by Marcus Katz
Authors and teachers have been almost without fail amenable to my enquiries, and teach also by example, by living their work, whether it be tarot or ceremonial magick, Enochian ceremonial, Thelema, numerology, or astrology. I have come to realise that the magical path is radically explorative and if it does not open you to more perspectives, diversity, wildly exotic and quixotic adventure and travel, you are likely already doing it wrong. It should, on the whole, be mainly uncomfortable and challenging most of the time.
In 2005 I became an academic student of Western Esotericism at the University of Exeter and was honoured to be the first student conferred with a Masters Degree in the subject.
A small part of my own experience of practical magical work and mystical practice such as the Abramelin Operation can be discovered in my published journal, After the Angel (Forge Press, 2011). Whilst many discuss the importance of operating a ‘fully contacted’ lodge or having ‘Inner Plane contacts’ or an ‘egregore’ – and we will discuss these concepts throughout The Magister – I prefer to go by the simpler route of “by their works shall they be known.”[4] Those truly in touch with such rarified beings can no doubt argue their own case, when they are not busy being under the tutelage of their masters.
I am not interested herein in offering more wallpaper for your prison cell, distractions from the work, nor am I encouraging you to take the whole journey in only your imagination through endless pathworking and pretence or endless cacophonies of opinion. You have the internet and other people for that. What follows is a representation of something entirely different. Something real.
Whilst this work comes to strip us of belief, some assumptions remain useful in directing our attention and activity. I do believe that if the Secret Chiefs/Hidden Masters do not exist, we would have to invent them anyway. I believe that there is a spiritual organisation transcendent of time and space whose members know each other through their work and do not need any other recognition. I believe each of us has a Holy Guardian Angel (blessed be they) who guides us from Rapture to Abyss. I believe, most of all, that this world is utterly and incredibly magical, and our time is short.
Let us then herald in a new dawn, the dawn of an everlasting day.
Marcus Katz
The Lake District, Summer Solstice, 2012.
Re-formatted and updated for Kindle, Winter Solstice, 2015.
Introduction
THE WESTERN ESOTERIC INITIATORY SYSTEM
“If only we could be a little bit more heroic. If only we could be a little bit more immortal. Then, and only then, might we realise more of what we dream.”[5]
— Lord A., Vampire Ceremony, Sao Paulo, Brazil, July 2012
The eclectic and synthetic practice of the Western Esoteric Initiatory System (WEIS) will take you to many uncharted places. It is the intention of The Magister to guide you through those realms, which ultimately will be unique to your own path in the labyrinth of the mysteries. We will provide you with a map and a traveller’s description of the geography and culture of the land you are about to visit, although your own experience will be determined by a range of factors; the land is ever-changing, the people there have their own lives, and you will soon discover many routes that none before you have travelled.
The reason we offer this work is because since the Reformation in Europe, the path of a personal ascent narrative – one’s own gnosis and salvation – has been progressively excluded from mainstream Western spiritual practice. Once, words were magic, names were sacred mysteries, language was power.[6] Then came the mystery of architecture and space, the understanding of construction and the power of stone sealing a place.[7] Now the internet contains the mystery of communication beyond physicality – a world where the currency will be imagination, and the powerful those who are free to imagine new realms.
So successful has this denial been that even when released from previous social constraints, it was to the East that we looked for ‘spiritual’ teaching; our own traditions had been rent asunder into two extremes of Christianity on one hand, and the ‘evil’ occult on the other. Religion, science and magic have become divorced, and yet in magic we find our soul, in science we discover mystery, and in religion we unveil spirituality. The WEIS marries these streams back together in a fourth way, a synthetic enquiry into life – as Crowley wrote, “the aim of religion, the method of science.”
We will first introduce an overview of the architecture of the WEIS through personal experience, and then turn our attention to the magical orders which have carried this system to the present.
STATE OF THE ART
“... assuming that irrefutable form of idealism which contents itself with the demonstration that, knowledge being a function of the mind, as the materialists not merely concede, but insist, the universe as we know it is equivalent to the contents of that mind; and assuming also that the mind contains a power able to control thought; then there is no absurdity in asserting that mind may be the master of matter. And the empirical rules laid down by the magicians of old may prove to some extent of use in practice.”
— Aleister Crowley, The Revival of Magick and Other Essays[8]
In this first volume, we will lay out the general references for practitioners who may wish to get ahead on their reading list and studies, and provide an overview of the source material which is further opened in subsequent volumes. This section can be usefully read with the ‘reading list by grade’ offered as an appendix herein and the Bibliography, which will also be extended in the following 10 volumes. My own introduction to the WEIS came through such authors as Israel Regardie, Gareth Knight, William Butler, William G. Gray, and other practitioners.[9] The fiction of Dion Fortune, particularly The Sea Priestess and Moon Magic, helped me bridge between my pagan roots and Western esotericism; a spiritual dilemma that persisted for some two decades.[10] In The Magister we do not differentiate between witchcraft and the WEIS as both are deemed aspects of one Western approach. One might consider that we take a Renaissance revisionist approach to our pagan workings.[11]
I was also enamoured of the adventures and magic of the notorious magician, Aleister Crowley, whose work encouraged me to travel to Egypt when I was just 19 years old, spending a month haunting the Cairo museum, pyramids, trekking across the Sinai, and generally being an English magician abroad.[12] At the time I did not realise that I would be spending the rest of my life reading and studying Crowley’s own notebooks from a century prior, detailing his magick, travels and experiences.
My early learning of kabbalah started with Dion Fortune, rapidly branching into studying with the late James Sturzaker, of the International School of Kabbalists.[13] The kabbalah that we teach in The Magister and within the OED, whilst unashamedly Hermetic, esoteric and Western, also draws from an appreciation of the work of contemporary scholars in the field and traditional kabbalistic practice.[14] One volume of The Magister is to explore kabbalah in depth, and its roots will be seen nourishing every volume. The kabbalah is our map, tarot our compass, alchemy our exercise, and ritual our path. Astrology is how we navigate when we are left to our own devices and our signposts are synchronicity.
I created my own tarot deck when I was 13, from images of the Swiss IJJ deck in a Stuart Kaplan book, and started reading and studying tarot every day, a practice I have continued for three decades and across more than 10,000 face-to-face readings. We will expand on the corpus and application of tarot in engaging life throughout these volumes.[15]
For me, and for many practitioners, the early attraction of the WEIS is in practical magick, ceremony and ritual, evocations and invocations. We recapitulate the history of the entire tradition in our own life; our roots are embedded in the grimoire tradition of magical practice, fostered in a Christian environment (hierarchies of angels, names of God, etc.) whilst at the same time rejecting the Church and forging our own direct communication with the divine.[16]
So what is a magical life? The field is now more open to study than when I commenced. There
are now autobiographies and biographies of contemporary magical practitioners available, including William G. Gray, Gareth Knight, Mark Hedsel, and David Conway.[17] Israel Regardie has provided a personal background of his encounter with the Golden Dawn teachings.[18]
Pagan practitioners have also come to provide their autobiographies and are themselves increasingly the subject of biographical treatment.[19]
Other experiential accounts include Greek traditions,[20] Celtic and Egyptian work,[21] and immersion in the world of contemporary occult groups and witchcraft written by a handful of academics.[22] My world was turned inside-out by reading Robert Anton Wilson’s (with Robert Shea) Illuminatus! series, but more importantly his personal account, Cosmic Trigger, which brought the esoteric to a uniquely contemporary re-synthesis.[23]
Other practitioners have also published biographical and semi- biographical accounts of their lives in magick, such as Lon Milo DuQuette.[24] There are semi-fictional accounts,[25] and strange self- published workbooks such as one in which one can learn to create one’s own real life lightsabre, or Zauberstab, from Vril energy.[26]
Earlier accounts include those of the well documented Crowley, and later practitioners such as followers of Dion Fortune; Charles Seymour and Christine Hartley, whose diaries span 1937-1939.[27]
Prior to that we have other ‘survivor’ records of Crowley’s regime and magical lifestyle, including Jane Wolfe, whose Cefalu Diaries record the discipline required for magical practice whilst enduring the poverty-struck conditions of the ‘Abbey of Thelema’.[28] This theme of magical practice in the most mundane of situations, resulting in tensions and strange sequences of events is taken up by the account of ‘Frater Shiva’ whose account of the Solar Lodge in California during the 1960s and 1970s is salutatory reading.[29] The work and biographical detail of Crowley’s later followers has been published to some extent.[30]
Modern magicians have provided workbooks of practice, deriving in part from the work of the Golden Dawn, Aleister Crowley or Dion Fortune. The works of Donald Michael Kraig, John Michael Greer, Frater U.D., Aaron Leitch, Josephine McCarthy, Christopher Penczak, Phillip Cooper, Peregrin Wildoak, and others represent a continuing formulation of magical practice.[31] Others have worked more explicitly within certain traditions, such as Dolores Ashcroft-Nowicki, whose work is in the lineage of Dion Fortune.[32]
In a similar vein is the body of work by Marian Green, who was a huge influence on my own early studies, particularly her Magic for the Aquarian Age.[33] I once found myself talking to a woman after a presentation I had given at a Golden Dawn conference, talking on about my research, whilst the woman politely nodded and let me chatter. After I had enlightened her about the inner mysteries, and my vast experience, I thought I should deem to ask her name in case she might wish to be a student. Of course, she smiled, nodded politely again, and said, “Marion Green”. That singular lesson was worth every book I purchased and studied from her.
Others have developed and re-presented Crowley’s Thelemic Magick, an ambitious undertaking in itself, so results have varied.[34] A later volume of The Magister will concentrate on Thelema in more detail. Whilst we will look then at Kenneth Grant’s work, we will also consider in our overview here of the ‘Aeons’ the post-Thelemic work of Maggie Ingalls.[35]
Several orders have achieved a relatively stable longevity, such as the Ordo Templi Orientis (O.T.O.), the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (in various forms), Servants of the Light (S.O.L.), and the Society of Inner Light being notable.[36]
Another cohort of authors have published works of less explicit lineage, including Alan Chapman[37] and David Goddard, whose Tower of Alchemy is an amalgam of Grail myth, alchemical visualisations and Kabbalah.[38] There are a range of synthetic systems drawing upon many streams, such as the ‘magic of light’ taught by the Society of the White Flame, drawing on Persian and Arabic literature.[39] Lesser known individuals have presented insights into the kabbalistic design of the initiatory system, such as Eldon Templar, whose pseudonymous works harbour a deep grasp of the impact of initiation modelled on the Tree of Life.[40]
Individual systems have flourished in separate streams, notably the Fourth Way work of G.I. Gurdjieff – a subject for our second and third volumes – and those who have followed that way, such as Ouspensky, Bennett, Pogson, Nicoll, and more recently Colin Wilson, Charles Tart and E.J. Gold.[41] Later we will also survey the works of Blavatsky, Besant, Kingsford, Steiner and other schools both theosophical and anthroposophical.[42]
Many groups have claimed a Rosicrucian heritage – the history of which we will come to examine from its roots in three original pamphlets including the Chymical Wedding – and risen in popularity, such as the Ancient and Mystical Order Rosae Crucis (AMORC). The AMORC teachings span a curriculum of almost 19 years in length and these will be compared and contrasted to other systems including the Builders of the Adytum (BOTA), the Ancient Mystical Order of Seekers (AMOS) and various other ‘modern mystery schools’ of the past century.[43] Less well known authors have taken a Rosicrucian standpoint, such as Freeman B. Dowd and other teachers. [44] The Rosicrucian heritage is fundamental to the WEIS, and is seen as a ‘landmark’ in the life of the ‘Great School’ by Manly Palmer Hall, who also considers the movement in social and political aspects.[45]
A number of Western practitioners pursue systems based upon Celtic or Arthurian myths, or have developed entirely new and novel systems, such as the Church of the Sub-Genius.[46] We will see how these reflect different grades and stages of the ascent narrative as a whole, tracing back to the structures of mystery schools and initiatory religions such as Mithraism.[47] A fundamental approach here is to consider these as a spectrum of perspectives, each useful at a particular step – until a new vantage point is gained and a new perspective gives a view to new horizons.
A number of other systems – both historical and contemporary – have been brought to light, which perhaps owe more or less to the main underground stream, such as Franz Bardon’s Hermetics, and the work of the Brotherhood of Luxor.[48] There are also papers and privately published works of smaller occult orders from which we can draw, including the Brotherhood of the Path, the Order of the Cubic Stone, the Brotherhood of Light (C.C. Zain), the Hermetic Order of Martinists (H.O.M.), A.S. Raleigh’s Hermetic Brotherhood, the Order of Secret Masters, the Gnostic Brotherhood of God (G.B.G.), the Martinists, the Elect Cohens, the Order of the Serpent, the Avalon Group, the Church of Light, the Astarians, the Ma’at Qabal, and many others in private collection.[49] Synthetic traditions have been published such as the work of the Merlin Temple of the Golden Dawn.[50]
Individual authors have presented very specific approachs to the kabbalah and the path of Initiation, some better known than others, such as Julius Evolva, William Blystone, Samael Aun Weor, and Ophiel.[51] Still others have presented alternative models of the initiatory progression and the ascent narrative.[52] A few teachers have worked very much without publication and fanfare until their students have collected their teachings.[53]
The work of magical lodges and schools has also received more public treatment, both from practitioners and academics.[54] We will also see in a later volume the overlaps between the WEIS and the arts, in the work of a wide range of artists, authors, poets, and directors.[55]
Throughout the course of The Magister, we will also draw upon periodicals and magazines across the last century – mainly published in the United Kingdom, but elsewhere too – such as Chaos International, The Lamp of Thoth, Cincinnati Journal of Ceremonial Magick, Occult Review, Thaneteros, The Occult Observer, The Gnostic, Azoth, The Occult Digest, The Occult Science Library, Quest, Probe, Talking Stick, Starfire, Ignator, The Qabalist’s I, Khephra, The Atlantean, Insight, Nox, Lightning Flash, Meridian, The Cosmic Connexion, Omni Vita, Sunpath, T.N.T., The Daath Papers, Formaos, and hundreds of others in collection.[56]
As we cover witchcraft and paganism in later volumes, we will refer to periodicals in that realm, such as Inn
er Keltia, The Cauldron, Pentagram, Pagan Dawn, Pangaia, Moonshine, Medicine Ways, Pentacle, The Wiccan, and Pipes of Pan. Finally, we will survey magazines of the more mainstream variety, including Gnosis, Magical Blend, Fate and Fortune, Destiny, and a host of other professional magazines representing the WEIS in more popularist guises such as ‘a transformational journey’, ‘exploring the unknown’, ‘predicting your future’, and journaling the ‘Western inner traditions’.
It is through these magazines, pre-Internet, that much discussion and networking took place, giving glimpses of the WEIS in constant turmoil, diversification, and synthesis. Taking just one small press magazine at random we can read about the Order of the Pyramid and the Sphinx, who advertise themselves as a “special custodian of a hitherto unrevealed tradition which expounds the famous Enochian system of Dr. John Dee”; take lessons from (the now sadly departed) Alexander Sanders, “Lessons in Witchcraft, Sex Magick and Esoteric Mysticism”; and be perturbed at the approach and grammar of the Pagan Front asking for members with the express statement, “No time-wasters, trouble-makers, homosexuals or black magicians, etc.” We can also find the Fraternitas Lucifer next to a Hatha Yoga group, and letters from Israel Regardie and R.G. Torrens arguing the history of the Golden Dawn. Not bad for 4/6d (that is, four shillings and sixpence).[57]
