MYSTERY AND REGENERATION

Tag: hermeticism

The Still Point of the Turning World: Meditation for Magicians

Hilma af Klint, Svanen, no 13 (1915) 

Meditation is recommended by Denning and Phillips at various points in their work, but it is rarely emphasised as a foundational practice. This short addition to the Steps of the Foundation series of posts is a reflection on the role it has played for me in practice, and gathers some of the scattered references to meditation in the published Ogdoadic material. For the aspiring magician, meditation has three functions: one using the trained meditative mind to unfold and integrate texts and symbols; another, developing the skills of concentration, openness and focus needed in ritual magic; another, in ‘mystical’ meditation, a transformation and illumination of the spirit.

One word, many meanings

We should briefly think about the word ‘meditation’ itself, which can sometimes be an unhelpful one, summoning images of a saffron-clad monk turning his mind off, with the gentle chime of temple bells and a curling plume of incense. Successive generations of occult teachers bear responsibility for this, as they sought to supplement what they perceived as a badly degraded western tradition with techniques derived (sometimes badly mangled) from esoteric Buddhism. In fact, as we will return to later, sublime noetic silence is not unknown in the west: being ‘alone with the alone’ was greatly desired by later Platonists and their inheritors. But an emphasis on total mental silence misrepresents the range of meditative practices in Indian and Tibetan sources, and obscures the shades of meaning the word possessed in European thought. In Crowley’s system, responsible for much of this overemphasis in 20th century magical culture, it is combined with a range of pointless if characteristic exercises in sadism. The aim in elementary meditative practices is not to achieve non-thought, but to concentrate one’s thought and attention – with minimal deviation or wandering – on an object, principle, symbol, or to achieve (as far as possible) mental dwelling purely in the single present moment. These are achievable goals. The ability to return at will to this ‘still point of the turning world’ is a very helpful one in magic.

In the long span of European spiritual thought, ‘meditation’ usually meant bringing the mind to bear on an appropriate object. Some Stoics, certainly, knew something like it; Christian scriptural devotion works in a similar way. The form of mental attention intended is not excessively rational, nor the mental recitation of material got by rote – involving instead a calm pursuit of chains of association, allowing the intuition to descend and guide the reflection. (To use the jargon of western magic, the desire is that the ruach is guided by the neshamah.) In appendices to each volume in the first edition of The Magical Philosophy, Denning and Phillips give a series of exercises using flashing tablets as a means of developing this skill; these exercises are condensed into a single brief reference in the combined edition’s guide to practice. They recommend the absolute beginner construct tablets for Jupiter and Mars, and meditate on these for a week each, in succession. (Note here the very strong emphasis, very early on, on balance between the powers, a theme repeated through the Aurum Solis material.) The exercise can be repeated for all seven planetary powers, and then go well beyond them. I have conducted sequences of meditations on traditional magical images, the Major Arcana (fairly regularly), as well as texts – including ritual speeches, but also highly allusive alchemical texts and passages of the Corpus Hermeticum.

This form of meditation, sometimes called discursive meditation by modern magicians, is a great boon. Some distinctions ought perhaps to be made: direct meditation on a power, though not an invocation itself, will bring some kind of contact with it. It is not unusual to feel one’s concentration ‘picked up’ and recognised by that power – the feeling is unmistakable though difficult to describe, and can come with an overwhelming jolt of emotion or mental disposition suitable to that power. Sometimes one feels a symbol unfolding itself to the mind: thus some magical groups give students specific symbolic meditations to foster deeper connection with its egregore. Defects in mental attention are more noticeable and more easily corrected than when trying to silence the mind altogether; love for the ever-creative perceiving mind and a gentle but unswerving return to the object will develop the skill much more securely than brutalising the body.

There is, however, another form of meditation in western spiritual traditions, strikingly similar to some yogic practices. This is the use of certain psycho-spiritual techniques – visualisation, repetition of divine names or prayers, withdrawal from the senses – to encounter the divine light. This mystical, or contemplative, form of meditation seems to have been discovered and rediscovered – or transmitted – among diverse spiritual traditions, often upsetting more conventionally religious practitioners whenever it broke out. The Aurum Solis technique of ‘Rising on the Planes’, given in a little-discussed section of Mysteria Magica, may produce an analogous effect. But one of the most potent forms of this meditation was publicly outlined in one of Denning and Phillips’s mass-market New Age paperbacks – effectively powerful little bits of occultism dressed up in voguish ‘80s pop jargon. They called it, with a nod to its origins, the Tabor Formulation. We will return to this crucial form of meditation below.

The ’70s have a lot to answer for.

Two further points on the question of ‘East’ and ‘West’. There has long been a scholarly movement questioning the usefulness of the ‘western’ in ‘western esotericism’. Certainly in a time when all sorts of claptrap about innate ethnic spiritual traditions gets smuggled in under the name of esotericism, it is useful to stress that esoteric thinkers in the west have often looked to sources they perceived as older and outside their culture for wisdom – Chaldaeans, Arabs, Indians or Tibetans. If it is still cogent to talk about western esotericism – and I think it is – then it is a tradition that is highly porous, often hungry for wisdom from elsewhere and just as often disclaiming the sources of that wisdom.

On that note, though, I believe there are great benefits for magicians in engaging in some of the basic Indian and Tibetan meditative techniques which have made their way to the west. So-called ‘shamatha’ or ‘shinay’ technique – sometimes called ‘calm abiding’ – is a superb foundation for any meditative exercise discussed here. Many of the Buddhist centres in Europe and the US teach introductory classes in (putatively) non-denominational formats; one London centre has a decent pair of recordings online.

But why meditate?

At the outset I suggested that meditation is an essential foundation for (this kind of) magic. Most of the reasons I gave were instrumental, e.g., that developing mental direction and focus is essential for invocation. That is, meditation is important because it allows us to do something else. This is of a piece with the graded curriculum-style approach to magical training taken by most older magical orders, which build up by deepening and expanding a set of fundamental ritual practices. They’re also structured according to certain magical-experiential landmarks, which simply recognise that – in general – repeated practice brings on experiences which, while individualised, are predictable and recurrent. My quibbles with this style of instruction aside – that it would benefit from incorporating some of the last century’s advances in pedagogy, and disliking its infinite capacity to inspire stupid competitions about ‘rank’ – it is a better start to magical practice than the consumerist pick-’n’-mix approach common today, partly because it should decentre the instincts towards consumption and immediate gratification on which much of contemporary society is based.

Meditation also has benefits in its own right. Among them is the capacity to recognise the way the individual mind moves, exercise control over it, direct it, still it or open it. It can grant awareness of the emotional manipulation common in advertising or mass media. And it can grant insight – sometimes initially painful and unwelcome – into the emotional and mental burdens, often unconscious, which pattern and sometimes warp our lives. These are especially helpful in the world of occultism, where many seekers who wash up on its shores do so injured and ill-treated, suffering and harming in turn. This is not a sneer: the world is a frequently cruel place, and often specially cruel to those who feel the yearning for spirit. Few make it into adulthood without carrying some such burden; modern occulture tends, perversely, to reward people who feign having overcome all such problems, and discourages its prominent names from talking honestly about them. The cyclically-repeating dramas which periodically tear through public-facing occultism look, with a little distance, like symptoms of just such problems. The powers of discrimination, self-possession and insight granted by meditation are significant remedies for these afflictions; I know some candidates for whom these meditative gifts turned out to be everything they needed from their initial attraction to magic, utterly transformative in themselves. They are essential for all of us, especially solitary magicians – not least in interactions with the wider occult ‘scene’, where capacity for discrimination is essential.

There is a wider point here. Denning and Phillips often write that magic is a way of freedom. That is true, and it is also a good test: if a particular practice makes one feel less free, more fearful or diminished, or a tradition demands unthinking loyalty and open wallets, then it’s probably harmful. There are nuances: sometimes binding ourselves to a discipline might make us more free, or we might give up our freedom to speak about certain things as a sign of respect and trust – but in both cases the sense ought to be that such commitments enhance, rather than diminish, our sense of agency. Freedom, however, is not always easy: the corollary of increasing agency and freedom is increasing responsibility for one’s decisions, a prospect which can initially be terrifying. But magic, even in its most highly spiritualised form, has always concerned itself with liberating the practitioner from powers which predetermine or constrain his or her life – sometimes understood as the disposition of the birth chart – and remedying their afflictions. Thus Ficino, in whom Saturn’s black flowed strongly, hung his neck with gold and danced in a secret place to the Sun.

It might be objected that none of this is magic proper, but a combination of psychological self-examination, spiritual exercise and self-improvement. Quite so. The theurgy taught in the Ogdoadic tradition combines spiritual transformation with its practical magic, a combination which recognises that one informs the other – and that combination is as ancient and venerable as disciplines which focus solely on either meditation or spirit-calling. (I stress this point because there has been much bad-tempered polemic on the issue in recent years.) The tradition also avoids the habit of some more staid schools, which insist on many years of meditative practice before engaging in practical magic at all, preferring to allow the one to develop alongside the other, thus intentionally speeding up the transformation. The speed of this transformation makes a strong meditative practice desirable: would you build a temple on shifting sand? If the personal insights and gradual transformation gained from meditation – discursive, contemplative, ‘calm abiding’ – seem less magical than the power of scrying, spirit invocation or talismanic consecration, that is fair. But it is worth stressing that almost all magical traditions incorporate such work of rectification into their earliest stages – whether elemental initiations, first degree, first hall, pronaos. To repeat: there are few skills as important and transformative as the ability to anchor oneself to the still point of the turning world.

The Uncreated Light

As Denning and Phillips give it, the Tabor Formulation proceeds very simply thus:

Stage One: Simple Breathing – Lower your gaze, fixing it upon your navel or a point in that region. Breathe in an even, gentle manner as deeply as you can without strain. If your mind wanders, as soon as you notice bring it back gently but firmly to your breathing.

Stage Two: Awareness of the Light – Entering into the second stage of the meditation, on an in-breath be aware of a nebulous radiation of golden light, which is also a radiation of love, from just below your sternum; it seems to form a luminous cloud about midway between your navel (at which you continue to gaze down) and your chin.

You don’t have to do anything about that light. Simply be aware of it, of being illuminated by it, of being loved by it. Accept that awareness; don’t think about it, don’t even try to aspire to it. Just keep on being conscious of it, and of your breathing.

Stage Three: Silent Utterance – Retaining awareness of your breathing and of the light, silently “utter” mantrams – phrases or single words – which you feel to be suited to your meditation: formulate each word distinctly in your mind, but with no vocalization or movement of the mouth. You will need two mantrams to use together, one for the in-breath and one for the out-breath. Their chief purpose is to express in brief compass something of your essential relationship with the Cosmos. It is to affirm your bond of oneness with the Cosmos: that bond in which you are sustained by the beneficence of the Whole, at the same time participating actively in the Whole. You are a living and purposing component of it, giving forth again with blessing that which you receive.

We’ll return to the question of what phrase to use below. Two very brief notes on this technique: the next post in this series will take in the Ogdoadic tradition’s method of awakening the centres, but here it’s worth noting that the solar plexus centre is distinct from the heart centre proper. It is used in psychic operations, like the formation of the astral double, but not included in the standard (middle pillar-like) rousing of the centres. That the light is first experienced through the emotional and instinctive nature governed by this centre, rather than the higher rational faculties, may chime with the chapters on the Holy Guardian Angel in Book IV of The Magical Philosophy.

Students of Christian mysticism will immediately notice the source of this technique: Hesychasm. Derived from the word ἡσυχία, meaning ‘stillness’, this internally-directed form of prayer involved psycho-spiritual techniques similar to those used by modern occultists. It flourished among Athonite monks, who silently recited the Jesus Prayer while gazing downwards, thus mocked by opponents of Hesychasm as navel-gazers. The light experienced by advanced practitioners was interpreted by Gregory Palamas as the ‘uncreated light’ seen on Mount Tabor at the Transfiguration. (Those interested in the occult uses of music may find it suggestive that the drone in Byzantine chant – the ison – is taken to represent the Tabor Light.) The Greek Orthodox compilation of mystical theology, the Philokalia, has extensive reflections on this practice, especially in its fourth and fifth volumes. Here it is shorn of its Christian trappings and non-denominationally ‘universalised’. 

Lee Mullican, Peyote Candle (1951)

A Hermetic Hesychasm?

This might give the conscientious modern magician pause. Many of us are less confident than our predecessors that the inner technology of a method can be so easily separated from its given cultural form. Even if Christ and the Agathodaimon, for instance, are two expressions of the same solar mystery, is the ritual repertoire for one so easily transferred to the other? (In this case, at least, many ancient Orthodox writers are happy to talk about the psycho-spiritual technique as distinct from its prayerful content and orientation; this, of course, they see as a danger.) Other problems arise: the states we seek using this technique, and the manner in which we use it, are precisely those about which Orthodox thinkers are at best ambivalent – in fact, many of them would think it dangerous, irreligious and disordered. But in too ready a rejection of a thousand years of writing on this form of meditation, we risk losing some of the wisdom which can enhance our practice.

I don’t worry so much about the magpie nature of modern magic, though I try not to be an ass about it. Hermes is also the god of thieves. I am especially relaxed about adapting this practice, because I believe very similar techniques are likely to have been used by non-Christian mystics throughout the Mediterranean basin in late antiquity. The parallel is often drawn between the posture adopted by Jewish mystics ‘going down’ to the Merkava and the Hesychast gaze, but something similar is at play in Plotinian spiritual exercises as well as later Iamblichean theurgic technique. I am also absolutely certain that a similar method was used by ancient Hermetists. Consider the famous opening of the first tract of the Corpus Hermeticum, where the speaker enters a state similar to sleep, κατασχεθεισῶν μου τῶν σωματικῶν αἰσθήσεων, ‘my bodily senses suppressed’: an emphasis on withdrawal from the bodily senses also characterises early Hesychast writing. It is through this withdrawal from the outer senses that Hermes encounters a vision of limitless divine light and its shepherding mind (ὁρῶ θέαν ἀόριστον, φῶς δὲ πάντα γεγενημένα – C.H. I.4). That tract was certainly supposed to inspire recognition in its readers of meditative techniques they themselves used.

A little thought along these lines will be enough to dispel the notion that meditation is an alien graft on to western magic. In its discursive form, it was so common a spiritual practice as to be unremarkable for most of the last millennium; in its contemplative form it is recognisable in the pagan desire for henosis – union with The One – and in precious traces in hermetic and theurgic texts. It is recognisable in mystical traditions in Eastern and Western churches, though often condemned by their official authorities. Though there are certainly forms of magic which can be done without it – ecstatic forms of witchcraft, natural magic – meditation, in at least its discursive form, is a key foundation stone for modern ritual magic.

Of Words and Warnings

Discursive meditation is best brought to perfection by doing; the rest of this note focuses on contemplative meditation of the Tabor Formulation type. Denning and Phillips recommend choosing a short phrase or mantra to accompany the rhythm of the breath, and give examples: ‘Light and life fill me / I share my abundance with all’, or ‘Energy / Ecstasy!’ Both are fine as they go, though their New Age formulations now seem a little dated, and of course they would horrify an Athonite monk. 

It’s always fun to horrify a monk, however hypothetical, but there might be something worth listening to as well. Hesychasts utter the Jesus prayer because their meditation is precisely that, a form of prayer. However strongly we dislike the prayer’s pleading for mercy and repeated self-identification as ‘a sinner’, it does stress the partiality and finitude of the individual – that divine presence is an act of grace, not a mark of personal power or election to sainthood. One need not share Christianity’s theology of grace to see there is something important in its emphasis on inwardly-directed humility, especially as a guard against spiritual delusion. There are two way to incorporate this insight into practice: one is to formulate the phrase more clearly as a prayer – perhaps taking inspiration from the various hymns in the Hermetica (especially CH I and XIII). Another is, simply, to adopt a humbler, more reverent attitude: not of cringing self-abasement, which is just the shadow of self-importance, but the calm joy which can come from participation in the light. 

Personally, my experience of this kind of meditation includes a sense that one’s own intellectual structures are clumsy approximations of the real, a sense almost like being a little brother marvelling at an older, infinitely more complex, loving and wiser mind. So different, in fact, that even the word ‘mind’ isn’t right for it, and my phrasing here is only a partial, sublunary approximation. It’s no accident that the verb for seeing used in the Poimandres – θεάομαι – refers to a different, visionary kind of seeing; it is also the verb Plato uses for the sight of those who have left the shadow-world of the cave.

For practitioners who work with the divine powers of the Ogdoadic tradition, orienting this practice to the Agathodaimon is another potent option. A future essay will discuss the Agathodaimon more fully, but it suffices here to say that he is the solar theurgic deity par excellence, and utterly fitting for invocation in this practice. The two phrases I have used in this practice are the god’s name – ‘Knouphis / Agathodaimon’ – on in- and out-breaths, and a paired epithet derived from the wider tradition: ‘who comes forth as the phoenix / who shines as the morning star’. 

Wash the Dishes, Sweep the Floor

Meditation is not magic, though it is an immensely helpful foundation for magical work. Mystical meditation of this kind should form part of a magical routine, rather than replacing it entirely. Many classic occult authors warn against merely seeking absorption in the infinite; one of the most desirable magical skills is the development, from long practice, of the ‘Janus-faced’ position of the soul, pointing both inward and outward at once. Denning and Phillips borrow that phrase from one of Ficino’s most touching letters, and though it is a skill few of us will master as a permanent state it is a key to unlocking deeper levels of practice. They were more circumspect about drawing from the treasury of writing on Hesychasm, doubtless ambivalent about its ascetic Christian disposition, there are two points from the literature useful to us.

Many Hesychasts write at length about the danger of spiritual delusion; many of them would categorise everything we do under exactly that category, if not demonic obsession. Nonetheless there are insights to be gleaned from the extensive writings on πλάνη (planê, lit. wandering), or spiritual delusion. In particular, these case studies stress cases where people have received flattering visions or intensified their spiritual regimen and begun to think of themselves as special, saintly or prophet-like. Anyone who has watched an occult group fall apart because of inflated egos or delusions of singularity will recognise these symptoms (which are sometimes associated with excessive invocation of Solar powers.) The remedy prescribed in the monastic tradition is usually a grounding, earthly kind of humility: sweeping the floors, washing the dishes, digging the garden. It’s an insightful remedy, placing us back in the body, a human among other humans. 

One sign of incipient planê among occultists is an excessive intensification of the daily regime, to the detriment of other aspects of personal life. Its remedy is two-fold: first, the adoption of some volunteering work which actively benefits the living world and, ideally, exerts the body. That might be soup kitchen volunteering, given the number of homeless in our great cities, or active restoration of the natural world, given how important our changing climate is. Involvement in political movements around these issues is also an option, though many of the same risks of ego inflation attend that arena; a good remedy to that is absorption in the tiresome, dutiful service part of political work. The second aspect is the development of a strong practice of discursive meditation, through which any visions or revelations ought to be integrated into the waking mind – with detachment and compassion, understanding the powerful but personal and subjective symbols with which the living cosmos communicates.

The Philokalia lays great emphasis on the spiritual director or confessor, in the same way that many Tantric texts lay emphasis on the guru (this is not the only point of striking similarity between these two spiritual traditions – a subject for another time.) Even within traditional magical orders today such a close supervisorial relationship is rare, although admirably more common than it used to be a couple of decades ago. The practice of the magical diary, and regular examination of its entries to discover recurrent themes and patterns, partially remedies this absence – provided it is filled in honestly. Nonetheless, the decrease in serious ‘communities of practice’ means that the individual magician often has to bootstrap their own development, sometimes without trusted friends to check in with: the internet has, as ever, proven a double-edged sword in this regard. As I get a little older, I am struck by how much I return to the question of community and its relation to spiritual practice, and how surprisingly little many occultists have to say about it.

The Hesychast literature also outlines three stages of the mystical life: purification (κάθαρσις, katharsis), contemplation (θεωρία, theoria), and divinisation (θέωσις, theosis). This division is very ancient indeed, and goes back at least to Pseudo-Dionysius; the latter two stages are sometimes also called illumination (φωτισμός, photismos) and perfection (τελείωσις, teleiosis). Some later writers are keen to stress that progress between them is not linear, as if they can be checked off and forgotten, attained for all time. But initiates of many western magical traditions will recognise a common structure here: the First, Second and Third Hall initiations of the Aurum Solis and its descendant orders can be seen to map, though imperfectly, to these stages. The same, naturally, can be said of the magical work of the sefirot of the middle pillar in ascending order. Though by no means is all of it applicable, much of the literature on these stages can provide precious insight to an often neglected aspect of western occultism. It is perhaps worth noting in conclusion that the sole active inner body of the Aurum Solis before Osborne Phillips relinquished his role as grand master was explicitly oriented to the practice of theosis.

The next post in this series will return to our foundational ritual practices, with an examination of the practice of the light-body, the Clavis Rei Primae – which, in truth, sits somewhere between meditation and ritual. When I finish a session of Tabor meditation, I typically close with this adoration derived from the Hermetica, and so I do here:

O Powers within me,
hymn the One and All:
chant in harmony with my will, 
all ye Powers within me!
 

Holy Gnosis, illumined by thee, 
through thee I hymn the light of thought, 
I rejoice in the joy of the mind. 
All ye Powers, chant with me! 

Steps of the Foundation I: Of Sources, Of Breath, Of Fire

Jean-Antoine Idrac, ‘Mercure inventant le caducée’, 1878. Musée d’Orsay

After an unforgivably long time – an absence prompted by the turbulence much of the world is going through at the moment – back to writing a little more, and a little more publicly, about magic. For those watching this little website, hello: I’m sorry to have been away for so long. I’m pleased that in my own period of silence, my own practice has deepened and expanded. 

I’ve found new depth and a surprising degree of spiritual solace in my daily practice. Magicians sometimes talk about daily practice as if it were some arduous task or a simple matter of exercise and training – like ensuring you cycle for half an hour a day, or get your gym session in. There are dry days of course, and in one sense it is like training: of the will and concentration, and learning to unforget our subtler senses, which many of us will have had educated out of us as children.

But the analogy with physical training falls down when it becomes a dry matter of developing psychic aptitude, without accounting for the joy, transformation and – above all – capacity for surprise that magical training brings with it. What experience is analogous to losing yourself in the recitation of the Secret Hymnody? There are times prior to practice where one might feel grouchy, irritable, lazy, or like the whole thing’s a chore –  but that’s something to bring to the chair in meditation, or to offer up for transformation at the altar. Am I ever really too busy, or is busy-ness covering for something else? (Was that meeting really necessary? Can’t this work wait until tomorrow? Are you in danger of thinking about magic as somehow separate to life?) Long ago I learned – and I think this is a common affliction in the modern west – that I can get in my own way by making myself ‘too busy’ to pursue things I want. And, almost always, curled inside that habit is fear: fear of transformation, fear of change, fear of what that might really entail. It is, paradoxically, a fear resolved best by admitting it and carrying on.

(If you wanted to think about this in the technical language of the Kabbalah, you might say this solution is the ruah turning its rational and loving gaze on the the nefesh, the passionate and instinctive part of the soul: thereby reversing the all too frequent situation, where powerful fears which rack the nefesh unconsciously pattern the activity of the rational soul, manifesting diversely as largely harmless contradictions and self-deceptions or terrible forms of self-destruction.) 

That digression aside, I have found myself thinking and reflecting on the simple rituals which make up much of my daily practice at the moment: the foundational practices of the Ogdoadic tradition, the Setting of the Wards of Power, the Clavis Rei Primae, the Solar Adorations – on which I’ve already written a little – among others. In these simple and powerful rituals there is much that repays study. New adepts of the Golden Dawn were sent back to study the inner dimensions of their first, 0=0 initiation ritual; I have heard that certain contemporary Golden Dawn orders also instruct closer study and meditation on the pentagram ritual as well. That makes sense, as the LBRP and the 0=0 ritual are respectively chamber and grand symphonic magical masterpieces. They repay meditation: so too do the foundational rituals of the Ogdoadic tradition.

Over the next few posts – which I am calling, somewhat grandiosely, ‘steps of the foundation’ after the lowest parts of our central magical formula – I want to explore some of the fruits of practice of and meditation on these rituals. The analyses will bounce around a bit between history, scholarship, the experience of magical practice and the fruits of meditation. Over the next couple of posts, I’ll consider our very simplest ritual, the Calyx – which might also be our most profound. That will also set us up to talk about the tradition’s basic banishing ritual, the Setting of the Wards of Power – although, as we will see, it is much, much more than that. But first… 

On Sources 

Some years ago now, when I first flicked through Mysteria Magica – which was harder to get in those days than it is now – I was thrilled and impressed and excited, but my initial reading of these foundation rituals was that they were altered and retooled versions of the fundamental Golden Dawn rituals. That’s not a bad instinct: they serve similar purposes, and as I’ve written elsewhere, the English magical world is and was comparatively small, and cross-pollination between groups and currents is inevitable. Not all of this is visible in public – very little of it is, in fact. My own suspicion – informed, but just a suspicion – is that what emerged as the Aurum Solis drew from a distinctive Hermetic inheritance – probably a rather more Christian one than that to be found in The Magical Philosophy books – including papers from old, non-Rosicrucian antiquarian societies, but likely drew heavily from Regardie’s and Crowley’s publications, and probably contact with small, post-Stella Matutina magical groups to augment their own techniques. It would be unusual had they not. 

This leads me to two thoughts: the first is that the rise, decline and fall of the original Golden Dawn and its wider roots in the Victorian occult revival is well-documented and widely written about; its afterlives in England rather less so. Many histories sketch out some trajectories, most regard one or the other of the world wars as the natural terminus of that history – as so many groups closed or died off during them. The definitive magical history of postwar England remains to be written: it would be a fascinating one. Ithell Colquhoun’s sharp, gossipy Golden Dawn history – which includes a somewhat garbled, probably third-hand mention of an Aurum Solis antecedent – is still indispensable. (Denning & Phillips’s equally sharp rebuke to Colquhoun is not as straightforward a denial as it seems – it contains its own sleight-of-hand as well.) 

Second, away from the minutiae of occult history, I wonder in retrospect about the wisdom of laying claim to long, unbroken traditions of magical practice – rather than acknowledging the truth, that esoteric lineages are amalgams of myth and reality, that they ebb and flow, die back and regenerate, and because they are living, change in the hands and hearts of each new generation. I know the reasoning, of course: an ancient lineage impresses an aspirant sufficiently to induce them to take whatʼs being taught seriously, the need for that crutch will fall away in time – and a few decades ago it also worked as a neat sales pitch. It also alludes to a deeper truth: anyone who has practiced magic seriously will at times feel the long chain of practitioners behind and around him, a kind of real Invisible College. Ogdoadic ritual even makes explicit provision for that in its ‘Catena’. If nothing else, feeling that wisdom is a bit more wise if it comes from long ago or far away is a habit as old as the ancient Greeks; Hermes, god of magic, is also god of trickery. 

Still, this lineage-mongering isn’t just a harmless initiatory trick. The history of magic in the 20th century is replete with crises precipitated either by claims to have the real, true, more authentic lineage, or by someone’s discovery that the ancient lineage that so impressed them was drawn up on the back of a napkin. Both of these are inevitable consequences if a tradition’s authority depends solely or largely on its pristine antiquity, and while the internal politicking of esoteric groups can be very funny if approached with sufficient detachment, one might think it a tragedy that the original G∴D∴, say, didn’t have more time to work out the kinks in its system before imploding. (And great as the Mathers-Westcott synthesis is, it does have its problems: its uncertainty about what the elemental grades are doing, or the sketchy nature of its adept curriculum – and its habit of producing fissiparous adepti!) Rather sadder is the repeated story of spiritual seekers disillusioned to discover that what allured them seemed to be a historical confection, and who drop away from practice in that disappointment: this still happens in magical orders, but is more particularly pronounced in neopaganism and witchcraft. It is something which ought to give leaders of magical groups pause. 

Pleasingly, I think the worst days of lineage-mongering are behind us. Partly because it’s harder to get away with, and partly because it seems less important to contemporary seekers. And yet it’s worth reflecting on what this desire for ancient, far-off or secret tradition might tell us. For instance, that many people drawn to the mysteries feel that there is something profoundly incomplete, profoundly limited about the way they have been taught to think about the world and their place in it. Such a realisation, taken seriously, can be profoundly disorienting – as if you were sitting of an evening, watching the light fade on a mountain ridge-line in the distance, only for the mountain, suddenly, to rear up and move. In such a situation, a scrabble for authority of any kind, a secure place to anchor one’s conception of the world, can be easily understood. The best outcome in these scenarios is that the student transitions from the mythic foundation story to a deeper, mature appreciation of the ebb and flow of esoteric currents; the worst-case scenario, frankly more common, chips away at the aspirant’s confidence, or seduces leaders into narcissism, vice or simple abuse justified by the borrowed grandeur of their lineage. Everyone has seen those wreckages. 

Pentagrams and Quarters 

You might think that the foregoing is setting the stage to say that, for instance, the Setting of the Wards of Power is nothing more than a Greek clone of the pentagram ritual. Nothing could be further from the truth. I donʼt doubt that the Wards formula was influenced by both the published form of the Golden Dawn ritual, as well – perhaps – as Crowley’s Star Ruby, in which the pentagrams are flung into each quarter rather than traced. Both mark out a space for ritual working, banish anything unpleasant, decayed or stagnant that might be hanging about, and invoke the rulers of the elements in their pure forms; both effectively establish a symbolic, magical microcosm in which any subsequent work may be accomplished. It is surely right to say, too, that both the Wards and the Pentagram ritual at least share a common ancestor in Eliphas Levi’s Conjuration of the Four – as well, perhaps, in the standard Jewish night prayer, found in just about any Siddur, which calls on the four archangels to guard the sleeper through the night. 

And yet. Beyond those surface similarities, what look like small changes impact sharply on the feel of the ritual. Unlike the LBRP, the Setting cannot be modulated for work in a particular element: it does not provide a structuring formula for other magical works (though it is itself very clearly patterned according to the fundamental ritual formula of the old A∴S∴). Elemental, planetary and zodiacal workings are undertaken rather differently in the G∴D∴; the theurgic uses to which expansions of the pentagram ritual are put are also covered by different forms of working, as in the Ogdoadic ritual formula called ‘The Magician’. The Setting, then, always establishes a sphere of perfect, dynamic balance, both in the place of working, and in the magician’s own microcosm. Of course, it also does so while placing the operator within the current and symbols of the Ogdoadic tradition. In combination with the Rousing of the Citadels, this act of microcosmic balancing, done regularly, can (and I can attest, does) have profound effects. 

There is one further similarity between the modern pentagram ritual and the Setting that we should reflect on, and it is one that is so fundamental it can easily be missed. If you were asked how you could tell that both rituals were descended from 19th century magical revival, you might point to their obvious ultimate textual roots in Levi’s Conjuration, or their relation to particularly elaborate rituals of purification, exorcism and opening which blossomed in that period. (There are magical traditions that do very little of this, and manuscript records of magical operations in the preceding centuries suggest experiments would often proceed directly to spirit invocation after a brief general prayer.) But few magicians who learned their magic from one of our fine modern manuals – Kraig, Greer, DuQuette, King & Skinner etc – would even notice the most obvious connection between them: that they lay particular emphasis on the use of breath control, visualisation and embodiment through the operator to achieve their magical effect. (By ’embodiment through the operator’ here, I mean both the imposition of visualised energy on the magician’s own body, as well as the physical vibration of words etc.) 

This may well have been a relatively late development within the GD: many MSS of the pentagram ritual mention no or very scanty visualisation; it is also sometimes claimed that many of these techniques were taught ‘mouth-to-ear’ in the second order, and not committed to paper. As a systematic technique, though, visualisation had been largely in abeyance in western ritual magic for a very long time, and it is my suspicion that it was only a renewed encounter with non-European esoteric systems which prompted its rediscovery. That is not to say that earlier magicians did not either use visualisation or seek visual phenomena – the very long history of crystal scrying should scotch that idea – but that it was neither systematic nor thought of as foundational. It is only in the late nineteenth, and a fortiori the twentieth, centuries that it becomes so central – thanks in part to the assiduous systematising and popularising work done by Israel Regardie on the Middle Pillar technique. 

Sometimes this leads to the claim that visualisation-heavy magical techniques are novelties within western magic – unnecessary imports which can be shrugged off in favour of other modes of consciousness alteration. Not so fast: if such techniques had been in abeyance for centuries, there is at least some evidence to suggest their presence among both the magical specialists whose resources come down to us as the magical papyri, and in the literature of the late antique theurgists. (Sometimes as instruction that ‘in such a direction you will see a particular beast’, or on the emphasis on perception of divine fire in parts of the Chaldaean Oracles.) In the case of regulation and use of the breath, that is even more emphatically the case – it is abundantly clear magical breathwork was part of the basic repertoire of the theurgist seeking the divine. This is less foreign import than patching together a badly degraded magical patrimony – more than anything a rediscovery of vital magical techniques. 

It is therefore of particular interest that the foundational rituals given by Denning and Phillips give such careful and detailed instructions on breathwork and visualisation. From the scholar’s point of view this marks the A∴S∴ as descending from a very particular magical milieu, and in conversation with the whole great stream of magical work that comes out of the late Victorian occult societies. This suggests two things of use to practitioners: first, that differences in technique will often be the result of years of practical experiment. For instance the standard meditative breath is given in a ratio of 2:1:2:1 – i.e., where both in- and out-breath are twice the length of time spent with the lungs held either still or empty. The standard G∴D∴ breath is 1:1:1:1 – the ‘fourfold breath’, of equal duration in all phases – a form other traditions reserve for works of healing or trance induction. Such adaptations are the fruit of long magical work. Second, that familiarity with the wider corpus of European ceremonial magic, and especially the work of the G∴D∴ and its heirs, is helpful in understanding Ogdoadic ritual. Again, this is as much about divergence as similarity: why do we not – unlike G∴D∴ magicians – typically repeat a banishing ritual at the end of our work? Why do we use the heptagram instead of the hexagram when working with the planets? Why is the placement of psychic centres in the equivalent of the middle pillar different? All of these questions require and repay reflection and meditation – they certainly inform a lot of what I will be writing about these rituals and techniques.

What kind of magic is this?

Last question for this post, and in some ways the most important one. There’s no point in just summarising the contents of Foundations, so I will simply try to bring the matter up to date. Usually practitioners of ‘high’ magic are at pains to disclaim any suggestion it is better than low magic. The distinction is typically explained in one of several ways: echoing that between ‘high’ and ‘low’ Anglicanism, i.e. by the amount of formality, elaboration and ritualism involved; or by the degree to which its mechanism of activity relies on invocation of higher powers, or, contrariwise, relies on exploiting sympathy, correspondences without explicit invocation of powers; one is learned, the other much more intuitive; one directed towards spiritual ends, the other much more materially inclined. That last is rather frowned upon as a definition now, but really all of them break down on contact with the magpie reality of magical practice. Show me even the most spiritual of magicians who hasn’t waved a mortgage application through some incense – or some such – and I’ll show you a liar.

The point of troubling those boundaries is to show how arbitrary they often are, even if they’re sometimes useful. Since Denning and Phillips were first writing, much has changed. Popular occultism has gone through various cycles of boom and bust, not least successive iterations of pop-witchcraft in both its saccharine American variant and its scare-the-parents goth club mode. Among more committed practitioners there has evolved a greater seriousness about learning from other, less damaged magical traditions, exploiting greater access to long-forgotten – or at least hidden – aspects of the European magical tradition, and the rediscovery of the many treasures of the grimoires – and a resultant stress on spirit work. I have learned a great deal from listening to some of those magicians – like Al Cummins – wearing the crown of Solomon anew. Every magician, surely, is thankful for the work of Golden Hoard or Joseph Peterson.

There is a kind of oedipal error, though, which I think is sometimes visible in the pronouncements of cruder grimoire enthusiasts: that the efforts of the late Victorian occultists, and much of 20th century ritual magic, was a kind of category error, which attempted to merge too much into a single entity. In this reading, magic is primarily concerned with calling spirits, religion with ethical propriety and moral purification, and – perhaps – something awkward called the mysteries concerned with direct spiritual experience and personal revelation. Under this definition, in Europe, religion in the form of Christianity grew to nearly obliterate magic and strangled the mysteries; insofar as either survived, they did so in degraded, secret and privatised forms – and like all privatised things, more available to the powerful than the common. The objection that emerges from this reading of history is that, in an attempt revive magic, the great Victorian occultists simply put too much into their synthesis, expected it to do too many things, and that magic proper has nothing to do with spiritual transformation: that it needs disentangling from the mystery tradition in order to really come into its own.

This is a superficially attractive reading, but one that’s hard to sustain given how often the practice of magic draws on prayer and invocation of divine powers; how frequently the records of historical magicians oscillate between the appetite for concrete change and fervour for spiritual knowledge and transformation; how often in practice the practical magician is borne along to the threshold of the mysteries. The real strength of this critique, in my view, is the series of questions it raises about the practice of ritual magic. That might be about the need to leave greater space for contact with spiritual beings, or how to shed some of the unnecessary Victorian cultural encumbrances, or the mildly imperialist habit of treating the kosmos as an array of ‘systems’ to be harmonised into the One True Map (and jamming them in if they don’t quite fit.) Ironically, the curriculum outlined in The Magical Philosophy obviously has questions like this in mind, with its cleaner ritual forms, the emphasis on physical gesture or dance, with none of the baroque elaborations of its predecessors on its Enochian material. But it is emphatically a curriculum that sees the value in the synthesis of magic and the mystery tradition, and wants to rescue and restore that synthesis; the two are entwined in even its most fundamental rituals. And that sets us up nicely for our next discussion: The Calyx.

ECCE HOMO: Occult Ephemera of the 1970s

Hilma af Klint, Svanen (1915)

I thought it might be interesting to some occult history nerds – of which I am certainly one – to transcribe the below article, which marks the earliest substantial appearance of the ‘Hermetic Order of the Sacred Word’ in print. (I say ‘substantial’ because I believe there may be an offhand reference in an early edition of Francis King’s history of ritual magic in England, but I only have a later revised edition to hand.) The short article is somewhat strange, and sections of it were later adapted as a manifesto of sorts by the Aurum Solis as it came in to public view; it is a brief summary of why one might be interested in ‘Qabalistic’ magic, and shows some of the hallmarks of Denning & Phillips’ later books, namely an insistence on the creative rather than restrictive and dogmatic aspects of Qabalah, an appreciation of the overlap between magic and religion, and a strong interest in Jungian analysis and related psychological or analytic literature.

The article was published on pp.139-145 of a handy pre-internet gazette glorying in the title The Aquarian Guide to Occult, Mystical, Religious, Magical London & Around (ed. Françoise Strachan, The Aquarian Press: London, 1970). The Guide is a colourful cheap paperback snapshot of occult London in 1970, and it is well worth glancing through just to get a sense of the riotous array of creeds, techniques and credulity-stretching backstories on offer. Its editor’s preface gives a very brief sense of how enduring and exasperating internecine squabbling and mutual enmity is on the occult scene: it’s hard not to think of the inclusion of an entry for Neurotics Anonymous as an unsubtle hint. But the Guide doubtless gave any number of curious seekers an entry-point to an otherwise sealed-off world: an address to post a nervous letter to, or, for the especially bold, a phone-number to ring.

And what if your appetite had been whetted by the mix of modern spiritual transformation and ancient Kabbalistic know-how alluded to in the article? You would search the pages of the Guide in vain for the details of the ‘Hermetic Order of the Sacred Word’, and end up frustrated. Perhaps you would write directly to the publishers, or ask around at the Atlantis bookshop. Perhaps you’d end up doing something else, following off one of the many other leads between the Guide’s psychedelic covers.

But if you paid attention to the occult press, you might notice the first editions of Denning and Phillips’ The Magical Philosophy rolling out from Llewellyn Press a few years later in 1974. The first volume contains a purported history of the Aurum Solis, and the Order of the Sacred Word, which is said to have split from the AS in 1957 and returned in 1971, after a difference of opinion or taste over the use of Masonic structure and method in esoteric work – with the Sacred Word favouring the somewhat cumbersome Masonic style rejected by the AS. The traces of O∴S∴V∴ (the abbreviation is of ‘Ordo Sacri Verbi’, the group’s Latin name) ritual and instruction which remains in the published work is interesting, and I’ll refer to it in a later post about some of the AS’s magical techniques.

Yet if you were still curious about this group and had picked up, a year later in 1975, Ithell Colquhoun’s book Sword of Wisdom, you might find something intriguing. Ostensibly a biography of S.L. MacGregor Mathers, a founder of the Golden Dawn, most of the book actually traces the fortunes of some of its successor groups and personalities. Colquhoun is not averse to recording gossip and passing judgement (both qualities I rather like) and a somewhat vague section on the Sacred Word occasioned a reply in high dudgeon from Denning and Phillips, at pains to deny any Golden Dawn or Stella Matutina descent, or any substantial links with Druidry – both claims levelled in Colquhoun’s book. That reply, which has its own sleights-of-hand about the identity of some people referenced in it, can be read here.

Were they protesting too much? It doubtless made sense to stake out clearly how different the system of the AS was to the Golden Dawn, and they do happily admit the presence of GD influence in the Sacred Word. As for the claimed links with Druidry, well – no-one could mistake the system presented in The Magical Philosophy as Druidic, but Melita Denning had great sympathy and periodic involvement in Druidic organisations. Indeed, the former Chief Druid of the A.D.U.B., Thomas Maughan, was claimed as a former Grand Master of the AS and was the dedicatee of Book III of The Magical Philosophy. What to make of this? Not much, of course, other than that Denning, certainly, had a great love for the Druids and the Celtic gods (as much can be guessed from her poems for the Celtic gods’ quarter days, and the extended discussion they receive in the books), and that the history of magical groups, especially in England, is rarely as pure and simple as it’s presented. Groups share members, influence each other, ‘borrow’ and appropriate from each other – and the bits that do make it to print can make tenuous connections seem too solid, and temporary experiments much vaster than they really were.

Nonetheless, the article below is a nice piece of AS ephemera, so – enjoy!

***

ECCE HOMO

Magic is a phenomenon co-extensive with the human race. Qabalistic magic is magic ordered logically and philosophically to the doctrine of the Qabalah. To speak of Qabalistic doctrine is a necessary statement of fact: to speak of Qabalistic dogma would be to misinterpret the whole nature and spirit of the system.

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