The Tree Of Life
May. 20th, 2026 08:51 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
poliphilo So I'm rereading Dion Fortune's The Mystical Qabalah.
Dion Fortune- aka Violet Mary Firth (1890-1946)- was a ceremonial magician.
Here she is, doing her thing
I don't have the temperament or the intellect for ceremonial magic. I can't remember- or be bothered to remember- all those lists of correspondences. Ceremonial magic ain't spontaneous. And I like spontaneity.
Still, if you want an introduction to Cabala- which is how I prefer to spell it- Dion Fortune is straightforward and readable- even chatty. She was also a Jungian and wrote novels. I'll acknowledge that she's very much out of date- but then I like old books.
She calls the Cabala the "Yoga of the West". It's roots are in Judaism, it was developed and elaborated by Jews and Christians through the Middle Ages- and taken up and made accessible to the modern mind by 19th and 20th century occultists. At its heart is the glyph known as The Tree of Life which "is an attempt to reduce to diagrammatic form every force and factor in the manifested universe and the soul of man." It looks like this
The circles are known as sephiroth and represent those forces and factors aforesaid. Malkuth at the bottom is the sphere of earthly manifestation and Kether at the top is the all but unknowable Godhead. The straight lines are paths that can be travelled {which the moderns have identified with the major Trumps of the Tarot) and the entire glypth tells you how things hang together. We used it a bit in Wicca.- and I once wrote a longish poem in which I travelled all round the tree- of which only parts still survive. The rest, the parts I ditched, were superficial and glib because what do I know?
I don't understand quite why I'm revisiting Cabala now, except that a dream seemed to be telling me to- and one must pay attention to dreams.....
Dion Fortune- aka Violet Mary Firth (1890-1946)- was a ceremonial magician.
Here she is, doing her thing
I don't have the temperament or the intellect for ceremonial magic. I can't remember- or be bothered to remember- all those lists of correspondences. Ceremonial magic ain't spontaneous. And I like spontaneity.
Still, if you want an introduction to Cabala- which is how I prefer to spell it- Dion Fortune is straightforward and readable- even chatty. She was also a Jungian and wrote novels. I'll acknowledge that she's very much out of date- but then I like old books.
She calls the Cabala the "Yoga of the West". It's roots are in Judaism, it was developed and elaborated by Jews and Christians through the Middle Ages- and taken up and made accessible to the modern mind by 19th and 20th century occultists. At its heart is the glyph known as The Tree of Life which "is an attempt to reduce to diagrammatic form every force and factor in the manifested universe and the soul of man." It looks like this
The circles are known as sephiroth and represent those forces and factors aforesaid. Malkuth at the bottom is the sphere of earthly manifestation and Kether at the top is the all but unknowable Godhead. The straight lines are paths that can be travelled {which the moderns have identified with the major Trumps of the Tarot) and the entire glypth tells you how things hang together. We used it a bit in Wicca.- and I once wrote a longish poem in which I travelled all round the tree- of which only parts still survive. The rest, the parts I ditched, were superficial and glib because what do I know?
I don't understand quite why I'm revisiting Cabala now, except that a dream seemed to be telling me to- and one must pay attention to dreams.....
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Date: 2026-05-20 03:51 pm (UTC)Hmmm, sounds fishy to me......
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Date: 2026-05-21 02:17 am (UTC)