Separated for chance of Union I worship you with endless devotion
The Invocation of Our Divine Infinite Being
Many doors
Through the years of the company, the household and the travel to India I kept searching for one rite that could hold all the others, and that search became the rite our School teaches today.
Like many who come to this path in the modern West, I came to ritual through more than one door. There was the Kabbalistic path, with its Tree of Life and its sacred letters. There was the ceremonial magic of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and of Thelema, with their banishing rituals, hexagram rituals, Middle Pillar workings and long sequences of initiatory grades. There were the contemplative streams of Christian Hermeticism, and in time the embodied mysteries of Tantra and the Eastern lineages. And there was the more austere purity of classical theurgy, the Platonic work of the gods.
Over those years I explored the teachings and practices of a number of occult orders and spiritual groups, and I learned something from every one of them. Most of the path I walked alone, in my own temple, at disciplines as different as Chi Gong, Yoga and Ceremonial Magick. I engaged with hundreds of rituals, from the practices of Tantra to the ceremonial frameworks of the Golden Dawn and the initiatory rites of Thelema, and I performed the rites of nearly every Mystery tradition at one time or another. My central focus was theurgy and the Tarot, and I treated them as living sciences of the soul, with laws that could be learned and tested in my own temple.
Raja Kundalini stayed with me all through those years.
The seams between rites
For years I practiced faithfully across these systems and the practice worked, the visions came, the presences came and my life changed because of them. What troubled me was the shape of the whole. Taken together, the ways that ceremonial magick and theurgy were practiced remained a patchwork, as each system had its own map of the soul and its own order of operations, and each rite had its own opening, body and close.
I felt the patchwork most clearly in the seams. The ceremonial traditions commonly string separate rituals together, a banishing, then a hexagram ritual, then another banishing, or else a banishing, the Middle Pillar, the Mass of the Phoenix and a final banishing. At the close of each rite something was released. The space relaxed, my attention loosened and the images began to fade, and the next rite had to rebuild what the one before it had established.
I also found that the bell could interrupt the natural flow of the rite, breaking the current as one divine Name passed into the next or as one phase of the operation passed into another. I still use the bell, though sparingly, most often in longer and more elaborate rituals with several clear transitions that call for a formal separation.
I knew intuitively that there had to be a more central way to engage ritual practice, one system in which every part was in sync with every other part and the work flowed from its first breath to its last without a break.
Journal after journal
The writing filled journal after journal as I authored rites, tried them, changed them and tried them again over years of practice. I wrote down what I did, what I felt, what appeared and what did not, and at the next rite I changed one thing and wrote it down again. Some of those pages were rituals of my own composition. Some were notes on a single gesture, a single Name or a single breath. Many were records of failures, rites that looked beautiful on paper and fell flat in the temple.
Beside the rites stood my reading notes, passages from Iamblichus, from the Golden Dawn papers, from Crowley and from the Kabbalists copied out next to the rite they bore on. When a teaching in a book matched something I had met in the temple, I wrote the two together. When the book and the temple disagreed, I went back to the temple and performed the work again. The journals also hold the operations of those years, for healing and for transformation, performed for myself and for others.
Out of all of this the methods slowly evolved, page by page, into the system our School now offers its students.
Thousands of pentagrams
Of all the rites I worked, I found myself returning again and again to the pentagram ritual of the ceremonial tradition. Through thousands of personal performances of that rite, in diverse forms across three decades, its purpose opened before me a little more each year. It became clear to me that the pentagram ritual, as it had been handed down in the ceremonial lineages, was a seed whose full growth had not yet been seen.
Practice refined it and visions corrected it, and when a vision showed me something about the structure of the cosmos, I carried it back into the rite and tested it there, and whatever held up stayed. Slowly the inherited framework was modified into a unique set of practices, the ones we now teach under the name the Theurgic Ritual of the Pentagram, and in our School we have chosen to center all other theurgic rites within the framework of this one foundational praxis.
I gladly honor the Golden Dawn for first establishing certain elements of that rite, particularly within our pentagram framework. Its criteria for drawing the pentagrams of invocation and of banishment fit well within our ritual model and serve much the same purpose, the purifying of the raw elements of fire, water, air and earth. Our vision of the rite as a fully interlocked system diverges significantly from theirs. The Golden Dawn and, by extension, the Thelemic ritual process are built upon the Kabbalistic Tree of Life and its positions, and our approach rests on a Platonic and theurgic foundation, centered on the gods, the Sun and the luminous vehicle of the soul. We use elements of their system, and where our rite departs from theirs, in the quarters and the order of its components, each departure is explained in its place in Ritual Praxis and Instruction.
The rite that came out of those years works by two principles, banishment and invocation, the purification that makes a holy emptiness and the drawing down of the divine into it. Every form of it opens with the Grand Invocation, an ascent from the non-dual ground of 'Ehyeh to the union of Helios and Protogonos. After it the pentagrams are cast, the elements are ordered to the will of the Dēmiurgós, the cardinal guardians are called to their stations and the gods are approached through their gates. We perform it in five sets, the Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram, the Divine Infinite Being Invocation, the Planetary Invocation, the Zodiacal Invocation and the Celestial working. Every set begins with the Grand Invocation and ends with the Closing of the Ritual, and what changes between them is what is placed in the middle. The first set is to the theurgist what daily prayer is to a priest.
The first discovery: one rite that holds them all
Two discoveries from those years shaped the rite more than any others. The first is that many rites performed in succession are weaker than one rite that contains them all.
I found that the sequences of the ceremonial tradition, especially when they are loaded with excessive psychodynamic elements, dilute the power of the work and scatter the operator's energy. The answer I came to was to stop performing separate, independent rituals one after another and to integrate them as components of a single, unified operation. In our School every theurgic rite is framed within the single grand operation of the Theurgic Ritual of the Pentagram, and from the opening silence to the close you stand in one unbroken body of light. The yogic preparation of the vessel stands outside this joining, as it is completed before the rite begins.
In practice the difference is easy to feel. The white light drawn in at the first Name is still being drawn in with every breath when the pentagrams are cast. The sphere opened at the start is still present when the guardians take their stations at its edge. When a gate is opened and a planetary god invoked, the god is received into a field built without interruption from the first Name of the rite. The temple I had been building and taking down with every rite in a sequence now stayed up for the whole of the work, and it gained strength as each part was added.
The second discovery: union first
The second discovery concerns the order of the ascent itself. Within the Golden Dawn and Thelemic traditions a long sequence of initiations and progressive workings culminates in the invocation of the Holy Guardian Angel, the Higher Self. This figure, in our system and in that of Iamblichus, corresponds to the personal daemon and, beyond it, to the Divine Double.
I practiced within that graded order for many years and learned a great deal from it, and in time I came to another conclusion. That approach is potent, and it defers the deepest and most transformative union until the very end of the path, so that a student may labor for years in the outer grades before the work that matters most is even attempted. In my own practice I found the reverse order far more effective. I began with the deepest union and set it at the threshold, and every other working grows out of it. In the Grand Invocation you climb through Helios, the body of light, to Protogonos, the union with the spherical and infinite Divine Double, and come down again, on the first day of practice as on the thousandth, and we call this the reverse order.
Those same traditions taught me to name the age in which I practiced, and the reverse order belongs to that age. With Aleister Crowley we hold that humanity has entered the Aeon of Horus, and in my essay The Dawn of the New Aeon I gave its solar formula as the Sun who is a child forever rising. The older age looked for salvation after death and through sacrifice. In the age of the rising Sun there is no need to wait, and the theurgist of this age is joined to the eternal Double each morning at the opening of the rite.
I open every rite I perform in the same way. I stand at the center of the temple facing the altar and the direction of Fire, lay a finger to my forehead and form a brilliant white light above my head, and from that light the Grand Invocation climbs to the union and comes down again before anything else in the rite is done. In the macrocosmic sequence our ritual permits Śiva and Śakti or the Thelemic Hadit and Nuit in place of the Hebrew Names (Ritual Praxis and Instruction, Chs. 26 and 32).
What the rite depends on
Through all of this I came to see that success in theurgic ritual depends on two things, state-change awareness and the holding of resonant states through disciplined work. The forms matter greatly, and I have spent decades on them. A perfect form performed by someone who cannot notice the change in their own state, or cannot keep it once it comes, gives very little.
State-change awareness means knowing, from the inside, the moment the rite has taken. The breath settles, the field around the body brightens, and the mind that was rehearsing the day goes quiet. My first contacts with my own vehicle of light were often fleeting, like a dream can be when you first awake in the morning, and only through long practice did they become something I could recognize the moment the rite had taken.
I came to understand the change of state through a distinction I still teach. A great part of any life runs on repetition, the morning that is like every other morning, the reaction that fires before we have noticed it, the familiar mood that settles over us without being chosen. Nothing is wrong with it, as a healthy life must run on habit or we could not even tie our shoes. The soul does its growing in the moment when something truly new is admitted into experience, the insight that reorganizes a problem, the encounter that changes a life, the presence of a god felt for the first time as presence and no longer as an idea. A rite that only repeats the day's habits changes very little, and a rite in which the operator notices the new state arriving, and makes room for it, changes a great deal. Learning to tell the two apart in my own temple took me years and filled many of the early journals.
Holding means keeping that state once it has come, steady enough for a god to be received into it. Much of the design of our rite serves this one task. The single enclosure exists so that nothing is released before the work is done. The union placed first exists so that the deepest state is present from the beginning and everything after it is held inside it.
Over many years in my temple I have come again and again to the same quiet place, the silence after a rite, when something has taken place and the reasoning mind has no account to give of it.
It was in contemplating the Monad that I first came to know what theurgy does. The many forms of the gods are drawn out of the One and return to it, and the rite is the human way of taking part in that movement. Hermes was my first example of taking the shape of a god, the messenger and psychopomp whose planet is Mercury and who passes between the worlds. In the god's consecration of the mind, when the nervous chatter of my thoughts was surrendered into the presence of God Mercury, the scattered thoughts and anxious rehearsals dissolved. What once spun in circles became a single bright current, quick and sure, carrying meaning without distortion, and I later taught this in our Persona teaching.
Saturn taught me something different, as at the moment his presence becomes strong you find that you are no longer bracing. The palms open, the shoulders drop and the breath is unheld. I have known this when his order seized the vessel of my being, and it is one of the signatures I now teach students to recognize.
In the rite the descent of light comes from every point of the boundary inward, and the seeing goes outward from the Double's eyes. What I have seen in that seeing is my own infinite nature. I have experienced samādhi, and I came back from it embodied and at home in the world, with my ordinary life still in front of me. In every union I describe, the observing "I" is refined and kept.
The same rite, five hundred times
One of the most common questions a new student asks me is whether the daily rite will grow stale, and my answer comes from my own life. When you begin the work of ritual theurgy the experiences from one encounter to the next continue to deepen, becoming more accurate and defined each time, even when the same ritual is performed hundreds of times, and this I have lived myself. The same invocation, the same Names and the same gestures, performed for the five-hundredth time, are subtly different from the four-hundredth, more accurate, more defined and more transparent to the god.
I have also learned how slow the change can be. Old patterns are costly to change, as every practitioner learns, often painfully, and I have seen it again and again in my students and in myself. A habit laid down over decades, especially one laid down early and under strain, runs on long-used pathways in the body, and a new pattern has to be held for a long time before it carries the impulse as readily as the old. The soul need carry no shame for this, and in our School we measure practice in years.
Lannah
I had been married twice before. I loved both of those women, and both marriages were very incompatible, for them as much as for me. Then I met the love of my life, Lannah Paredes, and after dating for a year we married in 2015. We are married still.
Lannah has been a powerful partner to me, and she holds traits I lacked. She has a real gift for organizing and planning, and a deep care for the welfare of our future, and those two things grounded me in ways I had never been grounded before. With her my theurgic practice finally had a foundation under it. She was the one with me in the country home we moved into in October 2014, and I shared my ideas with her as they came to me. We lived together in a way I had never experienced with a partner, and she made me a better person.
We grew so close that I began to experience telepathy with her. I would start a conversation with her in my head, and before I had spoken a word aloud she would answer it. This happened so often that it was impossible to ignore.
She challenged me constantly to be a better person, to live with truth and to mean what I say. My relationship with her did more than anything else to stabilize me, both in my personal life and in the theurgic work I was attending to.
What I saw in my students
All through those years I was teaching, and the rite was tested in other people's lives as well as in my own.
The tradition gives several marks by which a true divine appearance is told apart from lesser appearances, and over many years I have seen them confirmed again and again in my own practice and in my students. Divine appearances are given, arriving with a quality of otherness and objectivity, they are stable, they carry transformative power and they are coherent with the god. The relationship with the gods can be imagined from the outside, and only in undergoing it do you come to know that it is truly objective. The rite transforms the soul, and for many who practice it the experiences of the rite come to be more real than those of everyday waking life, as I have seen in my students many times.
I have seen the holding mature, as after months of holding the living form of the rite, students begin to find it present outside the temple, the light above the head while walking, the horizon of the sphere while speaking and the Double at the boundary while working. I have watched students decouple from the power of circumstance, as sustained recognition of the eternal self gradually loosens the hold that events have on a person. One who was shaken for a week by a discouraging message is shaken for an hour, and later for a minute. As that yielding matures the arrivals of life keep coming, and each one stirs less turmoil than the last, and I have watched this quieting come over my students many times.
Some of what I saw was very simple. Many students who breathe habitually into the upper chest discover in the preparation that the breath can begin in the belly, and that a breath which begins there steadies the whole body. In the moment a sudden understanding breaks upon a student, new knowledge arrives whole or not at all, and I have seen that in so many of my students that I now wait for it. In the meditation of the ascent the student rests at the station of the Moon until the mirror is quiet enough that a faint light would show in it. I have known students who sat for a month without passing beyond the Moon, and I teach that on some days the breath and the Earth are the whole of the practice.
When the Names are resonated in the method of octaves, the fire in the body and the thundering echo of the Name from every part of the surrounding space do come once the octaves are fully established, and I have seen this many times in my students. Those who strain for the sensation of being aflame find only the strain. I ask my students to practice resonance apart from the rite for a few minutes daily until they begin to hear the second octave, and within the rite to listen in the direction of the octave that does not exist, without any effort to produce it. The method requires practice, and I can demonstrate it easily when I work with a student in person. For the declarations made to the gods I composed model declarations by the same principles for my students, to be used, adapted or set aside. Reverence in a declaration guards against arrogance, which treats the god as an equal or a servant, and against idolatry, which confuses the god with its image, its planet's light, its card or its statue, and so we name the god by its titles and offices, acknowledge its magnitude and address it as a living presence.
Over the years I have watched two opposite errors in my students many times. The first is to treat shadow work as a separate therapy that must be finished before the gods may be approached, as though every inherited contraction had to be resolved before a student is permitted to invoke. The second is to ignore the shadow altogether and keep invoking the gods while their forms are scattered at the threshold, until the same god is called again and again and does not seem to stay. I teach that the two are one process, and every planetary banishing, rightly performed, is shadow work on one god.
There is one rule I have always given my students, that we never summon the gods for spectacle, as the posture is reverence and receiving and what appears is the gods' to give.
Where I was wrong, and what I changed
Over the years I have also changed my mind, and I want my students to know where.
In my early teaching I spoke at times of the power of attraction and of the gravitational pull of an intention. The experience I was pointing to is very real, and the image I used for it was wrong. What a person receives is admitted from a continuum in which it already exists, by a vessel prepared to hold it. I knew the strain of the older view very well, the long holding of an intention as if I had to pull the outcome across a distance by the strength of a wish. I understand that strain now as the work of clearing and steadying the place where the thing will arrive. The hard work belongs to the receiver, and that change let me ask my students to work hard and to wait without anxiety in the same breath.
In my early teaching on the living Earth I called Hecate the queen of witches, as she has long been called. Her patronage of sorceresses belongs to the poets, to Medea in Euripides and to Simaetha in Theocritus. The Chaldean Oracles are no book of witchcraft, and their Hecate is the cosmic soul between the Fathers, the source of Soul and Nature, and Iamblichus, whose theurgy we follow, separates theurgy sharply from goēteia, the arts of compulsion. I now approach Hecate through Platonic theurgy and the astrological Cosmos, as the soul of the world, the womb of space and the threshold of the gods.
For years I also scattered my own terms. I spoke of "liberation", of "salvation", of "enlightenment", of "union with the personal daemon" and of "the immortal self", and I rarely said how these were related. A seeker who met the human solar being in one essay, the personal daemon in another and the warning against heaven deferred in a third might never see that they were one teaching, and among my own students this happened many times. The name Solar Salvation came to me late, after many years of teaching. It arrived in my teaching Theurgic Quantum Solar Salvation, after a long meditation on the quantum picture of the rite and the solar order, when I came to see salvation ritually realized, here and now, as the union of image with its source. Every part of the teaching it names was with us from the start, and the name gathered them into one aim, the union of the temporal self with its eternal Double. From the first morning our Invocation of Our Divine Infinite Being had carried the whole of it in one prayer, "Separated for chance of Union I worship you with endless devotion", as the separation was never a fall and is for the sake of a union made richer by having been separated.
My time with the Eastern practices went the same way. Years after my first teaching on Śiva and Śakti I came back to Raja Kundalini with new eyes. I joined the three guṇas, sattva, rajas and tamas, with the Titanic and Olympian forces of the Greeks and with the practices of Raja Kundalini, and the preparation of the vessel became something I could teach as one grammar, the inner dynamics of a vessel being made ready for the gods.
The purified voice
Through all these years I kept the work in a prayerful posture. What we call the inner voice is the voice that reasons in us, and the passions of the body and our relation to the world distort it. Through the ritual work, divination, prayer and meditation that inner voice was purified, and the change came in growing measure as the result of the work over time. Ritual Praxis and Instruction teaches the discernment of what appears in practice (Chapter 4).
As the voice was purified, what had seemed to be my inner voice gave way to something completely different, and its guidance began to instruct me directly. Many times I was taken strongly by the spirit and given visions of the inner workings and the occult nature of the principles and the rites I was practicing, deep in the inner dimensions of experience. Sometimes the instruction came as inner dialogue, and many times it broke in as visionary realization that is hard to describe in words. These visions carried a fully kinesthetic, felt and intuitive nature, and that nature carried sudden meaning into my thoughts. I wrote such realizations into the journal.
The journals become essays
Out of the journals came essays, and our Central Doctrine began in them and in short articles, the insights of many years written down as they came, much of it in years when the only help I had was a notebook, a library and the silence of my temple. What became its first edition was a loose collection of seventy-two essays, and much of it lay scattered in that form until February 2022, when I sat down to formalize it.
Many of these essays came to me from a deeply transcendental visionary state, with the ideas emerging gradually over time. They were teaching and vision long before anyone could have called them a textbook. My visions, prayers, testimonies and poems are the living core from which everything else in our teaching grew. In our School revelation always stands beside argument, history and the best knowledge of the age, and the vision is my testimony while the argument is offered to your reason.
Some of that writing took me far afield. I made my own renderings of the Egyptian funerary texts, and from them I first learned who Nut is, the sky that enfolds, to whom a prayer of the Pyramid Texts entrusts the king's soul.
The essays carried titles my students will meet throughout the School's books, and among them are these:
- Animism, Synchronicity, and the Voice of the World
- Our Earth Is Alive, Imbued with Consciousness
- Taking the Shape of the Gods, Celestials, Divine Intelligences
- The Persona: From Daily Life to Theurgic Shape
- Cosmic Delusion, Fantasies about an Afterlife, Rewards beyond the Present Must Be Avoided for Those Seeking Enlightenment
- the ritual text The Theurgic Ritual of the Pentagram
Each one gathered years of practice notes into a single teaching. From Cosmic Delusion came the saying our School has made its own, that the only way out is in.
Through those years I kept working, shaping, refining and deepening the School's format, all while keeping my daily practice of meditation and theurgy. Like all sincere seekers I faced periods of disenchantment, when the weight of daily life threatened to put out the flame, and each time I returned to the work, driven by a conviction that would not let me rest.
By the end of those years I had dedicated myself fully to the ritual model of our own School. It is a precise framework that blends the Ritual Praxis of the Pentagram with the methods of Raja Kundalini, the vessel prepared first and then the one rite performed inside one unbroken field, with the Tarot and the structure of the sky built into its order.