As I have related in past posts I have begun working with the material of the Monastery of 7 Rays, overseen by Michael Bertiaux and the training ground for the work of Esoteric Voudon and the Gnostic Magical system of the Ordo Templi Orientis Antiqua. In this post I want to discuss the first year course and the first sixteen lessons and my experiences with them.
The material in the first sixteen lessons is very simple and addresses the Hermetic school of thought and elaborates on this topic in very powerful ways. When first reading the material when I received it through Tau David Beth in 2009, I was taken aback at the simplicity and basic nature of the material. Here I had been looking for these very mind blowing techniques and perspectives on magick that were promised in reading the first edition of Beth's Voudon Gnosis from Scarlet Imprint. I was, needless to say, very disappointed, but I was still very drawn to the Esoteric Voudon system and continued working sporadically with the Lucky Hoodoo Grimoire (LHG). I knew there was something more and I knew the Lwa wanted me to work with this system of magic, but I wasn't quite ready to embrace the Monastery lessons for what they were and I had a problem I needed to get over. What was this problem? Well it was two fold.
Firstly I had my personal prejudices, my own issues with Voodoo itself that were based more in a distaste for sacrifice and the impractical nature of the Voodoo for the situation of my life. While I acknowledged that Esoteric Voudon had little in common with traditional African and Haitian Voodoo practices, the reputation of Voodoo in general was a very vampiric one. This intimidated me and actually relates to the second problem I experienced in looking at the Monastery lessons and one that many modern magicians experience when they first see the Voudon Gnostic Workbook. I had read New Orleans Voodoo Tarot by Louis Martinie and Sallie Ann Glassman in 1997 and was very taken by the imagery. Around the same time I had a woman that I now assume was either a Santeria devotee or Mambo, insist I was the reincarnation of a black farmer from the 19th century and that the Lwa were very drawn to me. In fact she had handed the deck & book to me off the shelf. Still, the personal prejudice, the idea of the vampiric nature of Voodoo, stuck with me and disturbed me. I had heard many stories about crooked Houngans and Mambos in Haitian communities and especially of the superstitions and I was deep into Crowley in those days. Still am to a much lesser extent. So I acknowledge that deep in me, I was very afraid of Voodoo and the Lwa in spite of my draw, or maybe because of my draw to Lwa.
Secondly and this relates to the first, I was deep into the Crowleyan system. I was a student of David Bersson, focused on the S.O.T.O. and A:.A:. and therefore intimately entwined in the perspective of the Golden Dawn style of magick. So when I read the Monastery lessons and saw how simple they were, my perspective created arrogance and preconceived notions of what magick is and I balked. I saw this simple, basic material we all learn in our earliest readings and in that arrogance of 13 years (at that time) in magick I got bored with that material but I held onto it on my hard drive on three different computers and when one of them crashed I got a hold of a brother who had them and retrieved them above all other lost things. I was sorely mistaken in my perspective on the material presented though.
I hooked up with a mentor in the system a little over a year ago. I signed the required applications, received the instructions on how to work with the material and struggled with it. I mean I struggled with it, to get through what I felt was beneath me, while not acknowledging that was the problem I was experiencing with the material, the prejudice of being brought up in the Golden Dawn style of magick and my arrogance after so long. Here I was starting over in magic (drop the K here) and I felt like such a NOOB. A NOOB! I lamented feeling this way to my mentor. I was saddened and it wasn't directed at the material, I knew going in I would have to start at the beginning. I was "humble" enough to say "first year" on the application because I knew there would be things I didn't know in that first year course. It was just that early material. I failed to see the inspired brilliance in these first 16 lessons and what was happening in integrating the material!
I struggled to get through the first 8 lessons. I'd set it aside periodically, letting life get in the way, something I get frustrated with when I see it in others. All I had to do was read two or three pages a week, several times and make notes and I couldn't find the time to do that but I also made excuses to watch television, read other material that was unrelated or stare at my computer screen for hours on end. Thusly I no longer have a Facebook account!
I would build periodic moments of momentum for a few weeks at a time, make my notes, thinking I'd grasped the material. Always I would allow myself to get distracted though. Each time I went back I would re-read the previous material, catch things I had missed and subtly, very subtly I noticed a change occurring in myself and my experiences. I started noticing my prejudices were based on my Golden Dawn understanding of magick while the system I was being presented with, this very basic material, had some in common with the Golden Dawn, it was also quite different and tangentially related as it came from similar source material.
What was going on? What was I going through?
I was experiencing a paradigm shift from the Victorian era occultism with its flashing colors, telesmatic images, god forms and grade signs. Away from the Masonic structures wherein these systems developed. I was moving into a more old school perspective on magic, pre-Golden Dawn and more grimoiric.
Even after finishing those first 16 lessons of the first year course, I still felt strange with the material. I used the holidays to focus on family and work with full intent on getting into the next 16 lessons in mid-January, which I have done. I needed to paint some cards and read the works of Joseph Lisiewski and therein I found the key to what was going on in my work with the Monastery.
You see, looking at the grimoires, you don't really see any of the trappings that would become common place in our post-GD systems of magick like Wicca, Thelema, Chaos Magic and the various Golden Dawn derived orders of today. You see a far more basic, yet more intensive form of magic. A more demanding form of magic.
Nowhere in the grimoire systems do you see the "assumption of God Forms" practices created by the Golden Dawn. You didn't see various grade signs that were supposedly "impregnated" with magical force. I am not decrying the idea of godforms, I still find them valuable in my practices. What I am saying is that what we take for granted as Western Magic, or the Western Ceremonial Tradition, is that what we consider standard operating procedures in magical practices are the creation of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and their form of magic that went on to inform Wicca, Thelema and Aurum Solis (in spite of Aurum Solis claims to the contrary) and these systems all went on to influence New Age ideas, leaving the old system of magic in the dust of the past. Except for a few scattered traditions out there, the old system of magic appeared to be lost.
In the Monastery of 7 Rays though, as I have learned more and more about the old, pre-Golden Dawn systems of magical practice, are very powerful remnants of the old systems. Even the teachings about magic are closer to Neo-Platonism than the complex Qabalism of the Golden Dawn with its four color scales and various attributions and Crowley's later 777 compilation based on that material.
What the material in the Monastery courses gets back to is Hermetic thought and a strong emphasis on those ancient texts in those first sixteen lessons. We see therein an emphasis on re-learning how to experience the world from the perspective of a subjective universe and uniting with the divine. Sure this happens with the modern material but the way in which the lessons are approached and integrated it brings up Joseph Lisieski's concept of Subjective Synthesis wherein through study and analysis, asking questions of ourself about the material and digging into what nags us about the material, we rebuild it and make it our own, activating power zones. Here it occurs on a much deeper level. Spending a week constantly reading the same two or three pages, making notes and observations, putting it through an intense analysis, we wind up not just analyzing the material, but ourselves, building a relationship with the divine within ourselves.
The lessons are approached in blocks of 16. The first 16 unlock certain power zones within our psyche and then the next 16 power zones, Syzygies, in our bodies through contemplations of a color and integrating that color into the corresponding body part wherein the Syzygy in question is attributed. Carefully we unlock new empowerments in ourselves that open us up, in each stage of 16 lessons, to more intense experiences and powers.
As I said, when I first started the material and over the course of the last year I experienced difficulties with the material in my arrogance. When I finished I had experienced a paradigm shift though and developed a deeper level of respect for the material and my synthesis of the material has opened me up to new ways of thinking and approaching magic. Couple that with my readings on the grimoires lately and I have found such a commonality in the material in the Monastery, this wholly Gnostic approach (there is very little Voudon in these early stages, rather, work with Lwa, it's all voudon) causes an alchemical change I have not experienced in any other system I have partaken in.
My view shift has opened me up to seeing more clearly and observing phenomenon like I haven't before. I have really seen things for the simplicity that they factually possess and see the divine in much, which exasperated my sense of frustration in the last 2 years of my life wherein I haven't been able to get a foot hold on anything. My recent evocation of Orobas was a part of the answers I was seeking to life's problems at this time. Without the Monastery I don't think I would have pulled off the evocation as well as I did. I think, it would have been a failure.
I like this old school approach. I feel that in many ways the Golden Dawn further complicated the Qabalah with their additions to the system that weren't part of it beforehand. The Qabalah is in many regards a very simple system of magic and mysticism and on the other, when you get really deep into the source material, like the Sepher Yetzirah, the Zohar and similar materials, you come into a very deep, complicated system of mysticism and magic and the Golden Dawn just tacked more complexity onto it with their color scales, various pantheons that are incompatible, creating scenarios where magic would blow up in a practitioners face at worst and fail at best, because they would use different deities attributed to the same Sephira without thinking... Maybe Jupiter and Odin would conflict.
A part of this is the flawed notion of the "psychological model" of magic. This was popularized in an essay created by Ralph Tegtmeier, Frater U:.D:., to explain the ways in which magic works and also in Crowley's "Initiated Interpretation of Ceremonial Magic" where Crowley first posits that the Goetic spirits are a part of our subconscious. In Tegtmeier's essay he goes farther than Crowley by presenting 5 different models to explain the processes of magick. When I was younger I thought this essay was a great tool but as time has gone by I have noticed people saying they are "psychological model" or "energy model" and being quite bullheaded about their chosen model to explain spiritual phenomenon without really seeing the essay for what it truly is. RUACh masturbation, making something that sounds wonderful and like it explains everything and gratifying our ego, limiting us in our experiences to being only able to accept one paradigm of thought on a topic. I don't really think it was Tegtmeier's intention but it was the end result.
When Lon Duquette wrote "It's all in your head, you just have no idea how big your head is", he was absolutely right and absolutely wrong. Contained within each of us is a divine spark, we are all one with everything. It is solidly grounded in the Hermetic Axiom of "As Above, So Below" but misses the other side of that coin for "As Below, So Above" and this continues infinitely downward and upward, infinitely outward and infinitely inward. The real danger in all of this is Crowley's Black Brother. The "I am I".
By only accepting that everything is simply a part of our consciousness and ceases to exist or what ever one may be inclined to think, we fortify that tendency in ourselves to preserve the sense of identity. It is one thing to say we are all connected but according to psychology and I am all there is, we fail to acknowledge that Lucy might exist. In this I am using an extreme example because I don't think anybody really thinks in that manner aside from casual philosophical discussion but the flaw is this... we don't deny that Lucy exists in our material world but the Angels, Gods & Demons we deny their very existence by arguing for the flawed "models" of psychology, energy and information models. The other two models in Tegtmeier's essay are as tragically flawed but not as dangerous to spiritual development.
I am a fan of Jung as much as the next guy, his ideas of archetypes, shadow self etc. are just brilliant but the atheistic approach many take is not a scientific approach. Aetheism isn't scientific skepticism. If you are an aetheist great, but if you are an aetheist magician, I guarandamntee you one day you are going to have an experience, if you get into performing things like the Goetia, Angelic Invocations etc. that will rock your world like the first time you discovered what masturbation is and how to do it and then got caught behind the door or in the bathroom by your mom or dad. That "oh shit, I wasn't expecting that" experience.
This is what drives magicians insane, that things they thought weren't real just might be and they just might be subjective in existence.
In all honesty, I think both subjective and objective perspective must both be cultivated, the Relativistic model of science and the Quantum model of science co-exist and are very illustrative of subjective and objective perspectives of the Universe.
I really feel that the majority of magicians I have met exist in a comfort zone that they never challenge. They get into their chosen model and only perform magick that keeps that model from being challenged. Most of the models prevent these magicians, psychologically, from performing evocation or invocation per the grimoires. They fail to challenge their notions and assert "I am GOD" as opposed to "I am a GOD".
The nitty gritty in this latter part of my post, before you hamstring yourself with some model of magic to explain the processes you experience or what you do and what it is, usually magic as therapy, realize that just maybe... Asmoday exists in his own dimension and isn't some dark aspect of your consciousness. On the same token, he does exist as part of you and if anything I learned from the Monastery lessons that I haven't learned in the A:.A:. is that this which is below is that which is above. I am as much a part of Asmoday as Asmoday is of me.
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