What Price Is Eclecticism or Depth?

(Dedicated to you, but you weren’t listening.)

There are basically two dimensions that rule how a ritual magician will collect and/or develop his or her ritual lore. Wide ranging or narrow and deep. Combinations of these two dimensions often represent whether one is attempting to integrate too many dispirit elements without a sufficient depth or whether one is two narrow and too deep, being therefore unable to see the forest for the trees. Of course, the best approach is the middle ground, which is carefully gathering together various related ritual lore, creatively inventing what is missing or omitted while keeping the new elements relative to the acquired elements, and basically using an overall theme to keep things tightly integrated together. 

What anyone wants to avoid is attempting to reinvent the wheel, or to create something in an intellectual vacuum. One of the points that John Michael Greer made in his class on pagan magick was that too often magicians attempt to develop something that already exists in some tradition or another, and that they tend to use popularly defined beliefs and tastes to achieve this task. They don’t (for whatever reason) perform an extensive research to see what is already out there and what other experts have to say before attempting to build something. We are all guilty of doing this, and in my early years, I was particularly guilty of attempting to reinvent the wheel.

The first question that confronts anyone who is beginning on the path of becoming a ritual magician is where to start? Do we just jump in and start working magick as soon as we have a few tools and a few books? Do we look for a tradition and seek admittance to the nearest group, or do we just go it alone and damn the consequences? 

Experimentation is the key to mastering the art of ritual magick, but at some point, the magickal devotee needs to be trained in an authentic tradition. This will help him or her to build a foundation for all future work, and having some kind of foundation and access to a teacher is very important. I have covered this ground previously, so I don’t need to go over it again. 

Acquiring a tradition will also determine the frame through which all future acquisitions will be measured, valued and adopting. If some new technique, methodology or philosophy doesn’t fit in with one’s current tradition, then it will likely function poorly with the other elements of that tradition. In time, due to additions and revisions, the adopted tradition will end up becoming uniquely one’s own, and this is the overall objective of this kind of work. This is called revisionism, and it is a natural part of any competent and advanced magician learning to master his or her trade.

What traditions would I recommend to the erstwhile student magician? There are quite a number of specific spiritual traditions that are very friendly to the practice of ritual magick. Some are actually magickal traditions more than spiritual or religious traditions. The Golden Dawn comes first to mind, and then, the O.T.O. and the A.A., Druidism, Wicca or Witchcraft, any form of Western Paganism (Greek, Roman or Egyptian reconstructions), to be followed by forms of Western Theosophy, and finally, by any esoteric version of a mainstream faith. 

However, the first seven in my list are, in my opinion, the better candidates to help the aspiring student develop their own tradition of ritual or ceremonial magick. Some of these traditions have a complete system for working many varieties of magick, and others are more or less incomplete, requiring the adherent to invent and develop various systems of magick to fill in the holes. 

So what are the essential categories of magick that will need to be developed if they don’t exist already? Here is a list, but it is not comprehensive and doesn’t include other and corollary disciplines (such as esoteric astrology or alchemy).

1. Low magick or earth-based magick

2. Elemental magick

3. Divination

4. Planetary magick

5. Astrological magick (Lunar Mansions & Decans)

6. Qabbalistic Magick (Sephiroth & Pathways)

7. Invocation and Evocation (Godhead, angelic, demonic, neutral spirits)

8. Godhead Assumption and magickal religious practices (magickal liturgies)

9. Ascension and Theurgy

10. Myth building, liturgy creation and the channeling of Godhead

11. Magnum Opus (Great Work)

You should consider this a generalized list of the eleven categories of a magickal regimen, and of course, the devil is in the details, as they say. Also, it is quite possible to have various substitutions to this list, so it is by no means exclusive or somehow carved in stone. However, it does give a specific enough of a list to compare to what is in your own magickal regimen.

Eclecticism is a useful tool, but it’s one that can be over-used. A disciplined practitioner must be insightful enough to be able to discard old techniques and methodologies for new ones that are better and more efficient. Often, redundancy haunts the typical student, making them unwilling to put aside old tried and true lore for the sake of efficiency and to eliminate duplication. Collecting must always be balanced with organizing, and then if necessary, purging and discarding. The real curse of eclecticism is being a pack rat and keeping everything no matter how outdated or inefficient. The most ordered personal grimoire has maybe one or just two different methodologies for doing an operation, and each of these “tools” should be kept in optimal condition and readiness. As the saying goes, the better the tools, the better the results of the work. Also, a poor workman blames his tools (instead of his lack of ability).

Then another issue is to determine how deep one should go with developing and working with a particular methodology. Based on the list above, the numerically higher elements in the list would require a greater degree of development and research to formulate the most optimal and structurally elegant solution. Certainly, the last four can take a lifetime to master and complete, while the other seven can be brought to a certain level of competency and expertise without having to be over-developed. 

An important key is to keep one’s personal grimoire very ordered and moderately structured, since these will be the rites and practices that one will work with on a regular basis. Disorder makes such work difficult, if not even impossible. It’s also important to allow for a level of simplicity to rule over one’s collection of lore. Rituals should be readily easy to perform and have a certain natural flow to them. There is nothing worse than piling too much into a ritual so that it becomes so dense that it collapses of its own weight and becomes unworkable. Culling and making things more efficient should operate on each individual rite, and on the personal grimoire as a whole. This is not to say that some ritual workings won't be elaborate or quite complex, since some operations may require a large number of steps. It’s just that the magician should be aware and practice efficiency where-ever possible.

As I stated in the beginning of this article, the worst-case for eclecticism is to produce a disordered system that contains a great deal of redundancy and whose lore contains so much extraneous stuff that the rituals are difficult to perform and even less effective. An unbridled eclecticism will easily fill a whole house with a lot of unnecessary and unneeded junk, all of which will interfere with the ability to perform even the simplest working.

Someone who focuses too intently on depth will ultimately be unable to perform the simplest working because he or she is living under the requirement that everything must be perfect and thoroughly researched in order to be effective. It’s easy to spend eternity in the developing of lore, but none of us have an eternity that we can waste in this exercise. At some point the magician must experiment and work with what he or she has in their repertoire and move forward. Mistakes made in a ritual working seldom doom an operation, and in fact, they often appear as markers that real magick is alive and functioning well. 

Perfection is, therefore, an esthetic virtue but not a requirement for effective magick. This is a painful lesson that competent magicians need to learn. It can have the effect of making magicians less productive and capable as they become more advanced and knowledgeable of their art. If you ever find yourself musing about how simple magick was when you were just starting out, and how it also seemed more effective in the past than today, then you are likely afflicted by the disease of perfection, and it’s time to break out and be more spontaneous. Getting in too deep interferes with one’s ability to see other possibilities or to explore another variation. It can also interfere with the ability of just doing magick for its own sake.

So these are some of my rules of thumb when developing rituals and expanding magickal lore. The best advice is to find a middle ground between being too eclectic, derivative and redundant on one hand, and being too much of a perfectionist, or going too deep in any one direction. Be balanced, open to new possibilities and seek to be organized, efficient and engaged. Taking on such an approach will make the path of acquiring a magickal expertise one that is filled with joy, mystery and the manifestation of the unexpected wild magick that often seems to flourish all around us, but we’re too damn busy to notice.

Frater Barrabbas

René Guénon and “Against Reincarnation”

Continuing with my series of articles about reincarnation, I would like to examine the ideas and written opinions of an occultist named René Guénon, and particularly, the article  entitled “The Case Against Reincarnation,” written by Joscelyn Godwin, which appeared in the Winter 1997 edition of the Gnosis magazine. Some occultists have lionized Guénon’s writings, and others have considered him quite a pompous, arrogant and opinionated man. I have collected several of his translated works and have found them somewhat difficult to read, which might be due to the fact that the translations are more accurate than actually readable. Mr. Godwin’s translations and analysis of Guénon’s writings, particularly on this topic, seem to better represent his thoughts in an accessible manner. You can find the entire series of Guénon’s books translated into English and republished through the imprint “Sophia Perennis.”

Also, I wanted to comment briefly on a few remarks that one or two individuals have made regarding my previous articles in this series. First of all, I am not at all making light of anyone who ardently believes in reincarnation. If anything, I am challenging the typically accepted ideas that surround a belief in reincarnation. I haven’t said that reincarnation is impossible (although Guénon does make this statement, as we shall see), but I am just questioning the logic and built in assumptions associated with the popular belief in reincarnation. As occultists, no belief system should be accepted without some critical thinking and analysis.

While I may make light of what I consider to be the more abusive aspects of a belief in reincarnation (such as someone making unjustified claims of having been someone famous), I do respect the overall assumptions and personal beliefs that someone might have who believes in reincarnation. If my words have found offence or have disturbed some of my readers, then all I can say in my defense is that I have approached this analysis with the same critical thinking skills that I have successfully used in my own occult work. All I ask is that those who read this series of articles ask themselves some questions and do a bit of self examination after reading them.

French Occultist René Guénon

René Guénon (1888 - 1951) was a French author and intellectual who continues to be influential in the study of metaphysics and occultism, having written on topics ranging from metaphysics, sacred science and traditional studies to symbolism and initiation. (See the Wikipedia article for a thorough biographical examination of René Guénon - you can find it here.)

René Guénon not only expounded on the religious systems of Hinduism, Taoism and mystical Islam in his various books, but he had actually received initiations and instruction within these traditions as well. He was one of the earliest Europeans initiated into a lineage of Shankaracharya (Indian Vendanta) and he also received a consecration in Jules Doinel’s French Gnostic church. He was fluent in a number of languages, and declared that spiritual traditions must be handed down from teacher to student in order to keep those traditions relevant and alive within the culture that gave them their meaning. He was against borrowing terms and concepts from one culture to be used in another, and believed that the West had lost its valid esoteric traditions because of materialistic science and religious intolerance. He was often at times an opponent of the Theosophical movement and an ardent critic of the popular occultism of his day. His voluminous writings were first written in French, but were later translated into over twenty languages. He died in Cairo, having become something of an adopted Egyptian and a follower of mystical Islam.

In the article “Against Reincarnation”, Joscelyn Godwin had located the original source of René Guénon's opinions and theories about reincarnation in a single a book entitled “L’Erreur Spirite” (The Spiritist Fallacy) published in 1921, which, I might add, was one of the few books at the time that had not been translated into English. Godwin took the responsibility of distilling and paraphrasing the contents of this book into the salient points used in his article, stating that a mere translation of the work would be too difficult, since Guénon had a tendency to “extreme wordiness and philosophical abstraction,” which would distract the reader from its inherent and important message. However, that book has since been translated into English, and I have found it readable, although quite wordy with long and uninterrupted paragraphs. By the way, this book was written by Guénon to counter the popular beliefs and practices of Spiritualism, which had impacted much of occultism in the late 19th century. It was the proponents of Spiritualism who brought the concept of reincarnation into the popular imagination, only to be later picked up by theosophists and western occultists.

Ostensibly, the proponents of reincarnation believe that the same being can be born more than once in a human body while Guénon holds that it cannot occur. This is because he emphatically states that a human existence is only one of a myriad of possible manifestations through which the totally of being, which he calls the Universal Being, can manifest. The individual “beingness” of a human being is only the outer manifestation of this Universal Being, and only that greater entity re-manifests itself after the life of the individual human being perishes. If we value the individual human manifestation of life too greatly, then we misconstrue the nature of that Universal Being, which through its greater perspective cannot have such a bias. We also function as beings trapped in the web of space and time, and perceive events in our lifetime, as well as all lives in general, as sequential occurrences; but this would be considered an illusion from the point of view or perspective  of the Universal Being.

If we recall that Guénon had been trained and initiated into a sect of the Vendanta tradition in India, and that followers of Vendanta (especially the Advaita sect of Shankara) believe that the individual spirit called Atman is undifferentiated from the absolute Godhead called Brahma, then we can easily understand where he is coming from. Guénon believed that the indestructible element of an individual human being was essentially the same as the absolute Godhead, therefore it must exist in a state that profoundly transcends the individual self and its associated ego-body structure. This individual and internal Atman would not be limited by space, time or any aspects of the material world. Guénon believed that this absolute attribute of the individual was the only thing that could survive death, and in fact, he believed that it was completely untouched by the occurrence of death and mortality. If this is true, then it would explain his apparent hostility towards reincarnation and spiritualism. So this is what Guénon was referring to when he discussed the concept of the Universal Being; he was referring to the transcendental Atman.

In the book “The Spiritist Fallacy,” Guénon shapes his arguments against the possibility of reincarnation, stating unequivocally that it defies the concept of a trans-temporal, trans-personal inner Godhead which has no limitations. If we can agree that the universe has an infinite number of worlds, and that the material world is just one of an infinite number, and that life is not limited to this single planet but extends throughout the multiverse, then it does seem absurd that the individual Godhead incarnating as a human being would limit itself to just a series of sequential human lives instead of engaging with a multiverse of possibilities. As Guénon so succinctly puts it in his book, The Spiritist Fallacy, with the following quotations: 

“[U]niveral and total Possibility is necessarily infinite and cannot be conceived otherwise because, including all and leaving nothing outside itself, it cannot be limited by anything whatsoever.”

“Only within a finite set can one return twice to the same element, and even then that element would not be rigorously the same except on condition that the set in question is a closed system, a condition that is never effectively realized.”

“[I]n universal existence, a return to the same state is an impossibility. In total Possibility the particular possibilities, which constitute the conditioned states of existence are necessarily defined indefinitely multiple; to deny this is also to limit Possibility. This must be admitted on pain of contradiction, and suffices to establish that no creature can pass twice through the same state.” (See “The Spiritist Fallacy,” p. 180, translated by Alvin Moore, Jr. and Rams. P. Coomaraswamy Sophia Perennis 2003)

Godwin follows up with his own estimation of this perspective, which implies that a human incarnation is likely to occur only once for any individual spirit.

“In an infinite series, such as that of integers, each term appears but once. Likewise, in the infinite variety of the universe, experienced in its totality by every being, no single state need or can be repeated. The being contains (or to use the bead metaphor, passes through) them all, without singling out any particular state for special treatment through repetition.” (See “Against Reincarnation,” p. 30, para. 2)

What Guénon and Godwin have both said is that a single lifetime is unique and unrepeatable, which agrees with what I had often thought about the uniqueness of the genetic and temporal footprint of a living being. However, Guénon goes further to state that the essential nature of that being also cannot be repeated. This claim, if true, would go against almost all theories of reincarnation, and most particularly, the popular notion of reincarnation that he encountered in France in the 1920's, proposed by contemporary occultists and theosophists. As we discussed earlier, the issue of reincarnation is principally a question of what actually gets reincarnated, and according to Guénon, only the totality of being can and does re-manifest itself, but never in the same manner or through the same individual being. Godwin explains this logical pronouncement with the greatest of ease and efficiency.

“Guénon’s language and dry logic may obscure the grandeur of his view. Human life, he seems to be saying is not such a special and unique thing that beings are clamoring to experience it again and again. Beings including you and me are tremendous things, with unlimited vistas of lives in modes we cannot begin to imagine.” (See “Against Reincarnation,” p. 30, para. 3)

Thus from this viewpoint we can deduce that Guénon believes that corporeal life is but one of a myriad possibilities, and that to insist that a being should always be manifest in a material and human guise is so limiting as to be astonishing. As Godwin states: “With ‘indefinite possibility’ before it, it is absurd to imagine a being forever imprisoned in the closet of the physical universe, as the materialists do; or ever returning there, as the reincarnationists do.” As for the beliefs in reincarnation held by the Hindu religion and by Buddhism, Guénon states that they are misinterpretations of two completely different processes, which are metempsychosis and transmigration.

As Godwin points out in his article: “From the point of view of the essential being, so-called ‘death’ is nothing but a change of state, which might just as well be called ’birth into a new state’ inevitably a non-material one, if one follows Guénon’s principles. This manifestation of a being from state to state is called ‘transmigration’, although in fact the being has nowhere to migrate to. It is more a case of innumerable lives manifesting [due] to the being’s mere existence.”  (See “Against Reincarnation,” p. 31, para. 8)

Godwin goes on to point out that the serial manifestation of lives, seemingly sequential and having causal links to each other, and comprising of an evolutionary chain is illusory. Godwin also states that Guénon’s constant assault on reincarnation is because he feels that it obscures the real fact that “this unchanging self which sustains all the myriad states and who conscious attainment is the summum bonum.” The realm of the ego, which acts as the center of a human life is transitory, illusory and ephemeral. It is a grave mistake to elevate this transitory shadow of the true self and then to project it into the past and future as the self that is reborn in other bodies. As Godwin puts it so eloquently: “As soon as we die, we leave the human species behind forever.”

Guénon attributes the first appearance of the popular Western notion of reincarnation not with the advent of Theosophy or even Spiritualism, but to the French Socialists of the early 19th century, such as Charles Fourier and Pierre Leroux, who found it a tidy explanation for human inequality. While I am not able to thoroughly examine this claim, I was able to look up these two individuals in Wikipedia. Charles Fourier was an important French utopian socialist and philosopher of the early 19th century, and Pierre Leroux was a French philosopher and political economist from around the same period. Of these two individuals, only Leroux was reputed as believing in metempsychosis, who made it a part of his social theories (which were more in line with propaganda than scholarship),so I can at least verify the credibility of Guénon’s claim.

If metempsychosis was a popular notion amongst European intellectuals in the early 19th century, then it could have had a powerful impact on how reincarnation was defined by later organizations such as the Theosophical Society and the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor, who both lionized and developed this belief into a complex system. From those organizations this doctrine passed into the sentiments and beliefs of the common populous.  However, as we examine reincarnation from its historical sources, we will see more clearly where the origins of the theosophical theory of reincarnation came from as well as the digression of the popularly held belief.

Guénon's book also contained some theories that explain the occurrence of anecdotal evidence of reincarnation, as well the occurrence of ghosts and other paranormal phenomena. These phenomena are caused by what Guénon calls “psychic residue,” which are the energies or subtle parts of one's organic being. These energies are then separated or jettisoned from the body when a person dies, and while they slowly disperse and decompose, they can seemingly take on a life of their own. These residues can take the form of the body that they once inhabited, thus forming apparitions or ghosts, and they can also be picked up by individuals, sensed in dreams, manifesting as visions or even cause individuals to be possessed. Guénon also discusses in his book that some of these psychic residues are also passed down from parents to children in a kind of psychic heredity.

Since these energies are not unified through a physical body, they generally appear in a fragmentary manner, like the broken shards of a personality that once lived in another body in another time. However, without the constant renewal supplied by the physical body, these energies slowly dissipate; but they can and do continue to exist for long periods of time. Yet such a partial or fragmented entity, even though it is sensed and perceived in dreams and visions, and seems real and meaningful to the observer, it does not originate from one's own self. The apparition, however seemingly real, is only the fragmentary residual energy of a completely different person who happened to live in another time and place. Ghostly phenomena are the effects of mindless and soulless entities, since the true self or being that acted as the core of such an entity was retracted back into the Universal Being upon the death of the physical body.

Guénon defined this process of residual association that seems to influence individuals and cause them to believe in reincarnation as a form of metempsychosis. This definition is somewhat different than the classical definition of metempsychosis, which has its origins in ancient Greece (we will fully examine this topic below). However, Guénon wanted to differentiate the illusions of past lives and ghostly apparitions from the transmigration of the true self.

According to Guénon, metempsychosis occurs when the psychic residues associated with past incarnations appear in association with another being, human or animal. “Sometimes this gives the impression of reincarnation, as when a being contains identifiable psychic residues from the past. In such a case, one may remember past lives, but in the deepest sense they are not one’s own. They are an inheritance from other beings who will never reappear on the earthly scene.” This explanation would account for all of the anecdotal accounts and proofs for reincarnation, and it would further explain why the child who would become the current Dalai Lama was able to remember some things associated with the previous Dalai Lama, but could not gather together all of the memories and abilities that the previous mature individual possessed into the body and mind of the young boy.

We have covered all of Guénon’s views about and against reincarnation and its associated phenomena, and we can now make the following points about these views, assisting us in building an alternate theory to that which is defined by the Theosophical Society or held in the popular imagination.

• The true self, representing the indelible and immutable part of an individual being, is actually a vestige of the Universal Being, temporarily incarnating as a human being. The Universal Being is unlimited and ‘indefinite’, or infinite, while individual human beings are limited and definite, both in their characteristics and in their physical manifestation in the space time continuum.

• In the infinite variety of the Universal Being, no single state is ever repeated, which is to say that the true self that emanates from that universal state will incarnate as a human being only once, and then never revisit that state ever again, since it has an infinite variety of states in which to manifest itself.

• Death is but a rebirth into another state, and that the true self engages in a form of transmigration from state to state, never repeating the same state twice, although this is illusory, since from the standpoint of the Universal Being, all states are co-existent or ‘co-present’, meaning that they do not occur in a sequential or serial manner. There is no time and space from the perspective of the totality of being, there is only the eternal now.

• Reincarnation asserts that the true self is continually manifested in a corporeal body, but this would actually be against the odds, since corporeality is only one of an infinite series of possibilities for manifestation. Reincarnation also assumes the primacy of incarnating into a human body, which Guénon has shown is an absurd bias for human centric thinking that must be rejected.

• Anecdotal evidence for reincarnation can be explained as a process of ‘psychic residue’ left over from previous incarnations, and that dreams and impressions of previous past lives can be explained as a function of metempsychosis. The action of ‘psychic residue’ also explains the occurrence of ghosts, apparitions, and a sense of familiarity that one might find with places and events in the near or distant past.

• The belief in reincarnation in the Hindu and Buddhist religions is vastly different than the way they are held in the West. The popular belief in reincarnation as proposed by occultists and New Age adherents is the product of sentiments and ideas that have their origin in 19th century Utopian Socialism, progressive theories of social equality, and modern concepts on spiritual evolution rather than Eastern religious philosophies or Greek Philosophy. (We will prove this point in the paragraphs below.)

What remains is for us to examine the historical precedents for reincarnation, and also examine this belief as it is held in the religions of Hinduism and Buddhism to make our point that the current belief as held in the West is neither ancient nor concurrent with Eastern beliefs. It is, in fact, a very recent and modern creation, fashioned to give comfort to occult intellectuals who fear the oblivion of death; but it has also been responsible for propagating misinformation about the nature of the true self. This sentiment has also fostered a kind of false sense of personal immortality, in some cases allowing individuals to complacently delay their search for pathways to individual enlightenment. This is because they have subscribed to the belief that enlightenment takes many lifetimes, instead of it being available to everyone in this lifetime.

(To be continued..)

Frater Barrabbas

Public Interpretation is a Writer’s Responsibility

There is quite a dust-up going on in the Golden Dawn community, and I am not particularly interested in getting too deep into it. However, the source of the controversy is the latest book that Nick Farrell has writen about one of the founders of the Golden Dawn, S. L. MacGregor Mathers. I will admit that Mathers was quite a controversial figure in his time, and like all human beings, he had great virtues and terrible failings. Like most founders of occult organizations, he was a complex man who is now both honored and maligned by modern posterity. 

Ever since Ellic Howe’s book “Magicians of the Golden Dawn” and Francis King’s book “Ritual Magic in England,” it has been fashionable to paint Mathers as a sociopath and to declare that the Golden Dawn was based on deception and ruled by tyranny. Of course, my favorite book about the Golden Dawn’s history is still the one penned by Ithell Colquhoun, entitled “Sword of Wisdom: MacGregor Mathers and the Golden Dawn.” I truly wish that this book was republished in a paper back, since it is one of the few books that deals with the various personalities of the Golden Dawn and its various offshoot orders in a fair and compassionate manner. I am lucky that I own a copy of this book, and it’s one of my treasures.

Ms. Colquhoun wrote her book in manner that she did because she was an occultist and a one time member of the order. Ellic Howe and Francis King were never members of the Golden Dawn, and in fact, Mr. Howe was a historian with little compassion or actual sympathy for the order or its various members. Francis King’s relationship with occultism was very complex. While he managed to write and publish some excellent occult books, he also delighted in reporting on the most salacious and scandalous aspects of the modern occult movement. To this day, I don’t really know if Mr. King ever belonged to any occult organization, so if he wasn’t very sympathetic to the various founders of western occultism, it shouldn’t be too surprising.

Therefore, if someone is a member of an occult organization, you would think that they would be sympathetic to their subject matter if they happened to write a history of their order. However, the latest writer attempting to write the history of the Golden Dawn, and to make a name for himself as both the cutting edge historian and insightful occultist, is Nick Farrell. In his latest book, “King Over the Water,” he has sought to enlighten the public about Mathers and his various failings while attempting to exonerate the order and its teachings. This is quite a balancing act, to be sure. To quote the advertising on this book as it is marketed in Amazon dot com:

“In King Over the Water, Golden Dawn magician Nick Farrell paints a picture of the founders of the Golden Dawn becoming out of their depth as the Order began to create magicians. Rather than painting Mathers as an eccentric genius, Farrell sees him as an autocratic fantasist. He sees Mathers struggling to keep up as his students rapidly became better than him at the system he created, and shows how he was unable to raise his game to help the Order develop further. ”

You can read over this advertisement and it becomes pretty obvious that the book seeks to show Mathers in a particularly bad light. Instead of giving him credit for having founded the order and written most of its lore, he instead seeks to show that the lore stands above and beyond Mathers, who wasn’t apparently up to the job of building a comprehensive system of magickal occultism. I had judged this book to be just another a “hatchet job” on Mathers, so I haven’t bothered to purchase this book yet, but maybe I will so I can at least do a modest job of critiquing it. I am not an expert when it comes to the history of the Golden Dawn and its various affiliates, but I know the basic history. 

The Golden Dawn was founded around 116 years ago, so attempting to investigate the intentions and motives of its founder ends up being nothing more than a guessing game. There are historical records to be certain, but the individuals are now long dead, and their life stories are fragmentary at best, or in the case of Mathers, there are still a lot of mysteries. I believe that it would be better to honor the founders of the Golden Dawn for their unwitting contribution to western occultism and the practice of magick rather than attempting to reveal them as failed human beings. After all, we all have virtues and flaws, and we all accomplish some things and fail to accomplish others in our all too brief of a lifespan.

However, one thing that Nick Farrell did write up in his book that has particularly offended the active organization and honored initiates of the Alpha et Omega is an ambiguous line that he wrote in his book. David Griffin has quoted that part of the book which he found quite offensive, taking some sentences that were actually in two paragraphs and putting them together. However, after examining the actual two paragraphs, I still believe that David presented the basic idea of what was being said. The wording is very ambiguous, and of course, no names are named, so it’s up to the reader to determine the actual meaning implied. 

Whenever an author uses such phrases it’s because he or she doesn’t want to get sued for libel, or at least create a greater controversy. David and his colleagues at the one and only Alpha et Omega operating in the world (as far as I know) have taken this to mean that Nick is calling their organization a “cult.” Here is a paraphrase of the what was said in Nick’s book, and what has gotten the A+O crowd royally pissed off. 

“By the end of the 20th Century this availability of [Golden Dawn] information enabled various reenactment groups to be established. Some of these groups are sound... Unfortunately, other groups border on religious or political cults, typically centered on a single leader.... Typically such groups claim a link to that section of the Golden Dawn Order known as the Alpha et Omega or AO.”

 

I don’t know about you, but if someone wrote something like that about my organization, even if it was couched in ambiguity, I would be quite upset. Nick has denied that he was singling out David’s organization, and has said that he was referring to the recently fallen GD patriarch, Bob Zink and his group. Whatever Nick Farrell’s intention when he wrote these two paragraphs, the interpretation is wholly in the provenance of the reader, since he elected to use innuendo instead of clearly stating his meaning. If the A+O organization is upset at what Nick wrote, then they are fully justified, in my opinion.

As a writer, I am responsible for how people interpret my words, regardless of my intentions. I might say something that I consider innocuous in one of my blog articles or in one of my books, but if a group of people find it offensive, then I am responsible for their umbrage. I can ignore it, or attempt to explain my meaning, or just wade into the conflict and call my detractors names and start a flame-war. The sensible thing to do is to apologize and to write a retraction. I had to do that act of humble contrition on more than one occasion when I wrote something which was erroneous or managed to anger some of my readers. This can happen to any writer, and whether one’s intention was pure and the offending writing was an honest mistake, it doesn’t really matter. You wrote it and so therefore, you own it. It’s just a fact of life that anyone who seeks to be a writer has to deal with this kind of public backlash at some point in their career. The best advice is to be compassionate and seek to amend the wrong if possible.

However, instead of attempting to mitigate the anger that some in the Golden Dawn community felt about what Nick Farrell had written, he has steadfastly refused to take any responsibility, and in fact has resorted to calling his detractors “Brown Shirts,” as if to say that they represent some kind of fascist wing of the Golden Dawn community. That was like throwing gasoline on a brush fire, and it only made things a lot worse. Not only did Mr. Farrell write a hatchet job book on Mathers, but he also insulted some of the members of an operating second order faction. Why anyone would do this is beyond my comprehension. The notoriety will undoubtedly sell more books than what might have happened without the controversy, but the legacy that Nick Farrell is leaving to the rest of us is anything but positive and constructive.

Of course, to deal with this issue, David Griffin has decided to engage in some melodrama and a bit of tongue in cheek, talking about a Godfather-like conspiracy operating behind the scenes. (The only real conspiracy is hubris, personal vanity and egotism.) Some months ago David was comparing Farrell and Zelewski to the Star Trek Borg, which I might add was a humorous way of dealing with individuals who had caused him no small outrage. I guess making fun of your adversaries is better than trying to somehow silence them. If the propaganda against David was correct, then we could expect a mafia style assassination of his detractors, but of course, that won’t really happen. (We won’t get a blog article telling us that Nick Farrell sleeps with the fishes.) What has really happened is a number of adepts in the A+O are quite upset at their treatment by Farrell and company. They are outraged by the slander and the constant attacks against their organization. They aren’t guilty of starting any of these altercations, but they are quite zealous in defending themselves. Who can blame them for that?

As for myself, I am watching this all happen on the internet through the venue of various Yahoo groups and blog articles. There are those who are defending Mr. Farrell and showing their disdain and disklike for David Griffin and his associates, while others are defending their right to practice their lore in peace and goodwill.

All of this is very simple to sort out. The A+O has declared that it is in contact with the same group of secret chiefs that Mathers was originally in contact with. Having met the gate-keepers of this clandestine organization, I can say for a fact that I believe that their claim is legitimate. That really shouldn’t matter to any other faction of the Golden Dawn. They can seek out a connection to this group, or find their own connections, or use the various available inner plane contacts to develop their own lore. There isn’t any need to defame the A+O for making this claim, and there is plenty of room in the world for more than one faction of the Golden Dawn to peacefully coexist.

Still, in order for there to be peace in the Golden Dawn community, various individuals need to refrain from writing and publishing negative broadsides about other factions in the overall organization - or for that matter, writing hatchet jobs on the founders. Until that happens, then it seems obvious that there will be a lot of friction and occasional flame-war flare-ups.

I find this overall state of the Golden Dawn community very sad and disheartening. Instead of engaging in a war of words, I think that it would be better to teach the public (and other magicians, such as myself) about the benefits and social obligations of being an initiate and adept of the Golden Dawn. In time, even this latest flame-war will die down, but I hope it does end soon. Maybe if Mr. Farrell would apologize for what he wrote about the A+O (regardless of his intentions), that would be a good place to start, in my opinion.

Frater Barrabbas 

Nature of the Reincarnation Conundrum - Part 2

This in turn brings forth yet another consideration of how to measure reincarnation in regards to spiritual maturity. Some in the New Age community refer to individuals as either “old souls” or “new souls,” and give those who are older an exalted status in the hierarchy of spiritual evolution, whether or not they have actually done anything in their current life to earn this regard. They have the potential of greatness because they are an "old soul," which is kind of a circular argument.

A humorous exchange occurred between two individuals at a New Age convention that I attended years ago brings to my mind two opposing ways of looking at this issue. I overheard an older man loudly bragging to a pretty young female student and her witty young companion about his supposed long lineage of life-times, “I have documented over a hundred lifetimes that I had, spanning over three thousand years!” It was almost as if he was saying that he was superior to everyone else due solely to his spiritual longevity and its recollection. His arrogance was readily thwarted by the reply of the young witty companion who completely reversed the situation. He stated that the large number of life times was probably more indicative of a continuous string of mistakes and stubborn ignorance rather than spiritual sagacity, since if he was so enlightened, why was he still being reborn?

Of course the old sage couldn’t answer the question intelligibly, and was humiliated by someone who was obviously not his spiritual equal. The rest of us found this exchange highly amusing, but it highlighted an important point. The question is, how can we objectively determine spiritual maturity if we must also take into account many lifetimes including the present one? Does it not become then simply a matter of subjective belief and possible fancy? Unless a peer group evaluates a person’s claims and forces a certain degree of objective clarity and mental discipline, then anyone could claim nearly anything, no matter how absurd. Since in most cases there is no peer group or authority to judge someone's claims, this is precisely the kind of unbridled ridiculousness that occurs in the greater New Age community.

Then there is the life story of the current Dalai Lama of Tibet who is currently living in exile in India. I became acquainted with this story through the movie Kundrun, (released 1997 - directed by Martin Scorsese) which I also later verified by examining his official written biography. (See his web page located here.) When the previous Dalai Lama died, his attendants began to search the country for his reincarnated self, and after a couple of years they discovered a young boy living in a remote village who seemed to have the memories of the old Dalai Lama. The young lad was tested, and he was able to recognize and pick out personal objects from a collection of real and fake artifacts, choosing only those that had actually belonged to the old Dalai Lama.

I have quoted Wikipedia’s entry for Dalai Lama: “When Tenzin Gyatso [the current Dalai Lama]  was about two years old a search party was sent out to find the new incarnation of the Dalai Lama. Among other omens, the head on the embalmed body of the thirteenth Dalai Lama (originally facing south) had mysteriously turned to face the northeast, indicating the direction in which the next Dalai Lama would be found. Shortly afterwards, the Regent Reting Rinpoche had a vision at the sacred lake of Lhamo La-tso indicating Amdo (as the place to search) and a one-story house with distinctive guttering and tiling. After extensive searching, they found that Thondup's house resembled that in Reting's vision. They presented Thondup with various relics and toys - some had belonged to the previous Dalai Lama while others had not. It was reported that Thondup correctly identified all items owned by the previous Dalai Lama, exclaiming ‘That's mine! That's mine!’”

However, even though this young boy seemed to have some of the old Dalai Lama’s memories, he still had to be taught how to read and write, trained in the tenets of Tibetan Buddhism, taught the discipline of being a monk and later on, how to be a spiritual leader, not to mention that he also had to grow up and mature to become the great man that he presently became. He couldn’t just use the past memories of the previous Dalai Lama and thereby dispense with any training. So the fact that he was reincarnated didn’t also mean that he had total recall of everything from that past life.

This could be conjectured as a kind of narrative proof of reincarnation as well as its limitations, and it is something that I think about when attempting to dismiss reincarnation out of hand. There have been other anecdotal evidence presented, showing that reincarnation seems to occur, and at least in some rare occasions, could be verified. However, these anecdotal forms of proof would not be acceptable to a thorough and rigorous scientific inquiry; but they could at least demonstrate that the phenomenon of reincarnation in some form was at least possible.

Christians have a more simplistic eschatological doctrine to follow and also one that does not have so many additional considerations and qualifications in order to make it plausible. Christians believe that a person lives only one life, and when it's over they are judged for what they did during that life. Once a person's soul is judged, it is either rewarded with entry into heaven or condemned to the fiery depths of hell until the final judgment. This model is very old and was used by many ancient cultures in the past, such as the ancient Egyptians, who excelled in developing a culture devoted to a life after death.

While I concur that this model is much more efficient, backed by historical antecedents and seemingly plausible, the final judgment and the irrevocable condemnation to hell does not fit well with my spiritual sentiments of justice and redemption, nor does it lend itself to any kind of spiritual evolution. Of course, the final judgment always had an escape clause, which is a certain shady method to get past it. Whether one was an ancient Egyptian or a modern fundamentalist Christian, there was always a way to certain salvation (such as the spells of the Book of the Dead, or being saved by Jesus). I rejected this doctrine as Christian dogma a long time ago, but I also failed to fully embrace reincarnation as an alternative.

The various pros and cons about reincarnation put me into a difficult situation, since as a member of a modern earth-based spiritual movement, the tenet of reincarnation is part of the accepted doctrine. Yet this doctrine is one that I just couldn’t fully accept, since it seemed too implausible and was misused by the ignorant masses to promote all sorts of ridiculous ideas. I admit that I struggled with this problem for quite some time, and I had my own impressions and romantic notions to deal with as well.

As a teenager I had believed that I was once an Atlantean magician and high priest, and even managed to put together a magickal system that I thought was a restoration of that very ancient system of Atlantean magick and occultism. I also had memory fragments of other lives in other times and once thought that these were proof enough for reincarnation. The notion of reincarnation was pleasant to believe in, since the other available perspectives were so forbidding, namely final judgment or oblivion. But as time progressed and I became older and more mature, I began to intensely question these romantic notions and could no longer accept them even as subjective facts, since they defied any real empirical analysis. So I decided to leave these questions for other studies and practices that were more immediate to me and grounded in the present. I felt that there was little point in attempting to answer these questions or to organize my doubts into something of a sensible alternative theory.

Then over a decade ago I was reading the Winter 1997 edition of the Gnosis magazine (See the magazine Gnosis, No. 42, Winter 97 - pp. 28 - 32) and read an article that galvanized my opinions and helped me to materialize my opposition to popular reincarnation. This article not only addressed my doubts, but it also gave me an alternative perspective to explain this phenomenon in a much more plausible and logical manner. The article was entitled “The Case Against Reincarnation” and it was part of the thematic edition on “Death and the Afterlife.” It was written by Joscelyn Godwin who is an obscure writer to many occultists, but whose academic career is highly esteemed. He is reputed to be a gifted musicologist and translator, known for his work on ancient music, antique paganism and occult based music.

However, the article was concerned with translations of materials written by the equally obscure French esotericist René Guénon who, in his metaphysical examination of popular reincarnation, not only determined that it was false, but that it was also logically impossible. He also supplied a number of explanations for other related paranormal phenomena, and I found these to be both compelling and an answer to my many years of searching, not to mention my dissatisfaction with popular reincarnation. I also used the insights that this article presented as a springboard to examine the history of beliefs around reincarnation, including an examination of those beliefs as they are held in the Hindu and Buddhist religions as well as the Greek antecedents, such as metempsychosis.

I discovered some very valuable things in the process and even managed to organize my own thoughts into a theory of death and the afterlife that acts as a counter theory to the popular belief in reincarnation. I also found that the eastern definition of reincarnation, particularly the Buddhist, made more sense to me than what is being followed in western occult groups and the New Age in general.

Frater Barrabbas

Nature of the Reincarnation Conundrum - Part 1

In modern occultism, whether it's New Age, Neopagan, Wiccan or Theosophic groups and organizations, there is a wide-spread belief and support for the tenets of reincarnation. This belief is so prevalent in these groups that it seems to be an accepted fact, and one is judged either a fool or an unbeliever if he or she does not accept this doctrine as truth.

New Age adherents attend workshops to assist themselves in determining and remembering their past lives, and Wiccan followers speak platitudes about being reborn again with friends and family. Wiccans even reserve a special kind of hell for oath breakers and others deemed cursed by the Goddess, since they are denied this benefit of rebirth with friends and lovers, and are forced instead to be reborn and wander the earth with strangers.

Theosophists have established a doctrine of reincarnation that proposes a kind of long term cycle of spiritual evolution. This cycle is where individuals engage in a long series or chain of lifetimes in order to ultimately evolve into ascended spiritual masters. Once having achieved that goal they then exit the reincarnation cycle and continue to aid and assist humanity with its collective spiritual evolution. If it were not for the thorny problem of verifying and proving that reincarnation is indeed a fact, perhaps the Theosophical model of reincarnation would make the most sense since it's so well thought out and documented.

For those who are believers, the popular consensus of reincarnation is that we as individuals experience multiple lives, and that we are influenced today by what we have done in those past lives. We are ruled by a balance of virtues and flaws that have been a part of us since our nebulous origins, and that these positive and negative effects continue to follow and haunt us from one lifetime to the next.

These powerful influences are given the label of Karma, and they are an inescapable component of the influences of reincarnation. What happens to us in this life is not so much determined by our actions and intentions, but by actions and intentions that were part of our past lives. We might be so greatly influenced by past lives that free will and self-determination would be illusions, since all is predestined by events and actions that happened long ago. Thus a person murdered in this life could have been a murderer in a past life, because his karma would have required the previous murder to be balanced out by being a victim in this life. Diseases, accidents and other maladies that afflict us could be considered the result of wrongs perpetrated in past lives and not adduced so much to our current life style and choices.

With so much of our actions, intentions and even our goals pre-determined by our past lives, it's a wonder that there is anything newly emerging in the typical person for their present life. Perhaps there's a mix of the past lives and personalities with our current inner self influencing us today, with the past having less of an impact than the present. We could grade things as being less influential if they happened further in the past, and more influential if they happened in a recent life, thereby judging past life events as being more or less relevant to the present.Of course, there could always be exceptions.

In whatever manner we seek to organize and understand these influences, reincarnation creates a very complex model of human volition; where individuals have to carefully sift through their motives, intentions, actions and even the accidents that have occurred to them in order to determine what is being influenced unduly by past lives.

If reincarnation is considered a fact, then all of these speculations, and indeed even the required examination of past lives through regression hypnosis and trance, become very important tools to understand the totality of the self. However, if it's not a fact, then these activities could be considered extraneous and even counterproductive to self realization.

My experiences with the social fad of reincarnation and karma have not made them more plausible or acceptable to me, and in fact many of the problems with these powerful concepts are amplified by how people thoughtlessly and carelessly use them. The fault is not theirs, though, since there is no real authority to guide them in these beliefs and judge their pronouncements as accurate and believable or erroneous, and so mitigate what is implausible and even ridiculous.

There are many individuals who claim to have had past lives, and some even seem to have vivid memories of these past life experiences, which is all very well and good. However, many also seem to hold the romantic notion that they are the reincarnation of famous individuals in the past, such as Julius Caesar, Cleopatra, Napoleon, Washington, Queen Elizabeth I, Hannibal, Catherine the Great, or numerous other luminaries. Seldom have I ever heard anyone talking about having been an anonymous Chinese, Middle Eastern or European peasant, or some common cutthroat or nameless criminal, which would be much more likely if one considers the odds.

Reincarnation has been made romantic and glamorous in its common usage, and seems to be increasingly used to add prestige and a depth to people who would otherwise have shallow and uninspiring lives. Perhaps the most absurd element of popular reincarnation is that there is probably more than one individual claiming to be the reincarnation of the same famous person. To straighten out this conflict there would have to be some kind of mechanism to explain this phenomenon, either by verifying one claim over the other (or denying both claims) or by proposing that both are correct, with some kind of bifurcation of the reincarnation lineage occurring. Who is to say what that mechanism would be, or if there could be any criteria for judging such claims?

There is also another problem to consider, and that is what does it all signify? If some man or woman claims to be the reincarnation of Cleopatra, then what does that tell us about who they are in their present life? In my opinion, it really tells us nothing about the person living in the present time, since the life of Cleopatra was lived so long ago and all of the factors and the historical context of that life are long gone.

Promoting a famous past-life personality seems to be nothing more than a cloak or mask to hide the real truth of a person's sense of inadequacy and unimportance. Certainly, the claim of being the reincarnation of a famous person could not be taken seriously in a court of law, where someone would try to lay claim to the legacy of a famous person. So we are left with more puzzling questions and insolvable conundrums by accepting reincarnation rather than carefully judging it or considering that it might be fatuous as it is popularly defined.

The most difficult argument for reincarnation is attempting to define exactly what aspect of the “self” gets reborn if it does in fact occur. There is also the difficulty in defining an eternal and immutable aspect of the self, since by dint of its definition, such a thing would be inexplicable and incapable of being defined or discussed. If we consider that each individual is a unique product of genetics, culture, time, circumstance and life experience, and that this uniqueness affects all that is a determinant for an individual life, then such a life is impossible to be repeated at a later time.

If we also consider that life as we understand it is centered in the body, where reside the emotions, mind, ego and perhaps even the individual soul, then when that body perishes in death, so too must perish all of the other unique qualities of that individual as well. An individual life is precious, since once it is gone, the loss is permanent and irreparable.

There may be something that is permanent, immortal and eternal in regards to a human being, but it could not be related in any direct or conscious manner to what is based on the self as defined by the mind or by the living body, since these elements are verifiably perishable. The typical adherent to popular reincarnation seems to assume that their ego-based mind somehow manages to survive death, but there is no concrete evidence for that survival.

The lack of empirical evidence for an immortal soul would force theologians and occultists to define it as something ineffable and essential to the self; but not a part of that self which is perishable. The fact that they have defined the human spirit in just such a manner should be no surprise. Yet this would make temporal memories (life experience) and emotional or mental sensibilities incapable of being transmitted from one life to another, since they would not be a part of that immortal self.

So we are left again with the problem of defining what exactly gets reborn, and if it's so abstract and distant from the nominal self, what relevance does it have to the living and perishable part of a human being? Other questions that would need answering are how does reincarnation function, how long is the duration between death and rebirth, how is the new life chosen, or is it just randomly assigned, and who or what guides the spirit as it makes these transitions and implements these decisions?

One element that can be pointed to is that even with the large population of people currently inhabiting the planet, there is still 15 dead people for every one living. That number has been reduced in half since the 1960's, and might drop even further in the future. While one could conceive that there is a possibility of each person on the planet having multiple previous lives, there is also the possibility of a growing number of individuals who might be living their first life in the chain of reincarnated lives. 

Eventually, if the population continues to grow as it has, the number of living people may outnumber the dead, and then it would be likely that the majority of people would be “new souls” who have never experienced reincarnation. Other souls would have to be very archaic as well, since we would assume that all available “souls” would be used up before “new souls” would be fashioned. (There is also the question - how are new souls made, and who or what makes them?)

To be continued...

Frater Barrabbas

Thoughts About Reincarnation

I must humbly state to one and all that I don’t believe in the popularly held belief in reincarnation. I have thought long and hard about this tenet for a couple of decades, but I just can’t subscribe to the belief that reincarnation is a regular part of the human equation. I have a number of reasons for having this opinion, and I have decided to voice some of these opinions in a series of articles that will seek to represent my long exploration of this issue.

One of my objections to reincarnation was that I believed that there were more people alive today than the population of those who were dead. In other words, if the population of living people was greater than the number of dead, then there would have to be a lot of new souls living in the world today. “New souls” is the term for someone who hasn’t been previously reincarnated, which means that this life is their first and only life. I don’t know where I had acquired that little fact as being verifiably true, but it appears that it is actually an urban myth. Maybe I got it from the comedian George Carlin, but it has been in my head for many years.

Last month, Chas Clifton posted a short blog article that pretty much demonstrated that my belief in the living out numbering the dead was completely false. It doesn’t necessarily prove that reincarnation is a fact, but it does show that at least one of my objections to it has to be reconsidered. Mr. Clifton had a link in his article that led to an another article in the BBC News magazine about some scientists who used a bit of deduction and statistics to count the number of dead people going back to around 10,000 BCE.

Their results indicate that there are, even at the present rate of population growth, around 15 dead people for every living person today. So the dead outnumber the living by a significant margin, at least for the moment. That means that every living person today could have had several past lives at the very least. So another urban myth is challenged and shown to be false by science. I find that a bit ironic, however my other objections to popular reincarnation stand, and I will be presenting them in the near future.

Here is Chas Clifton’s short article in his blog “Letters from Hardscrabble Creek,” and this is the long article found in BBC News magazine. I also thought that the following quote from that magazine article pretty much puts this bit of controversy to bed, and I will include it here.

“This means that we are nowhere near close to having more alive than dead. In fact, there are 15 dead people for every person living. We surpassed seven billion dead way back between 8000BC and AD1.”

In the near future, I will be presenting a multi-part series of articles stating my issues with reincarnation and Karma, particularly how they are perceived in popular culture and various New Age and pagan communities. I don’t believe that reincarnation is impossible, mind you, I just think that it’s a very rare phenomenon which has little or no bearing on the considerations for personal spiritual evolution, personal destiny or free choice. We are, more or less, self-determined individuals, and our personal fate and destiny is very much tied to what we do in our present (and in my opinion, only) incarnation. Some individuals can pretend to be “old souls” who are nearing their final spiritual evolutionary stage due mostly to their superior conduct in supposed past lives, and others can even present highly subjective proof of their past lives. This might be enough for them to prove without a doubt that reincarnation is part of the human equation, but it doesn’t mean that the rest of us need to swallow this belief without using any of our critical thinking skills.

What I intend to show in future articles is that I am highly skeptical about the popular beliefs about reincarnation and Karma. I think that these terms are particularly misused by many who subscribe to the notion that they were important people in the past, and that fact somehow makes them important people today. Pre-Christian paganism didn’t actually believe in reincarnation per se, instead a mechanism of metempsychosis was promoted, which is quite different than the popularly held notions about reincarnation. To ancient pagans, all life engaged in the dance of life, death and reincarnation, and that a person could be reborn as an animal or even a tree. Later on, Greek sages began to establish moral criteria for the direction of this process of reincarnation, but prior to that, there were no boundaries nor moral determinations. All life was considered sacred and therefore, ensouled.

I will also demonstrate that these popular beliefs in reincarnation are part of our modern world view, and are not to be found in either Hinduism or Buddhist religious tenets. To a Hindu or Buddhist sage, the terms reincarnation and Karma have very different meanings than how we popularly use them. Understanding this difference, and going back to the source religions that developed these terms, will help us strip away the urban myths from the real (and in my opinion) more interesting religious tenets from the East. I might not accept those tenets, but at least they make a lot more sense to me than what folks talk about in the New Age communities when they use the terms “past lives” and “Karma.”

Stay tuned to these future articles, and let me know what your thoughts are about popular reincarnation beliefs.

Frater Barrabbas

Adventures at Paganicon 2012

All Snakes Day

Paganicon occurred over the weekend, and I fully attended and engaged in the various planned and unplanned activities. Overall, I would say that this pagan convention has turned out to be quite good. There were 50% more people attending this year than the previous year, and folks from as far away as Indiana and Winnipeg, Canada, attended. I also made some new friends, restored connections with some old friends, and basically had a good time. The weather over the weekend was quite warm for this time of year, and I am sure that some new record highs have been registered. Last year it was pretty cold outside with many traces of winter still visible, yet this year there was no indication that winter was even active. Gone was the snow and ice, and the temperatures were in the high 70's, which is very strange for the Twin Cities in mid March.

My two back to back classes on the Qabalah were initially fairly well attended. I expected a maximum of 15 attendees, and that’s how many showed up. However, after the first hour, all of those attendees except two departed to attend other classes, and most of them went to see Christopher Penczak’s class on Ascension Magick. I can’t blame them for departing, of course, and I quickly discovered that I had far more material to present than I had time to present it. Each section took longer to complete than I had anticipated, so what I was able to present to the attendees was a partial introduction instead of the whole thing. Also, considering that most of the people left after the first hour was up meant that there wasn’t enough ground covered to really segue into the next section. So the remaining two attendees and I engaged in conversations about some of the rest of the material, and I answered a number of questions.

This was the first time that I had attempted to present these two classes, and considering that they will be incorporated into an 18 hour three day intensive, I am not too worried about re-sizing them or scaling them down. Instead, I will seek to break them into sections and expand them so they will be fully vested with all of the information that I would want to present in a much larger format. So, I was satisfied with the overall results of the two presentations, and I did learn something about how much time I will need if and when I present the full weekend intensive. Some of my attendees gave me good feedback and told me that they are looking forward to the new book that I will be publishing via Llewellyn in March of 2013.

Christopher Penczak was the main speaker for Paganicon, and I must admit that I was completely unfamiliar with any of his writings. I’ve seen his books in the book stores, and it is fairly obvious that he is a prolific writer with many books in print. Christopher has put together a complete system of witchcraft, publishing his books in series of instruction manuals regarding his Temple of Witchcraft system. I attended his Friday night class on the Three Rays of Witchcraft, and I found his class to be quite engaging and interesting. What became apparent to me is that Christopher has managed to successfully pull together some pretty amazing and radically different philosophies into the revised foundation of witchcraft. I have always maintained that modern witchcraft is fairly incomplete, and that in order to make it a more comprehensive system of spirituality and magick, one would need to fill in the holes using other sources.

What Christopher has done was to pull in sources of occult and spiritual lore that I wouldn’t have chosen, being either unfamiliar with them or at least felt that they wouldn’t work together. These disparate sources include Reiki, Theosophy, the Alice A. Bailey teachings, other various New Age sources (Ascension), as well as pagan Druidism, ceremonial magick and the Qabalah. At first glance, these very difficult occult systems might seem to be contradictory and incapable of being blended or merged together, but Christopher has managed to artfully merge them together as if they were meant to be worked as one overall system. I found his way of moving seamlessly from one system to another without any jarring contradictions to be quire remarkable. Still, from my own experienced standpoint, I wouldn’t employ very many New Age systems in my own revised and developed tradition simply because I would find such a syncretism to be inelegant and esthetically unappealing. That’s just my personal opinion and tastes in occultism, and they in no way negate what Christopher has accomplished. In his thoroughness, he has given birth to a comprehensive system of spirituality and magick, and all of it is based on a foundation of witchcraft. I found that to be both attractive and compelling, and I saw that others who were attending his lectures and rituals found it attractive as well.

The Three Rays of Witchcraft are, of course, based on the first three Rays of the Seven Ray system of Theosophy and the Bailey teachings (being the Red, Blue and Yellow Rays). Christopher merged the concept of these three rays with the traditional witchcraft (Clan of Tubal Cain) concepts of the three paths of the straight, the bent and the crooked, which he had perceived through a three-fold ray vision, where the three rays emerge from a common point or source. This theme is well established in Christopher’s book, Three Rays of Witchcraft, which you can find here. However, one point that he made in his talk that I found very illuminating is where he discussed the origins of his vision, and that it represented how many seekers have approached a more comprehensive practice of witchcraft - or for that manner, any system of occultism.

According the Christopher, most practitioners are inveterate eclectic collectors of many diverse and often different and divergent techniques, philosophies and ritual lore. He compared it to a totemic magpie collecting shiny bits that it steals while it browses around for food and novelty items. These attractive baubles end up in the magpie’s nest, and after a time, the nest is full of completely unrelated, shiny and colorful junk. Occult eclecticism is the disease of the inveterate collector, and often times what is collected might seem important, but ultimately, in order to become an integral part of one’s personal spiritual or magickal discipline, it must have both relevance and some degree of relativity to the rest of one’s regimen.

Often this process of making a unified system out of a lot of disparate parts is to first begin to order them in some manner, perhaps to extend the analogy of the magpie, this act of creating order would be to formulate a collage or a mosaic out of these various seemingly unrelated elements. This effort at finding unity in diversity is very important, because the mere fact that one is manipulating powerful spiritual symbols and philosophies will trigger a visionary event where the structure and image of a meta-system will be revealed to the seeker. For me, this meta-system was the Tree of Life, for Christopher, it was the Seven Rays. Later on, he was able to find a synthesis between the Seven Rays and the Tree of Life, and all this could be accomplished due to the unifying vision that he had of the Three Rays.

I found this obvious biographical trope about how Christopher himself was able to merge several unrelated occult systems together into a unified system (the Temple of Witchcraft) useful in my own discussion of the importance of using a kind of meta-system to order and organize the various collected systems and methodologies of the practicing occultist, and that this action of ordering will have a profound effect on the seeker. It was true with me, and it was also true for Christopher Penczak, so in a sense, our approach to crafting a unified system are very similar. In some ways, his story corroborates my own, and it lends greater power to the idea that working with the symbols of the Qabalah as if they were dynamically alive is the key to making it truly a powerful system of occultism. Without this approach, the Qabalah is nothing more than a glyph and a bunch of tabular lists, along with some very arcane lore about creation, cosmology and the final dissolution. Making it come alive is the whole key to empowering oneself and being able to use the Qabalah as a metaphysical system in the study and practice of magick.

Saturday night was the “All Snakes Day Ball,” which was a costumed ball. Since I had too little sleep the night before, and I had to help out with the security for an hour, I missed some of this soiree, but what I did see was quite amazing. The cash bar was a bit steep in price and the selection of available drinks limited, but overall, the ball room was well decorated and well attended. I ducked out a bit after 10 pm and went back to my room to crash, but the dance continued until midnight.

Sunday is when I took part in a panel that discussed the organization and presentation of the four public Sabbat events that had been held in 2011 under the aegis of NordCog, a local pagan organization (Northern Dawn and Covenant of the Goddess). On the panel were three of the presenters, the artistic director (Paul) and the presiding leader (Steve). The panel turned out quite excellent, and that was the end of my involvement in the Paganicon pageantry. I did attend a really good class on Helenic Polytheism put on by Cara Schultz, which was scheduled before my panel. Cara focused on the rites and practices that would have been performed in the home during a typical lunar month, and how those beliefs and practices are deployed in the modern Greek pagan household. The class was short, succinct and highly informative. I thought that Cara did an excellent job of presenting her beliefs and practices.

So I gathering my things, made some final shopping transactions, and drove home from the convention, quite satisfied with the whole event. The temperature was almost 80 degrees outside, so I had the window down while I was driving. I got home tired and sweaty, and was amazed at the very weird weather that we were having for a mid March day. If there were any doubts about the impact of climate change, then perhaps how this winter has turned out should allay any doubts whatsoever.

Needless to say, I think that Paganicon was a tremendous success, and it will be interesting to see if it is sustainable. I am already thinking about next year’s convention, when I will have a new book out in print, and be focusing on marketing myself as a knowledgeable Qabalist.

Frater Barrabbas