Why I tell it now
A student who opens our School's works meets finished books, with the rites, the tables and the teachings set down in order and none of the years behind them showing on the page.
Each method in those books came from long contemplation and careful inclusion, then from experiment in the temple and from results in my own life, and I adjusted each one again as I kept practicing it. The sciences our School teaches beside the rite came in the same way. I drew them from realization in practice and brought them in over time, one discovery after another, until the model and the rite fitted each other.
A book of instruction has little room for that history. It gives the rite to the student as "you", step by step, with its reasons and its rubrics, and the "I" of the man who found it appears only in a line or two beside a teaching. A student can learn the whole method from those books and still not know which parts of it were practiced for many years before they were written down, and which parts came late.
You should be able to judge for yourself whether following me into this mystery tradition is a solid move for you and for your own path. Some parts of our system are old in my practice and some are recent, and a student who is asked to give daily hours to them should be able to tell which is which, how long each was kept before it was written, and what it did in the life of the man who wrote it. For this reason I tell each part in the order I lived it, first the discovery, then the practice, then what the practice did in my own life, and then the change I made to the model from it.
The history of how the system came together lives in my journals and in my memory, and nowhere else. I want it written down now, while the works are new and the years behind them are still clear to me, so that our students and those who teach after me have it in one place beside the books.
What I can offer
What I offer you is a path that has been walked. The rite I teach is one I have performed for many years and still keep in my daily practice, and what it asks of a student I first asked of myself, in my own temple.
I offer you my witness as I lived it. What I saw, heard and experienced in the temple, in dreams and in the natural world I state as I saw, heard and experienced it, in the words I would use with a student sitting across from me. Where my understanding of an experience changed over the years, I give the understanding I hold now and the year it came.
I offer you the methods in a form you can test. Our School's books give each rite in its order, with the reasons behind every part, and you can keep the practice for a season, write down what happens and compare it with what the books teach. I put every method to the same test before it went into our School's work.
I also offer you the teachers and the books that shaped me, named as fully as I can name them, so that you can read them for yourself. Our School was built on a great many of them, and a student who goes back to those sources will find the roots of our teaching there.
What I cannot
I make no promise of results. The experiences that come in theurgy vary from one theurgist to the next and from one season of a life to the next. My experiences are my testimony, and they come to you as testimony, with no promise that yours will take the same shape or arrive on the same schedule.
I cannot do the work for you. A teacher can give the method, the order of practice and the reasons behind it, and the hours in the temple belong to the student alone. The practice changed my life because I kept it, day after day, for many years.
I cannot hand you my life as a map to copy. The doors I went through were the ones open to a young man in eastern Idaho and Salt Lake City in the years I lived there, and your own road into the work will run through other doors, other books and other teachers. The method our School teaches was built so that a student can enter it from any of them.