When a lodge/temple has been established from both an inner and outer point of view, and there is a good foundation of adepts, initiates in training and aspirants, it is very easy for a magical lodge to fall into the trap of becoming a training school and not much more. That is fine if that was the intention all along, but then it is a school and not a lodge.
The function of a lodge is primarily to do work, and any training should be aimed at new initiates to bring them up to the standard of adepthood so that they can participate in the work of the lodge and operate as a full member. In the commercial world of expensive training, there is a great deal of temptation for the lodge to just become a glamorous school where very little real work is actually done.
SO WHAT IS THE WORK OF A LODGE?
This depends on whether it is a lodge of the lesser or greater mysteries (or both, if it is big enough). The lesser mysteries are concerned with providing the spiritual and magical community and sometimes the wider community with healers, priests/esses, exorcists, birth and death workers, teachers, seers and mediators. It is the external arm of the mysteries that function in the outside world, creating bridges between the inner worlds and the outer worlds for specific functions that serve the people of today.
The greater mysteries work with much deeper patterns of service over a longer time period — the lodge operates with the longer term patterns of power as they flow into the outside world. They function within the patterns of fate within a civilisation, the bridging of Divinity, the communion and balance of different realms/inner beings, and the bridging of knowledge from the inner to the outer worlds. The greater mysteries also act as a filter between longer term patterns of humanity and Divinity.
It is important that an adept setting out on a path of service to the greater mysteries first spends time in the service of the lesser mysteries to give the adept a deeper understanding of humanity and of their own limitations and qualities.
The training system designed for the initiates should reflect these forms of service through the lesser mysteries, exposing them to work in service so that they can gain practical experience and wisdom. Solid foundations of training based upon service will give the initiate, and later the adept, a strong grounding in the work of the lodge, which will uphold them in the face of great power and unknown inner territory. If the training of the initiate is too theoretical and not based upon practical work experience, or if it cuts corners, skipping over the harder and less glamorous parts of training, then the foundations of the initiate will be weak — weak foundations make a dangerous tower.
Because the training needs to be so thorough it will take time, which potentially presents a trap that so many lodges fall into by putting all of their energy into training and nothing else besides.
To avoid this problem, the training system should be designed to work alongside the practices of the lodge rather than become the major practice in itself. One way to do this is to ensure that the training involves resonance, i.e. working with someone already adept in their particular field; and by working alongside such an adept, learning by example and inner tuning. Full practical application of the skills learned by working alongside the adepts is also important. Regular application of the skills learned builds a solid practitioner of an art. That ensures that any theoretical knowledge learned by an initiate soon becomes a practical reality — this is very important because in magic, as in any other art, theory and practice are often two very different things.
There will be a wide variety of abilities, skills, and aptitudes within the initiates and the training should allow for such variance. There will be some who appear for training who are obviously old adepts in new bodies, and some who have never, in any life, been anywhere near magic before. The training should be flexible enough to allow an old ‘returnee’ to pick up the threads and continue with their work, or to take a complete beginner and slowly walk them a step at a time.
A pattern for such training is to basically pass the initiate from adept to adept who teaches the initiate about their specialist subject matter. Doing this, without grades, tests etc creates a bonding between the members of the lodge and is a more natural way of learning.
A non rigid system without grades is also a healthy way to work for the Hierophant and the adepts as it encourages people to strive for skill rather than status and a badge. It is important from the moment a person first walks through the doors of a lodge that there is no real hierarchy, only jobs. Too many leaders put across their absolute superiority as a magician, stating that their level can never be reached and therefore the adepts and initiates are kept weak and unskilled. They are tempted by offers of higher and greater initiations, but reminded that the highest one can only be held by the leader: what a load of bullshit.
The Hierophant must be willing to allow the adepts and initiates to make mistakes, make messes, make bad decisions and learn from them. The role of the Hierophant is to guide, encourage, advise and above all, to be happy to let the adepts progress beyond the level of knowledge of the Hierophant. The next wave of students should always end up with greater skills than their teacher; if that happens then the teacher knows that she has done a good job.
THE OUTER WORK OF THE MAGICAL LODGE
The outer work of the magical lodge should be organic, very loosely organised and low key. If something is highly controlled, high profile with rigid operational methods, it will very possibly crumble or degenerate quickly. The whole idea of training people is to get them out into the world ‘doing’ and developing their own work. People do that best when they have a support network quietly ticking in the background, but are free to be able to use and develop their own methods, to choose when, where, and how to work with minimum restrictions from the lodge. That way, the work takes on the many different aspects of the personalities of the practitioners which keeps it growing, changing, and balanced.
A magical lodge or group that gives out certificates, has a society to join, has set rate and rules that the newly qualified person must follow quickly becomes a business. Such organisations tend to encourage people to tow the party line, tick the boxes and not think for themselves — it also turns a mystery into a product or service for sale.
Once an initiate has trained and lived up to the level of adept, he should be proficient in visionary magic, seership, healing, exorcism, ritual, death work etc and particularly good at one or more skills. These skills are not there to earn the adept a living and this is a very important dynamic — an adept should have a job or other source of income that does not come from magic. Many disagree with me, but I have seen far too many good adepts damaged by charging for their skills — sooner or later the money begins to dictate what work should be done and with whom, which is a fatal downhill slope.
If an adept is willing to act in service, then the inner contacts put the adept in the path of those who need help, they also ensure that the adept has everything he needs to accomplish his work. One of the other traps that can happen with charging money is that it becomes full time work or an advertised service so the adept ends up doing far too much work with people who really do not need it. That ends up leeching the adept’s energy, closes down certain contacts and in the long term, can make him ill.
If the initiates are trained to trust the inner worlds, then the paths are laid and the work the adept is guided to is never more than is needed and never before it is needed. The adept quickly gets used to this dynamic as it opens a whole new world for him where he begins to see how magic can truly flow into the world in a gentle, subtle and quiet way. No gurus, no miraculous healers, just someone turning up when the need is there and getting the job done. No pandering to people’s wants, no people leeching energy out of curiosity, no performing monkeys. It’s all very simple.
If the adepts have the freedom to just go out and do as needs doing, then the Hierophant becomes a stable resource in the background available for advice and support, but not controlling or demanding loyalties. This makes the whole thing very organic — it grows in natural directions where the strengths are allowed to blossom and each adept forges a new path in their field of expertise while giving back to the lodge by helping the upcoming initiates. This also means that the initiates are taught by many adepts at different times, usually ones out working in the ‘field’.
And if the lodge has no dogma or creed, just intention and technique, then there are very few agendas and the adepts are able to mould to their communities which makes them far more accessible to a wider range of people. An adept should be able to work with a Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Wiccan, Ritualist, Pagan, whatever… it really doesn’t matter as the work should not be religion or belief based. If an adept is properly trained by both inner and outer training, they can slot in anywhere and be of service in their specialised field to anyone.
The majority of outer court work falls into two categories, A) the healing umbrella and B) the helping umbrella. The healing umbrella covers hands-on healing, working with the dying and the dead in the death vision and with death preparation, inner midwifery, ritual/ceremonial work for rites of passage etc. The second category of helping usually covers seership/divination, exorcism and clearings, finding lost things, protection and sealing things, and acting as a bridge between the living and the newly dead. So the lodge members involved in these outer court subjects will be either learning, doing or teaching.
It is interesting that when someone learns a specific skill and then offers that skill in service unconditionally without charge, how people in need are slowly brought to them. It is never more than the person can handle and is never more than is needed.
THE INNER WORK OF THE LODGE
This is where a lodge can truly come into its own, through the working with the deeper inner mysteries, so long as the work is actual work and service, not tourism in the inner worlds. So many visionary groups these days seem to go into the inner worlds, meet a being or two, look around, say thanks and leave; this is not very useful and certainly not work. Getting into the inner worlds is not enough, it is important that you go and work.
The work of the deeper mysteries that is done in lodges is usually work that may not fruit for decades or even hundreds of years — it is selfless work for the planet, the inner worlds and humanity. It can cover almost anything, but most of the time it centres around the land mass that the lodge is based upon, working within the Abyss to keep the beings in balance, or working to clean up and rebalance the civilisation that the lodge is a part of.
In practical terms that can mean pulling large long-term parasites off and out of political centres of power, out and off of war zones, working on the land after toxic dumping, bomb testing or atmospheric science vandalism, taking energetic tap roots out of the land that were put there by predatory religious or political groups, removing large demonic beings from positions of world power, working with the inner landscape of the land to help preserve species or trees/plants for the distant future, cleaning up the human line from ancestral baggage. The list is long, complex and full of very difficult long-term projects that need trained groups over time to take up the mantle and work unconditionally and without agenda.
That is that hardest part of such work, which is to do what is necessary to regain balance without imposing an agenda, no matter how well intentioned it may be. That can be very difficult for groups, particularly when they feel they have a ‘truth’. Any deep inner work with a purpose driven from a point of a ‘truth’ agenda is just adding to the chaos and mess (the inner workings of the British Israelite movement is a good example). We as humans cannot possibly even begin to understand the long term waves of power that flow through our universe. All we can do is pick up the trash, wash the paths down and put the cat out. Mostly the work is clean up and preservation work so if humanity has made a mess, then some human somewhere needs to clean it up, and it is usually spiritual or magical communities that do just that.
To do this sort of work, the adepts need to have a full understanding of the all the various inner realms, their front doors, their back doors, the beings that inhabit them and the forces that flow through them. To gain this sort of knowledge the adepts need to be able to work in death, in the underworlds, the stars, the inner temples, the Abyss and all its various access routes, the void, the stellar realms, the planetary inner landscapes, the past and the future. The adept also needs to know all the various types of beings, how they operate, what they do and why.
The structure of a group working in this way needs to be carefully thought out as the work is long term, often over generations and is dangerous in a variety of ways. If the Hierophant plans carefully and lays down good foundations, a healthy group structure can possibly last a long time. The secret I think is in the sharing of power but with strong leadership that is not autocratic and controlling: strong leadership is about taking responsibility, setting a good example and guiding rather than instructing. If there is no real leadership, what happens is that a group devolves down into endless discussion, very little action and lots of power games, if there is too much leadership then the group becomes weak, unable to take initiative, and unable to handle power.
If everyone within the group has a set responsibility where the buck stops with them, and their specialist skills are recognised and acknowledged, then it begins to work like a brother/sisterhood and not like a political party. It the group is hobbled by silly dogmatic rules, belief systems, agendas, limitations, judgements and putdowns, too much structure and red tape, then it will implode pretty quickly. The group needs elbow room; it needs freedom to think and no ladder of power/status to climb through manipulation. The tales of power shuffling in the Tibetan temples would truly turn your blood cold.
If some group members want to branch off and fly the nest, the Hierophant should be right behind them helping, advising and backing them. The willingness to let go is also a major part of the long term survival of the work — if the groups grow outward, the work will stay fresh and powerful and, if there is support, there is no need to cut off the roots. The lodge should grow outwards like children, with each group having their own independence and yet able to rely on home if they need it. When a parent group clings to its members, the group rots from the inside out.
So what if a break-off group takes the knowledge and decides to stop doing service, instead using the power for themselves? Well, that is their choice and they will obviously need to learn about inner power and how it works. That lesson is not for the Hierophant to teach — the inner world contacts are more than capable of teaching anyone whatever it is they need to know. An adept makes a decision and they need to live with the consequence for good or bad, and it is not up to the parent group to cast judgment or take action.
MAINTAINING A GROUP WHILE DOING DEEPER MYSTERY WORK
When a Hierophant initiates a series of deep longer term workings with their adepts, the Hierophant takes on a certain role of responsibility for the spiritual and physical wellbeing of the group. Long term or deeper inner work has many different spiritual and physical impacts upon a person and the group adepts need to be prepared, briefed and ready for those impacts to help lessen them. It is up to the Hierophant to keep a close eye on the group, not only for their health but their emotional well being too. Magic can impact the brain and cause all sorts of emotional imbalances to surface, it is one of the by products of deeper work. As the body interacts with power it begins to change and the body uses the power residue to resolve unhealthy patterns within the mind or/and body. This can surface in many ways and emotional crisis is one of them.
The best way to approach a series of powerful workings, or the beginning of a long term path of work, is to have the adepts physically and spiritually prepare in advance and be ready to support their bodies with whatever is needed. If the work is going to be long term then a preparation would need to be at least six weeks in advance, if it is a shorter span of work but very powerful then a couple of weeks before should suffice.
The preparations should include reassessing or altering diet, sleep patterns, medications and drugs. They should also include time alone, time in nature, preparatory meditations and the visionary quest for tools, armour and helpers. The preparations are not always about cleaning oneself up. If the adept is doing very heavy ‘down’ work, a very clean and light diet might not be enough to give the adept the ballast needed for heavy work. The preparations should be relevant to the work that is being undertaken and not come from a ‘health’ formula; similarly the visionary preparations should be tailored to the work at hand.
The emotional and physical instability that can come as a result of deep continuous inner work need to be very carefully watched for by the Hierophant so that early signs the adept might not see for herself can be picked up. Usually the first sign of strain will show in the emotions, so if an adept is not solid enough to handle a body of work they will emotionally buckle fairly early into the work. The Hierophant will begin to see defensiveness in the affected adept, mild passive aggression that was not there before, or withdrawing from conversation and being unwilling to talk to the group about the work they are undertaking. They are most likely to have been blocked from the work by the inner contacts and will be embarrassed to say so.
If a person is not in a mentally or emotionally healthy state to undertake a body of work, the inner worlds will shut down on them pretty fast and they will blank out at each vision. This is not the same as going very deep beyond visuals which is a different dynamic. Blanking is literally that — it is a total blank with no power, no sensation, therefore the vision simply just does not work. This is a safety mechanism which protects the individual from going mad.
If this is happening, the adept needs to be taken out of the group and given outer court work to do to support the team until they recover and get stronger. It can be a very difficult thing to do, both for the Hierophant and the adept, but common sense needs to prevail and safety must come before feelings. On the adept’s side the understanding that sometimes our bodies are just not up to it for one reason or another is a hard but necessary one, and the Hierophant’s responsibility is to pull out anyone who is drowning, no matter how much it might upset them. That way, the adept lives to fight another day and she gains a deeper understanding of her own body and inner weaknesses that need strengthening.
There are many reasons why the body may shut down including a festering infection that has not yet surfaced, hormonal changes, stress, toxicity, exhaustion — the list is long but any one of these conditions will be magnified greatly if the adept continues to work. In extreme cases, it can be the tipping factor on a delicate energetic scale that is trying to hold serious disease at bay.
Later into the work, the power build ups and the exhausting work may show through squabbles within the group, and it is helpful to recognise this as a natural energy dynamic. When power builds up, it grates upon the personality weakness of the person and usually outs through conflict. If left unchecked, the aggression or despair that can ‘out’ can be extreme and very damaging both to the group and the individual. One way to avoid such a dynamic is to ensure that every adept is fully conscious of such a dynamic and is also very well aware of her own weak spots. Awareness and understanding is half the battle, therefore if you know it’s not really a true emotion but a side effect of power, then patience, understanding and sometimes being able to hang on for grim death with the finger nails really helps. Each adept stays aware, so no one person falls apart and they all hang together like a bunch of strung-out monkeys.
If possible, while undertaking such powerful work, the adepts would do well to have some type of physical therapy to support them as they work, such as acupuncture, reflexology, or massage; generally, something physical will restore them. This is where it is always good to have some of the adepts who specialise in healing not involved in the heavy deep work. They can support the workers, and adepts can take turns in such service.
When the lodge has such a powerful undertaking as long term magical work, it is important that not all the founder members or more experienced adepts work. Some need to not work so that they can keep an eye on the rest of the group and that also ensures that there is at least one experienced adept who is not getting fried, who can then be available for anything else that comes along. It is also important for the lodge to always have a stable core of adepts and/or a Hierophant who is not working deeply and thus acts as an anchor for the rest of the working group. Someone has to be watching the weather and tending the phones….
It is also important in long term powerful work that the adepts work in teams that rotate and that every adept has a shelf life in the work. This is really important for a variety of reasons. Working too long on a project can literally kill someone and can at least disable someone as the human body was not designed to work with those levels of power over a long time. It is also very tempting for the work to become all consuming in someone’s life so it that becomes really personal. It can become dangerous for the soul to become so deeply entangled in a long-term issue and can lead to a soul becoming trapped in a particular pattern throughout lives. Better to give a couple of year’s service and then back out and let the younger ones take it on for a while.
Once an adept has given a decent span of time to the work, the Hierophant should haul her out of the project and assign her to teaching or outer court work for a while to recover. That way the adept regenerates and is ready in the future for more deep work. In the long term this ensures that the work will be consistent, powerful and sustained.
If the working group has a partnership of adepts working together, either married or long-term lovers, then the Hierophant has an added responsibility to watch over them, checking that the work does not damage their relationship. Often people say that love cannot be damaged by magic but I would beg to differ as I have watched it for myself. Yes, magic will break up a relationship that is past its due-by date, but that is not what I am talking about.
Deep long term magical projects create a great deal of strain that is not normal. If the strain starts to ‘out’ through a relationship it will do a great deal of damage that would not have been an issue if magic had not been in the picture. The power will build up behind little things and make them seem big, creating seemingly enormous emotional hurdles for the couple to navigate. The power will also gravitate to a sexual relationship and the inner contacts involved in the work may try and take advantage of the sexual power between couples. This is not done with any malicious intent; they see power, and they try and use it — simple.
If the couple are aware of the dangers and pitfalls before they begin the work and are supported by the Hierophant and founder adepts who all keep an eye on them, they will survive well. It is also a good learning curve to experience such deep work as a couple and see how the inner worlds try to play out power interactions through sexual union. That awareness in itself can go a long way to teach and mature a magical couple.
It also gives the lodge a strong working couple which is a powerful asset in any magical work — there are things that couples can achieve in magic that groups could not possibly dream of.
THE ROLE OF INITIATES IN THE GREATER WORK OF THE ADEPTS
While the adepts are working hard on long term projects, the lodge has the opportunity to give the initiates some good practical experience, enhancing their training and giving the adepts some well needed back up help.
When a group takes on a round of powerful and arduous work, there is a need to uphold the boundaries of the group, watch out for parasites, guard the doors, prepare the temple for work, clean up the inner mess afterwards, and work on the adepts to rebalance them. Sometimes the initiates can help by sitting in meditation in the inner temple to uphold the group when they are doing dangerous work. It is important that the initiates are involved in the work of the lodge from a practical point of view from the word go, so that they learn a work ethic instead of getting wrapped up in their own ‘enlightenment’ and the next ‘learning’ hit. True development comes from rolling up ones sleeves and getting on with work rather than umbilicus-gazing and book-flipping.
It is up to the Hierophant and the adepts who are not engaged in the round of work to organise the initiates, guide them, lead them, inform them of what is happening and support them while they support the adepts. They will learn a great deal while working this way and will also be energetically tuned by the inner worlds for work in the future. Magic works through resonance, so if the initiates are working on the boundaries of the deep jobs, they will be picking up the magical skills of the adepts without even realising it.
When the initiates ask questions about the deep work, it is best, if at all possible, to be truthful and straight forward with them rather than the usual, ‘oh you are not at the right grade to know that yet,’ comment. The mysteries have a self-edit mechanism: no one can learn a secret of the mysteries until they are ready. You could put it all in large print with lots of pictures but if a person is not ready to receive them, then the wisdom of the mysteries will go straight over their heads. This is why in true reality the mysteries are never hidden, because they don’t need to be. You just don’t see them until you are ready to see them.
By taking the attitude of openness and freedom of information, the wisdom goes to those who need it, regardless of their age, experience or title, and it also does away with the age old hierarchy of secret knowledge, funny handshakes, secret passwords and all the rest of that infantile pap that people get so wrapped up in. The truth and the protection of that truth is far less glamorous and much more powerful — no one ever gets to the mysteries before they are ready to absorb them properly.
If the initiates are treated in this way, you will end up with well-trained, experienced and enthusiastic initiates and adepts who are ready to work instead of being bogged down in power games, lusting for power, or stuck in ego traps. The inner work itself has a filtering mechanism so the more visionary inner work an initiate does the more likely it will be that unsuitable candidates will be weeded out.
The whole progression of the lodge depends on the Hierophant’s ability to refrain from getting sucked into a power role instead staying firm and solid with the work, and resisting the temptation of power that will be wafted under their noses.