By guest blogger
Steven Ashe
excerpts from his
The Complete Golden Dawn Initiate
The general theme of perfecting the Self in the western hermetic tradition of Qabalah was inherited from the renaissance in Judaic philosophy brought about by the teachings of Isaac Luria. His concept of Hitlabshut or the enclothement of higher dimensional souls in lower dimensional vessels transformed the earlier static hierarchy model of Qabalah evolved in Northern Spain and the Languedoc region of Southern France since the 12th Century.
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| Isaac Luria Tree of Life |
Luria articulated the ‘mechanics’ of the role of Messiah in the scheme of the Divine Creation, viewing the entire universal cosmic drama as a vibrant dynamic, aimed towards the redemption of an exiled Shekhina, or divine presence.
Luria considered each individual as having a cosmic role in the restoration of the Creation to what might be considered its pre fall from Eden state. The biblical Fall was symbolic of a shattering of God’s original perfect Creation and Luria envisioned the consequent reconfiguration of the sephirothic schemata as a paradigm in which the activity of divine consciousness seeks liberation from the forms in which it has become cloaked.
In addition to this quite novel focus, Luria’s philosophical teachings yielded new interpretations of the Zohar: The Book of Splendour. All this impressed the intellectual Samuel (MacGregor) Mathers who, with the scholastic assistance of Crown Coroner, Dr William Wynn Westcott, had produced a partial translation of the Zohar. Mathers and Westcott essentially shaped the GD, despite arguments over the order’s murky origins in pseudo Freemasonic mystique.
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| Golden Dawn Tree of Life |
The influence of Westcott underlies many of the subtleties in the Golden Dawn’s understanding of the dynamics of the Qabalistic scheme of the Tree of Life and the Four Worlds in which it is held to be manifest. Westcott had a classical education and was the founder of the Adelphi Lodge of the Theosophical Society in London. He translated and commented upon a number of important Qabalistic source works, the Sepher Yetzirah, or Book of Formation, being the most esteemed.
In this work, his presentation of the Yetzirahtic Texts of the Thirty Two Paths provides a link to some ancient meditative descriptions of the Tree of Life.
Westcott’s Sepher Yetzirah formed the basis of the Golden Dawn’s underlying cosmology, although the body of Hermetic works which had grown out of the Renaissance also contributed to its library.
Between 1871 and the time of Mather’s death in 1917, the revolutions in all fields of Science demonstrated notable phenomena affecting both religion and philosophy. This involved an understanding of Relativity Theory, research into evolutionary biology and the practical mysteries of radioactivity and X-rays. In many ways, the mind-set of the world’s population was being transformed by the new paradigms.
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| SL MacGregor Mathers |
The static hierarchical models of the Qabalah schools of 12th Century Europe, sourced by Westcott and Mathers, were still fodder for those who remained rooted in archaic models; but some embraced the new revolutionary thinking.
Crowley was commenting upon relativity in his sumptuous journal, The Equinox, during the first decade of the Twentieth Century and even made references to Quantum Theory in his book accompanying the Book of Thoth Tarot deck.
Violet Firth, writing as Dion Fortune, was in correspondence with Crowley and had been trained in the Alpha and Omega lodge of the GD, headed by Mather’s widow Moina – the sister of French philosopher Henri Bergson. Fortune authored the classic ‘Mystical Qabalah’ in the 1930s which is still considered by some to be of merit today. Kenneth Grant, one of Crowley’s prestigious students wrote of a meeting between Crowley and Fortune in Hastings, prior to the old mage’s demise. Apparently the two got along famously, despite the snooty disapproval of Fortune’s associates in Magic.
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| Aleister Crowley |
Whilst, retaining the core of the Golden Dawn schemata, Dion Fortune supplements her thesis with much theosophical material derived from Blavatsky and the monumentally laborious works of Alice Bailey. In an earlier detailed, and somewhat more convoluted, investigation of Qabalistic lore, The Cosmic Doctrine, she conveys something of the Lurian dynamic without getting bogged down in any form of historical narrative. The next great leap forward in the understanding of the Hermetic Qabalah was greatly-dependent upon the scholarship of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, after the historic upheaval of the Second World War.
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| Gershom Scholem |
The erudite Hebrew scholar Gershom Scholem has ‘named and shamed’ the school of Aleister Crowley’s system of Qabalah as unsatisfactory and there is little reason to elicit that he was not referring to the whole Golden Dawn school of Qabalah, as we have come to know it, through the works of IsraelRegardie and others. Similarly, there is little empathy from Scholem with fellow Hebrew University Professor, Martin Buber’s, more existentialist interpretation of Qabalah.
Scholem’s dismissal of Golden Dawn school Qabalah is prejudiced by a religious ethnocentricity. The Order’s approach to 12th Century classical lore involved techniques of gnostic illuminism quite authentic to these historical roots.
Gershom Scholem was a scholastic commentator upon the Messianic Qabalah of Isaac Luria. Particularly upon the impact of these teaching upon the rational and irrational forces vibrant within Judaic historical culture. Scholem saw the Messianic movement of the 1660s spearheaded by Sabbatai Zevi as a historical consequence of the Lurianic Qabalah.
Sabbatai Zevi presented himself as the Jewish Messiah during the reign of the Ottoman Turks. Converts to his claims to messiah status spanned the Judaic professional classes as far West as the City of London, as followers gave away their possessions and broke ancient religious taboos in anticipation of the immediate end of the world. Zevi performed a last minute conversion to Islam, astonishing and confusing the entire world.
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| Martiin Buber |
The writings of Buber and Scholem helped to inform the development of post traditional GD Qabalah research in an era when an explosion of publishing in Tarot and esoteric hermetics was at its peak. So, too, was the post Behavioural arena of Psychology, where functional schools of the discipline were now evolving with great sophistication.
From the work of Freud, to the systems of Jung, Adler and Wilhelm Reich, new architectures of the Mind were amassed to provide fresh models of human perception and mental representation.
As these insights came to the attention of the layman, the public became more conversant with notions of the Conscious and Unconscious Mind, theSubConscious, the Ego and the Id. So these concepts became integrated with models of the Tree of Life published during and after the 1960s.
Qabalistic theory embraces every system it meets. As psychology progressed into a unique Cognitive school, and science evolved through Chaos Theory into Supersymmetry and String Theory, so has the rich polymath of the Qabalah flourished.
The very latest conundrums of M Theory physics present the mathematics of the universe as an entity similar to a virtual reality. This would be of little surprise to the traditional Qabalist, who would simply point out the design of the Tree in the Four worlds (Atziluth – Nearness, B’riah – Creativity, Yetzirah – Formation and Assiah – Activity) as a dynamic of the sentience of the Deity underlying our noumenal world.
Scientific enquiry into the nature of Light, in the form of the Double-Slit experiment, has taught us much about the role of the observer in natural phenomena. Indeed, the whole of observed reality seems to be an equivocal agreement between the lowest common denominators of our perceptive faculties and wildly dynamic forces of the universe acting upon us.
Despite the ancient adage, ‘As above, so below’, the minutely microscopic behaves according to completely different rules and probabilities than the forces and energies of the macroscopic world. This is what distinguishes Newtonian Physics from Quantum Theory. Where the former yields logical equations, describing graduating mathematical formulas between forms and energies, Quantum Theory can only deal with probable descriptions and possibilities.
What ‘makes sense’ when dealing with the behaviour of matter and energy on the one hand cannot be applied to the realm of the microscopic. On the level of sub-atomic energies, huge velocities of energy and levels of atomic gravity apply which would crush us to a single point if they were applied at the human scale.
The true nature of the world we experience – The World of Assiah or Activity – must be infinitely far richer than that which our sensory apparatus allows a glimpse of. This richness belongs to the Formative and Creative worlds of Briah and Yetzirah, classified in GD system as the realm of the Archangelic and the Angelic respectively.
On these formative and creative levels the Tree of Life determines the balance between order and chaos within which the mechanism of our fields of experience may function. This algorithmic agreement between background forces is only now becoming detectable by mathematical description. Anything approaching a summation valid to our phenomenological logic could be as misleading as Newtonian theory applied to the Quantum level.
Communication within a neuron is electrical and near light speed, whilst that between neurons is chemical and suspiciously slow. Thought itself is present at a level where micro-gravities are immense and Space and Time are distorted at such sub atomic levels. In the Sepher Yetzirah, Time itself is described as having two dimensions. This alludes to the internal time measured by the Mind and to the notion of time by the clock. It is both experience and duration at one and the same moment.
Inexplicable apparitions reported since biblical times, and perhaps even unidentified flying object sightings, can perhaps be understood when regarded as cognitive dissonance against the background of spatial and temporal relativity.
In the realm of Assiah or Activity, the Sephiroth of the GD Tree of Life are referred to what are known as the Planetary Intelligences. In essence, these represent the qualities of human sentience. In the highest of the Four Worlds the Tree of Life in Atziluth, or Nearness, is closest to the most ideal representation of the ultimate state of reality.
The Tree in this realm is truly beyond the comprehension of the phenomenal mind. The values of its cohesion exist in the mind of the Creator alone.
According to the Hermetic precept ‘as above, so below’ conscious human thought is held to be the reflection of that of the Divine. But thought itself is not purely an ethereal activity, for it is bound up with our concepts of perception and representation. Also, there are contributory factors to consider regarding thought, such as signal input from our nervous and glandular system.
The study of the concept of consciousness as a Tour de Force, something greater than the sum of its parts, cannot ignore the role of the parts. The classifications afforded by the schemata of the Tree of Life provide ample means by which we may map the partial faculties of the intellect and the emotions combined within us. Thus we may come to learn the full potential of the Self.
On the level of thought alone, the physics of biology implies that a widely variant dynamic might apply to understanding the construct which our computational mind presents as our reality - a dynamic which may be highly dependent upon the limitations of our perception.
As a philosophical model, a kind of scientific ‘thought experiment’, the concept of Qabalah has evolved through the continental school of Eliphas Levi, Papus and that of the Golden Dawn to incorporate quite revolutionary concepts. Despite the disapproval of Gershom Scholem, this recently-engineered reworking of the traditional systems of Qabalah has been studied in at least one post graduate initiative in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
The Golden Dawn tradition is therefore not only still vibrant, but ever changing and becoming more sophisticated in the minds of those touched by its influence.