by Marcus Katz
Whilst Crowley saw the passage of the Aeon of Osiris (the Christian and patriarchal God, the central concepts of sin, sacrifice and salvation) into the Aeon of Horus, he also briefly admitted the possibility of seeing ahead into the Aeon of Maat. It was Crowley’s students and followers, notably Charles Stansfield Jones (Frater Achad) who took this idea and developed it further. In fact, Jones claimed to be the prophet of the incoming Aeon of Maat, and other contemporary writers as we have described, such as Soror Nema, have claimed to be in receipt of ‘communication’ from the future Aeon.[149]
These are referred to as magical ‘currents’, both incoming and outgoing, like tides or waves of general change or consensus bound together by common themes, such as the warrior nature of Horus.
Some esotericists also believe that the Aeons are ‘parallel’ or ‘dual’ or even multidimensional so that they all exist – in a sense – at the same time. The idea of the ‘dual current’ of Horus and Maat is one that we will apply.
On a basic level, the primary difference between the nature of Horus and Maat is that Horus refers to the individual and Maat to the group. Horus is seen as a warrior – fighting for the individual right and even revenge, and Maat is seen as the whole, the measure, by which all stand and are judged.
The energy or current of Horus is to be found in both the entrepreneur but also the dictator. The current of Maat is to be found in both the United Nations and crowd hysteria. The development of the Internet is a typical product of the overlap of both currents.[150]
You may wish to explore the ancient Egyptian concepts of both Horus and Maat before proceeding to the exercise below.
Exercise: Barack Obama’s Inaugural Speech
We will now look at the first half of President Barack Obama’s inaugural speech, given on 20 January 2009. You may wish to go through this text with two different coloured highlighter pens, highlighting aspects of the speech that you might consider to be pertaining to the Aeon of Horus and, in another colour, those pertaining to the Aeon of Maat.
In both cases you may find both positive and negative aspects of these currents being addressed. For example, the Aeon of Horus may contain the references to strong individualism, but also singular dictators.
My fellow citizens: I stand here today humbled by the task before us, grateful for the trust you have bestowed, mindful of the sacrifices borne by our ancestors. I thank President Bush for his service to our nation, as well as the generosity and cooperation he has shown throughout this transition.
Forty-four Americans have now taken the presidential oath.
The words have been spoken during rising tides of prosperity and the still waters of peace. Yet, every so often the oath is taken amidst gathering clouds and raging storms. At these moments, America has carried on not simply because of the skill or vision of those in high office, but because We the People have remained faithful to the ideals of our forbearers, and true to our founding documents.
So it has been. So it must be with this generation of Americans.
That we are in the midst of crisis is now well understood. Our nation is at war, against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred. Our economy is badly weakened, a consequence of greed and irresponsibility on the part of some, but also our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age. Homes have been lost; jobs shed; businesses shuttered. Our health care is too costly; our schools fail too many; and each day brings further evidence that the ways we use energy strengthen our adversaries and threaten our planet. These are the indicators of crisis, subject to data and statistics. Less measurable but no less profound is a sapping of confidence across our land – a nagging fear that America’s decline is inevitable, and that the next generation must lower its sights.
Today I say to you that the challenges we face are real. They are serious and they are many. They will not be met easily or in a short span of time. But know this, America – they will be met.
On this day, we gather because we have chosen hope over fear, unity of purpose over conflict and discord.
On this day, we come to proclaim an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn out dogmas, that for far too long have strangled our politics.
We remain a young nation, but in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things. The time has come to reaffirm our enduring spirit; to choose our better history; to carry forward that precious gift, that noble idea, passed on from generation to generation: the God-given promise that all are equal, all are free, and all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness.
In reaffirming the greatness of our nation, we understand that greatness is never a given. It must be earned. Our journey has never been one of short-cuts or settling for less. It has not been the path for the faint-hearted – for those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame.
Rather, it has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things – some celebrated but more often men and women obscure in their labour, who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom.
For us, they packed up their few worldly possessions and travelled across oceans in search of a new life.
For us, they toiled in sweatshops and settled the West; endured the lash of the whip and ploughed the hard earth.
For us, they fought and died, in places like Concord and Gettysburg; Normandy and Khe Sahn.
Time and again these men and women struggled and sacrificed and worked till their hands were raw so that we might live a better life. They saw America as bigger than the sum of our individual ambitions; greater than all the differences of birth or wealth or faction.
This is the journey we continue today. We remain the most prosperous, powerful nation on Earth. Our workers are no less productive than when this crisis began.
Our minds are no less inventive, our goods and services no less needed than they were last week or last month or last year. Our capacity remains undiminished.
But our time of standing pat, of protecting narrow interests and putting off unpleasant decisions – that time has surely passed. Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America.
For everywhere we look, there is work to be done. The state of the economy calls for action, bold and swift, and we will act – not only to create new jobs, but to lay a new foundation for growth. We will build the roads and bridges, the electric grids and digital lines that feed our commerce and bind us together. We will restore science to its rightful place, and wield technology’s wonders to raise health care’s quality and lower its cost. We will harness the Sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories. And we will transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age. All this we can do. And all this we will do.
Now, there are some who question the scale of our ambitions – who suggest that our system cannot tolerate too many big plans.
Their memories are short. For they have forgotten what this country has already done; what free men and women can achieve when imagination is joined to common purpose, and necessity to courage.
The Tree of Life and Kabbalah
It is necessary before we commence a description of the initiatory schema to introduce the Tree of Life and kabbalah. As these are the most useful maps of the schema, some knowledge is required for their appreciation. It is not necessary – nor likely – to fully understand kabbalah, which in itself is a lifetime study, even under the tutelage of authentic teachers and scholars, for our work here. It is one of several ways to hold together our thinking and map our experience throughout the initiatory work, and the one we chose to present here first as the most useful.
The kabbalah (a Hebrew word meaning ‘handed down’ or ‘oral tradition’) is the term used to denote a general set of esoteric or mystical teachings originally held within Judaism, but later promulgated to a wider audience in t
he 12th century onwards through centres of learning such as Spain. It consists of a body of teachings and analysis dealing with the nature of the universe, the aspects of divinity and the method of Creation. From this set of teachings is derived the role of man in the revealed scheme of things. The Tree of Life is a common diagram (in variant formats) illustrating the central concepts of kabbalah.
The history of the kabbalah is difficult to fix to dates and linear sequences of succession due to its nature as oral, traditional teachings. Long before printing presses, the kabbalistic teachings were passed from teacher to pupil as oral teachings and collections of manuscripts, which in turn may have been copies of other sets being used by other teachers. The original impulse of kabbalah, however, emerged from a 1st century school of Jewish mysticism termed ‘Merkabah’, meaning ‘chariot’. These mystics utilised secret methods of ‘spiritual ascent’ in order to attain mystical experience. These experiences can be recognised as those common to any modern Adept following the occult initiatory system. For example: “the world changed into purity around me, and my heart felt as if I had entered a new world.”
The teachings of the Merkabah mystics became part of the ‘Heikhalot’ school, whose name means ‘palace’, referring to the spiritual planes through which the mystics ascended. The description of these journeys seems to bear similarities to the journey of the soul into the Underworld depicted in the Egyptian Book of Coming Forth by Day, with magical words or appropriate names of the gods to be spoken before each door is passed and each palace entered.
Three classical texts formulate the basic structure of traditional kabbalah:
The Sefer-ha-Zohar, or Book of Splendour – first printed 1558- 1560 and 1559-1560;
The Sefer Yetzirah, or Book of Formation – first printed in Mantua, 1562;
The Sefer-ha-Bahir, or Book of Light – first printed in Amsterdam, 1651.
The Zohar was written around 1280-86 by Moses b. Shem Tov de Leon in Guadalajara, north-east of Madrid, Spain, where there was a lot of kabbalistic activity at the time.
Many of the later kabbalistic schools are formed about these books, finding in them interpretation and meanings revealing the work of God and Creation. The school formed at Safed during the 16th century produced many of the leading thinkers of kabbalah, particularly Rabbi Isaac Luria, called the Ari (1534-1572), and Rabbi Moshe Cordevero, the Ramak (1522-1570). The former is responsible for much of the current structure and cosmology of kabbalah, as the ‘Lurianic’ school of thought provided answers to many of the more complex issues of kabbalistic thought, particularly relating to the ‘breaking of the vessels’. The next major historical development of kabbalah came with the formation of the Hasidic movement in the mid-1700s, based around the Rabbi Israel, more commonly known as the Baal Shem Tov (1698-1760), which means ‘master of the word’, a high mark of respect in kabbalism.
Having briefly examined the development of kabbalah within the Judaic mystical tradition, we must now attempt to sketch some of the significant points at which it passed through to the occult tradition, particularly in Europe, and thence to the modern magician.
The kabbalah and its teachings passed across into the magical philosophy primarily by transition through medieval Christian thinkers who saw in kabbalah a model and validation for their own tradition. From the late 15th century Jewish converts to Christianity brought kabbalistic views to the attention of other theologians. A Platonic Academy in Florence, founded by Giovanni Mirandola (1463-1494), furthered research and discussion of kabbalah amongst the philosophers of the time. The later (1516) publication of the Shaarey Orah ‘Gates of Light’ in Latin – brought further interest in the teachings of the Bahir and the fundamental plan of the Tree of Life.
The prime source for the precursors of the occult revival were without question Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680), a German Jesuit whose Oedipus Ægyptiacus (1652) detailed kabbalah amongst its study of Egyptian mysteries and hieroglyphics, and Cornelius Agrippa’s De Occulta Philosophia (1533). Other works, such as those from alchemists including Khunrath, Fludd and Vaughan indicated that the kabbalah had become the convenient meta-map for early Hermetic thinkers. Christian mystics began to utilise its structure for an explanation of their revelations, the most notable being Jacob Boehme (1575-1624). However, the most notable event in terms of our line of examination is undoubtedly the publication of Christian Knorr von Rosenroth’s (1636-89) Kabbala Denudata in Latin in 1677 and 1684, which provided translations from The Zohar and extracts from the works of Issac Luria.
It was this work which, when translated into English by S.L. MacGregor Mathers (1854-1918) in 1887 as The Kabbalah Unveiled, alongside already existing translations of The Sepher Yetzirah, provided the kabbalistic backbone of the Golden Dawn Society, from which issued many of the more recent occult kabbalists, such as Dion Fortune (1891-1946) – who summarised the sephiroth in her Mystical Kabbalah (1935) – and Aleister Crowley (1898-1947). The Christian occultist and Golden Dawn member A.E. Waite also produced many works examining the secret tradition of kabbalah. Of these occultists, Gershom Scholem says that they relied more upon their imagination than their knowledge of kabbalah, which he sees as ‘infinitesimal’.
Another stream stemming from von Rosenroth’s work came through Eliphas Lévi (1810-75), who became familiar with cabalistic Martinism through Józef Maria Hoene-Wroński (1776-1853), and had read both Boehme and von Rosenroth amongst many others. He also became a student of tarot through the writings of Antoine Court de Gébelin (1725-84), who ascribed to the tarot an ancient Egyptian origin. From de Gébelin and von Rosenroth, Lévi synthesised a scheme of attribution of the tarot cards to the 22 paths of the Tree of Life, a significant development in that it provided a synthetic model of processes to be later modified and used by the Golden Dawn as mapping the initiation system of psychological, occult and spiritual development. Lévi wrote: “Qabalah ... might be called the mathematics of human thought.” Aleister Crowley continued Lévi’s work to some extent in his seminal work on the tarot, The Book of Thoth.
In summary, the kabbalah passed from Judaic tradition through to Christian tradition, and through other flowerings such as the Polish Jewry kabbalistic revival in the 18th century. Many of the early Hermetic scholars and Neo-Platonic thinkers began to merge kabbalah with other doctrines such as alchemy, and later occultists utilised it as a grand plan of spiritual ascent, bringing it full circle to its origins in the chariot riding of the mystics from which the tradition stemmed.
It is said by traditional kabbalists and kabbalistic scholars that the occultist has an imperfect knowledge of the Tree, and hence the work of such is corrupt. It appears to me that the kabbalah is a basic device whose keys are infinite, and that any serious approach to its basic meta- system will reveal some relevance if tested in the world about us, no matter how it may be phrased. The first kabbalists cannot be said to have had an imperfect knowledge because they did not understand or utilise information systems theory or understand modern cosmology.
Indeed, their examination of themselves and the universe revealed such knowledge many hundreds of years before science formalised it, in the same way that current occult thinking may be rediscovered in some new science 100 or 1,000 years hence.
The body of teaching has various traditions and groupings of belief, but most hold as their central model a diagram generally composed of 10 circles joined by 22 lines, entitled the Otz Ch’im or ‘Tree of Life’.
These circles represent the 10 concepts called ‘sephiroth’, a Hebrew word meaning ‘numerical emanations’, and are said to represent every aspect of existence. The lines connecting the sephiroth are termed ‘paths’ and are taken to represent the nature of the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet, which – unlike the letters of English and similar languages – are also concepts and numbers equally. The sephiroth are also seen as paths, and hence the full Tree has 32 paths.
To this basic diagram have been attributed various other systems and attributions of
elements from other systems. Therefore, the 22 tarot cards have been linked (in various formats) to the paths, the planets, elements, stages of alchemy, and other aspects of esoteric teachings have been linked to the sephiroth. The majority of these attributions are derivations and permutations of those developed by medieval Hermeticists, who painstakingly produced pseudo-scientific tables of every angelic hierarchy, every grade of demon and even the occult connections between rocks and stars. The Magus, or Celestial Intelligencer (1801) of Francis Barrett[151] is an example of these tables of correspondence and the occult dictionary 777 by Crowley[152] provides a synopsis of the major systems of magical correspondence (i.e. deities, zodiacal signs, planets, perfumes, colours, numbers, mythical animals, etc.). Such tables were also to be found as early as 1533 in Book II of Agrippa’s Occult Philosophy.[153]
[ILLUS. Tree of Life]
Rather than examining any of these many elements in detail, we will sketch a number of basic concepts that apply throughout any examination of the multiple facets of this meta-system, specifically where recent advances in information technology and related systems have provided new conceptual models and terms for utilising this highly advanced esoteric and mystical framework.
One of the prime tenets of occult belief is the law of correspondence, or ‘like affects like’. This states that due to the inherent unity of all things, certain items and concepts have a type of mutual sympathy, association or relationship. A primal application of this law is seen in the action of the witchdoctor or sorcerer who gains an item belonging to that of the individual he wishes to influence, be it for healing or cursing, or with or without the individual’s knowledge.
[ILLUS. Tree of Life with transliterated Hebrew Letters]
Other more esoteric correspondences are seen across sets of items, for example, numbers, planets, scents, and colours. An example is that the colour green, the number seven and the emotion of love are associated with each and the planet Venus, also viewed as the Greek Goddess of Love. A magician attempting to invoke the influence of this goddess is likely to surround himself with items which resonate with her. This occult idea has a psychological parallel in colour theory, which has demonstrated that certain colours produce changes in our internal physical and psychological states. A biological theory of morphic resonance has recently been postulated as detailing a non-local field which determines the manifestation of living things, and this relies upon a similar basic view of occult interconnectiveness.[154] Although many traditional kabbalists abhor magical systems of correspondence, it is evident that early kabbalists utilised this law in apportioning letters of the Hebrew alphabet to certain aspects of God.