The Mystical Qabalah (Paths to Inner Power S.)

by Dion Fortune

This ancient mystical tradition of the Hebrews possessed three literatures: the Books of the Law and the Prophets, which are known to us as the Old Testament; the Talmud, or collection of learned commentaries thereon; and the Qabalah, or mystical interpretation thereof.

It is a strange thing that Christian exegesis has never sought the keys to the Old Testament in the Qabalah.

It is well known to mystics that if a man meditates upon a symbol around which certain ideas have been associated by past meditation, he will obtain access to those ideas, even if the glyph has never been elucidated to him by those who have received the oral tradition "by mouth to ear."

Church availed to drive all rivals from the field and destroy their traces.

For those who are able to live in Eastern conditions and work under the immediate supervision of a guru, this may prove satisfactory, but it seldom gives good results when the various systems are pursued with no other guide than a book and under unmodified Western conditions. 19. It is for this reason that I would recommend to the white races the traditional Western system, which is admirably adapted to their psychic constitution.

The Thirty-two Mystical Paths of the Concealed Glory are ways of life, and those who want to unravel their secrets must tread them. As I myself was trained, so can anyone be trained who is willing to undergo the discipline, and I will gladly indicate the way to any earnest seeker.

If we intend to take our occult studies seriously and make of them anything more than desultory light reading, we must choose our system and carry it out faithfully until we arrive, if not at its ultimate goal, at any rate at definite practical results and a permanent enhancement of consciousness.

After this has been achieved we may, not without advantage, experiment with the methods that have been developed upon other Paths, and build up an eclectic technique and philosophy therefrom; but the student who sets out to be an eclectic before he has made himself an expert will never be anything more than a dabbler.

Experience proves with unfailing regularity that the methods of psychic development which are effectual and satisfactory for the recluse produce neurotic conditions and breakdowns in the person who pursues them while compelled to endure the strain of modern life.

By thinking about a thing, we build concepts of it. 11. It is said that thought grew out of language, not language out of thought. What words are to thought, symbols are to intuition.

Each symbol, moreover, admits of interpretation upon the different planes, and through its astrological associations can be related to the gods of any pantheon, thus opening up vast new fields of implication in which the mind ranges endlessly, symbol leading on to symbol in an unbroken chain of associations; symbol confirming symbol as the many-branching threads gather themselves together into a synthetic glyph once more, and each symbol capable of interpretation in terms of whatever plane the mind may be functioning upon.

The symbol of the Tree is to the Universal

In other words, if the universe is the conscious end-product of the mental activity of the Logos, the Tree is the symbolic representation of the raw material of the Divine consciousness and of the processes whereby the universe came into being.

Thus do we see in the Tree a glyph of the soul of man and the universe, and in the legends associated with it the history of the evolution of the soul and the Way of Initiation.

Aleister Crowley,

The essence of the Unwritten Qabalab lies in the knowledge of the order in which certain sets of symbols are arranged upon the Tree of Life.

connected by lines which are called the Thirty-two Paths of the Sepher Yetzirah, or Divine Emanations

In the Atziluthic World

In the Briatic World

In the Yetziratic World

The Assiatic World

It will be seen from the foregoing that each Sephirah will therefore consist, firstly, of its Mundane Chakra; secondly, of an angelic host of beings, Devas or Archons, Principalities or Powers, according to the terminology used; thirdly, an Arch-angelic Consciousness, or Throne; and fourthly, a special aspect of the Deity. God as He is, in His entirety, being hidden behind the Negative Veils of Existence, incomprehensible to unenlightened human consciousness.

Kether is equated with the most transcendent form of God that we can conceive, Whose name is Ehieh, translated in the Authorised Version of the Bible as "I am," or, more explicitly, the Self-Existing One, Pure Being.

In working with the Tree it is wisest to keep on going over it, rather than to concentrate upon a single point until it is mastered, for one thing explains another, and it is out of the perception of the relationships between the different symbols that enlightenment arises.

"Kether is the Malkuth of the Unmanifest."

Each Sephirah (which is the singular form of the word of which Sephiroth is the plural) is a phase of evolution, and in the language of the Rabbis they are called the Ten Holy Emanations. The Paths between them are phases of subjective consciousness, the Paths or grades (Latin, gradus, step) by which the soul unfolds its realisation of the cosmos. The Sephiroth are objective; the Paths are subjective.

"The point within the circle" to express the First Becoming of manifestation, and the idea is contained in the Rabbinical term, Nequdah Rashunab, the Primal Point, a name applied to Kether.

The student will find it very helpful to refer to the chapters in The Ancient Wisdom, by Annie Besant, which deal with the phases of evolution.

Chokmah, the Second Sephirab, is called by the Rabbis Mazloth, the Sphere of the Zodiac.

Binab, the Third Sephirab.

The result is a triangular figure upon the glyph, and it is called the Triangle of the Three Supernals, or the First Trinity

separated from the rest of the Sephiroth by the Abyss, which normal human consciousness cannot cross.

The meaning of the word Kether, we have already noted, is Crown. Chokmah means Wisdom, and Binah means Understanding.

this is the invisible Sephirah, Daath, Knowledge,