outside the box (and oftentimes dismantle the box itself in the process). However, attaining K&C is not like getting a raise or getting laid next Friday. In my own experience, chaos magic is not very well suited to long-term projects in general - to specific one-time results, ok, but not to drawn-out processes.
However, I've had this idea about how to establish contact with my guardian angel using chaos sigil magic: first you formulate your Sentence of Desire and draw yourself a sigil according to the usual methods. Then you return to the letters used for the sigil and see if you can combine them into cool-sounding barbarous words (what Carroll calls the 'mantrical spell method'); feel free to discard any letters you don't need but don't add any new ones. It would be best to create some sort of physical talisman by carving the sigil into wood, on a lump of playdough, etc. and then hold that talisman (in a specific mudra?) while meditating, silently reciting your HGA mantra and visualising the associated sigil, say for half an hour every day. It might work, I think.
