When magical workers go into the inner worlds, they usually use visionary structures that have been in place for hundreds if not thousands of years. The Hierophant, if she is trying to avoid all the baggage that goes with the old magical/mystical systems, must be able to understand the structures behind the visions, so that new paths can be laid and new systems constructed.
Most Western Mystery magical systems use Kabbalah as one of the major patterns in the practice and execution of magical ritual and vision. The initiate spends years learning the pathways, the spheres etc, and that information can be used in a variety of magical ways. Some systems work a little with the Abyss, and in the last hundred years various magicians have been looking a little closer at the construct of the Abyss, mainly in the search for demonic power.
The Tree of Life and Abyss system is a clever construction that can act as a fulcrum for all the patterns of the other realms, giving access to the stellar realm, the angelic realm, the future and past landscape, the ancestors, the faery realm, the deep underworld, death, and the homes of ancient deities and demons. In my previous books I have talked a little about the Abyss and the Tree of Life, but in this chapter I want to go into more depth to look at the natural foundation that these constructs are built upon. This is useful for the Hierophant as she begins to build new doors, new paths and new temples — they then connect into the reality of what is actually there in the inner worlds without having to rely on old systems like Kabbalah, Hermetic magic and so on. That way the Hierophant does not repeat past mistakes and take on old baggage.
THE TREE OF LIFE
The Tree of Life has been almost done to death in modern magic and yet still is not used anywhere near its full potential. It is generally used in isolation to everything else around it, therefore cutting its power off at the knees. What we understand as the Tree of Life is the human inner pattern for our place in the universe — it points out where we come from and where we are going, not in a philosophical way, but as a real road map. So, if you throw away all the Judaic language, all the patterns, all the paths, all the attributes that humans love so much in their striving to understand, what are we left with? We are left with the inner landscape of our existence from our perspective.
The Abyss sits between form and formlessness. The TOL takes us from formlessness to form, and beyond the TOL is our life path, which ends at the river of death. When we enter the inner realms in vision, there is a particular vision that we perceive a desert with the Abyss at one end and the river of death at the other. It is talked about in poetic terms over and over in ancient texts, and yet we never seem to make the connection. The TOL patterning developed in Kabbalah is a human attempt to make sense of it, to explain why and how, but as usual with all theoretical patterns, the simplicity of the reality gets lost somewhere in the details. So rather than get confusing, I will call the reality of the TOL the ‘desert’, saving the title of ‘Tree’ for the Kabbalistic usage.
Every being in existence in our world has their own version of the ‘desert’. Every being in existence can use that desert to access worlds, beings, Divinity and themselves in various times of their life. Every being that physically manifests in our world has a ‘desert’ parallel to ours, every being in our universe that does not manifest physically in our realm is perceived as above or below our level of the desert depending on their density and conditionality. It’s just how our brain (but not conscious mind) interprets something that is so multi-dimensional and converts it into something that we can understand. Such understanding is the first step to being able to work with such structures. That what we see is simply our feeble brain’s attempt to be able to process the information in a way that our conscious and unconscious minds have been genetically programmed to cope with, is a realisation that is critical to working at such deep levels. The truth of the whole structure is way beyond our ability to grasp.
Future generations will probably be able to forge on and peel away yet another layer of imagery, but for our generation I think just dropping the age old systems with their dogmas is doing pretty good. So the desert without TOL dogma is what we have.
In the desert certain beings can be accessed, for example the beings that function normally in our universe. These would include angelic beings that are filters, guardians and workers in our physical world, also included are faery beings, recent ancestors, elementals, inner adepts, and some deities that are still within our consciousness.
Knowing that, the Hierophant can build back doors to these realms from the area of the desert most connected to those realms. So for example if you wanted a back door to some inner adepts from a very long time ago, then you would go close to the Abyss as they are slowly making their way back to formlessness. If you wanted a back door to beings that work with sickness and death, the door would be near the death river.
They are back doors because the desert and the Abyss are the backrooms of our universe. This is where all the running around is done, where power is made, used and recycled, where Divinity prepares for manifestation and withdrawal. The front doors are out in our world from a visionary sense, so we would approach the front door of the ancient adepts by walking along the land that they lived upon long ago and entering a temple they once built. To get close to death, you would find the front door to the underworld, access to which is down through the earth and rocks below your feet.
So everything both physical and visionary (visions, myths, stories) that is a part of the world around us, becomes a potential front door. We as humans in human form are front doors — mountains, rivers, caves, temples, stone circles, stars, they are all front doors. But they all have back doors too and those back doors open out onto the desert which is also a level of the Abyss. The desert is our layer of the Abyss. When you go to work with a being that does not either physically manifest or normally reside in spirit form in our world, you would have to find its layer of the Abyss which would mean going up or down, depending on what type of being they are.
When the Hierophant builds a new system, they need to be able to fully understand the structure of the back doors including what they do, how they are built and how they affect us. That way, the Hierophant can build a whole new structure from the inside out, starting from the back door back room part and building outwards into the physical world. That way the system is stable and has roots, as well as all the inner pathways already built in.
So back to the desert — across the Abyss is Divinity preparing to come into physical form. On this (our) side of the Abyss reside the deities, angelic beings etc that are a physical part of our world and at the direct opposite edge of the desert is the river of death. Beyond the river of death is the mountain of repose, which is basically an area of recycling, and beyond the mountain is the Abyss. When we look across the Abyss from the vantage point of the other side of the mountain, we see the desert of life and so the whole cycle completes itself. It is at that point, as beings deep in death, that we realise we are on the ‘other side’ of the Abyss: we are in the realm of Divinity without form.
The Abyss is a crack that goes through all worlds, both up and down, in and out, and is the route that Divinity takes when falling from nothing into everything. All the ‘deserts’ or areas/landscapes of all beings can be accessed via the Abyss, which is the back door to everywhere in our inner and outer universe.
So, with that in mind, the Hierophant can basically build any inner structure that gives human access to virtually any realm or type of being. By anchoring it in the desert/Abyss, the structure has solid roots in a real realm that give it foundations, contacts, and access to Divine consciousness which are the building blocks of a magical, spiritual, or mystical structure. The key is not to bog it down in dogma, secrets, mystique, or psychobabble, all of which humanity loves so much. If the Hierophant can build a simple system that accesses realms and beings, as well as helping workers on the path to their own spiritual understanding, they will have constructed a truly magical path worthy of walking.
Constructing from this place will give initiates and adepts the chance to work from the inside out, to work with the power of Divinity without all the dressing that down-powers it and without all the glamour that filters it and hides it. It also gives the workers a chance to work face to face, as it were, with many powerful beings that would normally not really be accessible from the ‘front door’ method of magical work. It levels the playing fields, takes off the costumes and gives humans a chance to prove that they can function at high power without go-betweens, stories, and silly dresses.
BACK DOORS AND FRONT DOORS
So what is all this back door and front door business about? The front door of a realm is the access point that humans use to get from their place in time and the physical universe to the inner realm that they are trying to reach. So for example, the front door to the Barakiel is a frozen bolt of lightning that a person can climb up into the stars where they find a path that leads to a gathering place or temple. Other examples are: the front door of the Ancestral realm which is a stairway or tunnel down into earth that leads to a cave where the ancestors sleep, the river of blood that takes one back through time, the grand stairs up the face of a step Pyramid that take one into a temple with an inner sanctum, and the crack in a rock or hill that leads to the faery realm; these are all front doors to different realms and times.
Back doors are the routes by which the power and beings of different realms all come together in one pattern that Divine power flows through — it is the vast filtering system which takes raw power and turns it into places, people, and beings. The back doors give access to the point where these places and beings come together in the great pattern of existence.
An adept who has worked through the front door with full knowledge of where they are going has the potential to discover that there is another path/door that will take them beyond the surface dressing, leading them to the face of Divinity and the pattern of existence — it will take them home.
So each temple, each inner place, if constructed properly will have a back door somewhere, which is a very important point to remember; all of these places that we find in the inner worlds are essentially constructs that were built at some point by a magical team or natural process, possibly human, sometimes not, for the people of the future to use. They are not an illusion, they are not a figment of imagination, nor are they a reality within themselves — they are interfaces designed to provide us with a step on the path that was walked before us. The interfaces are masks that real powers wear so that we can recognise them.
That is why we treat everything we see in vision as real, because in a way it is. It is the same process our brain uses to create images for the every day world around us, but in reality the world really doesn’t look like that. It is just our way of understanding what is around us — we do not see energy, piles of cells, particles and electricity; we see trees, humans, and dogs.
BUILDING FROM THE INSIDE OUT
There are many ways of building inner structures, including from the inside of an element outwards, from a front façade backwards, from the void and then from the back door. Constructing from the back door means that the builders start at the universal pattern (desert and Abyss) and build outwards towards the physical world, from the inner to the outer. This gives it an anchor and automatic access to many different places but the downside is that it needs builders who all have a good deal of experience working in and with the universal pattern. If the builders are not acclimatised to that pattern, the sheer force of the power that flows through that threshold of consciousness can do considerable damage to the human body.
If the Hierophant wants to build an inner temple for humanity to use, one that would access Divinity, inner contacts etc, then she would build the back door in the desert and then build on from there. If the inner construct is a place to work with ancestors, then the Hierophant would have to go down the Abyss to the ancestors’ level and build the meeting place from there. Similarly if a temple/contact building was to be a place to work with angelic beings, the builders would have to start by going up the Abyss to the angelic realm and build down and out, just as the ancestral place would be up and out. Its access has to go to the human level for the human workers to be able to flow back and forth.
The building starts with the intention and the back door. From there a tunnel is constructed that will open out into the temple/area/structure and from that area a further tunnel of threshold is built that will hold a front door which in turn opens out into a landscape that is of the human realm.
The idea of this type of construction is that when the initiates and adepts work in this temple, they work within the building, its contents, and its contacts. Some will move on to another temple when they feel they have exhausted all they can find or learn. Some will continue to dig deeper, to search behind the construct, to search for power and Divinity. Those that do such work will find the back door, go through it and end up at the Abyss. That is the beginning of a whole evolution of spiritual awakening when the person finds the thresholds to all beings, all realms and beyond that, to Divinity without form.
One of the secrets that keeps the construct in place for a very long time in human terms is simplicity, so the least detail and the more natural the expression of the construct, the longer it will weather the changes to humanity. The less pot holes, crannies and containers it has, the less chance there is of unsavoury beings successfully moving in and taking over.
In the chapter on temple construction, you will notice that the egregore energy store was a lake which is a natural holder of power and information that will be recognised by many generations to come. The library on the other hand which holds books, scrolls, tablets, disks etc is more tied to civilisations that use writing, but the inner contacts who are represented by the books are also potentially present to communicate with those who do not use the written form. It can also be constructed as a place where elders gather and dispense their knowledge to those who visit them, basically serving the same purpose as a library.
If too much detail is added on to the constructions, particularly detail that is from our time and consciousness, it limits who can use it and can potentially end up confusing people in the future who may not recognise a lot of the imagery there. The Hierophant would be wise to think carefully about everything that is added and why, and think about how it will be interpreted in the long distant future. I am sure that most people reading this will have gone into an ancient construct in the inner worlds at some point and will have been nonplussed at some of the very strange things that they saw there. If the visitor does not understand what they are looking at, they cannot use it.
When constructing a back door, which is usually made up of angelic consciousness that will guard and filter it, it is also good to think carefully about how you present the door. It can simply be a door, which is obvious, but can make it too accessible to those who are not in the right magical stage of development to tumble out into the Abyss. Or it can be a more natural presentation of the angelic being coupled with the clue that it is a threshold of great power that leads to somewhere closer to Divinity. It also makes it less obvious that it is a door and would take someone who was willing to commune with the being to realise what it actually is. This allows the human to get into conversation with the angel who can in turn be more forthright about its purpose and what lies beyond, thus allowing the human to make more informed decisions.
One good way of presenting them in such a case is as pure elements, such as a flame, a whirlwind, a stone or an open sea. Some seekers will see the element and commune with it, finding that it is in fact a door and pass through it. Others will marvel at the sheer power of combined element and angel, and will work with what that angel can bring through itself — a potential preparation for the power that lies beyond.
PATTERNS
The universal pattern is made up of patterns, as are beings, humans, everything that has form of any kind. These patterns can be used in their bare form rather than presented as buildings, angels, doors, flames etc. This is a deeper and less penetrable form of temple building which brings together the patterns that create the power vortexes, thresholds and containers, but does not give them a façade.
Again the builder would start at the Abyss or desert, and would pull together the shapes and threads that are angelic power to create a threshold and form the patterns of access to humanity beyond that. It is the least recognisable form of temple building and will only be accessible as a container and threshold of power to those who truly know its real nature. To outsiders who stumble across it by accident, they will simply find a series of platonic solids, shapes, and lines hanging in the inner worlds. They will touch it and feel its power, but the understanding of what it is and what it does will be kept from them.
To construct in this way is the hardest way of working and is only really used when the temple or container is destined to hold a great deal of dangerous power that must be kept away from the blundering explorer at all costs. And yet for those who are searching for a way to work that is closer to the reality of our existence, it makes the most sense — we are putting patterns of power and expressions of Divinity in form.
Such a construct can be easily used to manipulate workers. Because there is no visual or living interfaces, there is no way for a worker to know exactly what the temple is and what it is doing, so if it is just power, then there is no way for a worker to know what that power is actually doing and they would have to trust the builder implicitly to be honest with them.
Such simple but powerful constructs can be used for all sorts of things such as powering something up, feeding, blocking, manifesting or destroying something: no-one but the builder would ever really truly know what it actually was doing. Because of the realities of human nature that makes them very dangerous constructs.
For that reason alone, if a Hierophant wanted to build something like that for a specific purpose, it would be good to have the whole group work on the construction, so that the intent is shared and understood. I personally think that if a Hierophant chose to build such a construct for a purpose, it should be built, worked with, and then carefully dismantled so that it could never be misused. Such a focussed construct is like a needle point or a nuclear missile which is pointed at one thing and does its job. To then leave it lying around or visited with vague intent is just madness. If a construct is for the long term and for multiple uses including education, healing, etc then it is best to build a more human friendly construct that would be accessible to workers at all different stages of development.
There is a sort of midway version that can use platonic shape and patterning to create a temple that can be entered, such as a pyramid, sphere or cube and they will have nothing in them as the shape and power is all that is needed. These forms of temples are not of much use for training initiates in that there are no cues to learn from, no interfaces to commune with and nothing that is familiar to help an initiate take a step further.
Such a patterned temple is best used as a working temple that has a specific purpose where workers gather, do their job and then leave. The shape alone serves as a container for the egregore and the choice of shape depends very much on the angelic consciousness being used to construct it. The down side is that it cannot be communicated with and it is not so accessible to inner contacts to interface with.
Outer versions of these types of working temples can be seen in our world through history, i.e. the Kaaba, a cube temple which is an externalisation of paradise, the great pyramid of Giza is another example. They are working spaces with very little cues, few interfaces and a great deal of power.
So the choice of construction depends very much on what it will be used for and by whom and for how long.
THE DIFFERENT REALMS OF THE ABYSS
In recent years people have begun to explore the Abyss after centuries of staying far away from it because of propaganda and religious dogma (it’s hell, it’s the place of evil, it’s where all that is bad lives etc). The dogma was there to stop people accessing what is truly a powerful and deep inner realm that will expose people to real power and Divinity in many different forms. If people know about and have worked with the powers we call the Abyss, they cannot be so easily taken in by magus bullshitters.
The Abyss is seemingly endless, goes up and down, inside and out, and holds access to every being that is in our manifest universe, both inner and outer. All realms end here, any expression of Divinity flows through and takes their forms from here: it is the best place in the inner worlds to learn how it all works.
The Abyss works loosely on the dynamic of conditional/manifest/density/ through to unconditional/non manifest/ethereal. Divinity polarises here from unformed to formed, neutral to male/female, and neutral to negative and positive — the Abyss is like a filter or a Play Doh machine that takes unformed power and gives it form.
As humans we need to approach the Abyss from our own understanding of existence and humanity, that way we don’t get eaten. If we approach the Abyss with an eastern spirituality concept of everything is love and light and just needs enlightenment, then we will be torn to shreds pretty quickly. If we approach it from a psychology angle that it is all in our minds and all that is there is our own demons, then boy are we in for a ride.
It has to be approached as a real place, with real beings, some who will eat us or tear us apart, and some that won’t. There will be some beings that haven’t a clue what we are, and some beings that will want to climb inside us and share our lives. There are also beings who will teach us, help us, and tend us when we are in need, and beyond all of that is Divinity, both within reach and out of reach. So if approached with a human reality check, the same approach we would take to exploring the Amazon jungle, we will stay safe and hopefully not get bitten, eaten, or worn.
It is a place where very ancient beings that no longer roam our world can be reached — their consciousness still exists, just as ancient deities and former waves of humanity do and this is the place where those powers and beings can be reached. The ancient landscape of the earth is layered under our desert and the landscape of the future is above the desert waiting to sink into being. Accessing all of these places and beings is possible; it just takes focus and energy.
When we go down the Abyss to reach beings that are far back in our past, we begin to get into areas where the consciousness of those beings is aggressive, bloodthirsty, and predatory — why? Well, think about dinosaurs for example. Our planet’s history is littered with extremes of massive aggressive beings that would terrify us, and little vegan humans that lived peaceful natural lives. It is a history of extremes and those extreme powers still exist, huddled down in their inner reality that to us is down the Abyss.
Also, what we perceive as down the Abyss is the realm of beings we often identify as demonic. These beings have their own realm which can open out with a front door into our world, just as angelic beings do. Working down the Abyss brings us through the natural filter of the pattern, which prepares us and puts us on a more even keel with these beings so that we can interact a little more safely, even though they are still dangerous. The same is true of working up the Abyss with angelic beings.
The one thing to remember with all these levels of the Abyss is that each level is an echo of our desert, which means it has Divinity across the Abyss, the area which is the inner power expression of their outer realm and beyond that is their form of death and recycling. In the case of angelic beings, there seems to be no death, just a holding pattern or place of silence. Most other beings have a death/recycling area, except the time concept is very different to our own.
When the Hierophant begins to work in these realms, it is wise to remember the structure, lay out, flow of power, front door/back door, tunnels, Keepers and all the other factors that present themselves to us as humans. Any of these realms can be worked in, be built in or have buildings that access them, if approached correctly. The main thing to remember, particularly if the Hierophant is in these realms in vision and has less experienced people in tow, is that the more manifest the power is, the more contained and formed it is. It is safer to interact with and there is less chance of someone getting burned.
If the structure behind the interface is understood, the interface itself can be worked with to the fullness of its capacity and then the interface itself can be moved beyond so that eventually the workers are operating without the need for an interface and are getting closer to the reality of the pattern and beyond. The magical structure will continue to blossom and mature if its workers and students do not fall into the trap of creating a dogma around the interface but instead retain an understanding of what that interface truly is. With more understanding, the people within the magical structure will grow spiritually and magically over the generations without becoming followers or founders of religions or paths. To achieve this and sustain it is truly magical.