The Mystical Qabalah - Dion Fortune 2000

Conclusion

1. Having ended my study of that portion of the Holy Qabalah which is concerned with the Ten Sephiroth upon the Tree of Life, I can find no other words to say than: “The little done, the undone vast.”

2. This book will, I hope, be followed by other books. The Twenty-two Paths form a system of mystical psychology, being concerned with the relationship between the soul of man and the universe. As the Ten Sephiroth, being concerned with the Macrocosm, are the key to illumination, so are the Twenty-two Paths, being concerned with the relationship between Macrocosm and Microcosm, the key to divination; and divination, taken in its true sense, is spiritual diagnosis, a very different matter to fortune-telling.

3. The Spheres of the gods upon the Tree is also a matter of profound interest and immediate practical application, for they give the key to the rites that were performed as a means, and a very effectual means, of contacting and equilibrating those different forces that are personalised under the names of the gods.

4. All these things, however, require detailed knowledge, and that can only be got together gradually. It is more than one pen can do unaided, and I should welcome the correspondence of those who are interested in these subjects, not as research into antiquity, but as living forces that come home to men’s business and bosoms.

5. All that remains to us of ceremonial in the West is in the hands of the Church, the Masons, and the producers of cabaret. All three are effectual after their kind: the Church evoking love of God; Masonry evoking love of man; and cabaret evoking love of women.

6. Viewed as a means of invoking the spirit of God, ceremonial is pure superstition; but viewed as a means of evoking the spirit of man, it is pure psychology, and that is how I view it. It is a lost art in the West, but an art that is well worth reviving.

7. In these pages I have given the philosophical basis on which this art rests. Its practical application depends not only upon technical knowledge; but upon the development of certain powers in the mind by careful and prolonged training, of which the first is the power of concentration, and the second the power of visual imagination. It is concerning the power of the visual imagination that we are so lamentably ignorant in the West. Coue just missed the turning when he sought in prolonged attention a substitute for spontaneous emotion.