Initiation as an Operating System

Egregors--easy to build all by yourself, right? No.

The line to burn me at the stake for violating modern ideas about initiated traditions (Golden Dawn, many forms of Wicca, Thelema) will soon be forming. Why? Because I am willing to say things like this:

You need both--individual and group work--to fully understand and use the [initiated Golden Dawn] system as it was designed to work. This is how it was designed--it is not a bug; it is a feature. Initiation (in a group) is like installing the operating system of a computer. The members of the group itself is like the circuits in a computer. The individual work, rituals, and study, are the programs and the owner's manual...which work best if you have the proper operating system installed, along with the suggested hardware (aka you are not working alone), and the right settings (godforms). And lineage is the official "I did not pirate this software" seal and code which (in my "healed lineage" experience) can be paid for after the fact, and allows for software patches. You would not expect a single unplugged circuit board to be able to run computer programs, so why does everyone expect the rituals of Golden Dawn to work without the set-up that was designed into the system in the first place?

Types of initiation

Kitty undergoes the trial of catnip during their initiation.

One of the problems about talking about initiations is that there are several types of initiation. And not all of them are equal to one another.

For instance, what we traditionally think about as initiation, at least in the esoteric Orders, is lodge initiation--being initiated by several officers of an lodge. In a lodge setting, this form of initiation trumps all...provided that it is only the merit badge of Grade obtained that concerns you.

Now, I will admit that lodge initiation is on the top of my list of preferred methods. But it only counts provided that you are using the same set of rituals as I am. If you are using a different set of initiation rituals, that means that you belong to a different Order, and quite possibly a whole different esoteric tradition than I do. Different ritual scripts result in different inner experiences.

This opinion annoys some people. Just slapping the same name on your system as a system that I work is not an automatic ticket to sit in the same lodge with me.

Nor is claiming that a degree from another system is the same as a Grade I work going to get you any points either in my book. There is only one time that a "transferred initiation" works, and that is when you are starting up a brand-new Order. It is how Mathers and Westcott could start up Golden Dawn, and not be actually initiated into its system...and why your Master Mason and fringe degree does not make you an Adept Extemptus automatically--degrees only transfer under specialized situations.

Of course, the very worst type of initiation is the one that did not happen. There are a ton of people out there who claim to have initiations that they have never recieved. My rule of thumb is that unless I saw you get the initiation, or I personally know one of the officers who performed it, then that initiation is mere hearsay.

I mean, after all, you do not believe me when I claim to be an initiate, do you?

In modern times, we have gained two new types of initiation: the astral initiation and the self-initiation. Having experienced several types of initiation, I must admit that I was not impressed by the astral initiation I undergone...and it was not the EOGD (yes, there are others who have experimented with that form of initiation). Personally, if you cannot travel to lodge to get initiated, my opinion is to go with the self-initiation.

Of course, the biggest determining factor about whether an self-initiation is successful is the amount of work you put into it. But then again, that is true of all forms of initiation, isn't it? I know several people who have "worked" their way into being what I consider an initiated Tarot reader.

One thing that must be said about all the types of initiation that I have mentioned is that they are not what initiation originally looked like. Our modern initiations are tame in comparsion to the original form of initiation.

The original form of initiation was what I tend to refer to as a "divine clue by four," or occasionally as "the bear done ate him." Initiation in is original shamanistic form was tramatic and scary. You could really die during it. You got seriously ill. You got badly injuried. But you somehow survived. Even today, there are some people who suffer this form of initiation...they tend to be a little crazy because of it.

To illustrate how severe this form of initiation is, just remember that the first thing a new prophet was told in Biblical times was "Do not fear, I am an angel.of the divine." It is never a good thing when the first thing you are told is "Do not panic." Planets have boiled away on occasion after that statement has been uttered. (Bear in mind that for most of human civilization, your entire world was your village or farm...a lots of worlds have been destoryed throughout history when you realize this little fact.)

So if you ever talk to me about initiation, remember that the first thing I am going to ask is exactly what type of initiation that you are talking about because there are many types of initiation. It is only after making sure that we are talking about the same type of initiation that we can truely start discussing the subject.

The poison of God---the Counter Initatic Force

Over on another blog, there has been an explosion of talk about the Counter Initatic Force (or Counter Initiatory Force if you prefer that term). Reading that particular blog, one gets the impression that all the other Golden Dawn Orders, students and members who do not condemn the actions of Nick Farrell, Pat Zalewski, and all their enemies are trapped in the Counter Initatic Force. If you are not with them, stoning their enemies alongside of them (figuritively speaking), then you too are being manipulated by the Counter Initatory Force, having your strings pulled by some giant invisible puppet master who insists that humanity be kept in the dark. After all, they are the only legitimate esoteric Order and the Counter Initiatic Force is determined to stop their progress of bringing people into the eternal Light.

Or at least, that is what it reads like to me. There is nothing like standing in a circle of fire while the dark forces howl outside to bind a group of magicians together.

Now, I will admit that the Counter Initiatory Force exists. It is called the dark side of the sephiroth. It is one of the reasons that the snake and serpent are used as symbols of the process of initiation. One can summon the Light side of a sephiroth without also summoning its Dark side. One cannot gain the power to heal without also gaining the power to harm. The poison comes with the ascension.

But honestly, the whole idea that the Counter Initiatory Force is manifesting primarily as flesh and blood human beings writing lies about them is a little too much. I am not saying it could not happen, but it sounds too much like something out of a fantasy movie or comic book for my personal tastes.

Then again, I live in another universe. I live in an universe where the Counter Initiatory Force arises from within. It is not the outside world that you have to worry about. It is yourself and the darkness that lays deep within oneself. Don't worry about other human beings. Worry about yourself stopping your own initiatory process. Worry about your own vices, such as greed and laziness.

The typical way that I see this manifest is the number of people who undergo initiation, have their world fly to pieces, and then cry that something went wrong---they drop out of the system, and attempt to put the genie back into the bottle.

It is not that something went wrong---it is their life was imbalanced in the first place, and the process of initation started to clean out the dirt and grime. If you have spent your entire life walking on your head, then all of sudden being placed upon your feet is going to feel mightly strange. For most people, comfort and unchanging familiarity is the goal---not the exciting world of change and spiritual struggle.

Yes, there is a Counter Initiatory Force, but its name is not Nick Farrell or Pat Zalewski.

Internal polarity of the Tarot Cards

If you are doing the Tarot Blog Hop, odds are that you have arrived from Tarot Notes by Zanna Starr, a nice blog which uses cards from many Tarot decks---for those of us who are always looking for more Tarot decks to buy. And if you are a regualr reader, the post is about a Tarot spread based on an Easter Egg.

The prompt for today (tommorrow) Ostra's Tarot Blog Hop is Paint a journey with new life. It was hard not to think of the "coloring the Tarot" exercise that I have done in the course of my Adept Minor ZAM training (Zelator Adept Minor--one of the subgrades that some Golden Dawn Orders use) when presented with this prompt. And being the lazy New Age Adept that I am, I figured "Why not?"

A rough draft of the Wheel of Fortune as colored by the RR et AC.

Now, I will be the first to admit that my results should be buried under a rock. My cards are not the world's prettiest; they are also not the most true when you look at the basis of the color scheme--the color scales of the RR et AC (the original Inner Order of the Golden Dawn, not to be confused with any of the modern Second Orders of the esoteric schools that call themselves Golden Dawn today). For instance, the Wheel of Fortune should be colored (according to my favorite set of scale sheets) with the colors violet, blue, rich purple, and bright blue rayed with yellow. Even my color blind Dad would have been able to see that my colors are slightly (or greatly) off the mark.

The polarities of the Wheel of Fortune card--according to the least reliable GD authority--me!

Even more suspect are my private non-canon, non-approved coloring experiments where I just toss out the traditional colors and do whatever I feel like doing. (Suspect in the sense that they are not even remotely what my mentor wanted me to turn out.) One of the coloring experiments that I have indulged in is to attempt to figure out the internal polority of the individual Tarot cards.

To understand why the internal polarity of a card matters, one must remember that in Golden Dawn ritual, the Temple is often symbolic (taking place in the location) of one of the Tarot cards. The projecting, neutral, and recieving (or positve, neutral, and negative if you prefer) parts of the card would in theory reflect into the space that the initiation is being done in. To figure out the parts would be a hint of what is going on in the lodge room during the initation. (Initiation equals a new stage of life and another step on the journey of spiritual development--smart I am, right?)

There would also be a bleed-over when reading the Tarot cards--the part that leaps out at you during a reading could be read in terms of polarity. For instance, if the first thing that leaps out at you during a reading is passive, there is a good chance that the energies of the card are manifesting themselves in that way in the client's life.

Now, one of the more easier cards to figure out the polarity for is the Wheel of Fortune (GD/RR et AC version). As I have colored it here, red represents the projecting element of the card (the sphinx), the neutral part is yellow (the wheel itself), and the recieving element is blue (the monkey). These are the basic zones of the card.

Actually, it may not be as simple as that. All three of these parts can be further subdivided, for they are comprised of symbols that add another layer to the polarity play of the card. For instance, the wheel's spokes actually represent the 12 zodiac signs; therefore, there are both positve and negative elements that comprise the neutral part of the card.

Of course, I do not need to tell my regular readers to take this idea with a large grain of salt. This idea is not gospel, rather it is suggestive only. After all, we all know that I got my Golden Dawn certificate out of a cracker jack box and my training in the back of a coffee shop. Ironically, according to some, that makes me the equal of most Golden Dawn leaders and teachers...in which case, feel free to take this as gospel (heavens knows that I am going to inflict it on the members of my own lodge).

If you are continuing with the Tarot Blog Hop, you are now going to head over to Johanna Powell Colbert's blog (she is the creator of the Gaian Tarot). Her post is also about an Easter Egg Tarot Spread--obviously, I am the odd one in this particualr Blog Hop.

[This post was updated on 21 March 2012 with the permanent web links to the Tarot Blog Hop blogs that preceeded and followed mine.]

QoW A Crowley in the Woodpile

Question of the week: If one's lineage goes through Aleister Crowley,* are you somehow less of an initiate because of it? If so, why? If not, why not?

*Or whoever your favorite villian is (Pat Zalewski, Nick Farrell, Robert Zink, David Griffin, Chic Cicero, Israel Regardie, or that bloke in Denver Colorado).

Activating the senses in ritual

This morning, I was reading a blog post by Donald Michael Kraig on visualization. In it, he mentions the fact that we get most of our sensory input through our eyes.

Later while shoveling the driveway, I found myself thinking about this fact. (A lot of my thinking happens when I am doing physical, no-mind needed tasks, which is why I go load the dishwasher when I hit the wall of writer's block.)

I used to do ritual with a Wiccan group for awhile that had a checklist for ritual design. One of the parts of it was a list of all the senses. The thinking was that ideally all the senses should be engaged during a ritual. The same checklist was applied to guided meditations and visualizations. It turned out to be helpful when we ended up with a blind (from birth) participant.

Coming back to Golden Dawn (I dropped out from official membership for a couple of years while I was between Hathor and Bast Temples), I had forgotten all about this checklist. Off the top of my head, the only ritual that I know of in Golden Dawn that would get a checkmark for each of the five senses is the Neophyte initiation ritual.

The Neophyte ritual is unique in the fact that the candidate being brought into the system is blindfolded during a large part of the ritual. This opens the door for the other physical senses to notice things that they would not normally notice. It also opens the door to the possibility that the astral senses will pick up on some of the energies of the ritual.

This is not to say that the rest of the Golden Dawn rituals do not engage the other senses. The other rituals do, but the Neophyte ritual is the best at filtering out the input from our primary sense (visual). There is some effort to tone down the reliance on the visual in the other rituals, but it depends upon your officers having memorized their lines, so that the lights can be turned down.

{*Answers the phone here---comes back and realizes that he has lost the thread of what he had been thinking. Hopes that someone can figure out where he was going originally.*}

Now, there is one ritual that is extremely visual, and that is the keystone ritual of the Inner Order (RR et AC), the Adeptus Minor ritual. The reason for that is the Vault itself, which functions as a diagram as well as a magical nuclear reactor.

Anyway, I thought I would throw this thought out there, so that others could think about how much emphasis their rituals are placing on the various senses. While it is simple lodgekit, it also has a place in practical magical work.

Why Golden Dawn officers frown on the use of drugs for magical purposes

There is something that needs to be stated about why Golden Dawn lodge officers (this includes the RR et AC and mythical Third Order) frown on drug use for magical purposes. Not only are drugs illegal (as an organization, we do not like having any meeting end with a police raid), drugs lead to random illuminations at best, delusions that you are spiritually advancing at worse.

It does not matter if drugs kill brain cells.

What matters is that drugs sensitizes the energy bodies, leaving one open to suggestion from any wandering entity that comes by. If you are lucky, they are higher in the chain than you are; if you are unlucky, they are less evolved than you are. Drugs also inflate the ego and lower passions.

Golden Dawn is about bringing a person to a certain energetic and spiritual place. The use of drugs in magic and spiritual development randomizes this process, and works against what Golden Dawn is trying to accomplish.

Our Magic is about control. It is not about visiting random spots in the universe, nor is it about making you feel better. Our Philosophy concerns controlled evolution. Randomness and the lack of controls works against what we are doing.

This is my official opinion as a lodge officer.

Assumptions

One of the things that every student of Golden Dawn needs to be aware of is the assumptions that themselves and other students (especially lodge and Order officers) have about the Golden Dawn system. These assumptions are constantly in the background, and they color the opinions of those who hold them.

What are some of the assumptions that I hold?

Grades represent a level of learning in the system. And while they are associated with a sephirah and certain spiritual states, they are NOT the sephirah and states of consciousness themselves. The Grade is a Gateway to those states, but just because someone has the Grade does not mean that they permanmently dwell in that mental state.

The baseline of Golden Dawn is the Outer Order material, that the entire system is built from the bottom up. There are some that say that the further development of the Golden Dawn system depends upon knowing what the Third Order teachings are--I disagree. It would be an awful poor mystery tradition if all you had to do to kill it was kill off the superior Grades in the chain.

I believe that the history of Golden Dawn is both simplier and more complicated than people can imagine. My basic view of Golden Dawn history is that Kenneth MacKenzie cobbled together the Cipher Manuscript for a group that never used it, and that Westcott and company created a myth to match it after it came into their possession.

Therefore actual contact with Third Order is impossible. Third Order, if it arises, will come from a further development of the Golden Dawn system. Any group that claims to be Third Order is involved in a plot to control Golden Dawn.

As one can guess these assumptions color my opinions about Golden Dawn. To convince me otherwise, one has to cough up actual evidence.

One of the most important assumptions that one can make about Golden Dawn is about the nature of initiation. Considering initiation is the backbone of the system, having a clear idea of what initiation is and is not is important. What is it supposed to accomplish? To put it simply, initiation's purpose is to bring you in contact with certain energetic sources that are tapped though symbols; the energy flow that results is used to develop spiritually and magically.

Personally, I believe that Temple Initiation is best. I firmly believe that one should belong to a community of scholars and mages. Failing the option, second choice is Self-Initiation. I consider Astral Initiation to be a compromise between the first two options.

My beliefs about the hierarchy annoy many people. I believe in electing officers. Many believe that one must have a place in the hierarchy to hold an office, and that it is true to a certain extent. But a member of the hierarchy does NOT have to hold an office to influence the system and the world.

I believe that Golden Dawn is NOT a religion. I believe that members of any religion can join the system, though I will admit that certain religions have a harder time in the esoteric Orders than others.

And most impotantly, I believe that I am allowed to change my mind about the assumptions that I have today. I am allowed to learn. Others are allowed to convince me that their assumptions are more correct. So if you think that I am in error, you might be right and I might agree with you tommorrow.