Quest Magazine

Tarot and the Tree of Life

By Isabel Radow Kliegman

Originally printed in the JULY-AUGUST 2008 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Kliegman, Isabel Radow. "Tarot and the Tree of Life." Quest 96.4 (JULY-AUGUST 2008):137-141.

WELCOME TO THE GREAT ADVENTURE! Together we are about to embark on an exploration of a time-honored facilitator of psychic growth—the Tarot cards. Many facets of the Tarot's origins, history, and evolution remain enmeshed in controversy and mystery. Tarot refers to a deck of seventy-eight pictured cards which most people associate with Gypsy fortune tellers. Others, for various reasons, have traced their origins back to the Egyptians. A more scholarly approach would say that Tarot first appeared in thirteenth-century France, in the still-available Marseilles deck. At that time, they were produced on leather and metal, predating both the invention of paper and the arrival from India of the Gypsies.

The seventy-eight cards are of two basically different kinds: the Major Arcana (Arcana, as in our word arcane meaning "secret," "esoteric," or "hidden away"), of which there are twenty-two; and the Minor Arcana, of which there are fifty-six. So we have the "great secrets," the Major Arcana, and the "small secrets," the Minor Arcana.

The Tarot eventually became associated with the Holy Kabbalah, and in particular, the Kabbalistic Tree of Life. There is the predictable controversy about when and how these two giants of metaphysical thought came together, with theories ranging from biblical times to the nineteenth century. However, it is clear that by the nineteenth century, the two modalities were used in concert, to the great enhancement of the Tarot cards.

In 1856, Alphonse Louis Constant, known as Eliphas Levi, published the first book to associate the twenty-two cards of the Major Arcana with the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet and the four suits of the Minor Arcana with the Tetragrammaton—the four-letter name of God. In 1889, Gerard Encausse, a student of Levi known as Papus, published The Tarot of the Bohemians, which asserts that the Tarot was generated by the Tetragrammaton and is to be understood in terms of it. Another student of Levi, Paul Christian, created a system combining Tarot with Kabbalistic astrology. Also in 1889, Oswald Wirth published a deck of Major Arcana whose twenty-two designs incorporated the twenty-two Hebrew letters. Both his teacher, Stanislos De Guaito, and Papus were members of the Kabbalistic Order of the Rose Cross, which has come into modern times as the Rosicrucians.

The connection between Kabbalah and Tarot continued to be recognized in the execution of decks by such proponents as Aleister Crowley, Paul Foster Case, and Manley Palmer Hall. Although the Hebrew letters do not appear in his deck, Arthur Edward Waite, a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, assigned Hebrew letters to the cards in his writings. The Golden Dawn deck, executed by Robert Wang, associates the ten sefirot, or vessels, with the ten numbered cards, and the four olams, or realms, with the suits of the Minor Arcana. Aleister Crowley, in the Book of Thoth, went so far as to assert that "the Tarot was designed as a practical instrument for Qabalistic calculations."

Regardless of the actual origins of Tarot and Kabbalah, by 1890 Kabbalistic teaching was integral to Tarot design. It is my contention that the expanded understanding and use of Tarot has Kabbalah—properly understood—at its root.

The Minor Arcana fall into four suits: Pentacles, Cups, Swords and Wands. Pentacles became Diamonds (the word pentacle refers to a coin within which is a five-pointed star, or pentagram), Cups became Hearts, Swords became Spades, and Wands became Clubs. Of course, our deck of playing cards has fifty-two cards, and the Minor Arcana of the Tarot, as I have mentioned, number fifty-six. The disparity can be explained in that we have three royalty cards in our modern deck—the jack, queen, and king. But the Tarot equivalent is composed of four court cards—the page, knight, queen and king. The page and the knight collapsed into one another to make the jack.

If we look at the aces of the Tarot, we see in every case a similar image. We see the hand of God, a huge, oversized hand coming out of the sky, out of the heavens through a cloud, shining in a halo of white light. Doing what? Offering a gift. Kabbalah means "receiving." The aces are doing the giving, and the universe is doing the receiving. They give us the gift of pentacles, of cups, of swords, and of wands.

Each of the suits corresponds to what the ancients called elementals and also to what the great psychologist Carl Jung called the functions of consciousness. The Suit of Pentacles refers to earth, the Suit of Cups refers to water, the Suit of Swords refers to air, and the Suit of Wands refers to fire. Having announced that authoritatively, I must add that you can find reputable writers who disagree with almost every one of these associations: C. C. Zain pairs Pentacles with air and Swords with earth, and Stephan Hoeller relates Swords to fire, for example.

The Suit of Pentacles has to do with how we relate to money, how we relate to our career, to our state of health, to the material world. If I get sick, how do I feel about that? What do I do about it? When I go to work, is it just a way for me to earn money, or is there a sense of service involved? Not the world, but how we interact with the world, is the domain of Pentacles. The Suit of Cups has to do with our feelings: how we feel, how we express feelings, and how we respond to the feelings of others. The Suit of Swords has to do with our clarity, our ability to analyze, our capacity to think clearly. It also has to do with our courage. The Suit of Wands reflects the fiery energy that on one end of the spectrum expresses as frank physical sexuality and on the other end of the same spectrum as intuition, psychic knowing, and inspiration.

Of more interest, in Jungian terms, the Suit of Pentacles refers to the sensate function, information that comes to us through our five senses. The Suit of Cups refers to the feeling function, our emotional response to stimuli. The Suit of Swords refers to the thinking function, how we consciously process information. The Suit of Wands refers to the intuitive function, that mysterious way of somehow knowing, and to what Freud called libido, our primitive life force. Each of these is equally valuable. The four court cards have similar associations: pages with earth and the sensate; knights with air and the mental; queens with water and the feeling-toned; and kings with fire and the intuitive.

It is my belief that everything that is part of human experience can be expressed by, and is expressed in, the Tarot. What a card conveys is determined by a complex of factors. So how do you know? How do you know when you're reading the cards what interpretation to put on them? Ah, that's what makes the game so interesting. That's why, over the centuries and our personal lifetimes, the Tarot is never in danger of boring us. It demands our intuition as well as our knowledge. It requires feeling, perception, and an awareness of all the other cards in a spread as a distinctive pattern. It also exacts a sense about the person for whom one is reading. Sometimes things we intuit seem to be coming not from the cards but through them. When that happens, the process is amazing and wonderful.

A Tarot reading shows you where you are headed if you continue your present course of action. It is the flashing light of warning. The cards are only little cardboard pictures, to be protected or destroyed by you. They have no power other than the power you invest in them. They are the instrument. The power is in you. The power is in each of us, in the glorious human psyche, with its infinite capacity to search and sense and stretch and unfold.

Kabbalistically speaking, we want to identify with the sap that moves all through the Tree of Life. The universe is in constant motion. Nothing in the universe is static. The chairs on which we sit are composed of molecules racing through the space between them. The blood circulates in the body. The air flows in and out of the lungs. If we lock our knees and say, "Now I've got the Truth! This is where I want to be and this is where I'm going to stay!" something will happen (instantly, in my experience) that forces us to make a readjustment. If we can avoid rigid attachment to a single perspective, a single way of being, a single truth, we are more likely, as our universe continues to change, to be ready for whatever happens next and to answer the demands of the experience.

Kabbalah: The Ultimate Gift

We are now ready to turn our attention to the Tree of Life, an instrument of great power that will prove invaluable to our understanding of the cards. Each vessel, or sefirah, on the Tree is named for an attribute of the infinite, unknowable God. Each bears an archetype of that manifestation of the divine. The Minor Arcana may be seen as pictorial expressions of those archetypes. Underlying the historical association of vessel and card is a potent, mysterious psychological truth: The Kabbalistic Tree of Life provides the archetypes by which the Tarot can be understood. This observation is well made by Stephan Hoeller, drawing on the teachings of Carl Jung, in The Royal Road: "The coincidence of the two systems . . . is not a mere haphazard concurrence of unrelated circumstances, but is a meaningful coincidence of great psychological, or if you prefer, mystical power and purpose."

As Gershom Scholem conceded privately to Stephan Hoeller, and as the latter emphasizes in The Royal Road, "the combined system of Kabbalah and Tarot works. . . . Past history matters less than firsthand experience." If the proof of the pudding is, indeed, in the eating, then sample the wares herein and be your own best judge.

If we are going to enter the mystical realm of Kabbalah, which draws so heavily on the female side of us—the intuitive, the psychic, the mysterious—we have to approach it with a highly developed male part of ourselves. To use Jungian terms, if we are going into anima activity we need a strongly developed animus. If we do not have this, whether we are male or female, we are going to be yanked way off balance. Each of us, male or female in body, is androgynous. To study Kabbalah, we require a strongly developed male side, so that logic, reason, objectivity, and the capacity for analytical thinking will balance the experiences we may encounter in this pursuit. Mystical experience, regardless of its source, must, if it is to have meaning, occur inappropriate context. Maturity, balance, and the wish to use these experiences to enhance rather than to escape from life are wise criteria to apply here.

The most important thing to know about Kabbalah is very simple: Kabbalah means "receiving." We are dealing with an explanation of the creation in terms of a generous God. (Kabbalistically, the godhead is twofold. There is Adonai, the male aspect of the godhead, the Lord. And there is the Holy Shechinah, the female aspect of the godhead. We are dealing with an androgynous spirit, not to be understood as male but as the divine ruling spirit, the Eternal One. Basic to the Kabbalistic system, then, is that the universe is created by a loving God whose wish is to give and who has created us specifically as creatures who can receive, with loving awareness and conscious appreciation. We have choices to make, and we can fall into evil ways, but we are born perfect.

There is a blueprint for all human beings, for all experiences, and for any system that one can imagine. This universal symbol, central to Kabbalah, is the Tree of Life. When we look at the Tree of Life, it certainly is a strange-looking tree. Clearly then, this is not meant to be a representational tree. The Tree is conceptual. What is of extreme importance about a tree is that it is a single organism. We can't look at the beautiful crown of the tree with its brilliant green shining leaves and its bright pink-and-white blossoms and say, "Well, that part of the tree I like. But these filthy roots down in the dirt? I don't see what we need those for!"

We have the roots, the trunk, the bark, the branches; we have the twigs, the leaves, and the blossoms: what we see here is diversity in oneness. That's the message of the conceptual tree. Isn't that what the universe is, the uni being the oneness and the verse the diversity? So it is true that we are all one and that the universe is a single organism. It also true that there is great diversity.

This is certainly true of ourselves as well. What we are is a single wholeness, and we cannot separate out the parts of ourselves that we think are unworthy or that we don't like or that we think are bad or evil. Our challenge is acceptance, recognizing that everything we have is a part of one whole and that everything we have enables us to function. Perhaps the aspects of ourselves we like least will turn out to be as valuable to us as the roots are to the tree.

Another cardinal message of Kabbalah, then, is integration. We are not here to get rid of anything. If it didn't belong here, God wouldn't have put it here. We are here to integrate everything we have and everything we are in order to put it to its best possible use. We are challenged to think a new way—as an energy that has the potential for positive thrust. The challenge, as always, is toward oneness. We are challenged to be at one with God, at one with one another, and at one within ourselves. Perhaps this last is our most difficult endeavor.

diagram

We see that the Tree has three pillars. The right-hand pillar is called the Pillar of Mercy. It is the pillar of energy flow, and it is called male or masculine and positive. The left-hand pillar is called the Pillar of Severity. It is the pillar of form. It is called female or feminine and negative. (Here we must interpret "negative" in terms of a necessary "nothing" in the same way that a socket is a nothing, an emptiness which receives a plug.) A connection is required to make the energy flow. We need both the energy and the form. If you want a drink of water, and the water is the energy flow, it must be in something; you need something to give water form, for example, a cup. To give form is to restrict, and yet without form we can receive nothing at all.

The central pillar is the Pillar of Harmony. It is the pillar of integration. Our task is to acknowledge the darkness—in the world, in ourselves—and integrate it with the light. The Pillar of Harmony is the place where these energies come into perfect balance. We have to work the Tree in the way that is called the Way of the Serpent, which winds all around the Tree and slowly, gradually, and patiently experiences and integrates every energy on the Tree.

Continuing our examination of the Tree of Life, we direct our attention to the series of circles that make up these pillars. These are called sefirot, the singular of which is sefirah. A sefirah is a vessel, created to contain the divine energy that emanates from the godhead. The Tree may be perceived as a many-tiered fountain. As God allows energy to flow forth, the energy is caught up in the first sefirah. When that overflows, it fills the next two sefirot, and when they overflow, they fill the following two sefirot, down into the sixth sefirah, and so on.

We can imagine that the sefirot at the top of the Tree are lighter, thinner, more transparent and more fragile; as we move down the Tree, we move into sefirot which are thicker and stronger, but through which the light (God energy) shines more dimly. When we're down on this earth plane, we need the stronger vessels to contain the divine essence, because we know what it's like on the freeway if we're driving in Baccarat crystal. We're going to get shattered. In order to get to the clearer energies, the sefirot through which the light shines more easily, we need to do our meditations working up the Tree. But the most important thing to remember is that the light at the base of the Tree is the same light as the light at the height of the Tree. The light itself is unchanged. The difference is in the container; Dom Perignon tastes the same in a Baccarat crystal goblet and an earthenware mug. There is a place between the first sefirah and the sixth sefirah in which there seems to be an empty space. There is, in fact, an uncreated sefirah there, which is called Daath. (That is the sefirah that God is waiting for us to create.)

As we turn our attention to the Tarot, we can only be amazed at the ways in which these two totally distinct and disparate systems of thought converge, leading us to a single great teaching. In exploring the relationships between the Tarot and the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, we discover parallels that make remembering the cards, as well as understanding them, simple. We are struck by the fact that there are ten sefirot on the Tree of Life and ten pip, or numbered cards, in each suit of the Tarot. This numerical association alone invites us to connect the ace through ten of each suit with the sefirah corresponding to its number. Keter, as the first sefirah on the Tree, corresponds to the aces, for example, while the fifth sefirah, Gevurah, lays claim to the fives, Hod to the eights, and so on. We will find as we explore these connections card by card that the associations do not seem to be those of chance. Rather, there seems to be an intentionality, a rightness, even a clear fit in some cases between the sefirah and card that share the same number.

This synchronicity, in Jungian terms, benefits the student of Tarot in a number of ways. First, it separates the forty pip cards from the sixteen court cards, making each more conceptually manageable. Instead of being accosted by fifty-six random images to memorize, we begin with forty that break neatly into four groups of ten. Ten cards numbered one through ten, each of which seems to have a sefirah governing it, is a reader-friendly proposition compared to fifty-six disorganized images clamoring for our attention.

chart In assigning the pip cards to the sefirot of the Tree of Life, we introduce a further suggestion that facilitates both understanding and remembering the cards. The implication is that similarly numbered cards of each suit have something in common. And, indeed, what they share is their association with one of the ten sefirot and the distinctive character of that sefirah. If we have understood what the energy of Chesed is, for example, in assigning the fours of each suit to that sefirah, we can say, "Look at the image of the Four of Cups. How does what I know about Chesed (mercy) color my perception of that card? Can I detect the quality of that vessel in the Four of Wands? How does it help me to understand the Four of Swords? How does the nature of Chesed challenge my initial impression of the Four of Pentacles?"

The appropriateness of the match between sefirah and Minor Arcanum is more powerful in some cases than in others, or at least more obvious. The coincidence of sefirot and pips challenges us to seek meaning and connection, to grasp why the image of the Four of Cups and that of the Four of Wands belong to Chesed, to find what, in essence, they share. Even at its most arcane, the connection between the sefirah and the cards that belong to it by virtue of their numbers is worth pursuing and exploring.

The sixteen court cards also break into four clear groups: kings, queens, knights, and pages. Once again, we are confronted with a numerical correspondence in the Tree of Life, this time with the four olams or worlds. Understanding the nature of each world will inform our understanding of each set of court cards. Again, seeing what the pages of each suit have in common, how they are manifestations of the olam that they all share, enables us to remember them more easily.

The process is reciprocal. The nebulous flavor of the sefirah or olam is rendered intelligible when we see, in the image of a Minor Arcanum, a palpable expression of it. Conversely, we find deeper meaning in the cards as we come to understand how they are characterized by the sefirot and olams of the Tree of Life to which they are assigned. That there should be twenty-two Major Arcana in the Tarot and twenty-two paths connecting the sefirot of the Tree of Life is the final mysterious connection between the two symbologies. Papus believed that from the Tarot alone all wisdom and knowledge could be elicited. If he was right, then there is no way to exhaust the riches it will yield to each of us.

Isabel Radow Kliegman, a graduate of Cornell University, attended Oxford as a Fulbright Scholar, and earned her Masters degree at Columbia University. For over twenty-five years, Kliegman has devoted herself to consulting, lecturing, teaching, and conducting workshops on the Tarot and related subjects. A published poet, she spoke at International Tarot Congress, and received an award from the United Sensitives of America. Kliegman resides in Pacific Palisades, CA. This article is an excerpt from her first book, Tarot and the Tree of Life (Quest 1997); her companion piece, tying the Major Arcana of the Tarot to the paths on The Tree of Life, is in progress.

Explorations: Meditation and Yoga

By Kay Mouradian

Originally printed in the JULY-AUGUST 2008 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Mouradian, Kay. "Explorations: Meditation and Yoga." Quest 96.4 (JULY-AUGUST 2008):148-149.

Theosophical Society - Kay Mouradian, Ed.D. is a retired professor of health and physical education from the Los Angeles Community Colleges. A long time student of Theosophy, she is author of Reflective Meditation (Quest Books 1982) and A Gift in the Sunlight: An Armenian Story.

BING ESCUDERO never knew me or how much he affected my thinking. Privileged to have attended one of his Theosophical lectures many years ago, I still remember a powerful sentence from his talk. It resonates in my being even today. He said that Madame Blavatsky's mission was to bring the words reincarnation and karma into the western vocabulary and that the mission of the Theosophical Society in the twentieth century was to expand that metaphysical vocabulary with the words meditation and consciousness.

At the time, I was in the midst of researching yoga for my doctoral dissertation and teaching physical education at a community college in Los Angeles. I was trying to define a yoga curriculum for the public schools minus yoga's spiritual core. A sabbatical allowed me to intensify my research in India. It was there, like a bolt of lightning, that I learned that yoga, without its spirituality, is not yoga. One of several yogis I interviewed had become exasperated with my superficial questions and said, "Don't talk to me about yoga, talk to me about asana." My eyes widened in a state of a shock. I realized my questioning session had just ended.

It is important for a researcher to ask the right questions, however, at that time my consciousness was devoid of a thoughtful understanding of yoga. I wanted all the physical attributes yoga books claimed for a healthy body, but I was not sure about the rest of that "yoga stuff." As a teacher in a public community college where teaching religion is frowned upon, I was not interested in knowing how much belief and religious practice were at the heart of yoga. For me asana was yoga. I had read of the Indian sage Patanjali and his eight branches of yoga (yama, niyama, asana, pranayama, pratyahara, dharana, dhyana, and samadhi), but my heart related only to asana, the physical postures designed to keep the body supple, strong, and healthy. What I did not know at the time is that the intent of asana is to spiritualize the physical body and prepare it for the all-powerful experience of samadhi, the uniting of one's consciousness with God's consciousness, like that of a wave pulling back from the shore and again becoming one with the ocean.

The ultimate objective of all the various yoga practices is samadhi. Yoga disciplines are powerful and need to be heeded in their totality. Asana is the third branch of Patanjali's yoga and only one-eighth of its discipline. It should not be taken out of context. A warning came from Edgar Cayce when he said that what is good can also be bad.

My fear is that taking asana out of its intended realm could result in harming the physical body instead of strengthening it. Even worse, with today's dilution of yoga, I fear that Patanjali's yoga without its spirituality will become infected and eventually lose its magic as did the ancient spiritual centers in Greece when persons flooding those areas came without a purity of intent.

Where do meditation and consciousness fall within the yoga discipline? A brief overview of Patanjali's eight branches reveals that the first two branches, yama and niyama, propose living with the right action of ethical behavior and that asana and pranayama are physical and breathing exercises designed to enhance the body's atomic structure and prepare it for the lengthy stillness needed in meditation. The next three branches of Patanjali's yoga are a series of meditative techniques that study the activity of the mind to help shape it to become skillful and attentive. Controlling the mind (raja yoga), which some say is the highest yoga, is essential before one finds the entrance and passes through into the enlightened state of samadhi.

My first attempt at meditation was an uncomfortable moment. I did not like closing my eyes and not being able to see all that surrounded me. Not being the center of the scene, I no longer could make judgments about what I saw. I heard the sound of a speeding car and my mind visualized ocean waves. Why did I visualize waves? Why did H. P. Blavatsky say, "Thou shalt not let the senses make a playground of thy mind"? That was a clue that led me into an exciting adventure of delving into my mind to see how and why it worked the way it did. After seven years of intense study I am now aware of what is going on in my mind at all times. Although my mind still wanders, I often catch it as it loses focus and understand why.

As my meditation practices became stronger, I saw my thoughts speedily go hither-dither, that "monkey mind" often referred to in yoga literature. Watching the initializing of my thoughts and identifying where they came from—inside my head or from the outside—I was able to determine if I wanted to keep those thoughts as part of my consciousness. All in a flash!

Anger had been my bane in my early years. Then one day in meditation, I saw an angry thought surfacing, watched it with full attention, did not give it energy, and it dissipated on its own. It was the beginning of understanding how to clear the negative junk thoughts that had encrusted my consciousness. However, once in a while, especially when driving in traffic, I feel a seed of anger rising, but am aware of its happening and I immediately change its energy. My secret is keeping my attention at the sixth charka, the mind's eye, where thoughts I want to keep in my consciousness are strengthened. I learned to do this in an unusually quiet and attentive meditation when I saw a thought forming in the back of my head. And that phrase, "in the back of my mind" made sense. I learned to bring those thoughts to the forefront of my mind, to the mind's eye, or dismiss them if they were junk. It is not so much control of my mind as it is becoming aware of what is sitting in the back of my mind that can cause discord in my hectic life.

Swami Sivananda said that the nature of the mind is such that it becomes what it thinks intensely upon. Most of us have no idea of what thoughts are sitting in our consciousness. How often have you heard people say, "I don't know who I am"? That phrase propels many of us who have no idea what thoughts dominate our lives. But, attentive meditation focusing on how and where thoughts are formed can begin to clear the fog and confusion that clouds our minds.

Once we understand the nature of thought and how it drives us in our daily lives, we have an opportunity to strengthen our thoughts of goodness, kindness, and compassion and become a human being whose consciousness is a reflection of who we can become. Meditation and consciousness, two words activated in our daily vocabulary, can uplift the human being to heights previously unimagined.

Kay Mouradian, Ed.D. is a retired professor of health and physical education from the Los Angeles Community Colleges. A long time student of Theosophy, she is author of Reflective Meditation (Quest Books 1982) and A Gift in the Sunlight: An Armenian Story.

The Outside Lands: Astrology and Taboo

By John P. O'Grady

Originally printed in the JULY-AUGUST 2008 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: O'Grady, John P. "The Outside Lands: Astrology and Taboo." Quest 96.4 (JULY-AUGUST 2008):143-147.

Theosophical Society - John P. O'Grady is a teacher ar Rocky Mountain College in Billings, Montana and the author of Grave Goods: Essays of a Peculiar Nature.

WHERE ON THE MAP of our contemporary cultural landscape would the practice of astrology be located? Certainly nowhere near the center, amid the skyscrapers of commerce and the ivory towers of academe. Nor will it appear among the trim houses and shopping malls of suburbia. Look instead toward the fringes, in the same far-flung and forgotten spaces occupied by city dumps, auto junkyards, and hazardous waste depositories. Yet even these extravagant reaches are not the proper place of astrology. The investigating eye must travel further still, over the edge and into the air. What we seek is not on this map. Astrology is elsewhere.

In the workaday world, the shopworn dictum of general semantics still applies: "The map is not the territory." But when it comes to the "Outside Lands" of the human mind—which is where astrology abides—the map is the territory, and then some. These districts are more commonly known as the imagination, or to use Henry Corbin's precise term, the "epiphanic place of the images." Astrology, like all forms of creative activity—poetry, painting, music, just to name a few—is a method for reasonable minds to extend a grasp beyond reason. Reason, that frontier William Blake called "the bound or outward circumference of Energy" in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Astrology takes place in an intellectual terrain vague, where common sense—for good reason, I suppose—sets up its "No Trespassing" signs and chain-link fences topped with razor wire. Every edge is perilous, not to mention, ambiguous. Step over this threshold and roads disappear, trails go unmaintained. Treacherous flora and fauna abound. Who knows what to expect? If you get into trouble out here, no rescue party will show up. It is no place for the unwary.

For the most part, the intelligentsia regards those who practice astrology as inhabiting a kind of mental Superfund site. The academic pundits would have you believe some of the most toxic varieties of thinking occur here, requiring concerted effort on the part of society to clean up. According to one prominent twentieth-century intellectual, Theodor Adorno, astrology is a "metaphysic of dunces." The Sorbonne's granting of a Ph.D. in 2001 for a thesis on the subject of astrology was met with a fury of academic criticism. Lamented Emily Eakin, a French sociologist: "I personally consider this defense a blow to our discipline and an insult to those who do their work properly." One of the more renowned contemporary skeptics is British professor, Richard Dawkins, who becomes discomposed at the very mention of astrology, calling it an "aesthetic affront." With menace reminiscent of Socrates' nastier interlocutors, he wonders why "are professional astrologers not jailed for fraud?" Passion such as this, even when expressed in the coolest of scientific tones, suggests that the practice of astrology must be in high violation of some taboo.

For a long time, I worked as a tenured professor of literature. Then one day I decided to leave the academy for more creative endeavors, including the practice of astrology. Once my colleagues figured out I was serious, they were aghast. You would have thought I had just announced plans to become an asbestos salesman or a purveyor of pornography. I had broken the academic commandment "Thou shalt not become a soothsayer." I tried explaining that astrology is not fortune-telling, but rather more like the study of poetry: both are concerned with cultivating a more attentive style of reading. Alas, this line of reasoning failed. Poetry is just about as worrisome to English professors as astrology, yet because poetry has long been part of the official curriculum, they are habituated to its threat, much like those who dwell in earthquake country. Even so, I have observed that most literature professors still get nervous whenever poetry's name is mentioned. As far as they are concerned, the Pierian Spring is just another contaminated water supply.

As both anthropology and psychology make clear, a taboo is a stern prohibition against certain persons, places, things, or even ideas that seem imbued with dangerous power. When confronted with something taboo, our response is often deeply conflicted. On the one hand, we may have the sense of being in the presence of the sacred, as if standing before the very engines of the universe and let out with, "Oh, wow!" On the other hand, we might also be overwhelmed with holy dread, a feeling that things here are dangerous, out of control, or unclean which elicits an "Oh, no!" That which is taboo would kill you to look at, for—as both Bible and Emily Dickinson make clear—"none see God and live." At the very least, according to the joyless Freud, violating a taboo renders the violator contagious and irredeemably defiled. In short, taboo is the shadow of order, the prison wall holding back all hell.

Some years ago, the esteemed Mary Douglas pointed out that taboos in a given society have to do with preserving symbolic boundaries. Think of the "great walls" in China, Britain, or Berlin that were built to keep out invading hordes. Or consider the "lesser walls" that today surround our zoos, prisons, military installations, and gated communities. When it comes to the line between certainty and confusion, order and chaos, good fences—we hope—make good neighbors. Such fences, however, require vigilant maintenance on the part of society, because, as Robert Frost phrases it, "Something there is that doesn't love a wall." A carpenter of my acquaintance likes to say, "Show me the walls you erect and I will tell you who you are." He could be a psychotherapist, or a cultural commentator on television.

The walls that house our most firmly held beliefs have no windows. Undistracted by bright light streaming in from the outside, we can kick back in the soft couch of habit and gaze upon our high-definition monitors. Inside our mortgaged House of Belief, each of us feels relaxed and secure. Here is our intellectual comfort zone, our hearth and home, and we furnish it according to our taste, whether it be the Shaker décor of scientific Positivism or the velvety tones of the New Age movement. If we make our way outside, or worse, are cast forth from the House of Belief, we find ourselves bushwhacking in the wild wooly-wags of doubt. Back in 1877, a rogue philosopher by the name of C. S. Peirce published an essay in which he characterizes doubt as "an uneasy and dissatisfied state from which we struggle to free ourselves and pass into the state of belief; while the latter is a calm and satisfactory state which we do not wish to avoid, or to change to a belief in anything else." Peirce calls it doubt, but this bewildering condition sounds much like Corbin's epiphanic place. We can call it the imagination, but I prefer the "Outside Lands."

If your house is located in a neighborhood anywhere near the Outside Lands, you must get used to the visitors from afar who show up at the door, speaking in strange tongues. "We know how to say many false things" declare the Muses in Hesiod's Theogony, "as if they were true, but we know—when we wish—to utter true things." The astrologer—like the poet, the saint, and, we must admit, the lunatic—welcomes these shady characters into the living room, because they come bearing what Plato calls "charms for the soul." But one person's charm is another's dangerous substance, which is why society makes every effort to regulate this traffic in imaginal lures by keeping a close eye on those who have known contacts in the underworld. The saint is stoned, drowned, or burned at the stake. The lunatic is medicated, institutionalized, and stripped of even a nominal connection to the nurturing moon by being reclassified as mentally ill. The poet, too, is institutionalized, albeit more kindly treated when granted a "residency" and tenure in the local university, not to mention a steady paycheck and a benefits package.

When it comes to the threat posed by the astrologer, things are somewhat trickier. As the embarrassing Sorbonne incident makes clear, academia remains ill-disposed toward the study and practice of astrology. In 1991, Kepler College of Astrological Arts and Sciences was founded near Seattle. When the school received preliminary endorsement from the State of Washington's Higher Education Coordinating Board, the chancellor of Boston University, John Silber, lashed out with an op-ed piece in the Boston Herald, declaring: "The promoters of Kepler College have honored Kepler not for his strength but for his weakness, as if a society advocating drunkenness named a school for Ernest Hemingway." Outside the academy, the practice of astrology does not fare much better. If social prestige is any measure, the astrologer enjoys about as much of it as a black market trafficker in plutonium. Thomas Merton once observed that the artist in our society has "inherited the combined functions of hermit, pilgrim, prophet, priest, shaman, sorcerer, soothsayer, alchemist and bonze." He should have added "outlaw."

Whoever would practice astrology must be a mutineer. Genius demands this of any artist. The word genius, in fact, may bring us closer to understanding the fulminations of astrology's antagonists. "Genius" is the Latin translation of the Greek daimon, root of our word "demon." (Recall Carl Sagan's last book, The Demon-Haunted World.) As we use the term today, genius is far removed from its original sense. In former times, you spoke of having a genius as you would of having a friend; nowadays you are a genius, and perhaps all the lonelier for it. In the fourth century BCE, Democritus claimed that the "soul is the dwelling-place of the genius." Maybe that was the case, but today we seem to have evicted our genius, our guardian angel, and sent it packing back to the Outside Lands whence it came. Each of us then occupies his or her own McMansion of an ego, but dwells there all alone. Not to worry, for it is crammed to the ceiling with possessions with more just a mouse-click away.

Once upon a time, human beings understood that happiness was an acquisition obtainable only through proper relationship with the non-human realm which used to be known as the daimonic, now called the divine. Because one's genius was regarded as a personal attendant throughout the course of life, the Romans thought it worthy of veneration. You were expected to offer yearly sacrifices to your genius. One's birth was a particular object of this guardian spirit's care and attention, thus the marriage bed was known as the genial bed. And those who enjoyed a fortunate existence were said to have a genial life. Apparent in these etymological musings is a congenial insight: when it comes to figuring things out, we are never far from spiritual aid. There is a vast unseen community out there just waiting for our renewed attention, but start chatting them up and you risk running afoul of the authorities—sooner breach the fence surrounding a nuclear generating station so you can get inside and play around with the dials. Mary Douglas puts her finger on it when she says that the "same forces that threaten to destroy good order represent the powers inhering in the cosmos" (161). Those who control power within the social structure are usually loath to share any of it.

Thus, it is chancy to play with Promethean fire. Genius, no matter what the form, is rightly approached with caution if not outright trepidation, since it draws power from dark outlets. While society may not nab you for the transgression, what awaits on the other side very well might. Keep this in mind when Hesiod's double-talking Muses come knocking or the charming politician asks for your vote. The nature of this unfathomable energy cannot be explained in the sanctioned terms of rational materialism, the vocabulary of those who speak from endowed chairs in the university. Yet this power is available to any who seek it, as Emerson reminds us, "by unlocking, at all risks, one's human doors, and suffering the ethereal tides to roll and circulate through." Be warned: even a degree from an astrological college is not enough to save you from drowning in these waters.

In early Greece, Simonides of Ceos was a man of genius, a prolific writer of verse, and said to be the first poet ever to take money for his work. Apparently his talent was such that he could induce people into believing that things unreal were real. Only the Thessalians were immune to his verbal conjurings. When asked why this was the case, Simonides' [paraphrased] reply was, "Oh them, they're just too ignorant to be deceived by me." By that he meant they were utterly lacking in imagination. Dull witted people, says Giordano Bruno, "are not soothed by eloquent speech, nor are they won over by beauty, music, painting or by any of the other attractions of nature" (146). Nor do they appreciate astrology.

Nevertheless, the practice of astrology is to be counted among the dwindling options in our society for getting behind the deadening slogans and billboards of everyday life. Grand gifts of healing, prophecy, and leadership only come to those who can get out of their right minds from time to time. The authorities may not like it, but those authorities are not so much "out there" as they are "in here," dressed up in the guises of our own fears, diminished expectations, and seductive sound bites designed to keep us in our place. "The war that matters," writes Diane di Prima, "is the war against the imagination/all others are subsumed in it." Astrology is not a science but an art, an art of surmising. To surmise is to imagine without certain knowledge, to follow the spirit without getting snared in the letter. It is a game of hit-or-miss, hide-and-seek, played in the buzzing thickets of the Outside Lands. "You're really getting at the nerve ends," said Robert Smithson when asked to explain what an artist does, "it is completely unknown territory you're getting into. And that's what's exciting, the whole element of exploration, expedition." Or you could say—with due apologies to Kenneth Burke—that the practice of astrology is part of our "equipment for living," a disaster kit for when the walls of habit come tumbling down.

A curious bit of lore is to be gathered in a certain precinct adjacent to the Outside Lands. It concerns the allurements of mind that each of us is subject to, whether scientist or astrologer, philosopher or debauchee. We are told that when we try to seismically retrofit our House of Belief, it is as if we were binding ourselves with chains. As long as our House of Belief stands, we do not feel these chains as chains, mistaking them as we do for fine threads of silk and strands of cashmere. We love them because they give us pleasure. But when the "Big One" finally hits and the walls of our House of Belief come tumbling down to the ground, the chains suddenly feel hard, and instead of providing pleasure they are now the source of great suffering. At last, we recognize the bonds for what they are.

When that time comes—and it is coming—we will require a new map, something along the lines of a treasure map. Choose carefully, because as Ptolemy warned long ago, "no one presents it rightly unless an artist." This new map may come in the form of a poem, perhaps written on the back of a cocktail napkin or spray-painted on the side of a building. Maybe it will arrive as a song coming over the radio or through a painting hanging on the wall. It might even show up in the much-reviled figure of a horoscope. Who knows? Nobody can say what your new map will look like, but be assured that, sooner or later, it will lead toward the darkling wealth of the Outside Lands

References

Adorno, Theodor. "Theses Against Occultism." 1947. The Stars Down to Earth, and Other Essays on the Irrational in Culture. Ed. Stephen Crook. London: Routledge, 1994.

Bruno, Giordano. "A General Account of Bonding." Cause, Principle and Unity and Essays on Magic. Eds. Richard E. Blackwell and Robert de Lucca. NY: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Corbin, Henri. "Mundus Imaginalis, or the Imaginary and the Imaginal." http://www.hermetic.com/bey/mundus_imaginalis.htm

Dawkins, Richard. "The Real Romance in the Stars." The Independent on Sunday, December 31, 1995.

di Prima, Diane. "Rant" Pieces of a Song. San Francisco, CA: City Lights Publishers, 1990.

Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966.

Eakin, Emily. "Star Wars: Is Astrology Sociology?" New York Times, June 2, 2001.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. "The Poet." Essays and Lectures: Nature: Addresses and Lectures/Essays: First and Second Series, ed. Joel Porte. NY: Library of America, 1983.

Merton, Thomas. Raids on the Unspeakable. NY: New Directions Publishing Corp, 1996.

Peirce, Charles Sanders. "The Fixation of Belief." Popular Science Monthly 12 (November 1877), 1–15.

Silber, John. "Silliness Under Seattle Stars." Boston Herald, May 16, 2001.

John P. O'Grady has been studying and practicing astrology for more than twenty-five years. A college professor on extended sabbatical, he now lives in San Francisco. He can be contacted at johnpogrady@comcast.net and his web site is http://johnpogrady.com/index.html .

The Future of Esoteric Christianity

By Richard Smoley

Originally printed in the JULY-AUGUST 2008 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Smoley, Richard. "The Future of Esoteric Christianity." Quest 96.4 (JULY-AUGUST 2008):131-134.

Theosophical Society - Richard Smoley is editor of Quest: Journal of the Theosophical Society in America and a frequent lecturer for the Theosophical Society

WHAT EXACTLY IS THE REALM OF THE esoteric and why is it so difficult to approach? The word esoteric is a curious one. It comes from Greek roots meaning "further in," and its ancestor, the adjective esoterikos, was first used in antiquity to refer to the writings of philosophers that were meant for their students rather than for the public at large. Practically all the surviving works of Aristotle are "esoteric" in this sense, consisting chiefly of his lecture notes that were edited by his students after his death. Exoteric, by contrast, means "further out"—that which was publicly available.

For the mystery religions of classical antiquity, the exoteric aspect was the myth itself—in the case of the mysteries of Eleusis, for example, of Demeter rescuing Persephone from Hades. This myth was publicly known, but its inner meaning was revealed only to initiates. As a result, today this esoteric meaning is a matter of speculation: devotees of these cults were sworn to secrecy, and generally speaking, they kept their oaths. (One possible exception is the tragedian Aeschylus, who was once prosecuted for revealing too much of the mysteries in his plays.) Nevertheless, it's easy to see how the mysteries of Eleusis resemble the death and resurrection myths that are so prominent in ancient Mediterranean religion. They also bear a strong similarity to esoteric teachings that we know today, in which the lower self must symbolically die in order for the higher self to be born.

Even this extremely brief sketch reveals a crucial difference between the two levels. The exoteric level was a story given out to everyone; most people believed it naïvely. But when someone suspected that there was more to this myth than met the eye, he or she was taken aside and initiated into its real meaning. It very likely had to do with the fact that human life does not end with death, as we gather from Cicero, the Roman statesman and philosopher, who wrote in De Legibus: "These mysteries have brought us out of a rustic and crude existence to a genuinely human life. The rites are called 'initiations,' and indeed they have initiated us into the true principles of life, giving us reason not only to live happily but to die with better hope" (2.36).

When proto-catholic Christianity, one of many strains of Christianity that existed in the first two centuries and ancestor of the present-day Catholic and Orthodox churches came onto the scene, it spread rapidly. After allying with the secular power of the Roman Empire in the fourth century, it eventually edged out and suppressed its competitors, in part, because its model, that of the mystery religions, was already familiar. Its only real difference—and its major selling point—was its claim that the death and resurrection of Jesus was not a myth but an actual event that had taken place in the recent past.

What, then, were the esoteric teachings of ancient Christianity? If you were to ask most conventional theologians today, they would answer that what was the esoteric meaning in antiquity, is for us today, the exoteric meaning: that Christ came down from heaven, died for our sins, was raised from the dead, and so on. However, the problem with this answer is that these teachings were never esoteric; they were common knowledge even in antiquity. Annie Besant quotes third-century Father Origen who addresses this issue in Contra Celsum, a refutation of Celsus, a pagan critic of Christianity:

Moreover, since he [Celsus] frequently calls the Christian doctrine a secret system [of belief], we must confute him on this point also, since almost the entire world is better acquainted with what Christians preach than with the favorite opinions of philosophers. For who is ignorant of the statement that Jesus was born of a virgin, and that He was crucified, and that His resurrection is an article of faith among many, and that a general judgment is announced to come, in which the wicked are to be punished according to their deserts, and the righteous to be truly rewarded? And yet the Mystery of the resurrection, not being understood, is made a subject of ridicule among unbelievers. In these circumstances, to speak of the Christian doctrine as a secret system, is altogether absurd. But that there should be certain doctrines, which are [revealed] after the exoteric ones have been taught, is not a peculiarity of Christianity alone. (44)

Origen is saying that the claim that Christ rose from the dead is not the esoteric meaning—not "the Mystery of the resurrection." What is it, then? To explore this question fully is beyond the scope of this article. I have discussed it in my book Inner Christianity, and in Theosophical literature, Annie Besant's Esoteric Christianity gives the best account. But in short, we can say there is a correlation of the mystery of the death and resurrection of Christ with the "death" of the lower self (the day-to-day persona with which we usually identify) which is reborn as the true Self, sometimes called the spirit or the "true I." As such, the resurrection of Christ becomes not merely a matter of blind belief or historical research but one of profound inner transformation.

This fact indicates why esotericism is so difficult to approach. An overwhelming majority of people are not particularly interested in it and instead want comparatively little from spirituality: some sense of community, a guideline for ethics, and hope for the afterlife. Esotericism provides none of these things in a ready-made fashion. The esoteric path, especially at first, is likely to create a sense of differentiation between the initiate and the world at large. If it imparts a sense of ethics higher than the common variety, it also reveals that much of what usually passes for morality is merely custom and convention. And if it provides hope, or even knowledge, of an afterlife, it raises profound questions about the nature of the Self that survives the body's demise.

The religious authorities are also frequently ambivalent, if not hostile, to esoteric awakening. An individual with his or her own direct contact with spiritual realities is less likely to need the priests. Furthermore, a religion is directed by genuine initiates for only a comparatively short time. As a religion grows in secular power, it attracts those who are interested in power, and these individuals are generally those who are least aware or capable of spiritual development. In Christianity, we can see this trend as early as the first and second centuries AD—the time of the arising of the proto-catholic church.

As a result of this process, the religion that was originally meant to serve as an outer court to esoteric truths became the chief impediment to it. Christ spoke of this danger when he said: "Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye shut up the kingdom of heaven against men: for ye neither go in yourselves, neither suffer yet them that are entering to go in" (Matt. 23:13). Ironically, the authorities who invoke the name of Jesus most often are the ones who most often violate this precept.

All this leads to the question of the proper relationship between esotericism and exotericism in Christianity today. Some insist that there can be no esotericism without exotericism. The best-known advocates of this view are the Traditionalist school, exemplified by the twentieth-century Swiss philosopher Frithjof Schuon. In Transcendent Unity of Religions, Schuon argued that esotericism and exotericism were inextricably linked and that one could not exist without the other. Schuon also had an apparently limitless faith in the capacity of the great world religions for self-renewal:

Nothing is more misleading than to pretend, as is so glibly done in our day, that the religions have compromised themselves hopelessly in the course of the centuries or that they are now played out. If one knows what a religion really consists of, one also knows that the religions cannot compromise themselves and they are independent of human doings. . . . The fact that a man may exploit a religion in order to bolster up national or private interests in no wise affects religion as such . . . as for an exhausting of the religions, one might speak of this if all men had by now become saints or Buddhas. In that case only could it be admitted that the religions were exhausted, at least as regards their forms.

I am not so sure. To accept Schuon's claim, one would have to believe that today's world religions express the truths of spiritual realities as well as they can be expressed on planet Earth. I can see very little evidence to support such a view. Instead, the history of religion shows a progression or evolution in expressing the spiritual impulses of humanity. For example, until about 2000 years ago, animal sacrifice was a universal part of religious observance. Today it is despised as the relic of an earlier and more barbarous era.

Animal sacrifice fell into obsolescence, in fact, with the coming of the great world religions, all of which were founded between 700 BC and 700 AD. Even the faiths that existed before this point—such as Judaism and Hinduism—were transformed into radically new versions that earlier practitioners might or might not even have recognized. The Vedic horse sacrifice and the immolation of lambs and bullocks at the Temple in Jerusalem were replaced by deeper, more sophisticated approaches to the divine.

Thus, it would seem, the world religions express a particular phase of human development. Astrologers call this epoch the Age of Pisces, and it may be no coincidence that they also associate Pisces with religion. Today, there is a widespread belief that we are entering or have entered the Age of Aquarius (as there is no consensus about exactly when one Age ends and the other begins). As the Age of Pisces passes, will the age of religion pass as well?

There is no reason to believe that the world religions as they are today represent the supreme or ultimate form of this exoteric faith, and there is much to suggest that they do not. In the coming centuries it seems likely that these religions will be transformed, yet again, into versions of themselves that will be practically unrecognizable to the present era.

Where, then, does this leave Christianity? Which of its teachings express eternal truths, and which merely reflect the limited perspective of the Age of Pisces? Again, this is an enormous question, but we can at least glimpse an answer in some of the facts we have examined in this essay. In the Age of Aries (the predecessor to the Age of Pisces), God was supplicated through the blood sacrifice of animals, as we see in the Old Testament. The Age of Pisces replaced this on an exoteric level with the doctrine of the vicarious atonement, whereby Christ came down from heaven and suffered and died to serve as a perfect expiation for the sins of Adam and his offspring. Although we can see it as an advancement on literal blood sacrifice, today this view itself is no longer satisfactory. Why, after all, should God, having become irked at the human race because someone ate a piece of fruit six thousand years ago, feel the need to send a part of himself down to earth and have it tortured to death as a way of making it up to himself? Put this way, it sounds ridiculous, but this is nothing more than a capsule description of the doctrine of the vicarious atonement. The human race is ready for something different, something, we may hope, that is more advanced and more profound.

An esoteric perspective offers such an advancement. The death of Christ to appease a peevish and self-important deity may no longer inspire us in a literal sense, but if we see it as a type of the sacrifice of the lower self to the higher dimensions within ourselves, it again becomes mysterious and sublime. Even so, I would not want to suggest that this perspective is itself absolute. Besant made this point obliquely in titling her book, which in full is called Esoteric Christianity, or the Lesser Mysteries. The "lesser mysteries" are those relating to individual human evolution; even these are merely a prelude to the "greater mysteries" of the cosmic sacrifice.

All this said, where can this perspective fit into Christianity as we know it today? All but the comparatively liberal denominations would have an extraordinary amount of difficulty accepting this perspective theologically, and the liberal denominations may not care: more and more they appear to be preoccupied with social rather than spiritual matters. Not long ago I found myself in Northampton, Massachusetts, with a spare half-hour and decided to go into the Episcopal church downtown to meditate. Unfortunately, I had chosen the time when the vestry board was meeting, and they were having a very loud and vexed discussion about their church's position on gay clergy. I soon decided to meditate in the comfort and privacy of my car, instead. "That pretty much sums up the Episcopal church today," I thought as I walked out. "You can't meditate because they're making too much noise arguing about gay rights." These social issues are of pressing interest to many, no doubt, but they come close to displacing spiritual life as the central concern of American religion today.

One way around these difficulties might be the forming of a church or denomination that is specifically orientated toward the esoteric perspective. The Liberal Catholic Church, founded by Theosophists in 1916, is perhaps the most visible attempt in this direction; there is also the Christian Community, founded by followers of Rudolf Steiner in 1922. Some independent con-gregations also foster an esoteric orientation. Current examples include Stephan Hoeller's Ecclesia Gnostica in Hollywood; the Ecclesia Gnostica Mysteriorum in Palo Alto, California; and Spirit United Church in Minneapolis. Nevertheless, denominationalism in itself has a propensity to be divisive, and one can easily ask whether what Christianity today needs is yet another denomination.

I may not be the best person to deal with this question, as my own approach over the years has been highly eclectic and personalized, and I have preferred working in small, informal groups rather than through a church as such. Although this approach has, I believe, served me well, others may not find it suitable; and in any case the spiritual curriculum is highly individualized, as A Course in Miracles, that great monument of contemporary esoteric Christianity, reminds us. But this feature may itself be a characteristic of the coming age. My good friend Alice O. Howell, author of The Dove in the Stone and The Heavens Declare, occasionally shares her memories of her studies with M., an enigmatic Rosicrucian master in New York in the 1940s and '50s. The spirituality of the future, M. said, would be focused in small groups. "The problem is," he added with a chuckle, "you'll never know how many of you there are."

M.'s point hits home on a number of different levels. In today's world, we live under what the French esotericist Rene Guenon called "the reign of quantity," where the value of everything is calculated by the ever-present consideration of how much and how many. Can the esotericism of the future appeal to the broad mass of humanity? Maybe, maybe not. But esotericism is principally about quality, not quantity, and the small groups of which M. spoke have always been the real catalysts for spiritual transformation. Christ alluded to this truth in his parable: "The kingdom of heaven is like leaven, which a woman took and hid in three measures of meal till it was all leavened" (Matt. 13:33). So it is likely to be both today and in the future.

In any event, these issues are real and pressing, as our civilization seems to be wrestling with the role Christianity and religion as a whole are to play in the collective life of humanity. At this point, it is probably more important to ask questions and follow the threads of various possibilities rather than setting out party platforms or fashioning flags for people to follow.

References

Besant, Annie. Esoteric Christianity. Reprint. Wheaton, IL: Quest, 2006.

Guenon, Rene. The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times. Translated by Lord Northbourne. Reprint. Hillsdale, NY: Sophia Perennis, 1994.

Schuon, Frithjof. "No Activity without Truth," Studies in Comparative Religion 3, no. 4 (1969). (wwwstudiesincomparativereligion.com)

———. The Transcendent Unity of Religions. Wheaton, IL: Quest, 1984.

Sedgwick, Mark. Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century. NY: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Smoley, Richard. Inner Christianity: A Guide to the Esoteric Tradition. Boston, MA: Shambhala, 2002.

Richard Smoley is the author of Inner Christianity: A Guide to the Esoteric Tradition and Forbidden Faith: The Secret History of Gnosticism. His other works include Hidden Wisdom: A Guide to the Western Inner Traditions (written with Jay Kinney) and The Essential Nostradamus. His latest book is Conscious Love: Insights from Mystical Christianity. He is editor of Quest Books. Visit his blog at

Speculating About Angels

By John De Hoff

Originally printed in the March - April 2005 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: De Hoff, John. "Speculating About Angels." Quest 93.2 (MARCH - APRIL 2005):54

Nearly sixty years ago, the spring of 1945, I was on my way to Paris for a three day leave. About seven o'clock in the morning, eight or ten of us from the 123rd Evacuation Hospital were riding in the back of a deuce and a half, the Army's two-and-a-half-ton truck. One can't easily sleep in transportation like that, especially on the way to Paris for the first time, but we were also not in any serious conversation. All was quiet. Suddenly, with no warning, I heard a voice in the center of my head, a man's voice I'd never heard before. The words were: You are going back to Baltimore. That was all. No introduction, no explication, no conclusion—just that voice and message.

Since then, I've heard of this sort of experience happening to two or maybe three other people. Without warning, and in the same fashion, they described almost identically, "a voice in the center of my head that said . . ."

I have never been satisfied with my attempts to identify, place or understand this voice or its simple message, any more than did the others I spoke with, until I read an article that stressed the importance of angels as messengers. It still left me with more questions than answers: Where do the angels get the messages they carry? Where do they come from? How do they know to whom they should deliver the message? Who sends those messages?

Speaking or writing about angels is fraught with difficulties. Their life form or existence must be as different as the cultural differences that exist in our three-dimensional physical world. And as humans it is as difficult for us to consciously know or comprehend the fourth or fifth dimensions as it would be for two-dimensional people, if they existed, to understand us. But it seems reasonable to consider that our world has other existences, even beings, and in more than three dimensions. The so called spirit world is another dimension, and there may well be even more "beings," who are different expressions of God's incredible Self, working in any of several other dimensions. (Sure, that's guesswork, but what the heck.)

Angels may be among other life forms than the physical in which we are currently embedded. Angels must be purposed differently, perhaps (or probably) existing in dimensions less familiar than our customary three. In another, but similar fashion, we humans share this earth with many different forms of life—animal, vegetable, mineral—each with its multiple "divisions." Perhaps unfortunately, artists have portrayed angels to fit religious concepts, not to replicate their own actual visions of angels, as would a portraitist who faces a living model. Artists give angels human form, even show them with six extremities, possibly to express differences more perceived than observed by either the artist or the ecclesiastic contracting for and consulting on the painting.

Encounters with angels occur under various circumstances. One person reports meeting an angel others may hear an angel's voice, and a third interprets the meeting as hearing a choir of angels. Any human witness may more aptly be said to have sensed the angelic meeting, just as one senses a ball game from a box seat or the bleachers. We say that we saw it or we were there and heard the crowd roar, but it was through our senses that we received the visual or auditory vibrations, and through our nervous system (and brain) that we interpreted or saw or heard. Can it be that we sense the presence and the messages of angels in some fashion other than through our physical senses, our eyes and ears? If so, we might easily misinterpret these contacts as having occurred via the customary ocular or auditory channels, and report that we saw or heard them.

One can guess that angels, therefore, are like the Western Union workers who used to deliver telegrams to businesses, all quite impersonally. They wore olive drab uniforms emblazoned with Western Union, usually rode bicycles from the telegraph office, and were impressive for the nature of their work rather than for their own identity.

Yet angels are so different, their messages so important, that artists set them up as creatures far different, a little holier than us humans. Perhaps they are not so special (just as Western Union boys were simply people dressed in Western Union uniforms), but their messages are more or less special.

Were we to be consciously aware of living with, say, an angelic kingdom, would we then have to consider the existence of bad angels, those more nearly demonic? If angels are correctly conceptualized primarily as messengers, how can we become better or more nearly accurate receivers of their news, their messages? Is this even necessary? Are angels more important than we are in God's work? Given a relationship between us and other beings, how can we in our human dimension relate more effectively to those angels of another dimensional class, if and when communication is warranted? Now I can better understand that what I received on that spring morning in France was probably a message, an angelic one at that.

I had been toying with the idea of moving away from Baltimore after the war was over to practice medicine in Oregon or Washington. Actually, and not in any manner planned at the time of my wartime trip to Paris, I moved to New York City for a residency in psychiatry at the New York Hospital. I soon realized, however, that it was not right for me and moved back to Baltimore.

John DeHoff, a retired physician, is a long-time member of the Theosophical Society. He lives in Maryland.

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The Future of Esoteric Christianity

Speculating About Angels

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