There's a tale they tell at Military Intelligence in London, when
the candles gutter low and the fog curls about the windows. It happened
in 1914 (they say), when England was losing the first world war and it
seemed only a miracle could save her. There was this writer bloke (they
say), name of Arthur Machen, never popular or well known, a bloody
Welshman in fact and a mystic to boot. Well (they say), this Welshman,
this Machen, took it into his head to write a story about the kind of
miracle England needed, so he imagined St. George himself leading a
group of medieval archers to aid the English troops at Mons. And after
the story was published in a magazine, some enterprising newspapers
picked it up and reprinted it as fact. And (they say) the whole damned
country was gullible enough to believe it. It did as much for national
morale as the real miracle would have.
What is even weirder is the sequel -and the chaps at Military
Intelligence only discuss this when the candles gutter quite low and the
fog is very thick, of course. Soldiers at the front, in Mons, began
claiming that they had actually seen the phantom archers created out of
Machen's imagination. They insisted on it. Some of them were still
insisting on it 40 years later. They said they had won the battle
because of this supernatural assistance.
Fair gives you a turn, doesn't it?
Stranger still: Machen, the man with the contagious imagination, was
a member of a secret society in London. This was known as the Hermetic
Order of the Golden Dawn, and it claimed to know the long-hidden secrets
of Cabalistic magic.
There were several other members of the Golden Dawn who made a bit
of a name. Florence Farr, one of the great actresses of the period, was a
member, and it was she who gave Bernard Shaw the ideas about
life-energy and longevity dramatized in Back to Methuselah; those ideas
are currently influencing life-extension research. Algernon Blackwood
and Bram Stoker (Dracula's creator) were members; so was the coroner of
London; so was an electrical engineer named Alan Bennett who later, as
Ananda Maitreya, played a key role in introducing Buddhist ideas to the
West.
The egregious Aleister Crowley; who claimed to have come to earth to
destroy Christianity; was a member for a while, and I know a good World
War I story about him, too. It was Crowley's habit to give his pupils a
word to meditate on every year. In 1918, Crowley gave them a number
instead of a word: 11. All year his pupils meditated on 11 for at least a
half hour every day. . . And the war ended on the 11th minute of the
11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month.
Did you feel another queer flash then?
The most famous Golden Dawn alumnus, however, was the great Irish
poet, William Butler Yeats. In 1894 Yeats predicted that "the right
pupils will be drawn to (the Golden Dawn) by dreams and visions and
strange accidents . . .”
Cabala, the working philosophy behind the Golden Dawn, is the
science of "strange accidents” – which are known as "mere coincidences"
to the rationalist or "synchronicities" to Jungian psychologists.
Cabala (also spelled Qabala or Kaballah) was either taught by God to
Adam in the Garden of Eden, according to its own tradition' or was
invented by a group of rabbis c. A.D. 200 as a means of transmitting the
esoteric inner teachings of Judaism after the fall of Jerusalem and the
Dispersion. Among the prominent medieval and Renaissance philosophers
who were Cabalists one can mention Raymond Lull, Cornelius Agrippa,
Giordano Bruno, Dr. John Dee, Pico della Mirandola and Isaac Newton.
Cabala became unfashionable in the 18th century and did not begin to
make a comeback until the Brain Explosion of the 1960s -the drug
culture, the consciousness movement, the importation of Oriental
mind-sciences, the popularity of Jung and Leary and Castaneda.
One way to get into the Cabalistic head space is to reflect long and
hard on the singular fact that we could not live-could not breathe, in
fact-without the trees busily pumping oxygen into the air. Yet the trees
are not "thinking" about producing life-support for us. To the
rationalist, it seems that our need for oxygen has no real connection
with the trees' production of that element; sheer chance (or, the more
vehement rationalists will anthropomorphically say, "blind chance")
happens to have produced trees, through natural selection, over many
aeons. The fact that we exist is, to this philosophy, a total accident, a
very strange coincidence.
And, to the same rationalist, Arthur Machen's imagination has no
real connection with what was happening on the battlefield at Mons. The
magical link between Machen's imagination and the "collective
hallucination" of the soldiers is just coincidence – like the magical
link between us and the trees.
To the Cabalist, the rationalist sounds like a man found in a closet
by a jealous husband, who hopefully explains, "Just by coincidence,
while you were away on business I happened to wander into this closet
without my clothes on. . .”
To the Cabalist, the whole universe is a network of meaningful
connections. The seemingly coincidental is as full of meaning as
anything else. To begin thinking like a Cabalist you must regard
everything as being just as important as everything else. All that seems
"accidental," "meaningless," "chaotic," "weird," "nonsensical;' et
cetera is as significant as what seems lawful, orderly and
comprehensible.
An elementary Cabalistic training technique is to try every day to
"regard every incident and event as a direct communication between God
and your sou1." Even the license plates on passing cars are such
communications-or can be considered as such-by the devout Cabalist.
Some will be thinking of Freud at this point; and indeed Nathan
Fodor points out in Freud, Jung and the Occult that Freud was heavily
influenced by a friend who was a Cabalist. The "dreams, visions and
strange accidents" that Yeats thought would bring people into the
ambience of the Golden Dawn are all Freudian "unconscious material.”
A more modern metaphor is to be found in current neurology; which
points out that the brain is divided into two hemispheres. The left
hemisphere is where we do most of our conscious thinking, and it is
linear; it breaks things down into sequences of A-causes-B, B-causes-C,
and so forth. The right hemisphere, on the contrary; thinks in
gestalt-meaningful wholes, comprehensive systems.
Cabala, like dope, is a deliberate attempt to overthrow the linear
left brain and allow the contents of the holistic right brain to flood
the field of consciousness. When you are walking down the street and
every license plate seems part of one continuous message-one endless
narrative-you are thinking like a very advanced theoretical Cabalist.
(Or else you're stoned out of your gourd.) Practical Cabala (or
Cabalistic magic) is the art of utilizing such holistic perception to
create effects that will seem like "strange accidents" to the
non-Cabalist.
A legendary example concerns an incident when the king of Poland was
being urged by his advisers to authorize a pogrom against the Jews. One
old Hasidic rabbi and the Hasidic rabbis spend most of their time
studying Cabala-sat down, on hearing of this, and pretended to be
writing something; but he did not write. Instead, he deliberately
knocked his bottle over three times. His students, who saw this, thought
the old man was getting a bit funny in the head. Then, a few days
later; came news from the capital: The king had tried to sign the order
for the pogrom three times, and each time he had-by "strange accident
knocked over his ink bottle. "I can't sign this," the king finally
exclaimed. "God is against it!"
Every Oriental culture has some equivalent to Cabala – some
neuroscience of meditations, visualizations and yogic contortions
calculated to shift consciousness, or part of consciousness, from the
usually overactive left hemisphere to the usually underactive right
hemisphere. Cabala differs from all these Oriental disciplines in being
as systematic as any natural science-although far weirder:
The system of Cabala is contained in a kind of ontological periodic
table of elements (see illustration). The purpose of this diagram has
been nicely defined by the eminent contemporary Cabalist (and Jungian
psychologist) Dr. Israel Regardie, who describes it as "a mnemonic
system of psychology. . . to train the Will and Imagination."
The tree, as you can see, is made up of ten circles, called lights,
and 22 paths connecting the lights. Each light represents a separate
level of consciousness, and hence a separate level of "reality:' That
is, to the Cabalist, each perceived reality is a function of the level
of consciousness which perceives it, and how much reality you can absorb
depends on how rich your consciousness is.
The paths, which are more technical than the lights, are techniques
for getting from one light (one level of awareness) to another: '
The aim of the Cabala is to always know which "light" you are in,
which is the level of consciousness that is creating what you are
perceiving; and then to know the paths, or tricks, to get from one light
(perceived reality) to another.
Dion Fortune, a Cabalist who also practiced psychoanalysis under her
birth name, Violet Wirth, sums it all up by saying Cabala is "the art
of causing change in consciousness by act of will"
The Tree of Life may be regarded as a map of those parts of
consciousness which (a) are active in everybody-the lower parts of the
tree; and (b) those which are only active in various orders of
adepts-the higher parts of the tree.
The pragmatic theory of Cabala is that each action creates a new
"universe," each experiment creates a new experimenter, each dance
creates a new dancer. We are growing and evolving all the time, without
noticing it usually; but a_ certain crucial points we can make a mental
quantum jump to a level of awareness that puts us in a new reality we
have never noticed before. Each of the lights on the Tree of Life
represents such a quantum jump.
Concretely, we all start out in Malkuth, at the bottom of the tree,
which represents the lowest level of awareness. This is what Freud
called the oral stage: We simply drift and wait to be fed. Alcoholics,
opiate addicts and most of the people on welfare for "psychological"
reasons represent this state in its pure form, but we all contain it and
relapse into it under sufficient stress. "I can't cope; somebody come
help me:' Hear the infant's shrill cry. "Maaa-Maaa!" and you know what
Malkuth is all about.
Above this is Yesod, the area of strong ego-awareness and what
Gurdjieff called conscious suffering. This is where you struggle to be a
real mensch, to be honorable, responsible, and self-sufficient. If you
never get beyond this, you become what doctors called Type A and are a
good bet for an early heart attack.
There are two ways to transcend Yesod's struggles. One takes you to
Hod, which can be called the tactic _of the rationalist (Dr: Carl Sagan
will serve as a model for this), and the other to Netzach, which is the
strategy of the ordinary religionist (Jerry Falwell, say).
According to Cabala, both the rationalist and the vulgar religionist
are unbalanced; in modern neurological language, the rationalist leans
too much on the left brain and the religionist too much on the right
brain. The synthesis, or balancing, brings you to the Middle Pillar and
is represented by the light called Tiphareth-which charmingly enough
means "beauty" in English.
Looking at the tree, you can see that the rationalist has a
different path to Tiphareth from that of the religionist. The
rationalist must go the path of nun ("fish") and the religionist the
path of ayin ("eye"). Any book on Cabala will tell you what nun and ayin
imply in terms of the psychological transformation involved.
Fortunately, the tarot cards were either created or revised by a
Cabalist and the meanings of nun and ayin are vividly conveyed to the
unconscious by the two cards called, respectively. Death and the Devil.
Anybody with even a rudimentary knowledge of psychology can grasp part
of what is meant here-the rationalist must "make friends with" Death and
the religionist with the Devil. This is what Jung means when he says
each man must face his own shadow.
(Every path on the tree has a tarot card illustrating it, and the
quickest way to make the tree clear to your unconscious is to layout the
cards representing the paths' between each light. The next step is to
redesign the cards in terms of your own understanding. Some Cabalists
redesign the tarot every two or three years, as their understanding
grows.)
Tiphareth, the balanced center between and above both rationalism
and religion, means beauty, as we said above. It is the first light that
does not appear in normal, statistically average consciousness, and is
identified with everything we mean by rebirth or awakening. It is dhyana
in the Hindu system, "Buddha-mind" in Buddhism, the "New Adam" in St.
Paul's epistles, Cosmic Christ Consciousness to Christian Cabalists. It
represents a total reorganization of the psyche for a higher level of
functioning than most humans ever attain. When Dr. Timothy Leary says
gnomically that "the nervous system sees no color, feels no pain;' he
means that the nervous system on this level sees no color; feels no
pain. You are floating, and this is the first light on the tree that
really feels like a light. Acidheads will know.
Above Tiphareth are two more unbalanced lights called Geburah and
Chesed. Roughly; Geburah is the stage of Nietzsche's superman: he who is
much more conscious than ordinary people and knows it. In George
Lucas's symbolism, Geburah means "being seduced by the dark side of the
Force:' It needs to be balanced by Chesed, which is humility in the
deepest, more ego-destroying sense. In Castaneda's lingo, Geburah is
"taking responsibility" and Chesed is doing so while always remembering
that "you are no more important than the coyote.”
Geburah says "I am God"; Chesed says, “And so is everybody else – and everything else!"
There are three more lights on the tree. These are known as the
supernals and are much further from ordinary human consciousness than
Tiphareth, Geburah or Chesed. Many Cabalists say that you cannot reach
the supernals without the direct help of the Almighty. Even with such
divine aid, reaching the supernals is known as "crossing the abyss" and
is regarded as fraught with peril.
The first two supernals are Chokmah and Binah. You will note on the
diagram that they are both unbalanced – off the Middle Pillar.
Basically; Chokmah is direct contact with the masculine aspect of "God"
and corresponds to whatever you associate with Jehovah, Jupiter; Brahma,
Zeus, et cetera. Binah is direct contact with the female side of
divinity and corresponds to Venus, Ishtar, Kali or the White Goddess
that Robert Graves is always writing about. Cabala says that each of
these Close Encounters has to be "balanced." That is, you have to get
beyond both Big Daddy and Big Mommy to arrive at the ultimate light,
Kether, the balanced center of all consciousness, which is beyond
gender, beyond space, beyond time, beyond words and beyond all
categories. In short, Kether is exactly what all the Oriental mystics
are seeking: pure consciousness without a blemish of emotion, idea or
image, and therefore infinite and formless.
Cabala is very complicated and very; very intricate; the above
sketch is no more than a hint of what the Tree of Life contains, on
about the level of a discussion of chemistry that tells you there are
eight families of elements but does not go on to list the elements in
each family. To discuss Cabala fully requires many books; and indeed
there is one good-sized book, Liber 777, by Aleister Crowley; which
consists only of listing the elements in each light and path of the
tree, and Liber 777 consists of 155 pages with four columns on each
page.
The purpose of such lists is to design rituals, and the purpose of
rituals is to program your own experience as you navigate from one light
to another. As Tim Leary once said, "Ritual is to the inner sciences
what experiment is to the outer sciences.” Cabalists agree.
For instance, suppose you have had a very powerful experience of the
Punishing Father aspect of God, such as John Calvin once had. Within
the orthodox Judeo-Christian tradition, you might take this literally
and proceed, as Calvin did, to establish a new religion. As a Cabalist,
you will recognize it as a Chokmah experience and know that it needs to
be balanced by a Binah experience.
You then look on the Tree of Life for a path from Chokmah to Binah.
That turns out to be daleth ("door"), which corresponds to the Empress
card in the tarot. If you look at the Empress you will immediately note
that she happens to be a pregnant woman sitting in a field surrounded by
vegetation. That should tell your unconscious what the path of daleth
means. (By a "strange accident" or "mere coincidence" the Empress card,
in most tarot decks, contains the women's-liberation symbol and always
has, long before there was a feminist movement. That should help jar
your consciousness. )
If the Empress card doesn't tell you enough, you look up daleth in
any Cabalistic textbook, such as Crowley's 777. You will find that
daleth is "in correspondence with" such things as the planet Venus, the
color emerald green, the swan, the rose, sandalwood incense, the
heptagram (seven-sided polygon), et cetera, and is most powerful on
Friday. Thus, to get from Chokmah to Binah, you construct a ritual-a
dramatized rnindchange operation-to be performed within a heptagram, on
Friday evening as Venus is rising, using emerald green decorations,
roses, swan feathers and sandalwood incense. If you follow all these
correspondences, and know how to write rituals, and have had enough
experiences with Cabala to have developed a powerful will and
imagination, you should achieve Binah, the vision of the All-Loving
Mother.
Similarly, there are favorable days, and perfumes, and geometric
figures, and other accessories, for every type of brain change
operation. Sunday is best for Tiphareth (Christ consciousness), Monday
for Yesod (building a stronger ego), Tuesday for Geburah (accumulating
powers), Wednesday for Hod (wisdom). Thursday for Netzsch (moral
strength), Friday for Binah and Saturday for Chokmah.
This is only the skeleton of Cabala, however. Real Cabalistic
practice consists of so familiarizing yourself with all the
correspondences on the Tree of Life that everything you experience is
filed and indexed by your brain as a Cabalistic "message.” Thus, if you
walk out the door and see a palm tree, you immediately (by
self-conditioning with Cabala) think of Venus and Hermes – because door
is daleth is Venus, and palm is beth is Hermes. If you see a license
plate with 333 on it, you remember that that is the number of egotism
and deception, and you must ask what egotism and deception remains in
yourself. In short, nothing is trivial; nothing is insignificant;
nothing is meaningless. The whole universe, as Crowley says, becomes a
continuous ritual of initiation.
A Zen Master was once asked, "What is Zen?" “Attention,” he replied.
"Is that all?" asked the inquirer. "Attention,” the Zen Master
repeated. "Won't you say anything else?" persisted the questioner.
“Attention,” said the Master, one more time.
Cabala creates attention by using the Tree of Life to "key" every
possible impression to one of the lights or paths and hence to a stage
in the evolution of consciousness. The world becomes – as it was to
Plato and Mary Baker Eddy and Sir Humphrey Davy when he tried nitrous
oxide – nothing but ideas.
Theoretical Cabala is much concerned with words and numbers, and
indeed insists that every word is a number. This is literally true in
Hebrew, because all Hebrew letters are numbers, and the number of a word
is the number obtained by adding its separate letters together. Cabala
claims that any words having the same number are in some sense identical
or "in correspondence with" each other.
For instance, achad (I am writing the Hebrew as if it were English,
for simplicity's sake) has the value of 13. So does ahebah. What does
this mean? Well, achad translates as "unity" and ahebah as "love,” so by
the mathematical theorem that things equal to the same thing are equal
to each other; the Cabalist calculates that love (ahebeh) equals 13 and
unity (achad) equals 13 and therefore love equals unity. And, of course,
when you love somebody you are in union with them: You are happy when
they are happy; you suffer when they suffer.
Better still, it works backwards, too, according to some Cabalists:
31 is 13 backwards and therefore 31 is mystically the same as 13. And
AI, the oldest name of God in Hebrew; has the value 31. Therefore, God
equals love equals unity.
Which is all very nice and cheerful, and it's pleasant to have our
first lesson in theorhetical Cabala coming up with such pleasant
information.
Unfortunately; la (nothing) also equals 31. Is God therefore nothing? Or is it unity that is nothing? or love?
The theoretical Cabalist is not abashed. God is nothing, he says
firmly – no-thing. And in this he is in agreement with the Buddhists and
Hindus and, indeed, the most advanced mystics of all traditions. It
only sounds queer to those primitives down at the bottom of the Tree of
Life in Hod (rationalism) or Netzach (conventional religion); if you
persist in Cabala long enough, the divine no-thing will make perfect
sense to you.
Unfortunately; before you arrive at Kether – "the Head without a
Head," the divine nothing – you will be sure to encounter even worse
shocks in theoretical Cabala. Thus, neschek, the serpent in Genesis, the
devil himself, has the value 358. You don't have to look far to find
another Hebrew word with the value 358. It jumps up at you, as soon as
you start studying Cabala. It is messiah.
In what sense is the devil the messiah? Some Cabalists have gone quite batty working on that one.
The charm of Cabala is that the universe adjusts-or in your excited
and overstimulated state, appears to adjust-in ways that heighten such
perplexities. When I first discovered the
358-equals-devil-equals-messiah paradox, I had to go to Los Angeles on
business. Arriving at my hotel I found I had been given room 358. That's
the sort of "strange accident" that Yeats was talking about, as one of
the portals to Cabala. . .
For several years English biologist Lyall Watson has been collecting
the products of Jung's "collective unconsciousness" – dreams, hypnotic
states, mediumistic phenomena, automatic writing, et cetera. In his
book, Lifetide, Watson offers a tentative summary of the data: "...
there is a sameness in the tone, the word structure, the feeling, and
the delivery of almost all the material. It has a dreamlike quality; and
my feeling is that the vast majority of all the evidence I am looking
at is a series produced by one prodigious dreamer" (italics added).
William Butler Yeats, trying to justify his interest in Cabalastic
magic to rationalistic friends, came up with the same metaphor: "The
borders of our minds are ever shifting, and many minds can flow into one
another; as it were, and create or reveal a single mind. . . our
memories are part of one great memory; the memory of Nature herself.”
This "one great dreamer" or "one great memory" can be accessed by
Cabalistic practices, or by Zen meditation, or by LSD, or by a dozen
other gimmicks. It has the quality of oneness in that it is the same no
matter who accesses it or when-whether they are in India 500 B.G or
Florence A.D. 1300 or in New York City today. It seems to be "timeless"
or unconnected to our conscious notions of sequential time, as even so
materialistic an observer as Freud noticed. One of the benefits of the
psychological investigations of our times-from Freud and Jung to the LSD
research of the '60s and the human-potential movement-has been to make
most of us aware again, for the first time since the 17th century; that
this level of the psyche exists in all of us and cannot safely be
repressed or ignored.
The Cabalist, scorned by the 19th century as a crank or a charlatan,
seems to be having the last laugh after all. There may be only one
person in 10,000 – or in 100,000 – who seriously studies Cabala, but the
avant-garde third of the population understands Cabalistic logic very
well. If you show them the Tree of Life, and explain it, they might say
that it is an alternative map of the charkas – if they are into Oriental
mind-science; or an anatomy of the collective unconscious- if they're
into Jung; or the circuits of the nervous system-if Tim Leary is their
bag; but one way or another they will recognize it. It looked like
gibberish to Yeats's contemporaries.
Military Intelligence never could figure out how the "angelic
archers" escaped from Arthur Machen's imagination to the perceptions of
the soldiers at Mons. But the readers of this magazine understand.
Don't you?
