En Esto Creo

In Much Wisdom Is Much Grief

On what the Tree of Life gives, and what it takes away "For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow." Ecclesiastes 1:18 A moment comes to everyone who walks this path long enough, and nobody warns you about it beforehand. You are reading, the Zohar , say, or Dion Fortune's Mystical Qabalah , or the dog-eared copy of Crowley's 777 that has followed you through three apartments, and something clicks. A pattern rises out of the chaos of symbols and numbers, and for a split second the universe makes perfect, terrible sense, and then you wish it did not, though by then it is too late to choose. The Tree first became real to me on a Tuesday afternoon in late summer. It stopped being an abstract diagram and became a map of reality I could see operating everywhere, the Sephiroth no longer pretty circles with Hebrew names but living forces, currents of divine energy running through everything around me, through me, and through th...

The Tree of Life

Ten spheres, thirty-two paths, the Qabalistic Cross and the Lord's Prayer The longer one stays with Kabbalistic thought, the more one pattern keeps surfacing: the universe as a web of relationships among its parts, with the Tree of Life as the map that web produces. A medieval Hebrew manuscript and a modern Western esoteric manual draw the same figure, ten spheres arranged on three pillars and joined by paths, and both use it to describe the same thing across centuries of commentary and practice. Where the Tree came from is disputed. Some writers find its forerunners in Egyptian, Mesopotamian or Gnostic systems, though the evidence for any direct descent is thin. The doctrine of the ten sefirot as divine powers first appears in the Sefer ha-Bahir , which surfaced among the Jewish mystics of Provence in the late twelfth century, and Kabbalah spread from there through Spain and the wider Jewish world. The diagram itself came later still. The familiar drawing, with its circles, pilla...

The Key That Was Taken

Jesus, the Kabbalah of Entering, and the Orchard of Pardes Luke records a sentence that many readers pass over on the way to something else. Jesus is at table in a Pharisee's house (Luke 11:37), speaking to the nomikoi , the lawyers whose trade was the interpretation of Torah, and the King James Version gives his words this way: "Woe unto you, lawyers! for ye have taken away the key of knowledge: ye entered not in yourselves, and them that were entering in ye hindered" (Luke 11:52). The verse usually gets filed as a rebuke, one more entry in the long ledger of Jesus quarrelling with religious authorities, and the reader moves on to the next pericope without much thought. The accusation, though, is oddly concrete. He charges the lawyers with removing an object, a key, and with failing to perform an action, entering, and the Greek presses the second charge by using the same verb, eiserchomai , twice inside one clause, once for what the lawyers refused to do and once for...

The Scholar and the Seer

Could Rizal and Blavatsky Have Met? I. Two Lodgers in London In the summer of 1888 two of the more remarkable minds of the century were living a few miles apart in London. One was José Rizal, the twenty-seven-year-old Filipino physician, novelist, and reformer, whose Noli Me Tángere had been published in Berlin the year before and had made him a marked man in the eyes of the Spanish friars. The other was Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, fifty-seven, Russian-born, the co-founder of the Theosophical Society, who was finishing the book she regarded as her life's work. No record shows that they ever met, and the question this essay asks is whether they could have, and what the asking teaches. Rizal arrived in London in late May 1888 and took lodgings with the Beckett family at 37 Chalcot Crescent, a curving terrace of houses at the foot of Primrose Hill. He had come with a single purpose. Spanish accounts of the Philippines before the conquest described its people as barbarians whom S...

The Secret Doctrine of the Spiritual Division

Immortality, the Divine Master, and the long-lived ones "Ako ang nag-tago sa walay pagtago, ug ako ang nagtug-an sa walay pagtug-an. Ang akong guitaguan guitug-an, guitug-an ug akong guisulti ang akong guitug-an, managkauban pa sila." Gen. Adriano dela Concepcion, Main Office, San Jose, Dinagat, December 9, 1970 Anyone who reads through the messages of the early leaders of the PBMA notices something within the first few pages: the older the message, the more teaching is packed into it. Those early texts carry an urgency that later documents often lose, as though the speakers knew the audience in front of them would not always be there to hear. Working through the preserved materials recently, I came upon a piece of doctrine that deserves careful examination, because it lies close to the center of what the Spiritual Division claimed to be. Lolo Adriano's Message of 1978 The message that opened the question came from General Adriano dela Concepcion, known in the organizatio...

Agur and the Son of Man

The Son of Man, the Banner of Reuben, and the Royal Arch Agur: "Who hath ascended up into heaven, or descended? who hath gathered the wind in his fists? who hath bound the waters in a garment? who hath established all the ends of the earth?" (Proverbs 30:4) Jesus: "And no man hath ascended up to heaven, but he that came down from heaven, even the Son of man which is in heaven." (John 3:13) Agur: "What is his name, and what is his son's name, if thou canst tell?" (Proverbs 30:4) Gabriel Cornelius Ritter von Max "Veraikon" or Veil of Veronica, was a piece of cloth, that Saint Veronica used to wipe off sweat from Christ's face during Calvary. The exchange above never happened, of course. Agur son of Jakeh, an obscure sage whose sayings were appended to the book of Proverbs, asked his riddle centuries before the Fourth Gospel was written, and the evangelist gives no sign of having it in mind. Set side by side, though, the two texts form a q...

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The God Who Descends and the Savior Who Ends History

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