The Magister 3

by Marcus Katz

  In terms of the original translation by MacGregor Mathers from the French version, this has since been superceded by a better translation of a German version, The Book of Abramelin, by Georg Dehn and Steven Guth. This promotes an 18-month version of the working.

  The Holy Guardian Angel

  There are as many descriptions of the Holy Guardian Angel (HGA) as there are practitioners, which is possibly emblematic of its individual conception. The practices which lead to this experience range far beyond the Abramelin working which is its most common association.[109] I can only offer the advice that the practitioner should seek towards this working as a culmination of their work between the grades of Neophyte and Adeptus Minor. It requires a significant amount of mental, psychological, emotional, and spiritual stability, as well as the physical and environmental capability to leave work and social bonds for six months. This is where your faith in magic and your spiritual path is truly tested – so by that point you had better be sure that there aren’t any other alternatives for your development and exploration. This is why, in the main, the work of the early grades is an exhaustive process, slowly undoing all the attachments and distractions, leaving an exit door that leads in.

  The actual working is possible, the result undeniable, and the resultant experience profound beyond any measure. It is to the successful accomplishment of this singular aim that the work of the Crucible Club and the Order of Everlasting Day is the basic introduction and foundation stone.

  Vignette: 13 Dancing Girls on a Wednesday

  Frater F.P. resolved with his angel to establish a working with the magical squares and got to choose a random square. This could have been anything from invisibility to having a siege army appear at the walls of the town. Luckily he had chosen a random talisman from another grimoire which offered the opportunity of conjuring ‘13 dancing girls on a Wednesday’. He activated the square in the manner which his angel informed him, and duly forgot about it.

  He mentioned the working to his wife, but not its nature. If he recalls correctly, she asked him why it could not have been about money or some other practical aim, because he told her it was an ‘unusual request’ of the magick.

  The following week he was asked to accompany his wife to a lesson in raqs sharqi, which was being held in Manchester. Unbeknownst to either of them, as it was a sudden urge of his wife, the class she joined unexpectedly had decided to put on an impromptu performance to visiting relatives.

  So there sat Frater F.P., lounging on Arabian-themed cushions, with live drummers and string instruments from another time, with – count them – exactly 13 dancing girls, of course on the obligatory Wednesday.

  It was not that the square worked which surprised him; it was that he had forgotten all about it. This working without lust of result is the most essential component of magick.

  The Angel and the Higher Self

  On a personal note, I would like to dispel some of the confusion that others seem to have created with regard to New Age or psychological interpretations of this working and its aim. The HGA is not the same as the Higher Self.

  It is not a ‘higher part’ of oneself. Nor is it entirely a ‘discrete entity’ as some might imagine an angel. Rather the nomenclature indicates a fully-engaged-in-divine-communication-emergent-from-self-in-relation-to-universe-messenger-carrier-state-presence.

  This manifests in a unique manner. A good model of how this can be contextualised can be found hidden in Florence Farr’s description of the Ancient Egyptian aspects of the soul and their activation during magical ritual. In that description is to be found a useful map of the correspondence of the human being, the Self and the HGA on the Tree of Life, in the four worlds.

  Without experiencing the working, any presumption of the result is forcing the mysteries to become reduced to fit into the mind, not the mind being enlarged to comprehend the mysteries. This seems to be the curse of the contemporary period, where rapid communication leads to an implicit assumption that such experiences and states can be efficiently compressed to superficial learning.

  This is not the case – indeed, the Abramelin ritual is a self-extracting file; much that is not apparent becomes obvious within the text itself as one performs the operation. And it modifies itself in practice to suit the nature of the practitioner, and the cultural, temporal and spatial conditions. I imagine that the operation, far from being a quaint superstition, could easily be performed on a Mars base a century from now. In many ways, another metaphor for this particular culmination of work is as a tuning fork between one Tree of Life in one world and the Tree/s in the other worlds. The Adept attunes to the angel to sing of one song above and below.

  As Crowley wryly remarked, the name Holy Guardian Angel is so ludicrous as not to be taken seriously and as a true indication of what one might expect. However, it turns out that this is equally and somewhat paradoxically a blind.

  It has not been intended here to confuse or obscure, but rather to hint at this stage the culmination of the magical work from Neophyte to Adept. It is an aim worth pursuing but it costs everything you currently believe yourself to possess – although, as Gurdjieff often remarked, you can only truly sacrifice the only thing you really possess: your suffering.

  Furthermore, if we hold with Crowley that “There is a single main definition of the object of all Magical Ritual. It is the uniting of the Microcosm and the Macrocosm. The Supreme and Complete Ritual is therefore the Invocation of the Holy Guardian Angel; or, in the language of mysticism, Union with God,” then we might see this angel as an ‘emergent property’ of our own unification.[110] The more that we see through separation and the illusion of separation, commencing with our own beliefs, the more that this angel is able to communicate – that being a two-way process, whether we can recognise it or not in the earliest days of the initiatory journey to this singular goal.

  As Crowley says, “It is obviously impossible to communicate with an independent intelligence – the one real object of astral research – if one allows one’s imagination to surround one with courtiers of one’s own creation.”[111] That is why we must concentrate our work on examining and questioning: “Enquiry is Everything!” as I once wrote in my own magickal journal, to break down the buffers that allow us to maintain the sense of separation within ourselves and to others. If you cannot communicate clearly within yourself, what chance to communicate with your fellows? If you cannot communicate with your fellows, what chance of communicating with more ethereal constructs? And if you cannot talk with angels, what chance of walking with God?

  On the Egregore

  Of uncertain origin, the term ‘egregore’ is often considered as a group mind which ‘watches over’ a group in some manner. This mind is created by the shared will of the group, directed to a common purpose, and it is suggested by some writers that the entity can become, in a sense, distinct from the individuals of the group, so that when they pass away, many years later the egregore can be somehow ‘contacted’ by those pursuing the same aims as the original founders of the group mind.

  An egregore is a kind of group mind which is created when people consciously come together for a common purpose. Whenever people gather together to do something an egregore is formed, but unless an attempt is made to maintain it deliberately it will dissipate rather quickly. However, if the people wish to maintain it and know the techniques of how to do so, the egregore will continue to grow in strength and can last for centuries.[112]

  We can consider the egregore as an ‘emergent property’, that is to say, something which exists as a result of the interaction and communication between individuals, and nothing intrinsic within the individuals or any individual themselves.[113] In this sense, when even two individuals come together and communicate, if they communicate in a focused manner, they will generate a powerful egregore – for example, the Enochian work of John Dee and Edward Kelly. It is noticeable that magical work generates such things more frequently because all truly magical work is willed, and involv
es the whole consciousness of the individual, focused in one act. Football crowds do not generate such long-standing egregores as the activity is based upon mixed emotional requirements being satisfied, albeit to a common purpose by a great number of individuals. More so, it is only magical – and occasionally religious or corporate leadership – activity that recognises and is expressly designed to create such entities.[114]

  Emergent systems require three significant components that we can recognise in the creation of egregores: simplicity, feedback and iteration. That is to say:

  Simplicity – simple observations and definition of the entity;

  Feedback – contemplation, channelling, meditation of the entity;

  Iteration – repetition over time, ritual devoted to the entity.

  In kabbalistic terms, it can be seen that the sephiroth are emergent properties of each other; the so-called ‘Orchard’ or Fractal Tree. From the relationship between Binah and Chockmah emerges Da’ath, and the Veil of Paroketh (veiling Tiphareth) is the emergent property from the interaction of the lower sephiroth. Once these Sephiroth are aligned and working in equibilirium, the ‘noise’ is removed and the ‘signal’ can be transmitted clearly between them and what is revealed as Tiphareth after the noise is gone and naught but silence remains.

  The Abyss

  As with all constructs, the nature of the Abyss is seen otherwise from either side of its experience as a real event. As with most of the mystical metaphors, it is entirely necessary and entirely misleading. It is further confused by being in the public domain enough for anyone – and almost everyone – to write about it. We will deal with this towards the conclusion of The Magister. In this present volume we introduce the term and place it upon the Tree of Life as part of the initiatory schema, and at least provide indications of what it is not.[115]

  The Abyss represents a significant event in the life of the magician-mystic. As such, it is a culmination of thousands of hours of work towards its attainment. It is not a vision, nor can it be visualised.[116] Nor can it be simply attained by taking the ‘Oath of the Abyss’ at any moment of your life.[117] It is an emergent property of a fundamental re-orientation of awareness in relation to the universe, given divine grace by its reception within the individual. It is the moment to which the HGA deigns to lead us, at which point it too vanishes, as it was never there.

  The HGA is the edge of light, the bridge, interface, component of awareness that arises from the shadow of the Abyss – the amaneusis of the soul. When the rememberance of the true state is attained, the light is entered and no longer casts a shadow (Abyss) nor has an edge (angel). The Abyss is the only step onwards from the grade of the Exempt Adept, one who has reached the edges of all self-awareness and fulfilled (and thus exhausted) the possibilities of that self.

  As Benjamin Rowe considers:

  By the time the person has achieved and absorbed the highest purely human level and become an ‘Exempt Adept’, both these processes have pretty much been exhausted. Those parts of the person’s being that are capable of being controlled and coordinated by the individual self are as integrated as they are ever going to be. The contents of the mind have been reduced to an integrated scheme and an encompassing philosophy. He is the Complete Individual, so to speak. Such people – as Crowley notes – tend to become leaders of ‘schools of thought’ for spreading their philosophy; or they become priests or social leaders of some sort.[118]

  At this stage, the only task of the Exemptus is to await absorption. We picture this as The Fool in the Union Deck falling back into the Abyss. The ego has been transcended and the Self-centre gained; the Self-centre has been completed and then transcended (although it was never there to transcend); the awareness of the other has been surrendered, and there is only a tripartite awareness now functioning, above the Abyss. It is there that the Master of the Temple literally triangulates the three remaining aspects of reality until they themselves are one – and none.

  Vignette: The Cube of Undoing

  Frater V. had a lucid dream in which he was being held within a perfect blue cube, with a stranger. The walls of the cube were composed of living and vibrant conscious patterns. It was within the awareness of the vision that there was no space or time within the cube itself.

  At this point, the walls of the cube began to swirl in dynamic flow, and the fabric of reality within the space began to change in an indescribable manner. The other person in the cube began to scream and clutch at themselves as their body and soul began to literally unravel in the transition of the space. Frater V. felt a fear unlike anything he had ever encountered. This was the very undoing of the Adeptus Major into the realm of Chesed and it had little to do with the Mercy or loving kindness associated with the sephirah.

  When awakened from the dream, he considered what the real experience might be like – and why anyone would wish to undo themselves so.

  The Fourth Way Work

  “And it’s all ‘bout your ego

  All the I’s in you, that you think make up your self

  Know yourself and maybe they’ll go -

  Waking from an illusion you believe that’s awake.”

  — Garry Kennedy, ‘The Fourth Way’,[119]

  In the work of the mystic G.I. Gurdjieff, he proposed that each of us has a kundabuffer, an organ “to prevent men seeing the reality of their situation.” Whilst this was proposed in a semi-fictional sense (like much of Gurdjieff’s writings), it is an important concept in self-awareness work.

  In the WEIS we introduce some of the elements of Gurdjieff ’s work at a later stage, but here we introduce a few basic concepts to promote understanding of how the Fourth Way work – as termed by Gurdjieff – assists self-knowledge. It is of value that the Fourth Way work has received contemporary attention, particular as to the original issues with its comprehension and reception. The work also admits to and fits neatly into the graduated ascent narrative, for example in statements such as “consciousness has degrees.”[120]

  One way of seeing the kundabuffers is that they are the psychological defense mechanisms that connect and absorb the minor shock of our ever-changing sense of self from one identity or personality to another. Usually in our day we ride these shocks on an almost momentary basis as we change our state and role. The Fourth Way of Gurdjieff promotes observation of these shocks to wake us up to the reality of our situation.

  There are many authors, artists, musicians, and other professionals who have been intrigued and attracted to the Fourth Way work. A notable contemporary case is Kate Bush, whose song, ‘Them Heavy People’, from her debut album The Kick Inside (EMI, 1978), mentions Gurdjieff by name and commences with lines describing how the work first appeared to her in a time of despair. However, there is little further evidence that she had anything other than a cursory interest in the Fourth Way.[121]

  Both Robert Anton Wilson – whose Prometheus Rising workbook I highly recommend to all Zelators – and Colin Wilson were heavily influenced by Gurdjieff ’s work. In the fiction, The Mind Parasites, Colin Wilson writes of the experience of attaining freedom from our attachment to the present:

  If we could learn the trick of putting the mind in and out of gear, man would have the secret of godhead. But no trick is more difficult to learn. We are ruled by habit. Our bodies are robots that insist on doing what they have been doing for the last million years: eating, drinking, excreting, making love – and attending to the present.[122]

  Another contemporary interpreter of Gurdjieff’s work is E.J. Gold, whose books Life in the Labyrinth and The Human Biological Machine as a Transformational Apparatus are essential reading for later Theoricus work, albeit very testing works.

  It is often said that Gurdjieff ’s original works are somewhat inaccessible, so it is to his students that we tend to turn for explanation. These students include C.S. Nott, P.D. Ouspensky (whose The Fourth Way is essential reading), R. Orage, and J.G. Bennett.

  I would also recommend the more contemporary interpret
ations of the Fourth Way work by Sophia Wellbeloved, Gurdjieff: The Key Concepts, and Charles T. Tart, Waking Up.

  The Kundabuffers

  It is to Tart’s work that we will turn for our praxis contemplative work. He gives a brilliant interpretation of the kundabuffers in terms of psychological self-defence mechanisms.

  This also reminds us of the constant mantra proposed by the late Da Free John, whose work we will arrive at towards the end of The Magister. He proposed that the only consideration we should hold from moment to moment is the answer to the simple question, “Avoiding relationship?”

  In Tart’s list of defence mechanisms, we will select several, and you may wish to choose one or two for a couple of weeks to examine in yourself. This prepares the ground for later work which is more demanding in terms of analysing oneself and one’s behaviours.

  The Gurdjieff work is very concerned with breaking habits, ending automatic responses or interrupting them, so here, we make a suggestion that you do something unexpected or unique every time you notice your chosen kundabuffer. It doesn’t matter what, so long as it is not the same thing as the previous times.

  Watching for Kundabuffers