Homemade Initiation
In all systems of religion is to be found a system of Initiation,
which may be defined as the process by which a man
comes to learn that unknown Crown.
Aleister Crowley, Liber LXI vel Causae 10
I didn’t know what exactly to expect when I mailed my membership application and money to the Rosicrucian Order (AMORC) back in 1971, but I was giddy at the thought of becoming a member of an honest-to-goodness occult society of students and adepts. My brother, Marc, had joined the organization (which advertised in magazines such as Fate and Popular Mechanics) a number of months earlier and had shared a few of his experiences. I knew I was signing up for a correspondence course—an ongoing series of monographs that taught ancient occult principles and exercises. I knew I was to faithfully study these monographs every Thursday evening in the privacy of my home “temple.” I also knew that my study sessions would involve a certain amount of ceremony: a little candle lighting, incense burning, chanting, and meditation—just the kind of spooky stuff a wide-eyed, twenty-four-year-old fledgling mystic like Lon Milo DuQuette was looking for!
My first monograph arrived unceremoniously in the mail on a Thursday, a cosmic synchronicity I could only interpret as a direct message from the gods. I nervously waited for the sun to go down so I could open the envelope and let the magick begin. After dinner, I showered and dressed in my karate gi (the closest thing I had to magical vestments). Constance, who was pregnant with our soon-to-arrive and as-yet-unnamed baby, agreed to busy herself in the kitchen and living room while I sequestered myself in the bedroom with my candles, my incense, and my first mystical monograph. I opened the envelope, smelled the contents (yes, I smelled the contents), read the few introductory words, and realized I was to undergo right then and there a ceremony of initiation.
When I was a youngster in junior high school, the word initiation was a word to be feared. Initiation meant institutionalized bullying and torment inflicted by older students upon naive and fearful underclassmen. A Midwestern junior-high-school initiation meant getting your pants pulled off and hoisted up the flagpole, or discovering (too late) that someone had sprinkled itching powder in your jock.
Of course there are other, more innocuous kinds of initiation in life, but at the very least the word implied a preliminary fee or penalty one must pay before presuming to be part of an organization.
Initiate as a verb means “to begin.” Initiation is simply a commencement. A magical initiation marks the beginning of a change—a mutation—an evolutionary step in the life of the magician who, if all goes well, will exit the initiatory chamber a different person from the one who blindly entered. Spiritual evolution is a series of these commencements. The magician formally recognizes the beginning of each new phase as he or she grows, step by step, degree by degree, in wisdom and understanding.
Formal initiatory societies were very popular in ancient Egypt, Greece, and various other Mediterranean and Asian cultures. The rites of initiation offered a more intelligent, elite, and esoteric spiritual experience than could be offered by the more crude and superstitious religions of the masses. Arguably, the most successful of the ancient initiatory societies was centered in the Greek city of Eleusis. The Eleusinian mysteries celebrated the agricultural mysteries of the goddess Demeter and her daughter Persephone for the better part of two thousand years.
The Eleusinian mysteries themselves had developed from the far older Mycenaean agricultural cults and the Egyptian rites of Isis and Osiris. The archetypal text that set the standard and formula for many of the initiatory societies was the Egyptian Book of the Dead, a magical text that on the surface presumes to counsel the recently deceased on how to navigate the obstacles and challenges of the afterlife in the timeless moments of the death coma. In doing so, the Book of the Dead also reveals the magical formula for the graduated process of self-induced consciousness expansion—the formula of initiation by degree.
Speculation about what actually went on during the ancient initiation ceremonies fills the pages of many occult books (some good, some laughably bad). Oddly enough, the process of speculation in and of itself is a vicarious initiatory experience, for in order to even contemplate the dynamics of an initiation, one has to put oneself in the place of both the candidate and the initiator.
To its credit, AMORC’s little correspondence-course ceremonies of self-initiation were artfully crafted and presented in such a way that if the candidate was sincere and open to the moment, a degree of true initiation could take place. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I can tell you without evasion, equivocation, or reservation that on that Thursday evening in 1971, I was profoundly sincere and open to the moment.
I allowed the printed words on the pages of that monograph to transport me to my own inner temple of initiation. There I met my magical self for the first time. There I pledged with every fiber of my being to discover the powers of my own soul and to use those powers to attain enlightenment and spiritual liberation for the benefit of myself and every monad of existence. I was ready for that moment. All I needed was a little shove—a little help and encouragement from those few words. The monograph may have given me the shove, but the initiation itself was entirely my own—a homemade initiation.
In the forty some years since that quiet evening, I’ve been the candidate in many initiation ceremonies. Some of them have required the dramatic and magical talents of many officers and have taken place in historic and richly adorned temples of gold and marble. Others have taken place in modest lodge rooms with only a handful of officers. Some have taken place under the stars or in converted garages and residential living rooms. In several of my initiations, the presiding officer was visibly intoxicated and the assisting officers ineptly read their lines from scripts they were seeing for the first time. No matter what the circumstances, I considered the experiences true initiations.
You’re probably wondering, how on earth can someone consider a ceremony conducted by a drunken “master” assisted by untrained and incompetent officers to be a true and spiritual initiation?
My answer is simple. It is because all true initiations are self-initiations. No matter how simple or elaborate the ceremony, and no matter how skilled or competent the officers, the initiation itself takes place in the temple of your own soul. Your “application” is your sincerity, and your “initiation fee” is your desire and ability to be open to the moment.
My little AMORC monograph initiation was a real initiation. It couldn’t have been more real, more effective, or more magical if I had been lying in the sarcophagus of the King’s Chamber in the Great Pyramid of Giza and the presiding officers had been Lao Tzu, Buddha, Pythagoras, S. L. MacGregor Mathers, Aleister Crowley, Mark Twain, and the Dalai Lama.
All the initiation ceremonies I have subsequently passed through in my life have simply been amendments, “booster shots” to that first homemade initiation in my bedroom temple on that Thursday night so long ago.
So how about you? Are you feeling sincere and open to the moment? Have you reached a season in your life when all you need is a little shove to push you into the deep end of the pool of homemade magick? If your answer is yes, then you have just applied to and been accepted by the hidden hierophants of the Ancient and Mystical Order of Homemade Magicians (A.A.M.O.O.H.M.).
You may now open your initiation monograph.
10. Aleister Crowley, The Holy Books of Thelema, Liber LXI vel Causae (York Beach, ME: Samuel Weiser, 1983), p. xxxvii.