Take a moment now to look at some nearby object: a cup, for instance. If you’re like most people, you’ve probably always assumed that what you see is what’s actually there. This assumption is so deeply ingrained in our ways of thinking that most of us never even realize it’s an assumption.

As you look at that cup, though, think about how the image you see is actually formed. First of all, light waves strike the cup; depending on the atomic structure of the cup’s surface, some of these waves are absorbed while others are reflected and scatter in all directions. Some of these reach your eyes, where they cause a set of chemical changes in your retina. These changes trigger cells in the optic nerve, which sends a pattern of electrical charges back through several different parts of the brain to the area at the upper back of your head, and there, by a process no one yet understands, the nerve messages are processed into the image of the cup that you actually see. We can only guess at the effects many of these stages have on the final image, but the one thing we can be sure of is that the cup and the image are not the same. The image is a representation of the cup in the mind’s terms, a kind of mental model. It is, in a word, a symbol.

If at this point you go from looking at the cup to talking and writing about it, you will find yourself even deeper into the world of symbols. Instead of the cup or your image of it, you will be dealing with sounds made by a voice or marks made with a pen. These sounds and marks have only the most arbitrary relationship to the thing they represent, so that if you travel to another part of the world you may have to use a completely different set of them to make yourself understood. By contrast, anyone with normal eyesight who looks at your cup will see an image very similar to the one you see.

The central insight of the Cabalistic approach to symbolism is that this same distinction is true not only of the things we perceive with the five ordinary senses but of those perceived by the spiritual senses as well. The names, words, and concepts people use to describe the realms of experience beyond the ordinary physical world are arbitrary, and change from place to place and from time to time in much the same way that languages do. The basic images and experiences that people have when they venture into the spiritual realms, on the other hand, are largely consistent between cultures and historical periods. This idea has gained some recent notice through the writings of the psychologist C. G. Jung, who made the same discovery independently. Where Jung’s work dealt only with the psychological implications of the insight, however, the adepts of the magical Cabala have taken it much further. (Paths of Wisdom, John Michael Greer, Llewellyn Publications, 1st edition, pp. 3-4).

I spent fifteen years meditating my way through this author’s manual on the magical Cabala, and that project began in 1998. The occult milieu has changed a great deal since then, when it was a few buddies and I down at the Masonic lodge, the occult store, and the elegant private temples that we constructed ourselves, for there was no sizable internet and no way to get these objects. I worked in concert with the ritual method introduced shortly thereafter, as well as work with the Builders of the Adytum and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. It was a set! Not to mention the fact that my Mexican-American father was an astrologer and a Freemason, so all of this Cabalistic astrology functioned as my primal faith.

Now it is time to do it again, but this time, I can write a more interesting occult diary than the one I had then, which stated, on most days, I meditated on Netzach, angels, Hebrew letters, pip cards, etc. It was nice.

Thus JMG’s magnum opus begins with a bald statement that this journey will end in the inner worlds where there are a lot of images and they seem consistent from culture to culture. The image JMG chose to start his entire public pedagogical career with is that of the Cup.

What does the cup symbolize?

Reception.

He is presenting his reader with the power of receiving this teaching. Those of us who do the work of western art magic(k), whether in the form of physicalized weapons like pentacles, daggers, chalices, and wands, or in the form of pictures of these same objects, as presented in the tarot deck, will recognize the Cup as a symbol of Water and of Reception. It is also preeminently a symbol of love, and that is what it has been for me, and is for me still.

Water pours out or flows by and we need a means of obtaining it so that we can have the hydration necessary to life. This is the science, in which we in this tradition end up well-versed, for John Michael Greer is a science fiction writer, and I have ended up in the health care profession, while my father was a computer programmer who worked for N.A.S.A. and helped write the code that put a man on the moon!

Christianity uses the Cup as part of its central ritual in the form of the eucharist, wherein, reflecting the events of the Last Supper, Jesus is urging the congregants to consider the wine therein to be his blood and the ingestion of his blood to be a means of becoming like him. In Judaism, a central ritual is the kiddush, wherein wine is blessed as one of the gifts that G-d provides humanity. In fact, it was the quest to construct a reliable source of the entheogen alcohol that all of agriculture began. Hunters/gatherers have, in many respects, more enjoyable and interesting lives than farmers, but they do not have a thrice-daily tipple! Thus the ancient Semites understood the centrality of wine to an agrarian culture, and as they blessed their bread as the outcome, they blessed their wine as the source.

The ritual method provided by JMG to stabilize and assist the transformations associated with the magical Cabala uses the eucharist as the central method of theurgy, wherein one summons an Angelic force to enter the wine and to transform the student’s soul for good. This theurgic method appeared a couple of years later in the volume Circles of Power, also pounced on.

When anyone picks up the meditative volume, Paths of Wisdom, and begins reading it, they are thus invited to become Water to JMG’s Fire, to receive the teachings and the knowledge of the magical tradition, and to participate in a eucharist wherein their very bodies will become imbued with the Angelic spiritual transformations of the Cabalistic Golden Dawn.