I'm with bgruagach completely on this one. There is an ASTONISHING amount of stuff out there about the spirit world, guides, heavenly heirarchies, and so on. Much of it is crap. Much of it reflects the cultural, religious, occult, and personal beliefs of the person presenting it, and, hence, is heavily filtered. In my personal opinion, ALL information about the Great Beyond comes to us, one way or another, through subconscious symbols, and must, therefore, pass through the filters of both the person communicating the information and the person receiving the information.
In my tradition (I'm also Wiccan) it's possible to contact personal guides or spirit beings, but care must be taken, first, to make sure you're talking to who you THINK you're talking to, and . . . well, we have a saying about channeling the Dear Departed: "They're just dead, not perfect!" Some spirits appear to cling to beliefs, prejudices, and bias for quite a while after they pass over, and just because they say something doesn't necessarily mean it's so!
(As a personal aside: one of the most traumatic emotional experiences in my life was an encounter with--I thought--the ghost of my recently dead father in early 1999, who told me I would be dead before the year 2000. I'm still here--though, arguably, a major change in my worldview and life's path that occured that summer could be seen as a symbolic death. But how do you tell?)
Speaking here entirely on my own--based on my own experiences but not intended as gospel--
There appears to be a veritable menagerie of beings interested in us and in our development.
Some--my tradition calls them "Guardians"--appear to be a part of our own soul energy remaining in a higher world. Some call this the "higher self" or the "divine self." This may also be the "guardian angel" of many traditions. Think of it as you, but watching things from a spirit-world perspective and knowing all the answers . . . but unable to more than nudge your incarnate self. The point is that the poor-earth-bound fellow has got to figure things out on his own, with minimum interference form his know-it-all higher self.
Others we know as "guides." Some of these appear to have been incarnate humans in the past, but have "graduated," so to speak. The majority appear never to have been human. It appears, in many traditions, at least, that each of us has a number of guides covering different aspects of our lives, but that we tend to have one "master guide" who oversees the whole shebang.
It's possible to get information from the guardians, though this usually comes as a flash of inspiration, or a feeling, or sometimes in dreams. It's possible to get information from guides via channeling or in a trance, but those mental filters of ours tend to distort what comes through, and all such information needs to be carefully screened, interpreted, and taken with a few billion grains of salt.
All information I've seen regarding heirarchies in spiritual realms I treat as suspect; there always seems to be a lot of human politics and cultural limitations wrapped up in those metaworldviews.
I've never seen anything indicating procreation among guides. The whole question of where spirits come from--are they created along the way, or are they all co-eternal with the same divine source?--is one of THE big occult mysteries. While spiritual beings appear to feel emotions like love, however, I've never heard anything about them having families. If anything, quite the opposite: there's a line in the Bible about angels "neither giving nor being given in marriage." Take that or not, as you wish!
And take what I say here with great quantities of sodium chloride as well. My experiences are my own, and for that very reason will be wildly different from the experience of anyone else!
