The Magister 3 Read online

  The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, founded in 1888 by Westcott, Mathers and Woodman and splintering in 1903, for 15 years provided arguably the most important synthesis of esoteric teaching of the late 19th century and early 20th century, in which the darkness outside the bright circle of consciousness could be explored both theoretically and practically in the consciousness of the initiates.[16] They also claimed an ancient pedigree, stretching back to Egypt, for the connection between hypnotism and magic.[17]

  Moina MacGregor Mathers wrote in 1918, that the establishment of the mysteries provided a “penetralia that which even the highest then known forms of religion had not, namely, a philosophico-religious reply resumed in Formulas and Ceremonies, to the problems of Life and Death, of Nature, of the Gods, of Spritual Beings, etc., and lastly of the linking of these things as a whole back to the First Cause of all things.”[18]

  In this we perceive echoes of naturphilosophie, and the holistic thinking at the centre of the inner order of the Golden Dawn, where the aim was to become “that Perfect Man,” and the Adept was to “apply myself to the Great Work – which is, to purify and exalt my Spiritual Nature so that with Divine Aid I may at length attain to be more than human.”[19]

  It is important to note that mesmerism and spiritualism were handled differently by the Golden Dawn; the Neophyte oath contains the lines, “I will not suffer myself to be hypnotised, or mesmerised, nor will I place myself in such a passive state that any uninitiated person, power, or being may cause me to lose control of my thoughts, words or actions.” It has been suggested that it was Anna Kingsford’s doctrines against passive mediumship that were instrumental in this clause[20] – certainly, Mathers and Westcott knew Kingsford and thought highly of her.[21]

  Dion Fortune and Israel Regardie, Psychoanalysts and Magicians

  Israel Regardie and Dion Fortune are two individuals who in a sense developed through the Golden Dawn society, were to greater and lesser extents influenced by the shadow of Aleister Crowley,[22] and sought, more than any other members of that order, a psychological parallel to their understanding and experience of the Western esoteric tradition. Fortune studied and practiced analysis in her early years, drawing upon Adler, Jung and Freud, whilst Regardie sought out Freudian and Reichian analysis, particularly in the latter half of his life. In this section we will highlight key interfaces which these two individuals created between magic and psychoanalysis, and expose the legacy this presented to contemporary esotericists.

  Israel Regardie: The Sage of Sedona

  In Israel Regardie’s The Eye in the Triangle, he writes that “Equilibrium is the basis of the soul,”[23] and that such equilibrium is the aim of the elemental grades of the Golden Dawn, which, as depicted in the diagram of the Fall shown to initiates during the ritual, “point to a higher type of consciousness, the beginning of a spiritual rebirth.”[24] However, he saw this equilibrium as being granted by psychoanalysis as much as initiatory experience.

  Gerald Suster, biographer and friend of Regardie, considered that Regardie sought the answer to five questions:

  1. How could the disciplines of magic and psychoanalysis be brought together?

  2. Could magical and mystical illumination co-exist with neurosis?

  3. Was the free association technique effective (as it consisted of verbalisation)? (A question that led Regardie to study non-verbal therapies, namely Reichian, indicating perhaps his answer in finding Fruedian psychoanalysis lacking);

  4. How could the processes of magic and psychoanalysis be practically combined to aid the individual?

  5. Was Freud right in asserting that our primary drive is sex?

  It is presently the first and fourth questions that concern us, despite the fascination of the remaining three avenues that Regardie pursued. In the early 1940s, his study of Wilhelm Reich – particularly the concept of psychological armouring and the connecting of schizophrenia and the autonomic nervous system – led him to combine these healing techniques with magical systems, in the ‘Middle Pillar’ exercise and related methods.

  In the writing of such titles as The Middle Pillar, Energy, Prayer and Relaxation, and The Art of True Healing, as Suster points out, Regardie was “uniting magic with therapy.”[25]

  On the efficacy of the Golden Dawn rituals, Regardie wrote that “Without the least conscious effort on the part of the aspirant, an involuntary current of sympathy is produced by this dramatic delineation of psychic events which may be sufficient to accomplish the intrinsic purpose of the ceremony or ritual.”[26] He later refers to the participation mystique of the Adeptus Minor initiation, and indeed, uses Reichian terminology – in reference to the shattering of the character armour – to analyse the mechanism of the ceremony.[27]

  It is in the Middle Pillar exercise that Regardie separated and re-synthesised his esotericism and his psychotherapy into one technique, applicable outside of the structure of the Golden Dawn, and in this he paved the way for others to begin to deconstruct the legacy of the order into self-developmental exercises.

  Dion Fortune: Priestess of the Soul

  In the unassuming grounds of Studley Agricultural College,[28] between 1911 and 1913, a battle of wills was fought between the College Warden and a young woman, aged 20, in her employment. The young woman described the lowest depth of this abusive encounter when she wrote, “I entered her room [the Warden’s] at ten o’clock, and I left it at two. She must have said these two phrases [‘You are incompetent and you know it. You have no self-confidence, and you have got to admit it.’] several hundreds of times. I entered it a strong and healthy girl. I left it a mental and physical wreck and was ill for three years.”[29]

  That young girl was Violet Firth (1890-1946), known more popularly by a form of her magical name, Deus Non Fortuna (God, Not Luck), Dion Fortune. Her natural desire for understanding, this abusive experience and subsequent illness drove her to study psychology and psychoanalysis at the University of London. She was influenced by Freud and Adler and, later, Jung (from around 1943).[30] She became interested in the writings of Francis Aveling, author of Personality and Will, and Directing Mental Energy.

  Her pursuit drew her towards not only psychoanalysis but also occultism. Fortune joined a daughter lodge of the Golden Dawn in 1919 and between 1924 and 1927 was also a member of the Theosophical Society. In 1922 she formed the Fraternity of the Inner Light as an ‘outer court’ of the Golden Dawn, although she was later expelled from the Golden Dawn by Moina Mathers. It was also in 1922 that she wrote an article ‘Psychology and Occultism’, which Gareth Knight notes, “marked a transitional phase between Violet Firth as psychologist and Dion Fortune as occultist.”[31]

  Throughout, her abiding interest was in the untapped power of the mind. Her interest in the power of suggestion is evident in The Machinery of the Mind, where she writes,

  Autosuggestion, or the insertion of ideas in the subconscious by the conscious mind of the person concerned, has been reduced to a therapeutic system by the New Nancy School of psychology, and is associated with the name of Emile Coeué. It is held by this school that suggestibility, or the faculty of permitting ideas to so possess the mind that they express themselves in action, is a normal human faculty.[32]

  Her learning eventuated in a realisation that esoteric principles, to the initiate, had real practical use, and that application often answered for her problems that were unanswered in psychotherapy. In The Mystical Qabalah, she takes “the problem of the sublimation of the sex-drive” which she says “besets the psychotherapists, concerning which they talk so glibly and say so little.”[33] She provides a qabalistic interpretation of this ‘problem’, archly veiled in symbolism, demonstrating a complex model of sexuality on many levels. Indeed, this is a model, concern and theme to which she would return many times in her fictionalised works, such as The Sea Priestess and Moon Magic.

  Her writing on the physiological aspects of psychology, in particular the influences of drugs, both in Machinery of the Mind
and The Mystical Qabalah, shows an intuitive but advanced appreciation of the physical and psychological mechanisms employed in ritual.[34] Her legacy was to introduce psychological concerns into the esoteric tradition, and demonstrate that esoteric models comprehended those of psychology.

  Contemporary Syntheses of Psychology and Magic

  Having analysed the crossing-points of psychology and esotericism since the rise of naturphilosophie in the late 18th century and into the 19th century, through Jung, the Golden Dawn, and individuals such as Regardie and Fortune, we can briefly examine contemporary usages of psychology in occultism, particularly where that usage continues to develop from the foundations we have traced.

  The analysis of self-development through both psychology and the Western esoteric tradition continued in the late 1960s with the publication of a little known book, The Christ, Psychotherapy and Magic, written by a Christian parish priest, Anthony Duncan. Duncan spent time working with the occultist Gareth Knight in Tewkesbury and, using his knowledge of psychosynthesis,[35] began to draw comparisons between pathworking – a technique favoured by Knight and his school - Christian active prayer, and a psychotherapeutic technique known as initiated symbol projection (ISP)[36] developed in West Germany since 1948, referenced by Assagioli, based upon the work of three therapists, Happich, Leuner and Desoille. The common ground Duncan finds is in the use of will and the use of symbols – he refers to prayer as “a dialogue of wills”[37] and quotes Assagioli’s three functions of symbols:

  1. As containers and preservers of a dynamic psychological charge;

  2. As transformers of psychological energies (see ‘Use of Metaphor’);

  3. As conductors or channels of psychological energies.

  This willed initiation of a symbolic dialogue is common, Duncan argues, between psychology, religion, mysticism, and the Western esoteric tradition. He goes on to illustrate this commonality by examining a psychotherapeutic group working described by Assagioli which, in its use of Arthurian and Grail symbology, is identical to a similar working performed by Gareth Knight’s esoteric group. In this similarity, Duncan finds a bridge to the ‘corporate act’ of the Christian Mass, also underpinned by a claim “by both schools [of] an enhancement of the whole enterprise by the linkage of minds on a common object, via the unconscious.”[38] He uses Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s description of ‘Noosphere’ (a form of group mind) in passing, as a unifying model for these concepts.

  Duncan’s work largely draws upon the kabbalah of Dion Fortune, which he quotes at length in his introductory sections, and begins his analysis of pathworking by quoting Regardie’s The Art and Meaning of Magic and using a working described in that book to illustrate his points. In 1983, we can read Regardie again, introducing Wilson’s Prometheus Rising, based upon the methods of Crowley and the psychological eight-circuit model of consciousness developed by Timothy Leary. Wilson continues the synthetic experiment of Fortune and Regardie and blends in the esotericism of Gurdjieff and the general semantics of Alfred Korzybski. Regardie notes that the scientific view-points that Wilson develops are, for him, reminiscent of the Reichian vegetotherapy, in that “everything alive is really alive in the fullest and most dynamic sense of the word. It twitches, searches, throbs, organizes and seems aware of an upward movement”[39] This foundation would be familiar to naturphilosophie, and Prometheus Rising could be seen as continuing in that tradition of synthesis. Indeed, Wilson leaves the reader with a quote from the futurologist Barbara Marx Hubbard: “The Future exists first in imagination, then in will, then in reality.”[40]

  Most recently, the experiment to integrate the methods of psychology and magic have resulted in such works as Jason Newcomb’s The New Hermetics, which describes itself as a “synthesis of Western esoteric thought, Jungian psychology, the ideas of neuro-linguistic programming, the eight-circuit model of consciousness, and Scientific Illuminism.”[41] Newcomb interprets techniques such as the Middle Pillar (as we have seen, also used by Regardie as an integrative technique between magic ritual and psychotherapy) in the context of NLP. He directly acknowledges Jung, Reich and Leary as the psychological underpinnings of the “new Hermetics”[42] and his “empowering beliefs of the new Hermetic masters” are direct echoes or re-statements of those of naturphilosophie, where we commenced the scope of this present section:[43]

  1. Naturphilosophie: Nature has a mythical order.

  The New Hermetics: The possibilities are unlimited and the universe functions according to rules, although, at any given time, some of these rules may not be understood.

  2. Naturphilosophie: Spirit becomes Nature, Nature becomes spiritualised.

  The New Hermetics: There is a subtle realm beyond matter, from which the physical universe manifests. In life, you are constantly learning, growing and evolving.

  3. Naturphilosophie: Nature is a living set of correspondences. The New Hermetics: The universe is ultimately one thing. It is possible to make your own luck and synchronicities.

  This restatement of the beliefs encapsulated by naturphilosophie inevitably leads to the urge to self-development, in the case of the ‘new Hermetics’ through a contemporary re-codification of techniques originally designed by Mathers, Westcott and Waite, and opened to a wider audience and psychological interpretation by Regardie and Fortune. NLP itself derives from modelling the work of Milton Erickson (1902- 1980), a hypnotherapist, and its formative books were deliberately entitled The Structure of Magic to reflect a modelling of the ‘magical’ techniques utilised by therapists such as Milton Erickson, Fritz Perls and Virginia Satir.[44]

  The concerns of contemporary esotericists continue to derive from the same current as was evident in naturphilosophie. The post-Crowley Thelemic writings of Kenneth Grant refer to the ‘nightside’ of esoteric work,[45] echoing Gotthilf Heinrich von Schubert’s work on dreams and the ‘nightside’ of the soul.[46] Esoteric artist and author Maggie Ingalls (writing as Soror Nema) refers to the relationship between the individual unconscious and the global unconscious (whom she personifies as an entity named Na’aton),[47] as did Carus in 1846: “we must realise that our unconscious life is affected by all humanity, by the life of the earth and by the universe, for it is definitely an integral part of this totality.”[48] Post-Crowley Thelemites and Chaos magicians look to titles such as Future Ritual for a re-presenting of Coué’s self-suggestion as ‘meta-programming the self ’ with techniques modified from the Middle Pillar as used by Regardie.[49]

  We have seen how as ‘footnotes of Plato’[50] esoteric and psychological approaches seek out the contents of the darkness outside of the bright circle of consciousness, whether that darkness is seen as the mundus imaginalis or the unconscious mind. In travelling the planes, ritual magic, alchemy, or psychoanalysis, the individual is driven to discover – in their own state of consciousness – more of themselves. In this, they discover more of their relationship to the universe of which they are necessarily an intrinsic part.

  From the naturphilosophie of Schelling through the rituals of the Golden Dawn, through the work of Carus and Jung, and in the syntheses proposed by Fortune and Regardie, not only are we all perhaps footnotes of Plato, we are all also working in that same temple whose portal has inscribed upon it, ‘Know thyself’.

  The Oath of Harpocrates

  I provide below one of the Golden Dawn Flying Rolls. These papers were privately circulated by members of the order for initiates only, although they have been in public circulation and published for many years now.[51]

  Be that as it may, the Flying Rolls still contain a great deal of power when studied at the relevant time in the initiatory journey. For your present consideration I have attached Roll No. 13, and particularly refer you to the first section on ‘Secrecy’. This was written by MacGregor Mathers.

  The secrecy of which we speak is that of Hermeticism; a true seal on the vessel in which calcination – the slow fire – is taking place. Like a pressure cooker, our work must be regulated and not opened
to the outer lest the pressure be entirely lost to the environment. In maintaining a secret, we easily and efficiently provide ourselves such pressure – an inner dynamic that maintains the work in which we are engaged. It leads to results, whereas openly speaking to all and sundry about our views, practices and values does not lead to anything useful at all. The Ancient Egyptian god-form given for the Neophyte in the Golden Dawn is that of Harpocrates, the child-god of innocence with his finger to his lips in the universal sign of silence. This is the first asana which we must learn – that of secrecy. Only when this is mastered do we learn the balancing Neophyte sign, that of Horus, the Avenger – a sign of projection; a willed and deliberate projection with all our values behind it, as any magical act should be.

  The following section is quoted verbatim from the Flying Roll.

  Flying Roll XIII on Secrecy and Hermetic Love

  We have all no doubt heard of the terrible physical tests applied in Egyptian Initiations and are aware that violence amounting to torture was used in the Ancient Mysteries before the Neophyte was considered fit to take the first steps in his Ascent of the Mountain of God.