The Mysteries of Magic

Imagination is actually as the eye of the soul, and it is therein that forms are delineated and preserved; by its means we behold the reflections of the indivisible world; it is the mirror of visions and the apparatus of magical life. Thereby we cure diseases, modify the seasons, ward off death from the living and resuscitate those who are dead, because this faculty exalts the will and gives it power over the universal agent.

Imagination is the instrument of the adaptation of the Logos. In its application to reason it is genius, for reason, like genius, is one amidst the complexity of operations. Demons, souls, and the rest, can therefore by really and truly beheld by means of the imagination; but the imagination of the adept is diaphonous, whilst that of the uninitiated is opaque. The light of truth traverses the one as through a crystal window, and is refracted in the other as in a vitreous mass full of scoriae and foreign matter.

The things which contribute most to the errors of the vulgar and the extravagances of the insane are the reflection of depraved imaginations in one another. But the seer knows with an absolute knowledge that the things he imagines are true and experience invariably confirms his visions.

Eliphas Levi, The Mysteries of Magic

Twelve Wise Men

In these twelve men who came together to perform a special mission, the twelve different streams in the spiritual development of mankind were represented. The fact that all possible religions and all possible philosophies belong to the twelve basic types is in itself a mystery.

Buddhism, Brahmanism, Vedanta philosophy, materialism, or whatever it may be – all of them can be traced to the twelve basic types; it is just a matter of being quite exact. And so all the different streams of man’s spiritual life – the religions, the philosophies and world conceptions that are spread over the earth – were united in that council of the twelve.

After the period of darkness had passed and spiritual achievement was possible again, a thirteenth came in remarkable circumstances to the twelve. I am telling you now of one of those events which takes place secretly in the evolution of mankind once and once only. They cannot occur a second time and are mentioned not as an indication that efforts should be made to repeat them but for quite other reasons.

When the darkness had lifted and it was possible to develop clairvoyant vision again, the coming of the thirteenth was announced in a mysterious way to the twelve wise men. They knew that the time had come when a child with significant and remarkable incarnations behind him was to be born. Above all they knew that one of his incarnations had been at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha.

It was known, therefore, that one who had been a contemporary of the events in Palestine was returning. And the birth of the child in these unusual circumstances during the thirteenth century could not have been said to be that of a person of renown.

Rudolf Steiner, Intimate Workings of Karma

True Inner Sight

When I think like this, I am experiencing light.

You are touched by a feeling – it is true inner sight.

I know those I love as the greater part of me,

But then the reason is unspeakable.

It must remain a mystery.

Still I would pray to feel the action of creation.

It is thought to me – your ecstasy –

My heart, your inspiration.

Is there a simple way to plan the course of each new day?

By free will, you are determining.

You are the teacher.

I am the way.

Hopes, dreams or visions?

The journey is yours –

Cast off all burdens and walk through the doors,

To me.

The encounter with souls?

Be as one:

Perfectly whole like a star. Overcome

Other reflections – those lunar rays

Dazzle the senses to madness in ways

Which mortal connections interpret as bliss.

But wholly uncertain is light-feigned.

RESIST.

A keen mind uncovers the mystery of age

With prophetic books. The curtain is raised

On secrets – the manuscripts – found and unfurled,

Longed-for and meant to bring sight to the world.

The essence of beauty is shown and unbound. Say:

“Darkness be banished to deep underground.”

The Magic Key

The Principles of Truth are Seven; he who knows these, understandingly, possesses the Magic Key before whose touch all the Doors of the Temple fly open.

One of the old Hermetic Masters wrote, long ages ago: “He who grasps the truth of the Mental Nature of the Universe is well advanced on The Path to Mastery.” And these words are as true to-day as at the time they were first written. Without this Master-Key, Mastery is impossible, and the student knocks in vain at the many doors of The Temple.

There are planes beyond our knowing, but when we apply the Principle of Correspondence to them we are able to understand much that would otherwise be unknowable to us…a knowledge of the Principle of correspondence enables Man to reason intelligently from the Known to the Unknown. Studying the monad, he understands the archangel.

Nothing rests; everything moves; everything vibrates. “He who understands the Principle of Vibration, has grasped the sceptre of Power,”

Everything is Dual; everything has poles; everything has its pair of opposites; like and unlike are the same; opposites are identical in nature, but different in degree; extremes meet; all truths are but half-truths; all paradoxes maybe reconciled. Where does “darkness” leave off, and “light” begin? What is the difference between “High and Low”? Between “Positive and Negative”? The Principle of Polarity explains these paradoxes, and no other Principle can supersede it. The “Art of polarization” becomes a phase of “Mental Alchemy” known and practiced by the ancient and modern Hermetic Masters.

Everything flows, out and in; everything has its tides; all things rise and fall; the pendulum-swing manifests in everything; the measure of the swing to the right is the measure of the swing to the left; rhythm compensates. There is always an action and a reaction; an advance and a retreat a rising and a sinking. This is in the affairs of the Universe, suns, worlds, men, animals, mind, energy, and matter. This law is manifest in the creation and destruction of worlds; in the rise and fall of nations; in the life of all things; and finally in the mental states of Man.

There is a Cause for every Effect; an Effect from every Cause. It explains that: “Everything Happens according to Law”; that nothing ever “merely happens”; that there is no such thing as Chance; that while there are various planes of Cause and Effect, the higher dominating the lower planes, still nothing ever entirely escapes the Law.

Gender is in everything; everything has its Masculine and Feminine Principles Gender; manifests on all planes. If you would understand the philosophy of Mental and Spiritual Creation, Generation, and Re-generation, you must understand and study this Hermetic Principle.

The Kybalion

The Fairy Ship Sails Upstream

It is not the purpose of this book to trace the subsequent history of Christianity, especially the later history of Christianity; which involves controversies of which I hope to write more fully elsewhere. It is devoted only to the suggestion that Christianity, appearing amid heathen humanity, had all the character of a unique thing and even of a supernatural thing. It was not like any of the other things; and the more we study it the less it looks like any of them

I have said that Asia and the ancient world had an air of being too old to die. Christendom has had the very opposite fate. Christendom has had a series of revolutions and in each one of them Christianity has died. Christianity has died many times and risen again; for it had a god who knew the way out of the grave. It is so true that three or four times at least in the history of Christendom the whole soul seemed to have gone out of Christianity; and almost every man in his heart expected its end.

The Church in the West was not in a world where things were too old to die; but in one in which they were always young enough to get killed

At least five times, with the Arian and the Albigensian, with the Humanist sceptic, after Voltaire and after Darwin, the Faith has to all appearance gone to the dogs. In each of these five cases it was the dog that died. How complete was the collapse and how strange the reversal, we cars only see in detail in the case nearest to our own time.

A thousand things have been said about the Oxford Movement and the parallel French Catholic revival; but few have made us feel the simplest fact about it; that it was a surprise. It was a puzzle as well as a surprise; because it seemed to most people like a river turning backwards from the sea and trying to climb back into the mountains.

In short, the whole world being divided about whether the stream was going slower or faster, became conscious of something vague but vast that was going against the stream. Both in fact and figure there is something deeply disturbing about this, and that for an essential reason. A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it. A dead dog can be lifted on the leaping water with all the swiftness of a leaping hound; but only a live dog can swim backwards. A paper boat can ride the rising deluge with all the airy arrogance of a fairy ship; but if the fairy ship sails upstream it is really rowed by the fairies.

G K Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, The Five Deaths of the Faith

Don Juan

Don Juan is not purely and simply a blasphemous dissolute, he is rather a hierophant of this small god of great power known in antiquity under the name of Eros or Amor (Love). It is the magic of Eros that he represents, and it is the mysteries of Eros over which he presides in the capacity of a priest.

Don Juan was neither a blasphemous dissolute nor a false-hearted seducer, nor even a brutal adventurer, but rather an obedient and courageous servant of this childlike divinity who loves and commands elan, enthusiasm and ardour, and who detests and forbids the weighing, measuring and calculating of reason with its laws of utility and advantage, circumspection and respect for convention and, lastly, its priority of a cold head over a warm heart.

However, love has not only its right to exist, but also its transcendental metaphysics, philosophy and mysticism. Don Juan was more than a victim or dupe of love – this apparently capricious goddess. He embraced her philosophy and mysticism and was therefore her conscious collaborator, her hierophant initiated into her mysteries. And it is thus that he has become an archetype – the archetype of love for its own sake, the lover par excellence.

Don Juan lives through the energy of amorous influence for the energy of amorous influence – by nourishing it and maintaining it like a fire which should never be extinguished. This is because he is conscious of the value of this fire and of the mission that htis fire has in the world. In the eternal conflict that there is between law – of right, of reason, and of the divine – and love, he takes the side of love, for which courage is necessary.

And it is thus that Don Juan represents an idea, an archetype, an arcanum. He represents the young man on teh Card of the sixth Arcanum of the Tarot “The Lover”, who has chosen the fire of love as such and multiplicity instead of the unicity of the love of his eternal sister soul – since Babylon, the woman appointed to the mysteries of erotic magic, has convinced him.

Unknown Author, Meditations on the Tarot, Letter XXI, The Fool

Monkshood

“The taking of the poison Monkshood is an example of one illegitimate way into the Spiritual world: however, if the entry is complete, and the entrant is not an initiate, then there is no return.

“This is one reason – one reason among many – why the Schools keep their secrets from the common herd. You can enter the Spiritual world in a split second, if you want. The problem is alawys that of finding a way back.

“Just so, you can enter the world of the demons, if you are not too worried about returning to the Earth. But” – he grimaced – “I am reasonably confident that you would want to come back pretty quickly, if you caught sight of the demons.”

He paused, and perhaps because he was thinking of the dog which follows the Fool around in the Tarot card, he nodded towards us. “Have you ever been attacked by a wild animal?” He must have known what our answer would be.

“A dog,” we replied truthfully, “a mad dog.”

Mark Hedsel, The Zelator

Key Words

abyss air apollo artemis

beauty blood dawn divine

earth fire future god

gold golden heart heaven

human light love magic

magical

meditations

tarot mind moon mystery

nature power prayer reason

sea secret silver sky

soul spirit spiritual star

sun time truth vision

water wind wisdom world

Absolute Confidence in the Cosmic Force

There may be certain precursors to successful magical procedures, including perfect spontaneous timing, heightened and receptive consciousness to the point of unconscious subordination to divinity, absolute confidence in the cosmic force. Free will united with obedience to the higher intelligence. It may also be more conducive to positive results if magic is conducted whilst the magician is in motion. It seems less likely that stasis would be more of an optimum state than movement if there is an intention to bring about transformation within it.

Although the potential is there in everyone and although the preconditions for success are not impossible to understand, one may, in theory, simply chance upon the optimum conditions for making magic. This is the chaos theory (I think). In the Western world, the probability that success in this area may be brought about by chance may well be greater than the probability of their being actual magicians, which is not to say such individuals do not exist. Or individual. Maybe there is but ONE magician, whereas surely there must be an infinite number of chances. It is difficult to determine because most people have fallen out of sync with the rhythm of the universe and there is evidence to suggest that there can only BE one at any given moment. Maybe the spirit of magic, the soul of creation, moves transiently through each of us with unfathomable reason.

If we have fallen out of sync with the rhythm of the universe, does this then mean, I wonder, that there is another universe with perfect timing at this moment – how close is the zeitgeist of the earth to the plan of a higher intelligence? Does it randomly coincide – at which point we would presumably be at a peak of civilization – or must we achieve a particular state of collective being if we are to join forces with the cosmic instigator?

Gabriel saves the burned Soul

I went to bed around midnight and no sooner had I lain down when I realized I was being drawn out through my inner eye, as happened very often during that era, until it was happening at almost all times.

During the initial stage of the journey I was not really conscious of it being either an ascent or a descent, as the world is round, but I later realized it had probably been a descent. Very near the start I seemed to be travelling through a vast tunnel of ‘cloud’-like gaseous material that was not black but was dark – like ink in water – and seemed smoky.

At the end of this very large tunnel was a blazing orange light which looked incredibly fiery, like the sun or a furnace. I let myself be drawn up the tunnel without thinking too much about what was happening, dispassionately, you might say.

I do not know what happened next, for all went blank, but I do know that when I emerged into the next ‘scene’ I was no longer ‘one’, but was split in two. My consciousness and reason – ‘me’, the part with my mind – was in a high up place watching for my ‘other’ (etheric, soul, spirit?) self, although we did not realise this until we actually saw this ‘other’ part.

All around me was very clear, pale blue sky – all was airy and light – and I realized at once we were very high up. Below me was a large platform – basically a flat, white cloud – and I observed ‘my self’ arrive at the base of this platform and cling to it as if for dear life, looking not just exhausted, but on the verge of death.

I must have been given some kind of ‘prompt’ as a thought/word sprang into my head in that instant and I spoke it gleefully, like a pupil who’s cracked the exam, a bit like with ‘Capricorn’:

“Gabriel!”

A split second later, with barely a breath between them, another word was said very quietly, from behind me. This was, ‘Satan’.

The voice which had whispered this last attempted to tell me I’d ‘failed’, that I was lost, but I was not in doubt because it was very plain to see that my first thought had been of ‘Gabriel’, which I reasserted this very firmly. I was not for having my mind poisoned and at that point in time was able to resist this kind of pollution.