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Underground > Temple >

In Praise of the Golden Dawn

  
  

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trouser the trouserian
09:12 / 23.07.04
The Golden Dawn still looms large in the mindset of contemporary magicians. Rather than dismissing the order and its methods as "outdated", shouldn't we rather honour the Golden Dawn as innovators and to a large extent, the founders of modern magic?

The membership list of the order in its heyday reads like a "who's who" of the late Victorian glitterati: Moina Mathers (Henri Bergson's sister and an early exponent of Collage) William Peck (Astronomer Royal of Scotland), Gerald Kelly (later president of the Royal Society), multi-talented actress & diva Florence Farr, Annie Horniman (founder of the Gaiety Theatre), W.B. Yeats, Algernon Blackwood, Papus, Bram Stoker, Sax Rohmer, Arthur Machen, Irish revolutionary Maude Gonne, Constance Wilde (wife of the divine Oscar), A.E. Waite, Pamela "Pixie" Smith (who painted the so-called Rider-Waite Tarot), Dion Fortune (albeit briefly) and British Museum curator & Eygptologist Wallis Budge. And Crowley, Mathers, Westcott & Woodman of course. Aubrey Beardsley is 'rumoured' to have been a member, although this is unsubstantiated as far as I know (but he was certainly friendly with Yeats & Farr).

The G.D. was one of the first organisations to admit women on an equal basis to men, and Moina Mathers, Florence Farr & Annie Horniman were prominent members. Annie Horniman effectively bankrolled the order, and Florence Farr wrote a great deal of the order's material. She became the Praemonstratrix of the outer order in 1892.

The G.D. tends to get portrayed as a predominantly qabalistic order, but it's great achievement was to draw together the disparate strands of Western Hermeticism - Qabalah, Alchemy, Enochian, Tarot, Astrology, scrying, Greco-Roman & Eygptian romantic magic etc. - into a unified whole.

thoughts?
 
 
illmatic
09:56 / 23.07.04
Well, I'm always up for honouring the ancestors. I agree with you completely in terms of acheivements of members of the GD - I can't imagine one of today's magickal orders having anything like that starstudded cast! It raises interesting questions about the role of the magickal order and it's social standing. When you look at the GD like this, they almost seem like a version of the Masons for the bohemian and arty members of Victorain high society, whereas often today magickal orders sometimes seem like an intellectualised spin off of youth culture.

I also agree with you about the question of their (or was it Mathers?) "grand synthesis". Would be intrigued to know how many GD members beyond Mathers contributed to this.

Perhaps some grounds for critquing the GD would be in terms of their actual teachings and practical instruction (as collected by Regardie). I must admit I've never read the complete Teachings of the GD closely but what I have read, I found often too verbose and unwieldy for my tastes. Is it possible we miss the signiicance of the Order because of a distaste for this kind of material?
(
 
 
Joetheneophyte
10:21 / 23.07.04
Undoubtedly there have been few comparable concentrations of intellectual power gathered together over the last thousand years. The Founding Fathers of the US might have boasted similar brain power when they got together .....or the Royal Astronomical Society of Newton's day......definately a special grouping of peple, which must add power and validity to their findings and work.

I recently bought a book called Enochian for Beginners (I have always avoided Enochian Magick as it is a little too left brained and complex for me and basically, it frightens the heck out of me)


Donald Tyson wrote the book and in it, he is critical of the Golden Dawn's take on Enochian......accsing them of missing half the picture. I am not qualified to offer an opinion but I also read with interest (sorry somewhere on the net recently) that the Golden Dawn were too heavily influenced by Qabalah and Judaic thought.

The accusation was that contemporary Western Magick is dominated by Crowley and the G D and as such, we are limited to a Judeo-centric understanding of Magick

For me, if it works it works but I have had doubts about calling on YHVH as the God of the Old Testament is not somebody I particularly want to be associated with. Over on some of the Gnostic message boards, YahWeh is considered a Demiurge and from the descriptions in the Old Testament, not without good cause

The Golden Dawn from my very very limited knowledge seem to utilise a lot of Judaic thought and practive and I wonder what other peoples thoughts are about this aspect of the question

There s no doubting the impact of the GD on modern magick....in fact for the past 50-100 years
 
 
trouser the trouserian
12:12 / 23.07.04
Would be intrigued to know how many GD members beyond Mathers contributed to this.

That's a good question, Illmatic. The contributions of Mathers & Westcott for example, are well-known. Others less so, as occult biographers have tended to concentrate on the 'big names'. Christina Oakley was saying last night (stupendous lecture on "Women of the Golden Dawn") that thus far, no one has really done any comprehensive work (apart from Mary Greer's book "Women of the Golden Dawn") on the contributions of Annie Horniman, Moina Mathers or Florence Farr, for example.
Moina is credited with being largely responsible for creating the Vaults of the Adepti and devising the Colour Scales. She also did a lot of Enochian work with both her husband and with Yeats.
Florence Farr wrote several of the "Flying Rolls", some commentaries on Alchemical texts, a treatise called Egyptian Magic, a book on Enochian magic (still available, I think!) and she formed an inner order group called "the Sphere" which specialised in skrying. She also wrote a book called Music of Speech about the relationship between poetic rhythm and speech which probably influnced her approach to ritual. She also co-wrote the Evocation of the Spirit Tapthartharath with Allan Bennett. Christina said that she is reputed to have told George Bernard Shaw that she couldn't spend all her time rehearsing for the plays he'd written for her as "she had magical rituals to perform - and a young man [Yeats] to see to!"

Maude Gonne and Yeats worked together to promote the Celtic mysteries within the order. Annie Horniman is mostly known for providing a great deal of financial assistance to both the order and Mathers. She was a graduate of the Slade art school (where she first met Moina) and, given that she apparently had a flair for costume design, it's possible that she was involved in designing G.D. regalia and furnishings.
Allan Bennett is thought to have been largely responsible for collating the raw data for the G.D.'s system of correspondences - eventually published by Crowley as Liber 777.
 
 
_Boboss
13:44 / 23.07.04
you seem to know a bit about this ab grav, perhaps you can help with this minor annoying thing that's been in my head:

any connection whatsoever as far as you know between the GD and james joyce? aside from his lit-scene connections to yeats i'm fairly sure he was never a member but he did spend a few months in london where it's quite conceivable he might have attended a meeting or two. there's plenty of gd-esque imagery in joyce's prose and verse, but again this could just be yeats. i seem to remember a rather bold and unreferenced asssertion on some dodgy website that joyce was definitely a member. i find this notion doubtful, but bewitchingly fun. do you know anything that might clarify?

[there's an aside in wilson's masks of the illuminati where fictional-joyce is said to have met up with the gd at some point and, as you might expect, decided they're a bunch of loons. though an invented occurence, this doesn't seem too far from what might have happened if any such meeting had actually taken place]
 
 
trouser the trouserian
14:20 / 23.07.04
As far as I'm aware, James Joyce was not a member of the Golden Dawn (unless someone knows different). He did attend the première of Yeat's 1899 play, "The Countess Cathleen" (which starred Florence Farr, btw) but was by all accounts rather dismissive of Yeat's interest in folklore and mysticism.
 
 
gale
15:39 / 23.07.04
There's one passage in Ulysses that made me think Joyce had GD connections. I have to look it up, but it jumped out at me when I read it.

Then again, considering what he did with words, maybe it was just a coincidence.
 
 
SteppersFan
14:25 / 26.07.04
This your much-vaunted commitment to dialectical materialism coming through Abs?

On the one hand, the GD was very obviously an elitist, frequently whimsical, and sometimes shallow group that brought to turn of the century establishment culture a dash of bourgeois individualism. Its membership was comprised principally (if not completely) of monied upper middle classes and aristocrats who were using "magic/k" and art as a sort of long-term finishing school... an idle pursuit, by the idle classes.

On the other, the GD was in historical terms a key melting point and practice ground for the development of modern magic/k and an iconic institution in terms of the development of conceptual models of liberation. It undoubtedly set the format -- one which is tenacious due its efficact -- for 20th and 21st century magic.

Take your pick.

For me the key issue w.r.t. the GD is, was it a "magickal group"? I doubt it was in the sense that 99% of modern magickal groups regard themselves. Primarily Christian in orientation. I;m not anti-Xtian per se, but Xtians within the GD were uncomfortable with a lot of both the magickal operations and the magickal themes in their devotions.

Just a thought...
 
 
trouser the trouserian
14:35 / 26.07.04
And an interesting thought 2stepfan (though I've got an icepick here with your name on it ). Care to identify these "Christians" in the G.D. you're talking about?
 
 
Boy in a Suitcase
16:32 / 26.07.04
They had the roster, they had the style, they had the class. Who's been there before or since?

As Crowley and Dion Fortune discovered and have written about, the Golden Dawn existed for the same reason that any visible occult order exists for--as the OTO(s), TOPY, the IOT and others did after the fall of the G.'.D.'.--as basic skill training, but mainly as rehearsal and play-acting of the "real" initiations which occur later in the magician's life. (See Crowley in "The Temple of Solomon the King", Fortune in, I think, "Esoteric Orders and their Work") BUT the Golden Dawn did it in style and impressed the "sigil," if you like, of the initiation rituals deep into each aspirant's mind.

As far as the Golden Dawn methods--this stuff forms the underlaying material for everything that came afterward, as need not be repeated. So why not go back to the primary source and study that directly? My problem with things like Grant Morrison's recent interview and the general discourse of chaos magick--which says by rote "You don't need all that old bullshit to do magick"--is this is often (not always) said from the perspective of ignorance about that material, and those who don't go back to it inevitably end up working off of 17th-generation rehashes and "simplifications" of that same material, with which I include people like Peter Carroll, or off somebody else's contrived mythology (Grant's, Spare's, TOPY's) in which case one is venturing into personality cultism or just plain cultism. Anti-intellectualism should have no place in magick but does because of people's false interpretations of what "turning off your mind" really is/involves and, often more than a little bit of anti-semitism.

So--do the research before breaking the rules, don't reinvent the wheel, and respect yo elders.
 
 
Skeleton Camera
19:04 / 26.07.04
BiaS warrants an amen too, for the last sentences particularly. And this seques into HeadShop territory, but I'll keep it brief. Modernism <---> Postmodernism, a swinging pendulum. PoMo's goals are so noble (reexamining and elevating the oppressed and marginalized, preventing tyranny via structure) that it can be anathema to "re"acknowledge the actual achievements of earlier folks.
But that doesn't make PoMo any more of a solution, let alone any more of a balance.
 
 
Unconditional Love
06:40 / 27.07.04
i have recently been using golden dawn based workings as given by regardie with surprising success, for an often termed dead system it works remarkably well, much better and more vital in fact than many other systems i have tried to use. with regard to yhvh i had reservations at first but quickly overcame them by working with the system and also broadening my conception of god by working with the system and why is this oh so common gnostic belief of the demiurge etc raised so high on a platform within certain areas of the magical community, its a metaphysical story of the seperation of the ego not a literalist interpretation of real events, well imo.
 
 
SteppersFan
09:46 / 27.07.04
(Sound)Bwoy in Suitcase: I assure you there was plenty of magick in TOPY that was nowt to do with a cult of personality.

Abs: I'm sure my perspectives on the nature of the GD were nicked from stuff you said in the past! On the GD and Christianity:

The individual who supplied the set of initiation rituals that were translated by Westcott and Mathers to form the basic hierarchy, ceremonies and teachings of the GD was Adolphus Woodward, a Christian clergyman.

AE Waite was a committed Christian. So was WA Ayton, a clergyman who doubted the wisdom of operative magic. Both were instrumental in setting up the schismatic Isis Urania Temple, which confined itself to Christian mysticism.

There was a great deal of Christian imagery in the rituals. The inner Rosy Cross order's full title was the Rose of Ruby and the Cross of Gold, and its central symbol was a cross that was largely Christian in meaning. The Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram was soaked in Christian imagery. And so on and so forth.

As Hutton puts it, "Was the Golden Dawn a pagan organisation? The question must be answered firmly in the negative, but only in the sense that it was not a religious society at all, but a magical one".
 
 
SteppersFan
09:50 / 29.07.04
Oh, and TOPY wasn't a magickal group.
 
 
trouser the trouserian
10:58 / 29.07.04
2stepfan
Okay, point taken. It isn't surprising, really, that many G.D. members were Christians, or that the G.D. largely was based on Christian symbolism, given the dominance of Christianity in Victorian England.

Actually, your post brings up something I was going to get around to with respect to the G.D. - that one of its "legacies" to contemporary occultism is its syncretic approach to gods & goddesses. Syncretism is usually defined in terms of attempts to combine or unify elements of different religious systems. In the case of the Golden Dawn, it was the combination of Egyptian deities with Hebrew divine names, or the correspondence between Osiris and Tiphareth. Of course, syncretism didn't begin with the G.D. (there are numerous examples in history and pre-G.D. Hermeticism was itself highly syncretic) but it did receive a massive boost in the 19th century (due to the emerging interest in comparative religion/mythology by scholars such as James Fraser, Max Muller & H.H. Wilson).

One of the features of Victorian approaches to religion which I find fascinating is the way in which "mythology" was utilised in a way that privileged Christianity. Victorian "comparative religion" made a distinction between Christianity [as rational & historical] and the religions of other cultures (particularly those being colonised) as "mythological" [i.e. inferior]. I'm not saying that this was necessarily the dominant view in the G.D., just that it was a very popular idea floating around in that era.
 
 
Boy in a Suitcase
13:25 / 01.08.04
This is definitely the strain in Golden Dawn thought that reached its apex with the Aurum Solis and Dion Fortune--and also with Crowley, if one digs a bit; Thelema has often been commented on as really a cheeky form of esoteric Christianity, which I think is a fairly apt description (very apparent in the Equinox and especially the work of JFC Fuller).

When people get into magick, their preconceptions have already been formed by the dirty word itself; their idea of what it is has already been shaped by the media and their inherited/learned ideas of what the "sacred" or "unexplained shit happening in your life" are. But magick--the kind of magick you can study in books, the western esoteric trad stuff that is directly called "magic" and taken as a subject of study--is something else entirely (various shells of meaning constructed upon the Dee/Kelly Enochian system which forms its core), a subject that should really just be named something else to avoid the obfuscation. And if one wants to study a field one knows nothing about, one needs to go to the primary sources, not rehashes.

Now this has nothing to do with the "magic" that is what is usually meant by the use of the word today--usually a mixture of intuition and inspiration derived from the pop cultural arena along with some minor knowledge of esoteric symbol sets--which may be more valid than Enochian-derived esotericism--but let's keep terms straight and keep "fake it till you make it" out of an area of academic/esoteric study in which there is little room for interpretation--in which there ARE single answers to single questions.
 
 
SteppersFan
13:26 / 01.08.04
Abs, could you be a bit more precise abouyt what you mean re: the GD and syncretism? I can't tell what's special about its syncretism from what you're written and I don't know GD material well enough to figure it out for myself. Can we compare the GD with other groups of the same period or earlier and identify significantly greater syncretism?

AFAICT, the GD got its "open-mindedness" (if not formal syncretism) from Theosophy, cos it didn't insist on members having any particular religion. Its training system covered Herbrew, Greek, Eyptian, mediaeval and early modern magic while its rituals blended these, so I guess the GD might have been different cos others (uh -- who? Eliphas Levi?) might have kept these systems seperate. Though you could argue that forerunners such as Agrippa might be considered to have created a syncretism of Graeco-Roman magic and Christianity. Undoubtedly it's true that Mathers exercised his syncretism enthusiastically by appropriating the latest research (such as his use of texts excavated from Egyptian and Graeco-Roman ruins) and blending at will elements of Masonry, Rosicrucianism, cabbala, tantra, etc. Without him, we would never have had the pick'n'mix tourism of the occult which has enabled generations of shallow, un-informed un-initiates to commodify worlwide magical cultural capital, and for that we should of course be grateful. Or something.

You're quite right to point to 19th century Christianity's vigourous exposition of the Empire's various religions as a means of illuminating the superiority of western culture and religion. Much like Protestant scholars' determined quest to demonstrate the historical validity of Biblical Christianity, this process backfired spectacularly, and is perhaps overdone: I'm quite interested in Christian magic.
 
 
Skeleton Camera
13:41 / 01.08.04
I'm quite interested in Christian magic.

As am I, for many reasons. I have no Christian background at all and it seems a fascinating and complex spirituality - at its core. Reaching that core is part of the interest as well. Pop/media culture seems to use and abuse Christianity so much I want to find out what the 'meat' of it is.
 
 
SteppersFan
13:41 / 01.08.04
Boy in a suitcase:
But magick--the kind of magick you can study in books, the western esoteric trad stuff that is directly called "magic" and taken as a subject of study--is something else entirely (various shells of meaning constructed upon the Dee/Kelly Enochian system which forms its core), a subject that should really just be named something else to avoid the obfuscation. And if one wants to study a field one knows nothing about, one needs to go to the primary sources, not rehashes.

Your assertion that there is a definitive magick and everything else is to paraphrase you just "rehashes" doesn't hold water for me. To use an example within the current discussion, Mathers might not quite have been making it up as he went along, but he wasn't sticking to some canonical set of texts, he was mixing / versioning a variety of forms while also originating new material. As did Crowley, Levi, Agrippa... Your proposition that there is a single current of "true" esotericism which is worthy of academic study and which is based on Enochian-derived esotericism trivialises the heterogeneity, confusion and disconnectedness of the very current which you posit as yeilding single answers to single questions.

It ain't working for me bruv. Far as I can tell, these boys were forced to play fast and loose with the (much more limited than what we have now) materials available to them. Nothing here now but the recordings.
 
 
Boy in a Suitcase
03:56 / 03.08.04
You're missing my point here--I'm speaking only about the western esoteric trad and that should be apparent. I'm not saying there's only one definitive magick--I'm saying that there is one strain of thought that is technically called "magic"--the Western esoteric trad. One can clearly describe vodoun, tantra, shamanism, witchcraft, etc etc etc as magic if one is an English speaker in the late 20th century as this word has become the banket term for esoteric religion with a "results" angle, but technically when one says "magic" or "magick" one is talking about the WET. And Enochian has formed the core of that tradition since its reception--I am not saying that Enochian is the only thing that matters or that the creative contributions of Crowley, Mathers etc weren't just as valid--far from it--just that when we say "magick" we are indeed talking about Enochian-derived esotericism; this is the backbone of a stream of thought and largely defines it, and that backbone should not be glossed over and ignored in favor of the systems that have developed around it. I am not calling Enochian "the truth", I am calling it a "primary source." Straight?
 
 
---
04:15 / 03.08.04
Where does the magick of Solomon come into this then? I thought that was also part of the core when it comes to Western magick. Is Enochian more high magick, and if so why is this?
 
 
LVX23
05:22 / 03.08.04
Enochian. The Goetia (Solomon). Elemental Magick. Planetary Magick (Aurum Solis). The Hermetic Rosy Cross. The Great Work.

This is pretty much the core of western esoterica. Add a dash of kabbalah and egyptian mythology for flavor.
 
 
trouser the trouserian
07:38 / 03.08.04
Abs, could you be a bit more precise abouyt what you mean re: the GD and syncretism? I can't tell what's special about its syncretism from what you're written and I don't know GD material well enough to figure it out for myself. Can we compare the GD with other groups of the same period or earlier and identify significantly greater syncretism?

2stepfan
Sorry, I kind of lost the plot a bit with that post - but I thought it was worth making a point about Syncretism in general. Of course the G.D. was influenced by other groups - notably The Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor - a magical fraternity which predated it, which drew heavily on both Egyptian & Rosicrucian symbolism in its theory & ritual practices. And, bearing in mind that the The Victorians had a passionate interest in Egypt (the British 'colonised' Egypt in 1882), and that Egypt has long been considered to be the cradle of the Western Esoteric Tradition, it's hardly surprising that the G.D. focused on Egypt as one of the geographic 'sources' of its magic.

boy
...technically when one says "magic" or "magick" one is talking about the WET. And Enochian has formed the core of that tradition since its reception.

Interesting point. The 16th century seems to have been another 'hot zone' in occult history - Dee/Kelly allegedly start 'receiving' the Enochian alphabet in 1582. Cornelius Agrippa published his De occulta philosophia in what, 1531? and Guillaume Postel translates the Zohar and Sefer Yetzirah into Latin.
 
 
illmatic
09:05 / 03.08.04
Can someone answer this one for me - how does the "primacy" that BiaS is asserting of Enochian in the WET square with other influences, noticeably Qabala? What I mean is in most of the WET stuff I've read has had more of a noticeable qabalistic slant than Enochian - Dion Fortune, Crowley, Grant, Regardie etc. What I'm asking is does qabalistic thought have primacy over Enochian in the WET in that a) qabalistic traditons are older (though I'm not sure how long they've been part of the Western trad, as opposed to Judaism) and b) qabalah is more "visible" than Enochian in the materials mentioned (is this possible because it's easier?). If not, why not?

I think I already know the answer to this but I want to see someone qualify it.
 
 
---
12:57 / 03.08.04
One more question here for anyone who might know :

How much importance can be placed on the Corpus Hermeticum, and is this one of the central parts of the WET?

I always thought that this was one of the most important parts, one of the spearheads of the renaissance, twinned with the work that Mirandola and Ficino took up after one of the two got the work translated into Latin for the first time.
 
 
Boy in a Suitcase
00:40 / 04.08.04
My take on this is that Enochian and Qabalah are both maps of the same territory (they are directly related to eachother on a (slightly rickety) one-to-one basis in the commentary to "The Vision & The Voice") but that Enochian is the high-octane method of actual results, actual ascent. Interesting point about when Qabala entered the WET--anybody know? Not sure if Fortune used Enochian, but at least with the Thelemic lineage, Qabalah is a preparatory system and becomes a language for fact-checking results gained through Enochian magic.
 
 
illmatic
07:17 / 04.08.04
Interesting point about when Qabala entered the WET--anybody know?

There's some material about this in Francis Yates's books - which you really should read BiaS - The Occult Philosphy in the Elizabethian Age has some related material in the early chapters, which I can't remember! Will look it up when I get home.
 
 
---
08:12 / 04.08.04
My take on this is that Enochian and Qabalah are both maps of the same territory (they are directly related to eachother on a (slightly rickety) one-to-one basis in the commentary to "The Vision & The Voice") but that Enochian is the high-octane method of actual results, actual ascent.

I think i understand what your saying with this, but if the Kabbalah is supposed to be a glyph of the whole of reality, (and i'm not favouring the Kabbalah here, just wondering about this) then surely that too can be a high-octane method of actual results, and actual ascent?

Because if the Kabbalah contains everything, then in theory any possible type of work can be undertaken using it. I've read a bit in some threads about the Kabbalah being something that can be used to retreat into fantasy worlds without resorting to real practical work, but that must fall down at some level and Enochian Magick should correspond to a sphere on the tree, with the Angels that communicated with Dee and Kelly also having their corresponding sphere on the tree where they originated from.

I don't want to derail the thread with this type of thing but i remember sitting in the library reading a Kabbalistic book by Mathers that looked pretty esoteric some time ago so i'm assuming that he also placed a lot of significance on this, and that Enochian Magick is kind of like what High Kabbalistic Magic is but stress is placed on being careful with it because there isn't any type of beginning stages for the neophyte like there is with the Kabbalah, you are already supposed to be pretty adept at magick before you go near it.

I'm only adding this because i have the opinion that a Kabbalist that has only used the Kabbalah, with a lifetime of experience, who knows exactly how to use it, can get actual results and actual ascent working with the higher spheres just as much as someone using Enochian could. Not because i think more of the Kabbalah, but because if it contains everything, then surely you can do anything with it. Also that when i've used it in the past, it's been something that i've been able to draw a lot of power from and that if I or anyone had a lifetime of experience with it, real ascent and real results would be expected and achieved every time it was used.

I did have the Golden Dawn workbook or handbook a few years ago (pretty huge brown book) and thinking back now i do rememeber Enochian being one of the main parts of the book, but the Kabbalah was also in there and a it looked like a big influence on what i read. Was there some type of balance between the two, and also was Enochian possibly the main part of the higher type of magick simply because of the buzz that Dee and Kelly had created in Engalnd at the time? Not saying it wasn't as good, but just that it was more popular to use then, Dee and Kelly being a lot more legendary then than they are now so Enochian was favoured and seen as a more focused way of communication with the higher planes.
 
 
illmatic
08:38 / 04.08.04
Rob/Banana - I am not delibrately trying to flame you but could you please curb your comments a little if you don't know what your talking about. I mean

was Enochian possibly the main part of the higher type of magick simply because of the buzz that Dee and Kelly had created in Engalnd at the time? Not saying it wasn't as good but just that it was more popular to use then, Dee and Kelly being a lot more legendary then than they are now - mate, Dee and Kelly's experiments took place a time when it was dangerous to be a bloody Catholic let alone directly trafficking with angels. So there was no "buzz" in England about their experiments at the time, they've largely been reconstructed from Dee's diaries (I stand to be corrected by Dee scholars).

Look, if you want to ask a question about a subject which you don't know anything about, at least do us all a favour and keep your posts short.
 
 
illmatic
08:54 / 04.08.04
Also Kabbalah - because it a "glyph" of Creation does not mean it "contains everything". The keyword there is "glyph" ie symbols ie not the thing it is describing.
 
 
---
09:56 / 04.08.04
So there was no "buzz" in England about their experiments at the time, they've largely been reconstructed from Dee's diaries (I stand to be corrected by Dee scholars).

Yes i got this wrong, i meant a buzz in the occult fraternity, not the general public, my bad there.

Also Kabbalah - because it a "glyph" of Creation does not mean it "contains everything". The keyword there is "glyph" ie symbols ie not the thing it is describing.

I have to disagree here, because i think that anything and everything can be accessed using it. It just depends on what sphere you work with. I think this applies to other systems of course, not just the Kabbalah. I see it as something that can be used as a correspondance symbol that anything can be placed upon, and then worked upon. Maybe i'm wrong.
 
 
illmatic
10:03 / 04.08.04
Fair enough. I dunno what the relationship is between angels and the Tree actually. Anyone care to enlighten me? How are the links between the different angels and the qabalistic spheres expressed?
 
 
illmatic
10:11 / 04.08.04
Another point - I've wondered previously if the power puported to Enochian comes because one moves from the abstracts of the Tree to a more personal relationship directly with specific "intelligences" - this is purely speculative but I was thinking of the relaions a Voodoun priest might build with the loa, through offerings of alchol, drumming and prayer etc. Maybe simialr relations are expressed through the Enochian angels only through a different "language" - that of elemental symbolism, the Enochian alphabet and so on. Any thoughts?
 
 
---
10:20 / 04.08.04
I've wondered previously if the power puported to Enochian comes because one moves from the abstracts of the Tree to a more personal relationship directly with specific "intelligences"

This is exactly what i was thinking when i thought that it could of been a more focused method of communication with the higher planes, it was maybe seen as something that goes from abstract to specific, a type of magick that needed a higher level of skill to carry out, and something that was saved for the intitiates of the higher degrees.
 
 
Unconditional Love
15:07 / 04.08.04
has anybody investigated the saabian influence within kabbalah?
 
  

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