The Mystical Qabalah - Dion Fortune 2000

The Gods Upon The Tree

1. All students of comparative religion and its poor relation, folk-lore, are agreed that primitive man, observing and beginning to analyse the natural phenomena surrounding him, attributed them to the agency of beings akin to himself in nature and type, but transcending him in power. As he could not see them, he not unnaturally called them invisible; and as he could not see his own mind during life, or his friend’s soul after death, he concluded that the beings that produced natural phenomena were of the same nature as the invisible but active mind and soul.

2. Now all this sounds very crude as it is put by the anthropologists, but that is only because when translating savage ideas they choose words that have crude associations. For instance, the standard translation of one of the chief scriptures of China refers to the venerable philosopher Lao Tse as “the Old Boy.” This sounds comical to European ears, yet it is not so far removed from the words of another Scripture which has been fortunate enough to receive translation at the hands of those who reverenced it—“Except ye become as a little child.” I am not a sinologue, but I incline to the opinion that the translation “Eternal Child” would have been equally accurate and in better taste.

3. There is a saying in the Mysteries, “See that ye blaspheme not the Name by which another knoweth his God. For if ye do this in Allah, ye will do it in Adonai.”

4. And after all, was primitive man so very far off the mark when he attributed the causation of natural phenomena to activities of the same nature as the thought-processes of the human mind, but upon a higher arc? Is not that the Point towards which both physics and metaphysics are gradually converging? Supposing we were to recast the statement of the savage philosopher and say, The essential nature of man is similar in type to that of his Creator, would we be held to have said anything either blasphemous or ridiculous?

5. We may personalise natural forces in terms of human consciousness; or we may abstract human consciousness in terms of natural forces; both are legitimate proceedings in occult metaphysics, and the process yields some very interesting clues and some very important practical applications. We must not, however, make the mistake of the ignorant, and say A is B when we mean A is of the same nature as B. But equally we may legitimately avail ourselves of the Hermetic axiom, “As above, so below,” because if A and B are of the same nature, the laws governing A can be predicated concerning B. What is true of the drop is true of the ocean. Consequently, if we know anything concerning the nature of A, we may conclude that, allowing for the difference in scale, it will apply to B. This is the method of analogy used in the inductive science of the ancients, and provided it is counter-checked by observation and experiment, it can yield some very fruitful results and cut out many leagues of weary wandering in the dark.

6. The personification and deification of the natural forces was man’s first crude and shrewd attempt to evolve a monistic theory of the universe and save himself from the destructive and crippling influence of an unresolved dualism. As age by age extended his knowledge and elaborated his intellectual processes, he read more and more significance into the first simple classifications. Nevertheless, he did not discard his original classifications, because they were fundamentally sound and represented actualities. He simply elaborated and extended them, and finally, when he fell on evil times, overlaid them with superstition.

7. We should not, therefore, regard the pagan pantheons as so many aberrations of the human mind; nor should we try to understand them from the viewpoint of the uninstructed and uninitiated; we should try to find out what they must have meant to the highly intelligent and cultured high-priests of the cults in their heyday. Compare Mme. David-Neel and W. B. Seabrook on the subject of heathen rites with the reports of the average missionary. Seabrook shows us the spiritual significance of voodoo, and Mme. David-Neel shows us the metaphysical aspect of Thibetan magic. These things appear in one way to the sympathetic observer who wins the confidence of the exponents of these systems and succeeds in being received into their holy of holies as a friend, and who goes to learn instead of merely to observe and ridicule, and in another way to the “beef-fed zealot” who walks into the holy place in his dirty boots and gets stoned by the indignant worshippers.

8. In judging these things let us consider the form Christianity would present if approached in the same way. Unsympathetic observers would probably conclude that we worshipped a sheep, and the Holy Ghost would yield some spectacular interpretations. Let us credit other people with using metaphors if we do not expect to be taken literally ourselves. The outer form of the ancient pagan faiths is no cruder than Christianity in backward Latin countries, where Jesus Christ is represented in topper and tails and the Virgin Mary in lace-edged pantaloons. The inner form of the ancient faiths can compare very favourably with the best of our modern metaphysicians. After all, they produced Plato and Plotinus. The human mind does not change, and what is true of ourselves is probably true of the pagans. The Lamb of God which taketh away the sins of the world is only another version of the Bull of Mithra which does the same thing, the only difference being that the ancient initiate was literally “washed in blood” and the modern one takes it metaphorically. Autres temps aures mours.

9. If we approach those whom we elect to call pagans, both ancient and modern, in a reverent and sympathetic spirit, knowing that Allah and Brahma and Amen-Ra are but other names for that which we worship as God, we shall learn a very great deal that was forgotten in Europe when the Gnosis was stamped out and its literature destroyed.

10. We shall find, however, that the pagan faiths present their teaching in a form that is not readily assimilable by the European mind, and that if we are to arrive at its significance we must restate it in our own terms. We must correlate the metaphysical concept with the pagan symbol; then we shall be able to apply to the former the vast mass of mystical experience which generations of contemplatives and experimental psychologists have organised about the latter. And when we speak of experimental psychologists, we must not make the mistake of thinking that they are an exclusively modern product, because the priests of the ancient Mysteries, with their temple sleep and deliberately induced hypnogogic visions, were nothing more nor less than experimental psychologists, though their art has been lost, like many other of the ancient arts, and is only being laboriously recovered piecemeal in the more advanced circles of scientific thought.

11. The method used by the modern initiate for interpreting the language spoken by the ancient myths is a very simple and effectual one. He finds in the Qabalistic Tree of Life a link between the highly stylistic pagan systems and his own more rational methods; the Jew, Asiatic by blood and monotheistic by religion, has a foot in both worlds. Upon the Tree of Life with its Ten Holy Sephiroth the modern occultist bases both a metaphysic and a magic. He uses a philosophical conception of the Tree to interpret what it represents to his conscious mind, and he uses a magical and ceremonial application of its symbolism to link it up with his subconscious mind. The initiate, consequently, makes the best of both worlds, ancient and modern; for the modern world is all surface consciousness, and has forgotten and repressed the subconsciousness, to its own great hurt; and the ancient world was mainly subconsciousness, consciousness having been but recently evolved. When the two are linked up and brought into polarised function they yield superconsciousness, which is the goal of the initiate.

12. Holding the foregoing conceptions in mind, let us now try to coordinate the ancient pantheons with the Spheres upon the Tree of Life. There are ten such Spheres, the Ten Holy Sephiroth, and between these we must distribute, according to type, the different gods and goddesses of whatever pantheon we wish to study; we are then in a position to interpret their significance in the light of what we already know concerning the principles represented by the Tree, and to add to our knowledge of the Tree all that is available concerning the significance of the ancient deities.

13. This is, obviously, of great intellectual value—but there is another value which does not so readily appear to the average man who has had no experience of Mystery workings; the performance of a ceremonial rite symbolically representing the working of the force personified as a god, has a very marked and even drastic effect on the subconscious mind of any person who is at all susceptible to psychic influences. The ancients had brought these rites to a very high pitch of perfection, and when we moderns are trying to reconstruct the lost art of practical magic we can go to them with great profit. The whole philosophy of European magic is based upon the Tree, and no one can hope to understand it or use it intelligently who has not been trained in the Qabalistic methods. It is this lack of training which makes popular occultism so very apt to degenerate into the crudest superstition. “Your number in your name” becomes a different thing when we understand the mathematical Qabalah; fortunes in tea-cups are another matter when we understand the significance of the Magical Images and the method of their formulation and interpretation as a psychological device for penetrating the veil of the unconscious.

14. Broadly speaking, then, we sort out the gods and goddesses of all the pagan pantheons into the ten pigeon-holes of the Ten Holy Sephiroth, relying chiefly upon their astrological associations to guide us, because astrology is the one universal language, for all people see the same Planets. Space is referred to Kether, the Zodiac to Chokmah, the seven planets to the next seven Sephiroth, and Earth to Malkuth, Consequently, any god who has an analogy with Saturn will be referred to Binah, as will any goddess who might be termed the primordial mother, the Superior Eve, as distinguished from the Inferior Eve, the Bride of Microprosopos, Malkuth. The Supernal Triangle of Kether, Chokmah, and Binah always refers to the Old Gods, which every pantheon recognises as the predecessors of those forms of Godhead worshipped by the current faith. Thus Rhea and Kronos would be referred to Binah and Chokmah, and Jupiter to Chesed. All the corn goddesses refer to Malkuth, and all the lunar goddesses to Yesod. The war gods and destructive gods, or divine devils, refer to Geburah, and the goddesses of love to Netzach. The initiator gods of wisdom are referred to Hod, and the sacrificed gods and redeemers to Tiphareth. So great an authority as Richard Payne Knight in his valuable book, The Symbolic Language of Ancient Art and Mythology, speaks of “the remarkable concurrence of the allegories, symbols, and titles of ancient mythology in favour of the mystic system of emanations.” With this clue we sort out the pantheons, thus enabling ourselves to compare like with like and make the one illuminate the other.

15. In the system he gives in his book of correspondences, 777, Crowley assigns the gods to the Paths as well as to the Sephiroth. This, in my opinion, is a mistake and leads to confusion. It is the Sephiroth alone that represent natural forces; the Paths are states of consciousness. The Sephiroth are objective and the Paths are subjective. It is for this reason that in the working glyph of the Tree used by initiates the Sephiroth are always represented in one Colour Scale and the Paths in another. Those who possess this glyph will know to what I refer.

16. The Paths themselves, in my opinion, should be regarded as under the direct presidency of the Holy Names governing their Sephirothic attributions only, and should not be confused with other pantheons; for although we may go to other systems for intellectual enlightenment, we are unwise to attempt to mix the methods of practical working and unfoldment of consciousness.

17. For instance, the Seventeenth Path, between Tiphareth and Binah, is assigned by the Sepher Yetzirah to the Element of Air. We are far wiser to work it with the rite of the Element of Air and the Holy Names assigned thereto, and to approach it through the appropriate Tattva, rather than confuse the issue with the associations of the assorted collection of deities, Castor and Pollux, Janus, Apollo, Merti, and other incompatibles assigned to it by Crowley, whose correspondences present an inextricable tangle of associations.

18. The Sephiroth should be interpreted macrocosmically, and the Paths microcosmically; thus we shall find the clue to the Tree in both man and nature.