When you can build this filter, where you ignore grand proclamations of ownership and seek only the true gems of eternal knowledge in between human error, all religions and all peoples worship the same infinite equally.
Eddie Paredes, Central Doctrine
The booth
For over four years, from about 1993 until I left for Oregon in the summer of 1997, I worked in a parking booth. The job carried me through my years in Salt Lake City and my months at UCMT, while I was building my holistic bodywork practice on the side. The lots I looked after were largely automated. Monthly subscribers scanned their cards at the gate and drove on, and the booth was there for the occasional driver who needed help and for the days when a gate or a machine went wrong. On most shifts nobody needed anything from me for hours at a time, and I filled those hours with books.
I came to think of that booth as my invisible college. It had no teachers in the room and no examinations, but it had a counter wide enough for an open book and a notebook, and a quiet that lasted most of the day. I gave nearly 80 percent of my working hours in that booth to study and contemplation. I estimate, with no exaggeration, that over those four years this came to more than 5,000 hours of self-directed learning, which works out to well over twenty hours of reading in every week of those years.
I often looked forward to work more than anything else in my week. A shift meant the book I was in, the notebook beside it and long hours with nobody to call me away. That job was a true gift of fate, and it shaped my adult life.
Pen, margin and notebook
Each day in the booth I worked through whatever I was reading at the time, and over those years the books came to hundreds of titles. I scribbled notes in the margins, I copied key passages out by hand, and I filled notebook after notebook with insights, symbols and techniques.
The notebooks fed the other records I kept at home. I was building personal grimoires and compendiums of symbolism, correspondences and meditative insights in those same years, and the booth was where most of their raw material was gathered. When I met a correspondence, a planet joined to a Hebrew letter or a color joined to a Tarot trump, I wrote it down under the ones I had already collected from other authors, and I marked the places where two authors disagreed. When I met a rite, I copied it with its gestures, its divine Names and its order, so that I could perform it from my own page that night.
I would read a chapter of Crowley, turn to a book on the chakras and then to something on parapsychology, and look for the place where all three were describing one thing in different words. A great deal of what our School teaches about the one operation behind many traditions began as arrows drawn between pages in those notebooks, linking one author's term to another's.
Five hundred volumes
During those years I gathered a library of more than 500 volumes. It spanned the occult, pagan studies, meditation, Eastern philosophies, psi science, psychology, shamanism and the broader field of the Western mystery traditions. The books I was working through at any given time came with me to work, and the rest stood on the shelves at home.
The shelves at home had a rough order. The ceremonial books stood together, Crowley, Regardie and the Golden Dawn papers, with the Kabbalistic books beside them. The Tarot books had a shelf of their own. The yogic and Tantric books, the books on witchcraft and the pagan revival, the anthropology of the Americas, the books on psi and the psychology I was reading for school all had their places, and many of them were full of my margin notes.
Crowley and the Thelemic writers
Over about a decade of disciplined and passionate research I read most of Aleister Crowley's major works and most of his other writings. Two of them I wore out completely, Magick in Theory and Practice and The Book of Thoth, which I read again and again throughout my Thelemic studies.
Magick in Theory and Practice sets out ritual as a disciplined art with its own method, a set of operations that could be learned, practiced, recorded and refined. The Book of Thoth gives the Tarot as a complete system of correspondence, each card set on the Tree of Life with its Hebrew letter, its planet or sign and its element. Our School's books draw on many more of his works, The Book of the Law, The Equinox of the Gods, The Book of Lies, The Vision and the Voice, 777, One Star in Sight, Liber Aleph, Little Essays Toward Truth and Magick Without Tears. Years after I first read Liber Aleph, his book of letters to his magical son, I cited its chapter on the works of the star of the microcosm in my own essay on the mandala.
After Crowley I read the Thelemic writers who carried his current into the following generations. I read Kenneth Grant, Phyllis Seckler, J. Daniel Gunther and David Shoemaker. Each of them wrote out of long practice within the Thelemic orders. Our School's own sources also draw on James A. Eshelman's The Mystical and Magical System of the A∴A∴, the order Crowley founded for the individual student.
Israel Regardie
Israel Regardie had a great influence on me, and I studied and read all of his works. Regardie served as Crowley's secretary as a young man, and in the late 1930s he published the papers of the Golden Dawn, breaking the order's secrecy and putting its rites into the hands of anyone who could buy the books. He later trained in psychology and Reichian therapy and practiced as a chiropractor and psychotherapist, and his books treat relaxation, healing and the body beside the Tree of Life.
From Regardie I took my daily rites in print. The Lesser Ritual of the Pentagram stands in his volumes of the Golden Dawn material, and the Middle Pillar has its own book from his hand, The Middle Pillar of 1938. For years those two rites stood at the center of my practice.
Regardie taught me how to sound a divine Name. In his writing on the vibration of the Names he gives the signs that a Name has been sounded truly, the whole body of the magician aflame with force and energy and the Name heard thundering back as an echo from every part of the surrounding space. In our School we still call that sign Regardie's echo. In The Tree of Life, his study of magic published in 1932, he wrote that the vibration of the god-names sets up "a strain in the upper astral light, in response to which the intelligence evoked hastens". Our teaching on the sounded Name still draws on that passage (Ritual Praxis and Instruction, Ch. 20).
Regardie also gave me Iamblichus on prayer before I had read Iamblichus himself. In The Tree of Life he quotes De Mysteriis V.26 in Thomas Taylor's translation and applies it to invocation, prayer as "the divine key which opens to men the penetralia of the gods", which "does not desist till it raises us to the summit of all". The declarations of our rite are spoken as that prayer, an act of orientation in which the theurgist makes their alignment toward the divine and toward cosmic order explicit, so that the daemons, the planetary gods and the zodiacal intelligences can enter into mutual recognition with the one who invokes.
In the same book Regardie wrote, "The Divine Astral is solar and celestial in nature, whereas the gross Astral is lunar, reflective, and purely automatic," and he cited Blavatsky as confirming the dual nature of the astral light. I first read that sentence as a description of two levels of the subtle world, one luminous and one that only reflects. Our School's teaching of the Sun as the reference of the whole system and the Moon as the reflective medium that takes and returns its light grew from that distinction.
From The Middle Pillar I took his teaching that the aspirant comes to the knowledge and conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel through the abdication of the false ego, through "the utter destruction of its illusory nature, the rooting out of that element which gives egoism to a mere combination of perceptions, tendencies, and memories". In our language the false ego is identification with the Persona and its reflexes. The Persona is offered to the god, and the observing "I" stays and becomes transparent. Our Central Doctrine gives his words a section of their own (Ch. 26).
Regardie cited Iamblichus often, and his citations later sent me to the Platonists.
Most of the Golden Dawn material
Through Regardie I came into the Golden Dawn itself, and over the years I read most of the Golden Dawn material, from the grade rituals and lectures of the Outer Order to the deeper papers of the Second Order on the Tarot, the pentagram and hexagram rituals and the Enochian work. I read the order's papers as Regardie printed them, and I read the books of its founders. Our School's works draw on Mathers's The Kabbalah Unveiled, The Key of Solomon the King and The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abra-Melin the Mage, and on Westcott's edition of The Chaldæan Oracles of Zoroaster.
The Golden Dawn's founders took the Hermetic, Kabbalistic, Neoplatonic and astrological grammar of the Renaissance and built it into one ceremonial order, with every grade, color, Name, planet, sign and card in its place. I practiced its rites for many years and learned a great deal from them, the pentagram and hexagram rituals, the Middle Pillar workings and the long sequences of the initiatory grades.
The Golden Dawn also gave our School its decan wheel. Our decan system takes its thirty-six stations from the Egyptian decan-clock and its wheel from Mathers and the Golden Dawn. The order's Book T, its teaching on the Tarot, laid the Chaldean decan rulers upon the small cards, and those are the attributions our ritual and our Divine Arcana Tarot use today.
The Kabbalah
The Kabbalah came to me first through the ceremonial books, in the Hermetic Qabalah of the Golden Dawn and of Crowley. Lévi, Mathers and their circle joined the Tree of Life to astrology, alchemy and the Tarot, and I lived in that Qabalah for years, with its planetary attributions of the sefirot, its paths and its divine Names.
Robert Wang's The Qabalistic Tarot of 1983 changed the direction of that study. I read it just before my two years of Lurianic Kabbalah, and it was Wang's work that really taught me I was seeking a more authentic foundation in the work.
In the years that followed I read all of Aryeh Kaplan's works on Kabbalah, the Kabbalistic writings of Isaac Luria and of Ḥayyim Vital, who followed him and recorded his teaching, and much of the Zohar. Kaplan taught me the Kabbalah as a practice, and our rite draws on Luria's teaching of the contraction and the single line of light at its center (Ritual Praxis and Instruction, Ch. 26). From the Zohar I took the great images of the tradition, the palace raised around the hidden point, the Bridegroom of Tiferet and his union with the Shekhinah, and the subtle garments of the soul. The Zohar and the literature after it also gave me the tzelem, the image in which the human being is made (Genesis 1:27), which in the Kabbalah grew from a statement of likeness into a real spiritual form, a garment formed from the light of the upper worlds that accompanies the soul and overshadows the body. The image of the Kabbalists and the luminous vehicle of the Platonists are two traditions' names for what we call the ochēma.
The books our School's works draw on from this shelf run from the Sefer Yetzirah, the Sefer ha-Bahir and the Hekhalot and Merkavah literature to the Zohar with the Sulam commentary of Rabbi Yehuda Ashlag, Moses Cordovero, Christian Knorr von Rosenroth's Kabbala Denudata and Maimonides's Guide for the Perplexed.
The old books of ritual magic
The grimoires belong to the history of magick I studied over the years, and I read them for their history and for their methods. The old books of ritual magic our works draw on include the Key of Solomon, the Lesser Key of Solomon with its Goetia, the Heptameron attributed to Peter of Abano, the Arbatel, the Sworn Book of Honorius, the Grimorium Verum and the Book of Abramelin, with Cornelius Agrippa's Three Books of Occult Philosophy standing behind them. Beside them I read the books of the witch hunters, the Malleus Maleficarum, Johann Weyer, Reginald Scot and the Daemonologie of King James, for their record of how the old arts were judged and punished. Behind the grimoires stand the Greek magical papyri of late antiquity. The Golden Dawn's Bornless Ritual was adapted from one of them, a London papyrus known as PGM V, through C. W. Goodwin's edition of 1852, and from the 1890s onward the ceremonial magicians mined such texts for inspiration as if they were one manual of ancient magic. Our Central Doctrine sets the papyri in their history and separates the theurgic rites among them, rooted in Platonic philosophy and aimed at divine ascent, from the coercive ones.
The operator of the grimoires binds and commands spirits by his own will and the force of his Names. The theurgy of Iamblichus, which stands a thousand years and more before them, makes the magician into the worshiper, and in it the daemonic is transformed and never bound. Our Central Doctrine weighs the grimoires against Iamblichus at length, and our rite keeps the worshiper's way.
Dozens of works on the Tarot
The Tarot has been in my practice since I was eighteen, and over the years I have read dozens of works on it. Beside Crowley's Book of Thoth the author I read most was Paul Foster Case, and I read most of his works. Case taught the Tarot as a course of training, card by card, with each trump given its letter, its color and its tone, and the cards themselves to be meditated upon as images of the powers of the soul. Our School's Tarot quotes him card by card from Highlights of Tarot, The Tarot: A Key to the Wisdom of the Ages and Tarot Revelations. Case was born in Fairport, New York, in 1884 and taught the Tarot from 1922. He served the Alpha et Omega, one of the orders that came out of the Golden Dawn, as its head for the United States and Canada, then founded the Builders of the Adytum, and he made his deck with the artist Jessie Burns Parke.
I read many of the works of Arthur Edward Waite, among them The Pictorial Key to the Tarot of 1910, written for the deck he had published the year before, and Éliphas Lévi's Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie, which Waite translated into English as Transcendental Magic.
Of everything written on the Thoth deck since Crowley's own Book of Thoth, the most deeply written work I know is the three volumes of Marcus Katz's Secrets of the Thoth Tarot, on the trumps, the small cards and the court cards. The court cards in particular are companions to the rite and a study I hold very dear.
Among the dozens of Tarot books on my shelves I also worked through the Golden Dawn's Book T, Lon Milo DuQuette's Tarot of Ceremonial Magick and Understanding Aleister Crowley's Thoth Tarot, and the histories of the cards by Michael Dummett and his colleagues, The Game of Tarot, A Wicked Pack of Cards and A History of the Occult Tarot, 1870–1970. The histories taught me how the cards came down from the decks painted for the courts of Milan, through Antoine Court de Gébelin and Etteilla in the eighteenth century, to Lévi, the Golden Dawn, Waite and Crowley. The occult authors showed me what that revival made of them, with the Hebrew letters, the paths of the Tree, the planets, the signs and the decans laid onto the images one by one.
From all of this I learned to read the cards as a game with a long human history, as a system of correspondences built by the occult revival and as living images for meditation and the rite. Our School designed its own Divine Arcana Tarot for theurgy, divination, ritual and meditation, joining astrology, Jungian psychology, the Eastern traditions of our lineage and the Western mystery tradition.
The scriptures and Tantras of India
Over the years my reading in the scriptures of India became one of the largest parts of my study. I read the Upaniṣads and the Vedas, and the Śvetāśvatara Upaniṣad above all became a text I return to in my own teaching.
I read The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda, among them his Raja Yoga of 1896, and the life and sayings of his teacher Ramakrishna. Both stand in the lineage I name for our School, and their teaching that the traditions are many roads to one reality runs all through it.
The Indian books also gave our School the order of its methods. The student begins with Jñāna, the yoga of knowledge, built on scientific discovery, philosophical insight, the poetics of prophecy and the study of transcendent symbolic language. Jñāna leads to Rāja, the yoga of focused action through meditation and ceremonial ritual, and finally to Bhakti, the yoga of dedicated service leading to God-realization and divine union with the supreme reality. The Vedānta philosophers call that reality Puruṣa-Ātman, the Platonists the One, and our School our Divine Infinite Being. The same reading gave me the teaching on karma and dharma I give my students.
The Tantric reading went deepest. I read most of the Tantrāloka of Abhinavagupta, the great Kashmiri master of the Śaiva tradition, whose work gathers the Tantric rites and their philosophy into a single vast system. I read the Devī Bhāgavatam, the Purāṇa of the Goddess, in which the Devī is the supreme reality and every god acts by her power. Beside these I read dozens of works authentic to the Tantric path, mostly by liturgical authors writing for devotees in India. Their writing speaks in a different register from Western scholarship. A scholar in the West describes a rite from outside, while these authors write as worshipers for worshipers, giving the mantra, the offering and the meditation on the deity's form so that the devotee can perform them that day.
This reading also taught me a filter, and I use it on every tradition. Many lines of the Hindu schools give their lineage to human beings claiming to be the very avatar of God, and the way those teachers lived showed that they were all very human indeed.
Buddhism and Taoism
I read many works on Buddhism. Its several schools showed me that the highest spiritual potential offered in this life can be reached even by a path that speaks little or nothing of God, and its analysis of the mind and its practices of attention stood beside the yoga I was already practicing.
I read several books on Taoism, on its traditional philosophy, on its place in the martial arts and on the folk magic of East Asia. The philosophy gave me the way of nature of the Tao Te Ching, one of the elements of our School's central model, and the Taijitu, in which neither half of the circle is greater than the other, each carries the seed of the other and the circle that holds them is one. The martial arts showed me the same principles trained into the body, in the breath, the stance and the flow of energy I had studied in Chi Gong. The folk magic showed me Taoism as the people practice it, with its talismans, its protective rites and its spirits of place.
The Bible
I have read the Bible since the household of my childhood. The Bible is replete with esoteric mystical knowledge while at the same time it has been politicized by Hebrew and Christian societies alike. In its pages you can see every age weaving in its own logic of control, reform and personal interest, as its authors balance between revelation and political management. Reading it with that in view, I found the mystical knowledge everywhere in it, from the Name given to Moses at the burning bush to the visions of the chariot and the throne that the earliest Merkava mystics practiced.
The Gospel of Thomas became the Christian text closest to me. Its sayings place the kingdom within and all around the one who knows himself, and we read it in our School through the Vaiṣṇava teaching of inconceivable oneness and difference, achintya-bhedābheda. I have long taught that heaven is here, realized in a transformed life, and Thomas is one of my strongest witnesses for it. With the Bhagavad Gītā and the Tao Te Ching it is one of the three works of wisdom our School has chosen for every aspirant. From those three works, from the writings of Iamblichus and from the verses of the worship of the Goddess Devī we drew the Five-Fold Way, the way of life of our School, made of Dharma, the Law of Duty, Karma, the Law of Action, Jñāna, the pursuit of Wisdom, Bhakti, the Law of Loving Devotion, and Sannyāsa, detachment from material possessions.
Plotinus, Proclus and all of Iamblichus
I read Plotinus, Proclus and all of Iamblichus, and the Platonists became the shelf of my library I return to most often.
Plotinus came to me in the Enneads, the fifty-four treatises his student Porphyry gathered into six groups of nine and published with his Life of Plotinus. From the Enneads I took the three hypostases of the One, Intellect and Soul, the teaching on beauty in I.6, the treatise against the Gnostics in II.9 and the undescended part of the soul in IV.8.8. In II.3 Plotinus asks whether the stars are causes and answers that they signify, and he teaches that all things are full of signs and that the wise can read one thing in another (II.3.7). Our astrology takes that answer as its own.
Proclus was the head of the Platonic school at Athens in the fifth century. His Elements of Theology sets out the whole procession of reality from the One in 211 propositions, and his Platonic Theology orders the gods in six books. His commentaries carry the teaching of the school through the dialogues of Plato, the Timaeus, the Republic, the Parmenides, the First Alcibiades and the Cratylus, and into geometry with the first book of Euclid. The fragment On the Hieratic Art gives the theurgist's reasons for the stones, plants and animals of the rite, each of them carrying a share of the god it belongs to. His Hymn to Helios calls the Sun the king of intellectual fire and teaches that every rank of being receives its portion of light from him, and our solar teaching quotes it.
Our doctrine of the ochēma, the luminous vehicle of the soul, owes its ground to Iamblichus and Proclus together, and I learned it by following the vehicle through the Platonists one by one. Plato set each soul upon a star "as in a chariot" (Timaeus 41e) and sent the chariots of the gods and of the souls who follow them riding to the outer rim of heaven to behold the Forms (Phaedrus 246–248). Iamblichus speaks of the soul's "aethereal and luminous vehicle" (On the Mysteries III.14), which the gods illuminate in the leading-in of light so that divine images appear in it. Synesius of Cyrene called it the soul's first vehicle and identified it with the imagination, and Proclus taught that every participated soul uses a first body that is perpetual and without generation (Elements of Theology, propositions 196 and 207–209). The later Platonists called it the radiant body, light-like and star-like, and gave it the shape of a sphere, the most perfect of figures and the figure of the heavens.
The same reading taught me what the Platonists meant by light. Plato set the Sun in the visible world as the offspring and likeness of the Good, giving to visible things both their visibility and their coming to be (Republic VI). Plotinus taught that light is the activity of the luminous body going out from it, present whole wherever it is (Enneads IV.5.7). Iamblichus compared the presence of the gods in the world to that same undivided light, present whole to everything it illumines and mixed with none of it (On the Mysteries I.9), and the Emperor Julian taught that the light of the visible Sun is the image of an intelligible light proceeding from Helios. Our School's teaching on light begins from these passages.
Of Iamblichus I have read all that survives. I read De Mysteriis, his reply in ten books to the letter of Porphyry, and the books of his Pythagorean collection, On the Pythagorean Way of Life, the Protrepticus, On the General Science of Mathematics and his introduction to the arithmetic of Nicomachus. I read the Theology of Arithmetic handed down under his name, the fragments of his commentaries on Plato's dialogues and on Aristotle, his On the Soul and his letters, among them the Letter to Macedonius on Fate.
Among the passages of De Mysteriis I have read most often are the two souls of VIII.6 and VIII.7, one bound to the movement of the heavens and one above it, with the way of the soul out of fate, and the personal daemon of Book IX, given to each of us at birth and met in the rite.
Around these three stand the other Platonists and the old sacred texts our School's books draw on, Porphyry, Julian's Hymn to King Helios, Sallustius, Syrianus, Damascius, Olympiodorus, Synesius on dreams and Macrobius, the Chaldean Oracles and the Corpus Hermeticum. The Chaldean Oracles say that the Father's Intellect has sown symbols throughout the cosmos, and I have read that line as the charter of every token our rite uses. Reading the Greeks beside the Indian scriptures, I have taught for many years that the Orphic teaching came out of the Indian philosophical writings and was carried into Greece through contacts across the Persian Empire.
I read the scholars of theurgy beside the sources. E. R. Dodds, from his paper "Theurgy and its Relationship to Neoplatonism" of 1947 to The Greeks and the Irrational and Pagans and Christians in an Age of Anxiety, called theurgy a kind of magic and set it apart from the philosophy of the Platonists. Hans Lewy's Chaldaean Oracles and Theurgy gathered the Oracles and their rites, and Sarah Iles Johnston's Hekate Soteira showed me Hecate as the cosmic soul who stands between the Fathers in the Chaldean system. Crystal Addey's Divination and Theurgy in Neoplatonism, Algis Uždavinys's Philosophy as a Rite of Rebirth and The Heart of Plotinus, and Radcliffe G. Edmonds III's Drawing Down the Moon answered Dodds. With Gregory Shaw they set the rite at the center of Platonic philosophy.
The histories of theurgy, magick and the occult
I studied the history of theurgy, of magick and of the occult from several sources over time. That study runs as one long line, from the theurgists of late antiquity to the Renaissance of Marsilio Ficino, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Johannes Reuchlin, Cornelius Agrippa and Paracelsus, who brought the Platonists, the Corpus Hermeticum and the Kabbalah back into Western learning, and from them to the occult revival of the nineteenth century. My own teaching on the Tarot wheel began from the vocabulary of that Renaissance. The revival itself I studied through its own people, Éliphas Lévi and Helena Blavatsky, Mathers and Westcott, Crowley and Regardie, with each of their books read beside the history of the circles they founded.
The history taught me where each element of the rites I practiced came from, which Name came from the Hebrew sources, which correspondence from the Renaissance and which grade from the orders of the revival. That knowledge lets our books mark each borrowing with its source. Each history I read went into the notebooks beside the rites it described, and many of them now stand in the lists of sources at the back of our books.
Screens and podcasts
As an engineer I was involved in the social media space from its earliest times. Since then I have poured through videos and podcasts dedicated to the occult, to physics and to much more, into the hundreds of hours.
Some of these have become companions as steady as any book, and David Shoemaker's Living Thelema stands in our School's list of sources beside the books of the Thelemic writers. The spoken format suits the way I work. A lecture or an interview goes with me on the road and into the hours when my hands are busy, and I write down the names, references and ideas I want to follow up in the library.
Hundreds of volumes
The names I have given are only a few of them. Over the years I have read hundreds of volumes in the disciplines that make up our School, the Western mystery traditions and the Tarot, the Kabbalah and the grimoires, Neoplatonism and the history of theurgy, the scriptures and Tantras of India, Buddhism and Taoism, the Bible, depth psychology, physics and biophysics, and much more. Through all of those years I kept up a very heavy practice, and many of my rites began as a page copied from a book.
I ask my students to read in the same way. Read the books of our School and the books behind them, Regardie and the Golden Dawn, Crowley and Case, Kaplan and the Zohar, the Upaniṣads and the Tantrāloka, Plotinus, Proclus and Iamblichus, and take what you read into your own temple and test it there in practice, with your journal open beside the book.