Today, I was talking to a friend online and mentioned that I have never been happy with the Portal ritual, not alone the Portal Grade of Golden Dawn.
I have never been able to place my finger on why I dislike the ritual, but I do. Of course, it may just be simply that the version I was exposed to was a modified version of the one published by Regardie (obviously, there is problems with the Regardie presentation of the ritual if even the bad lineage I came from decided to attempt to fix it). In fact, I have been led to believe that the Portal ritual is the one that has been changed the most among the various offshoots of the system---hordes of initiates have attempted to fix it.
There are a couple of things to keep in mind about the ritual. First, it is the first ritual that came out of Golden Dawn that was not contained in the Cipher Manuscript. Second, most of the diagrams were in the East (my friend said that 98% of the diagrams were originally in the East). Third, the Portal ritual was originally the first half of the Adept Minor 5=6 ritual (split to generate a waiting period before members entered Adept Minor, a change that was coming before Crowley was insulted by it). Fourth, the Regardie presentation of it is missing a lot of diagrams and has some of the speeches messed up.
As for the Grade itself, I am fairly sure that my problem with the Portal Grade is the vast amount of nothingness that I was exposed to. A couple of exercises and the writing of a thesis on the Outer Order Grades is all that I was exposed to: no lectures, no documents, no nothing.
Anyway, I guess that I am just stating that I was really unhappy with the version that I had access to---just in case, I decide to take a sledge hammer to it and try to beat it into shape later. I would hate for something like that to be unexpected.
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5 comments:
There are more prosaic objections to the Portal grade, such as it takes *at least* four hours to perform! Pity the poor f----r who has to meditate a lot while the officers get their act together. ;-)
"Of course you can come to the next grade! Uh... just wait here for a few months while we invent it..." =p
the inner personal work of reconciling the elements has little to do with being exposed to more intellectual material
@Robert: Perhaps not, but not being given any guidance beyond "Wait 9 months and write a paper" isn't terribly helpful either, I imagine.
Pallas, there comes a time where a would be magician must become his own reconciler. Portal is that time. At this point, there should have been years of instruction and work. This is make it or break it time.
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