You must realise clearly that the aim of the work is to train for initiation, not to convert the world.
—lord erksine, channeled by dion fortune, dion fortune & the inner light
Instead of spaceships, we have our minds. In futility, we assumed it was outer space that we have been called to traverse into uncharted territory, but it is actually inner space that is our true destiny to explore.
It was on Day of the Dead 2013 that one particular psychonaut crossed the threshold of my front door and into my living room with strange eyes that were full of conspicuous mystery. Adorned in an overly large trench coat that reached down to his ankles, he waddled in with a stack of worn books tucked under one arm. His white-gray disheveled hair, a goatee braided into beads, and his prickly eyebrows all formed the same sort of otherworldly demonic look as Max von Sydow playing Ming the Merciless in the horrendously campy 1980 Flash Gordon film. Physically, his stature was tiny, but his ambience radiated huge throughout the room.
My wife, Autumn, and I had invited him over to speak to a group gathered for a Día de los Muertos event, as we have a great interest in South and Central American ceremonial practices and were excited to delve deeper into the ceremonial aspects of the culture. He was a noted local expert in all things esoterica and had agreed to “pull something together” for us.
But John Nichols had other ideas.
With a warlock grin—the kind that made you feel like you were caught up in some grand cosmic joke that only he knew you were a part of—he sat down cross-legged, avoiding the head of the room, and immediately informed us all that this would be less of a presentation and more of an informal discussion. At that time, I eyed the tattered spines of the tomes he placed on the floor in front him: the Yoga Spandakarika, The Sea Priestess by Dion Fortune, and The Forgotten Mage by C. R. F. Seymour. What do any of these texts have to do with Day of the Dead? I thought.
And then, he began: “The thing about Day of the Dead, or just this time of year in general, is that it seems to be a period of time in which the veil separating this world from the unseen world is thinnest …”
And that was the last mention of Día de los Muertos for the rest of the evening. The conversation breathed its own life from there, from discussing other dimensions of existence to the expansion of consciousness, from shamanic techniques of ecstasy to something called the Tree of Life.
I had known about the Qabalah Tree of Life for years. Because it is a vital component to a robust career in the magical arts, I understood its importance but somehow always likened it to the quantum physics of mysticism. At some level, I knew, I needed to acquire my so-called mystical “undergrad” and “graduate” degrees first before taking on “PhD”-level territory. I had mentioned this at some point during the conversation that night, feeling like I wasn’t ready yet to take on the Tree of Life.
As a response, John pulled out his well-read copy of the Yoga Spandakarika, one of the most important Tantric texts in Kashmiri Shaivism, translated by Kalu Rinpoche–disciple Daniel Odier. John and his partner teach Tantra, a highly misunderstood discipline that is less about sex and more about the fulfillment of sensory experience, around the world. Spandakarika translates from Sanskrit to “Song of the Sacred Tremor,” the “sacred tremor” being the infinite fluctuation of creation and death, which the tenets of Qabalah identify with.
“Check this out.” John eyed me with a court-jester glance. “Odier is talking about meditation, and the fellas who stay quiet all day and deprive themselves of experience, to gain some sort of enlightenment … and how great that is, and everything, but that Tantra, resonating with the sacred tremor … well, let me just read it: ‘In general, this is what happens: we have this presence to inner feeling, then we come to a situation where there is a great variety of stimulations, and we get lost in order to taste what is outside.’ 1 Wow.” He closed the book, a shiver of elation jolting through his body like he’d been overcome with some invisible ecstasy. He looked back up with wide, determined eyes. “You see, incarnating in this life … I see it like a massive buffet splayed out before us—‘a great variety of stimulations’—and it’s our duty to try a little bit of this, a little bit of that, not to deprive ourselves, but to ‘get lost in order to taste what is outside.’ The inner world grows through the experience of the outer, and vice versa. They augment each other. There’s nothing you need to prepare for, because life itself is the preparation, the experience to gain the knowledge you need.”
Hours later, John and the crowd left. Autumn and I looked at each other with an earnest expectation. We knew there would be no going back from here.
We were going to execute an initiatory pathworking into the Qabalah Tree of Life.
After five months of intensive study and preparation, we gathered a cadre of like-minded folks to join in on the pathworking together. Historically, these rites were always done in groups, from the mystery schools of old to the secret societies of the modern age. The Lodge of People, run from our home temple, was a hodge-podge of bright individuals from a variety of spiritual disciplines but with one common goal in mind: exploring the Tree of Life together as a sacred community.
On the evening of March 20, the spring equinox of 2014, the Lodge candidates all gathered together to launch the Great Work, a collective pathworking into the Qabalah Tree of Life. From the outset, we dubbed our endeavor “the Mystic Path.”
Initially, almost tongue-in-cheek, we likened our venture to that of the television show Star Trek: explorers going where no human has gone before. In some respects, we had no idea how true this sentiment would be as the weeks, months, and then years rolled by. However, the interesting thing about this Work is that others have gone to these places before. This is what makes the Tree of Life function as a vital spiritual architecture: it is powered by those who have previously worked it throughout history, but it is up to us to take that knowledge and move it forward, to explore further and deeper into the unknown based upon what has come before.
As with any voyage of discovery, there are times of both rapture and despair. Regardless of the difficulties, Autumn and I knew that this information would have to be communicated out to the world. Even though there have been countless texts written through the ages about Qabalah and the Tree of Life, it has been said that a good Qabalist takes what they have been taught and makes it simpler for the coming generations. After completing a full initiatory pathworking of the Tree of Life, we indeed now consider ourselves justifiable Qabalists.
Lineage
“We need to get away from this crap,” John told me once. “Lineages and fraternities—we no longer need that shit to be legitimate.” In a way, he is absolutely right. However, I am reminded of a quote from one of John’s (as well as my and Autumn’s) own inspirations in Qabalah, the great mystic Dion Fortune. She once wrote,
One of the chief advantages of initiation into a fraternity having a long line of tradition behind it lies in the fact that many souls will have entered into their freedom through its discipline and be working on the Inner Planes, and into their comradeship the newly-initiated brother enters. He is therefore in a very different position from the psychic who ventures on to the astral by means of his own unaided psychism. The latter is like a person who comes to live in a great city without any letters of introduction; it will be a long time before he gets to know anyone, and those with whom he scrapes casual acquaintance will not be among the best of its citizens.2
I take this to include some sort of a shamanic or esoteric lineage as well, not just a fraternal order. Let’s then consider living a sacred life in the modern world. The sacred life (in other words, spirituality) contains two epistemological ingredients that, ideally, should reinforce each other: mythology, which denotes our connection to something Other than the Self, to the unknown, the Unseen; and geosophy, which denotes our connection to the land around us, its history, and its agrarian impact.
The problem we have in Western culture, specifically America, is that we are displaced due to colonialization. The majority of Americans have no geosophical connection to the land, and what mythological connection we may (or, likely, may not) have with our ancestry has been watered down through the industrious expediency of the modern age.
The predicament of North Americans is that this land we are on has been co-opted from an ancestral lineage that is not our own. America is a melting pot of immigration: a member of every culture on the planet can be found within its borders. And as the generations evolve, very few can trace their ancestral lineage to the land they live on.
As Dion stated, an ancestral lineage has power and is vital to maintaining a strong connection to both the inner and outer landscapes, tapping into their mythological souls. The methodology outlined in this book is based upon much of the training my wife and I had received from the lineages that we have adopted (or have been adopted by) as our sacred path of living. We feel it is important to honor and recognize the teachers and their wisdom before us, not only to recognize the unique blend this particular breed of Qabalah has provided for us, but to trace a family tree of power for future initiates to be able to draw upon in their own individual pathworkings.
The Western Mystery Tradition (WMT) is a broad set of esoteric disciplines rooted in magical and mystical practices. Distinguishable from Eastern mysticism, many of the WMT branches claim to be derived from the Greek and Egyptian mystery schools, embodied in the enigmatic teachings of Thoth-Hermes, Hermes Trismegistus, the “Thrice-Great.” Although there really is no definable origin or pedigree of doctrine, the nineteenth century saw a rising interest in spiritualism and theosophy, which gave birth to a renewed interest in the various tributaries of WMT knowledge. From alchemy to Gnosticism to Masonry, the WMT template encompasses a variety of mystical cultivations that can normally be found on the fringes of an institutionalized religion, rather than being the primary infrastructure or face of the religion itself.
Dion Fortune is the cardinal influence on the tenets of our process. Born Violet Mary Firth in 1890, she later changed her name to a variation of her family motto Deo, non Fortuna (God, not Fortune) as a commitment to her spiritual work. There can be no doubt that Dion Fortune, with the exception of S. L. MacGregor Mathers and Aleister Crowley, was perhaps the most influential occultist of the early twentieth century. She was a prolific author with an entire library of works, and The Mystical Qabalah could arguably be her greatest contribution to WMT scholarship, as well as her fiction novels, such as The Sea Priestess, Moon Magic, and The Winged Bull. Much of the material in this book is acquired from her vein of the WMT, as her independent break from the secrecy of the fraternal magical orders of her time brought clarity to the legacy of mystery school teachings.
Other primary influences which Dion’s career propagated that inspired many of the teachings in this book are her peers and students C. R. F Seymour, W. E. Butler, Israel Regardie, and Gareth Knight, as well as Dolores Ashcroft-Nowicki, the director of studies at the Servants of Light mystery school. Dolores’s pathworking meditations in her two books The Shining Paths and Inner Landscapes were the driving fuel of our pathworking initiation with the Tree of Life. I could not recommend these books any more highly as a guide to initiation. Along with Gareth Knight’s A Practical Guide to Qabalistic Symbolism, there really is no need for anyone to ever be replicating this knowledge to the outer world. However futile the effort, I still make the attempt, based upon their exceptional leadership, to keep communicating the Great Work to future generations in the hopes that a new audience is reached.
The Pachakuti Mesa Tradition (PMT) is a shamanic lineage that is Peruvian in foundation, though cross-cultural in implementation. Autumn and I are both sanctioned teachers within this lineage, so it is undeniable that many of the teachings of our Qabalistic process would be in alignment with our shamanic roots. Brought to the Western world by Kamasqa curandero don Oscar Miro-Quesada and originally taught to us by don Daniel Baxley, the PMT was developed to enact a transformative medicine into the world as tasked by don Oscar’s teachers, don Celso Rojas Palomino and don Benito Corihuaman Vargas. Over the years, the PMT has seeded multiple communities across the globe into a new type of lineage that has transcended borders, race, gender, religion, and all the other divisions in humanity. Historically, the PMT is an amalgamation between two Peruvian traditions of don Oscar’s teachers.
The Paqokuna lineage comes from the Quechua peoples of the Andes Mountains. The Quechua claim to be the direct descendants of the Incas and lead peaceful lives at one with their environment as farmers, llama herders, and so on. Paqokuna (paqos) of this particular shamanic lineage are healer-priests who execute their craft by making pagos (offerings) to the apus (mountain lords), which they consider an integral influence of their everyday existence. Indeed, the practice of ayni (sacred reciprocity) is the lifeblood of the people, maintaining a relationship with the beings of nature required for their survival. The paqos are also skillful at healing sickness, just like the healers of the curanderismo lineage.
Curanderismo of the northern coastal region of Peru is a practice that mixes ancient folk healing with ceremonial practices based upon Catholic iconography. The practice—other than the utilization of an altar called a mesa (explained later)—revolves around the usage of a sacrament called San Pedro, a mescaline-infused tea which produces visions and healing capabilities. Many curanderos (curers) are expert herbalists and often spend their time combating sorcery and misfortune in others.
Lineage is important not so much as to justify a system of knowledge but to understand its framework. However, in truth, wisdom needs no lineage.
Going Forward
After my initiation into treading the paths of the Tree of Life, utilizing my foundations of shamanic training, I uncovered a strong connection between the two. After years of training, notes, journals, and blog posts, the information was compiled into the volume you now hold in your hands. The goal of this book is to provide an introduction into the initiatory mysteries of Hermetic Qabalah, correlated with the philosophy of shamanic practice. It is my assertion that shamanism and Qabalah go hand in hand, as they are both methods for facilitating direct relationship with the unseen powers of the universe.
I have organized this book into three parts. Part I, “The Great Work,” lays out the philosophy, aim, and makeup of what exactly this thing called “initiation” is and why it matters. Part II, “Shamanic Qabalah,” details the definitions and meanings of both Qabalah and shamanism and dives into the particular methods of interacting with each school of thought. Finally, part III, “Simulacrum,” takes one through various paths of the Tree of Life as a practical initiatory tool for use by the modern reader. It has been my experience that coming across viable information on all +the paths of the Tree of Life all in one volume is difficult. I hope to provide all the information a practitioner needs to get started working with the Tree of Life in one volume, albeit in a shamanic way of creating sacred trust with the natural world.
1. Daniel Odier, trans., Yoga Spandakarika: The Sacred Texts at the Origins of Tantra (Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions International, 2005), 67.
2. Dion Fortune, The Training & Work of an Initiate (San Francisco, CA: Weiser Books, 2000), 76.
Part I
