On the General Guidance and Purification of the Soul v2.0
A revised OSOGD teaching document on guiding and purifying the soul.
The classical Order left a document under this same title telling the aspirant how impure their soul is, how it must suffer to attain, and how it cannot be trusted to guide itself. Sam sets that dualistic inheritance aside and rebuilds the document around the path Iamblichus laid out in the fourth century: three phases, moving from awakening the Augoeides Soma — the Shining Ideal Body, the vehicle of magick — through Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel and the full flowering of adeptship, to entering the Company of Heaven under the Angel's guidance.
On purification, Sam traces the West's two inherited models and rejects both. The Hebrew concept treats the Holy as unbearable, so ritual purity exists to let a human tolerate the divine presence; Augustine and Calvin, starting from the Fall, concluded that humans and nature are inherently and irredeemably polluted, fixable only by Christ's vicarious atonement. Pagans, he writes, renounce the Fall as both false and dangerous, and find the holiest to be the most intimate rather than the most alien. In its place he offers the Order's working metaphors — refining ore, polishing a mirror, tuning an instrument — and turns to the Buddhadharma for the mechanism: what is purified are kleshas, emotional obscurations built from ignorance of how much of our experience we are ourselves composing, and the karma those obscurations generate, which magick can address directly rather than through repayment.
On self-sacrifice, Sam is unsparing. He lays out three failures in the concept as usually practised: it diminishes the practitioner, often being valued in proportion to the harm it does them; across a closed system the net benefit is frequently zero-sum; and the glory attached to the sacrifice can inflate the donor's attachment and narcissism rather than reduce it. His example is the self-immolation of monks during the Vietnam War, not all of whom died with serenity. The Buddhist solution he adopts is Bodhichitta — dedicating one's spiritual effort to the benefit of all beings, explicitly including oneself, since excluding the self from 'all beings' is simply bad arithmetic and the purely self-directed pursuit of enlightenment is, on inspection, the most self-centred act imaginable. His conclusion: self-sacrifice is not particularly useful, but magick without bodhichitta is death, because magic-users manipulate karma directly and unless that manipulation is dedicated outward it curdles into narcissism and eventual self-destruction.
The bulk of the piece is the method itself, laid out as five practices. First, the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram three times daily for a month, to purify the soul and expose the shadow complexes that would otherwise be empowered and amplified by what follows. Second, the Middle Pillar at least once daily for a month, to charge and sensitise what the LBR has cleared. Third, structured invocation of the Elements — first balanced, then one at a time until each is fully awakened, for anywhere from a week to a year — from which the Quintessence emerges as an integrating fifth term, turning the Cross into the Pentagram. Fourth, a branching choice: Liber Samech toward Knowledge and Conversation of the Angel, or the Planetary Cycle (a week-by-week working through each planet's metal, colour, hexagram and godnames), or the Solar Path of devotion. Fifth, once Knowledge and Conversation is achieved, invoking each of the remaining great symbol-sets — Sephiroth, Tarot, Zodiac — under the Angel's own guidance, which is the proper work of the Adeptus Major.
The essay closes on the oldest advice in the tradition — invoke often and inflame yourself with prayer — and quotes Israel Regardie's front matter to the Falcon Press Golden Dawn, itself quoting Calvin Coolidge on persistence: that talent, genius and education are all common among the unsuccessful, and that persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.
Originally published at samwebstermage.com →