One Architecture

13.1 Whichever Door You Came Through

A practitioner formed in the Golden Dawn or in Thelema can take up the work of our School and keep the tradition that formed them. We ask no one to leave the tradition of their birth or of their heart, and we ask no profession of belief at the door (Central Doctrine, Ch. 4, §4.1.6 and §4.1.1). In the words of our Doctrine, "We are not a religion, nor a church, a faith, a creed, a denomination or a new religious movement" (Central Doctrine, Ch. 4, §4.1.6). Students come to us under many names and are asked to give up none of them (Central Doctrine, Ch. 3, §3.11).

My own road came through the same doors, the Kabbalistic path and the ceremonial magic of the Golden Dawn and of Thelema, and the pentagram ritual of that tradition, performed through three decades, grew into the Theurgic Ritual of the Pentagram we teach today (Ritual Praxis and Instruction, Preface; Chapter 5).

The invitation has two halves, given together. In the first you keep your tradition, its names, its tables, its cards and the long training of the body and the voice that it gave you. In the second a few practices of the orders are set down at the threshold, because the work cannot succeed while they are carried into it. We give the second half, with its reasons, in Chapter 14.

13.2 A Thelemite in Our School

I consider myself a Thelemite. I seldom use the word and I press it on no one, and yet I hold the Law of Thelema to be a true statement of the work, and I leave behind what I find irrational in Crowley and in the orders that carry his name. The Book allows the name to anyone who understands it: "Who calls us Thelemites will do no wrong, if he look but close into the word" (Liber AL I:40). Looked at closely, the word is will, thelēma, and the will of each star is that star's own. A Thelemite who takes up the work of our School has every reason to go on calling himself a Thelemite, and we have no reason to ask him to stop.

Thelema's own principles lead to the same place. The Book gives each star a will of its own and adds, "Do that, and no other shall say nay" (Liber AL I:43). Crowley's handbook states as a theorem that "Every man has a right to fulfil his own will without being afraid that it may interfere with that of others" (Magick in Theory and Practice, Introduction, theorem 28). On these grounds no order, Thelemic or any other, holds the right to tell a star in which frame its Will must work. A Thelemite who finds the direction of his Will in our rite and reads its outline in his own nativity is doing what the Law commands, and taking up a more coherent frame is itself an act of Will.

The method of Thelema points the same way. The Equinox set the method of science beside the aim of religion, Liber O tells the student that his own crude rituals may prove more effective than the polished rituals of others, and Liber LXI judges the cipher literature by itself and by no reputed source (Chapters 6 and 8). A tradition that judges its founding documents by what they contain, and tells its students to test every ritual by its effect, has already given a Thelemite leave to test ours, and the Book's own rule of proof is success (Liber AL III:42).

I have seen this at the table as well as in the texts. In the final two years of developing our system, when my friend Anibal Alvarez had become the body master of the O.T.O. in Salt Lake City, he gave me the privilege of teaching his members in our system, over five trainings of three to four hours each. I sat with Thelemites, grappled with how they understood the work, and carried what I learned back into the books, and that teaching greatly shaped how the work was finalized.

So the Thelemite who comes to us rejects nothing that Thelema's own principles ask him to keep. He keeps the Law, the Will, the star, the Aeon, the Record and the scientific temper of the A∴A∴. What he sets down are practices that his own Law does not need, and in Chapter 14 we argue each of them from Thelemic ground wherever Thelema gives it.

13.3 What Each Door Asks

The orders and our School ask different things of a person who comes to them, and the difference decides how easily one tradition can be kept inside another. The papers of the Golden Dawn and of the A∴A∴ are those of the founding years. The statements of the O.T.O. and of the Outer College of the A∴A∴ are those they publish today.

(Gilbert, The Golden Dawn Scrapbook, "Order out of Chaos"; Crowley, "One Star in Sight"; Liber AL I:54; O.T.O. U.S. Grand Lodge, Frequently Asked Questions; Outer College of the A∴A∴, home page; Central Doctrine, Ch. 4, §4.1.1 and §4.1.6; Appendix B, §B.2.4.)

The O.T.O. adds that its members of higher degree "are expected to avoid allowing their participation in other groups to unduly limit the time and energy they can devote to their O.T.O. obligations" (O.T.O. U.S. Grand Lodge, Frequently Asked Questions).

What a member has sworn in another order is a matter between that member and that order. Our works describe no oath for a student, state no rule on membership of another order, and ask no one to break a promise made elsewhere. A Golden Dawn adept who has bound himself to keep certain papers concealed keeps them concealed among us, and nothing in our grades requires their disclosure.

13.4 Why a Tradition Can Be Kept Here

Our School can receive a member of another tradition whole because of what our Doctrine teaches about the One and its veils. With Iamblichus we hold that the One shows itself only under many veils, and that a single exclusive revelation would contradict Platonic metaphysics (Central Doctrine, Ch. 2, Article 4). The gods are many, each a whole and each an emanation of Our Divine Infinite Being, and the names a tradition gives them are the veils under which that tradition has known them. A Thelemite who calls the circumference Nuit and a Śākta who calls it Kālī stand before one circumference under two veils (Central Doctrine, Ch. 59, §59.12).

We weigh a tradition by its concepts held over time. Platonism and Vedānta carry weight among us because their teachings have been stated, argued against and stated again across many centuries, by writers in different lands who belonged to no single chain of initiators. The same measure gives weight to the Hermetic Qabalah and to the Western esoteric current on which the Golden Dawn and Thelema draw. A practitioner from those orders brings concepts that have been tested by many minds, and we receive them as such. Age gives a concept a reason to be read. It does not close the door on a method of greater effect, and so the method of the work is decided by practice.

Our Doctrine also names the error that makes traditions refuse one another, the false identity of ownership (Central Doctrine, Ch. 3, §3.10), which Chapter 11 sets out in its own words. A School that holds this as its root error cannot then ask a Thelemite to disown Thelema as a condition of entry. We study and honor the traditions, and we claim to be none of them and no synthesis of them either (Central Doctrine, Ch. 4, §4.1.6). A student of our School may keep the festivals of their own people and remain a student of our School.

13.5 The Holy Guardian Angel Beside the Divine Double

The aim of the orders is union with one's own genius, the higher and divine Genius of the Golden Dawn's Obligation and the Holy Guardian Angel of Crowley's supreme and complete ritual (Chapters 1 and 2), and our aim is the same union under other names.

In our School the one name of the orders becomes three, set in a fixed order. The Divine Double is the infinite eternal self encoded at the cosmic horizon. Protogonos is the first-born, in whom the center is united with the Double. The personal daemon, the oikeios daimōn of Iamblichus, is the Double's signature in one birth, which we also call the Agathos Daemon in the nativity rite and in the grade title Agathos Theurgos (Central Doctrine, Ch. 25, §25.13). We hold the Holy Guardian Angel as a name for comparison beside these three, and it does not enter our own order of names. The word guardian, among us, names only the four cardinal guardians of the circle (Central Doctrine, Ch. 50, §50.4.1).

A Thelemite will want to know whether this is Crowley's Angel renamed. Crowley wrote that the Angel is "not ... a mere abstraction from yourself," and that the term Higher Self implies "a damnable heresy and a dangerous delusion" (Crowley, Magick Without Tears, ch. XLIII). We read that refusal with respect. The Double is no abstraction from the self in our account either. It is encoded at every point of the cosmic horizon and is one reality under two aspects, physical and psychic (Central Doctrine, Ch. 25, §25.12.3). The pairing of the Angel with the Double is our own reading, and Crowley drew no such line. A member who holds the Angel to be an objective individual met at a fixed grade keeps that conviction, and meets in our rite a presence whose nature our Doctrine describes in its own terms.

The place of the union in the work differs, and here our frame offers the member something new (Chapter 6, §6.10). In our rite the union with the Double is enacted at Protogonos in the opening of every working, on the first day of practice as on the thousandth (Ritual Praxis and Instruction, Ch. 24, §24.8). It is sealed on the birthday in the Natal Blueprint Invocation and completed over a life (Central Doctrine, Ch. 2, Article 16). A practitioner who has spent years preparing for the Angel at the end of the road meets the Double at the threshold of every rite and carries the aspiration of those years into each performance.

13.6 The True Will Beside the Thread and Dharma

The True Will passes into our School almost intact, and a Thelemite will find it given an instrument. Crowley distinguished egoic desire, fleeting and confused, from the True Will, eternal and precise (Central Doctrine, Ch. 59, §59.5), and we read the will "delivered from the lust of result" beside the Bhagavad Gītā on action without ownership of the fruit (Chapter 2, §2.3).

We name the True Will "the solar frequency experienced from inside as direction" (Central Doctrine, Ch. 59, §59.5). It is outlined by the native configuration, the order of the sky at the moment and place of birth, and articulated by the planetary gods as the operators of the solar microcosm. The command to find the Will is where we place the chart. A True Will that is merely asserted can be the ego's favorite preference, and a True Will read in the native configuration, tested in the life and refined in the rite is in our Doctrine's words "the star's own orbit" (Central Doctrine, Ch. 59, §59.5). The member keeps the Will, its law and its discipline, and gains a reading of the sky that shows its outline.

The True Will also meets two teachings that a Thelemite may not have met before. The first is the thread of destiny. Our Doctrine teaches that the sky fixes the necessary class of experience and that the soul chooses the thread and the octave in which it is lived (Central Doctrine, Ch. 2, Article 13). The thread already exists in the continuum, among the branch histories of the Multiverse picture, and the soul admits it into its life (Central Doctrine, Ch. 59, §59.16). A Will that is found and followed is the admission of one thread, lived in the higher octave, where the same current that arrives as compulsion in an unready vessel arrives as providence.

The second is dharma. Our ethic is the Five-Fold Way of Dharma, Karma, Jñāna, Bhakti and Sannyāsa, held under the three highest Forms, Beauty, Justice and Truth (Central Doctrine, Ch. 2, Article 17). Dharma is the Eastern name for the orbit a star is given to keep, and the Gītā's teaching on the duty that is one's own stands very close to the Thelemic Will. A Thelemite who works in our School finds his law of Will joined to a law of Dharma that the East has kept for more than two thousand years, and the two describe one direction.

13.7 Nuit, Hadit and the Aeon

Our Doctrine reads The Book of the Law as a witness to our teaching, and a Thelemite will find its two deities at the head of our cosmology as the circumference and the center of Our Divine Infinite Being (Chapter 2, §2.2). Nuit, "Infinite Space, and the Infinite Stars thereof," is the cosmic horizon and the womb of the Cosmos. Hadit, the unextended point and the flame in every heart, is the Singularity known from within as the center of the self. The Book's star is our solar microcosm, every person a solar center (Central Doctrine, Ch. 59, §59.5).

The pair can be sounded in our temple. Our ritual permits Hadit and Nuit, or Śiva and Śakti, in place of YHVH and Elohim at the second stage of the Grand Invocation, because each pair names the same two poles. I have often worked with Hadit and Nuit, and I prefer the Hebrew Names for their sonorous effect and their Kabbalistic depth (Ritual Praxis and Instruction, Ch. 26, §26.7). Three rules govern the substitution. The Hebrew Names stay the canonical liturgy, our ritual prints resonance strings only for them, and it sets out no substituted form of YHVH-Elohim. A theurgist who uses another pair takes counsel within our School before altering the joined Name and never mixes the pairs in one rite, as YHVH at the center with Nuit at the horizon (Ritual Praxis and Instruction, Ch. 26, §26.7).

We hold with Crowley that humanity has entered the Aeon of Horus, and our astrological theurgy in the solar register is our answer to that age (Central Doctrine, Ch. 2, Article 17). We read the Aeon of the Child as complete when the Mother and the Father of the earlier ages are restored to it (Chapter 2, §2.5), so that the present age carries forward the inheritances of Isis and Osiris (Central Doctrine, Ch. 60, §60.13.2). A Thelemite keeps the Aeon and its formula, and our School asks only that the earlier ages be honored inside it.

Two things a member does not meet among us, the status of Crowley as a singular chosen prophet and the third chapter of the Book as a stance in the temple (Chapters 8 and 11). The A∴A∴ paper that requires the Book as the sole Rule of Life also asks members to acknowledge "the Authority of the Beast 666 and of the Scarlet Woman" (Crowley, "One Star in Sight"). Our works do not describe how a member of the A∴A∴ holds that requirement together with our reading, and the member settles it in conscience with their own order.

13.8 The Pentagram, the Names and the Archangels

The pentagram holds most of what a Golden Dawn member will find familiar in our temple, and Chapter 5 gives what we kept from the Order's rite and what we changed.

A hand trained in the Lesser Ritual will find its method of tracing in our strokes, and our manual asks it to draw each figure as it is printed (Ritual Praxis and Instruction, Ch. 30, §30.4.4). Our quarters come from the four letters of the Divine Name, with Fire before the theurgist at the altar, Water at the right hand, Air behind and Earth at the left (Ritual Praxis and Instruction, Ch. 24, §24.3.2).

The archangels are welcome. At the four stations our rite calls the cardinal daemons Kratos, Eros, Eirene and Janus, and it permits Michael, Gabriel, Raphael and Uriel in their place, set by element at our quarters, with Michael before the theurgist at the altar, Gabriel at the right hand, Raphael behind and Uriel at the left. The manual asks a member to choose one form and keep it through the seven performances of a level and through every level after it (Ritual Praxis and Instruction, Ch. 31, §31.6).

The vibration of Names passes into our resonance of Names, sounded in three vocal octaves with the overtone ladder and the silences, and Regardie's consecrated substance passes into the Cup of our rite (Chapter 5, §5.3).

13.9 The Tarot, the Tables and the Tree

A student of the Thoth deck or of the Golden Dawn's Book T will read our cards at once. Our Tarot keeps the Thoth names, court ranks and descriptions, and the small cards keep the decans on which the Golden Dawn laid them, counted from Aries on the wheel we call ROTA, each under a Greek daemon (Chapter 5, §5.7 and §5.8).

The tables of correspondence come with the member as well. We keep the Golden Dawn's correspondences wherever they bear on the astrology, and the planets, signs and decans form our frame. The Kabbalah stands as a second grammar beside the rite, offered for study, and the Tree is described in our manual as a lens for study kept out of the temple (Ritual Praxis and Instruction, Appendix D, §D.1 and §D.11).

The Tree enters our practice in two places, both outside the rite. A study contemplation reads the solar register in two grammars at its own hour, sitting outside the consecrated circle, laying Tiferet over the body of light and the Tzelem rooted in Keter over the descending Double (Ritual Praxis and Instruction, Appendix D, §D.10.2). In the Meditation of Unity of Raja Kundalini, a student formed in the Kabbalah may take the throne-seat of awareness at the crown as Keter encircled by Ayin, in the preparatory hour before the Opening Preliminaries (Ritual Praxis and Instruction, Appendix D, §D.10.2). The Middle Pillar, the Qabalistic Cross, the Hebrew god-names of the sefirot and the archangels of the spheres are added to no set of the rite (Ritual Praxis and Instruction, Appendix D, §D.11).

13.10 The Adorations and the Daily Round

Many members of the orders keep a daily practice of their own, and the most common is the adoration of the Sun in Liber Resh, which stands beside our Grand Invocation as a near relative (Chapter 5, §5.13).

Our works give no ruling on a member who performs Liber Resh, or another order's daily ritual, apart from our rite and at another hour. They state that nothing is inserted into the rite once it is opened, and that the yoga and meditation that ready the vessel belong to the hour before the circle (Ritual Praxis and Instruction, Ch. 24, §24.2.1). The nearest guide is the rule the manual gives for the Kabbalistic contemplation, kept apart from the rite at its own hour and never inserted into a set (Ritual Praxis and Instruction, Appendix D, §D.10.2).

The body also comes trained. The A∴A∴ takes yoga into its graded tasks, with Asana and Pranayama at the Zelator and Pratyahara and Dharana at the Dominus Liminis (Chapter 2, §2.6). Our School keeps Raja Kundalini before ritual work from the first grade for the rest of a student's life (Central Doctrine, Appendix B, §B.2.2). A member who has sat in Asana for years and controlled the breath under Pranayama will find our yoga a continuation of that discipline, joined now to the Tantric teaching of kundalini and directed to the preparation of the vessel for the rite.

13.11 What Your Training Brings, and What It Does Not Buy

Training in the orders counts in the hand, the voice and the mind, and it does not count as credit toward a grade. Our works state no rule that credits training in another order toward a grade, and the Outer College of the A∴A∴, from its side, accepts no outside association "as equivalent to the curricula established by its Authority" (Outer College of the A∴A∴, home page). Our first grade is defined by its own readings, counts and tests. Associate Membership of our Inner Order gives no credit toward a grade either, and an Associate who takes up the grades begins at the foot with every Aspirant (Ritual Praxis and Instruction, Ch. 1, §1.14.1). A member who has banished daily for years meets the nine levels of our rite in the second grade, each held until it has been performed seven times, and the works state no shortening of the count for an experienced hand (Ritual Praxis and Instruction, Ch. 1, §1.5).

What the training brings is real. A Golden Dawn member already knows the elements on the star, the law of direction, the vibration of Names and the drawing of figures with a steady arm. A Thelemite already keeps the Record. Both have studied correspondences, Tarot and astrology, and both have sat in silence for long hours. Our journal of prescribed rites, sent in at the close of each of the first five grades and returned, asks for exactly the habits such a person already has (Central Doctrine, Appendix B, §B.2.2).

The first grade asks something that can surprise a trained member. The Golden Dawn put the pentagram ritual into the Neophyte's hands immediately after initiation, and our first grade performs no rite at all. It reads the Doctrine, The Divine Arcana Tarot and the Primer, keeps at least forty recorded sessions of Raja Kundalini and throws each prescribed spread of the Tarot once (Ritual Praxis and Instruction, Ch. 1, §1.3).

I would ask an experienced member to take the first grade gladly. I came to Iamblichus late, after many years in the orders, and his On the Mysteries changed what I thought every rite of those years had been doing. A practitioner who reads our Doctrine with a trained eye and an open heart will find the same thing happening to their own practice, as each familiar act takes a new place in the theurgy of the gods.

13.12 Beginning While Honoring Your Order

The way of application to our School is on our website, www.DivineInfiniteBeing.com, and the first steps of the first grade are set out in the Epilogue. A member who comes from an order begins in the same way, with a few things to settle at the start. A member who wants to meet our rite in a short form before deciding may first take Associate Membership, a membership of our Inner Order with its own manual, a light practice and the Threshold Ritual of the Pentagram, performed three times over about two to three weeks. It is no condition of entering the first grade (Ritual Praxis and Instruction, Ch. 1, §1.14.1).

The first concerns the promises already made. A member keeps every obligation sworn in another order, including obligations of secrecy, and our grades ask for no disclosure. Our works state no rule on a member's obligations to another order, and the member weighs them in conscience. Time and energy are the practical question, as the O.T.O. itself names them for its higher degrees (section 13.3). Our work is planned at about two hours a day on four or five days a week, with gaps expected (Ritual Praxis and Instruction, Ch. 1, §1.2), and a member already committed to an order's curriculum should measure that plan against the commitments they already carry.

The second concerns the temple. Our rite is one operation from the first 'Ehyeh to the last, and nothing from another system is inserted into it once it is opened (Ritual Praxis and Instruction, Ch. 24, §24.2.1). A member keeps the order's own rites, if they keep them at all, at their own hour and in their own frame. The archangels and the pair of Hadit and Nuit are the two forms of the orders that our rite admits inside itself, and each is chosen and then kept through the level.

13.13 Names Set Beside Names

The table gathers the pairings. Each pairing is our reading of a term of the orders.

13.14 Where the Invitation Works Better

Our invitation works better for a practitioner of the orders because it asks for nothing at the door except the work. It asks for no belief, no text accepted as written and no oath, and it translates the member's own names into one frame, where the orders' rules either set their own curriculum apart from all others or leave the member to work in two systems with no account of how they meet. The Angel, the Will, Nuit and Hadit, the star, the archangels, the Names, the cards and the Tree each find a stated place in our works, and the member can read where that place is before taking a single step. The pairings are our readings, and a member who holds the orders' own definitions keeps them beside ours. A Golden Dawn adept keeps the elements on the star, the law of direction, the Names, the Tarot and the Tree, and a Thelemite keeps the Law, the Will, the star, the Aeon, Nuit and Hadit and the Record. What each gains is one frame in which all of these have a stated place and a date in the sky.