Paths of Wisdom: Cabala in the Golden Dawn Tradition: Third Edition

by John Michael Greer

Overview

A comprehensive introduction to the theory and practice of the magical Cabala, as practiced in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and most other contemporary Western occult traditions.

Engaging and accessible, yet packed with material found in few other books, it illumines the Cabalist underpinnings of today's Hermetic magic as never before.

From the fundamentals of Cabalistic philosophy, through a detailed examination of the Spheres and Paths of the Tree of Life, to the magical disciplines that bring the symbolism to life as a potent toolkit for self-knowledge and esoteric attainment, Paths of Wisdom is your guide to the principles and practices of the magical Cabala.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781904658832
Publisher:	AEON BOOKS LTD
Publication date:	03/27/2017
Edition description:	3rd ed.
Pages:	336
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

John Michael Greer is the award-winning author of more than fifty books, including The New Encyclopedia of the Occult, The Druidry Handbook, The Celtic Golden Dawn, and Circles of Power: An Introduction to Hermetic Magic. An initiate in Freemasonry, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids, Greer served as the Grand Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids in America (AODA) for twelve years. He lives in Rhode Island with his wife Sara. Greer is also the author of eleven fantasy and science fiction novels and ten nonfiction books on peak oil and the future of industrial society, and also blogs weekly on politics, magic, and the future at www.ecosophia.net.

Read an Excerpt

Paths of Wisdom

Cabala in the Golden Dawn Tradition

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By JOHN MICHAEL GREER

Aeon Books Ltd

Copyright © 2017 John Michael Greer
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-904658-83-2

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CHAPTER 1

THE TREE OF LIFE

One of the great difficulties in beginning work with the Hermetic Cabala — and one of the reasons that this system of magic and mysticism has developed such a reputation for complexity and obscurity — is the sheer mass of material that has been built up over the years. As a living tradition more than four hundred years old, with its roots in other traditions many centuries older, it has been enriched by the efforts of generations of magicians, mystics and scholars. An immense store of tradition, lore, and experience has been amassed over this time. Like an ancient forest, it has grown thick with underbrush, and in all this underbrush it is easy to become so thoroughly lost that not only the forest but the trees themselves are hidden from sight.

Underlying all this, however, is a basic structure of great simplicity. It arose, as all mystical philosophies arise, out of the experiences of human beings facing the inner side of existence, and their attempts to describe those experiences. Such attempts are problematic, to say the least, because in a very real sense human language — any human language — can only express certain kinds of perceptions clearly.

The thinking mind, the part of us which creates and uses language, deals principally with the world of our everyday experience; language takes its meaning from that world, from the things most people perceive in common. And yet, the attempt to talk about mystical experiences — which most people do not perceive — has to be made, if only to explain to others just what all the strange activities and experiences of the mystical path are about. In the process, mystics the world over have resorted to symbolism to hint at truths that cannot otherwise be expressed.

The founders of the Cabalistic tradition turned to the same resource to express their insights. In the course of time, however, they (like the founders of several other traditions) realized that the link between the symbol and the experience could be made to work in more than one way: not only could spiritual experiences be communicated in symbolic terms, but the symbols thus created could then be used by other people to experience these things for themselves. Working with this realization, Cabalistic adepts explored the subtle links between one symbol and another, and between the symbol and the thing it represents. Once these were mastered, the hidden doors to the higher levels of human experience lay open.

Symbol and Reality

Take a moment, now, to look at some nearby object: a cup, for instance. If you are like most people, you have probably always assumed that what you see is what is actually there. This assumption is so deeply ingrained in our ways of thinking that most of us never even realize it is an assumption.

As you look at that cup, though, think about how the image you see is actually formed. First of all, light waves strike the cup; depending on the atomic structure of the cup's surface, some of these waves are absorbed while others are reflected and scatter in all directions. Some of these reach your eyes, where they cause a set of chemical changes in your retina. These changes trigger cells in the optic nerve, which sends a pattern of electrical charges back through several different parts of the brain to the area at the upper back of your head, and there, by a process no one yet understands, the nerve messages are processed into the image of the cup that you actually see. We can only guess at the effects many of these stages have on the final image, but the one thing we can be sure of is that the cup and the image are not the same. The image is a representation of the cup in the mind's terms, a kind of mental model. It is, in a word, a symbol.

If at this point, you go from looking at the cup to talking or writing about it, you will find yourself even deeper into the world of symbols. Instead of the cup or your image of it, you will be dealing with sounds made by a voice or marks made with a pen. These sounds and marks have only the most arbitrary relationship to the thing they represent, so that if you travel to another part of the world you may have to use a completely different set of them to make yourself understood. By contrast, anyone with normal eyesight who looks at your cup will see an image very similar to the one you see.

The central insight of the Cabalistic approach to symbolism is that this same distinction is true not only of the things we perceive with the five ordinary senses but of those perceived by the spiritual senses as well. The names, words, and concepts people use to describe the realms of experience beyond the ordinary physical world are arbitrary, and change from place to place and from time to time in much the same way that languages do. The basic images and experiences people have when they venture into the spiritual realms, on the other hand, are largely consistent between cultures and historical periods. This idea has gained some recent notice through the writings of the psychologist C. G. Jung, who made the same discovery independently. Where Jung's work dealt only with the psychological implications of the insight, however, the adepts of the Hermetic Cabala have taken it much further.

Let's return to the cup for a few more moments. As we have seen, the word "cup" (or its equivalent in another language) is a symbol, which can be used to represent the image of the cup you see. The word takes its meaning from its link with the image, and apart from that link and its connections to other word-symbols it has no meaning at all. But the image itself is a symbol, representing the reality of the cup as such. We can know almost nothing about that reality. We can reason, if we happen to be philosophically minded, that it exists and causes the images and other sensations we experience; we assume, as well, that our mental representation of it is close enough, accurate enough, that we can make use of that representation as if it were the thing in itself — that, for example, if we pour coffee into the cup we perceive, it will stay there and not flow straight through the porcelain into our laps.

To the Cabalist, these same considerations are true of the universe in its totality. The words we use to describe the universe are symbols of our experience of the universe, which is itself a symbol of something else. About that "something else" we can know almost nothing. Whether we use our ordinary senses to perceive the everyday world of matter, or develop those special senses which allow us to perceive other, hidden realms of being, all we can ever really experience are the symbolic images the "something else" creates in our minds. Still, after a fashion, we can reason about it. We can postulate that, in some sense, it exists. We know that it lies beyond the universe we experience, that it gives rise to that universe in some manner we don't understand. We know that its true nature is totally inaccessible to us. And as we consider these attributes, we may begin to realize that this "something else" sounds very much like what mystics of so many different places and times have called God.

The Veils of the Unmanifest

However, this term, borrowed by mystical thought from the vocabulary of the established religions of the West, is as much a barrier as a help. We have already seen that the ultimate reality we are seeking cannot be clearly expressed in language. How, then, does one express the inexpressible? The question may seem absurd, but it is a necessary one. If the existence of an ultimate Reality is to be taken into account at all, we need to have some way to think about it, however inadequate. Just as language must be stretched to its limits to deal with experiences beyond the physical, the language of symbols must be stretched to its own, much broader, limits if it is to deal with the Reality that is beyond all experience whatever.

In seeking a way to tackle this problem, the creators of the Cabala — like mystics everywhere — turned to paradox as the only useable tool. At the outermost edge of its symbolism, then, the Cabala provides three paradoxical images for the Existence beyond all existence. They are called the Three Veils of the Unmanifest, to remind us that as symbols they necessarily conceal what they seek to express.

The first of the Veils is named AIN, which in Hebrew means Not, or Nothing. If ultimate Reality is something utterly distinct from anything we can experience, then in human terms it cannot be called "something" at all, but rather Nothing. If we try to speak about it, all that we can honestly say of it is what it is not. Here the symbol is, simply, Absence; the Veil, the trap hidden inside the symbol, lies in taking the symbol literally and deciding that ultimate Reality simply doesn't exist.

The second of the Veils is named AIN SOPH, which means No Limit, Infinity. Everything we can know, however large or small, is finite. The sands on the beach or the falling raindrops may be beyond our ability to count, but a little logic shows that however large their numbers might turn out to be, the count will eventually reach an end. No matter how large a finite number we may choose, it falls short of infinity by an infinite amount, and the Cabalists of old saw in this absolute distinction a metaphor for the difference between the universe we experience and the ultimate Reality. Here the symbol is a Vastness like that of interstellar space, and the Veil lies in thinking this implies that the Ultimate is like the things we know, only bigger.

The third of the Veils is named AIN SOPH AUR, which means Infinite Light. One of the oldest and most universal of all symbolisms describes the world of ordinary experience as darkness, and the spiritual realms that underlie it as light. Like the mental image of the cup, the image of spiritual light is based on experience: the energies of certain states of mystical awareness are very commonly perceived by human beings in the form of physical light. It is for this reason that terms like "illumination" and "enlightenment" are used to talk about spiritual experiences. In Cabalistic thought, the experience of inner light is a signpost pointing toward the attainment of the higher realms, and — as these realms offer a less constricted way of approaching the hidden Reality — light has been used to symbolize that Reality as well. Here the symbol is, of course, Radiance, and the Veil lies in mistaking that Radiance for the unknowable Existence it signifies.

In the practical work of the Cabalist, the three Veils play only a minor role. Their place is as reminders and, to a certain extent, warnings, of the distinction between the symbolic and the real.

This distinction does need to be kept in mind. At the same time, awareness of the difference does not mean that the symbolic should be despised or rejected, as some philosophies claim. This attitude seems rather like that of the man who complained because he has nothing to eat but food, and nothing to wear but clothes! We are creatures of symbolic reality by our very nature, and our task is to comprehend and master that reality, not waste our time in a futile attempt to flee from it.

In the same way, the Cabalist doesn't seek to abandon the material level of experience, as some teachings urge. The whole of our universe, again, is a symbol that expresses ultimate Reality; every aspect and experience it contains has its value to us, its lessons to be learned. The everyday world is as holy as any other. The Cabalistic magician's goal is to be at home in all the levels of human experience, to travel from one to another at will, and in this way to embody the full potential of what it means to be human.

Symbols of Ultimate Reality

However, what are these "levels of experience"? There are a number of ways to approach this idea, and a number of mistakes that are often made concerning it. Perhaps the most common of these latter is the notion that these "levels," "planes" or "worlds" — all three terms are used in different sources — are actually separate realms of existence, like the "other dimensions" of fantasy fiction. This is true only in the most metaphoric of senses; it is more useful, instead, to think of them as different modes of consciousness, different ways of seeing and symbolizing the same hidden Reality.

In the Cabala, each of these ways of looking at the world is defined by one of ten fundamental categories of being. We can begin to explore these categories by thinking about the idea of Reality itself, starting from the most basic concepts possible. Since these concepts are symbols, of course, they cannot reach the Existence beyond all symbolism; since they are symbols, on the other hand, they provide the foundation of the entire symbolic structure of the Cabala.

The first of these concepts is the idea of existence itself, and the first thing we can say about Reality is, simply, that it is.

The second concept is the idea of action. Reality seems to include the possibility of change and motion, and so we can apply another idea to Reality: it acts. The third concept is closely related to this; Reality also seems to include the possibility of an absence of motion, and so we can also say, it rests. The concepts of action and rest, however, cannot both apply at once; to include them both in our concept of Reality implies alternation, which is the root of the idea of Time.

So far, each of these concepts has dealt with Reality as a unity; we have had no need to postulate anything else. To go on, though, we will have to move in this direction. In the context created by the first three ideas, action takes the form of distinct actions in time, and each new action extends the total range of action within Reality. This idea of increase or extension gives us another thing we can say of Reality: it extends. In the same way, we can speak of rests rather than of rest in the abstract, and each of these rests can be seen as the end or limit of an action; we can thus say, it limits. To speak of distinct actions and rests, though, is to suggest that the first of our concepts can be applied to them as well; once we have granted them existence, in turn, the other concepts follow, and we end up with many things rather than one, each existing, acting, resting, extending, limiting. We can put this in two ways: from the point of view of the one, it divides; from the point of view of the many, these are.

Once there is more than one thing in Reality, though, the possible range of concepts we can use goes up sharply. Any of the things which exist may contact others, and so we can say, these unite; once entered into contact, they may leave this state, and so we can say, these separate; these various unions and separations create a context which shapes and is shaped by the effects of all the other concepts, a context in which each thing which exists takes part; we can therefore say, these participate.

Finally, all these considerations apply to every action and rest, every union and division, and every participation of each existing thing. All these also exist, and take part in the full range of categories; their actions, rests, and so forth do the same; and this process continues out to infinity, creating an image of Reality made up of uncountably many things, all interacting in different ways — an image which seems very like the universe we experience in our everyday state of consciousness. This image represents the complete manifestation of the potentials contained in the original idea of being; we can thus say, last of all, it manifests.

These ten categories — existence, action, rest, extension, limitation, multiplicity, union, separation, participation, and manifestation — form, from the perspective of the Cabala, the basic structures of human thought, and thus of the universe we are capable of perceiving. More, these are the grains of sand at the center of the pearls of the tradition; around each of them, layer by layer, has arisen one of the ten great symbolic patterns which make up the heart of the Cabalistic system: the Tree of Life.

The Tree of Life

The traditional diagram of the Tree of Life appears overleaf on page 16. You will need to spend some time familiarizing yourself with it, because everything you will be doing with this book will refer directly back to it. The ordering of the circles and lines — Spheres and Paths, respectively, are the terms we'll be using for the sake of simplicity, in place of the Hebrew terms Sephiroth and Netibhoth — is anything but random; each detail of the Tree's structure teaches specific lessons, which will become evident as your work with the Cabala progresses.

The first of the ten Spheres is KETHER, which means Crown. Its nature is absolute unity. On the diagram of the Tree, the three Veils are placed directly above Kether, referring to the idea that this Sphere is the simplest and least defined of all the realms of symbolic existence, the closest approach that symbols can make to the unknowable Reality beyond. Kether is said to be above all opposites and dualities. It has no attributes or qualities beyond pure existence; it and any quality it might have would make two, and it is always One. As a state of consciousness, it is awareness of unity with all things — not the intellectual notion that this is the case, which is easy enough to obtain, but the direct personal experience. This consciousness is the highest that human beings can achieve, and it represents the highest goal of all mystical practice.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Paths of Wisdom by JOHN MICHAEL GREER. Copyright © 2017 John Michael Greer. Excerpted by permission of Aeon Books Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Introduction: The Hermetic Cabala

PART I: PRINCIPLES OF THE HERMETIC CABALA
Chapter One: The Tree of Life
Chapter Two: The Paths upon the Tree
Chapter Three: The Polarities of Being
Chapter Four: Macrocosm and Microcosm
Chapter Five: The Way of Creation
Chapter Six: The Way of Redemption

PART II: SYMBOLISM OF THE HERMETIC CABALA
Chapter Seven: The Tree Below the Veil
Chapter Eight: The Tree Between the Veil and the Abyss
Chapter Nine: The Tree Above the Abyss

PART III: PRACTICE OF THE HERMETIC CABALA
Chapter Ten: Foundations of Practice
Chapter Eleven: Ritual Magic
Chapter Twelve: Meditation
ChapterThirteen: Pathworking
Chapter Fourteen: Prayer
Chapter Fifteen: The Hermetic Cabala in Daily Life

Index

Editorial Reviews

A comprehensive introduction to the theory and practice of the magical Cabala, as practiced in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and most other contemporary Western occult traditions.

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