Alchemical Transformation in the Golden Dawn

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Alchemical Transformation in the Golden Dawn

Lyam Thomas Christopher

The Great Work is not an easy task for the human animal. It is the alchemical change

from human to more-than-human, and it brings the student of the occult into a direct

relationship with the predicament of mortality and with the compromises that he has

made in order to survive in the material world. Plunging into these issues when most

people would turn back, the student finds himself on a journey through disillusionment,

self-doubt, and a dreadful loss of purposeand possibly a journey that arrives at a new

vista of life going far beyond what ordinary consciousness can fathom. In the process

of this magical work, life usually gets worse before it gets better. The immortal Self

awakened by the Golden Dawns Kabbalistic techniques, by its very definition, bringswith it a permanent joy and realization, yes, but these rewards are obtained by a

journey through darkness. For the true thrust of the Golden Dawn comes as an assault

from within. The Great Work brings forth an inner truth that destroys what we hold

most dear. It dissolves from the inside the stranglehold that our biology has upon our

spirit, subduing the animal and calling forth the god.

This is not good news to the ego, the assumed identity that you and I have adopted in

order to survive in the world. We have spent at leasteighteen years creating a fully

functional personality capable of finding food and shelter, forming profitable

relationships, and rearing offspring. To discover other possibilities beyond this baselineof existence poses a threat. The human animal fears the power of magic because, in its

essence, magic seeks to supplant the animal motives with deeper ones. It seeks to

penetrate beyond the boundaries of our daily survival drama. The fact that the body,

which you and I work so hard to care for, is mortaland obviously expendable in the

hands of some deeper purposeis the last reality we want to face!

For those of us morbid enough to value this kind of self-discovery there are available

the hidden traditions that still maintain magical practices of self-transformation. The

grade system of the Golden Dawn spells out one such program of practice for us.

Granted, there are many modern-day offshoots of the Golden Dawn that have becometoo respectable and mainstream to explore the darkness of the human soul. They

teach the rudiments of Kabbalah and Egyptology, revealing to us secret handshakes and

granting us prestigious certificates, all while oozing an aura of empty mystery with

every email. But for those of us who are looking for more than diplomas and historical

trivia, there are the less impressive curricula that still teach the distasteful, hands-on

work of killing and resurrecting the human animal.

To begin this not-so-glamorous process of transformation, the Golden Dawn student

enters the first grade of the Outer Order: Neophyte. In most temples, the students

primary responsibility in this grade is to perform two exercises every day: the Lesser
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Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram (LBRP) and the Middle Pillar. He must also complete a

small amount of reading, study, and group ritual, but these formalities, as important as

they can be, are secondary to the actual daily practice of self-initiation.

The LBRP and Middle Pillar exercises restructure the psyche of the student and set

the stage for the transformation process to begin. To do this, the LBRP creates a

cleared space within the students imagination. He draws a magic circle of protection,

he intones Hebrew names of God, and he draws sigils with the intention of warding off

the influences of the material world from his inner landscape. Following this, the

Middle Pillar exercise invokes the highest, purest spiritual light from the students

divine aspect, drawing it downward into the cleared space and into his body, all the way

to the feet. The student thereby identifies himself with a continuum of pure,

unconditioned consciousness. He becomes the Middle Pillar of the Tree of Life. This is

not so much pictured as an actual tree, but as a framework of interconnected spheres,which symbolizes the creation of the universe from spirit into matter.

Neophyte is a probationary grade. By creating this cleared space, the student

introduces himself to future possibilities. If he isnt yet ripe for spiritual change, his

ego has a chance to wage its war of resistance and win. And it often does win. The

student who isnt ready for transformation either stops the process honestly and quits

the Golden Dawn (usually for very rational reasons) or he joins the social club of New

Age charlatans, accumulating grades, certificates, and a storehouse of impressive and

useless information. Invisible to him are the students who proceed onward into the

inner roller-coaster ride of the grades that follow. No one can fully understand thechanges that come next, except those who have gone before.

The next step then is to jump-start the process of dissolving the personality. The

student proceeds into the realm of the four Elemental grades:

1. Zelator = Earth2. Theoricus = Air3. Practicus = Water4. Philosophus = Fire

In each of these grades, he uses Kabbalistic ritual to call forth one of the Four

Elements, experiencing intimately its inner psychic correspondences. His personality

becomes temporarily unbalanced, preoccupied with anything that corresponds to that

Element. In Zelator (the Earth grade), for example, he feels the heaviness and the grit

of life in the world. The physicality of everything around him comes into sharp focus.

Even the supposedly exalted phenomenon of light can appear as darkness, as just one

kind of brick in the tomb of matter. In Theoricus (the Air grade), thoughts and

daydreams become overly pronounced. Elation, wonder, and the temptation to chase

after glamorous images become commonplace. This gives the student a chance to reach

a better understanding of his powers of imagination and his habits of thought, and to
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organize them and eliminate obsessions. In Practicus (the Water grade), the student

gains gradual perspective over emotion and intuition, seeing these as a playing field that

reveals the influence of higher forces, similar to the way that the surface of water

that displays the influence of wind. And lastly, in the Fire grade, his ritual invocations

fan the flames of his animal powers. Passions and instincts rise from below, and the old

personality begins to burn away and disappear.

These four grades call forth, purify, and consolidate the each of the Elements, showing

how these four come together to produce the illusion of the personality. The student

discovers that his ego isnt inherently real or composed of any singular essence, but

rather that it is an arbitrary patchwork, woven together from separate Elemental

threads. The false image of the ego shows itself for what it is, and the question of

whether anything lies beyond its ingredients becomes serious.

A new perspective begins to dawn, and the student realizes that the real work hasnteven begun yet. The Elemental grades actually comprise thepreliminarywork, and a new

landscape awaits him as he readies himself to embark on the GreatWork itself.

The next task then is to balance the Elementsthe facets of the personalityuntil

their unity-in-diversity yields forth something more than the sum of its parts. The

Portal Grade is therefore the last grade of the Outer Order, and it reverses the

process of disintegration brought on via the Elemental-Grade exercises. All four

Elements, which now stand in the four quarters (North, South, East, and West)

symbolically untangled from one another, are brought back together meaningfully. This

reintegration creates a healthy, sturdy base on which (or withinwhich) to ignite theoven of the Great Work.

In Portal and the grades that follow, the language of alchemy, which has remained

unreliable and even impenetrable till now, begins to make sense. The sturdy foundation

(or vessel) that the student has built via the Elemental grades becomes tangible to the

inner senses as a sort of inner, ethereal body, neither energy nor matter. In the midst

of the four Elements the newborn adept can discern, for the first time perhaps, a sort

of stasis fieldwithin which he can manipulate the three hidden alchemical principles:

Mercury, Sulfur, and Salt. As he proceeds into adeptship, he graduates from working

with the four visibleElements (the outer facetsof the quintessence) to the three

invisibleprinciples of the Trinity (the inner aspectsof the quintessence). These three

supernal principles, expressed in their raw form, are the Salt, Sulfur, and Mercury of

alchemy, and they comprise the intangible "guts" of the Four Elements, beneath the

"skin" of tangible sensation. They must not be confused with the salt, sulfur, and

mercury of common experience.

Into the stasis fieldalchemical Saltthe magician begins to concentrate Mercury, the

volatile, meandering aspect of mind, and Sulfur, discipline and concentration. His

visualization ability now acts from a higher dimension, and it becomes nearly impossibleto relay these deeper activities in words. But this kind of magical work has many
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symbols that attempt to explain it. The alchemists have sometimes represented the

process as a crucified serpent, such as the serpent that Moses affixed to a cross in

the desert. The cross represents the framework established by the preliminary work

(Salt), the Serpent represents the volatile mind (Mercury), and the nails represent the

fixation, the restraint and focus (Sulfur) applied to the volatile mind. The adept, in

other words, is now capable of working with the quintessence. He can use visualization,

breath, and ritual actions to contain his minds volatile tendency (Mercury) within a

localized area (Salt) and concentrate it to crystallize into manifestation (via the

principle of Sulfur). The end product of this effort is the legendary philosophers

stone, none other than manifested spirit. His body begins to transform and take on the

quality of invisible radiance.

Another image that represents this idea is that of the squared circle, common to

Renaissance magicians. Renaissance humanists symbolized the unexpressed, divine self

of an individual as a circle (Mercury). Its expression in matter, in the outer world, theyvisualized as a square (Salt). So, for the magician of antiquity, the squared circleor

circle with a square drawn around itrepresented manifested spirit. Sulfur he

represented as a point in the center of the circle. The point is the constant, balanced

pressure (or meditation) that gradually pushes spiritual potential into matter, forcing it

to crystallize and come forth.

To summarize then, the Work in the Golden Dawns Outer Order is to dissolve the false

personality and make it disappear. The Work in the Inner Order is to call forth the

true personality, to make it appear or express itself tangibly in the physical world.

Though at first glance, the mysticism of the Golden Dawn seems to focus on dissolvingthe self into spirit, become more subtle and airy, it may come as a surprise to many

that the further work of the inner order actually reverses this process such that the

adept actively comes out into the world as a direct expression of his Higher Self. In

the open air of awakening, his outer world of appearances is consumed by the Worlds

within and by the very process of transformation itself. His very presence, without

effort, begins to act as a catalyst for magical change wherever he goes.

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Alchemical Transformation in the Golden Dawn