Crystallising the World
“… all the powers of the soul together, because of the union in the inner cellar, drink of the Beloved…
This draught of God’s most deep wisdom makes the soul forget all the things of this world, and consider all its previous knowledge, and the knowledge of the whole world besides, as pure ignorance in comparison with this knowledge….
For a clearer understanding of this, we must remember that the most regular cause of the soul’s ignoring the things of the world, when it has ascended to this high state, is that it is informed by a supernatural knowledge, in the presence of which all natural and worldly knowledge is ignorance rather than knowledge. For the soul in possession of this knowledge, which is most profound, learns from it that all other knowledge not included in this knowledge is not knowledge, but ignorance, and worthless. We have this truth in the words of the Apostle when he said that “the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God” (St. John of the Cross, A Spiritual Canticle XXVI, 7, 10, 11).
Last week I did myself a disservice by starting the piece talking about Jack Chick of all people, I try not to miss an opportunity to make the distinction between a form of Christianity that clearly does not follow the Gospel and is an ignorant expression of an individual or group’s hardened hearts, but bringing it up made me handle high magic with a certain fragility. As if by talking about my own experiences with this spiritual system I would run the risk of sounding like Jack Chick’s rude appraisal of all things not Evangelical Protestantism.
I’m not really interested in telling people what to do or what is right, because that is not my place and proselytizing goes against Scripture and Holy tradition. All I can do is talk honestly about my experience with high magic. High magic protected me during my first year of struggling to stay sober as well as helping me navigate lockdown orders in NYC while in a relationship that, through sobriety, was revealing itself to be unhealthy, to put it mildly.
High magic, as an extension of that sober revelation, was bringing to light my own repressed memories and trauma through ritual. This was unexpected and thus I chose to re-repress them which, without booze, proved to be impossible and dangerous. It was like swallowing a grenade to save your eyes from an explosion.
In hindsight, I did not appreciate that this emergence was the way to God.
No, I could not see that, because I was too busy trying to get to God, swallowing trauma, and invoking stellar intelligences, trying to make contact with the world beyond our senses. Which I did, a number of times. It was like seeing a strobe light go off underneath a blanket and it induced a panicked reaction in my body.
It says a lot about me that I was more willing to invite fear-inducing presences into my space than I was to deal with my own demons. It was like sending out invitations to a party that had already started because you don’t like the guests.
High magic is a cerebral spiritual system, with most of the work done within one’s own mind. If we conjure an image of the archetypal wizard then one might imagine a pointy hat and a beard, a long cloak and a staff belonging to an older, wise looking man shut up in a tower, pouring over scrolls and ancient tomes, because in this reality, knowledge of the arcane begins in the mind. This tower is precisely where I ended up through my practice, holed up in my mind, building complex visualizations in my mind’s eye, ascending through spiritual realms of increasingly subtle.
This is the previously mentioned practice of building up the light body, which is an integral part of high magic. This form of prayer involves the magician holding many visualizations at once, building on the previous, and using various divine names to charge certain symbols and invoke certain entities. This process builds up the magician’s astral presence, the body of light which is subtle, but just as real as one’s physical body.
Aleister Crowley’s own teachings present the idea that the body of light is to be built and used by traveling, astrally, using different symbols and attaining new heights in different planes of existence.
Regardless of one’s belief in this subtle body the rituals strengthen it… and if done over a period of time will prove that, “Within the human body is another body of approximately the same size and shape; but made of a subtler and less illusory material” (Crowley, Magick in Theory and Practice).
The body of light is a Platonic concept referring to the astral plane (or the realm of the stars); Plato believed that stars were made up of the universal substrate (Renaissance magic, from which the Western tradition was revitalized, concerned itself with seeking the universal substrate, the most basic element in the universe, a pursuit that goes back to the days of Thales of Miletus in Greece) and the human mind was made up of the same material, leading to the idea that man was a microcosm of the macrocosm, having within oneself the nature of the planets.
This relational model would give way to astrotheurgy, not always in opposition to, but distinct from astrotheology which is the worship of stars and planets.
I would go further as to suggest that what anthropology might deem astrotheology is probably the remnants of cultures which practiced astrotheurgy, meaning the science of–or working with–the stars. While stars and planets were deified it may not be because they were being worshiped, rather it may have been easier to engage with these aspects of the human psyche as symbols if they were personified as “gods.”
Theurgy means divine work and the Neo-Platonists practiced this form of ritual magic with the explicit intent to attain henosis: union with the divine. Theurgy is distinct from what most might assume to be magic, thaumaturgy, which is the manipulation of the material world for one’s own gain—or, for example, achieving the ability to walk on water for walking on water’s sakes.
The Hindu tradition calls this siddhi chasing.
This is where we get ‘high magic’ from however thaumaturgy is not necessarily ‘low magic,’ which is magic done for survival rather than attaining supernatural abilities or union with God.
This is all to that, while magic conjured repressed memories within myself, it also amplified my own obsessive-nature which, if not grounded, works against me rather than for me. Additionally, it might be easy to see that this practice of theurgy, the Great Work, requires a certain level of dedication that borders on obsession. This can become quite the self-isolating practice as it demands so much—I mean, we are trying to break free of samsara in a single lifetime, after all. There is no time to waste.
This no-wasted-days is a consistent theme in my own recovery that does tend to naturally amplify my own obsessiveness, because when you feel like you wasted years of your life to circling a drain there is a lot you feel you must make up for and nowhere was that mentality more present than with my practice of magic.
Sometimes when you shoot for the moon, you miss, and then fly off into nothingness. The same thing happened to me where I shot for a more realized life, missed, and flew off into isolation.
Magic instilled me with a rejection of the world that, admittedly, I have carried with me into my Christian practice—clearly being the reason I am attracted to monasticism. However, there is a disconnect between the Christian understanding of dying to the world and this high magic rejection. The latter is influenced by Gnosticism, which leads to a rejection of the material world because it is a product of the false god of the Hebrew Bible, the Demiurge. There are a lot of parallels between this Gnostic framework and the Hindu maya. This is, in relation to Man’s role in Creation—that the world was made for Man and is thus redeemed through Man’s becoming, is a rejection of our role as stewards.
It is a refusal to participate in life, locking oneself up in their wizard’s tower of Babel.
This disconnect that high magic has is made whole through the full tradition of Christianity, preserved by the Orthodox Church:
“‘The world’ is the general name for all the passions. When we wish to call the passions by a common name, we call them the world. But when we wish to distinguish them by their special names, we call them passions. The passions are the following: love of riches, desire for possessions, bodily pleasure from which comes sexual passion, love of honor which gives rise to envy, lust for power, arrogance and pride of position, the craving to adorn oneself with luxurious clothes and vain ornaments, the itch for human glory which is a source of rancor and resentment, and physical fear. Where these passions cease to be active, there the world is dead…. Someone has said of the Saints that while alive they were dead; for though living in the flesh, they did not live for the flesh. See for which of these passions you are alive. Then you will know how far you are alive to the world, and how far you are dead to it” (St. Isaac the Syrian).
These passions are like Buddhism’s three poisons, they keep us cerebrally focused on attachments, fleeting desires, and our hearts hard.
It was by reading The Meditations on the Tarot that made me realize that high magic may be doing the exact opposite of what it professes to do, which is to achieve moksha. The use of consistent rituals hardens the light body so that it can pass through the stages of death without being dissolved into the process of reincarnation, bypassing rebirth and uniting with source, or Brahman. It is in hardening one’s outer shell, what some magician’s call crystallising the aura, that allows one to do this, and ultimately be ‘snuffed out’ of existence.
Meditations offers an opposing view this by showing that this type of hardening is, in fact, reverse crystallisation where the corporeal becomes psychic and the psychic becomes spiritual—the author describes this as the “construction of the tower of Babel,” where normal crystallisation is described opposite, “the spiritual becomes psychic and the psychic becomes corporeal. The process of normal crystallisation is therefore one of concretisation from above below” (Meditations 358). The former reverse crystallisation is shown to produce a “psycho-electrical double” in the form of an energetic complex which can resist death, albeit in a singular state, possessing “an inferior consciousness in comparison to that of a human being” (Meditations 359).
This complex survives as a passion, a desire, or a habit. This is the end result of developing the body of light, binding a subtle, dissipating “self” to the world by way of strong intention. The author makes a strong case that by strengthening the light body the magician is actually preparing for future terrestrial life, rather than ceasing the passions and dying to the world the magician is feeding them, granting them life and using this energetic complex as a vehicle to move through incarnations via reverse crystallisation.
This may illuminate us to “possessions” of mind, wherein an individual is captured by a singular desire or passion. Why perhaps, by practicing high magic one comes into contact with subtle energies and how they are able, through the practice, “download” information as some practitioners have called the phenomena of intuiting knowledge.
If we use the Book of Genesis, like the author Meditations does to present his case, then we can see—like the author—that the serpent is right that Man should not die, but that it would the serpent, and not God, “who shall attend to the uninterrupted continuation of [Man’s] life in the horizontal, for [the serpent] shall make up for the lack of divine wisdom and love by replacing them with the intellect and with psycho-physical electricity, which will be the source of [Man’s] life” (Meditations 362). Whether the serpent is Satan or not, it is the principle at work when we construct the tower of Babel, such as with the practice of high magic.
Read differently, Adam and Eve were presented with immortality by the very ouroboros that keeps us trapped wandering this world aimlessly, and immortality to the ouroboros is exactly this perpetual cycle of death and rebirth that we are trying to escape. High magic, in my opinion, is heeding the call of the serpent. Interestingly, the author of Meditations touches on the Church’s awareness of the reality of reincarnation, “It is worth a hundred times more to know nothing of the fact of reincarnation, and to deny the doctrine of reincarnation, than to turn thoughts and desires towards the future terrestrial life and thus be tempted to resort to the means offered through the promise of immortality made by the serpent” (Meditations 361).
It is an interesting notion to both accept the reality of reincarnation while rejecting it as a part of say, the Christian tradition based solely on the idea that by adopting this lens it may distract us from our own attainment of Paradise. The phenomenon can exist without the Church acknowledging it as cosmological fact. the Church’s exoteric hostility toward reincarnation can now be framed as a way to protect the faithful from becoming lost in samsara.
This was also the beginning of my own suspicion toward high magic, and a moving away from the schools of crystallisation that this system belongs to. An echo in my head expressed concern with the connection between our own becoming and what we worship; it seemed to me that high magic was celebrating the serpent, no doubt influenced by its Gnostic roots, but then… what are we becoming by doing this?
Shedding one skin for the next, over and over again. This is not escaping samsara, this is becoming one with it. This became my orientation, whether or not I was right about the serpent what became clear was there is a spiritual need to reject certain frameworks that may only be distractions along the Way. There was a need to simplify the path, directing me to the schools of, as the author of Meditations puts it, “radiation, i.e. the complete de-crystallisation of the human being and his transformation into a ‘sun,’ into a centre of radiation. ‘Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of the Father’ (Matthew xiii, 43)” (Meditations 354).
This meant descending the wizard’s tower, down the staircase, and into the heart.
Si comprehendis, non est Deus
Witness, NM 