Occult Training

For those who don't know about occult training, and this includes some of my online friends who have inquired, the simplest advice I can give is to choose a path that works for you and stick with it.  Like any art, the esoteric arts take time to learn.  In fact, they are the supreme arts, so you can expect to spend the rest of your life mastering them.  And the most important part is taking the first step.  But, you might ask, and fairly so, how do I know what path works for me?  You don't, not at first.

What you can do to help with this is to think for a short time before getting started.  Is there any mythic tradition that really calls to you?  If you're a Christian, there are Christian Esoteric societies and paths.  There are also Heathen and Druid paths that are well-developed.  There are traditions of astrological magic from the Renaissance and before.  Some people get into Eastern traditions, and they have the advantage of having living traditions with actual teachers of some accomplishment.  But I have worked predominantly with Western traditions.

Where I started was with Golden Dawn magic.  Contrary to popular opinion, this is not Satanic at all, and the founders of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn were all Christians.  There was a long tradition of Christian Cabalistic magic in the West, and these guys were involved in resurrecting it.  In truth, I didn't go very far on this path, because I didn't need to.  The most important things for me to master were the basics which were the techniques of relaxation, banishing and invocation rituals, discursive meditation, and divination with the Rider-Waite Tarot deck.  After that, I realized a meditative system was of more use to me anyway and I had the basic building blocks of spiritual accomplishment at my fingertips.  I will write more about my ongoing path as it evolves from here.

One thing that many will not like, especially if they come from the heathen end of the right wing, is the explicit Hebrew imagery of the Golden Dawn path.  I personally didn't have a problem with this.  Keep in mind that Biblical Hebrew was used by European Christians as much as by Jews.  Frankly, propaganda aside, I have no reason to believe that the temple religion of the Old Testament has much to do with anything Semitic.  It was clearly a local adaptation of a Hellenistic tradition that existed across the Mediterranean, and the name Yahweh sounds an awful lot like how Jove was pronounced in those days.  You might well be praying to Jupiter Optimus Maximus in an alien language.  Right down to the symbolism it was remarkably like the rest of the temple tradition of Antiquity.

In a sense, it's just an attempt to recreate the sort of atmosphere and sacred practices of old mystery schools that had long since died out.  I tried to focus more on what I was trying to accomplish, and approaching the divine from an attitude of respect, rather than to see the negatives in this path.  The Golden Dawn has a quite developed system, and it works.  But these days, it's not the only path there is by any means.  It's just the one I found that led me into a wider world.  There is no reason that a novice in the occult couldn't pick something else instead.  I repeat once more that the most important part of any spiritual work is to take it seriously and give it the work it is due.  Once you do that, the results will come in time.  And that's another thing, don't expect quick fixes.  Spiritual accomplishment will come at its own pace.