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To be honest, I think this sort of mounting of correspondence upon correspondence, endless memorisation of obscure symbolism, valiant efforts to make sense out of and bring together other magician's disparate and often conflicting spins on this material, and admirably creative efforts at coming up with new abstract visual maps to the Tree of Life glyph - isn't necessarily the best way to get to grips with it.
I find it often seems to take you off into an entirely contrived and theoretical headspace that largely just exists on elaborate posters you've made and pinned to your wall, or secret mentalist notebooks that you keep in a drawer and bring out whenever you want to feel a bit magical. It's like there's a strong geek element to western magic, where it's some special hobby that we squirrel away and bring out whenever we want to step into a magical world for a few hours. There's something almost escapist about it, where this barrage of complex symbolism is brought in to replace and, for a few hours, perhaps obliterate the unsatisfying mundanity of your day-to-day life.
There is sometimes a sense among certain magicians that "Malkuth" is the boring stuff, that we've all had enough of, so we need to get away from that and go off and explore all of these mystical realms, eventually - if we're really clever - getting all the way up to Kether and becoming Ipsissimuses (Ipsissimi?), then we'll really have it made, eh. As great a book as it is, I think Alan Moore's 'Promethea', perhaps inadvertently, tends to re-enforce this view of western magic as a magical mystery tour. It can be that. You can tackle it like that and have experiences like that - but ultimately, I think the point of the Tree of Life is that it's about your life. The clue is in the name really.
I've found myself that the best way to understand this material is to look for it in your actual life, and constantly relate it back to nature, your emotions, the processes taking place within you and in the world. Put the books down and go for a walk in nature, try to find Netzach in the world of the senses. Observe the ebb and flow of your fantasy life, your dreams and secrets, and learn something of Yesod. Look at your patterns of aggression, dominance, and severity, and comprehend the nature of Geburah. Allow your correspondences to emerge out of this active engagement with what these symbols actually represent - because, although it's been said, many times, many ways - the map is not the territory.
Malkuth is not the boring, mundane bit of the Tree - it's the whole point of it. The culmination of the whole process. Kether and Malkuth are one pulsation. Here we are in the world. For example, if you are trying to understand, say, Crowley's tables of correspondences - and you are wondering why the Empress card of the Thoth deck has pictures of a mother Pelican and a Sparrow on it, you might want to go and observe and have direct contact with actual pelicans and sparrows to grasp those mysteries. A lot of the time people seem to think that symbolism is just about the idea of a thing, rather than the thing itself. As if Liber Resh deals exclusively with the idea of the Sun and what it means symbolically, and doesn't really relate much to the actual Sun out there in the sky right now. But Nature and Magic are one. If you can learn anything from the diagram of the Tree of Life, it is that GOD, Kether, the Mysteries of the Sephiroth, express themselves and find their perfect fruition in Malkuth, in the Kingdom, in Nature, in the World. Magic is right under our noses all of the time if we have the eyes to see it. |
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