Probably why the Norse work was advised

Here I quote the next segment wholesale, for that is the best approach:

There are a number of ways to approach this idea, and a number of mistakes which are often made concerning it. Perhaps the most common of the latter is the notion that these “levels,” “planes,” or “worlds”–all three terms are used in different sources–are actually separate realms of existence, like the “other dimensions” of fantasy fiction. This is true only in the most metaphoric of senses; it’s more useful, instead, to think of them as different modes of consciousness, different ways of seeing and symbolizing the same hidden Reality.

In the Cabala, each of these ways of looking at the world is defined by one of the ten fundamental categories of being. We can begin to explore these categories by thinking about the idea of Reality itself, starting from the most basic concepts possible. Since these concepts are symbols, of course, they cannot reach the Existence beyond all symbolism; since they are symbols, on the other hand, they provide the foundation of the entire symbolic structure of the Cabala.

The first of these concepts is the idea of existence itself, and the first thing we can say about Reality is, simply, that it is.

The second concept is the idea of action. Reality seems to include the possibility of change and motion, and so we can apply another idea to Reality: it acts. The third concept is closely related to this; Reality also seems to include the possibility of an absence of motion, and so we can also say, it rests. The concepts of action and rest, however, cannot both apply at once; to include them them both in our concept of Reality implies alternation, which is the root of the idea of Time.

So far, each of these concepts has dealt with Reality as a unity; we have had no need to postulate anything else. To go on, though, we’ll have to move in this direction. In the context created by the first three ideas, action takes the form of distinct actions in time, and each new action extends the total range of action within Reality. This idea of increase or extension gives us another thing we can say of Reality: it extends. In the same way, we can speak of rests rather than of rest in the abstract, and each of these rests can be seen as the end or limit of an action; we can thus say, it limits. To speak of distinct actions and rests, though, is to suggest that the first of our concepts can be applied to them as well; once we have granted them existence, in turn, other concepts follow, and we end up with many things rather than one, each existing, acting, resting, extending, limiting. We can put this in two ways: from the point of view of the one, it divides; from the point of view of the many, these are.

Once there is more than one thing in Reality, though, the possible range of concepts we can use goes up sharply. Any of the things which exist may contact others, and so we can say, these unite; once entered into contact, they may leave this state, and so we can say, these separate; these various unions and separations create a context that shapes and is shaped by the effects of all the other concepts, a context in which each thing that exists takes part; we can therefore say, these participate.

Finally, all these considerations apply to every action and rest, every union and division, and every participation of each existing thing. All these also exist, and take part in the full range of categories; their actions, rests, and so forth do the same; and this process continues out to infinity, creating an image of Reality made up of uncountably many things, all interacting in different ways–an image that seems very like the universe we experience in our everyday state of consciousness. This image represents the complete manifestation of the potentials contained in the original idea of being; we can thus say, last of all, it manifests.

These ten categories–existence, action, rest, extension, limitation, multiplicity, union, separation, participation, and manifestation–form, from the perspective of the Cabala, the basic structures of human thought, and thus of the universe we are capable of perceiving. More, these are the grains of sand at the center of the pearls of the tradition; around each of them, layer by layer, has arisen one of the ten great symbolic patterns which make up the heart of the Cabalistic system: the Tree of Life.

* * *

It is said that every person who works with the Cabala inveterately builds their own Cabala. This is not usually able to be seen, but the magic is, indeed, very distinctive to those who have done a bit of it.

Paths of Wisdom is John Michael Greer’s Cabala. It was taken from many other teachers, most notably Israel Regardie and Dion Fortune, but there is no doubt that JMG did investigate numerous sources in his frenzied drive to WORK at magic.

His energy world does exactly that.

However, the other great Cabalas with which I am familiar do different things — some with raunch — some with the purest celibacy — and some at such great power that it will, in fact, bring such serious physiological side effects that it should be approached with extreme caution.

And this is magnified by THE GAME.

We used to have candles rise up a quarter of an inch in lodge type magic. The signs were very slight.

Now the candles flare up six inches! Not uncommon in African Traditional Religion which is investigating/being investigated by our work.

I don’t like it. I don’t like signs. I can hear PAIMON reminding me of the words of Christ that ring out in my ears, A wicked and adulterous generation seeketh after a sign!

These Cabalas all have to have some kind of engine to power their magic, for it is a magic and it does work. The Jewish set has its entire religion, the daily prayers, study of the Torah (Tanakh), weekly temple service, observance of Shabbat, the Tzedakah box, the sacred round of the holidays, and the ancestors, imprecated in Aramaic YIDDISH. The Golden Dawn lodge world has the magic of the lodge, the monthly–and often weekly–classes, rites, initiations, inner circle magical work, as well as the daily ritual, candles, incense, chanting, meditation, and workings of the members that generate energy, not to mention the rose recumbent, the sexual magic that binds the participation of the Angels of Enoch. Going into a neighboring country, Thelema was designed with similar gizmos for The New Aeon — as well as THE GAME — and seems able to mesh more seamlessly into the modern world, while retaining its fundamental roots in Tradition.

This volume, Paths of Wisdom, was quickly followed by another, Circles of Power, a functional manual for a solitary magician that laid out a rubric for a daily grind of ritual work that did, in effect, enable a wizard to POWER this Cabala, and this Cabala to form the intellectual and ethical groundwork for a serious worker in the Renaissance art magic, including the grimoires, a fact not fully grasped by myself at the outset.

KABOOM!

The grimoires are the most dangerous and rewarding aspect of our work. THE GAME was already coming in, and with it, a telekinetic lucid dreaming universe that had always been a possibility of the grimoires. This was no doubt known to John Michael Greer, and he perhaps designed part of this magic, in part, to accommodate that possibility. However, what Chic and Sandra Tabatha Cicero call “astral tourism” was greatly discouraged, for we do not wish to open the doors to our inner worlds to any but the most ardent and serious seekers. It is for this reason that the work of the Golden Dawn Cabala contains a great deal of rote memorization, repetitive action, and not so fast there with the drugs and sex.

I respect the professional magic that makes the workplace better, yet it is not appropriate for your regular colleagues, family members, cute people you date, or random others to jump harem scarem into THE DREAM WORLD OF THE RENAISSANCE that can cause all kinds of unintended consequences, not the least of which that everyone gets sucked into a bunch of whatever we are up to in the magic, and they may not comprehend what is perfectly normal for us or cause odd interpretations of the images to be.

* * *

Now, let’s review the quote at the start of the epic journey. What a gorgeous summation of the MACHINE of the Cabala and how it can be conceptualized in ways that place the human mind in control of it all. It is very easy to allow G-d, the Angels, the Secret Chiefs, and whatnot to call the shots and to construct a mental structure that either runs off the rail or does not conceptualize what the Cabala as a whole can do, and that is, create the inner world.

Here I am, nearly thirty years after having encountered this volume hot off the press, reviewing that paragraph and exclaiming, I don’t actually remember this gem, and I spent fifteen years on this Cabala.

The Jewish Kabbalah is so different as to constitute a different thought process, yet the religion/culture of Judaism has within it such power and rote repetitiveness that it is possible for an ordinary person to debate how many Angels can dance on the head of a pin and thereby go into vast Angelic realms. This is no longer possible for Christians, and early enough in the tradition the power tribes set down some limits for their work. It is very clear that for one of us Rosicrucians to learn the Hebrew language, we have to sit at the feet of the Rabbis themselves, not just a book. I call it “the vowels,” and find my level of Hebrew hooted in the underworld as E-I-E-I-O. The Rosicrucians work the consonants only, and have a very limited working capacity in the form of the word concepts and the holy Names, that are used principally anthropomorphically as the names of Angels and other spirits, as well as the tiny bit of gematria — numerology — that yet scries. So much of the flow of the Kosher Kabbalah in terms of its giant machine is lost to us, and we have to rely on the more minute segments and integrate a lot of other ancient cultural furniture to get the job done. Hence, the Goetia and not just the trappings of Yahweh.

And ours is a very powerful Cabala.

THE KINGS, also called the Malakim, can be conceptualized as the Angels of Tiphareth, and are connected to the Middle Pillar at the heart center, where this magic also imprecates Christ and works to open the heart center through the use of the Russian Orthodox practice of hesychasm.

Go find out what Elegua wants.

The theurgic ritual engine focuses on the Ten Holy and Divine Names and a basic rubric of creation, destruction, and redemption. Each of these has a specific character development capacity mostly, and as we progress through the Cabala, starting from the bottom and working our way up, we work with the Angels who require us to get our lives together and help us to expand our talents in the various values that they represent. It takes a long time to square ourselves away with each Sephirah, and then move on to the next, and is such an intense transformation that we often cannot see the forest for the trees.

Here we are in a situation wherein the classic Golden Dawn has a profoundly different energy structure, hence the rationale for this elegant system. As a lodge magic, the Golden Dawn can form groups that can frequently extend up to twenty-five active members, often then splitting, either geographically or in terms of the leadership wanting a different flavor of the magic. I returned to Seattle ten years ago and looked up my old lodge; today that very group, including new members, encompasses four or five lodges. My how things change.

The lodge magic of the Golden Dawn is a structure that has levels or Grades. These grades are not strictly Cabalistic, and the Angels of the Cabala with their magic machine do not rule in every situation or capacity or in every technique. From the magical standpoint, it is a hodgepodge that can often be influenced by the group or one in which other value systems take preeminence in a particular question. The Cabala is part of the Grades, but not all of it, and it often gets juggled in with the rest of the magical techniques. That is part of what this author addresses, and it is worth having the through line of the Cabala — and worth enshrining The Mystical Qabalah as a central magical experience.

At this point, the new magic that I irreverently call THE GAME is causing its normal people to enter the lodges with an astral structure already in place, usually from the workplace, school, sometimes family, hobby group, and often church, such that the Golden Dawn is having to play by new rules, and I am kind of at odds with that. I want it to play by the rules of the Golden Dawn, while I haven’t played by those rules in years! So there.

What this magic does is to make the Cabala and its angels a distinct and coherent structure of its own, that likes to govern or be profoundly capable of stepping in to make it work out for their lovely wizarding. I call this magic “a witchcraft of Angels,” and it is a beautiful magic that likes to be.

At the same time, it is so vertical that it causes one to become weird, and it is a solitary business, that causes one to be a hermit, whereas in this era, everyone is doing magic and you have to get involved in different kinds of cliques. So there is the inveterate search for other subroutines that will enable this to function more effectively. It becomes syncretized, and that is not popular down at the lodges who are newly able to SKRY into everyone’s magical business and want their magic to be THE ONE. We used to just tiptoe around and do stuff and no one was the wiser.

The real reason we have to take the Goetic spirits or daemons quite seriously as constantly working with us is that these gorgeous magical cathedrals do not have the capacity for quick and easy adaptation, and that is called for in life. The spirits are mercurial by nature and have the energy structure to go into many worlds and make many adjustments. So they are REAL.

After JMG expanded and evolved into Druidry — for what interesting person wants to be stuck in doing the same stuff when they want to grow and explore and do better stuff? — I stayed with this, as did a lot of people, for it was a great love. Over the years, I have poked my head in to that other work, and have found a lot of its core values and practices seeping in via the egregore. Here we are with a lot of fermented vegetables, second-hand clothes, yogurt from local milk, co-op and farmer’s market shopping routines, homemade sourdough bread, and, what the Writer himself does best, interesting ideas about the human condition vis-a-vis magical issues, and, while some cry out, CAN WE WATCH SOME TELEVISION PLEASE? this magic trends toward the reading and writing of books and the pursuit of fine arts and sciences.

It is a great path for a low-ranking intellectual, but not one that readily accommodates easy categorization via tax bracket, academic credential, or the labels on one’s clothes. I am not living in a slum, nor am I in the lap of luxury, but in some middle ground once well-known to polite society, and that is, the local arts, where, yes, our objects come from the second-hand store but they are lovely, useful, and, frankly, cherished. What’s not to like about a bottle of two-buck Chuck over a freshly prepared meal? It is a wonderful evening that we have, not an overweening necromancy of power objects.

The fearsome eerie of primal things

The opening STANZA of this entire procedure enables one to comprehend the SOLAR NATURE OF this total structure of the Hermetic Cabala, and, for that reason, could be reviewed periodically to remind the worker of the grand scheme.

GLOSSARY

JMG himself told me in a letter in about the year 2000 that he had done Renaissance magic and I did comprehend this to include the grimoires as well as astrology. Christopher Warnock’s work would be a good resource here, while the preeminent adjunct to this magic would be Mark Stavish’s Institute of Hermetic Studies, but let us not fail to mention The Book of Oberon, smartly edited by Joseph Peterson and intended for perusal, not the coffee stains of summoning, whereas JMG whistles so loudly in the direction of the Heptameron that I can hardly ignore the Latin version, also available in the oeuvre of Mr. Peterson, not to mention the Bard himself, in The Tempest and Midsummer Night’s Dream. The Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica, the O.T.O.’s ecclesiastical wing, could refer the work to its visionary saint of the Cabala, Doctor Robert Fludd, a.k.a. Robertus de Fluctibus, while the scientifically inclined could study the GHOST IN THE MACHINE of its saint Francis Bacon. For my purposes, being female and in the Golden Dawn, while often seen in the precincts of the Church, both regular and off-label, the necklaces of our rectory can be an essential accessory, not just a Goth parade.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hesychasm