The country home
In October 2014 Lannah and I moved into a country home. We were dating then, and we married the following year, and Lannah was with me through all the work of that house. On the property stood a separate large storage building, and I converted it into a temple, and the winter and spring that followed were spent in it.
To reach it I had to leave the house, cross the ground between the two buildings and open a door that led to nothing but the work. Inside, the building held only what the rite needed, and every hour I spent there was spent on the rite, the cards, the journals and the books.
The conversion toward the cards and the sky
In that building I worked diligently on the Tarot and on the integration of astrology into the ritual setting, and there I really began the major conversion of our ritual praxis toward astrological and Tarot-identified modeling. By then I had worked with the cards in my readings and my journals for more than twenty years. While in that country home I worked very closely with the rite itself and brought the Tarot deep into the technology of the ritual, and in that building the cards began to give the ritual set its order. The work filled my journals as I experimented and developed it, and the journals of the houses that followed carried it on into the system our School teaches today.
Out of those journals came the order our rite keeps today. The Aces stand as the raw elements of the casting, fire, water, air and earth purified at their root. The Twos stand as the forces of the four guardians. The thirty-six small cards of the decans, from the Twos to the Tens, stand as the forces of the decan daemons in the Celestial work and in the Decan Year (Ritual Praxis and Instruction, Chs. 30, 31, 54 and 55). Each card brings its zodiacal and planetary place into the rite with it, the attributions the Golden Dawn laid upon the small cards and the planetary rulers of the decans in the Chaldean order. A card linked to a part of the rite gives that part its salience in study, and the rite itself is performed as Ritual Praxis and Instruction prescribes it.
The Twos show the kind of work those journals hold. Each of the four Twos stands at the first decan of a cardinal sign, the Two of Wands with Mars in Aries, the Two of Cups with Venus in Cancer, the Two of Swords with the Moon in Libra and the Two of Disks with Jupiter in Capricorn. The four guardians of the temple are the ministers of the four turnings of the solar year, the two equinoxes and the two solstices, and in our rite they are called to the four stations immediately after the casting, at the edge of the sphere.
The astrology of the storage-building temple was the astrology of the ritual set, the signs, the planets and the decans with their cards built into the structure of the rite. I studied each card beside the force it named. Before a working I would read what I knew of the card, its sign, its planet and its decan, and after the working I wrote what had come in the rite beside those notes, so that over the months the journals filled with pages on each force.
A method for the forces
While in the country home I developed a method that brought the Tarot and the astrological sciences into my rites through two things, my first modification of the pentagram ritual and the use of the hexagram rituals prescribed by the Golden Dawn. Until then I had worked the inherited forms much as they were printed. Here for the first time I changed the pentagram rite on purpose to serve a method of my own, and I set the hexagram rituals beside it to begin working with the forces in a more systematic way.
The hexagram rituals of the Golden Dawn come in a lesser and a greater form. The lesser ritual opens with the analysis of the keyword, the letters I.N.R.I. resolved into the names of Isis, Apophis and Osiris and into the sign of Light, and then the six-pointed figure is traced at the quarters in its four forms, with the great Name Ararita vibrated at each. The greater ritual takes the planets one at a time. For each planet the hexagram is traced beginning from the point of the figure that belongs to that planet, with the divine Name of its sphere on the Tree of Life, so that Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, the Sun, Venus, Mercury and the Moon each have a figure and a Name of their own.
That structure is what made a system possible. The Tarot already gives every planet and every sign a card, through the attributions of the Golden Dawn, and the hexagram rituals give every planet its own operation. With the cards to name the forces, the astrology to place them and the two rites to open and invoke them, I could take up the forces in order, one after another, and come back to each of them in its season. I wanted to know each force by meeting it in the temple and writing down what it did, and the method gave me a way to meet them one at a time and to compare them over months.
Six months, morning and evening
Through a dedicated cycle of six months, spanning from early that winter into the late spring, I performed ritual every morning. Most evenings I closed with an additional banishing ritual. On Sundays I added the Middle Pillar ritual of Israel Regardie to the set.
On a weekday morning the method set the order of the work. A working began with the banishing, and then came the hexagram ritual for the force I had taken up, the figure traced at the quarters and the Names vibrated, and the presence of the planet invited into the temple. I stayed with that presence for as long as it held and then closed the work. Afterward I sat down with the journal, with my notes on the card, the sign and the planet open beside it, and I wrote what had come. Each new morning given to a planet could be read against the earlier mornings given to the same planet.
Sunday was the day the set changed, and Regardie's Middle Pillar entered it. In the Middle Pillar the light is drawn down the center of the body, sphere by sphere, each lit with its divine Name, until a column of light stands from the crown to the feet. Through the week the work was the banishing and the hexagram workings of the method, and on Sunday the Middle Pillar stood in the middle of the set.
I kept that rhythm through the winter and into the spring, morning after morning, with the journal open after every rite. For six months the temple in the storage building was the first place I went each day.
What the journals showed
The biggest turn toward what would eventually be made the foundation of our School's use of ritual came in that cycle, and it became the central focus of my journaling. The forces were the subject of the method, and the journals were meant to record them. More and more of the pages came to be about the shape of the practice itself.
In those months I fully realized that disparate ritual sets were drawing me into a complexity that pulled me away from the work, and that the complexity needed to be centralized. Each rite I had added brought its own opening, its own Names, its own figures and its own close. The pentagram ritual had its form, the lesser hexagram had another, each planet in the greater hexagram had its own, and the Middle Pillar had a structure of its own beside them. Every new force I took up seemed to need another rite or another variation, and the set kept growing. I could feel my attention going into the management of all those forms, and the more forms there were, the less of me was left for the force I had come to meet.
The journals also showed me a difference in effect I could not ignore. On a weekday the holding of the ritual followed the inherited pattern, a banishing first, then a hexagram ritual, then a closing banishing. That sequence worked, and the hexagram workings brought the planetary forces into the temple with real presence. The pattern itself carried a cost, as the closing banishing cleared away much of what the hexagram had brought in, and each morning's work had to be built up from its foundation again.
The Middle Pillar on Sundays was different, and I saw it again and again in the entries. It moved far more energy at the foundation of the body than the other rites, and it centered my focus as none of them did. When it was in the set, the whole set ran on its current. The energy of the Middle Pillar rose above the predicate of the other rites, and the forces I invoked around it arrived into a body that was already full of light, centered and steady.
A rite that centers the operator and fills the vessel does something that a sequence of separate operations cannot do, and the order of the parts mattered as much as the parts. The journals of that winter hold my first long record of that difference, Sunday after Sunday, written beside the weekday entries that showed the other pattern.
Magick in Theory and Practice, front to back again
During that time I went through Aleister Crowley's Magick in Theory and Practice again, front to back, searching for how he may have dealt with this discrepancy. Crowley was a practical magician who had worked inside the Golden Dawn's system and then rebuilt it, and if anyone had faced the problem of a growing set of separate operations, I expected it to be him.
The book is a manual of method, written by a man who wanted magick taught as a discipline. Near its opening Crowley defines Magick as "the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will", and everything after that definition is set out as technique. It gives the magical formulas, the banishings and purifications, the consecrations, the invocation, the oath and the Eucharist, and it treats the magical record as a discipline in its own right. Its appendices add further rites of his own, among them the Star Ruby and the Mass of the Phoenix.
Crowley's account of invocation in that book was the part I studied most closely. He describes the work of invoking a god as a work of identification, the magician raising himself through devotion, through the Names and through the drama of the rite until he and the god are one, and he lays great weight on the record, the daily diary in which every working is written down and later examined. I had kept that kind of record for years, and in that winter my journals were full of the problem I hoped he had solved. I read it with my journals beside me, looking for the place where he joined the operations into one or explained how the force of one rite could be kept through the next.
What I found instead was more ritual, further operations of his own design set beside the older ones. Crowley's rites are potent in form, and some of them are potentially more potent than the older rites they answer. They still stood as separate operations, each with its own opening and close, and together they were caught up in the same complexity of a patchwork of operations. The book gave me more rites to perform and more formulas to study. On the question I brought to it, how to keep the work in one current from beginning to end, it had no answer.
That reading settled something for me that the winter journals had already begun to show. The problem I was writing about in the journals was in the structure of the tradition itself, and the masters of the tradition had added to the set without centralizing it. If the work was going to be centralized, I would have to centralize it myself, in my own temple and in my own journals.
Salt Lake City, 2016
In March 2016 we moved back to Salt Lake City. Shortly after we arrived I attended an open class with the O.T.O. The local bodies of the order hold classes open to the public, where members and visitors study the texts of Thelema, its rituals and its history together, and anyone with an interest can come through the door. At that class I met Anibal Alvarez, who was then a member of the order. He later became the body master of that body, and he still holds that office today.
That meeting was an incredible opportunity for me. Anibal and I became very close friends, as we shared a deep interest in both Aleister Crowley and Carl Jung, and few people I had met could talk about either one with the knowledge he brought to it. He is a scholar of the highest degree, with a deep knowledge of the occult and of religious studies in general. He knows the texts and their histories, how the traditions grew out of one another and where their ideas came from, and he is a practitioner as well as a scholar.
Our talks went from Crowley to Jung and back again. I was continuing my study of Jung at that time, reading steadily through his volumes, and Anibal knew both bodies of work well enough to set them beside each other. Crowley gave a magician's account of the gods, the self and the will, and Jung gave a psychologist's account of the archetypes and the objective psyche, and the two of us could spend hours on where the two accounts met and where they parted.
Between the two bodies of work the meeting points are many. Crowley sets the Great Work as the knowledge and conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel and the discovery of the True Will, and Jung describes individuation, the long work in which the conscious personality comes into living relation with the Self. Crowley's gods and Jung's archetypes are both met in images, both act on the one who meets them, and both are held to be more than the private inventions of a single mind. Talking these through with someone who knew both men's writings as well as Anibal did sharpened my reading of each of them.
Through meeting Anibal I became a great deal more interested in the O.T.O. and in Crowley's overall framework. I had read Crowley for many years as a body of writings. In the company of Anibal and the members of the order I saw that framework as a living system, practiced by its members, with its degrees, its classes and its community.
In those months I began listening to David Shoemaker's podcast, Living Thelema. Shoemaker speaks out of long practice within the Thelemic orders, and his episodes take up the practices, the texts and the psychology of the path, often with guests who teach from their own practice. I listened to it regularly and wrote down the references I wanted to follow up in my reading.
I also extended my study of Thelema to several other authors I had not studied before, whom Anibal pointed out to me. He knew the literature far beyond the books most students begin with.
Mornings with Lannah
At this time I did not have a temple. After a winter and spring in the storage-building temple, my practice in Salt Lake City had to be carried on without one.
Instead I started doing a great deal of meditation work with my wife. We began practicing together every morning, Lannah and I in the same room at the same hour, before the day began.
What we practiced was above all Kundalini Yoga, as our School now teaches it in the preparation of the vessel. A morning set works through the postures held with the breath, the forceful breaths and the stillness that follows them, and it ends in meditation. In our practice it is the work that opens and steadies the body before anything else in the day is done.
The yoga and the meditation work together as one practice. The yoga moves the energy through the body and wakes it, and the meditation that follows gathers the attention and lets it settle in the stillness the yoga has made. In our School the preparation of the vessel is completed before any rite begins, and in those months without a temple the preparation was the whole of our morning practice.
Lannah embraced it along with me, and so did my children. It became our household's practice, something done together at the start of the day. We have continued it together through all the years since, in the form our School now teaches.
For years my practice had been a solitary one, and now the start of the day belonged to the two of us.
Blackfoot, Idaho
In November 2016 we moved to Blackfoot, Idaho, and once again I had a temple and a room to practice in. We lived in Blackfoot for nearly three years, until 2019.
In Blackfoot I moved deeper into journaling toward a new system. The realization of the country-home winter had stayed with me, that the disparate sets had to be centralized. I wrote out rites, tested them in the temple and wrote them out again. The journals of those years hold drafts of rites, notes on what each draft did when it was performed and long pages of notes from the reading in physics and science that filled those years.
What I did there more than anything was keep practicing Kundalini Yoga and performing the banishing rituals. The yoga prepared the body each day, and the banishing kept the temple and the self clear. The elaborate sets of the country home gave way to this simpler and steadier practice, done daily, while the new system grew in the journals beside it.
Each day the yoga came first and prepared the body, and then the banishing cleared the temple and the self, and in the cleared space I sat with the journal and worked on the rites of the new system.
Beside that practice I dove much deeper into my studies of physics and science, and into how they related to the system that was developing. I had come to Wolfgang Pauli through my long study of Jung, and in Blackfoot this is where the work really started to turn toward the modern framework our students find in our School today. Pauli had worked with Jung for many years on the meeting of physics and the psyche, and through him the physics stopped being a separate interest beside my practice and became one of the foundations of the system I was writing. Every reading in the sciences was read with the journals open, and I kept asking how each principle bore on the rite.
Until then the framework of my practice had come from the traditions, the Kabbalah, the Golden Dawn, Thelema, the theurgy of the Platonists and the yoga of the East. In Blackfoot the sciences of the age began to enter that framework as partners, and the system in the journals began to be written in two languages at once, the language of the temple and the language of modern physics and psychology. Our School's books are written in both of those languages today, and in Blackfoot they first came together on the same pages.
We were in Blackfoot for some time, and through about two of those years I was able to study more than at any other time of my life. My wife and I decided to try biphasic sleeping, dividing the night's sleep into two periods in place of a single long one. The change gave me an additional four hours a night, and I dedicated those hours strictly to reading and to making notes for the School.
Biphasic sleep is an old pattern, and for many people in earlier centuries the night came in two parts, a first sleep and a second, with a waking between them. For me those four hours were a second day given entirely to study. I read physics and science, Jung and Pauli and the writers around them, and I wrote notes for the School as I went, pages that would later feed the School's works.
Lannah shared that schedule with me, and it took real discipline from both of us. We kept it for about two years, and the hours it gave me went into the School.
Las Vegas, Nevada
In September 2019 we moved to Las Vegas, Nevada, and I joined the local O.T.O. body there.
Interestingly enough, it was at one of their classes that I was fully introduced to formal astrology as a science in and of itself. In that class, among the members of a magical order, I met astrology for the first time as a complete discipline, with its own technique, its own history and its own standards of practice.
Formal astrology has a large body of technique. The chart is cast for a moment and a place, the planets are read in their signs and in the houses of the chart, the aspects between them are measured by their angles, and the movement of the planets after birth is read against the natal positions. Each part of that technique has its rules and a long history of practice behind it, and the whole is learned as a discipline in its own right, apart from any rite.
I found it very interesting, and I even spent some time with the body master there discussing its value to a practicing ceremonialist. A ceremonialist works with the planets and the signs in every operation, in the Names, the figures and the correspondences of the rite. In the temple he meets the planets as forces and as presences, and in the chart the same planets are positions and relations, measured and timed. What the measuring and the timing could give to a man who already works the forces in the temple was the subject of our talks, and I carried that question with me out of Las Vegas.
Its impact as an art sank in for me only later, with the full reading I received from Tabatha Adams.
Saint Anthony, the room behind the bank
In May 2020 we moved to Saint Anthony, Idaho, the town of my birth, so that I could spend time with my parents. They lived just a few houses away from us, close enough that time with them could be part of our ordinary days, and after many years and many houses elsewhere I was living again in the town where I was born.
I had a small office in the back of a bank, and I was able to take a room there and turn it into a temple, so that I could start up ritual again.
It was at this time that I began experimenting deeply with the predicates of physics, of the new science and of ritual. What I had studied in the sciences became the ground on which I built and performed the rite, and the journal recorded what happened.
I found the effect to be much more potent than I could have ever expected.