Reincarnation is part of the apparatus of Hermetics, so we tend to think of ourselves as part of a line of past lives that are more or less like a strand of pearls, one right after the other, each linked by soul essence. Thus this life is important but not THAT important. It is the soul itself that matters.

This is partly true but also partly not true, and the way the idea is formed does not serve us optimally.

The Higher Self that incarnates is a corporate being that has from 200 to 300 humans in play at any given time. It is the Higher Self that reincarnates, not you the human.

Anciently the Higher Self was probably quite a bit smaller in its number in play. In many premodern tribes or clans there is a totem animal or a sense that everyone is part of one being. The Higher Self was probably, in some areas, the group soul of a clan or subset of a clan that comprised far fewer units within a very small geographical area participating in one traditional set of spiritual practices. And it was not just human souls who entered the new lives but also the souls of animals, plants, and the intermediate energy beings of the land itself. The entire conglomeration could track and work with the humans in a myriad of energy ways going back in some cases thousands of year. Thus the Higher Self could keep track of its humans and the immortalized old ones could participate in very direct and elegant ways in the new humans of the Higher Self. The ancestors also work into this, but they were, anciently, also members of one’s Deep Self. They still figure today in traditions where witchcraft is prevalent like the Latino population, though that system is disintegrating.

Shamanism is the spiritual technology of this type of system.

It is in shamanism that we should think of ourselves as an “incarnation.”

The massive expansion of human population with the advent of agriculture changed this. Gradually the Higher Self had to take on larger and larger numbers of humans and had to be stretched over large geographical areas.

The impact of this was known to ancient sorcery. The Romans knew that the only way to break a profoundly uncooperative tribe was to scoop them up out of their lands, mix them all up, and replant them in a new land where they had scooped up the people and replanted them elsewhere. Enslavement also had this effect.

The advent of large nations meant that there had to be a way of controlling people in large ways.

This meant that the Higher Self and its immortalized old ones was no longer the fundamental unit of death technology though it did enter the lives. It could not work with them or track on them very well. And the old immortals of that Higher Self could not really work with the new ones of the soul.

Thus the spiritual technology was altered away from shamanism with its focus on the continuity of the Higher Self and the old immortals in the new lives and into a situation where the new lives were not really accessible or knowable except as a pulse that withers and disintegrates for the most part in the atheistic modern era or enters a world that is homogenous over a large number of souls and is a giant mush of whatever religion. The Mega Church.

The way to immortalize in the giant system era of Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, and the other giant system religions is to work very hard in the giant system as an individual soul and to treat THE SYSTEM as the Higher Self.

I once had a revelation with St. Gertrude who told me that the Catholic underworld does not consider it very important that reincarnation is not stressed in Christianity.

It wouldn’t be, because it is not usually functionally possible to be a part of a series of incarnations in the same way as in shamanism. It is more important to be a strong former of one’s soul in a system that works, and Christianity does work.

The old demon workers knew this and did a great deal to assist the souls who were hellbent for leather on shamanism. Like me.

It behooves us to think of our lives in this era and situation as “my life” and not “my incarnation” and work like the devil to achieve a great deal of power in our death technology, or we will not immortalize.

The problem with contemporary Enochian Hermetics is that it is neither fish nor fowl, and that is where it has cost me and my comrades our lives, in some cases, and a great deal of life potential in others.

Angels have wings. This means that in magical technology, they are affiliated with the bird gods who do have energy work of birds. Birds mostly encounter humans from way up high. In the human body, it is the higher chakras and the higher outer chakras that the birds can work with. The higher chakras are associated with abstract thought, the future direction of humanity, and stereotypes. Thus the Angel/Bird Gods of the Higher Chakras figure out where you fit in broad strokes and move you there.  They do not have the capacity to deal with the deep wisdom of the past lives or the individual bent of how the soul has evolved. They also have no capacity to know a unit as small as an individual human as separate from their group of humans.

The gods of the underworld are usually imaged as serpents, who encounter humans in their lower chakras. The lower chakras possess the patterns and energy of the past lives, the ancestors, the dead in the geographical area, and the lower chakra energies of people around you. Thus the Demon/Serpent Gods of the Lower Chakras can only see you as part of a mass of past lives extending back for thousands of years and the magical work these you-beings have done in the past. They shape the energies of the past to affect the situation. It is very hard for them to to know a unit as small as an individual human as separate from their Higher Self’s past lives.

I know I have gotten whooped up on for things some Vikings did a thousand years ago!

What happens to Hermetists is that neither set of potentialities is fully operational. The empire of Golden Dawn/Thelema needs to build the empire more than it needs to make finished wizards.

We invariably get stalled out by the disjunct between these energy layers and enter a Mobius strip that lasts forever. The old gods possessed both potentialities taken as a whole, but the Egyptian gods in Hermetics have been pruned so that they do not fully bridge the gap. To bridge the gap, we need to figure out who the old gods of our own Higher Self were and work with them and all of the god situations in between so that the immortals of the Deep Self can communicate with one another.

(I was only able to do this after nearly twenty years of Hermetic Cabala, hoodoo, the Abramelin, and Solomonic magic. And even then it was a real bumpy start, I tell you.)

This pretty much almost never happens but sometimes people work syncretically as much as they can and the old ones do work together, though usually without the conscious knowledge of the living wizard.

When an occultist gets stalled, and if they are not particularly stellar, that unit enters a “chop shop” and is energetically carved up and eaten by the dark old ones. There is really not much the nice old ones can do if the occultist is incapable of functioning.

The nice ones do make arrangements for us to function nicely after death in such worlds as they have access to. I know my father arranged for me to enter his Jewish worlds after I had done so many thousands of hours of Cabala.

Other old ones had arrangements for me elsewhere. I know I am now probably bound for a Norse afterlife in many ways, having connected with that wing.

Fundamentally, if you do not function in occultism there is a sense of them giving up on you when if you had the right knowledge you would push through and do the work in the body instead of backing your students in death.

I write this as I have reconnected with the ghost of my Golden Dawn teacher who was an amazing Adept but had the regular prejudices of Regardie against the chthonic work and only did the Angel work. He is an immortal of Golden Dawn, but he lost his life early because he did the Bird God Angel work and tapped his lower chakras to fund that in extreme power and did not do the Serpent God Demon work which enables the lower chakras to evolve.

The Bird God Angels do not have the capacity to extract the wizard from the group behavior of junk food and lack of exercise. Those are energies of the lower chakras. They can assist their wizards with enormously beautiful mental work but it is the Serpent God Demons who kick can your butt down to the gym and make it stick.

I know several wonderful Enochian and other Hermetic adepts who are dying early of preventable illness for exactly this reason.

The Complete Adept will do both in some capacity and enable the full energy to evolve.

There is no reason Hermetics should be a chop shop for old ones who had complete technique. I have been written off by my Deep Self and the tradition more times than I can count. Some have written me off as a woman in man magic. It is only after exasperating failure upon failure that I am starting to make a case for myself with the old ones to really HELP instead of chart paths for the most elegant transition into the underworld and our future work from the underworld.

Though I am assured that this is being done. The Norse gods are trying to make that viable bridge between the Angel Bird Gods and Serpent Demon Gods really work for us.

Odin is of extreme assistance, given that He shapeshifted into both an eagle and a serpent, and is thus THE COMPLEAT GOD. He is willing to help anyone in Hermetics who needs Him.

(If my teacher had done the Serpent God Demon work, I would not have been so demolished and now in my extremity working with him to finish his work. Standing on the shoulders of giants, but no one knows how to do this stuff and the Golden Dawn/Thelema energy pattern wants to keep it that way. So we have to risk our lives cobbling together very different energy work and maybe someday we will collectively get it together. Shout out to Aaron Leitch whose chthonic work has been helpful but also is not absolutely complete or foolproof so there is room for more of us to work.)

The wonderful ladies in my work tell me that I am able to hear the old ones of the European Roscruciana because my Higher Self is originally from Denmark and we have so many old Europeans in us. I am certain that there are great things being done in Enochiana that I cannot hear because they are being done by the gorgeous Amerindian souls of this land who are magical geniuses in their own lands and can do anything with much less effort than it takes me. So if I am kind of tone deaf about Enochian magic, please forgive me. Enochian magic shouldn’t try to replicate the old European magic. It should learn to be itself. The Bird God Angel work I do is with the older Angelic portals that my being can form to while it forms the Enochians weirdly and in a way that I can’t stand.  Granted that the finest and most superb Enochian magicians tend to be Amerindian souls and that Enochian magic is the North American ceremonial magic. At the same time, without the wisdom of the past, it is not possible to be balanced and elegant. I think all inveterate Enochian magicians should make special studies of the First Nations cultures around them and assume that they are probably associated in the Higher Self with the peoples of the region of their birth. Offerings to those gods and goddesses would probably ratchet their magic up several notches.

I am fortunate in that my old gods are fundamentally of the same culture as the North American First Nations people and that they really get along well. If I were living in Europe, it would have been completely different, but I choose to live where my family and actual, physical ancestors are. Perhaps that is why the Solomonic spirits demanded that I summon the old gods and undertake the painful, difficult and foolhardy task of binding the Deep Self from thousands of years ago. It is a muddle of confusion and I am a toxic mess in many ways and the local powers keep running me out of town.

The souls from other lands who need to do the Serpent God Demon work should be able to get past Enochian magic. They are not just Europeans, either. Just from places where the land gods are worked in great elegance and power. That is my beef with the newly emerging empire. Let’s hope the wizards at the top of the pyramid in California will stop firing missiles at us. I have lost my physical possessions in this quest to work with the Serpent God Demons and I don’t begrudge the fawns that, but I do need us wizards to FIGURE THIS OUT.