Occult philosopher Rudolf Steiner’s story is a cautionary tale for those who fail to walk the talk but still manage to be lauded by the history books much more than they deserve.

Steiner was born on 27 February 1861 in Kraljevec, then Austria, and died on 30 March 1925 in Dornach. He first made his name through Goethe scholarship, philosophy and the 1894 book The Philosophy of Freedom, before occultism claimed the big desk. From 1902, he led the German section of the Theosophical Society before founding Anthroposophy following the 1912 and 1913 break.

From 1900 onward, he taught Western Christian Rosicrucian esotericism in various forms. Steiner presented Rosicrucianism as a Western initiatory path, centred on Christian Rosenkreutz, the Grail and disciplined inner development. In his lectures, the Rose Cross preserved the higher ego, reborn through Christ, turning occult Christianity into a method.

Steiner’s early Theosophy came through the eastern-leaning Theosophical Society shaped by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky and Alfred Percy Sinnett. Yet the German-speaking circles around Friedrich Eckstein and Franz Hartmann had already mixed that material with Western occultism. Through this environment, Steiner encountered the practical Rosicrucian stream of Johann Baptist Krebs, writing as J B Kerning, and Alois Mailänder.

In his book In the Wake of Adepts, Sam Robinson said that, from the Golden Dawn’s perspective, Steiner was using Krebs’s or Mailänder’s methods; especially Mailänder’s body-based and meditative practice helped westernise the Theosophy Steiner had first received through eastern channels. Steiner was not a member of Krebs’s or Mailänder’s groups; he simply adopted the teachings of their remnants and repurposed them as his brand of Rosicrucianism.

By 1906 and 1907, Steiner was openly teaching Rosicrucian training as method, process and initiation.”

As I wrote in my book Beyond the Sun,”it is this that Robert Felkin of the Golden Dawn found in 1915 when he went looking for the European secret chiefs. Steiner gave him the authority to work Rosicrucian Second Order rituals and to use Kerning-Mailänder’s meditative practice (which was called the processes). It is important to note that the use of these processes was not popular within the Golden Dawn and was made optional.

All this should have established Steiner as the centre of European occultism; however, a few things were already going wrong. In trying to make his teachings more accessible, he was attempting to make life more certain, and that is a dangerous road to travel.

Steiner was too bright to dismiss as another crank. He was philosophically trained, widely read, and capable of subtle arguments. His work on education, agriculture, architecture, art and consciousness contains ideas worth taking seriously.

The awkwardness shows up when his principles are set against the public oracle he gradually became. Steiner defended individuality with unusual force, then described humanity through racial, national and spiritual pigeonholes. But Steiner’s biggest problem was a growing habit of treating spiritual perceptions as if they were truth.

The philosopher of freedom

The obvious starting point is Steiner’s The Philosophy of Freedom, first published in 1894, before Anthroposophy inflated everything. It remains one of his strongest books because the later metaphysical scaffold had not yet swallowed everything.

The young Steiner argued that freedom develops when people act from conscious insight rather than inherited instinct. Social convention and received opinion were not supposed to be the final boss of human consciousness. Steiner argued that people must become free of what is generic, however tempting those labels may appear.

“Man, however, makes himself free from what is generic… Only that part of his conduct that springs from his intuitions can have ethical value.”

Race, sex and other shared conditions might shape circumstances, but they could not explain the individual. He even warned that judging a woman by supposed feminine characteristics obscures the actual person before us.

That is the sort of thought you would expect from a reasoned occultist and philosophically reasonable, but it lands awkwardly beside his later writing on race, sex and collective categories.

Writer Gary Lachman treats The Philosophy of Freedom as one of Steiner’s genuine achievements, and rightly so. Lachman presents a thinker trying to rescue consciousness from mechanical determinism without handing it back to the church. That is why what Steiner later became is not just embarrassing but instructive for magicians.

When clairvoyance becomes knowledge

Every magician who works seriously for long enough meets the same nasty trap. Something arrives from outside ordinary consciousness, or at least from somewhere that refuses to be filed normally. We saw this in cases like Dion Fortune and Alice Bailey [where dreams or rituals produce hidden information and the result is impressive enough to make the safe psychological explanation look a bit knackered.

In 1894, Steiner demanded empirical/philosophical verification of truth, but by 1910 he demanded belief in his private, ungrounded vision. Steiner seems to have lost some of that caution once clairvoyance became his preferred research department, and he was high enough up the pecking order of his associated groups that no one questioned him.

His From the Akashic Record claimed that trained spiritual perception could recover information unavailable to archaeology or conventional history. This would be ok if he could generate information on provable historical events. If you could find the spot where something could be dug up that proves your case, that would be useful. Instead, Steiner’s Akashic Record only banged on about things that were unprovable and were used to confirm fantasies like Atlantis and Lemuria as real periods in history.

At the start, Steiner admitted spiritual perception could be inaccurate or distorted by the observer. As time wore on, he came to insist that correctly gained spiritual observations were more reliable than ordinary historical evidence or physical research. Steiner should have known better, but he clearly did not, and he and his followers became more defensive as time went on.

The bigger concern is what happened afterwards, when experience settled into a fixed, all-encompassing picture of reality, and from then on, correcting the teacher means dismantling the entire system.

Race enters the cosmos

Steiner’s racial teaching is where modern discussions tend to sour and grow bad-tempered even now. His defenders select his universalist statements, while critics select the lines that deserve a stiff drink.

Both camps can quote him honestly, because Steiner managed to say both sorts of things.

On the shitty side of the scale, in his 3 March 1923 lecture, “Colour and the Human Races”, Steiner said: “The Negro race does not belong to Europe, and it is, of course, only nonsense that it now plays such a great role in Europe.”

Steiner’s racial thinking was not just ugly phrasing, but part of his wider cosmic machinery. In The Mission of Folk-Souls, Indigenous Americans were tied to Saturn and were undergoing a process of racial decline and disappearance. Africans were linked to Mercury, Malays to Venus, Mongolians to Mars, and Europeans to Jupiter, showing race had been built into his occult cosmology. A basic knowledge of astrology shows how he expected those races to behave.

Scholar Peter Staudenmaier has argued that racial and ethnic ideas occupied a significant place in Anthroposophy. Staudenmaier rejects the soothing claim that these were incidental leftovers from nineteenth-century racial terminology.

Anthroposophists have challenged that reading, particularly through a Dutch commission led by human-rights lawyer Ted van Baarda. The 2000 commission found passages now regarded as discriminatory but rejected racism as Anthroposophy’s systematic doctrine.

Yet, the appearance of racial categories contradicts Steiner’s The Philosophy of Freedom. Steiner once warned that the individual could not be understood through the genus or any tidy doctrine. Now his clairvoyant investigation explained vast groups through planets, evolution and cosmic administration from above.

Germany gets a mission

Steiner’s shadow appears during the First World War, when European brains went out to lunch and did not return until 1918. Steiner was not unique in being damaged by the German patriotic fever that swept intellectual life and would get a kick in the nadgers at the signing of the Treaty of Versailles.

Thinkers who had praised universal civilisation suddenly decided that it looked remarkably like their national culture and all others smelt of wee. Steiner sometimes resisted raw nationalism, and his later political ideas moved beyond simple ethnic loyalty. Yet wartime spiritual interpretation of national destiny sometimes led him into extraordinary territory all the same. On 3 December 1914, Steiner explained that reincarnation meant souls could move between nationalities during the war.

Apparently, an Englishman might be inwardly preparing for a future German incarnation. So far, the idea could undermine nationalism by making today’s enemy tomorrow’s awkward family history, but Steiner steered the argument into a trench.

He suggested that in the war an Englishman attacking German culture might be fighting his own future German destiny. English hostility towards Germany could become unconscious hostility towards the person’s future German self.

Steiner took a universal teaching, reincarnation across nations, and produced a conclusion flattering his cultural position. The supernatural was terribly convenient for this wobbly position. He probably believed what he was saying, and that is precisely why sincerity is not enough. Magical training needs more than conviction, as spirits do not usually agree with your passport.

The problem of spiritual Christianity

The same pattern appears in Steiner’s relationship with Christianity, which was anything but simple church nostalgia. He had little interest in pushing people back into conventional doctrine or tidy Sunday respectability.

His Christ was a cosmic being whose incarnation transformed humanity’s spiritual evolution for everyone. That view helped break him from the Theosophical leadership surrounding theosophical leader Annie Besant and occultist kiddie fiddler Charles Leadbeater.

Besant and Leadbeater promoted young teacher Jiddu Krishnamurti as the vehicle for the coming World Teacher. Steiner rejected the claim that Christ could physically incarnate again in that theatrical fashion. The German Theosophical section eventually separated from the wider organisation during 1912 and 1913 amid the row.

Steiner’s refusal looks better than Besant’s enthusiasm, since Krishnamurti later rejected the whole Messiah role. Even so, Steiner’s Christology shows the same problem of spiritual certainty.

In From Jesus to Christ, he treated the Christ event as an objective fact of terrestrial evolution. It was no longer one spiritual interpretation among several, but part of the machinery.

Steiner could respect Buddhism, Hinduism and other traditions while fitting them inside his Christian cosmic history. The central event had already been decided, and the other traditions were given supporting roles.

There’s something very human in stepping beyond ordinary consciousness and discovering your favourite symbol enthroned. That doesn’t disprove Steiner’s Christology; magic was never going to hand you the neatness of a laboratory. It does show why spiritual experience requires merciless attention to cultural conditioning for everyone involved.

A Christian magician may encounter Christ because that concept is objectively real within the spiritual economy. The same magician may encounter Christ because the psyche speaks fluently through Christian symbolism instead.

When spiritual science enters medicine

Steiner called his system “spiritual science”, and the phrase deserves closer questioning than people tend to give it. He did not offer myths that might help people think through spiritual experience on their own. He believed disciplined supersensible investigation could produce knowledge, which places a heavier burden on the claimant.

Science has value partly because its claims remain vulnerable to evidence, however elegant the theory. Nature remains unimpressed by reputations, devoted pupils and solemn words in German.

Steiner’s medical lectures show what happens when the boundary becomes dangerously blurred in practice.

For example, in Spiritual Science and Medicine, Steiner discussed mistletoe as a treatment for cancer directly there. He connected mistletoe’s strange growth with abnormal formative processes in tumours, then drew therapeutic conclusions.

To be fair, he did include some caution about preparation, treatment and clinical experience. He admitted the remedy had not yet been developed sufficiently for reliable medical use for patients. Then he said that mistletoe provided, “beyond question,” a means that eventually allowed doctors to avoid surgical tumour removal.

“Beyond question” is exactly where spiritual investigation should never sit down and get comfortable ever. Medicine has produced enough confident errors to fill a morgue with patients who won’t get another shot at it.

Another one of his howlers was Steiner calling epilepsy “a disorder in the relationship between the physical body, etheric body, astral body and ego organisation.”

In Curative Education, he wrote: “The epileptic is able to dive down with his ego organisation and astral body”. His claim was that they entered the physical and etheric bodies but became trapped in an organ rather than passing through. He then said the outward fit showed an inner congestion of the astral body and ego organisation at an organ’s surface. In another lecture, he described seizures as happening when “the ego and astral organisation snap down too strongly” into the body.

Steiner recasts epilepsy as an occult imbalance, rather than treating it as a serious neurological condition. That spiritual framing risks stigma and can encourage people to seek esoteric correction instead of proper medical treatment.

Steiner died aged 64 after a long illness, which is awkward for a man selling spiritual diagnosis. If the etheric body explains disease, his own seems to have filed a damning internal report.

The teacher who knew too much

Steiner’s productivity created another difficulty, because he lectured on almost everything within reach almost daily. Education, agriculture, medicine, architecture, drama, karma, Atlantis, angels, economics, and bees somehow entered his universe.

So did Christianity, racial development, planetary evolution and the future of humanity, as if those were things one could clear before lunch.

Lachman’s biography presents a man of astonishing energy trying to reconnect modern consciousness with spiritual reality. That judgement is fair, but it does not remove the danger of excessive authority either.

There comes a point when knowing something about many things begins to resemble knowing everything. That is a dangerous stage in an occult teacher’s career, especially when pupils keep asking.

They start by asking about the system the teacher understands through practice and thought. Eventually they ask about diet, politics, education, the cat, marriage, medicine, history and the destiny of civilisation.

The teacher discovers that people listen when he answers, and any silence starts to feel like a professional failure. Soon, the absence of knowledge will no longer serve as a useful reason to shut up. For whatever reason, Steiner did not feel in a position to say “I don’t know.”

This creeps into his writing and lectures, where something very simple is said in an unnecessarily complex way. Steiner fans often claim that the problem is all due to translation from German into English, but that is not entirely true. While German does favour long sentences, the translator usually breaks them down and rarely picks the longest word they can find in the dictionary.

While the sentences remain long and purple, they are reassuring to those facing a life crisis. They sound certain, which was probably what Steiner was going for. For any question, one can search the archive for what Steiner said about it. If you are worried about the future evolution of Jupiter, you can find it in Steiner’s writings.

The real shadow

Steiner’s shadow was not that he was a racist crank whose clairvoyance failed; like many occult teachers, he did have some good stuff to say. He trusted human consciousness to transcend ordinary limits, and serious magicians need some version of that trust. He believed that spiritual perception could be trained, a view most magical traditions would broadly accept. He insisted that people could become freer by developing consciousness rather than by obeying inherited assumptions.

His failure came when confidence in perception outpaced suspicion of interpretation. The more he saw, the more he explained, and the larger the system around him became.

Eventually, the visionary stood inside a universe that confirmed his cultural, religious, and historical assumptions too efficiently. Had Steiner been mature enough to see it, he would have realised that he needed a faculty that receives much less applause than clairvoyance in public.

Steiner almost reached that point when he plainly admitted that spiritual perception could be inaccurate. He knew even advanced investigators could make mistakes, which should have been written above his desk. But it was almost as if he was admitting that so that people would discount it.

Steiner wanted spiritually free human beings capable of directly knowing the spiritual world. However, he made that world too certain, too rigidly classified and too comprehensively explained, often through convoluted concepts that made it less accessible to the “modern man” he hoped to reach. Modern Steiner students often reject things like Kabbalah because he said that these were “ancient” and not for the “Modern Man.” The irony is that his prose is based on taking something the modern man could easily understand and making it so complicated that no one would really apply it. He could take something that could be explained in three sentences and make the explanation take three chapters.

It is also interesting that modern Steiner students insist that he abandoned Rosicrucianism in favour of his anthroposophy (something I consider unlikely).

His tragedy is that his younger self had already supplied the cure inside The Philosophy of Freedom. He warned against allowing general categories to obscure the living individual standing before us. The same warning could have been applied to his clairvoyance and cosmic paperwork.

Leave room for the person who breaks the category, and for the vision that later changes its face. Most importantly, leave one open space for the great initiate to be magnificently wrong. Steiner filled too much of that space with Steiner.

One of the nastier tests of magical development is not the power of the initiations or the ability to make a candle tremble, but what happens when someone disagrees

Authoritarianism is a political or social mindset that prizes obedience, control and enforced conformity over individual dissent and independent judgement. It can appear in what people call right-wing or left-wing forms. For those not in the know, the last decade has seen a rise in authoritarianism within parts of the occult movement.

This may seem contradictory, since occultism often presents itself as a path of individual development, personal sovereignty and direct experience. In practice, however, occult groups often involve all the trappings of authority. Those structures can support serious training and provide cover for control. Once a group believes it possesses privileged access to truth, disagreement can be treated as spiritual failure or disloyalty and compliance as discipline. The language of liberation then becomes a means of dependency.

In my lifetime, I have seen authoritarian leaders gain an increasing say over the spiritual direction of students, usually to ensure control but sometimes to re-enforce some political agenda. While it has been easy to write all this off as narcissism, a failure in training or other forms of ego influence, there might be a type of person who is predisposed to authoritarianism who is worth avoiding. Indeed, authoritarianism could be a red flag for any student observing their teacher.

A recent neuroscience study by Jesús Adrián-Ventura, a researcher at the University of Zaragoza, and colleagues examined authoritarian attitudes in 100 young adults using psychological tests and structural MRI.

They examined right-wing authoritarianism and the newer, more contested construct of left-wing authoritarianism. The study is useful, but it should not be overread. It involved only 100 people, shows correlation rather than cause, and does not mean particular brain regions can be reduced to tidy “empathy centres.”

Both forms of authoritarianism were linked to negative urgency, the tendency to act impulsively when strong negative emotions surface and start smashing things.

Left-wing authoritarianism was associated with higher trait anxiety, while Right-wing authoritarianism was associated with reduced grey matter volume in a region of the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, which is involved in social cognition and understanding other minds.

One component of left-wing authoritarianism, anti-hierarchical aggression, correlated with reduced cortical thickness in the right anterior insula. That region has been implicated in emotional processing and inhibitory control.

The study does not prove that authoritarians should be written off because they have borked brains, but it does suggest that unregulated drives and certainty are drinking partners.

Even the most advanced of Magi has primitive drives; anyone who claims otherwise is lying, or from another planet. The Work just alters a person’s relationship with those drives.

The magician catches those drives before they get out of control and become something like persecution. But from the brain’s perspective, this reflection becomes unbearable because it prolongs uncertainty, while Authoritarianism offers a convenient shortcut. It states that there is an enemy and a correct doctrine to quash it. It defines insiders and outsiders. Anything outside the authority must be silenced or punished.

This is why, within certain types of groups, the person making the process towards individualisation ends up falling foul of the leadership and getting themselves expelled. It is often not what they have done; it is simply that they have fallen foul of the group’s authoritarian rules.

This is why some people arrange leadership challenges in groups dedicated to individualisation. They are often broken people who seek the certainty of authority to avoid confronting their own shadow.

The drive beneath the politics

The political content matters socially, but a magical angle often lies beneath it.

The scale used by Adrián-Ventura’s study follows the model developed by Thomas Costello and colleagues. That model identifies three components: anti-hierarchical aggression, top-down censorship and anti-conventionalism.

A right-wing authoritarian may defend an existing hierarchy while a left-wing authoritarian wants to tear it down. Their beliefs can be deeply different, but psychologically, both ends can give an unconscious drive a nice moral frock.

The right-wing authoritarian can decide authority protects what is sacred, so those threatening it may be controlled. The left-wing authoritarian can decide existing authority is corrupt, so extraordinary coercion is justified.

In both cases, aggression becomes justice and control becomes protection. Authoritarian groups favour conformity as a sign of solidarity and are often fond of censoring external teachings or people. One of the first groups I was in told me not to read other groups’ books and to just focus on the leader’s words. The second group, which was more active magic, gave me a reading list so long I started collecting it and now have more library than space.

Projection

Occultism makes authoritarianism nastier because it hands unconscious drives huge symbolic powers. In ordinary life, a fragile leader merely dislikes being challenged. In occultism, the same fragility can declare that the challenger is unbalanced or poisoning the egregore.

That is magical failure in its purest form. The magician’s job is to sort apparition from projection. The authoritarian magician moves the other way, and inner conflict becomes increasingly externalised. Eventually, the psyche reaches a suitable arrangement in which everything unpleasant is someone else’s problem.

The failure to hold opposites

Authoritarianism should worry occultists for another reason. Advanced magical thinking requires the ability to tolerate contradiction. Magic rarely offers clean data. Gods refuse tidy explanations and even a true vision can arrive mixed with personal fantasy. Traditions can preserve useful techniques alongside nonsense inherited from people who thought Atlantis had excellent public transport.

Maturity in magic means resisting the urge to nail everything down. Immaturity mistakes uncertainty for failure.

An adept can leave something unresolved because they are safe in the knowledge that the universe is not perfect (since god created it from within itself, it is probably not perfect either). Authoritarian consciousness hates that territory because ambiguity removes psychological control. Certainty feels safer, so the doctrine becomes unquestionable.

Magical inflation

Authoritarianism can manifest as what Jung called inflation, in which consciousness identifies itself with something larger than the ordinary personality. Ritual magic intentionally exposes practitioners to big symbolic forms. The magician temporarily identifies with these forces.

The important word is temporarily. The magician invokes the god-form, then returns to being the person who needs to buy cat food on their way home from the initiation.

A high office is not proof of superior wisdom; it is a job inside a ritual structure. But the authoritarian does not want to serve, even when they dress it up as guiding others to the light. They want to sit above the food chain. Soon, the role fuses with the person, the person fuses with the Order, and criticism of their behaviour becomes an assault on the Tradition.

Authoritarian followers make the opposite bargain. They give up responsibility in exchange for certainty. Instead of learning to judge, they let the leader judge for them. Outsiders may call it loyalty, but psychologically it is a retreat into childhood.

The point of initiation is not to create adults who need spiritual babysitting. If people still require the chief to tell them what to think, the system has produced dependency.

Left-wing occult authoritarianism

The left-wing form should be observed because occultists often assume authoritarianism only happens among traditionalists. But a group can reject hierarchy while becoming brutally hierarchical in practice.

A person can condemn oppressive power and still enjoy having power over heretics. They can sneer at old moral policing while building a fresh vocabulary of forbidden thoughts and approved opinions. They can speak constantly of protecting the vulnerable while almost glowing at the chance to punish and exclude.

Costello’s concept of anti-hierarchical aggression captures this paradox.

The objection concerns who holds power, not necessarily the use of power itself. Research on the construct has linked it to dogmatism, moral absolutism, and aggression towards ideological outgroups, although the broader idea remains debated.

I saw this in what appeared to be a liberal “left-wing” group with an authoritarian leader who was hugely insecure. At the time, he liked all the drama and the power of expelling people, and while he held left-wing views on issues that affected him, like homosexuality, he had some scary right-wing views on those that did not. When challenged on these views, he would get quite angry. In the time I knew him, his goal was to get to the top of a hierarchy and be recognised as such.

Right-wing occult authoritarianism

The traditional version is easier to spot because occult history has supplied plenty of it. Here the magical past becomes sacred because it is old. Founders become incapable of serious error.

In this model, grades become a measure of human value, and seniority is treated as automatic insight. The right-wing authoritarian temperament can find occult tradition attractive because, read literally, it seems to offer a universe arranged from top to bottom, with power and purity flowing downward through approved ranks.

That symbolic structure can then be treated as evidence that hierarchy is the natural order of existence. The temptation is to turn a language of initiation into a justification for political and social control, so that spiritual development becomes a defence of domination.

Hierarchy earns its place only when it remains functional, limited, and temporary.

A healthy magical hierarchy should make itself redundant over time. Its job is to produce competence, and an unhealthy hierarchy produces dependency.

The failure of initiation

This is why authoritarianism, from either political direction, can reasonably be treated as a warning sign of occult failure. I am not saying that a magician must become centrist; this has no inherent spiritual virtue, and history has produced plenty of authoritarian moderates, such as A. E. Waite [link].

Radical ideas can come from careful thought and moral conviction. Distance from the political centre reveals little. The real question is how the psyche responds to psychic pressure.

Real magical work should make a person harder to manipulate by that kind of pressure. They notice what is steering their judgement, especially the need to be right. They become wary when every despised quality appears in the enemy and learn to disagree without turning the other dissenter into a source of contamination.

That may be one of the simplest definitions of magical sovereignty. The authoritarian either surrenders sovereignty to an authority or seeks sovereignty over everybody else. Sometimes they manage both.

Neuroscience echoes an old magical warning. Uncontrolled emotions and lack of self-awareness can swamp reflective judgement.

If 20 years of magical practice leave someone more certain of their righteousness and keener to control others, the problem has nothing to do with party politics. The Work just failed. Perhaps that is the most embarrassing occult failure available: spending decades learning how to command spirits while remaining commanded by your drives.

The First Revelation of James left us with an unfinished picture of salvation, in which Jesus does not tell James to believe harder or behave himself. He is preparing him to face the powers that police the lower order when a soul attempts to leave it.

James must know where he comes from and where he is going, and that the powers questioning him have authority only within their system. If the soul still identifies with the world those powers administer, then the interrogation will achieve its purpose easily.

The Revelation of Paul shows what happens next.

The text is only seven pages long in the fifth Nag Hammadi codex, yet it packs in an unusual amount of practical material. Its central device is Paul’s ascent through the heavens, a theme familiar in early Christian literature and further developed in the later Vision of Paul. That work circulated widely in several languages, influenced medieval afterlife descriptions and became one of the sources of Dante’s Divine Comedy. Despite the shared subject, there is no evidence of literary parallels between the Vision of Paul and the Nag Hammadi Revelation of Paul.

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Long before Western ceremonial magicians mapped Hebrew letters to the Tree of Life, a second-century Gnostic magician was turning the Greek alphabet into the living body of a goddess.

The late-second-century Christian Gnostic teacher and magician Marcus, associated with the school of Valentinus, developed an elaborate system of Greek letter-number symbolism, including what is usually called isopsephy, the Greek equivalent of gematria. Almost everything known about him comes from Christian writers, especially Irenaeus of Lyons, who hated his guts and dismissed him as a heretic. Marcus appears to have taught first in Asia Minor, although his followers later became established in the Rhône valley around Lyons, where Irenaeus encountered communities influenced by his teaching. His followers became known as the Marcosians, and Marcosian communities survived for generations after Marcus’s death.

Marcus developed Valentinian Christianity in an unusually ritualistic and numerological direction. He believed that the structure of divine reality could be revealed through Greek letters, numbers, names and combinations of syllables, turning the alphabet into a map of the divine Pleroma. According to Irenaeus, Marcus claimed to have received a revelation from the divine Tetrad, which appeared to him in female form and disclosed mysteries concerning the origin of the cosmos. His followers practised prophecy, initiation and forms of sacramental ritual, including a Eucharistic ceremony in which wine represented the blood or presence of Charis, divine Grace. Women played a conspicuous role in Marcosian worship and were encouraged to prophesy and pronounce Eucharistic invocations. There is a fair bit there for Christians of the period to get their knickers in a twist about.

Irenaeus portrays Marcus as a charismatic wonderworker who used magical tricks, love potions and elaborate ceremonies to impress wealthy followers, particularly women. He describes Marcus changing the colour of consecrated wine, apparently causing a small quantity of liquid to overflow a larger vessel, and inducing followers to speak spontaneously as prophets. These accusations may preserve genuine traces of Marcosian ritual, although Irenaeus’ lurid claims about sexual exploitation and sorcery are par for the course when Christians attempt to run down a system. Ironically, pagan critics levelled much the same sort of accusations at Christians and their “love feasts”, which probably tells us more about the accusers than the accused.

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When you become involved in magic, teachers will often make a big thing about the importance of intuition and imply that it is a hotline to the gods. While there is some truth to this, often what people consider as intuition is just common anxiety pretending to be more important.

Occult training can go a bit pear-shaped. Students are told to trust impressions before they have learned how to test them. They are told to notice omens before they have learned how often the mind manufactures them. While a teacher might say that the inner voice matters, students can’t tell if it is their higher genius or too much garlic and red wine after a heavy dinner.

Psychology offers the magician a less flattering explanation, using terms such as expectation, hypervigilance, wish fulfilment, and confirmation bias to explain these higher intuitions.

Expectation is when a student expects magic to produce signs then their world quickly becomes crowded with omens. Psychologically, the magician has created a search pattern, then finds something.

In their research titled “Top-down and bottom-up factors in threat-related perception and attention in anxiety”, Sussman, Jin and Mohanty (PubMed) show that top-down factors, including expectations, can shape attention towards possible threats. That is useful if the threat is real, but it is rubbish when a magician has decided that any unpleasant feeling before ritual must mean astral trouble or a curse. The brain has been briefed to look for danger, so danger gets promoted.

In another paper (PubMed), researchers Richards, Benson, Donnelly and Hadwin, “Exploring the function of selective attention and hypervigilance for threat in anxiety” said that hypervigilance makes everything worse. Once the body enters threat mode, attention begins to scan and monitor for potential dangers, often by broadly scanning the environment.

A person in an unsafe room who has performed a lesser banishing ritual of the pentagram to feel better will listen more closely, check for shadows, and question whether the atmosphere feels different. This state of anxious attention can increase false alarms. The practitioner sees more because they are hunting more, not because there is more to see.

Wish fulfilment is another dodgy bit of wiring. The magician wants their initiation warning to be real because it makes them feel important, protected, or specially plugged in. A vague feeling then becomes proof that the universe is taking a personal interest. Freud used wish fulfilment to describe how desire can shape dreams and mental life, but the occult version is simpler. The student wants contact or reassurance, so anxiety is channelled into guidance. A bad feeling promoted to prophecy.

In his “Confirmation bias: a ubiquitous phenomenon in many guises”, Review of General Psychology. (Sage Journals) Raymond Nickerson described confirmation bias as the tendency to seek or interpret evidence in ways that favour existing beliefs, expectations, or a current hypothesis.

Occult diaries are often full of this rubbish, where hits are written in capital letters, and misses vanish because they are boring. They are a huge problem with contact work or channelling, where the spirit seems to speak what the channeller believes. I was once expelled from a group because the leader heard an incorrect rumour (from an incredibly unreliable source) about me. He apparently asked his contact, who said it was completely true and that action was needed. He did look incredibly stupid later (although I don’t remember him admitting that his intuition had let him down).

A 2022 systematic review (PLOS) found the most consistent associations between paranormal beliefs and increased intuitive thinking, confirmatory bias, reduced conditional reasoning and weaker perception of randomness.

This leaves room for genuine occult claims, while showing that the territory is full of known mental traps which occultists blindly walk into by “trusting their intuition.” If the work is supposed to improve perception, it cannot depend on ignoring every fault in perception.

Not every alarm bell is a message from the gods. Daniel Kahneman and Gary Klein argued (PubMed) that skilled intuitive judgement depends on a predictable environment and enough chance to learn its regularities through feedback.

Doctors, nurses, chess players, or mechanics can build reliable intuition because their fields have patterns and feedback, but most occultism has weaker feedback. Its claims are vague, and results can be interpreted in different ways after the event. This means magical intuition needs more discipline than ordinary hunches.

The Golden Dawn had its own blunt line on this. In the instruction “On the General Guidance and Purification of the Soul”, it says: “Fear is failure and the forerunner of failure; and courage is the beginning of virtue.”

The terms mean something slightly different these days. Fear usually belongs to an immediate and identifiable threat, but anxiety is a much better term; it is broader, future-facing and focused on diffuse threat.

Anxiety loves unclear material and thrives when there is no definite enemy or testable claims. That makes magic a perfect playground for it, as a world full of spirits can all be made vague enough for anxiety to occupy.

Balance is one of the best ways of handling the problem. It means the magician can discern the mood without interpreting it as a message from the gods.

The first practical rule is never act on an intuition while frightened, unless there is an ordinary physical danger. If you have an intuition that you are about to get struck by lightning on a sunny day, you do not have to act as if a storm is coming. A real fire does not need divination.

Most magical warnings arrive as a bad feeling or a sudden certainty that something is wrong. Speed is a poor test of truth, and anxiety is built to rush.

The second rule is to write the intuition before interpreting it. Put down the date, time, setting, emotional state, sleep, food, stress and exact claim. It must be exact, as “Something bad around communication” is useless. It can be made to fit anything from a lost email to a family row. A magical intuition will say what is expected, when, and what would count as a failure.

The third rule is to separate perception from explanation. “I felt pressure in the chest during the invocation” is an observation. “A demonic force entered the room” is an explanation. The second needs more evidence than the first. Magicians often skip this distinction because the explanation is more interesting. That is how ordinary anxiety is turned into occult drama.

In a group I was in, there was a self-appointed guardian of the order who halted a ritual because he felt that it had attracted a “bad contact.” It had taken the magicians a long time to set up the ritual and get some of the order’s finest into one room to do it, so they were considerably pissed off. No one noticed the “guardian’s?? evil contact.

Divination can help, but only if it is used properly. A structured oracle can slow the reaction and move the problem outside the head. Lang, Krátcý, Shaver, Jerotijević and Xygalatas, “The role of ritual behaviour in anxiety reduction: an investigation of Marathi religious practices in Mauritius”, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B. (PubMed Central (PMC)) suggests that ritual can reduce anxiety, although mechanisms and results vary across settings.

A proper oracle slows the rush and makes the fear speak in sentences. However, fear can still colour divination.

This is why frightened divination needs rules. Do not ask loaded questions such as “what disaster is coming?” Ask better questions about your intuition, such as “what is the nature of my intuition about this matter”, “what action is useful”, 2What happens if nothing is done.”

When divination works in this situation, it does so because it breaks the magician’s private feedback loop, as anxiety is a closed circuit. A feeling produces the same interpretation, which strengthens the feeling. Oracles can interrupt that loop, which is why they are useful.

These methods remain fallible, although a magician must deal with something other than the noise in their own head. Even a sceptic can see the value in that, Just don’t twist the reading until it flatters the panic.

If intuition suggests the work is dangerous, the oracle should be asked what level of response is appropriate. This could mean cancelling a rite, delaying or changing it or performing a banishing. Anxiety thinks only in terms of fear, so to snatch yourself out of it you must provide lots of different solutions.

It is worth asking what ordinary cause is being ignored. Simple tiredness can either be interpreted as a draining atmosphere or just stress. Group politics can do the same thing if you are doing a ritual and think that someone in the group is trying to kill you magically.

If divination produces only grand language, cosmic dread and no useful action, the magician should distrust the reading, although this is also a red card for their intuition. If you can’t even do a decent reading about it, chances are anxiety is doing the talking rather than intuition. Divine guidance usually has some handle by which it can be picked up. Anxiety prefers impressive fog because it cannot be tested.

Some magicians enjoy the drama of a warning more than the work itself. A crisis makes them central. They become the one who sensed the danger, protected the temple, or saw what lesser mortals missed. That sort of thing is toxic in group work because it makes whoever feels most dramatic sound most initiated.

A teacher should shut that down politely and early. A lack of discrimination is an unreliable instrument, forcing everyone else to arrange their practice around it.

A bad feeling should still be considered, but it still has to answer for itself.

One ritual I participated in blended African tradition with Kabbalah. There was a team of magicians of African descent who were chanting Hebrew names for a very long time while banging staves. The group leader then went into a trance in which she channelled her contact. It was a great experience; there was shedloads of magic in the room and no black magic.

That did not stop a bunch of white, middle-aged magicians from deciding their intuition had detected something sinister. What they were really detecting was their own racism and discomfort with unfamiliar ritual forms. They did not say they were frightened by black people using magical authority. They said the ritual felt like voodoo, or that the room had been swamped by bad contact. This is how anxiety launders prejudice.

I have never seen people exit a ritual like that before or since. Their “intuition” protected their racism from being recognised.

A magician should aim for a more detached intuition. It can still be strange and sudden, but it does not need to drag anyone into a vortex of doom. If it cannot survive being checked, it was probably not reliable insight.

After the repetition and uncertainty surrounding several of the earlier lunar pentacles, the final pentacle returns to a recognisable Solomonic structure. While it is similar in format to the other planets, it stands out from the other pentacles by having magical pentacles connected to the Moon on the spokes of a wheel.

According to Samuel Mathers, the sixth pentacle of the moon was “wonderfully good, and serveth excellently to excite and cause heavy rains, if it be engraved upon a plate of silver; and if it be placed under water, as long as it remaineth there, there will be rain. It should be engraved, drawn, or written in the day and hour of the Moon.”

Summoning rain was important in the Middle Ages, when life was dependent on agriculture, but it is unlikely to be a major tool for weather manipulation. To understand this, you must look at some of the meanings of the Moon. Mathers’ description places the operation firmly within the traditional lunar domain of water, moisture, generation and change. In older magical cosmology, it governed the movement of waters through tides, rainfall, bodily fluids and the hidden processes by which things germinate and grow. Heavy rain represents lunar power in a concentrated form, bringing what has been held in suspension down into material manifestation.

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Arthur Edward Waite spent a lifetime chasing a single hidden thread in magic and mysticism in search of a sense of family, but he is better known for what he didn’t invent.

Waite was born in Brooklyn, New York, on 2 October 1857. His father, Charles Waite, was a captain in the American merchant marine who died at sea. His mother, Emma Lovell, returned to England with young Arthur and his sister Frederika, bringing him into the class-anxious, church-haunted world that would form his imagination.

R A Gilbert, his major biographer, argues that Waite downplayed his early life because his parents were unmarried and his childhood carried the sting of family rejection. Gilbert suggests that this “shame” might be related to Waite’s obsession with lineage. Lacking a lineage, Waite wanted the universe to provide him with the hidden genealogy in which scattered fragments of wisdom could be stitched into one great ancestral cord called a “Secret Tradition.” It was an emotionally useful idea as it meant that whenever he spoke about this magical thread in his books, he was talking about something he was desperate to be tied into.

Rejected by his extended family, Waite turned inward. Lacking access to formal schooling, he educated himself and found a path of escape through ‘penny dreadfuls’ and medieval romances.

His mother’s conversion to Roman Catholicism marked him deeply. Waite drifted from the church after Frederika’s death in 1874, but he never quite escaped its atmosphere of ritual, sacramental language and ancient authority.

Waite educated himself further at the British Museum, read widely in esoteric literature and passed through Spiritualism and Theosophy before settling into his own version of Christian occult mysticism. He admired the French occultist Éliphas Lévi and became one of the important English translators and publicists of Lévi’s work. Encyclopedia.com credits Waite with helping bring several occult and mystical texts into British circulation, including Lévi’s writings.

However, Waite reacted against popular occultism, which was then a jumble of séances, sigils, table-rapping and theatrical conjuring. He wanted it to be a serious literature of the soul and became one of the first English writers to treat Western occult material as a spiritual tradition worthy of systematic study rather than as delusion or grubby parlour entertainment.

However, Waite’s psychology meant that he needed a preferred answer before the evidence had finished speaking. In his Grail writing, he suggested that several medieval and esoteric literatures carried the same hidden implications, expressed through different veils and symbols.

But the esoteric has varied throughout the ages, and while there are similarities of techniques, Waite’s claim of a “secret tradition” does not hold water. However, hunting for it did make him patient with manuscripts, rituals, and forgotten authors. It made Waite a nuisance, because once he believed he had found the thread, he could become dismissive of anyone who saw a knot, a break in his logic.

Searching the Cupboards: The Golden Dawn and Masonry

Waite joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in 1891, left after a short period, then rejoined in 1896, entering the Second Order in 1899. Waite found it fascinating, but he never fully trusted its taste for operative magic, and his attitude to magic was chilly. He believed rituals differed mainly by how much black magic they contained, and he distrusted magic that tried to manipulate forces. Instead, he favoured ritual that purified the soul, dramatised devotion and pointed upward.

But within the Golden Dawn, Waite’s views were highly respected. When a split happened over the creation of the cypher manuscripts, they were handed over to Waite to confirm their authenticity. To the surprise of many modern occultists, who believe that the cyphers were created after the rituals were written, Waite confirmed their authenticity.

Yet while he rejected false histories when they did not suit him, he built a grander one of his own. The Golden Dawn’s Egyptian claims could be convenient, but Waite’s Christian secret tradition was far too tidy. He saw alchemy, Kabbalah, Grail legend, Rosicrucianism and Freemasonry as fragments of his “Secret Tradition.”

Waite could be scathing about Masonry, calling much of it spiritually hollow, yet he later entered Freemasonry in 1901 and the Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia in 1902. But he was disappointed with craft masonry, bringing him no spiritual enlightenment.

“For myself it was a curious experience in more ways than one, and perhaps especially because it was so patent throughout that I could have told the Worshipful Master all that he was communicating to me. My initiation was nothing therefore but a means to an end: I awaited the Grades beyond.”

He was not enthusiastic about other masons either and dismissed Masonic rules as:

“Framed for lodges and chapters by “hollow hearts and empty heads”

Gilbert notes that Waite became interested in Masonic higher degrees partly because he hoped they might help him reshape Golden Dawn ritual in a more mystical direction.

That contradiction is pure Waite. He could denounce an institution as spiritually empty, then search its cupboards for the missing chalice. He wanted to rescue symbols from people he thought did not understand them. This gave him energy, but it made him arrogant. Gilbert says Waite was criticised, with reason, for errors of historical fact, peculiarities of style and contemptuous treatment of contemporaries.

Waite’s morality, though, was straightforward. While he wanted to be involved with Martinism and run a group, he split with that idea after a few years because it involved working with the Synarchist and anti-Semitic Papus.

Tugging the Thread: Order Reform and Legacy

The Golden Dawn split gave Waite his chance to tug the thread into his own hands. In 1903, he helped turn much of the Isis-Urania temple toward the Independent and Rectified Rite, a more Christian and mystical body that reduced the emphasis on ritual magic. The wider order was already fragmenting, but Waite’s intervention made the divide explicit.

Waite wanted to cut away what he saw as ego-centred magic and preserve the symbolic ladder of initiation. He wanted initiates climbing towards sanctity. That sounds noble enough, until one notices how often reformers decide that everyone else’s practice is vanity while theirs is purification. Practically, his version of the Golden Dawn rituals was the same thing, made long and ponderous and without any godforms.

By 1914, Waite had shut down his version of the Isis-Urania temple after further disputes, including arguments about the authenticity of documents. In July 1915, he founded the Fellowship of the Rosy Cross, a Christian esoteric order drawing on Golden Dawn structures (including something like a ritual of the pentagram) but rejecting much of its magical tone. The Fellowship’s history says Waite wanted an order open to men and women, based on Golden Dawn forms.

That founding is the clearest expression of his lifelong obsession. Waite’s “thread” had become an institution with grades, rituals, symbols and a Christian centre. But the more Waite purified magic, the more he narrowed it and the vast, unruly world of occult practice was pressed into a devotional mould.

His best-known public legacy came through tarot, almost by accident of popular memory. In 1909, Waite commissioned artist Pamela Colman Smith to illustrate what became the Rider-Waite-Smith tarot deck. The Guardian notes that the deck became one of the most famous and popular tarot designs, helped by its availability to the public and its striking occult press promotion.

History has largely forgotten that the Rider–Waite–Smith deck is fundamentally a Golden Dawn deck. Waite retained most of the Order’s symbolism, attributions and esoteric structure, repackaging them for publication with Pamela Colman Smith’s illustrations (with her name taken off it). Only recently has Smith’s name been restored to the title of the deck.

Taking the idea from the Golden Dawn, Waite saw tarot as part of an integrated symbolic system covering universal ideas. He helped make tarot feel like a contemplative map rather than just a fairground gadget.

The Mechanics of Prose and Selective Suspicion

The same pattern appears in The Hidden Church of the Holy Graal, The Book of Ceremonial Magic, The Secret Tradition in Freemasonry and The Holy Kabbalah. Waite was forever peering through texts for signs of a hidden school or a sanctifying wisdom preserved under masks. Some of this work was pioneering; some of it, however, was incredibly purple.

There was an issue with how he wrote. Waite could take an interesting idea and make it lifeless with his prose. His sentences were so long and impossible to read out loud without gasping for air. There was little reason for this, as he was a professional writer turning out copy for the Slough drinks company Horlicks. Even at the turn of the 20th century, no one was going to read a 120-word sentence, so this means Waite’s style must have been unique for his esoteric writing.

Aleister Crowley referred to Waite in his satirical “Moonchild” book as Dead Weight because of his style. This is ironic, as Waite and Crowley had similar writing styles.

Waite went wrong by mistaking resemblance for inheritance. Repeated sacred imagery across cultures shows the stubborn habits of human imagination, not proof of one secret fraternity posting the same memo since the dawn of humanity.

He Christianised things too much, and while his faith gave him discipline and depth, it became a filter that made other traditions useful mainly when they could be made to point towards his sacramental mysticism. Kabbalah, alchemy and Rosicrucian legend became less themselves and more supporting witnesses in Waite’s private trial, called to confirm the doctrine of interior regeneration.

While depending on ritual, Waite disliked magic as manipulation. Instead, he renamed the acceptable kind as mysticism. A ritual designed to transform the soul is still a ritual making claims about hidden effects.

Waite wrote as though obscurity were proof of profundity. This was not just a stylistic crime; his clouded purple prose protected weak joints in his argument. When every tradition becomes a veil, every gap can be explained as secrecy or a “blind.” The thread survives because the missing evidence has supposedly gone underground.

Waite had a curious habit of believing that the custodians of a tradition rarely understood it. He approached Freemasonry, the Golden Dawn, Rosicrucianism, alchemy, Kabbalah and even the Grail legends with the conviction that their outward forms had become cluttered with error, vanity or empty ceremony, while their true spiritual meaning lay hidden beneath. His instinct was not to discard these traditions but to rescue them from their practitioners.

He saw himself as stripping away accumulated misunderstandings to recover the forgotten current running beneath them. This gave Waite the patience to study neglected texts and obscure rituals with unusual care, but it encouraged a certain intellectual arrogance. Waite was often less interested in what a tradition said about itself than in what he believed it ought to have meant. Whether consciously or not, the pattern resembles someone rescuing himself. Having grown up without the secure lineage he longed for, Waite spent much of his life constructing a better spiritual family and then placing himself among its most authoritative interpreters.

It is lazy to dismiss him, as Crowley did, as a pompous occult antiquarian. Waite had real critical instincts and was behind the unmasking of the Taxil hoax.

For those not in the know, this conspiracy theory was one of the most famous literary and religious frauds of the nineteenth century. Between 1885 and 1897, the French writer Léo Taxil claimed to have converted to Catholicism and published sensational accounts alleging that Freemasonry secretly worshipped Lucifer, practised black magic, and conspired against Christianity. He invented elaborate characters, most notably the supposed former high-ranking Freemason Diana Vaughan, whose dramatic “confessions” captivated the Catholic public.

Waite had exposed the Taxil hoax around alleged Satanic Freemasonry before its perpetrator publicly admitted the fraud. He recognised that occultism needed sources, comparison and suspicion. His problem was not that he believed everything, but he disbelieved selectively.

Waite died in London on 19 May 1942, leaving behind a mountain of books, rituals, translations, correspondence and institutional fragments. For all his faults, few English occultists shaped the modern Western esoteric tradition more profoundly. Even those who rejected his ideas often did so through books he had translated, edited or inspired.

Waite’s grand “secret tradition” thread was not imaginary, but it was not what he thought it was. There is a thread through human magic, if by that we mean the recurring human desire to make terror intelligible, death patterned and suffering meaningful. Waite saw that better than many, but where he went wrong was in believing that this thread had one authorised route, proper theology and a solemn custodian to hold the spool.

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When people think about performing magical rituals, they often get stuck in concepts that are so messed up they end up damaging the work. There is a way of performing a ritual, and it is not what most people think.

Over the years, I have seen many people in the same magical role. Many read the script in a monotone and often mumble. They move around the temple as if they were one of Elon Musk’s robots, occasionally tripping over the furniture. Yet magic has long been entwined with drama and acting, and at a certain level it must be seen as a dramatic performance.

If you look at the history of magic, it fits snugly into theatre, with humans playing the roles of gods, backed by special effects. This carries over into Masonry and into the 19th-century lodge system, which the Golden Dawn used. That sort of acting is not like what we see today and probably would not be a good idea to completely recreate in a modern ritual set-up.

In the Golden Dawn, Florence Farr, who was a notable actress of her day, trained the magicians as if they were trainee actors. But in her time, the stage was much more melodramatic than realistic. Movements would be exaggerated, and what was then normal stage acting would probably be dubbed “chewing the scenery” or “overacting” today.

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In the previous article on the Gospel of Mary, we followed the soul as it passed beyond the powers that had governed it during embodied life. Desire, Ignorance and Wrath tried to stop its ascent by claiming authority over it. We saw that the soul escaped because it realised those powers no longer had any claim over it. They belonged to a lower order, and the soul had already broken free from that world.

The First Revelation of James picks up almost exactly where Mary leaves us but makes the problem more technical. The story gets more complicated when the immigration official at the celestial border asks who you are, where you came from and where you think you are going.

The work survives in two Coptic versions, one in Nag Hammadi Codex V and another, better-preserved version in Codex Tchacos. It was probably composed in the late second or early third century, drawing on material which may be older. The text frames itself as a private teaching from Jesus to James the Just. It describes James as Jesus’s brother, although Jesus says the relationship is spiritual, not physical.

Most of the work consists of conversations between the pair. The first takes place shortly before Jesus is arrested. After his death, Jesus appears again and gives James further instruction, preparing him for his persecution and eventual martyrdom.

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September is one of the most dynamic astrological months of the year, placing relationships, personal growth and important life decisions centre stage. In keeping with the Hermetic principle “As above, so below,” the movements of the heavens are reflected in our lives, making this a month of profound inner and outer transformation. Venus begins the month in graceful Libra, encouraging harmony, fairness and meaningful connections. There is a stronger appreciation of beauty, art and culture, making this an inspiring period for relationships and creative and professional pursuits.

The turning point arrives on 10 September, when three major planetary shifts occur within a single day. Uranus turns retrograde, Venus enters passionate Scorpio and Mercury moves into diplomatic Libra. Together, these changes create a noticeable shift in atmosphere. Conversations become more thoughtful and balanced, and relationships grow deeper and become more emotionally intense, while innovation and rapid progress may temporarily slow as Uranus begins its retrograde journey.

The New Moon in Virgo on 11 September follows immediately afterwards, offering the perfect opportunity to pause, reset and regain focus. It encourages us to simplify our lives, look after our wellbeing and prepare for the changes still to come.

Another significant shift takes place on 14 September, when Lilith enters Capricorn. This placement can bring challenges to outdated structures, restrictive expectations and traditional power dynamics, both within personal relationships and on the wider social stage.

The autumn equinox on 23 September, marked by the Sun’s entry into Libra, turns our attention towards balance, diplomacy and partnership. Just three days later, the powerful Full Moon on the Libra–Aries axis highlights the eternal dance between self and other, and the tension between independence and partnership, reminding us that true growth often emerges through the meeting of opposites.

Love and Relationships

Autumn begins beneath unusually peaceful skies. Until 10 September, Venus in Libra encourages harmony, fairness and emotional balance, making it easier to resolve differences and strengthen existing relationships. Once Venus enters passionate Scorpio, however, the atmosphere changes noticeably. Feelings become deeper, attraction becomes more magnetic and emotional honesty becomes essential. Casual romances may no longer feel fulfilling, as this transit favours commitment over uncertainty and emotional depth over superficial connections.

Work and Career

Jupiter in Leo continues to support ambitious projects and long-term career goals throughout the month. Professional growth, leadership opportunities and international connections remain strongly favoured. With Mercury entering diplomatic Libra on 10 September, communication becomes one of your greatest strengths. Negotiations, presentations and networking all benefit from a more balanced, persuasive approach, making this an excellent time to build valuable professional relationships.

Wellness

The New Moon in Virgo on 11 September offers the perfect opportunity to reset both body and mind. Healthy routines, nutritious food and conscious self-care are well supported under this practical earth sign. As Chiron returns to Aries while retrograde on 18 September, you’re encouraged to reflect on how confidently you assert your needs and direct your energy. Let go of commitments that drain your strength and focus instead on what genuinely supports your physical wellbeing and emotional resilience.

Astrological Alignments:

On 1 September, Jupiter forms a trine with Saturn.

This is a useful day to give long-term career plans practical shape. Jupiter works harmoniously with Saturn, combining optimism with discipline and vision with practical action. The hard work you’ve put in over recent months may now begin to pay off, and plans that once seemed ambitious may start to look more achievable.

However, Mars also squares Saturn today, which can create delays, frustration or resistance if you try to force things too quickly. Patience will be just as important as ambition, so work steadily and avoid wasting energy fighting obstacles that may simply need more time.

On 10 September, Venus moves into Scorpio.

Passion reaches a whole new level. Venus in Scorpio has little interest in superficial attractions; it seeks emotional depth, loyalty and complete honesty. Relationships become more intense, feelings more powerful and emotional bonds stronger. At the same time, jealousy or possessiveness can surface if trust is lacking, making openness more important than ever.

On 10 September, Mercury moves into Libra.

At last, the nit-picking influence of Mercury in Virgo begins to fade. Mercury in Libra brings a more balanced and considerate style of thinking without becoming overly pedantic. Conversations in our private and professional lives can now feel lighter, kinder and far more cooperative; agreements are easier to reach, and even difficult subjects may be handled with tact. There is, however, one small caveat: when everything runs too smoothly, uncomfortable truths can easily be glossed over.

On 10 September, Uranus turns retrograde.

The effects of Uranus are often subtle rather than immediate. As the planet turns retrograde, its themes of change, disruption and innovation may become more reflective, encouraging us to reconsider changes already underway. This is a valuable period for reviewing innovative ideas, reassessing long-term plans and deciding which direction truly deserves your energy.

On 11 September, there is a New Moon in Virgo.

Every New Moon offers the chance for a fresh start, but Virgo reminds us that lasting change begins with daily habits. Slow down, organise your priorities, look after your health and create space for quiet reflection. Small improvements made today can have surprisingly long-lasting effects.

On 14 September, Lilith moves into Capricorn.

Lilith’s rebellious nature meets Capricorn’s world of rules and responsibility, creating an interesting tension. Structures that once felt secure may suddenly seem restrictive, encouraging you to question authority and expectations that no longer reflect who you are. This influence can expose uncomfortable issues around control, ambition and power, while encouraging stronger personal boundaries.

On 16 September, Neptune forms a sextile with Pluto.

This gentle yet powerful long-term aspect works largely in the background, encouraging gradual changes in collective ideals and beliefs. Sensitivity, imagination and intuition combine with Pluto’s transformative energy, inspiring new perspectives on both personal and collective issues. Changes may develop quietly, but their effects can reach far beyond what they first appear.

On 18 September, Chiron returns to Aries while retrograde.

As Chiron moves back into Aries, attention shifts towards identity, self-confidence and the ability to assert your needs. If your energy has felt blocked or your motivation has faded, this transit encourages you to identify what’s holding you back. Healing often begins with recognising where you have been holding yourself back or doubting your right to act.

On 23 September, the Sun moves into Libra.

Balance becomes the defining theme. The Sun’s arrival in Libra, the cardinal air sign, coincides with the autumn equinox and ushers in a new phase centred on relationships, diplomacy and peaceful cooperation. Art and culture move into sharper focus, both personally and professionally, while beauty and fairness are viewed from a broader perspective. The shadow side of Libra season is an excessive desire for harmony. We may become so determined to preserve appearances that we erect a polished façade rather than face the truth. The challenge now is to remain honest without becoming tactless, and diplomatic without avoiding difficult truths.

On 26 September, there is a Full Moon on the Libra–Aries axis.

Primal energies rise to the surface as the tension between self and other, independence and partnership, assertion and compromise comes sharply into focus. The Libra–Aries axis represents the eternal tension between partnership and independence, making this Full Moon emotionally charged, deeply revealing and undeniably sensual. It offers profound insight into who we are within our relationships and where we may have sacrificed too much of ourselves in the name of keeping the peace.

On 28 September, Mars moves into Leo.

Mars feels confident and expressive in fiery Leo, bringing renewed courage, enthusiasm and determination. This is a wonderful period for taking initiative, pursuing ambitious goals and allowing your talents to shine. Confidence grows naturally, making it easier to take decisive action and compete without losing sight of your goals.

On 30 September, Mercury moves into Scorpio.

Communication becomes more probing, perceptive and emotionally charged. Mercury in Scorpio prefers meaningful conversations over polite small talk and has a remarkable ability to uncover what lies beneath the surface. It’s an excellent influence for research and investigation, but be cautious of manipulative people, hidden agendas or offers that seem too good to be true.

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As I have mentioned before, there is a bit of a mess when it comes to the final moon pentagrams, as if the person behind the seals had not thought things through. While there is a limited amount of effort put into the last three seals, this one is supposed to pick up all the work and do shedloads of things.

The final Moon pentacles in the Key of Solomon look as if someone lost the plan halfway through. The earlier seals at least try to keep a recognisable purpose, while the later ones begin collecting functions like a grimoire junk drawer.

This seal suffers from that problem in a particularly obvious way, because its first advertised use sounds tidy. It is supposed to obtain answers in sleep, which places it in the familiar lunar territory of dreams and night-time communication.

Then Golden Dawn founder Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers makes the thing stranger by handing it several jobs at once. He writes: “Figure 53. - The fifth pentacle of the Moon. - “It serveth to have answers in sleep. Its angel Iachadiel serveth unto destruction and loss, as well as unto the destruction of enemies. Thou mayest also call upon him by Abdon and Dalé against all phantoms of the night, and to summon the souls of the departed from Hades.”

That is a large amount of business for a seal which begins as a device for getting replies during sleep. The dream oracle suddenly gains an angel of destruction, protection against night phantoms and a necromantic line to the dead.

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In an era of spiritual burnout, digital distraction, and existential thirst, the burning bush speaks with a prophetic power. Many today unwittingly associate with the thornbush: prickled by deep anxiety, climate dread, social fragmentation, and the sense that material or even conventional religious belief fails to fill the void. The vision assures us that this very restlessness is indeed holy ground. The Divine does not require perfection or spiritual grandeur, only the willingness to turn aside and truly behold. As it states in the Zohar: “Come and Seeתָּא חֲזֵי—Ta Chazi.”

The bush also carries a potent collective message. As Manly P. Hall’s Sons of Flame laboured hand in hand, the burning bush calls modern initiates to transcend division. Whether encountered through Kabbalah, Hermeticism, Gnosticism, Theosophy, Religious contemplation, or a direct Mystical experience, the Flame points towards one transforming reality. It manifests as the Holy Spirit’s tongue of fire, the kundalini serpent, the alchemical ignis, or the holy Shekhinah dwelling in the lowly thorn. To serve the Flame is to become a channel for Truth and Salvation, freeing ourselves and others from inner Egypt, and the bondage of ego disorder and unexamined life.

The burning bush appears in the Bible in Exodus (Shemot) 3:2:3:4:5

“An Angel of the Lord appeared to Him in a Flame of Fire from within the Thorn Bush, and behold, the Thorn Bush was Burning with Fire, but the Thorn Bush was Not being Consumed. So Moses said, “Let me turn now and see this great spectacle why does the thorn bush not burn up? The Lord saw that he had turned to see, and God called to him from within the thorn bush, and He said, “Moses, Moses!” And he said, “Here I am!” And He said, “Do not draw near here. Take your shoes off your feet, because the place upon which you stand is holy soil.” ~

In the sun-scorched wilderness of Horeb, where the veil between worlds grows thin, Moses encountered a mystery that has ignited the imaginations of Mystics, Kabbalists, and Philosophers for millennia. A humble thornbush burned with celestial fire yet was not consumed. From its midst, the voice of the Divine proclaimed the sacred holy name Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh ,אֶהְיֶה אֲשֶׁר אֶהְיֶה,“I AM THAT I AM” and commissioned the reluctant shepherd to become the liberator of his people.

This is no mere historical anecdote. It is a living archetype of spiritual awakening, a symbol that speaks with renewed urgency to the restless souls of our time. Across esoteric traditions, the burning bush stands as the quintessential emblem of divine fire, that primal, unquenchable force which purifies, illuminates, and transforms without destruction. Manly P. Hall, in his profound reflections on the initiates of antiquity, numbered Moses among the great “Sons of Flame.” These masters- Orpheus, Hermes, Krishna, Zoroaster, Abraham, Buddha, Jesus, and others- emerged from the eternal Flame and returned to it, serving a single ideal beyond creed or clan. “They were without creed or clan,” Hall writes; “they served but the one Great Ideal. Hand in hand they labour for Humanity.” The burning bush is their shared emblem: the living fire of spirit descending into Matter.

Éliphas Lévi and later Hermetic writers frequently portrayed Moses as an initiated Egyptian adept who had mastered the great magical magnetic agent (the astral fire). In transcendental magic, for example, Lévi stated: “This secret constitutes the fatal science of Good and Evil. Known to the Egyptian Magi, it is symbolically summarised by the narrative of the Biblical burning bush.” In this interpretation, the burning bush reveals force in its benevolent aspect: a living flame that speaks, directs, and reveals the Divine Name without reducing the vessel to smoke and ash.

Within the Golden Dawn tradition, meticulously preserved and transmitted by Israel Regardie, the Burning Bush appears ritually as the guardian of the Southern Gate, the place of the “Lake of Fire,” linked to the Pillars of Cloud and Flame that guided the Israelites. Here it represents the threshold at which the candidate confronts the non-residual presence of the Divine.

Dion Fortune, in her luminous exposition of the Tree of Life, anchors the bush in the sephirah of Kether, the Crown. Here, the name Ehyeh (“I AM”) blazes forth the pure, unmanifest being before differentiation. Metaphysically, the ‘I AM’ represents the ultimate threshold between the unmanifest and the manifest. The thorn bush, lowly and prickly, becomes the unlikely meeting point of the Ain Soph (the Infinite) and the finite world of Nukva (Malkuth). The fire does not consume because true divinity does not annihilate form; it quickens and eternalises it.

In Avalon of the Heart, Fortune wrote; “Let those who follow the Inner Way study our native tradition and re, discover and re, sanctify its holy places; let them make pilgrimage thereto at the times when the power descends, and spiritual forces are rushing in like the tide up an estuary and ‘every common bush afire with God.”

A.E. Waite, the diligent scholar of the secret tradition, further illuminates the enigmatic alchemical dimension. In The Secret Tradition in Alchemy, he connects the fire of Horeb to the sustaining, living flame that supports the initiate through the desert of material existence, leading toward transmutation and the Philosopher’s Stone. For Waite, the burning bush exemplifies the alchemical mystery wherein the secret fire communicates divine knowledge without destruction. It becomes a symbolic bridge that unites ancient Egyptian initiatory themes with the contemplative depths of Jewish Kabbalah. In his poetic and mystical writings, he invokes the burning bush alongside the prophets as the one that dispels misrule and night, revealing sacred law and order. The alchemical ignis of the bush is thus both personal and cosmic. The transformative fire that refines the soul while preserving its essential form. In the Way of Divine Union, Waite stipulated: “It is Jehovah—YHVH in the burning bush, or a manifestation of that Order.” Eluding to the divine attributes or heavenly emanations through which the infinite, unknowable God manifests in the universe.

The Tree, the Spine, and the Inner Fire

Across modern Hermeticism and the convergence of Eastern and Western esotericism, the burning bush has also been interpreted as a symbol of the inner Tree of Life embodied within all human beings. In this metaphysical understanding, the spinal column becomes the living Tree, while the ascending flame represents the awakening of higher consciousness. Some modern interpretations compare this mysterious ascent to the serpent, the fire of the kundalini rising through the subtle centres to ignite the pineal gland, the seat of inner vision.

At this stage, the burning bush is understood not just as an event in time, but as a living reality within the awakened soul. Moses turning aside to behold the bush symbolises the initiate withdrawing into deeper meditation, directing consciousness inward along the hidden Sephirotic Path of the “backside of the desert” towards the mountain of God. The fire that burns without consuming becomes the awakened spiritual energy that illuminates consciousness while preserving the body as its living temple.

Rabbi Raleigh Resnick offers a poignant psychological and Kabbalistic layer, particularly resonant today. All humans are “trees of the field.” Some stand as majestic royal oaks of spiritual accomplishment; others, like thornbushes, carrying unresolved tension, perpetual irritation, and an unquenchable yearning. For these, and perhaps for many sincere seekers in our fractured age, the inner flame is never fully satisfied.

Spiritual complacency quenches the fire of the tall trees, but the thornbush burns eternally precisely because fulfilment remains elusive. Here, Rabbi Resnick teaches, “God is present in the flame of the thornbush.” The prerequisite for Moses mission was the discovery that the deepest truth of the divine is encountered in the search itself. The moment one declares “I have found God,” one may possess everything except God. This is the Ratzo v’shov (רָצוֹא וָשׁוֹב),the sacred running and returning of the soul, the eternal dance of longing and restraint that keeps the everlasting fire alive.

The Command That Still Echoes True

“Remove your sandals, for the place where you stand is holy soil.” These words are spoken not only to Moses but to every seeker who pauses before the inner fire. The burning bush is not merely a relic of the past; it is a perpetual theophany available to every seeker in the wilderness of meditation, the desert of doubt, and the quiet moments of life when we dare to look within. May we, like Moses, find the courage to approach and stand upon the right hand of God. May our inner thorn bushes burn brightly with a flame that is never consumed. And may that same fire forge us into liberators for our age. Children of the Flame, illuminating the world not through domination, but by the quiet radiance of awakened Hearts. For the Flame that called to Moses still burns within every Soul willing to draw near, tune in, and listen.

L∴ V∴ X∴

Paul Francis Young

“They were the Sons of Flame. From the Flame they came, and to the Flame they have returned. To us they beckon, and bid us join Them…” ~ Manly P. Hall 1901, 1990

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Alice Bailey turned her personal turmoil into metaphysical law and became one of the twentieth century’s most influential occult writers.

Many people use her ideas without reading the books, which may be the safest method. Her phrases now float around modern esotericism, where her Seven Rays get treated as ancient. The New Group of World Servers gained the same borrowed antique glow in later occult circles. Whare Ra students read Bailey during the Mrs Felkin era, which carried her jargon into Golden Dawn territory.

Bailey mined a lot of her material from Theosophy. Helena Petrovna Blavatsky gave her the basic architecture, including some of its racial baggage, and Bailey bolted on Christian mysticism. Science, psychology and astrology made the system more fashionable, while Djwhal Khul, a supposed Tibetan adept, provided supernatural authority.

Bailey sounds plausible and has good ideas, which makes the resulting mess more dangerous than ordinary occult woo. She told students to discipline their thoughts before chasing psychic fireworks, and that remains one of her better pieces of advice, even if she overegged the pudding until some of her students became frightened of having a happy thought.

Her warnings about spiritual vanity are just as sound, especially in occult circles full of self-appointed god kings and queens. She dragged occultism away from private wish-fulfilment and towards service, which partly explains her appeal. People read her because she offers duty and not tricks for spiritual tourists. Things go wrong when she turns symbolic insight into objective knowledge about invisible spiritual machinery.

For those not in the know, Bailey was born Alice La Trobe-Bateman in Manchester in 1880, inside an extremely conservative and wealthy Christian family. She later described a religious youth defined by guilt, anxiety and suicide attempts.

At 15, she said, a mysterious man appeared and told her she had work ahead. He added she needed to develop more self-control, which later became a central demand of her teaching. Bailey identified the visitor as Master Koot Hoomi, already a poster boy in Theosophical literature. If you were going to have a secret master in Theosophy, you had to have had a brush with Koot Hoomi, or you were no one special.

It is tempting to read the experience psychologically as a way of converting private distress into mission. Being selected by a Master gives anxiety and suffering a purpose, while guilt becomes preparation for important work.

Despite Master Koot Hoomi’s message, misery did not leave Bailey. She had an unhappy marriage to Episcopal clergyman Walter Evans, moved to the United States, divorced him and later married Foster Bailey.

Her relationship with Theosophical Society’s leadership deteriorated, which was hardly shocking inside a movement obsessed with hidden authority. In 1919, she claimed telepathic contact of her own with Djwhal Khul, whom she called “the Tibetan.”

The partnership produced two of Bailey’s classics, A Treatise on Cosmic Fire and later A Treatise on White Magic. Bailey insisted that the Tibetan supplied the teaching while she acted as amanuensis, although the resulting books continued to use ideas and structures already familiar within Theosophy.

The name Djwhal Khul should have set off someone’s alarm bells and scared the astral cat. Tibet was effectively closed to most Westerners, while serious Tibetan language scholarship remained the province of a small number of specialists. An exotic-sounding Tibetan name was unlikely to encounter many readers equipped to complain about it.

Djwhal Khul is not a convincing Tibetan name, despite later attempts by Bailey’s followers to make it one. A later reconstruction proposes rgyal khul, pronounced roughly as “Gyal Khül.” The first element suggests victory, while khul points towards a district or region rather than a chap. That gives something like “victorious domain,” which sounds more like a particularly successful town council than a person. The emergency translation arrived long after the name had entered Theosophical literature and people started asking tricky questions such as “why is this lucky district telling us how to live?”

Bailey was unusually explicit about how the material arrived. Describing her contact with the Tibetan, she wrote: “I simply listen and take down the words that I hear and register the thoughts which are dropped one by one into my brain.”

Bailey’s description establishes that she experienced thoughts arriving as though from elsewhere. It does not establish that Djwhal Khul put them there. Mediums, automatic writers, novelists and anyone who has worked seriously with active imagination can experience material which seems to possess an independent life. For an occultist, that makes source-testing more important, not less.

A Treatise on Cosmic Fire shows Bailey’s second great problem when correspondence becomes cosmology. The book treats fire as the basic reality behind creation and the hidden order beneath it. Electric Fire becomes one engine, Solar Fire another piece of cosmic machinery, while Fire by Friction completes the scheme and gives the whole arrangement a scientific BBQ smell.

Correspondence is one of the oldest magical tools when handled with restraint by adults. A magician uses correspondences to organise consciousness inside a coherent ritual environment. Those links may work through symbol or long use inside a living practice with discipline.

Bailey tells us how her machinery was constructed. In The Consciousness of the Atom she admits that “there are certain deductions we can make under the law of analogy.” She moves from the physical atom to humanity, planets and finally the solar system, treating each as progressively larger versions of the same basic pattern.

This is a mistake, as an analogy can suggest a possibility, but resemblance does not establish that the same hidden mechanism exists at every scale. Bailey builds enormous parts of her cosmology by extending the pattern upwards. A human being becomes an atom; a planet is another; the solar system becomes a still larger atom. Eventually the universe resembles a Russian doll.

The number seven receives similar treatment. Because sevenfold patterns occur within existing occult systems, seven becomes the organising principle for almost everything. Rays condition people, nations and planets through evolutionary patterns which nobody can independently audit.

Bailey borrowed the shine of early twentieth-century science to make occult speculation look modern and respectable. A Treatise on Cosmic Fire is saturated with atoms, electricity, etheric substance, energy and vibration, but these terms do not behave as they do in physics. Her “energy” cannot be measured, while “vibration” never troubles itself with something as mundane as frequency. Her occult atoms have only a passing acquaintance with particles studied in laboratories.

A Treatise on White Magic sounds as though it should contain rather more magic than it eventually delivers. Bailey gives the reader 15 rules concerned largely with spiritual discipline, thought, soul contact and service to the divine Plan.

Her “white magician” receives an impression from the soul and shapes it mentally towards spiritual purpose. There is value here for people whose magic consists of emotional improvisation followed by triumphant hindsight, because Bailey at least understood that concentration has to come first.

The system nevertheless contains fewer practical checks than stronger magical traditions with tougher working habits. Structured divination receives little attention, ritual testing still less, and physical ceremonial work is repeatedly subordinated to inward meditation.

Bailey gives the game away when discussing magical rules in A Treatise on Cosmic Fire. She says their “terminology is in the nature of a blind” which reveals truth to those possessing the clue while bewildering students who are not ready.

Paul Foster Case liked to drop supposed blinds into his Builders of the Adytum course. It was only when the head of the Order told me that even he had never figured out what some of them were that I realised how convenient the idea could become. Nobody needed to explain an obscurity if failure to understand it proved that you had not found the hidden key. Difficulty becomes evidence of profundity instead of a reason to ask whether the explanation is much chop.

There is practical magical material in Bailey, including thought-form construction, visualisation and manipulation of what she calls energies. Compared with the Golden Dawn, however, she stripped away much of the old ritual embodiment and texture. Golden Dawn symbols were experienced through sound, movement and physical action inside a worked ritual environment.

Bailey’s magic takes place mostly in the head, which encourages intellectual inflation. A student can master cosmic classifications without producing much of a practical result.

Bailey taught that advanced Masters guide human evolution according to a divine Plan. Disciples are expected to serve that Plan without interference from private ambition or personal judgement.

In theory, this could restrain egotism and stop occult students worshipping themselves for once. In practice, the Plan is known through people claiming contact with hidden supervisors and cosmic emails.

Bailey’s treatment of glamour becomes more interesting when we look at how Djwhal Khul supposedly addressed individual disciples. In one instruction, the disciple is warned against acting on the “reasoning of the lower, concrete mind” instead of impulses supposedly carrying the hallmark of the soul.

That sounds harmless until the disciple must decide whether an objection comes from genuine perception or from the lower personality. Meanwhile, the teacher claims access to the soul-level perspective by which the distinction is judged.

Elsewhere, Djwhal Khul says that “Glamour, when it is of such a definite kind, is most convincing and of a seeming reality.” That is psychologically perceptive because delusion feels convincing from the inside. Once the system itself decides what counts as glamour, however, conviction against the teaching can become further evidence that the student remains trapped inside it.

Bailey’s record as a prophet is less impressive when the predictions are allowed to age. After Hiroshima, Djwhal Khul announced on 9 August 1945 that the release of atomic energy meant “my prophecy has been justified.” The earlier prediction had said that scientists would help usher in the new era, which gave it enough room to accommodate almost any important scientific discovery. Having claimed the victory, Bailey predicted that atomic energy would doom capitalism, make employment meaningless and provide the means to solve humanity’s material problems.

After 80 years, capitalism has survived the spiritual shock remarkably well; unemployment still manages to mean something, and nuclear power has failed to turn humanity into a civilisation of spiritually creative people wondering what to do with all their leisure.

Her Externalisation of the Hierarchy is even slipperier. Bailey wrote that enormous changes would continue until 2025, when a supposedly once-a-century “General Assembly of the Hierarchy” would probably decide the date for the first stage of the Masters appearing openly in the world. Elsewhere she prepared disciples for the reappearance of Christ while carefully stating, “I must refuse to foretell what will happen.”

It was probably just as well, as by 2026, no army of Masters had emerged from its astral offices, but the way the prediction has been constructed so that this hardly matters. Bailey did not say the Hierarchy must appear in 2025; she said its invisible members would invisibly meet and pencil in a date for doing so later, so this might have happened, but the riff-raff down the spiritual food chain might never know.

Human nature becomes considerably less abstract when Bailey reaches race and politics. The most indefensible part of her system is its racial teaching, inherited partly from Theosophical theories about root races and collective karma.

Bailey’s defenders sometimes soften this material by arguing that Theosophical races describe enormous occult epochs instead of ordinary biological categories. Her writing makes that defence difficult. Esoteric Psychology explicitly speaks of “our particular racial ray, the ray that determines the Aryan race.” Bailey repeatedly connects these categories with historical peoples and supposed stages of human development.

In Problems of Humanity, after discussing persecution and separateness, Bailey states that “for the perpetuation of the separation the Jews are largely responsible.” This appears in a work which simultaneously condemns antisemitism and Nazi persecution. Bailey could oppose the persecution of Jews while preserving a theory which attributed part of the cause to supposedly inherent “Jewish characteristics.”

In Esoteric Healing, Bailey associates humanity with successive Lemurian, Atlantean and Aryan stages before stating things like “Negroes are especially prone to infectious epidemics.” This was presented as esoteric knowledge about race, disease and evolutionary type.

That creates an awkward test for the Masters. If Djwhal Khul and the Hierarchy possessed knowledge transcending ordinary human culture, why did their racial anthropology resemble theories circulating in European occultism and imperial society during Bailey’s lifetime? An ageless Tibetan adept had apparently mastered the mysteries of cosmic evolution but remained strangely vulnerable to the anthropology department of the British Empire.

Bailey’s split between soul and psyche creates another difficulty because ordinary emotion becomes suspect. Anger stops being something to understand and becomes astral disturbance. Grief can be hurried into karma, while desire is dismissed as lower nature instead of being investigated.

In Bailey’s system, the student can learn detachment as reasonable dissociation and repression. There is not much integration in her approach. Hers is the cold-baths-and-jogging-before-dawn school of repressing the lower self until it stops making a fuss.

One person I met who had been involved in her system for years eventually found himself so emotionally repressed that he had to do considerable work simply to allow himself to feel again. He was a cracking formal ritualist but could never feel much joy from the process.

That makes Bailey’s background difficult to ignore. Her childhood religion emphasised self-control, guilt, purification, service and suspicion of desire. Her mature occult system still demanded self-control, purification and service, while the troublesome lower personality replaced the old sinful nature. The vocabulary changed, but the problem was still there.

Modern depth psychology would ask what all that serenity had locked away for later. Resentment, probably, and the ordinary human wish to be loved.

Taken literally, Bailey’s system becomes a cosmic civil service staffed by unverifiable superiors and watched over by suspicion from above. Its laws borrow the tone of science, while its racial ideas belong too clearly to the period which produced them.

What Bailey never solved was authority, and Djwhal Khul solved it for her with suspicious convenience.

Boffins have found ancient human traces in modern DNA, giving ancestor work an explanation for some weirdness and creating a few stranger magical problems.

A preprint with the catchy title “Recovering Signatures of Archaic Introgression Using Ancestral Recombination Graphs” introduces TRACE, a method for reconstructing ancestry hidden across modern human genomes. TRACE won’t play back an ancestor’s voice, but it proves vanished lineages still dictate how our bodies function.

Researchers Yulin Zhang, Arjun Biddanda, Sarah A. Johnson, Colm O’Dushlaine and Priya Moorjani found familiar Neanderthal and Denisovan signals, along with stranger fragments from populations with no sequenced bones and no tidy species label. Ghost ancestry accounted for an average of between 0.49 and 1.1 per cent across the populations studied. It appeared to come from a population that split from the lineage leading to modern humans hundreds of thousands of years ago.

The study does not confirm magical ancestor contact and says nothing about spirits, survival after death or ritual consciousness. It shows that ancestry is physically present in ways that cannot be reconstructed from family records, and that we carry genetic traces of these long-vanished populations.

That makes modern ancestor work look a bit limited when it stops at grandparents and a candlelit photograph routine.

The dead may be waiting beyond the visible world, assuming they are waiting anywhere at all. They may be built into our physical bodies, copied through generations and contributing to its structure.

Nobody can isolate the precise psychological effect of these unidentified fragments. However, they belong to the body that shapes perception, stress responses, temperament and the possible ways someone experiences the world.

The interesting part for a magician is that these lost people have not gone. They are still here, scattered in fragments through our bodies. A population can vanish from history and archaeology yet continue inside its descendants. We carry ancestors whose names are gone, and whose stories were forgotten before they were written down. Their bones may have turned to dust, but something of them is still alive.

Unfortunately, genes do not preserve an ancestor’s private memories or preferred method of cooking a mammoth. Nothing in the TRACE study suggests that a genome functions as a spiritual answering machine.

Yet DNA helps to build the organism that experiences the world, influencing brain development and the range of possible responses available to us. The body can only remember through structure.

Magical traditions have always suspected something similar. Blood and bone were treated as carriers of lineage long before anyone knew about chromosomes. Family spirits are approached through inherited objects, burial places and bodily substances.

These practices are usually explained through sympathy and the belief that a thing once connected remains connected. Genetics provides a practical explanation of why part of the ancestor is still here, copied imperfectly through generations, shuffled with countless other lives and embedded in the magician who calls.

Austin Osman Spare called this “atavistic resurgence”, which is the idea that magic can awaken older forms of consciousness buried beneath the civilised mind. He was writing in occult metaphors, but genetics gives it an unexpectedly physical dimension. The conscious self is just the newest layer of paint on ancient wood.

Ritual can disturb that arrangement, making room for buried habits and instincts to rise in shapes the magician can recognise. An ancestral figure may not be a literal visitor every time. It may be the psyche giving a face to something inherited and old enough to feel like someone else.

This could explain why ancestor contact is fragmentary and emotionally powerful. The dead usually appear through dreams, bodily sensations, images and words that feel older than the conscious mind.

Some visions may be spirits, while others may be masks the psyche creates to give inherited material a visible and workable form.

A magician trying to contact such ancestors will have no names to call, stories to follow or images to work from. Anything that appears in vision will be mixed with expectation and whatever television the person happened to watch the week before.

It is safer to begin with the body before imagination takes over. Turn the attention inward and notice whether breathing or some unfamiliar impulse begins to change.

This gives the magician an honest starting point grounded in experience. The discipline lies in letting imagination speak without treating every theatrical detail as truth. Imagination under supervision remains one of the magician’s finest tools.

An ancestor cooked up by the psyche is not automatically useless. It may still show the magician what has been avoided or obeyed for years. But it might also be coloured by some ancient ancestor who had the same issues. If an ancient Roman ancestor had similar emotional problems, a pathworking dealing with those issues might inexplicably clothe itself in Roman imagery. Normally this could be interpreted as a “past life” experience. It may instead be imagination finding ancient inherited material and building a story around it, giving the pathworking an emotional force that feels older than the conscious personality.

This is useful as such a pathworking could expose dodged fears and habits. Judge it by what it shows, changes and whether its message survives the grubby clarity of the following morning.

This is why the presence felt at an altar rarely fits the memory of a single relative, as we inherit nervous systems shaped by old crises. TRACE exposes a physical archive in the blood, vastly older than surnames or national myths. Every person may carry fragments from human groups whose cultures are gone, whose gods are unreachable and whose languages died.

TRACE makes racial purity fantasies look increasingly ridiculous. Human populations have been splitting, mixing, and recombining for hundreds of thousands of years. Modern racial categories appeared unimaginably late in that process. Beneath them lies a tangled inheritance shared across populations whose identities disappeared long before history began making any altar built on “pure blood” pure delusion. If DNA predates Chinese, Aryan and Polynesian ancestry to a common point (presumably in Africa), then human memory returns to a central library that existed long before “races” divided.

Experiment

One useful practice is to place no human image on the altar. Use a small bowl of earth, and a strand of your hair, blood or spit. Address the unknown contributors to your body without pretending that you know who they were. Don’t ask for a grand revelation, just invite whatever within your inherited nature supports survival, adaptation and clear perception to become conscious.

Record any dreams, physical responses and changes in behaviour for several weeks. Look for recurring material. Imagining an ancestor who delivers magnificent speeches but leaves you more frightened, vain or dependent can be dismissed as a piece of psychic theatre.

Don’t assume a dead father speaking at the altar is actually him. You could be hearing an external ghost, a childhood memory playing tricks, or just your inherited temper acting up. Usually, it’s all three fighting for the spotlight.

Human consciousness was never obliged to respect the categories invented by occultists or scientists. Ritual brings systems into contact, and the resulting figure may contain parts from several levels at once.

For the magician, this requires a broader definition of necromancy. Contact with the dead may include contact with the things the dead left behind. So it is possible that an inherited fear can seem like a haunting, and a family neurosis can possess the living. This is not the same rubbish as a “family curse”, which is a modern marketing technique to squeeze cash out of the terminally student. If there really was a long-term curse that could be passed on, it would come through the DNA, and it could have happened for hundreds of thousands of years. There would not be just one of them either; it is more likely to be thousands of them that would affect everyone in that family line.

On the plus side, qualities like endurance may arrive from people from pre-history. When ritual or imagination gives these forces a face and voice, the magician can begin a relationship with what was previously unconscious.

Ancestor work becomes useful when it allows us to recognise what has reached us, accept its presence and decide what deserves to continue. We honour the dead most intelligently by refusing to repeat everything they did.

The figure at the altar could be an external spirit, or the genome muttering in dream language through the nervous system it helped build.

Ritual or pathworkings may open a border between the living body and whatever survives without one. Nobody has built an instrument capable of pulling those strands apart cleanly. Better to admit the gap than fill it with a doctrine that only looks solid in candlelight.

The new genetics tells us that each person is a temporary gathering of innumerable lives, including some that science can detect but cannot name.

Calling the ancestors might reach across the veil, or it might just sink into a body already packed with old ghosts that won’t shut up. That voice could be your dead aunt, your own DNA, or the place where blood, bone and spirit start talking using the same language.

Kleos, or κλέος, was Homer’s ancient battery pack for immortality, and magicians still play with the same current today.

The schoolbook gloss calls kleos fame, or what people say about you, but Homeric society gave it real power. A person did not fully vanish while living mouths and ritual memory still carried their name. Kleos turned mortal action into a signal that could survive mortality, which made it a tempting immortality contract for Achilles. The hero gained kleos by living in a way that people could not easily stop repeating.

The Greek spelling is κλέος, and its isopsephic value is 325:

κ (20) +

λ (30) +

έ (5) +

ο (70) +

ς (200) = 325.

The value 325 carries its own explicit magic when read against the Greek lexicon. It shares its total with (basilikē), meaning “sovereign” or “royal,” reinforcing the commanding, noble force of Leo that sits at the head of the word’s geomantic map. Equally telling, 325 is the isopsephic sum of (diakaēs), a term for the “white-hot,” “consuming,” or “burning through.” Kleos is not a static portrait preserved in amber; it is a basilikē diakaēs—a sovereign, white-hot current that burns away the temporary noise of personality to leave a signal bright enough to outlast the grave.

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In Behind the Mask, I used one of Kim Krans’s archetype cards to look past divination and into the mechanisms behind it. The Mask became a way of investigating the face we had learned to show the world, what made it necessary, and what part of us had been traded away to maintain it.

I keep coming back to inner transformation because years of practice have taught me that there is little point trying to change the material world through magic while leaving ourselves intact. There is a particular arrogance in believing that reality can be bent while the magician remains exactly as petty and ego-driven as before. Nothing is hammered into change until something in us changes first. People think that rare books, obscure terminology and pentacles, or experiments with exotic alternative beliefs will provide the secret recipe for hacking the order of things; but without recognising what rules us unconsciously and undergoing some break, maturation or realignment within ourselves, these practices might produce superficial effects, like spraying cheap perfume on a pile of shit.

This deck doesn’t follow a sequential order. It offers 78 cards, and working through them one at a time gives each image space to work more deeply and press on a different part of the psyche. That makes the deck a useful counterweight to the intellectual study of texts, which can grow elaborate enough to impress the mind without making the slightest difference to what is happening within us.

Alongside Gnostic texts, magical theory and historical material, there must be some movement inward. It is possible to acquire a great deal of theoretical knowledge while remaining at the mercy of our automatic responses. A twat that has learned the word Anagogē is still a twat.

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Occultism has an uneasy relationship with time. One sort of magician looks backwards and imagines a lost age when initiates possessed perfect knowledge, society reflected divine order, and nobody had invented TikTok. Another looks forward and assumes that inherited traditions are cultural debris which can be rewritten whenever they become inconvenient. Both approaches can produce interesting work, but they can also become elaborate methods for replacing reality with fantasy or propping up politics.

The first tendency reaches its most sophisticated expression in the Traditionalist school, particularly associated with René Guénon and Julius Evola. The second might loosely be called progressive, modernist or post-traditional occultism. It emphasises individual experience and allows inherited magical systems to be adapted or reconstructed for contemporary life.

Neither category covers everyone because human beings remain resistant to categorisation. More importantly, ordinary respect for magical tradition should never be confused with Traditionalism.

Traditionalism is a specific intellectual movement. Guénon argued that authentic religions and initiatory systems preserve fragments of a primordial metaphysical Tradition standing above particular historical cultures. Modern civilisation, in his view, was declining because it had lost contact with these transcendent principles. Even super conservative bodies like the Roman Catholic Church had lost their power because they surrendered too much to modernism. The best-known academic historian of Guénonian Traditionalism as a movement, Mark Sedgwick, describes Traditionalism in terms of its rejection of modernity and appeal to sacred, perennial truth. Apparently, Sedgwick does not see himself as a Traditionalist.

Ironically, Guénon himself would probably have objected to being described as an occultist. He was ferociously critical of contemporary occultism, particularly Theosophy, which he regarded as a counterfeit spirituality. His concern was legitimate transmission, initiation and metaphysical knowledge, not collecting unusual experiences.

Guénon asks questions that modern occultism often avoids. Where does a tradition obtain its authority? What exactly is transmitted during initiation? Can someone invent an initiation for themselves? Does an esoteric system contain an objective metaphysics, or merely provide symbolic material for personal exploration?

Those remain excellent questions even when Guénon’s answers can be deeply unpleasant.

The invention of the perfect past

The central Traditionalist idea depends upon decline. Humanity once possessed a fuller understanding of spiritual reality and gradually lost it. Existing religions and initiatory organisations supposedly preserve remnants of that wisdom, making history a movement away from sacred order.

This provides Traditionalism with one of its great attractions: certainty. The modern world is obviously disordered, with consumer capitalism reducing almost everything to price. Political culture resembles several drunks shouting at each other across a kebab shop, and technology gives humanity unprecedented access to information while apparently doing little to improve wisdom. Traditionalism looks at all this and says that something fundamental has been lost.

The problem comes when a reasonable criticism of modernity becomes a mythology about the past. There has never been a historical civilisation in which humanity lived universally according to some perfect metaphysical Tradition. Ancient societies produced remarkable philosophy and sophisticated magical systems, but they were still inhabited by ordinary human beings behaving with their usual mixture of stupidity and self-interest. The Golden Age looks considerably less golden once history is allowed into the room.

Traditionalists often compress enormous periods of history into an imagined traditional world. Cultures as different as ancient India and medieval Christianity become expressions of the same underlying sacred order. Their obvious differences can then be explained as local manifestations of transcendent principles.

That is metaphysically possible, but it cannot be demonstrated historically.

The danger is that the imagined primordial Tradition becomes unfalsifiable. When historical evidence agrees with the theory, it confirms Tradition. When the evidence disagrees, the surviving historical material is declared decadent, corrupted or incomplete.

Evola takes Tradition into politics

The political problem becomes much clearer with Julius Evola, whom we covered in detail here.

Guénon’s writings certainly contain political implications, particularly through their suspicion of egalitarianism and modern individualism, but his main concern remained metaphysical and religious. He eventually settled in Cairo, became a Muslim and concentrated increasingly upon spiritual questions. Sedgwick argues that Guénon’s Traditionalism was primarily religious with political implications, while Evola made politics much more central to the project.

Evola transformed Traditionalism into something that an incel could admire from their mum’s basement. His ideal society was covered in oil, hierarchical, aristocratic, heroic and butch. He admired warrior elites, caste, imperial authority and spiritual rank. Anything that smacked of democracy and egalitarianism appeared to him symptoms of degeneration. Oxford scholarship on Evola describes Guénon’s concept of Tradition as a major source for Evola’s subsequent political and racial ideas.

Evola considered Fascism insufficiently radical and cultivated contacts within Mussolini’s Italy and Nazi Germany while developing his own racial theories. After the war, his writings became enormously influential within sections of the Italian radical right, providing an intellectual bridge between interwar Fascism and later movements.

This explains why Traditionalist occultism has such a persistent gravitational pull towards the far right.

This is because Traditionalism assumes that spiritual reality is hierarchical. Some states of being are higher than others, some forms of knowledge are superior, and genuine initiation cannot simply be democratised. None of that logically requires authoritarian politics, but the jump from spiritual hierarchy to social hierarchy is remarkably easy to make.

Once society is imagined as a reflection of cosmic order, institutions based on inherited rank begin to acquire metaphysical significance. Political inequality can then be presented as something more sacred than ordinary privilege.

Traditionalism insists that civilisation is in decline. It imagines a lost age when society supposedly possessed a clearer sense of purpose and authority. Modernity then becomes the long disaster which broke that order apart, with each Traditionalist free to nominate whichever political or social development supposedly fucked everything up.

Modern liberal democracy rests upon the political equality of citizens, however enthusiastically governments sometimes work to disguise the fact. Traditionalist metaphysics is comfortable with difference, rank and qualitative inequality. Evola carried this into explicitly aristocratic political thinking.

Traditionalists oppose many features associated with modernity because they believe these sever people from inherited forms and spiritual authority. The radical right attacks much of the same territory, although frequently for completely different reasons. The overlap makes an alliance tempting, and Traditionalist ideas consequently continue to appear within sections of the European, Russian and American far right.

None of this means that every reader of Guénon becomes a Fascist after chapter three. Many Traditionalists concentrate upon religion, metaphysics or spiritual practice.

Traditionalism also tends to assume that spiritual development follows a recognisable sequence, moving from ordinary religion towards initiation and eventually a direct perception of reality. This may describe the internal logic of some schools, but it is difficult to treat it as a universal map. Traditions understand spiritual development differently, and some do not recognise these stages at all. When one model is declared the natural shape of the Path, doctrine replaces observation.

The same caution applies to lineage and continuity: a tradition can preserve valuable methods, but survival does not prove antiquity or truth. Occult history contains too many reconstructed pedigrees and invented authorities to pretend otherwise.

Spiritual continuity becomes dangerous when it is extended into a demand for social continuity. When an esoteric order is assumed to require a corresponding outer order, metaphysics turns into politics. Hierarchy within an initiatory system then becomes evidence for hierarchy in society, while historical change is interpreted as decline from a supposedly more integrated past. You will find a dickhead who has high Martinist degrees believing his own bullshit and thinking they would make a great world ruler if only the woke people got out of the way.

This is one reason Traditionalism so easily drifts towards the political right. The mistake lies in assuming that the structure of a magical school provides a blueprint for civilisation.

The fantasy at the other end

The obvious reaction is to run towards the opposite camp, where a different problem waits.

Progressive occultism rejects fixed tradition as the final authority. Magical systems are treated as historical constructions which can be adapted, combined or abandoned when their assumptions no longer appear useful. Personal experience carries greater weight, while inherited ideas about social organisation or spiritual authority become open to challenge. Gods can become archetypes, spirits can become psychological complexes, and ritual can become a technology for altered consciousness.

There is some truth in this worldview. Historical occult traditions were constructed, and almost all borrowed, reinvented and occasionally fabricated material. Pretending that every magical instruction descended intact from Atlantis saves the magician from having to research anything.

Modern occultism corrected genuine weaknesses in older systems. Psychology provided better ways to examine how imagination and projection might shape magical experience, while historical research exposed supposedly ancient lineages as much later inventions. Traditions once restricted by class or gender also became available to people who earlier institutions would have excluded.

There is another advantage to this flexibility. Institutions can preserve mistakes for centuries simply because authority protects them from inspection. Individual experience can therefore provide an important corrective when traditional explanations fail to match what practitioners encounter. A living magical system must remain capable of learning from experience, or it becomes little more than ceremonial archaeology.

Unfortunately, progressive occultism can create an imaginary history of its own.

Instead of fantasising about a perfect past, it sometimes rewrites the past until ancient people miraculously acquire twenty-first-century opinions. Historical gods become therapeutic metaphors, and initiations become statements of personal identity. Difficult texts are then stripped of anything which clashes with current morality.

Modernity can become its own unquestionable revelation. It becomes ok for untrained people to follow their “true will” by peddling occult tat on Etsy or to evaluate a magician only by their material success.

In the end, personal experience becomes sufficient evidence for almost anything. If a ritual feels empowering, it is assumed to be magically effective. If an interpretation feels meaningful, it becomes historically legitimate. Tradition converts into an occult dressing-up box from which symbols can be removed without understanding the system which gave them their function.

The Traditionalist says the ancestors possessed the complete truth. The extreme progressive says the ancestors can safely be corrected by someone who has watched three YouTube videos.

Both positions require remarkable, confident stupidity.

Two different fantasies

The Traditionalist fantasy is a Golden Age. Somewhere behind recorded history lies a complete sacred order from which authentic spiritual traditions descend. Modernity represents fragmentation and decay, so the magician must recover what has been lost.

The progressive fantasy is a blank slate. Traditions are human constructions and can therefore be reconstructed according to contemporary assumptions. Progress becomes the implied direction of history, with the present enjoying the flattering position of judge over the past.

Neither picture adequately describes how occult traditions or spirituality develop. Traditions survive because they change, but they remain recognisable because something continues through those changes.

Every successful magical system must have a balance between inheritance and innovation. Without inheritance, a tradition loses its accumulated experience, blocks innovation, and becomes a museum exhibit guarded by people arguing about whether a 19th-century mistranslation must remain compulsory because Mathers typed it.

The Golden Dawn was already a middle path.

The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn emerged during the late nineteenth-century occult revival. Its creators fused several streams of Western esotericism into an organised initiatory structure. Rosicrucian and Masonic frameworks provided much of the architecture, while other magical material was woven through the grades. The result was one of the most influential synthetic systems in modern Western occultism.

The Golden Dawn was never preserving an intact ancient system. Its founders inherited material and then rearranged it, expanded it and created connections which earlier magicians had never made. The resulting structure was extraordinarily innovative. Modern scholarship consequently treats the Golden Dawn as part of the development of modern occultism rather than the survival of an untouched ancient tradition.

At the same time, the Order did not treat tradition as meaningless.

Its rituals depended upon inherited symbolism, so Hebrew divine names were not replaced because somebody preferred dolphins. Grades followed a structured cosmology, and students were expected to understand established magical techniques before improvising. Progression through the system required disciplined study.

The Golden Dawn complicates the assumption that hierarchy must produce reactionary politics. It possessed an elaborate initiatory hierarchy while admitting women on substantially equal terms with men, something striking for a Victorian organisation. Women, including Florence Farr, Annie Horniman, and Moina Mathers, became important figures within the Order. Scholarship on nineteenth-century Freemasonry and occultism specifically notes the Golden Dawn’s unusually equal treatment of female members. Traditionalists such as Evola saw women as inconsequential breeding machines who were supposed to cook and clean and be forgotten about.

Its members ranged politically from pro-Nazi figures such as Maud Gonne and the authoritarian sympathies of W. B. Yeats to liberals such as Annie Horniman and Florence Farr.

This is probably the distinction Traditionalism most dangerously forgets. A magical hierarchy describes stages of consciousness, initiation or responsibility within a particular system, but it tells us very little about whether France needs a King.

Likewise, the Golden Dawn’s willingness to innovate did not mean that every personal revelation became part of the system. Magical experimentation occurred inside an inherited symbolic framework.

The Order also indulged in historical fantasy. Its Continental adepts and Secret Chiefs provided exactly the sort of mythic authority occult organisations have always found irresistible. The Golden Dawn was hardly a perfect institution, and once ordinary human ambition entered the machinery, disputes became theatrical. Before long, members were denouncing one another and behaving as though control of an occult temple were a matter of national survival. Its achievement survives independently of those claims.

The system works as a synthesis because its creators treated tradition as material to be understood and developed. They were neither archaeological reconstructionists attempting to live in the fifteenth century nor spiritual consumers assembling a personal cosmology.

A living tradition

Occultists would be better served by something resembling critical tradition.

The past deserves respect because practitioners have spent centuries discovering and refining methods. Old techniques should not be discarded simply because they are old. Symbols accumulate meaning through repeated use, while initiatory structures can transmit experiences which would otherwise have to be rediscovered from scratch.

But a manuscript can be ancient and wrong, and a teaching can possess a pedigree and still be as useless as a chocolate teapot. A traditional practice may turn out to have been invented in 1897. Historical research should be allowed to discover this without being accused of destroying the Mysteries.

However, new ideas deserve consideration because circumstances change and knowledge develops. Modern research can reveal how magical practices affect the mind, how traditions evolved and where earlier occultists misunderstood their own sources.

Novelty still needs testing.

The magician occupies a problematic position between custodian and experimenter. Something valuable has been inherited, yet this creates a responsibility to understand it rather than preserve it.

Traditionalism turns toxic when reverence for the past develops into longing for an imaginary sacred civilisation and then into a political programme for recreating its supposed hierarchy. Progressive occultism becomes equally ridiculous when liberation from the past means that history and symbolism can be rewritten according to whatever currently feels agreeable.

Both extremes offer an escape from the present, whether by dreaming of a Golden Age that never existed or by imagining a blank future unconstrained by anything inherited. Magic is more complex.

The Golden Dawn, at its best, points to a better answer. Tradition should be inherited, studied and practised until its logic becomes clear; after that, what works can be preserved, what fails can be corrected, and what is discovered can be added to the stream. The occultist’s responsibility is to pass on something alive, not a respectable corpse.

Tradition gives occultism a memory, but memory becomes useless when it prevents anything new from happening. The magician has to respect what came before without becoming its servant, because sometimes the dead magicians were talking complete bollocks.

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Concealed within this pentacle is an important occult secret which is often overlooked by modern magicians. Despite all the paranoia about how a magical attack is conducted, the science behind it is ignored. It is assumed that if you want to curse someone, you pick a demon or spirit from your planetary Filofax and that will do all the work.

However, a real psychic attack focuses only on the moon and its ability to reflect other planetary powers back to Earth. Without the moon, the power of a Saturn curse would remain on the abstract level and not have a physical effect. You might get a target suffering from Saturnian melancholy, but you are unlikely to get the sort of constriction that a physical manifestation of the moon would bring.

The moon rules the astral, and it is here that the demons, shells of the dead, or other nasties live and move and have their being. So, most magical protection involves the astral forces, as that is where the worst aspects of an attack are going to come from. The Golden Dawn’s Lesser Ritual of the Pentagram, which is used by the majority of modern magicians, is so popular because it provides protection at this level, meaning that people can see its effects

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Dion Fortune’s greatest weakness grew directly from one of her greatest strengths: an extraordinary ability to turn invisible forces into vivid images, personalities, and dramatic events. This talent made her a powerful ritual magician, an influential teacher and one of the few occult novelists whose fictional magic occasionally feels as though it might work. Unfortunately, she became increasingly unable to distinguish between a useful magical story and an event which had happened.

Her imagination did more than illustrate magical ideas, because it reorganised memories, absorbed other people’s experiences and transformed personal disagreements into episodes from a secret occult war. Cats became astral weapons, cracked doors became physical evidence of magical combat, and inherited Golden Dawn lore returned as incidents from Fortune’s own life. By the end of her life, Atlantis had acquired temples, priesthoods, political factions and architectural details, with the special twist that Fortune had led its colonists after the whole lot sank.

Fortune was not a fraud and believed most of what she wrote about herself. Her failure lay in allowing imagination to replace evidence whenever an experience offered a satisfying story.

The Making of Dion Fortune

Dion Fortune was born Violet Mary Firth in Llandudno on 6 December 1890, into a prosperous English family. Her magical name came from the family motto Deo, non fortuna, meaning “by God, not chance.” She became involved in psychology, mediumship, Theosophy and ceremonial magic before joining the Alpha et Omega, a surviving Golden Dawn branch, during 1919. Her teachers and associates included Theodore Moriarty, Maiya Curtis-Webb and J. W. Brodie-Innes, each of whom influenced a different part of her developing system. She later founded the organisation which became the Fraternity, and eventually the Society, of the Inner Light before dying from leukaemia during January 1946.

Her achievement was considerable, because she preserved practical Qabalah while much of British occultism dissolved into Theosophical platitudes, spiritualist theatrics and elderly gentlemen quarrelling over the authentic Secret Chiefs. The Mystical Qabalah remains one of the clearest introductions to the subject because Fortune understood how symbols behaved within consciousness. She could explain a Sephirah as a living field of experience instead of another box on an increasingly complicated diagram.

Fortune also understood ritual construction, group organisation and the difficult business of creating a coherent magical atmosphere. Her work encouraged the later revival of goddess spirituality and helped restore myth as a practical instrument within modern occultism. Magic consumed almost every part of her life through seasonal rituals, Egyptian and Arthurian symbolism, trance communication and the imaginative construction of inner-plane temples.

Imagination remains essential to magic because it gives form to forces which cannot otherwise be perceived or directed. Unfortunately, imagination also produces convincing rubbish with an efficiency that should make every magician twitch at the thought of personal revelation.” A magician must separate symbolic perception from personal projection, yet Fortune’s autobiographical stories show how often she failed to apply her own discipline.

The Unreliable Witness of Psychic Self-Defence

The worst evidence appears in Psychic Self-Defence, where Fortune insists that she avoided second-hand accounts and relied upon cases within her personal experience. She dismisses stories about somebody whose friend knew somebody who once saw a ghost, while sensibly declaring that witnesses must be cross-examined. The remainder of the book demonstrates how little cross-examination Fortune’s own stories received once they had developed a suitable atmosphere.

Fortune repeatedly warns that alleged psychic attacks are rare and that illness, fraud, suggestion and psychological disturbance should be excluded before occult explanations are considered. One memorable obsession turns out to be constipation and is successfully exorcised with castor oil, which remains among the book’s more reliable banishings. She also recommends consulting qualified doctors whenever physical symptoms are present, advice which inexperienced magicians should probably embroider onto their robes.

Then the storyteller takes over again, improving each account until inexperienced readers are given nightmares when they should have received practical instruction. I was one of those readers, which is why I know how easily Fortune could turn every unexplained noise into evidence that something unpleasant had arrived from the astral plane.

The Geomantic Drain Demon

Fortune recounts experimenting with geomancy while insufficiently trained, although the exercise formed part of her Golden Dawn work. As Fortune tells it, every form of divination begins by evoking the genius which governs its operation. She claimed that geomantic genii were spiritually inferior and that drawing the figures on paper had offended them because wet sand should have been used. A terrible smell of drains then filled the room and disappeared only after Fortune performed a banishing ritual. She regarded the smell as objective proof that her experiment had invoked something unpleasant from the lower astral regions.

Almost every technical claim in this little yarn is wrong, although Fortune should have known what the exercise required. Geomancy certainly has historical associations with earth and sand, while its Arabic name, ʿilm al-raml, means the science of the sand. Medieval European authorities nevertheless accepted parchment or paper, while the invocation of a presiding spirit belonged specifically to the Golden Dawn approach. The figures are created from random lines of points before being reduced and judged through their relationships within the shield and house charts. Wet sand had not been standard European practice for centuries, and earlier geomancers somehow completed their work without reporting sewer elementals.

The story shows Fortune’s issues: either she knew just enough geomancy to frighten herself and turned that into a lesson for everyone else, or she made it up. Giving her the benefit of the doubt, once the smell appeared, she used her expectations to explain it, while the gaps in her knowledge became proof that geomancy concealed dangers, she had somehow uncovered.

The Plague of Cats

Fortune claimed that her household became surrounded by black cats after she had offended Moina Mathers. The animals crowded neighbouring doorsteps, appeared near her associates’ workplaces and filled the surrounding area with their smell. Fortune then saw an enormous tabby thought-form, supposedly twice the size of a tiger, descending the stairs inside her home. When the street eventually filled with yowling cats, she performed an exorcism before the animals disappeared and the visitation ended.

Alan Richardson regarded the account as a characteristic Fortune story, powerfully told but historically confused in several important details. He suggested that Annie Horniman made more symbolic sense as the mysterious cat woman, although she was not involved in Mathers’ Alpha et Omega. Horniman’s nicknames included “Tabbie” and “Puss,” while Mary K. Greer confirms that Moina was called “Bergie.” Fortune had apparently attached the attack to the woman already occupying the role of villain inside her private magical drama.

Fortune’s quarrel with Moina probably happened when too many local cats were around, and her imagination did the rest. Before long, the ordinary moggies had become furry delivery systems for whatever magical nonsense the story needed. When the exorcism ended, and the cats buggered off, Fortune found her conclusion wrapped and labelled for publication.

The enemy had acted, signs had appeared and a ritual had worked, allowing everyone to imagine that a junior magician had bested an adept like Mathers. This pattern runs beneath many Fortune stories, because every crisis eventually places her above the teachers, adepts or dangerous occultists who originally held greater authority.

The Mysterious Death of Netta Fornario

Netta Fornario’s death gave Fortune something better than another suspicious cat story, because it involved a real mystery and a former member of the Alpha et Omega. On a Tuesday afternoon in late November 1929, the body of Fornario, 32, was found on Iona wearing only a cloak. Later versions placed her beside a fairy mound south of Loch Staonaig, although the known facts are considerably less picturesque.

Fortune suggested that Fornario’s association with Moina Mathers had contributed to her death through the same pattern of psychic attack. She claimed that scratches had appeared on Fornario’s body and connected them with marks supposedly found upon Mathers’ other victims. Those scratches do not appear in other reports, while Mathers had already been dead for sixteen months and was unavailable for further cattiness, even with a surviving thought-form.

Francis King acknowledged that most readers would conclude Fornario suffered from severe schizophrenia and believed herself attacked, which remains the likeliest explanation. Fortune took a sad and uncertain death, added details unavailable elsewhere and fitted the result into her continuing campaign against Moina Mathers.

The Abramelin Story

Fortune’s use of the Abramelin incident is more complicated because she did not simply steal the story without acknowledgement. In Psychic Self-Defence, she identifies its source as a letter by H. Campbell published in The Occult Review during December 1929. Campbell described making an Abramelin talisman without adequate knowledge, suffering terrifying apparitions and eventually receiving help from an unnamed female friend. Fortune reproduced Campbell’s letter at length before incorporating it into her warning about the dangers surrounding ceremonial magic.

Her arrangement encouraged readers to assume that Fortune herself had been the unnamed woman who rescued Campbell from his experiment. Campbell was a high-level New Zealand magician associated with Whare Ra at Havelock North, and the woman who helped him was Harriet Felkin. Fortune probably never met him, which makes her implied appearance in the rescue considerably more impressive than ordinary geography permits.

Calling it plagiarism would be difficult because Fortune credited Campbell when she reproduced his original version. The appropriation came from the way she placed another magician’s ordeal among her revelations and made herself the authority who explained what had really happened. As later occult writers repeated the story, Fortune became associated with a rescue carried out by somebody else.

This was how Fortune made stories about her without erasing the person who had told them. She absorbed each narrative into her magical universe until it became secondary, and everything orbited her.

The Indian Occultist and Brodie-Innes

The most suspicious example concerns Fortune’s encounter with an unnamed Indian occultist, whom Richardson identifies as the Theosophist B. P. Wadia. His belief in Indian spiritual leadership offended Fortune’s conviction that Britain possessed a unique occult destiny within the world. Soon after withdrawing from his work, Fortune sensed a hostile presence while talking with a friend beside a gas fire. She saw Wadia’s projected form enclosed in yellow mist before sending her companion outside and drawing a protective pentagram. The apparition shattered as Fortune used divine names, while a loud crack provided the required physical confirmation. Her friend returned and discovered that one panel within the nearby door had conveniently split into two.

Fortune interpreted Wadia’s belief in India’s spiritual importance as a possible attack upon the group soul of Britain. Political and racial anxiety became occult diagnosis, while an Indian challenging British authority became an agent psychically penetrating the empire.

Fortune’s description follows the same pattern as an earlier Golden Dawn story written by J. W. Brodie-Innes, under whom she had studied. In his Flying Roll, “An Exorcism,” Brodie-Innes describes sensing a vampiric elemental in a gaslit room before an inner adept guides him through the pentagrams and divine names needed to force it into manifestation. The thing appears as a foul shape and is then struck with projected force, leaving Brodie-Innes with unpleasant physical sensations afterwards.

Fortune did not copy the story word for word, because she turned the elemental into a living Indian opponent, removed the guiding adept and placed herself firmly in charge. She added the cracked door, which supplied the physical proof every good occult story apparently needs when the witnesses are otherwise inconveniently absent. Even with these improvements, the two versions follow the same route closely enough to make coincidence look rather overworked.

Fortune presented the incident as independent evidence that her method of banishing worked against a projected occult attack. However, her method was a shortened Pentagram Ritual, while the example followed a Flying Roll, she already knew very well. The story may reveal the power of magical suggestion more clearly than it proves Wadia projected himself into Fortune’s sitting room.

The cracked door contributes nothing except physical confirmation, because doors split for many ordinary and thoroughly unmagical reasons. Only a born novelist could persuade one to wait until the precise instant required by the developing plot.

Atlantis Takes Over

Fortune’s Atlantean material shows the storyteller entering her final imperial phase and claiming an entire civilisation as supporting scenery. She had reported far memories of Atlantis since the 1920s, when she initially advised readers to treat them with reserve. During the later 1930s, those visions expanded into an elaborate magical civilisation connected with Glastonbury, Avalon and Fortune’s previous incarnations.

Her Atlantis contained a great Sun Temple whose black-and-white paving surrounded pillars serving as enormous gnoms. A separate Sea Temple trained seers and priestesses, while the Sun Temple included a Hall of Mirrors and a subterranean Hall of Images. Its priesthood developed internal disputes, political responsibilities, specialised initiations and disastrous magical accidents capable of damaging an entire civilisation. Fortune also described Atlantean bloodlines, forehead markings, social classes and the disposal of malformed infants with remarkable confidence.

The lunar current entered through the Priest of the Moon and eventually reached the temple developed within Moon Magic, her unfinished final novel. These imaginative temples were magnificent magical constructions capable of altering consciousness and providing powerful settings for ritual experience. Fortune’s mistake was to treat their accumulating detail as evidence that she had recovered the architecture and history of Atlantis.

Specificity proves only that the imagination has been busy, because novelists routinely know the wallpaper and childhood traumas of people who never existed. Fortune’s imagination was exceptionally disciplined when constructing worlds, which made those worlds compelling and increasingly dangerous to mistake for memory.

Her Atlantis reproduced the values and anxieties of Fortune’s environment through empire, priestly hierarchy, racial destiny and fear of civilisational decline. Atlantis became the British Empire collapsing beneath the waves while Fortune watched from a previous incarnation near the command deck.

Learning from Dion Fortune

Fortune could not always tell where an event ended, and her imagination, training and expectations began. Some of her stories contain genuine occult experience, but she kept improving them until nobody could tell what had happened and what she had added afterwards. In the process, the human Violet Firth vanished.

A vision can contain useful information without proving that anything happened outside the magician’s own head. A ritual may work perfectly well even when the explanation is wrong, because doors crack and cats gather without taking orders from Moina Mathers. Fortune understood this when judging other people’s experiences but became less careful whenever the story placed her at the centre.

Fortune’s storytelling always placed her near the centre, and later British magicians copied the habit with depressing enthusiasm. She considered herself chosen by hidden adepts, attacked by dangerous occultists and entrusted with the spiritual destiny of Britain. She also remembered priestly incarnations in Atlantis, while opponents suitably became black magicians or instruments serving hostile currents.

Had Fortune admitted that these beliefs were personal and might possess no importance outside her imagination, she might have escaped the worst consequences. Instead, followers since the 1940s have copied her example and declared themselves equally important because similar imaginary friends confirmed similar private mythologies.

None of this destroys Fortune’s magical work, because she was brilliant at creating myths capable of moving consciousness. Her temples and inner-plane contacts remain effective imaginative forms because magical symbols have never required historical passports. The Mystical Qabalah survives because it organises experience, while her novels survive because they openly use narrative as initiation.

Psychic Self-Defence remains her weakest major work because it requires polished stories to function as objective evidence. Throughout that book, the novelist dresses herself as a witness and proves unable to stop improving her own testimony.

Fortune’s tragedy was that she possessed enough authentic ability to make these inventions completely unnecessary within her teaching. She was an excellent magician who could have taught more clearly by admitting uncertainty whenever experience resisted a tidy explanation. Instead, she repeatedly converted uncertainty into adventure until the storyteller who created Dion Fortune finally consumed Violet Firth. What remained could command temples, nations, spirits and previous incarnations, but could no longer be trusted with cats.

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Nick Farrell has been writing what some readers call hatchet jobs on prominent occultists. This is slightly melodramatic, since most of the “victims” died decades before he arrived with his axe.

Some of the articles have been about people, such as Julius Evola, who were nasty pieces of work but managed to escape much of the reckoning they deserved because their reputations were protected by their followers. Others, such as Gérard Encausse (Papus) and Charles Webster Leadbeater, have escaped judgement because people did not know how rotten they were. Leadbeater, in particular, faced serious allegations of sexual misconduct involving adolescent boys and was repeatedly protected or rehabilitated by the organisations around him.

The articles have examined influential occult figures whose intelligence and spiritual insight coexisted with some spectacular personal defects. They missed important lessons which coloured their work or, in some cases, crippled it. Bill Gray, for example, was a gifted practical magician who was also a racist and a talented destroyer of friendships. What strikes me is that these articles often bring out details most readers never knew or were only half-understood. But they are not demolition jobs. Farrell makes room for the qualities that made these personalities influential in the first place. Some of them built far-reaching systems while private dysfunctions, often invisible to most people, seeped into their teaching. The series is ongoing, since there is no shortage of material.

Every time one of these articles appears, someone decides the author is trying to ruin the person’s work. As if admitting awkward truths about these people somehow makes everything they wrote worthless. Uncomfortable facts become threatening because they disturb the emotional arrangement supporting admiration. But if the work collapses the moment its writer becomes human, perhaps it was never solid to begin with. We should not let personal identification cloud our discernment. Useful teaching can still be separated from the personality of those who delivered it.

The recent controversy involving astrologer Steven Forrest showed this mechanism operating around a living teacher. During a podcast discussion about shadow work, Forrest used a racial slur and spoke about prejudices he had held earlier in life. His subsequent apology was criticised for concentrating heavily on his intentions and reputation while giving less attention to how his words affected others. One response came from astrologer Samuel Reynolds, who had known and respected Forrest for years. Reynolds did not deny the reality of the shadow, but questioned what shadow work means when its effects reach beyond the person examining it.

What interests me is not so much the argument itself, but why it struck such a nerve. Some people examined Forrest’s words and apology, while others heard an attack on astrology, their training and the man who had helped them understand their lives.

When you reach that point, the discussion becomes almost impossible, because the boundaries between teacher, student and system disappear, and the criticism of one ends up applying to all three.

Forrest may appreciate the astrological timing more than most. On 12 August, a total solar eclipse falls at about 20 degrees of Leo as the lunar nodes shift towards the Leo-Aquarius axis. Symbolically, the tension is between identity, visibility and personal authority on one side, and the wider group on the other. Under that pressure, reputation can stop cushioning everything, allowing careless words or actions reach people who are less willing to excuse them as the public persona begins to crack.

A character like Bill Gray may not have cared about his flaws or the damage they caused, perhaps because he considered other people beneath his concern. This astrological configuration can symbolise how such contempt does not always remain contained, and how reputation cannot protect someone indefinitely from the consequences.

Many books or teachings come into a reader’s life during a crisis. They provide a new perspective or language for experiences the reader could not previously understand and become part of that person’s intellectual and emotional scaffolding. For these reasons, the teacher becomes woven into the student’s story, and their work helps shape them.

Later criticism can feel like an attempt to take that transformation away. If the teacher was deeply flawed, perhaps the student’s insight was wrong. If the system contains prejudice, detachment from reality or dishonesty, maybe years of study were wasted. Defending the teacher becomes a means of defending one’s past. The logic may be poor, but emotionally it has considerable power.

Psychologists describe cognitive dissonance as the discomfort produced when evidence conflicts with an existing belief or self-image. That discomfort is reduced through dismissal or selective interpretation. When a spiritual teacher has become attached to the student’s identity, evidence of misconduct goes beyond intellectual disagreement and threatens a portion of the self. The easiest escape is often to resent or attack the evidence.

This can include a variety of justifications: the teacher was misunderstood; the quotation lacked context; standards were different then; the critic is jealous, politically motivated, insufficiently initiated or possessed by an annoying fluffy demon called Marmaduke. The excuse changes according to the audience, but the aim is the same. It protects the devotee from having to admit that part of their inner world was built on unstable ground.

A useful psychological term for this situation is the parasocial relationship, a one-sided emotional bond with a public figure. A student may feel they know an author through books, recordings, workshops and stories, even though the author knows nothing about them.

This is why people warn against meeting your heroes. The real person may fail to match the version you have built in your head, and you might discover that your favourite artist, writer or teacher is a tosser.

Occultism intensifies the effect because the teacher often claims access to hidden worlds, giving their revelations an authority that cannot be tested. A student may believe the teacher possesses a superior consciousness or direct contact with beings whose names contain too many vowels. That is why any criticism can then feel like an assault on what is considered sacred.

The shadow is another useful psychological concept because it concerns the parts of the teacher that do not fit the spiritual identity they present to themselves and others. Their disowned flaws can remain hidden while the public personality appears increasingly wise or enlightened. Those rejected qualities continue operating beyond conscious control and are often projected onto other people.

In his reply, Reynolds pointed out that a person’s shadow may belong to their private psychology, but its consequences do not remain private once they reach others. Self-recognition is only the beginning. The fact that a person may understand the origins of a prejudice or trace it through family history does not mean they have taken responsibility for the harm it causes. Reynolds’s point was that Forrest could explain what he meant, but he could not control how other people experienced what he said, particularly those who knew racism as something lived instead of a concept studied at a psychological distance.

Shadow work should not become another form of self-absorption, with the person endlessly talking about the grandeur and complexity of their darkness while everyone else is expected to admire the excavation.

The old Jungian idea about a brighter light casting a darker shadow applies here, but only if it is not made into a spiritual alibi. A larger shadow does not prove a greater light but shows that increased influence and public authority simply give private defects a longer reach.

In these situations, the follower gives the teacher exceptional status, while receiving reflected importance from the association. It feels better to be an apprentice of the master than a lost person trying to make sense of difficult material. So, when the master falls, the follower loses some of that borrowed light.

A gifted spiritual teacher can still be remarkably blind to their own faults. Intelligence does not automatically make someone self-aware; in many cases, it only gives the ego more elaborate lawyers. They can justify behaviour with greater sophistication than an ordinary idiot, using spiritual language and symbolic systems to turn anger into righteous force or prejudice into tradition.

Students also have the habit of gathering around teachers who seem to have definitive answers, especially about invisible realities that cannot be checked. Admitting doubt weakens authority, so the teacher becomes increasingly invested in appearing complete and authoritative.

A Gnostic view is suspicious of any external authority claiming to possess the final truth. Teachers and techniques can be useful; they may point the way or stir something awake, but none of them can replace gnosis. In the end, truth must be recognised through direct contact with the divine within.

A Gnostic may respect a teacher or use a method, but they do not hand themselves over to either. Spiritual development means becoming freer from anything that wants to define reality for us. A tradition may serve as a map, but attachment to it becomes another form of imprisonment.

This must be turned inward. It is easy to question doctrines and teachers while leaving our prejudices untouched. Gnosis requires the same scepticism toward the assumptions and mechanisms inside the personality.

This does not erase the value of the teachings. Instead, it places them in a broader human context, where even contradictions and distortions can be revealing, allowing for a more honest and discerning approach.

The same principle applies across religion, philosophy, science, politics and art. Martin Heidegger produced some of the twentieth century’s most influential philosophy while openly supporting the Nazi regime. Picasso helped reshape modern painting, yet his treatment of women was cruel and exploitative. Spiritual history contains enough similar figures to fill a lodge, where they would likely spend the meeting arguing over who had attained the highest grade.

Brilliance and moral development are separate achievements. A glimpse of something extraordinary, or even the ability to devise a system of spiritual growth, does not automatically make someone emotionally mature or incapable of manipulative or abusive conduct.

Acknowledging this does not require reducing every historical figure to their worst behaviour. Discernment means looking honestly at the scale, persistence and consequences of their actions without reaching automatically for canonisation or the bonfire.

Some teachers were damaged human beings who produced valuable work. A few were utter fuckwits whose reputations survive because their followers preferred saintly biographies. Some followers even went so far as to build a cult of personality around their dead teachers, refusing to tolerate any criticism.

Maturity means being able to hold both things at once. Gray was not less racist because he was a gifted magician. Crowley’s best writing still has to be read beside the ugliness of his behaviour, and Dion Fortune’s insight did not prevent her from sometimes turning suspicion and personal mythology into fact. We do not discard a useful idea because its author had a shadow but knowing that should make us look at it more carefully. We can learn a lot from a spiritual teacher’s failures.

The awkward parts of a teacher’s life can show where the system failed, where the teacher failed to apply it, or whether the system gave their pathology somewhere comfortable to live. Those questions deepen the study, while removing them creates hagiography, until the human being ends up being embalmed for devotional use.

Followers need to ask why criticism makes them so furious. A favourite teacher is exposed as prejudiced or ridiculous, and suddenly more than the teacher’s reputation feels threatened. Some part of the self relies on that person remaining perfect. The answer may reveal more than another decade spent memorising correspondence tables.

Recognising the master’s shadow may mark the point at which the student finally begins to grow beyond them and develop independent thinking. The teacher or system no longer needs to function as a supporting crutch or a mirror for the student’s projections.

As noted in the example at the beginning, self-deception is not confined to the dead. If past teachers failed to recognise their own shadows, there is little reason to assume that living charismatic or inflated spiritual authorities will suddenly achieve exceptional self-awareness. The responsibility remains with the student to observe and discern. Respect does not require surrendering judgement.

The famous occultist may never have understood the dynamics operating beneath their personality, but their admirers still have the opportunity. They can defend a plaster saint assembled from selective quotations or accept the human being with all their brilliance and faults. Doing so may demonstrate more spiritual maturity than their hero ever achieved.

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