"Take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy ground." (Exodus 3:5)
A room below the house
I began deeper magical practice at the age of twenty. In the autumn of 1996, at twenty-one and just before I began the accelerated program at UCMT, I built my first ritual chamber in the basement of the house where I was living. It was a simple room below the rest of the house, and from the day I set it apart I treated it as a place with its own rules. I went down the stairs to work, and I came back up when the work was done.
Upstairs the house went on as any house does, with its kitchen, its visitors and its noise. Downstairs I kept the room for one purpose. The basement was cool and quiet, and on a winter evening I could hear nothing in it but my own breath and the house settling above me.
The rites I kept there were the foundational rites of the Western esoteric tradition, the ones nearly every student of the Golden Dawn and of Thelema learns first. The center of my practice was the pentagram banishing ritual and the Middle Pillar, the rites Israel Regardie had printed from the Golden Dawn's papers. Around them I worked the hexagram rituals and many other rites drawn from the books I had gathered by then. I had performed some of these rites since my late teens, and in the basement they became a discipline.
The banishing came first, and it cleared the room and the self. I opened with the Qabalistic Cross, vibrating Ateh at the forehead, Malkuth at the breast, ve-Geburah at the right shoulder, ve-Gedulah at the left shoulder and le-Olahm, Amen with the hands clasped at the heart, drawing a cross of light through the body as I went. Then I went to the east and traced the first pentagram in the air before me, and at its center I vibrated the Name. I traced the pentagrams at each of the four quarters in turn, YHVH in the east, Adonai in the south, 'Ehyeh in the west and AGLA in the north, carrying a line of light around the room from one figure to the next until the circle was closed. Then I called the four archangels, Raphael before me, Gabriel behind me, Michael at my right hand and Uriel at my left. I stood in the center of the figure I had drawn, with the pentagrams flaming about me and the six-rayed star in the column of my body, and I closed with the Qabalistic Cross as I had opened.
Vibrating a Name is a skill of its own, and the basement is where I learned it. The Name is drawn in on a full breath, held for a moment in the body, and then sent out on the out-breath in a long, low tone that is felt through the chest and the whole frame as much as it is heard. On a good evening the sound seemed to fill the room and then to keep going past its walls. On a poor one it stayed in my throat. I spent many evenings learning to put all my attention into a single Name.
The hexagram rituals do for the planets what the pentagram does for the elements. Where the pentagram banishing works with the four quarters and the elements of the world below, the hexagram figure traced at the quarters works with the seven ancient planets and the forces of the heavens. I performed them after the pentagram on the evenings I set for them, and I copied their forms and their Names into my books as carefully as I did the pentagram's.
The Middle Pillar followed, and in it the spheres of light are brought down through the center of the body, from the crown to the throat, the heart, the genitals and the feet, and each sphere is lit with its divine Name vibrated on the breath. At the crown the Name is 'Ehyeh, "I Am", and I sounded it there many times in that basement. Below it came YHVH Elohim at the throat, YHVH Eloah ve-Daath at the heart, Shaddai El Chai at the genitals and Adonai ha-Aretz at the feet. When the five spheres were lit I circulated the light around the body, down the front and up the back, from side to side, and then up through the center from the feet to the crown, where it spilled over and fell around me before I closed.
Those last two Names of the descent have stayed with me ever since. Every set of our School's rite still closes with the descent through Shaddai El Chai, the Almighty Living God, and Adonai ha-Aretz, the Lord of the Earth, carrying the work down into the Foundation and then into the body and the world (Ritual Praxis and Instruction, Ch. 31, §31.7.6).
Evenings in the basement
I committed to these rites as a regular discipline, performed on fixed evenings week after week. What changed in the basement was the schedule. Before it I had practiced when a book excited me, when a friend wanted to try a rite or when a question pressed on me. In the basement I performed the rites whether I felt inspired or not, and I kept doing them on the evenings when nothing happened at all. I learned to go down the stairs on every evening I had set for the rite, whatever I felt when I reached the bottom step.
On a working evening I let the day settle for a while, then went down, stood for a few minutes in the quiet to let my breath slow, and began with the banishing. The Middle Pillar took longer, as I let each sphere grow bright and steady before I moved to the next. On some evenings I added a hexagram ritual or another rite I was studying. When I was done I sat for a while in the silence, and then I opened the journal and wrote.
On some evenings I came back up the stairs with the column of light from the Middle Pillar still standing in me, warm and clear from the crown to the feet, and it stayed with me through the rest of the night and into my sleep. On other evenings I felt very little and came up the stairs the same man who had gone down them. I wrote both kinds of evening into the journal in the same plain way. Over the months the strong evenings became more frequent, and they came more often after a week of steady practice than after a single inspired night.
In the journal I could see the practice build from one performance to the next more clearly than I could feel it on any one night. A page of thin entries was very often followed by an evening when the light came down through the spheres with no effort at all.
The chamber ran alongside my months at UCMT, the drum in the parks and the long hours of reading in those same years. In the daytime and out in the world I was training as a bodyworker and drumming with friends. Downstairs I was a ceremonial magician with a notebook, performing the same few rites over and over and writing down what happened. In time the two halves began to meet. What I felt in the Middle Pillar at night came with me to the massage table in the morning, and what I saw and felt on the table came back into the journal that night. None of it was organized yet, and it lived in the margins of the notebooks, in arrows drawn from one page to another and in questions I wrote to myself and did not answer for years.
Journals, grimoires and compendiums
In that same room I began keeping extensive journals. I wrote down every working with the date, the rite, the time of evening and what I felt before, during and after it. I added the dreams that came that night and any synchronicity that came in the days after, and when a rite failed I wrote that down too, with whatever I could find of the reason. The early entries were short, and within a few months they ran to pages, as I learned what was worth noting and began to notice more.
Alongside the journals I began crafting personal grimoires. A grimoire in the old sense is a book of rites, and mine were books of my own rites, copied out by hand from the sources and then adjusted as I learned what worked for me. I would copy a rite exactly as I found it, perform it as written for a while, and then make a change and write the changed version on the next page with the date. Over time a single rite might run through several versions in the same book, and the journal beside it told me why each change was made.
I also compiled compendiums of symbolism, correspondences and meditative insights, and these were where my reading and my practice met on the page. I would take a Hebrew letter, a planet or a Tarot trump and gather into one place everything I could find about it in Crowley, Regardie, the Golden Dawn papers, the Kabbalistic books, the yogic writings of Atkinson and the Tarot books on my shelf, Crowley's Book of Thoth among them. Then I added what I had seen myself in meditation and in the rite. A single trump might fill several pages, with its Hebrew letter, its path on the Tree, its astrological attribution, the colors of its scales and the images that came to me when I sat with the card in the chamber.
These tools became the architecture of a highly disciplined ceremonial practice, and I carried them forward and refined them over the decades that followed. The basement is where the first of the journals was opened, and the habit has never left me. I still write down what happened after the rite, and much of what our School now teaches began as a line in a notebook that I went back to read a month or a year later.
Even in those first books I could see a problem. My grimoires were a patchwork, in which a banishing from one source sat beside a meditation from another and a set of correspondences from a third, and each came with its own assumptions about what a human being is, what a god is and what the rite is meant to do. I was faithful to each of them, and each of them worked to some degree. Behind the patchwork I already had an intuition of one central system, a single order in which the Hebrew letter, the planet, the trump, the archangel at the quarter and the sphere of light in the body would all stand in sync with one another. I could not yet draw that order, and the lines I drew between the pages toward it were the parts of the notebooks I valued most.
A trip born of a rite
I graduated from UCMT on 17 May 1997, and shortly after that, in the summer of 1997, I set out with my then-girlfriend in a VW bus to explore the Pacific Northwest. The trip itself was born from a theurgic ritual I had performed. That is a great fireside story for another day.
We went where the road took us, slept in the bus and stopped wherever a place looked good to us.
I seized every opportunity along the way to perform the rites. I would find a place off the road, a clearing, a riverbank or a hillside, and I would do the work there. By then I had performed the pentagram rite and the Middle Pillar so many times in the basement that I needed no book and no chamber to do them. The quarters were wherever the sun told me east was. The circle was the ground I stood on, traced in the air with my hand, and the Names went out over open ground and through trees instead of against four walls.
The canyon
One of the most powerful experiences of my entire spiritual life happened while we were traveling through a 40-mile canyon in northern Idaho. Towering trees and mountains rose on either side, monumental and alive. The road ran along the bottom of it for mile after mile, and the further we went the quieter I became. The walls of the canyon closed off everything but the trees, the rock and a strip of sky.
Somewhere in the middle of that canyon I pulled over. I climbed a slope above the road, found a place to stand among the trees and performed my standard ritual sequence, a Banishing Pentagram, the Middle Pillar and then another Banishing Pentagram to seal the work. I had done that sequence more times than I could count, in the basement and along the road.
This time was very different, and as I moved through the ritual something shifted in my awareness so completely that I was carried beyond time and space. I fully identified with the body of light for the first time. In the Middle Pillar I had always drawn the light down into my body and felt it there, sphere by sphere. On that slope the direction turned around. I was the light, and the body standing among the trees was something the light was wearing. The canyon, the trees and the mountains were no longer around me in the old way, as things outside a man looking at them. They stood within the same light I was, and I knew them from inside it.
I do not know how long the state lasted by the clock. When the final banishing was done I stood there for a long while, and slowly the ordinary sense of a body on a hillside came back around me. I came down the slope and got back into the bus, and I knew that something in my practice had changed for good.
Until that day I had performed rites and watched for their effects afterward, the warmth in the body, the clearness of the night, the dream or the synchronicity in the days after. On that slope I had been inside the state itself, with no distance between me and what the rite was opening. I wanted more than anything to find my way back to it and to learn how to stay in it. That afternoon marked the beginning of the most intense and transcendent work I would undertake in the years that followed.
We now teach this difference to every student of our School. At the Name Helios in the Grand Invocation the theurgist enters the body of light and experiences from it, and the point of view becomes the light itself, radiating, within which the body is lit, where before it was a small observer inside a body that contains light (Ritual Praxis and Instruction, Ch. 29). I first stood in that point of view on a hillside in northern Idaho, during a banishing and a Middle Pillar.
What the canyon asked
The words and the rite on that slope were the same as on every evening in the basement. I had come to the slope after mile after mile of quiet road, among trees and mountains that were alive to me.
The same rite had done far more on that day than on other days, and I wrote about this in the journal on the road and for years afterward. Many entries pointed the same way, away from the order of the gestures and toward the state of the one making them, and toward the work of noticing when that state changes. In time those entries became one of the foundations of what our School teaches about holding a state in the rite.
From then on my aim was to reach that identification with the body of light again by practice.
The mushroom farm
Our trip eventually brought us to Salem, Oregon, where I took work as a manager on a shiitake and oyster mushroom farm. We stayed on the farm in our VW bus and used the facility's showers and laundry. We lived very simply, with our days given to the work of the farm and our nights to the bus.
A mushroom farm runs on moisture, temperature and timing. The growing rooms are kept damp and dim, the crop comes on in flushes, and someone has to be there every day to watch it, harvest it and keep the cycle going. As a manager I was part of that rhythm from morning to evening. The work was physical and steady, and it suited me.
The farm's owner, surprisingly enough, was sympathetic to my theurgic pursuits, and he even had a background in ritual philosophy himself. He generously allowed me to use a large, open building on the property for my work, and that building became my temple for the rest of my time on the farm.
The building had open floor and room enough to walk the full circle of the rite with space to spare. I set it up for the work, and every day when the farm work was done I walked across to it from the bus and began. When the rite was finished I wrote up the day's working in the journal before I slept.
Five months without a break
There, for over five months, I kept a daily ritual practice without a single break. Every day I went into that building and performed the work. I did it after long days in the growing rooms, on days when I was tired, on days when the bus was cold and on days when I would rather have slept. I had practiced on a schedule in the basement, and on the farm I kept that schedule every day without exception.
The first weeks were much like the basement. Some days the rite went deep and some days it stayed on the surface, and I wrote both into the journal. Each day's rite started where the last one had left off. As the weeks passed I could feel an intensity and a coherence gathering in me that cannot be reached through occasional practice.
After about sixty days I began to experience elevated and ecstatic states of consciousness that went beyond any limit of mind and spirit I had known. These were truly exalted experiences of cosmic union, and of education directly from an eternal, infinite living Mind. They had nothing of the shallow, fleeting trance one might taste at a workshop or a retreat. They were long states, and they did not end when the rite ended. They went with me out of the building and into the growing rooms, into the bus at night and into my sleep. I would be at work in the growing rooms and find the same light that had filled the building still filling me.
In those states I was taught, and understanding came into me whole without my reasoning my way to it. I wrote as much of it into the journal as I could hold onto afterward, and I went back to many of those pages for years. The Mind that taught me in that building is the One our School now calls Our Divine Infinite Being.
That season was a rebirth for me, an initiation into dimensions of existence I could never have reached without sustained and committed theurgic discipline. In our School today a long run of successive performances is how a state held with effort becomes one that holds of itself (Ritual Praxis and Instruction, How to Use This Manual, and Ch. 16).
Our students build that holding in the way they learn the rite. Each form of the Grand Invocation is kept present in the inner sight while the next is added, until by the Closing the student holds everything together, from the white light of 'Ehyeh to the four Guardians. No one can do this at first, and repeated performance develops it (Ritual Praxis and Instruction, How to Use This Manual).
The verse on the door
On the door to my temple today I have a verse from the book of Exodus, "Take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy ground." These are the words spoken to Moses at the burning bush, on the far side of the wilderness, when he turned aside to look at a bush that burned and was not consumed. I have kept that verse on the wall or on the door of every temple I have put together since my early twenties, from the one in my two-room apartment in Salem to the temple where I work now.
When I take off my shoes at the door I am already beginning the rite. The God who speaks from that fire names himself in the same passage 'Ehyeh 'ăšer 'Ehyeh, "I Am That I Am" (Exodus 3:14). It is the Name I vibrated at the crown in the Middle Pillar in the basement, and it is now the Name with which every rite of our School begins.
Our students set aside their shoes at the temple door before they put on the robe and enter the circle. The donning of the robe is itself a threshold rite, and in it the student steps across the boundary of ordinary identity and takes a place as a citizen of the cosmic temple. To remove the shoes at the door is to begin the Grand Invocation before a word of it is spoken (Ritual Praxis and Instruction, Ch. 21).
In many ceremonial traditions the opening of a rite is a work of construction, in which a space is marked out, defended and charged and only then considered fit for the presence of the divine. I built my rites that way for years, from the basement on, and our Theurgic Ritual of the Pentagram constructs as well, with a real circle, drawn pentagrams and placed guardians. Our rite begins with recognition, and before a single line of light is traced you take off your sandals, inwardly, and acknowledge that you already stand on the ground of being (Ritual Praxis and Instruction, Ch. 25, §25.1.2).
Thirty days to six months
The farm set the pattern for the rest of my practice. Since then I have kept long ritual cycles lasting anywhere from thirty days to six months, refining the practice and exploring the mysteries. I begin a cycle with a clear aim and a fixed rite, write both at the head of a new section of the journal, and keep the rite daily until the cycle is complete.
The length of a cycle depends on what I want from it. A short cycle of thirty days lets me test one change to a rite and see what it does over a month of daily work. A long cycle of several months shows me what a rite does to a life when it is kept long enough for its effects to settle.
Thirty performances of the same rite, written down each day, show what the rite builds, where it stalls and what in the operator has to change before it can go further. I read a finished cycle in the journal from its first page to its last, and the pattern that I could never see from inside a single evening stands out clearly on the pages. The core rites of our School went through cycles of this kind for many years before they were written down for students. Our students now build the rite by levels, and each level is performed at least seven times before the next part is added to it (Ritual Praxis and Instruction, Ch. 1).
My practice was not always consistent, and there were pauses during life's storms, and seasons when the demands of work and life left room for only the simplest daily practice. Through all of it I have stayed devoted to my life as a practicing theurgist. Each time I came back to the full work after a pause, I opened a new cycle and went back to the daily schedule I had kept on the farm.