Wherefore, all things must needs be a compound in one. (2 Nephi 2:11)
A morning in May
I was born on 26 May 1975, at 7:01 in the morning, in Saint Anthony, Idaho, a small farming town on the Henry's Fork of the Snake River. About thirty-one hours before my birth the Moon had passed through a total eclipse, which reached its peak late in the night of 24 May by the clocks of Idaho. In my chart the Sun, the Ascendant and Mercury all stand in Gemini. The Sun had only just cleared the horizon and sits in the twelfth house, and Mercury lies close on the Ascendant, so Mercury is the ruler of my chart and its dominant planet.
Astrologers read the twelfth house as the house of the hidden things behind form, and in my own charts I have seen it read as an ability to see the meaning behind the forms of things. A Gemini Sun, a Gemini Ascendant and Mercury in Gemini, with Mercury in command of the whole, make the chart of a messenger and a translator. The work of Mercury is to carry meaning from one language into another, and most of my working life has gone into that work, between the grimoire and the physics paper, between the Hindu East and the Western mysteries, and between the temple and the classroom.
Six generations
I grew up in a highly religious household, strict in its disciplines and serious about its theology. My family belonged to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, known to most of the world as the Mormon church, a church of alternative Christianity formed in the creative religious revivals of early nineteenth-century America. My ancestors were among its first members, and that history forms a major part of my family's story. Had I stayed a member, I would be counted today as the sixth generation of my family in the Church.
In the towns of eastern Idaho the Church is the center of community life. The ward house is where families meet on Sunday, where the youth gather during the week, and where the young men are ordained to the priesthood as they come of age. A household like mine ordered its week around that building and its year around the calendar of the Church. Scripture was read at home, prayers were said at the table and beside the bed, and the stories of the prophets, the angels and the early pioneers were told to us children as the history of our own people.
What a boy was taught
As a child I was taught that a person can receive personal revelation about the future directly, through a relationship with God. I was taught that those who hold the priesthood may see visions of light and receive truths revealed through dreams. I was taught that priesthood holders are given power by God to heal the sick and to bless others by the laying on of hands.
I was taught the founding story of the Church as sacred history. A boy named Joseph Smith went into a grove of trees to pray, and God the Father and Jesus Christ appeared to him in a pillar of light. An angel named Moroni later showed him where a book written on plates of gold lay buried in a hill in New York, and Joseph translated it by the gift and power of God. That book is the Book of Mormon, and it stood beside the Bible in our home as scripture.
The Book of Mormon itself opens with a dream. After fervent prayer the prophet Lehi is carried away in a vision and sees the heavens open, and soon after he dreams of a pillar of fire, of angels and of the judgment coming upon Jerusalem (1 Nephi 1:6–13). A few chapters later he has the dream of the tree of life (1 Nephi 8), with its luminous tree, its dark river, its rod of iron and its multitudes pressing forward toward the fruit or falling away into the mists. The leaders of the Church still speak of dreams today. Elder David A. Bednar of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles has taught that God conveys revelation through dreams and visions among other patterns, and President Thomas S. Monson described revelation that comes in the moment between sleep and waking and advised noting it at once, before it fades.
I was taught that faithful adults who have gone through the temple wear sacred garments marked with symbols, and that the garments protect them from evil. In the temple, families are sealed to one another for eternity, and the living are baptized on behalf of the dead so that the ancestors may receive the ordinances they missed in life. In each stake there is a Patriarch, an older man set apart to give each member a patriarchal blessing. In that blessing he declares the person's lineage among the tribes of Israel and speaks of their mission in life and of what lies ahead for them. To a young boy, this man acted a good deal like a shaman, a diviner and a fortune teller.
I was taught a cosmology of eternal progression. After this life the soul enters one of three degrees of glory, the celestial, the terrestrial and the telestial, and the faithful who reach the highest of them may in time become gods themselves. I was taught that God himself was once a man.
So by the time I left childhood I was already steeped in the ideas of special powers, of initiations in a sacred house, of a secret system of progression through degrees, of revelation through dreams and of a priesthood that could heal. Both of my parents had their own experiences of the supernatural, which they credited to their faith and shared with us children. Quite the ripe breeding ground for developing interests in the occult.
Skipping classes at fourteen
I was disenchanted with the Church early. At fourteen I began skipping my classes, and by sixteen I had stopped going altogether, except for the times my parents required me to attend. My parents were sincere, and I never hated the doctrine. What I could not accept was its claim to exclusivity, the idea that one church alone held the truth, the priesthood and the keys to God, and I knew even as a boy that there was something very off about it.
Years later I gave that conviction its full form in our Central Doctrine, where I named the poison at the foundation of so much religious life the false identity of ownership, and I wrote there that a person can reach the highest spiritual potential offered in this life as a Christian, a Hindu, a Mormon, a Sufi or a Shaman.
Later in life I asked for my name to be removed from the Church's records, and I did so on purpose. I left that world behind, and still my childhood was filled with its narratives and practices, its scriptures, its stories of angels and visions and its accounts of revelation.
The magic in the roots
As an adult I went looking for the history behind what I had been taught. The most important book I found on it was Early Mormonism and the Magic World View by the historian D. Michael Quinn, first published in 1987 and revised in 1998. Quinn documents, largely from Mormon sources, how closely folk magic and religious faith were bound together in Joseph Smith's world and in the early Church.
Quinn argues that the Smith family practiced the folk magic of their time and region, treasure seeking, the use of seer stones and the use of magical parchments. Joseph Smith used a seer stone in his years as a treasure seeker, and by the accounts of those who watched him he used a stone again in the work of translation. Quinn discusses a silver talisman associated with Joseph Smith that bears the seal of Jupiter, and he connects its design to the seals printed in Francis Barrett's The Magus of 1801, a work drawn in large part from the occult philosophy of Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa. Family tradition holds that Smith carried the talisman on the day he died in Carthage Jail in 1844. That point rests on a late family source, and the historians who defend the Church dispute it, as they dispute much of Quinn's reading.
Quinn also writes on Smith's astrology and on his initiation into Freemasonry in 1842, the same year the temple endowment was introduced in Nauvoo. As I read further I came to see how many of the principles I had been raised with were drawn from esoteric sources, from the Hermetic and Kabbalistic ideas that moved through the America of Smith's day and especially from Freemasonry. The handclasps, the signs, the aprons, the degrees and the sacred drama of the temple endowment carry a strong family likeness to the lodge. The idea of a God who was once a man, and of a human being who may become a god, has its own long history in the mystery traditions of the ancient world. All very esoteric ideas, but most of them borrowed and modified, and in the form I knew as a boy their sources had been forgotten.
Quinn's book showed me that the tradition of my childhood had roots in the same soil as the ceremonial magick, the talismans, the planetary seals and the old grimoires of the West. Joseph Smith was, in Quinn's argument, a man formed in the magical world view of his time, and the church he founded carried that world view forward in religious form. It amused me greatly to find Barrett and Agrippa standing behind a talisman of the prophet my ancestors followed. Aleister Crowley even mentioned their founder in a positive light, which gave me a laugh when I read it.
Growing up Mormon, you can imagine why I might be just a bit skeptical of any order that asks its initiates to swear secret oaths under threat. For most of the history of the temple endowment, from its introduction in 1842 until the changes of 1990, participants swore not to reveal certain secrets and enacted symbolic penalties of death in the ceremony, agreeing that such consequences would follow a breach. When I later read Crowley's "Comment" on The Book of the Law, with its warnings to the reader, I recognized the gesture. At least in Crowley's "Comment" there is no requirement for magical underwear.
The scripture I carry
There is a scripture I have known from my youth. In the Book of Mormon the prophet Lehi teaches his son Jacob that "it must needs be, that there is an opposition in all things" (2 Nephi 2:11). The verse goes on to say that without opposition there could be neither righteousness nor wickedness, neither holiness nor misery, neither good nor bad. In the same chapter Lehi teaches that "Adam fell that men might be; and men are, that they might have joy" (2 Nephi 2:25), and that people are "free to choose liberty and eternal life" (2 Nephi 2:27). So the fall in Lehi's account is the condition of life, joy and choice, and the opposites are the ground on which a soul moves at all. In Lehi's teaching there is no movement, no choice and no growth without the opposites, and all things are a compound of them held in one. When I came to write the Central Doctrine, I placed Lehi first among the witnesses for our teaching of the opposites, since that is where I first learned it, and the witnesses of the Tao, the Tantras and the physics of complementarity stand after him.
Another verse from the same scripture I have quoted in teaching the return of the soul, "the course of the Lord is one eternal round" (1 Nephi 10:19). I read it as an image of descent and return, the soul's circle out from the One and back to it. In the Central Doctrine I set it beside the verse of Ephesians, "He who descended is the one who also ascended far above all the heavens, that he might fill all things." Together the two verses give the two directions of our cosmology, the descent from the boundary of the Cosmos into every point within it and the ascent of what is lived and gathered within back out to the boundary. We honor these verses as witnesses without taking up the doctrines of the churches whose scriptures they are.
I also carried out of my upbringing the word "salvation", with the meaning it has held in the West for most of two thousand years, rescue from damnation, purchased by belief and redeemed after death. Many students of our School carry that same meaning out of the religions they were raised in. Our School keeps the word for its oldest meaning, the salvation of the ancient mysteries, the soul made safe by being made whole and joined again to its source.
I know Rexburg, Idaho, very well. In the Central Doctrine I give counsel about a family whose life does not fit the forms of a town like Rexburg, and I give it as one who understands why its people hold to the forms they hold. My counsel asks that the well-being of the child come first, before the wish of anyone to be proved right.
My father's dreams
The center of the supernatural in my childhood was my father, and it came to us through his dreams. Throughout my childhood he often gathered us children to speak of what he had dreamed. In his religious world as a Mormon, personal revelation and the interpretation of dreams were accepted and encouraged, and although it is actually rare in that tradition for a man to live by them, it was not rare for my father.
His dreams came to him with a prophetic force, especially at moments of family crisis. He would have a vision at night while dreaming, and the next day he would gather the family to tell us what he had seen and what it meant. He recounted each dream in careful detail, turned its images over before us and invited us to consider what they might mean. He treated them with a seriousness that impressed itself upon all of us.
When his mother died, and later as his own death drew near, those dreams grew stronger, carrying visions of passage, visitations of family members and messages of release. In those evenings we children learned, almost by osmosis, that the night world is not to be taken lightly. Dreams, as my father lived them, were messages that deserve attention and reverence.
My father taught me in another way as well, by how he lived. He was a man of tireless work ethic, guided by few attachments and resolute in his simplicity. From the time I was a teenager I have dedicated myself to an ascetic life of few possessions and a great deal of work, and much of that commitment I owe to his example in my formative years. His example also led me to fall in love with the roots of Stoicism, and to a minimalist life given to the pursuit of knowledge and experience over the gathering of things.
My mother's stories
My mother had her own stories of the supernatural, and like my father she credited them to her faith and shared them with us children. They seemed impossible and fantastic, but I believed her.
I had my own experiences as a boy, moments of uncanny intuition, strange visions and synchronicities I could not explain. Nothing in my church gave me a language for them.
Father
From my earliest childhood I have lived in dialogue and prayer with a presence I simply call "Father." As a boy I understood it as the Father of my Christian heritage, the God my family prayed to at the table and on their knees beside the bed, and it was a familiar refuge from my earliest years.
I spoke to that presence constantly, in stillness and in motion, and it answered me as a constant inner companionship. It was there before I had read a single book of the mysteries, and it was there through the years when I stopped going to church. Leaving the Church did nothing to that conversation. Throughout every day, whether in stillness or in motion, I am still in dialogue and prayer with the presence I call Father, and the channel that opened in my earliest childhood has never been broken.
The presence answered me through the inner voice, the voice that reasons in each of us, weighs what we meet and speaks back to us in thought. That same voice is bent by the passions of the body and by our ties to the world, and in a child those passions and ties are already at work, in fear, in wanting and in the wish to please. As a boy I could not tell where the presence ended and my own reasoning began, and the answers I received carried both. Prayer kept the channel open, and it was the work of the temple, kept up over many years, that gave me the means to tell the two apart.
My grandmother's line
My family's story has a second root, far to the south of Idaho. That inheritance follows back to southern Chile, to the rugged and storied lands toward Patagonia. My grandmother, who played a central role in raising me and lived in our household until the day she died, came from a Mapuche line. She shared with me a quiet legacy of resilience and strength.
Carl Jung taught that within each of us lives a vast psychic inheritance, the collective unconscious, formed from the archetypal patterns and experiences of countless generations before us. If that is so, then each of us has reason to know our own ancestry, as in our blood and bones we carry the triumphs, traumas, beliefs and dreams of those who came before us. Bloodline alone does not determine anyone's destiny, and our School asks no student about their ancestry. My own Mapuche line has given me a fascinating connection to that inheritance.
The Mapuche are among the Indigenous nations of the Americas who resisted conquest for centuries. The Spanish Empire never subdued them, and the frontier on the Biobío River held for generations. The Chilean state occupied their lands in the Araucanía only in the military campaigns of 1861 to 1883, and the Mapuche have kept their identity and their sovereign spirit to this day.
In South American Indigenous cultures, the Mapuche among them, shamanism and what Europeans called witchcraft were long recognized as real forces of natural and spiritual power. That world view shaped my own fascination with the history of witchcraft, which I have studied for many years. I was struck to learn that one of the last witch trials in the Americas was held in Chile, in 1880 and 1881, on the island of Chiloé. The authorities in Ancud put on trial a group of men they said ruled the archipelago through a secret society of sorcerers called the Recta Provincia. The traditions of Chiloé are Huilliche and Chilote, close kin to the Mapuche of the mainland and mixed over the centuries with Spanish folk belief. The trial opened for me a window into the colonial fear of these old traditions, and into the long and often brutal meeting of colonial Christianity with Indigenous spirituality.
The machi and the witch
The figure at the center of Mapuche spiritual life is the machi, the shaman and healer of the community. Most machi are women. A machi works with a carved wooden pole called the rewe, which stands outside her house and which she climbs in trance, and with the kultrun, a shallow drum whose painted head carries a map of the Mapuche cosmos. Through the drum, the songs and the trance she travels to the spirits and brings back their healing for the sick. Her great healing rite, the machitun, is held at night beside the sick person, with the beating of the kultrun, the songs of the machi and the smoke of herbs, and while she is in trance a helper stands by to receive and interpret the words the spirits speak through her. The machi also leads her people in the great communal rites of prayer and offering for the health of the land and the community.
The anthropologist Ana Mariella Bacigalupo has written about the machi for many years, and her book Thunder Shaman: Making History with Mapuche Spirits in Chile and Patagonia (2016) is a portrait of one of them, a thunder machi named Francisca Kolipi. Some in Francisca's own community and family called her a witch and blamed her for their misfortunes, while others came to her for healing. The line between the healer and the witch was drawn by the people around her, and it moved with their fortunes.
What I took from my reading of Bacigalupo was this. When a machi was pressed to say how a machi differs from a witch, the answer came back, in frustration, that the two use the same spirits and connect with the same powers, and that the difference lies in what the power is used for and whom it serves. I give that answer in my own words. The Western mystery traditions have wrestled with the same question under other names, the white magician and the black, the theurgist and the goēs.
In my early reading I came across the claim that the name of the Mapuche goddess Kushe means "witch", and for a time I repeated that claim myself. In the Mapuche language kushe means "old woman". The Mapuche picture their great power, Ngünechen, as a family of four persons, the old man, the old woman, the young man and the young woman, and the pairing appears again in other powers, such as Antü fücha and Antü kushe, the old man and old woman of the Sun. The old woman is a figure of wisdom and age. Before the colonial preachers taught the people to fear the one who knew the spirits, the wise old woman was honored, and only later was she made a witch.
Over time, those who gave themselves to healing and to the protection of the community came to be known specifically as machi. Their work runs through the dream from its very start. A machi is commonly called to her office through dreams and visions, often in a season of illness, and she learns from the spirits of the dream as much as from the older machi who train her. For the Mapuche, dreams are the threshold to the other world, the bridge to spirit, and the machi are known as dream-walkers who travel both sleeping and waking states. They enter dreams to meet spirits, to receive instruction, and even to travel into the past of the person who needs healing, changing the very texture of memory to restore balance in the present. To dream, in that tradition, is to walk in both directions of time, to commune with ancestors and divine intelligences, and to reshape fate.
When I read about the machi, I thought at once of my father. Everyone in my family has known dreams of unusual force, and my father and I most of all. He understood his dreams in the language of his church, as revelation through the priesthood, and he was also carrying forward something older than his church, the dream-walking of my grandmother's people. His visions, and the way he drew us children into them, were his own experiences and also the inheritance of a deeper bloodline of dream-walkers.
My own dreams and the journals
The same current came down to me. Throughout my life my dreams have foreshadowed events, sometimes arriving with startling clarity just days before a disruption or a turning point. In my earlier years, when I had little discipline, these prophetic dreams came unbidden, like sudden flashes from a storm, raw and insistent, carrying warnings and revelations when the ordinary rhythm of my life was about to break. On more than one occasion I have seen the future in my dreams, guided by symbols and voices that I know as part of the legacy of my ancestors.
With time I learned that while such dreams can seize us without any preparation, the quieter currents of dream-vision, the ones that run beneath the surface of daily events, need cultivation. Without discipline they slip away unnoticed, and with attention they become a steady stream of guidance. So I began to write them down, and over the years I have filled several dream journals. In their pages lie some of the clearest proofs I have of the prophetic power of the night.
Again and again I recorded a dream, and the event it showed me came to meet it in waking life with a precision that left me in awe. When I turn those pages I find the dream written down in one entry and the lived event that followed it written down in a later one. To dismiss these as coincidence would be to deny what I have seen with my own eyes, in my own handwriting, over and over. Such dreams stand ahead of life and announce what is coming.
Much of what I wrote there is private. Many of the entries speak directly to personal trials, betrayals, losses and epiphanies. Some record dreams so difficult, and in certain cases humiliating, that to look back on them is to live again the shadow of the events they anticipated. Were we face to face, I would be willing, cautiously, to share some of those records with a student. They came with a clarity that set them apart from the ordinary images of sleep, and they proved themselves in sequence, dream giving way to fact. I cannot deny their truth.
Dream theurgy
Even after many years of theurgic practice, dreams have remained one of the most potent mediums of divine communication I know. They reach me in ways that no waking method entirely replicates. They cut through pretension, they seize the imagination with images that cannot be ignored, and they come when they must. In my own experience they have been at once mantic and prophetic, terror and blessing, intimate confession and divine scripture, written in the shifting symbols of the lunar unconscious.
I have written an essay on dream theurgy for our students, and in it I gathered what the ancient and modern writers teach about the night. Plato held in the Timaeus (71b) that no one divines while the rational mind is awake and busy, and that in sleep the soul receives divine messages that must then be interpreted. Homer gave the oldest warning about discernment, when Penelope tells of the two gates of dreams, the gate of ivory through which the false dreams pass and the gate of horn through which the true ones come. Macrobius, in his Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, sorted dreams into five kinds and held that only three of them, the somnium, the visio and the oraculum, carry divination.
Synesius of Cyrene, in his treatise On Dreams, taught that imagination is the soul's subtle vehicle of perception, "the first body of the soul", so that in dreams this imaginal body receives impressions from the divine directly. Aelius Aristides filled his Sacred Tales with the dreams Asclepius sent him, and he records that the god ordered him to write his dreams down. The suppliants at the sanctuaries of Asclepius purified themselves and slept in the sacred chamber to receive a healing dream. Artemidorus, in his Oneirocritica, taught that the images of a dream correspond first to the dreamer's own life, social role and habits of speech. He gathered his interpretations from experience, traveling to learn from those most practiced, and for him water in a dream could mean fortune and travel to a sailor and flood or loss to a farmer.
The scriptures of East and West keep the same witness. In the Bible, Jacob dreams of a ladder reaching to heaven with angels ascending and descending on it (Genesis 28), Joseph's dreams of the sheaves and the stars foretell his rise in Egypt, and Joseph the husband of Mary is warned in a dream to flee into Egypt. The Hekhalot Zutarti of the Merkavah mystics teaches that when a worthy man lies upon his bed and sleeps, the angels of the Presence come to him in a dream and reveal the mysteries of the chariot. The Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad teaches that in dream the self creates its own world by its own light, and the Chāndogya Upaniṣad separates the true dreams that show what is to come from the false ones born of the day.
Crowley gave me a distinction I still use in my own dream work. In Liber Aleph he separates the lunar dream from the solar dream. The lunar dream belongs to the body and rises from unmet needs, appetite and the sediment of the day, and it refreshes and clears the vessel. The solar dream comes to the one who has purified the body and clarified the will, and its images move in harmony with the soul's destiny. My own journals hold both kinds, and over the years I learned to tell them apart on waking by their clarity.
Jung wrote that "the dream is a little hidden door in the innermost and most secret recesses of the soul", opening onto the cosmic night that was psyche long before there was any ego-consciousness. He taught that dreams are autonomous events of the psyche, with a compensatory work to do, balancing the one-sidedness of the waking mind, humbling it when it is inflated and showing it a hidden light when it despairs. He distinguished the big dreams, the ones that arrive with numinous force and change a life, from the fragments of ordinary sleep. In our School we carry that current into theurgy, where imagination becomes a vessel through which the divine intelligences show themselves in form, voice and presence. In our methods we ask of a dream which god speaks through its images, and then we carry it into the rite.
The disciplines I gave our students are the ones I keep myself. The work runs in four stages, first increasing recall, then faithfully capturing what comes, then classifying it with discernment, and finally validating what proves true in waking life. I ask students to keep a regular window of sleep, to keep a pen and a notebook by the bed, or in our age a voice recorder, and to write the dream down before anything else is done, as Asclepius ordered Aristides. I ask them to frame a clear question before sleep, to map the images of a dream to their own lives first, as Artemidorus taught, and to lighten the body before lying down. After a day of major operations a theurgist may sleep in the temple, as the ancients slept in the sanctified chamber of the god, and let the dream become a continuation of the rite.
The longest and clearest dreams come in the last third of the night, when the periods of rapid eye movement sleep grow long. For this I teach the method researchers call wake-back-to-bed. Once a week, especially after a major theurgic operation, the student sets a quiet waking after four to six hours of sleep, rises for ten or fifteen minutes, perhaps to read again the question set the evening before, and then returns to sleep. A gentle waking keeps the images intact where a jarring alarm scatters them, and going to bed and rising at the same hours each day teaches the body to wake on its own at the appointed time.
On waking I stay with the sequence of the dream for as long as I can, retracing its scenes backward and forward before the edges dissolve, and I write down everything, even a stray word, since the fragment is often what later proves significant. Each entry in my journals carries the date and the hour, the question I set the night before, the dream itself written in the present tense as a plain transcript, its colors, numbers, directions, animals and strange phrases, its emotional tone and what filled the day before it. I give each dream a headline and a few tags so that its motifs can be followed from one month to the next. Later I mark whether its elements were confirmed, whether it hit or missed, and in that way the journals became a record of their own reliability.
I teach students to interpret without forcing. A vision that comes true as it is seen and an oracle spoken by a dignified figure need no decoding, and only the enigmatic dream asks for the labor of symbol. Some recurring dreams of heat, suffocation or falling teeth belong to the body, as the old medical writers knew, and I ask students to mark each reading with a grade of confidence, A, B or C, and leave the uncertain ones open.
The last discipline is waking within the dream. All of us have woken up inside a dream at some time, and with practice it comes more often. In a lunar state of dreaming you watch yourself from outside, as one actor among others. In a solar state you see through your own eyes and the scene is lit from within, and when you say with calm authority, inside the dream, that you are here, the dream stops its stream of narrative and begins to answer you.
My dream life has given me my own proof that our ancestors remain alive within us, working through us and continuing their labors through our own consciousness.