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The Way of the Mysteries Correspondence Course LESSON TWO

PAPER 3 QABALAH Ó m t. harris 2002

Our Qaballistic studies now come to Malkuth, the sephira at the base of the Tree of Life, which represents the "end result" of the emanation of spirit.. We are starting therefore from the world we know (or think we know). Qaballah sees that emanation of spirit proceeding through and being manifest in four modes in each of the sephiroth. Thus The Mystical Qaballah lists the symbolism of each sephira, not least Malkuth, in the "four worlds" of Atziluth, Briah, Yetzirah and Assiah Whilst there is a tendency in popular books on Qaballah to give short shrift to The Four Worlds, it is essential that this concept is understood from the start, not least to make sense of the correspondences given for each of the sephiroth. Indeed we cannot understand Malkuth as the "world we know" without this. Whilst some branches of neo paganism might dismiss this fundamental Qaballistic doctrine as "Judeo Christian theology", its principles actually transcend specific "religious" beliefs and make no bad job of explaining the perplexing world that we live in. The origins of this ‘four worlds" concept may, in any case, be glimpsed in earlier ancient Egyptian religious magic and the adoption of this concept is further betrayed in the later writings of the Celtic Taliesin bards. Magic worthy of the name must address the problem of "Being" and the related Qaballistic doctrines of The Four Worlds and Tsimtsum do this very well! .

Atziluth is the "world’, or mode of the divine self awareness, affirmed by divinity uttering the phrase which "starts" the "process" of being :Eheieh asher Eheieh "I am what I am" . All that is, and will be, emanates from and within this divine realisation. This idea of creation being ‘contained" as an elaboration within the mind of God is a fundamental Qaballistic doctrine called Tsimtsum ..

Briah is the world of archangels, who arise as ideas within the divine mind of how EHEIEH "I am" may be expressed.

Yetzirah is the world of angels, who are in effect those ideas being given substance in specific divine thoughts and actions

Assiah is the ever evolving outcome of divine thought and action. Thus the Assiah state of Malkuth is very much the world we live in.

We might suppose from the foregoing that the universe operates like divinely ordained clockwork, with everything proceeding within the mind of God being predestined and predictable. The expression "God’s in (his) heaven and all’s well with the world", rarely, however, reflects our own experience. Any theologian challenged with this observation will wag his or her finger and sooner or later utter the words ‘free will". Free will involves choice and the implications of free will and choice are reflected in the virtues and vices listed for the sephiroth..

Using the Qaballistic analogy of all arising and proceeding from ideas in the divine mind through four worlds provides us, however, with an easy way to suppose why the divine plan doesn’t appear to be going according to plan in the good earth and why virtues and vices constantly collide with each other.. Somewhere along the line the divine thoughts appear to have run away from the divine thinker and unity has become duality. This dichotomy between the divine thinker and objectified angelic thoughts is what theologians call The Prime Deviation. In terms of the knock on effects for human beings in Assiah they refer to The Fall. In fact as contemporary writers like Matthew Fox) have pointed out, such "falls" and "deviations" should be looked upon as "Original Blessing" (the title of his first book) rather than the dire sources of original sin. This is perhaps best summed up in the analogy of a loving parent giving children the opportunity (with caveats) to make their own mistakes as part of the process of learning and. growing up Mainstream religious belief tended and still tends, however towards a more old fashioned view..

Mainstream exoteric Judaism , being somewhat patriarchal in nature, is and was more concerned with the God of the Torah, a God of law rather than a God of love. A view largely endorsed by the succeeding Christian and Islamic traditions.

Qaballah is somewhat subtler, universal and even handed, not least in acknowledging an equally feminine side to divinity and glimpsing a compassionate God beyond the face value "rules" of the Torah. It wonders why an all powerful divinity might allow independence, free will and the opportunity to break rules and comes up with the unlikely answer "Love", for love by its very nature may not command and compel.

It is this image of divinity courting what has taken independence from it and attempting in love to reunify with it, which gives Malkuth the title of The Bride. This reunification theme is further emphasised in the spiritual experience of Malkuth The "Knowledge and conversation" or "Vision" of the Holy Guardian Angel, which means in essence a reunification with that "angelic" part of ourselves, as an undistorted reflection of the mind of God.

his view of a god who works through Love and Compassion rather than Law and Compulsion of course emphasises the maternal rather than the patriarchal side of God and this is well summed up in the feminine/containing image which Tsimtsum ("sim sum") expresses. The idea of God ‘making a void" within "himself" in which creation may take place actually expresses the emanation of the quality summed up in the sephira Binah in the world of Assiah, where the mind of God (Chokmah) finds a "format" or space for expression. The image used is one of a great sea, like the contents of a seething cauldron. One early Qaballistic treatise talks about a cauldron of divine light which reaching saturation burst open to give rise to creation. Similar images arise in Celtic cauldron myth.

TSIMTSUM…the three within the one.

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Dion Fortune does not go into the idea of Tsimsum as such but discusses the Four Worlds concept in chapters eight and nine of The Mystical Qabalah. You should, however, be aware that she wrote this in a time when Jewish Hassidism was not as forthcoming about its Qaballah as it is today. Consequently she states that the Kether of a Tree in each world is formed by the Malkuth of the Tree of the world preceding it. In traditional Jewish Qaballah there is in fact more ‘overlap" than this (as the diagram below indicates).This means that the Malkuth of, say, Briah, produces the Kether of Assiah rather than Yetzirah.

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Since the beginning of time human beings have lived their lives through patterns. They have described those patterns in dance, word and song, in art and architecture. In the Dance of Being - through birth, life and death - the ancients set their dance patterns to the rounds of the stars, to the changing seasons, to land and mood. They differentiated the special measure of each in their structuring of belief and sacred places and custom to express belief. All these were and are patterns, dances that part and join and part again through the cycles of being like endless, interwoven Celtic knotwork.

Magic teaches us how to utilise those patterns.

Mysticism in its many forms teaches us how to reach and form a personal relationship with their source.

In the patterns of time, space and events we perceive and interpret our place and purpose in creation and our relationship to the creator.

Avalon is a convergence of patterns in mythology, history and inner and outer geography which lead to a source through which we can find our place and purpose in being human. It is not of course the only set of patterns to provide this, but it is one which has particular relevance to the folk-soul of the Isles of Britain and Ireland and all who are hereditarily associated with these lands whether resident there or not.

Ancient peoples structured their mythologies upon the observable patterns of environment, human behaviour and the interaction between them. To find their place in the inner and outer worlds, they projected the vagaries of human nature onto the patterns of all Nature. They used Nature as a mirror of themselves, and themselves as a mirror of Nature, instinctively realising the first injunction of the Mysteries "Man know thyself". In this gradual "knowing" the broad patterns of mythology began to fall into place. In the projection of human behaviour onto Nature, they assumed that male gods tended to provide life force which female goddesses fashioned into patterns of life form. The god was the creative impulse, the goddess embodied subsequent creation. Even the later "revealed’, patriarchal religions (Judeo, Christian and Islamic) in which the originating male god appeared to "reveal" himself in creation, can look to their origins and find a goddess who is mistress of the patterns which the male god utilised for his revelation. That mistress of the patterns is traditionally three fold, for whilst, as we shall soon see, human consciousness has four modes of operation, it processes the patterns of the goddess in three ways.

Knowledge of the patterns

Understanding of how patterns relate to other patterns

Wisdom to interpret patterns in the light of experience.

The qualities of Wisdom, Knowledge and Understanding may be seen to typify most aspects of a "triple Goddess" whose patterns human beings must learn to live by and, less obviously, of a three-fold god who inseminates creation with the life principle. Three is the essential number of the construction and perception of patterns. It describes the cause of a form or state through movement, light and sound, the dynamic forces which our ancestors called "gods" and the "shape" of that form or state in point, line and circle, From these basic patterns of ideas, of thoughts and thought forms our ancestors arrived at a plethora of patterns to map out their place in the scheme of things. These have evolved into many scientific and spiritual disciplines but a few might include:

Astronomy…patterns and cycles of the cosmos

Geometry… patterns of shape

Astrology…patterns and cycles of human behaviour related to the cosmos

Biology...patterns/ cycles of life forms.

Theology…patterns of belief

Chemistry… patterns of elements and compounds

Psychology… patterns and processes of the human psyche

Poetry… patterns of insight, evoked in images constructed from patterns of words.

Our work will touch upon most of these and other sets of patterns. Essentially however, we shall be dealing with:

The Tree of Life of Qabalah as a magical map. This is a sacred geometry used to explore our own inner selves, the inner worlds beyond ourselves and to approach the source from which we and the rest of creation take our being.

The mythology and sacred geometry of the Isles of Britain set upon the Tree of Life and other magical patterns. This will draw upon the knowledge and wisdom of the megalith builders, the later Celtic peoples and even some modern day poets, mystics and magicians.

The psychological patterns of human personality.

The employment and integration of such patterns in white magic in the service of creation and the betterment of ourselves (these being two sides of the same coin!).

Mysticism reaches for the source of all patterns; mythology sets down Archetypal patterns which point us to that source, which we generally call God. Magic teaches us how to interact with, learn from and serve through archetypal patterns, so we need in the first instance to see what that loosely used word "Archetype" means in its various contexts.

The word archetype is generally used in three ways, all of which will be considered and interacted with in this course.

1) The first are psychological archetypes pertaining to standard key images which operate in the personal unconscious of each of us. These were set out and related to the key images of mythology by the psychologist Carl Jung. For example they include "The wise old man, or woman " archetype, a figure which may appear in dreams to denote wisdom and guidance. The Anima and Animus, often called the "contrasexual image", which relates to human libido and so on.

2) The second kind of archetypes are magical archetypes which are inner benchmarks defining how we should relate to creation. Unlike psychological archetypes, they consist of areas of independent inner consciousness beyond, yet parallel to, the constructs of personal psychology. Like psychological archetypes they appear in meditation and dream as humanised figures embodying and defining facets of inner reality, usually in relation to a particular folk soul or mythology. Examples in our own folk soul/mythology might include Merlin, King Arthur, Queen Guinevere, Morgan le Fey, Britannia and so on. The essential difference is that these are independent sources of action and power which stand beyond the vagaries of human consciousness, even though our own perception may warp or limit them to conform to the psychological archetypes of our personal perception. In other words Merlin is what Merlin is, whatever our personal notions of him may be!

3) The third kind of archetypes, most vividly expounded on the Qaballistic Tree of Life are Archangelic archetypes. If Jungian psychological archetypes describe the format for personal human consciousness and magical archetypes describe the consciousness of a race or folk soul, then archangelic archetypes reveal the mind of God. They embody what tends to be called "the divine plan" and are seen as the projected thoughts of God from which creation arises. They appertain, as you will see, to what Qabalah calls the world of Briah. When magical treatises talk about the "Archetypal" or "Heaven" worlds it is usually this archangelic realm they are referring to. In the holistic philosophy of the Mysteries all these three patterns of archetype relate and interact in one pattern, a pattern of form under the presidency of the Triple Goddess. We may form our first magical pattern to illustrate this. It is important to note how these three "worlds" or modes overlap each other:

Let us now look at these " patterns of the dance" which are related to inner processes and relate them to patterns, firstly in our perception of the outer world. Whilst we have been looking at these as three fold manifestations, their function in and through the outer world we know tends to be four fold. The human psyche, as Jung demonstrated, is rather like a ball of four segments of function floating on the sea of the unconscious, with the surface of that sea representing the emergence and submergence of these to waking conscious perception. These four functions of the psyche are seen as

Thinking….as opposed to feeling

Feeling…...as opposed to thinking

Intuition…. as opposed to sensation

Sensation…as opposed to intuition

In other words the opposites of each function must take their respective places in unconsciousness or waking consciousness but can’t be operable at the same time:

These psychological functions are of primary importance in magical work. Dion Fortune defined magic as "The art of making changes in consciousness in conformity with will". Consciousness therefore, in its fourfold functioning, becomes a tool with which we can operate and mediate between the inner worlds and our outer environment.

Jung identified such patterns as magic circles in his studies of eastern esotericism and consequently called them mandalas. Whilst however there is a certain "universality" to esoteric ideas, there are specific and important differences between the psychic and cultural conditions of the Far East and the west and they cannot normally be successfully mixed. Dion Fortune’s view that Qaballah should be treated as the "Yoga of the West" is a view which the Western Tradition has generally endorsed. But for the setting of magical ritual we tend to use a less complex pattern.

 The seasons are of course governed by the celestial phenomena of the Summer and Winter Solstices and the Spring and Autumn Equinoxes, which occur as the Earth, tilted on its axis, makes its annual progress, with the rest of the planets, around the Sun. Our Celtic ancestors didn’t however gauge their year by the beginnings and ends of seasons but by mid seasons from the centre of each Solstice and Equinoctial tide. Their seasons also related to regular but vital occurrences in the cycles of their lives. For example the Irish name for the midpoint between the winter Solstice and the spring Equinox was Imbolc, which means "milk time", the time in February when the ewes came into milk, ready to feed their spring born lambs. They were well aware of the Solstices and Equinoxes and celebrated them, but their essential celebrations were these "cross quarters", which are still celebrated, particularly by neo pagans, today. We may overlay our magic circle with these Celtic Festivals or "cross quarters" whilst using the same four colours we have been using to define the seasonal and elemental quarters in our previous diagrams. (Yellow for East/Air, Red for South/ Fire, Blue for West /Water and Green for North / Earth) These are the traditional quarters used in the Western tradition.

 

The Solstices, Equinoxes and the Celtic Fire festivals. The names given are those generally used in the Western Tradition and/or among neo pagan groups. They are actually a hybrid of the traditional Irish and old English names, but are presented in the common currency of the many and varied groups in the British Isles and elsewhere who observe them.

he ideas that we have been considering of a three fold power that has a four fold mode of expression are easily reconciled if we think of our four fold magic circle as a two dimensional plan of three interlocking circles. In other words, a magic circle is a sphere of three rings "laid flat".

We may go on to think of those qualities of "Triple" Gods and Goddesses …Wisdom, Knowledge and Understanding…as being manifested by the Triple Goddess in the phenomenal world through Time, Space and Events.

t is this elaboration of the magic circle of four fold consciousness into three dimensions of environment which gives us the magical concept of Sacred Space. Sacred Space places the magician with his or her four fold facilities of consciousness at the centre of a personal universe in the here and now. From this centre of the microcosmic personal universe the macrocosm of the greater universe may be talismanically set to rights. Needless to say there are weighty ethical issues here, and we shall consider these in due course. Meanwhile, with the concept of Sacred Space, our sacred geometry moves through expression of the three fold and four fold factors of being to sevenfold expression. This is a concept which we shall come across time and again in magical cosmology and in the mythologies which express it. It is also a basic premise of the pattern used in Qaballah of "The Three within the One" (the so called Supernal Sephiroth) being manifested by the Seven (the so called Lower Sephiroth), through Four Worlds.

If we now return to our first diagram of the three worlds of Archetypes we may see Sacred Space "appear" in the central "world" of magical archetypes.

The Way of the Mysteries Correspondence Course Lesson Five

Paper 6 Magic. Ó mike harris 2003

 

MORE ABOUT PENTAGRAMS

 

Since Neolithic and Bronze Age times, five fold symbolism has been employed in all sorts of magical contexts. Many prehistoric remains in the British Isles attest to this, from the fivefold chambered tombs like Hetty Peglar’s Tump in Uley in Gloucestershire to the five enscribed stones in the burial chamber at Barclodiad y Gawres on Anglesey, to the fivefold geometry found by Professor Thom to be implicit in the stone circle at Moel Ty Uchaf. near Corwen in North Wales and of course the five great trilithons at Stonehenge. The ancient Egyptians also used the device of a pentagram within a circle to denote the Duat, the Egyptian underworld, somewhat equivalent to the Welsh underworld called Annwn. A charm, discovered at the mithraeum just outside of the Roman fort at Segontium (modern day Caernarfon) also had a pentagram engraved upon it, suggesting perhaps a Romano Celtic merging of magical methods and/or beliefs..

This longstanding pentagonal/pentagram symbolism may have been part of the reason why "Avalon" came to be. As you will know by now, the word Avalon derives from the welsh word afal, which means an apple. There was also a preoccupation with the colours red, denoting the outer world, and white denoting the inner world (Annwn), both colours of which comprise the spherical apple and thus a sphere which simply indicates the inner and outer worlds. Take an apple and cut it horizontally and you will find at the heart of this representation of the inner and outer worlds, a perfect pentagram. This appears to have been all part of the apple/Avalon mythos developed by the bards of Wales in the Dark Ages, who also used a lot of "five" and "seven" symbolism, as their enigmatic poetry and mythology make clear.

(The Dark Ages, sometimes now called" the early mediaeval period", are considered to be the period from the time that the Roman legions left Britain in 410ad until the Norman invasion in 1066. They are called "Dark Ages" because our knowledge of the period is scant. This is however the period when the so called "Celtic Mysteries" received their main impulse and Arthur, Merlin and Taliesin first appeared. It was a peculiar time when mythology and magical ideas , many of very ancient provenance, were eagerly furthered alongside of the early Christianity of the Celtic church…indeed many of the bards promoting these ideas, which particularly included concepts of a" triple Goddess", cauldron myth and the idea of a sevenfold inner world called Annwn, were themselves clerics)

Concepts of the Welsh /British Avalon and of magical chess (called Gwyddbwyll in Welsh and Fidchell in Irish,) developed in the Dark Ages, all employed five fold symbolism which went somewhat beyond mere "opening and closing" of rituals.

This in turn seems to have come from a realisation of the structure and dynamics of those much earlier British prehistoric sites. Bards and commentators of the 12^th century ad, like Geoffrey of Monmouth ,were just as fascinated by places like Stonehenge (which incorporates fivefold symbolism) then as we are now.

 

Most stone circles, as distinct from the earlier Neolithic tombs, were built in the Bronze Age (approx 2,000bc – 700 bc) but mostly abandoned by about 1, 200 bc. They had therefore fallen into disuse some thousand years before the Druids and some two thousand years before the bards of the Dark Ages could give them any consideration.

 

We don’t know what the Druids thought of them, but we do know that the Dark Age bards were as interested in them then, as many of us are now. But we should be wary in our interpretation of these old sites because it is probably a mistake to assume that the Bronze Age or Neolithic inhabitants of these islands thought as we do and that we can simply transfer modern occult concepts to ancient peoples…not least concepts of what we think the pentagram signifies. We should also be aware, when working at such places that they were often built to function with geomagnetic and astronomic configurations which have long since changed. With not a few pole reversals in the earth’s magnetic field in the last several thousand years, it is unlikely that such things as electromagnetic hotspots have remained as they were when these sites were inaugurated

There is, however, evidence to suggest that some Bronze Age sites were used for occasional human sacrifice which involved the so called five fold death or death of Hercules Even discounting the barbarity of such practices, they do, nonetheless appear to enshrine a principle and one which perhaps existed (if in a much less barbarous way) from the earlier Neolithic epoch. Alan Richardson’s book Secrets of the Stones, to which I contributed, carried an account of a site visit by Wendy Berg and I to the Neolithic tomb called Hetty Peglar’s Tump at Uley in Gloucestershire.

The tomb consists of a mound with an entrance overhung with a huge stone lintel, so low that one has to almost crawl beneath it to enter. Inside is a passage almost seven metres long with five chambers leading off, two on either side and one facing at the end. The two chambers on the right hand side are ruined and closed off now, but the original configuration was pretty much as shown. Wendy and I independently used a distant viewing technique to try and ascertain what had actually taken place there some four or five thousand years ago. Our accounts, compiled without collusion, were remarkably similar. For what it’s worth (and all such things must be taken with a degree of scepticism) mine was as follows:

 

The body was pulled into the tomb with a rope. This was an important part of the ritual because the rope represented a restoration of the umbilical cord that joined the deceased to Mother Earth. The rope also had a practical purpose. Obviously the body couldn't be carried or easily manoeuvred through the very low and narrow opening and had to be roped and dragged in. This umbilical symbolism was carried on when the navel of the deceased was punctured with the point of an antler to, as it were, re-establish the umbilical connection which had been closed when the umbilical cord had been tied at birth. In fact as it turned out I got this slightly wrong! On reading up on this site after the visit, I noted that excavation hadn't found antler, but boar tusk. This actually equated better with the Underworld tradition that was spawned in these prehistoric times and carried through into the mythology of the Celtic Dark Age era The boar tusk being used by women in death/rebirth rites equates very well with the sow mythology of Cerldwen, the Welsh underworld cauldron goddess. These boar tusks may even be the origin of the 'horns of light' referred to in Taliesin's Prieddeu Annwn poem, which seems to be structured around the Underworld mythology associated with pre-Celtic burial chambers.

 

 

 

Be that as it may, in this ritual it seems that five mature women occupied the stations of the burial complex to see the deceased into his or her rebirth state. This rebirth would be through merging with the land. The mound is sited with its entrance in the East, and end chamber in the West. The deceased would therefore be going into the west and into the earth ... just as the sun appeared to, to merge with the earth mother, so that it could be reborn from her each following day. The tiny opening would in this case assure a 'disappearance' to the uninitiated gathered outside who would not be able to look directly into the tomb. When the corpse had been drawn into the tomb (legs first) by a woman crouched with -a rope in the end (western) chamber, the navel would be punctured to let the deceased know that the umbilical connection had been restored. This would be done when the corpse was between the stone screens situated between the two sets of side chambers, as these screens represent the transition point at the neck of the womb. This 'divide' offers the traditional three/five symbolism and it may be of some significance that this tomb was sealed after it had received the fifteen burials / skeletons found. I believe that another Neolithic tomb a mile or two up the road may have been built to accommodate further burials or that skeletons were removed and bones dispersed from time to time when it was thought that earlier burials had merged with the land and/or to stop the fifteen figure being exceeded.

What happened after the corpse was dragged in and the navel punctured wasn't so clear. It seemed that the women in the side chambers each performed some ritual act over the four limbs and that being done the corpse was dragged further in and some ritual act performed on the head by the presiding woman/ priestess in the western end chamber. (the fontonel, the open hole in the skull at birth which closes soon in infancy was probably "re-opened") How they coped with the existing burials in the confined space of the tomb when ritually introducing a new corpse was unclear.

 

The principle embodied in this and later sacrificial Bronze Age practice was perhaps the idea of the cessation of mortal life being marked through five stages and thus to all intents forming a fivefold bridge between the red "outer" world and the "white" inner world. In prehistoric times these five graduations of the crossing, the "going back" into the inner earth or the sunset from which the person had been born was probably marked by the cessation of the five senses…sight, hearing, taste, smell and touch.

 

ASSIGNMENT

We may therefore think of the pentagram as the "knot of life" not simply as a standard magical symbol for opening and closing rituals. Meditate upon this. But you will need absolute silence and a completely neutral place without not only any exterior noise but any intruding smells or other sensations. Sit quietly with an apple and perform the ceremony of cutting it (horizontally). Look at the revealed pentagram with the seeds of life (the apple seeds) at its core. Now put the apple down, keep your hands free so that they rest upon nothing in particular, close your eyes and in doing so be aware of the loss of the sense of vision. Then imagine the loss of hearing, the loss of taste, the loss of touch and the loss of smell. Try to wilfully therefore suspend the senses. Then having done so, in as far as you can (it IS difficult!!) bring each sense slowly back on line appreciating it as you do so. It needs practice and it is almost impossible to get anything but a partial "result"…but in magic "intention is everything". Opening your eyes last of all pick up the two halves of the apple and in a gesture which definitely closes the operation, hold the two cut halves of the apple back together. Get up, move about, be aware of all your senses fully functioning and make a note of the psychological and physical sensations that you have experienced. You may want to re-establish the sensations of taste and hearing by chewing the apple. Do this exercise at least once a week for this lesson period…remembering that eating apples is good for you !

 

 

 

 

 

© mike harris 2003

 

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