I’m really trying to work with the established magic and rituals set up by Mathers, and it all seems incomprehensible to me. Something very simple that’s practiced by 99% of Hermetic occultists is the LBRP. Yet the more I study it and look into its sources—namely Eliphas Lévi, the Jewish evening prayers, the Book of Ezekiel, the ladder of Jacob—I still can’t understand why these four tetragrammatons are used, why AHIH is in the west, when it’s supposed to be the Macroprosopus and should be in the east, on the side of the spiritual world. Why is Yahweh, Yod-He-Vav-He, placed in the east? Why do these elements correspond to those angels, when it seems to me that this isn’t the result of deep foundational work, but just a mixture of the Jewish evening prayer and the vision of the cherubim in Ezekiel? It doesn’t seem logical within the system of correspondences established in Hermetic Kabbalah.
In short, a ritual as simple as this is making me question the entire structure of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. I fully understand that one must cross the Abyss four times, that the Tree of Life is a fractal, that each world has its own Tree of Life, and that once one reaches the Keter of Yetzirah, one has reached the Keter of the original Tree of Life—but now I’m completely lost.
In short, a ritual as simple as this is making me question the entire structure of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. I fully understand that one must cross the Abyss four times, that the Tree of Life is a fractal, that each world has its own Tree of Life, and that once one reaches the Keter of Yetzirah, one has reached the Keter of the original Tree of Life—but now I’m completely lost.
