by Marcus Katz
The Four Rivers
The four rivers which flow from the Herald, from between the trees, represent the four elements, the four quarters of the universe, and the four rivers which were said to flow out of Eden:
Now a river flowed out of Eden to water the garden; and from there it divided and became four rivers. The name of the first is Pishon; it flows around the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold ... The name of the second river is Gihon; it flows around the whole land of Cush. The name of the third river is Tigris; it flows east of Assyria. And the fourth river is the Euphrates.
— Genesis 2: 10-14.
This river, divided into four heads, is said by the Golden Dawn to be “the River of the Apocalypse, the Waters of Life, clear as a crystal proceeding from the Throne, on either side of the Tree of Life, bearing all manner of Fruit.”[120] In the Herald is signifies that there are many paths back to the source, and that same source nourishes the whole of eternity and the everlasting day.
The Two Trees
In a sense, the most significant yet enigmatic symbols of the Herald are the two trees. These appear in other illustrations of the Order such as The Fool and The World in the Union Deck, and The Lovers in the Outer Deck of the Tarot of Everlasting Day. They symbolise the Tree of All Knowledge (Good and Evil / Night) and the Tree of Life (Everlasting / Day) and are both fruit-bearing.
The Tree of Knowledge, which is to the right of the Herald (as viewed) contains the sparks of holiness in each fruit. The eating of this fruit and the subsequent ‘fall’ (descent into matter) expulses the Shekinah (divine presence / feminine) from the Garden. This allegory is depicted in The Lovers card as ‘choice and consequence’. As it has been said, “It will end, as it began, in a garden.”[121]
The fall causes the process of beirurim, which is the ‘sifting’ of Good and Evil, to redeem the sparks of holiness trapped within fallen matter. At its simplest level, this is the seeing of good in all things.
The Tree of Knowledge (Eternal Night)
Whilst it is not clear what specific trees the biblical authors had in mind for the two trees in Eden, the Book of Enoch describes the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge as tamarind. Others suggest the fruit as grapes, figs or even wheat. The commonly held notion of the apple being the fruit is perhaps because of a Latin pun on malum, being both ‘apple’ and ‘evil’.
The four fruits at the base of the Tree of Knowledge symbolise four experiences of knowledge:
Grapes: Ecstasy (Bacchanalian, divine ecstasy, etc.);
Figs: Redemption / Grace (as the story of the withered fig tree, etc. in Biblical accounts);
Wheat: Nature (Both pagan and Christian, nature as exemplar);
Apples: Science (thought, dualistic mind, fall into consciousness).
The Tree itself has fruit (tamarind) which becomes an amalgam of all knowledge. It is drawn on the Herald as a typical bushy growth usual to the tamarind, as the other Tree is more slender.
[ILLUS. GD 1-7 p380 Tree of Life After the Fall from Original Golden Dawn Manuscripts]
The Tree of Life (Everlasting Day)
We have used for the Tree of Life the lesser known moringa tree, particularly as it is known as the ‘tree of life’ or ‘miracle tree’. It is a very ancient tree and its dried seeds also look as if they are dark husks (klippoth) in which light may reside. The Tree of Life is depicted as having these black seeds, shells, husks, and pomegranates at its base, the latter recalling the myth of Persephone.
Exercise: Contemplating the Herald of Everlasting Day
Contemplate the image and reflect upon what pains and pleasures have burnt you in your life and consider too where you find the perfect peace. How do the fire and the rose find their relationship and union in the crucible of your life?
The fruit of the Tree of Life bears white flowers of light, with darkness on their inside, in contrast with those of the Tree of Knowledge, which glow from the inside. There are ten flowers on the Tree of Life, representing the sephiroth of the kabbalah, and 12 fruit on the Tree of Knowledge representing the 12 tribes, signs of the zodiac, months of a year, hours in a half day. The Tree of Life holds the secrets of the divine; the Tree of Knowledge, of time. In between them, our Work is done.
This Herald will be revisited in Volumes 5 and 10 of The Magister where we will see it with totally different eyes.
It is to the central mystery of time that we will first turn to contextualise our work. All of the rituals and works of the WEIS have a cumulative impact upon our being and relationship to the world – none more so than our relationship to time, space and our sense of self. We will begin with time.
THE AEONS
“That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even death may die.”
— H.P. Lovecraft, The Nameless City (1921) [122]
In our magical practices for the first grade of work, the Neophyte, the newcomer to magick is given four rituals: Liber Resh, the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram, the Middle Pillar, and the Rose Cross. Whilst not stated explicitly in any publication, these rituals are designed to re-orientate the individual respectively to time, space, self, and relationship.
This has a fundamental effect on the Neophyte in addition to the overt nature of these rituals, which are ostensibly given to provide a daily observation, a protection ritual, a mystical means of self-development, and a meditation practice. As the initiatory work commences, through study and practice, experiences arise which fundamentally destroy these constructs – hence, we build artificial scaffolding to sup- port us later in the journey. Ultimately, the scaffolding is then taken away, leaving nothing.
Thro’ many a birth in existence wandered I, Seeking, but not finding, the builder of this house. Sorrowful is repeated birth.
O housebuilder, thou art seen. Thou shalt build no house again. All thy rafters are broken. Thy ridge-pole is shattered.
Mind attains the Unconditioned. Achieved is the End of Craving.
— The first utterances of the Buddha
The practice of the initiatory system is retro-engineered from its ultimate goal, and as it is said, the Neophyte ritual of the Golden Dawn contains the essential teachings of the later grades to Adeptus Minor. The first practice we provide in this volume, Liber Resh, can be found in the brief practical section of the book, and is an observational and semi-devotional practice to the passage of the Sun. One of the central mysteries of our experience is time, and in most mystical literature, the transcendence of time is a common feature.[123] Time may even be considered the alchemical stone of great price.
In the Herald of Everlasting Day, the feather of Maat can be seen as representing time as the writing of our lifespan, and is shown as the highest point of the whole image – even slightly above the pyramid, in whose centre is the eye of Maat herself. This re-visions the earlier ‘illuminati’-associated ‘eye in the triangle’ with the eye of Maat rather than of Horus or Osiris.[124]
We build from our practice of Liber Resh to consider the passage of time as it applies to culture and consciousness, and hence our magick. The experience of time is fundamental to our consciousness, and yet most people do not consider this at all, other than notice how ‘a watched kettle never boils’ or ‘time passes quickly when you’re having fun’.[125] These temporal associations, held in awareness, are indicative of a far deeper phenomenon: a truly magical one.
When the father who had engendered it [the universe] saw it in motion and alive, a shrine brought into being for the everlasting gods, he rejoiced and, being well pleased, he conceived the idea of making it more like its model. Accordingly, as that model is the ever-existent Living Being, he set about making the universe also like it, as far as possible, in that respect. Now the nature of that living Being was eternal, a character with which it was impossible fully to endow a generated thing. But he planned as it were a moving likeness of eternity; and, at the same time that he set in order the Heaven, he made, of eternity that abides in unity, an ever-flowing l
ikeness moving according to number – that to which we have given the name Time.[126]
— Plato, Timaeus, 37 c-d
The most commonly known esoteric division of time in terms of culture and consciousness is that of the zodiacal ages. Many in our society would know that it is presently the ‘Age of Aquarius’ and some- how associate that with the 1960s ‘cultural revolution’. They might be somewhat more tentatively aware that the previous ‘age’ was that of Pisces – and perhaps be bemused that the symbol of Pisces, and the earliest symbol of one of the world’s most dominant religions over that period of approximately 2,000 years, in both cases is a fish.[127]
However, some Western esotericists have maintained another model of the passing of large-scale time, which we will now examine. This is perhaps a more relevant model than the current ‘in-vogue’ model of Mayan time, although it is also an interesting exercise to overlap these various models.[128] The model we will examine is that of the Aeons.
The word Aeon comes from the means ‘age’, ‘forever’ or ‘for eternity’. It is a Latin transliteration from the koine Greek word ὁ αἰών (aion). It was used to describe periods of time, but also in Gnostic writings the Aeons were spiritual entities and planes of being, with their own characteristics such as ‘power’ and ‘charity’. This idea of emanations in time is fundamental to both our magick and our working model of kabbalah, which shares this central concept.
Whilst the Order of the Golden Dawn celebrated the passing of time on a global level with the equinox rituals, the more strident proponent of Aeons was Aleister Crowley, who developed the model to incorporate the Egyptian deities, particularly Horus, the warrior God whose Age Crowley saw himself as prophesying. The full model has been revised and argued since Crowley, but a general perspective would be as the table below, starting with the Nameless Aeon and moving through periods of approximately 2,000 years to the yet future Aeon of Maat and beyond.
Aeon Name (Egyptian)
Aeon Title/Nature
Time Period
Bes
Nameless (Primitive)
Isis
The Goddess (Agriculture, Tribal)
Osiris
The Dying God (Industry, Science, Religion)[129]
?-1904
Horus
The Child (Psychology, the Self, Individualism)
1904-?
Maat
Global Consciousness
Harpocrates
Transcendent, Wordless[130]
However, Crowley was not the first esotericist to divide the ages in such a way – in fact he was building on a lesser known stream of Christian theology, influenced by Eliphas Lévi (1810-1875). Lévi used the Joachite teaching that there were three ages corresponding to the Father, Son and Holy Ghost: the Age of the Nettle (Law), Rose (Gospel) and Lily (Spirit); Father, Son and Holy Ghost.
These were based upon the teachings of Joachim of Fiorre (1135- 1202).[131] In the following diagram we can see that Joachim taught that the three ages overlapped, and this is an essential part of our Western esoteric concept of the Aeons or the ages – that there are substantial periods of overlap in transition between each Aeon. The signing of the American Declaration of Independence comes at the central point of the overlap between the Age of Pisces and Aquarius, for example.
In the illustration, we commence with Adamo (Adam) and the text reads: “Anyone who wants to be saved must first hold strong to their Catholic faith and those who are saved are whole and inviolate / pure and must banish all doubt into forever / eternally.” We see that the purpose of modelling time is to offer some transcendence of it.
Above the circles we read: “The darkness was upon us like an abyss, it was an ‘occult’ trial from the realm of death when the time between Adam to Moses was dark. It could not be removed ... therefore it was the darkness of ignorance.”
The phrase “Io sono ...” means “I am the Alpha and the Omega” and again shows the divine world as the beginning and end of all time. In fact, the illustration is not just about the passage of time but the “Primo / second / terzo stati ...” – the three states of man. This is the important thing about Aeons: they are recapitulated (played out) in our own personal lives – and the lives of organisations, cultures and social groups. An understanding of this fundamental pattern in the structure of our relationship to time allows the initiate to understand the deeper patterns at work in everyday experience. Ultimately, the continued and long term understanding and observation of those patterns frees the initiate from time itself.
To the right of the circles, we read: “In order for these five ways to be understood, although it is a solo process, it will bring you into communion with all living creatures and the trinity of F, S and HG [Father, Son and Holy Ghost].” The process is seen to be modelling a way of life as well as a cosmic scale of time.
[ILLUS. Joachim Three Trinitarian Circles]
At the far right of Adam, following the circles, we have “fine del mondo” – the “end of the world.” This is the world as it is perceived by the initiate, not the end of the world itself.
The text goes on to say: “... with these 7 modes, we are defined as people of God, and we are not alone, but three together in communion.” The modes of comprehending time ultimately lead us to a
meta-mind or group consciousness, a theme often seen in many Western esoteric works.
Here is how Joachim characterised these ages and gave timeframes:
The Age of the Father, corresponding to the Old Testament, characterised by obedience of mankind to the Rules of God.
The Age of the Son, between the advent of Christ and 1260, represented by the New Testament, when Man became the son of God.
The Age of the Holy Spirit, impending (in 1260), when mankind was to come in direct contact with God, reaching the total freedom preached by the Christian message. The Kingdom of the Holy Spirit, a new dispensation of universal love, would proceed from the Gospel of Christ, but transcend the letter of it. In this new Age the ecclesiastical organisation would be replaced and the Order of the Just would rule the Church.
In a commentary on Fiore’s works, the Islamist scholar Corbin remarks, “The three Ages of which Joachim de Flore speaks [of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit] are not successive periods of historical time ... (and Berdiaev observes this in a profound remark ...) ... the three Ages represent unities of existential time, interior time ... The succession of these Ages plays itself out in the interior of souls, in the mystery of each soul ... In historical time in fact these Ages coexist.”[132] This is a most important observation that the Aeons co-exist, and all are accessible to the consciousness of the initiate – including those of the future.
Teilhard de Chardin speaks of the passage of time in similar scales:
“... under the commonplace envelope of things and of all our purified and salvaged efforts, a new earth is slowly being engendered.”[133]
Each age reaches towards an ultimate parousia, a Greek word for the imminent physical presence of a person – in its common usage, the second coming of Christ. This is worded differently by Terence McKenna in Re-Evolution:
Human history represents such a radical break with the natural systems of biological organisation that preceded it, that it must be the response to a kind of attractor, or dwell point that lies ahead in the temporal dimension. Persistently Western religions have integrated into their theologies the notion of a kind of end of the world, and I think that a lot of psychedelic experimentation sort of confirms this intuition, I mean, it isn’t going to happen according to any of the scenarios of orthodox religion, but the basic intuition, that the universe seeks closure in a kind of omega point of transcendence, is confirmed, it’s almost as though this object in hyperspace, glittering in hyper-space, throws off reflections of itself, which actually ricochet into the past, illuminating this mystic, inspiring that saint or visionary, and that out of these fragmentary glimpses of eternity we can build a kind of map, of not only the past
of the universe, and the evolutionary egression into novelty, but a kind of map of the future ...[134]
In the initiatory work, this same concept is also taken on a personal spiritual level; that we aspire to integrate the Aeons and rise through them, ultimately culminating in our own parousia, when we meet ourselves coming back along the way. As the mystic poet A.E. Waite wrote:
I carried the star; that star led me:
The paths I’ve taken, of most forsaken,
Do surely lead to an open sea:
As a clamour of voices heard in sleep,
Come shouts through the dark on the shrouded deep.
Now it is noon; in the hush prevailing
Pipes, harps and horns into flute-notes fall;
The sea, conceding my star’s true leading,
In tongues sublime at the end of all
Gives resonant utterance far and near:-
“Cast away fear;
Be of good cheer;
He is here,
Is here!”[135]
Having laid out some of the groundwork for understanding the concept of the Aeons, as passages of time and of the soul’s experience, we will now look more particularly at the next Aeon – the Aeon of Maat – to discern what awaits us further along our journey.