“Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning
The innermost ethic of magic is indivisible from that of all occultism, art, philosophy, religion, literature, and ultimately science: man asks the world, “What does life mean?” and the world replies, “It means this!” Man lives with “this” until, by dint of tiredness, disappointment, and countervailing examples, he asks again. And the world replies, “Actually, it means that!” But “that” only satisfies for a short time. Soon the world will offer the next in an innumerable succession of psychological explanations or occult principles or metaphysical systems or theologies or philosophies. And so a perpetual cycle is established between man, this, that, and the search for meaning itself.
The world presents endless thises and thats to keep man occupied and treading the circular mill of meaning seeking. If he doesn’t devolve into cynicism or collapse from exhaustion, he eventually becomes an initiate, which is to say he acquires a formal sort of insight into the path itself. He has a moment of clarity: “Nothing is true; everything is permitted,” which can also be expressed as “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law” or “Xepera Xeper Xeperu—I have come into being and, by that process, my coming into being is established” or “We make the path by walking.” All of these generally convey a similar idea: meaning is found in the process, the journey, not in a separate, discrete product or destination. In fact, process and product are the same. The process is the product.
What a trite conclusion after so much trouble. Yet, having suffered through many years of study, trial and error, and deep communication with himself, with society, with history, and with the unseen, man accepts that the treadmill does not lead anywhere. The path has no end-point. And the existential reality of the examined life is its own reward, for what it may be worth.
Put differently, first we try to change our experience of what we think is outside and around us. Then we try to change our experience of what we think is inside and coming through us. Then we try for its own sake because the outside-around and the inside-through only offer more questions instead of answers—we try because we have begun to see the questions as the answers and the effort of trying is beautiful. Then we stop asking questions altogether. We smile a lot. We appreciate more and manage less. We have now become adepts (adept, skillful).
Is this enlightenment? Things certainly become lighter at this point. Things also become darker. Mystery (the occult, that which is hidden) becomes more compelling when we realize that some barriers to human understanding cannot be intellectually transcended no matter how we try. We cannot grasp some things from the vantage point of our finite, cause-effect incarnation.
In other words, we stand in Assiah, looking up through Yetzirah, with imperfect comprehension, at an impenetrable cosmos. We have recourse to symbolism and metaphor at best. We are speechless or completely blind at worst. In Theosophical-Enochian terms, this is the “Ring Pass Not.” And it is in place out of necessity: pass this boundary and you shed your relative truths for the ultimate truth. You shed your illusion of separateness for samadhi. You become a spirit in a metaphysical continuum. You are no longer human.
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| from An Advanced Guide to Enochian Magick, by Gerald Schueler |
Or, as Gandalf declares to Durin’s Bane in The Fellowship of the Ring, “‘You cannot pass,’ he said. The orcs stood still, and a dead silence fell. ‘I am a servant of the Secret Fire, wielder of the flame of Anor. You cannot pass. The dark fire will not avail you, flame of Udûn. Go back to the Shadow! You cannot pass.’”
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| Ye Balrog |
The “Secret Fire” or “flame of Anor” is a Tolkienian expression for the sun (in Tolkien’s elvish language, Sindarin, “anor” means “sun”). Incidentally, on the Tree of Life, this is Tiphareth, the sephira that the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn associated with the sixth degree, “Adeptus Minor.”
Whether we see this passage through Tolkien or associatively through a symbol set from ceremonial magical Kabalah, it means roughly the same thing: Gandalf is telling the Balrog, “Durin’s Bane,” a Qliphothic personification of the dark sun or nature reversed (“Thagiron” / “Tagimron,” the dark fire, the antithesis of the light of the sun and therefore of the natural order of things), that there are unassailable boundaries in the cosmos. There is a Ring Pass Not that divides the underworld of faerie, inhabited by daemons (like Durin's Bane) and the sunlit realm of mortals.
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| Tiphareth is at the center of the glyph. |
Because the members of the Fellowship are each uniquely magical beings, they are able to pass through the upper layers of the underworld. But they cannot follow the Balrog into the depths. Gandalf is killed when he tries. Likewise, Durin’s Bane cannot attain the surface and stand beneath the light of Anor without being destroyed. This recalls a line at the completion of the Golden Dawn neophyte ritual: “Child of Earth, long hast thou dwelt in darkness. Quit the night and seek the day.” In other words, go to your rightful place and be content there.
We cannot transcend certain boundaries for that would violate the very cosmic order that sustains and defines us. Neither can the daemons take physical form nor stand beneath the light of the sun. Their desire to do so is a catalyst that functions harmoniously as part of the greater whole (as the One Ring functions as a catalyst to bring about the Fourth Age of Middle Earth); though, the daemons do not realize it. But we, in the world of matter, can identify the boundaries of our aspirations—in Buddhist terms, that there is nowhere to go and nothing to do when we attain mindfulness of the perfect present. This is a VI° revelation in the Golden Dawn, an insight from Tiphareth, the basis of what it is to be a functioning Adeptus Minor. Understand the range of implications embedded in this and your magic, your life, will be miraculous and truly adept.
Tiphareth, the Solar Logos, the messiah, is Osiris, god made flesh, capable of dying and being reborn, of coming into being in order to establish the path of coming into being. And this is the work of that grade in the Golden Dawn hierarchy, the “Portal” grade. Having elementally balanced himself in the First Order degrees, the initiate is now seated among the adepti. The initiatory secret he has learned through hard-earned, firsthand gnosis is that everything is perfect and all roads lead nowhere—another way of saying, “Nothing is true; everything is permitted,” since truth depends on falsity, a binary, relative proposition. Instead, the initiatory path at Tiphareth manifests as a circle with no beginning or end.
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| Daemon est deus inversus. |
The deepest misconception of mortal man is that he can
become a god when his very desire to do so is a defining characteristic of his mortality. His ultimate failure to ascend
the Tower of Babel is a feature of its architecture: “And they said, Go to, let
us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and
let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole
earth” (KJV, Genesis 11:4).
Accepting that it is impossible to transcend the Ring Pass Not and become a god elevates the initiate above the daemons, who desire above all things to dominate the surface world, and certainly above non-initiates, who only think of social status and bodily gratification. Or, as the Tibetan Buddhist nun, Pema Chödrön, writes in The Wisdom of No Escape, “One of the main discoveries of meditation is seeing how we continually run away from the present moment, how we avoid being here just as we are.”
When the Golden Dawn Adeptus Minor obligation talks about aspiring to be “more than human,” it is referencing the knowledge and conversation of spiritual perfection, not the petty grasping and lust for power that would motivate the construction of a Tower of Babel: “I further promise and swear that with the Divine Permission I will, from this day forward, apply myself to the Great Work—which is, to purify and exalt my Spiritual Nature so that with the Divine Aid I may at length attain to be more than human, and thus gradually raise and unite myself to my Higher and Divine Genius.” To attain communion with that perfection is to “be here just as we are” to the most profound degree. When we can do that, when we can accept our limitations and embrace the present, we are magi.