"Whichever door you enter, I am your guide into a realm full of Gods, Goddesses, eternal Archetypes and Forms, and a bridge to the infinite, eternal selfhood on the royal road of religious and philosophical thought."
Central Doctrine
Who I am
My name is Eddie Paredes, and I am the Head Master of the School of Our Divine Infinite Being, a school and a mystery tradition of theurgy, astrology and the Tarot. I wrote the books our School's work is built on, beginning with our Central Doctrine, and I teach in our courses and guide our students through the grades of the inner work.
I am also an engineer. Alongside the School I own and operate the Beto Paredes Family of Companies, which I founded, and it builds bioinformatics and advanced medical data platforms for physician offices and hospital systems. If you would like to know more about that side of my life, my professional work is at www.betoparedes.com.
I tell you about the company because most of you who read this have jobs, families and responsibilities of your own, and our School's program was written for people who live that way, with the practice kept at home, in a room set aside for it, at the pace a working life allows.
In my company a method has to be repeatable and a result has to be checkable, and over the years I learned to ask the same of every rite I performed and every teaching I read. Continual ritual work has in turn been paramount to my thinking as a professional.
In 2015 I married Lannah Paredes, the love of my life, and she has been a powerful partner in all of this work.
Whom I wrote it for
I wrote this account for those of you who are thinking of entering our School, whether you come to our astrology community, to earn a certificate in our Academy, or to take up the inner work of our Mystery School, as an Associate Member or in the grades, and I wrote with all of you in mind. If you are going to give your evenings and your mornings to a practice I designed, you should know who I am, what I have read, what I have practiced and the roots I teach from.
You may come to us from a church, a temple or a meditation hall, from years of reading in the occult and the Eastern philosophies, or with your first book on the subject still in your hands. The account is the same for all of you, since every course, rite and grade we offer grew out of the same practice and the same years of study.
A student's account
At heart I am a curious and dedicated student, of academic research and of direct practice in equal measure. It has always been my conviction that true knowledge stands on the bridge between theory and lived experience, and I have devoted my life to pursuing both. When I read about a rite, I want to perform it in the temple, and when something happens in the temple, I want the study that will let me understand it, test it and teach it.
What you will find here is a student's account of what he studied, what he practiced and what came of it. I name the books I read and what each one taught me, the teachers I learned from, the rites I kept and how they went from day to day, and the way each of them entered our School. Everything I read I took into the temple to see what it does there. Some of it held up and much of it did not, and what held up is in our School's books, written as methods you can perform and check for yourself.
Testing has also meant changing my mind. Some things I taught in my early years I taught in a language I no longer use, and some practices I kept for years I later rebuilt or set aside when I found a better way in practice. I give each correction in the years where it came, beside the teaching it changed.
Every sincere seeker should try at least once to write their own biography, and I have found that it is rarely an easy thing to do. To look at your own story with care is to look at the achievements and also at the struggles and the hard seasons.
Years ago I wrote a short introduction to my life for our School's website. I called it a curated portrait, and I said then that a detailed account worthy of a true biography would take an entire book and would be a project for another day. In the years since, I have written a great deal about my own practice in our School's works, most often a few lines set beside a teaching or a rite to show where it came from in my life. Here I have gathered those passages together with the old portrait and set them down in the order in which I lived them. Where I am unsure of a year I give my age or the period of my life.
A solitary road and a wider one
Over the years I learned from a number of occult orders and spiritual groups, and from teachers in America and in India, but most of my path I walked as a solitary practitioner in my own temple. I hold steadfastly to real spiritual community, a place where people rise together, sharpen one another and do some good in the world through what they learn. The work of our School is now shared with the colleagues who work on it with me in America and in India, and with every student who takes up the practice.
Where my story goes
My story runs from the household I grew up in, in eastern Idaho, through the doors that opened to me in my teens and twenties and the first temples I kept, to the long years of reading and practice, my years of travel to India and the search for one rite that could hold all the others. It goes on to the sciences I brought into the work, the sky that came into the center of my practice, a friendship that changed my picture of the Cosmos, the books in which all of it was written down, my life as I live it today and our School as it stands now.
I share this story in the hope that it, and the books of our tradition, find a place in you and give you a reason to take up the work.