Tarot magick: The structure of belief. Ph.D. dissertation

TAROT MAGICK: THE STRUCTURE OF BELIEF Rebekah Zhuraw

A DISSERTATION IN FOLKLORE AND FOLKLIFE

Presented to the Faculties of the University of Pennsylvania in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2010

Supervisor of Dissertation

lfflrrYf~~ Robert St. George, Associate Professor of History

Graduate Groujf|Chairpers6;

Dan Ben-Amos, Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations

Dissertation Committee Robert St. George, Associate Professor of History Jean-Michel Rabate, Professor of English and Comparative Literature David Hufford, Adjunct Professor of Religious Studies

UMI Number: 3414109

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

First and foremost I wish to acknowledge my entire family—no-one left out—for their overwhelming support. Next, to the families of Shakti's friends who supported her so that I could work—the Beckers, the Martins, the OppenheimerAbbots, the Simonian-Taylors, and the Watsons—thank you. My great appreciation goes to the friends who supported me directly: Karen Cisario, who put up with me, and Norm Roessler, who gave me solace and reward. Perhaps most importantly, my appreciation goes to my Committee: David Hufford, who as a teacher taught me understanding; Bob Saint-George, who taught me Love (creative emotion) under Will (intellect) in a purely academic sense (even if it took a long, long time) and is always a pleasure to talk to; and Jean-Michel Rabate for his generosity. Lastly, I wish to acknowledge Balthazar and Nettle Spreng, who in this time of great hardship made possible this work; may her dragons guard you always.

u

ABSTRACT

TAROT MAGICK: THE STRUCTURE OF BELIEF Rebekah Zhuraw Robert St. George

Magic has traditionally been defined in Folklore Studies as a last resort of the powerless and poorly educated. However, recent trends in popular culture coupled with an upswing in historical studies of magic have shown magic to be a perennial middle class pursuit and one currently on the upswing. Using the methodology of the Ethnography of Belief, this dissertation examines one Tarot reader's belief system in depth to see how four domains commonly associated with magic combine in the overall belief structure: magical thinking, practice, symbolism, and manifestation. A current life crisis guides the narrative, contextualized by an indepth life history put into the historical context of Neo-Paganism. Detailed accounts of practices indicate a feedback loop between held beliefs and induced experience. A binary system of organizing cognitive processes and magical powers ultimately emerges. The dissertation concludes that Tarot Magick provides a form of cognitive map, the goal of which is for practitioners to achieve a multidimensional consciousness which integrates all dualisms, including the lifeworld and the otherworld, into a third perspective conceived of as God consciousness.

iii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

ii

Abstract

iii

Table of Contents

iv

Table of Figures

vii

Chapter 1

Introduction and Methodology: Ethnography and Magic

1

1. From a Book on Tarot to a Dissertation on Magic

1

2. The Problem of Magic

7

3. Defining Magic

21

4. Magical Thinking

24

5. Magic and Cognitive Theory

29

6. Final Notes and Outline of Chapters

34

Life History

38

1. Beginnings

38

2. Youth and Family Life

47

3. Emancipation

52

4. Structures of Recognition

61

5. Crisis 1: Arrest

72

6. Practices 1: Astral Projection

74

7. Practices 2: Constructing a Battery and a Genii

82

8. Practices 3: Afterward

86

Chapter 2

iv

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

9. Crisis 2: Dematerializations and Discovery

92

10. Europe and Franzel: 1989,1991

96

11. Practices 4: Shielding

113

12. Final Notes on Franzel

121

13. Franzel's Tarot Reading

123

14. Postscript

127

Occulture

129

1. The Tradition of No Tradition

129

2. We're All Pagans Here (Neo-Paganism)

140

3. The Rosicrucians

146

4. The New Age

155

5. The Cultic Milieu

164

6. Neo-Pagan Self-Identification

174

7. Full Circle

184

Magic in a Time of Crisis

199

1. The Gender of Tarot Magick

199

2. My Life in 14 Tapes

214

3. The Law of Love

223

4. The Law of Fate: Physical Plane (Law)

230

5. The Law of Fate: Mental Plane (Planning)

241

Chapter 5

Chapter 5

6. The Law of Fate: Spiritual Plane (Prophecy)

249

7. Grass Roots Magick

258

The Third Personality: Manifestation

269

1. The Third Personality

269

2. The Cognitive Blend

280

3. Casting the Circle

285

4. Conceptual Closure

290

5. Lazy Machines

294

6. My Religion

301

Reflection

307

1. Nonsense

307

2. Hagiography: Portrait of a Magus

319

3. The One You Seek Is No Longer Available

327

Bibliography

337

Index

351

VI

TABLE OF FIGURES

Figure 1: Charge Structure of the Tetragrammaton

201

Figure 2: The Conceptual Blend

281

Figure 3: Ritual Blend Synthesis

283

Figure 4: Tetragrammaton: "Wheel of the Year"

286

Figure 5: Combined Cognitive Blend and Tetragrammaton

287

vn

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION AND METHODOLOGY: ETHNOGRAPHY AND MAGIC

1. From a Book on Tarot to a Dissertation on Magic In January 2003, having recently given birth to my daughter and needing employment that would allow me to work at home, I was hired by my landlord, Balthazar Spreng, to help him write a book on Tarot.

In my dissertation proposal, I record the

initial stages of this process:

I have to say I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I was well versed in comparative literatures and religions, and especially strong in Greek and Egyptian myth. As a student of Folklore and an ethnographer, I am a trained witness and listener. I am also, as well as a standard writer/editor-for-hire, a poet and sometimes artist, which has in turn influenced my research in the arts, orality and literacy, and intertextuality. Balthazar had stated that he wanted some of the book written in incantation. This cinched the intrigue on both sides. We first met to work on the book in his wife's study on the second floor of his home on January 3, 2003 at 9 a.m.. The meeting consisted primarily of his holding up Tarot cards and telling me their meanings—a stream of numbers, Hebrew letters, geometric solids, planets, constellations, and names of gods from a variety of pantheons which flowed forth in rhythmic incantation. I had never experienced anything like it, and I struggled to connect the diverse details of what I had thought to be largely, mutually exclusive systems. We broke for lunch, then continued, stopping at nightfall. Through the entire process, my newborn daughter slept in her basket, waking periodically to nurse. We met like this for 5 days, during which he explained the overall structure of the book and suggested that I could begin writing. At this my mouth dropped, and I declared that I could not—or not yet anyway. Balthazar at first did not understand why. I was a writer, he was paying me—why couldn't I write it? I explained that I needed more information—that, quite simply, I did not understand, and if I did not understand the subject, I could not possibly write coherently about it. How exactly, for example, did the Tarot correspond to astrology—which he had frequently mentioned—I asked him. What was the system—the 1

big picture? He looked at me strangely then and laid out the Tarot cards in a large, time consuming circle around me: that was how. Then I was given my first lesson: go buy myself a deck of Tarot cards, duplicate the circle at home, and then come back and show him. I did. Thus began an ongoing series of lessons through which I shifted from non-participant writer to participant-observer apprentice as Balthazar taught me about the Tarot, Hermetic Qabalah, and magical practices in the manner that his teacher had taught him.

Or so I thought at the time. In fact, this last sentence turned out to be false, but I did not know that until I switched from writing a book of magic to writing a dissertation, which was not until last year. But to mention this is to leap-frog chronology. Thus to return to the unfinished story above and, notably, what I left out of my proposal, what followed was an odyssey into mysticism—a year and a half in which I memorized the many facets of the Qabalistic Tree of Life and inhabited the conceptual realm of Qabalistic creation, according to which the Hebrew alphabet contains, fossilized yet still pulsing within, the very code and building blocks of life—all through the symbolism, definitions, and mythology of the Tarot cards. Daily I reported my progress, and once a week we met for a lesson in Qabalah. Throughout I wrote sample pieces of incantation and began the first entries of a dictionary of the cards. Then, on May 12th, 2004, it all ended abruptly when, in the early morning hours, Balthazar was arrested and his properties seized—all except for the one I was living in—for the alleged cultivation of marijuana. For those who have never encountered the process of the legal system in the "war on drugs", I will summarize simply by saying that it was devastating for Balthazar and those who shared his life, with many twists and turns. Initially, Balthazar was held for $3 million dollars bail and the D.A. vowed "to put him away" for 20 years. A skinny, 55 year old, vegetarian, hippy, pacifist with a series of pre-existing injuries and illnesses and 2

a 20-some years prior conviction for selling LSD, because of the amount of his bail, was housed with the most hardened murderers. Suffice it to say the conditions reported were deplorable—lights left on for days on end, sleeping on a sheet of metal, freezing cold, people having epileptic fits left unattended on the floor. Visits—I went twice, once bringing my child—were surreal: a roomful of men in giant, orange jumpsuits, no-one allowed to touch anyone, the visit rushed and business-like, and Balthazar inevitably streaming tears. Meanwhile, his wife, suddenly homeless, came to live in the apartment below me, where, after the months it took for the audit of his financial records which allowed him to put his last remaining property, the house I lived in, up towards bail and to find someone else to put their house up, as well, he came "home" on house arrest. Deprived of sleep, essentially starving, leery of the future, and having simply not seen sky for months, he was a nervous wreck, distracted to say the least—certainly not the warm, energetic, abstract artist and often silly mystic I had come to know. It is strange how people react in an emergency. Most of his friends simply evaporated (though some have since returned). Others turned mean. I had not known him long in the scheme of things, but it was not my inclination to do either. Within months of his return, a tenant who had been arrested in the sweep, the artist William Riley, a friend from his Academy days who lived on disability, having been deprived of his chemo and having suffered two heart attacks unattended, along with other hardships in jail, died at 60 years of age. Another person, similarly arrested, who was bipolar and whose house was ravaged by crack addicts and his dogs "euthanized" in his absence, went off his meds and lost his mind. It just went on and on. It was not long before I had to move because he had to raise my rent to cover his expenses, but I returned to visit. I 3

always returned. The book was necessarily shelved—it was not even a topic of discussion. There was only one topic of discussion, and I listened endlessly to it. I volunteered to attend his hearing dates when his wife had to work and I did not, as I intrinsically knew it was not good to be alone in a courtroom, and there were many hearings on many issues as each side gained and lost ground. Eventually, in spring of 2007, when it became clear that this was going to take a long, long time, we decided to begin work again on the book—not to write—neither of us were ready for that yet— but to do research for a star map which was, he now revealed, along with the Tree of Life, the basis of the Tarot cards. By this time, Balthazar had adjusted to his situation enough to have regained much of his original disposition. When asked how he was, he answered with his signature, "Paradoxical." While he had continued to practice Tarot all along—one of the first things he did upon release from jail was a Tarot reading on his situation (to which, as a student and now one of few remaining friends, I was invited, as I was to most of the fourteen total readings on his situation which he has performed over the elapsed five years)—he had begun occasionally reading Tarot for others again, as well. Moreover, he had physically healed enough to resume his magical practices (which include strenuous yoga and chi gung forms) in full. Overall, his general standard of living had improved. No longer regarded as a flight risk, his house arrest requirements had been greatly reduced so he was less of a shut-in and could sleep uninterrupted through the night. Plus he had made practical and aesthetic improvements to his "temporary" home, and he seemed in a peculiarly German way to enjoy the calculations of budgeting. In short, he had learned to live again in the present. 4

Our renewed work on the book coincided with his setting up of a tiny, but functional studio, and, stimulated it seemed by our renewed conversations about the book, he began once again to paint, first painting a series of yantras (geometric designs used as Tantric meditation tools in Buddhism and Hinduism), but soon settled into sketching designs for his proposed Tarot deck, to accompany the Tarot book. The card he selected to begin with was the Justice card, for which a friend posed, and, as with everything, I soon realized it was to be a "magical" painting. The painting was produced through precise mathematical calculations and purposeful meditations using specific imagery. In the course of my now renewed weekly visits to work on the star map, he displayed his progress and discussed his set backs on the painting, at one point veiling the painting for weeks as he struggled with a turn for what seemed like the worst in his court case. It was through this painting that I came to realize that everything having to do with Tarot—everything about his life, it seemed, really—certainly everything to which he put any intention at all—had to do with magic. When we began our work on the book in 2003, "magic" was not a word I would have associated with Tarot. I would have called it divination, but not "magic". Even at the time of Balthazar's arrest, at which time I had fully experienced, conceptually (mythically), the Qabalistic story of creation symbolized numerically through the transition from zero—nothing—to one—something—and knew that "one" was represented by the Tarot card called "The Magician", upon whose definition—Hermes, the inventor of language, mathematics, and magic, the embodied Mind of God, the breath, the juggler of life, life itself—we had dwelled for some time, magic had not been the focus of our conversations. Or I had not noticed that it was. But then I was only at 5

the beginning of such studies, and, typical of beginnings, I did not know it. I was focused on mastery of the underlying structure, but I knew nothing of its application, and in truth, as the summer of 2007 came to a close and I broached the idea of writing a dissertation on the topic of Balthazar's practices, first with Balthazar and then with members of the Folklore Program, I had only the glimmer of an idea of what that magic was. And in truth, not being an initiate to these practices, there are definite limitations to what I can claim to know now. Mine is not insider's knowledge. Ultimately, Balthazar's arrest was, however, what gave me that glimpse of the massive shadow of the iceberg beneath the waters, the small tip of which I had been chipping diligently away at. In the wake of the arrest, he talked about his progress in healing and the gathering of his strength for the final showdown, which, of course, included magical practices, and, true to my nature, I asked questions. Thus I learned what this man, who I'd gotten to know better since his arrest than I'd ever known I would, had been doing in ritual every night for over 20 years—meditations, astral projection, conjurations—and how these general practices, as well as magical practices specific to his law case, tied in with his practice of Tarot reading, both in terms of how the Tarot is used as a tool in his other magical practices and how his other magical practices, in turn, are tools for his development as a Tarot reader. I began to see that these were all related magical practices, and through witnessing reading after reading on his personal situation, I began to understand that the process of reading itself was magic and why. What I still did not know, however, was "the whole picture"—that elusive subject about which I'd demanded information those first weeks in which I had been hired to 6

write a book on Tarot, except the meaning of this had now shifted for me from underlying system to context. I had, for example, only vague notions of "The Heidelberg School of Hermetic Qabalah," the tradition into which Balthazar claimed to be initiated. Nor did I know much about his teacher, Franzel Meyer, whose picture sat atop his altar, nor his relationship with him. Thus, once my dissertation proposal was accepted, while on the one hand I searched for everything I could get my hands on related to magic in Folklore and related disciplines, in traditional Folklorist style I returned to "the field" to collect a detailed life history. This produced treasures: letters, photographs, and even a journal and audio-tapes of his sessions with his teacher. We poured through photo albums and discussed readings, but mostly Balthazar lectured, as is his wont, telling the story of his life as if giving a series of structured lessons on the Qabalah—all of which I tape recorded and dutifully transcribed and from which I have built the substance of this dissertation. 2.

The Problem of Magic

As Robert Cantwell states in his examination of the manifestation of culture, Ethnomimesis, "In the modern world, the idea of folklife belongs to the romantic tradition and, like that tradition, is a response to, an instrument of, and a phenomenon of modernity" (Cantwell 1993: v). Well, there is nothing more romantic than magic, which, in popular usage, is both the sine qua non and the je ne sais qua of love—and, for that matter, most things mysterious, ecstatic, and compelling. But as with all ideals, it also finds itself at the point-end of the double edged sword of passion, where it is as often vehemently denounced as it is otherwise enthusiastically embraced, most often in the 7

name of either science or religion, and, as many a philsopher-historians has successfully unveiled, such cultural phenomena are more oft than not mirrored in the academy. Thus in Making Magic: Religion, Magic, and Science in the Modern World, Randall Styers painstakingly traces the path by which magic becomes the ultimate foil of the forces of modernity, including Christianity, capitalism, and the modern university (Styers 2004). But to finish Cantwell's thought: "And yet, in a larger sense the idea of folklife surely belongs to the long and complex pastoral dream founded in western civilization's primary myths" (Cantwell 1993: xv). So, too, magic. Folklore partially inherits the problem of magic from anthropology, where one can say the subject is foundational, but it also co-creates this discourse through its own invention of "the folk". This discourse finds voice in both hemispheres of Folklore studies, folk-literature, via folk and fairy tales, and folkways, primarily through Folk Religion and Folk Medicine, through which related fields of inquiry Belief Studies has its ostensible beginnings. This dissertation is founded in the impulse of Belief Studies, but from here moves in a necessarily interdisciplinary direction, as ubiquitously called for by the scholars who have constituted a recent and compelling resurgence of academic study of magic, many of them anthropologists (Styers 2004; Greenwood 2000, 2005; Sorensen 2007), some sociologists (Berger 2003, 2005; York 2005a, 2005b), also scholars of Religion (Lehrich 2003, 2007). Notably, Christopher Lehrich opens The Occult Mind: Magic in Theory and Practice (whose subtitle he acknowledges borrowing from renowned magus Aleister Crowley) with the following declaration:

Modern academe does not recognize a discipline devoted to the analytical study of occult, magical, or esoteric traditions. Work in these areas, 8

though on the increase, remains hampered by various methodological and political blinders. The primary difficulty is simply explained: work on magic is tightly constrained by the conventions of the disciplines in which it is locally formulated.. ..Academic scholars working on magic have often been strikingly anxious to situate themselves indisputably within a conventional disciplinary framework, as though thereby to ward off the lingering taint of an object of study still thought disreputable if not outright mad.. .But it should no longer be necessary to defend studies of magic, given the long line of distinguished predecessors in several disciplines.. .1 hope that this book will act as a preliminary to an interdisciplinary field of magic" (Lehrich 2007: xi-xiv).

About this declaration and the overall thrust of Lehrich's work, Chris Miles, in a review in Pomegranite (an international review of Pagan Studies) notes, "Lehrich's 2005 work, The Language of Demons and Angels: Cornelius Agrippa 's Occult Philosophy, which applied structuralist and deconstructionist methods in a groundbreaking reading of Agrippa, also contained a number of passages examining the assumptions and intellectual paradigms informing modern scholarship on esotericism. It was clear in that work that Lehrich had a lot more to say about the job of doing scholarship on magic and doing theory in general—and The Occult Mind: Magic in Theory and Practice represents an extraordinary blooming of some of these earlier concerns" (Miles 2007: 198). I will return to Lehrich's proposal and use of structuralism momentarily, but for now I will take up the theme of apology. I had three wishes in writing this dissertation: 1)1 did not want to apologize for the subject matter. Given the perennial popular groundswell of interest in magic, as British anthropologist Susan Greenwood notes, the very lack of serious scholarly attention to the subject warrants attention (Greenwood 2005). Plus Lehrich has given me an out here. Thank you, Christopher Lehrich. 2) Closely related to wish number one, I 9

did not want to do an exhaustive review of how precursors to Lehrich's proposal of an interdisciplinary study of magic have addressed magic historically—in Folklore or in any discipline, for as Lehrich notes, philosophies travel well beyond Philosophy departments, quickly becoming cultural discourses, both in the academe and society at large. Each of the previously noted sources has done an admirable job of locating the major names and trends in magic theorizing in Anthropology, Sociology, and Religion and established reasoned objections to them—not surprisingly, as many are the end results of dissertations—as have recent Folklore dissertations in my home department at the University of Pennsylvania established the decisions that lead to the formation of Belief Studies and its application to the fields of folk medicine and folk religion. Abject repetition is, to my mind, not far from abject poverty when it does not adequately address the issues at hand. The problem of the discourse on magic is not simply its modernist legacy, but the dearth of attention it has received in its own right in post-modernity. Thus at the risk of grand reductionism, I will state that there is one great divide in the interdisciplinary history of the study of belief as it applies to magic, and that is the attempted break from positivism and evolutionism that accompanied the philosophical critique of Western relativism and the reified, hierarchical, cultural machine of modernity, of which the university is part and parcel. "But," as notes Cantwell in Ethnomimesis, "it is not my purpose to tell again the story of modernity, already admirably told by Paul Mantoux, E. P. Thompson, Raymond Williams, Walter Ong, Michel Foucault, among many others. I have chosen instead to concentrate on those configurations in the cultural text that, because they are imaginative, admit of many

10

imaginative transformations" (Cantwell 1993: 2). Still, the subject requires some reckoning, as it is intimately bound up with the discourse on magic. Notes Don Cupitt in Mysticism After Modernity, "Opinions may differ about just when it was that the Modern age suddenly confronted its own deepest assumptions and found itself compelled to recognize that it didn't actually believe them any more, but perhaps the best candidate is the year 1968, a turbulent time in Prague, Paris and Chicago. Since then we have increasingly thought of ourselves as living in a 'postmodern' period—a term that we use not by way of dignifying that we have successfully completed the transition to a new understanding of the human condition, but rather by way of admitting that at yet we haven Y" (Cupitt 1998: 1). In apparent concordance with Cuppit's projected "D day", I. C. Jarvie published The Revolution in Anthropology in 1964 (reprinted in 1967), a self proclaimed inter-disciplinary and "rebellious" study in which he critiqued the "scientific attitude" of social anthropology — specifically, lingering structural-functionalism—and proposed instead a "philosophical anthropology." Jarvie frames his concept of a philosophical anthropology by quoting Kant, "Kant put philosophical anthropology well in his Introduction to Logic when he said that philosophy tried to answer four questions: what can I know (metaphysics); what ought I to do (morals); what may I hope (religion); and what is man (anthropology). 'In reality, however, all these questions might be reckoned under anthropology, since the first three questions refer to the last'" (Kant 1885: 15 quoted in Jarvie 1967: xx). Kant's postulate is complex, but amongst its implications picked up by Jarvie are that anthropology—and all related studies of man—are always bound up with an innate metaphysics and an innate issue of ethics. 11

Jarvie's text, also an outgrowth of his dissertation, again provides an excellent summary and critique of his anthropologic fore-runners, ultimately exposing ethnographic methodology as "impregnated with interpretations and theories", by which he primarily meant the ethnographers' own metaphysics, now brought into question procedurally and ethically. Jarvie uses the example of a "concrete, first-order problem", cargo cults, to address this meta-methodological issue. His conclusion: "the reason social anthropologists got stuck [in theorizing cargo cults] is because they get stuck with all problems of social change." This point is illuminating, both in its own right and in its applicability to the innate problems still underlying theorizing magic and magic traditions. But that aside, one might call all subsequent critique of the ethnography of belief within the social sciences "variations on a theme of Jarvie's", and there have been many well-stated, thoughtful permutations of these, including some made along the way by Robin Horton, Jonathan Z. Smith, and Stanley Tambiah, amongst others, which directly address the study of magic, but given the groundswell of subsequently redirected energy to addressing maligned and misunderstood subjects, the fact that, instead of being a hot topic, magic mostly went to the back burner is curious. One cannot blame this on the academy mimicking popular historic trends as, in fact, the sixties, seventies, and even eighties were rife with magical-religious trends, as this dissertation graphically addresses. Yet in a keyword search of the sixteen Folklore journals archived by JSTOR (which includes the top four U.S. Folklore journals), despite that there were 2,463 hits for the word "magic" between 1960 and 2007, only 52 of these had the word "magic" in the title, and more than half of these were book reviews. Examining the articles that did not include the word "magic" in the title, the word was almost always superfluously or 12

generally used, essentially an epithet or catch-all, and magic was not itself usually an object of focus. Further, the years 1970 to 1979, where, noting popular trends, one might expect a surge in academic interest in magic, one instead experiences a noticeable dip. A slight upswing in the eighties can probably be attributed to the attention sociologists were giving to the "New Age Movement", an apparently suddenly ubiquitous outgrowth of sixties spirituality with a decidedly capitalist flavor, which sociologists took the role of attempting to normalize, applying the toned down term "New Religious Movements", especially to the various eastern religious elements under the New Age umbrella, though in fact these eastern elements had been present in American and European culture long before the sixties (especially in the arena of Philosophy). The term never caught on much outside of Sociology, and by the nineties the JSTOR numbers were as low as in the seventies again, though census numbers show that in fact another sixties-generated groundswell was in formation: the neo-pagan movement (Berger, et. al. 2003, Pew Forum 2008). Outside of magic, per se, however, ultimately such redirected energies as represented in such texts as The Revolution in Anthropology freed the social-sciencesminded academic intellectual imagination to new levels of curiosity, exploration, and experimentation of many kinds, most inherently interdisciplinary, breeding such foment as ethnopoetics, ethnomusicology, literary and cultural studies, the anthropology of the emotions, bodylore, and other intersections of otherwise distinct departments with the arts, each other, and the popular milieu, as well. Meanwhile, back in Folklore, in both the areas of Folk Religion and Folk Medicine, Don Yoder produced, in 1972 and 1974, respectively, groundbreaking definitions of each, reconfiguring the stigmatized "exotic" 13

spiritual beliefs of the socially and economically marginalized "folk" into what David Hufford would later characterize simply as "the intellectual work and insights of ordinary people" (Hufford 1995a: 23). In "Beings Without Bodies: an experience-centered theory of the belief in spirits," Hufford, characterizes spiritual belief as follows: There is a common core, and it consists in the belief that there exists an order: (1) that is objectively real, (i.e., not "all in the mind") (2) that is qualitatively different from the everyday material world (e.g., invisible at times), (3) that interacts with this world in certain ways (e.g., answers to prayer, visits from deceased loved ones), and (4) that includes beings that do not require a physical body in order to live (e.g., God, souls of the deceased, angels, evil spirits). In different traditions, this order is variously called "the spirit world," "the supernatural," "land of the ancestors," etcetera. These four elements are held in common by folk belief traditions and religions around the world. How this spiritual order is different, when and how it interacts with the mundane world, and who the persons in it are, constitute major differences in cultural and religious traditions, and frequently between institutional religious tradition and folk belief (25-26).

Hufford debuted his experience-centered theory and methodology with the publication in 1982 of The Terror That Comes in the Night: An Experience-Centered Study of Supernatural Assault Traditions, with which publication Belief Studies had officially arrived, and with a distinctly political orientation. In a series of subsequent publications, Hufford deconstructs the production of knowledge and cultural authority by "a powerful, self-regulated intellectual elite", refraining all knowledge as inherently occurring within structures of belief (23). Like Jarvie, Hufford uses a particular case 14

study (the "old hag" tradition) to expose the meta-methodological problems involved in ethnography, and in his case, to suggest a concrete framework for interpreting belief. Belief is the certainty that something is true. (This is belief in the cognitive sense; belief also has important emotional meanings that associate it with such terms as faith, but those aspects are beyond the scope of this paper.) Knowledge is a particular kind of belief, that is, belief that has met customary criteria of justification; this is the basis for the strong distinction between the two terms—that knowledge is justified true belief. However, different criteria for justification are customary in different cultural settings, so this distinction does not serve us well in examining belief in a cultural way. In cultural terms knowledge is what particular people call the beliefs that they consider to be most justified and true. This usage relies on local values and does not require the outside observer either to impose alien criteria or to enter into local debates. Under this usage we may determine which beliefs are knowledge simply by asking those who hold them, rather than by attempting to finally determine matters of truth (13-14).

Folk beliefs, Hufford states, are neither inherently "false" nor stupid, but rather are better understood as "unofficial beliefs" (18). The automatic attribution of irrationality and falsehood to informant's testimony (the latter often based inappropriately in literary models), without thorough investigation as to the nature of the truth claims contained within, notes Hufford, is both unethical and, perhaps more to the point, does not contribute to the purpose of the investigation of belief in the first place: "to understand why widespread beliefs are held" (31). Notes Hufford:

"The natural vehicle of folk belief, perhaps of most belief, is stories that show what is true by what is said to have happened. This process combines beliefs with some of their reasons and some of their implications. But for tacit and embedded beliefs to be described and understood, the investigator must infer them and state them as propositions. The investigator must also ensure that the propositions as stated are agreeable to those who are said to hold them. In the cognitive

15

sense it is wrong to attribute to someone a belief they disagree with or do not understand" (30). To which he adds: "All reports are constructed, but that does not make all reports fiction" (32). Hufford's critique is informed in part by Robert Halm's article "Understanding Beliefs: an essay on the methodology of the statement and analysis of belief systems" published in Current Anthropology in 1973. In this article, Hahn, then a social anthropology graduate student working on his dissertation, puts forth a comprehensive methodology for studying native—or any "foreign"—belief systems. Hahn foremost "recommends a conception of beliefs as general propositions about the world (consciously) held to be true [and] suggests that other concepts (e.g., of beliefs as unconscious as well as conscious) have never been adequately explicated." (The latter subject is further taken up by Hufford in "Response: The Adequacy of Freudian Psychoanalytic Theory", 2003.) Most intriguing is Hahn's proposition of ethnography as an act of translation in which "(1) a series of beliefs is stated as a system and (2) the beliefs and systems so stated are analyzed and compared with others," through which "the epistemological limits of the knowledge of foreign beliefs" are reached (Hahn 1973). (This is a subject that Lehrich will revisit in critiquing the pros and cons of the structural analysis of magic.) Hahn's analysis is especially evident in Hufford's "The Scholarly Voice and the Personal Voice: reflexivity in belief studies" in which Hufford warns of the "domination of belief scholarship by a particular religious tradition", by which he means Christianity, whose proclamation of "skepticism" towards "unofficial" belief systems, has the tendency to smack loudly of disbelief rather than neutrality. This pronounced 16

"skepticism", he notes, ironically developed in the academic community out of the academe's history "as a community of professional experts who had first to wrest cultural authority from the Church" (Hufford 1995b: 67-68). This point has particular resonance for the study of magic. Hufford's theory is also informed by J. Kellenberger's The Cognitivity of Religion: Three Perspectives, published in 1985, in which, through analysis of Psalms and other mystical and devotional works within the Judeo-Christian tradition, Kellenberger locates a common narrative of realization and discovery which is "rational", that is: based on empirical evidence—though Kellenberger, noting likely objections to the term, suggests: "We can use as well experiential grounding or even manifestations in place of 'evidence'" (110). Kellenberger's text also provides a thorough summary and critique of the forerunners to Belief Studies from the perspective of Religion, noting, for example: "Phillips, referring to the Psalms, says that 'any event can lead the believer to God,' " to which Kellenberger retorts, "Yes, and non-believers too—if their eyes are opened" (109). This is in agreement with Hufford's findings regarding the "Old Hag" tradition in The Terror that Comes in the Night, in which people with no prior knowledge of the tradition in widely disparate cultural contexts and religious—or distinctly nonreligious—traditions report a spiritual dimension (in this case, primarily negative) associated with what the Western medical establishment calls "sleep paralysis." Based on this evidence of his own ongoing case study, Hufford challenges the prevalent assumption that pre-established, faith-based belief "produces" the experiences that give rise to such personal narratives. Rather, he posits that "core experiences" with "distinctive characteristics" give rise to "core beliefs", and he points out that while 17

doctors may accurately diagnose sleep paralysis, they neither know its causes better because of their diagnosis nor does their diagnosis explain away the "Old Hag" matrix of experiences. Finally, Hufford points out that the testimony provided is often richly descriptive and quite specific, providing a phenomenology lacking in conventional medical diagnosis which may in fact be beneficial to a scientific understanding of certain medical conditions and to the study of states of consciousness (Hufford 1982, 1995a). This theory is corroborated in Genevieve Foster's personal experience narrative in The World Was Flooded With Light: A Mystical Experience Remembered, to which Hufford wrote a companion commentary, and which, like Kellenbergers's analysis, was also published in 1985 and to which I'll return in Chapter Five. While not an initial focus within Huffordian Belief Studies, magic falls logically under its purview, and Belief Studies provides a welcome vehicle for the study of magic within and beyond Folklore. Yet while post-modernity ushered in a host of new, sensitive, smart, reflexive ethnography and historicity, not until after the millennium has a post-Jarvie surge of academic interest in magic occurred with real vigor, offering provocative, new insight, beyond apology. This has been lead by sociologists, following the increasingly politically visible, neo-pagan beat, but the really groundbreaking theorizing has come from Anthropology and Religion. One is tempted to ask why—and why (and why)? To the first "why", we can only assume that it was largely felt that, in fact, the problem of magic had been answered—that modernity, in this one place, was in its analysis, essentially right. But an absence of news does not in itself indicate an absence of discourse. As my keyword search indicates, in the underground of what is, on the one hand, the rumor mill, and on the other, secrets—if often open secrets—magic 18

prevails. Research into magic as a topic of popular and academic discourse over a broader "geologic" time period reveals a topic at once perennial and constant, arriving both in points and as a continuous, sonic wave. Thus, in answer to my second "why", perhaps, popularly, historically, and ultimately academically we can say that seeds sewn in the sixties (which, in fact, have a far longer genealogy) have finally blossomed in an unpredicated fashion. This is a topic I will take up in Chapter Three. As to why Folklore has not been at the forefront of this movement, it is a mystery, perhaps tied to a previously undiagnosed provinciality unwittingly outed by Cantwell in the research that would eventually lead to his publication ofEthnomimesis. In 1991 Cantwell published an article containing the results of his research on the 1985 Smithsonian Institution's Festival of American Folklife. As he recounts in the preface to Ethnomimesis, he had been hired by the Office of Folklore Programs to write a history of the festival in conjunction with its upcoming 20th anniversary. Applying his ethnographic skills to the project, Cantwell indeed produced provocative findings. In the article, titled "Conjuring Culture: Ideology and Magic in the Festival of American Folklife," Cantwell describes what amounts ultimately to the production of a third level festival culture, wherein the performance of culture, deployed under the idealism of a conservation ethics loosely modeled on eco-conservation, yet constituted within the public domain, ultimately defied that ideal, revealing instead the complex, erotic, and ephemeral contours of the very cultural apparatus by which culture is conveyed and deployed. The article was published along with a response by folklorist Peter Seitel, then the director of the Office of Folklore Programs at the Smithsonian, itself followed by a counter-response by Cantwell. Here is a highly compressed excerpt of Seitel's response: 19

Robert Cantwell's article (1991) on the Smithsonian Institution's Festival of American Folklife seems an unfriendly way to mark the Festival's 20th year. Cantwell's ornate argument ridicules the knowledge the festival's staff has developed about producing living cultural presentations. He dismisses this knowledge by ironically calling it "magical thinking"...and compounds his figurative predication...with complex irony and metaphorical assertions.. .of how festival planning becomes "purely symbolic and combinatory" (1991: 159), that is, magic... In his summary Cantwell talks of Festival visitors' and participants' "reality" (1991: 148) as though the article contained evidence collected through interviews or some other systematic technique.. .apart from his own brief, impressionistic glimpses.. .Cantwell relies on paradox.. .In doing so he avoids the responsibilities of honest discourse.. .Does Cantwell believe in magic or doesn't he? His rhetoric allows him to have it both ways" (Seitel 1991, pp. 495-6).

Coming in many ways as an insider ethnography, Cantwell's analysis was clearly highly unexpected and perceived as unwarranted whistle blowing and name calling. Apparently the problem was not so much in Cantwell's summoning of the magic of the festival, a popular and acceptable use of the term perceived as "positive" within academic culture, but the perceived damage stemmed from his turning back upon academics the accusation of "magical thinking". Seitel's response thus provides a quick tally of the accusations against magic: it is ornate; it is compounded by figurative predication, complex irony, and metaphorical assertions; it is symbolic and combinatory; it is false, clever, and a trick; it dares to address the topic of "reality", yet uses no apparent systematically collected evidence; it is impressionistic, paradoxical, dishonest, and unfriendly. It also, ironically, carries within it counterclaims that religious and magic practitioners characteristically produce in their own defense: that theirs' is a separate, if contingent, order of knowledge manifested and transmitted through lived traditions. Cantwell, gracefully, does not address this in his response to this response. However, in the long 20

run, that Seitel's response was to Cantwell equally unexpected apparently paled in significance to the potential threat of his message. 3. Defining Magic

My third wish in writing this dissertation was 3) not to get caught in the trap of trying to "define" magic, for magic is deliberately elusive. That said, beyond apology and a lack of appropriate academic attention, the chief problem of magic is of definition. Academic definitions of magic tend to be either narrowly assumptive and implicitly pejorative, as previously discussed, or at the experiential end, wildly floundering in their attempt to convey every nuance, as in Susan Greenwood's The Nature of Magic, in which I found countless, separate, descriptive words in a single section said to "define" magic. Notably, most of these were analogies or metaphors, not actual descriptions or definitions, meant to impressionistically convey the experiential and cognitive dimensions of magic which, in an attempt to avoid the traditional anthropological phrase "magical thinking", Greenwood calls "magical consciousness". For my purposes, her first text, Magic, Witchcraft and the Otherworld: An Anthropology, (based on her doctoral thesis) which involves a participant-observation based study of two specific traditions, one Qabalistic, the other Wiccan, was far more compelling and useful than her later more diffuse exploration of "magical consciousness" and the claims of "earth religions" of being eco-religions. On the insider angle, the majority of magic texts adamantly declare, by way of a "definition", magic to be either an "art" or a "science" or both. (My informant adamantly calls his a "science.") Sidestepping momentarily the other obvious issues involved, such 21

declarations do not adequately define magic either, as both are essentially umbrella categories, much like magic itself, and, placed on a continuum, all partake in some way of each other, as do the triad of magic, science, and religion. Take, for example Frank Burch Brown's observations in Religious Aesthetics: A Theological Study of Making and Meaning. More a survey of potential issues and interests than a treatise on theory or methodology, Brown ultimately calls upon the work of Mircae Eliade regarding the relationship of religious art and theological states of consciousness "whereby the individual or group participates in sacred time and space and in this way discovers transcendent, timeless meaning" (Brown 1989: 190), in which, taken together with earlier discussions of texts such as of The Body in the Mind by Mark Johnson wherein "bodily states, processes, and perceptions continually supply the tacit basis for abstract mental operations and for the very meaningfulness of concepts and propositions" (Brown 1989: 96), we have essentially come full circle. Perhaps, as the popular lack-of-clarityother-than-general-excitement-and-intrigue, yet alternately situational-specific definitions of magic earlier invoked makes clear, there can apparently be no absolute clarity about magic outside of the direct experience of it, and as Phenomenology has lain bare, there is something ineffable about experience in general—without the added consternation of mystical experience. Thus I have made a series of executive decisions. First, as magic is both an apparently "universal" phenomenon, appearing ubiquitously across cultures, yet magic is also culturally determined and socially constructed, a specific definition of magic can clearly only come from within a specific tradition, and then one must be prepared for potentially ambiguous use of language. For 22

the purposes of my study, I needed to ask my informant his definition of magic, which I have done. This discussion is taken up briefly below and is developed throughout this dissertation. That said, the only generalized approach that seems possible to take prior to having such a definition of magic is one borrowed from aesthetics—i.e. that a piece of art is "art" foremost because it is declared by the "artist" to be so, as in the case of Duchamp's famous urinal. Transferred to the realm of magic, the ethical rule of thumb would be that a practice (or its "result") are "magic" because the magician says so. As the quotes around the words imply, this is a matter of framing, a subject taken up by Erving Goffman in Frame Analysis. In Frame Analysis, framing, achieved through cultural markers for which the gilded frame around a classical painting becomes a metaphor, is taken to be the primary method of organizing both ordinary and extraordinary experience, by which "definitions of a situation are built up in accordance" (Goffman 1974: 10). As Susan Stewart summarizes in Nonsense: Aspects of Intertextuality in Folklore and Literature (her dissertation), "Framing involves, and, indeed, is the articulation of a boundary between domains, a statement of relationship between domains" (Stewart 1978: 38-39). This topic also will come up again in new ways in Chapter Five. That said, as magic is, conversely, not only culturally determined and socially constructed, but it is also apparently "universal", appearing ubiquitously across cultures, this suggests an underlying, inherently "human" element to magic. It is to an understanding of this underlying "human" element to which I ultimately wish to add in this dissertation on magic. 23

4. Magical Thinking Call them negative theologies, but my three wishes were sincerely and openly made, and thus they could be granted. But as with all things occult, I had also a secret wish: like Greenwood, I wanted to avoid the pitfalls of the phrase "magical thinking" which I perceived to bear a tinge of the "skepticism" discussed by Hufford. Like Greenwood, I toyed with the idea of "consciousness", but ultimately dismissed it, saving it for my discussion of Balthazar's hippy dialectic, where it would come from his own mouth, but for my own purposes I would upgrade my language. My first choice thus was to eliminate it as subject altogether: I would explain how in the past many people had neglected the praxis for the thinking (true) and catalogue the faux pas of default past uses of the term which fail Kellenberger and Hufford's requisite inquiry. (That this flatly contradicts my wish #2 seemed to have escaped my notice.) I would then present a narrative of my discovery of Balthazar's intricate web of practices (also true), and then, by some fancy sidestepping, I would rush past magical thinking, embracing praxis—yes, somehow, some way I would separate magical thinking from magical practice! (False.) I don't know what I was thinking. I guess I was desperate—caught up, as Cantwell would say, in the protective politics of folkloric public display. Lucky for me, however, I had chosen a magic tradition which directly addressed the subject of magical thinking in its own meta-theorizing and could not help but teach me so—one which also made clear that, within this tradition at least, no one practice could be isolated, especially not the practice of thinking. On the one hand, my informant did not simply read Tarot; he did a series of practices that were mutually supportive, all clustered around or 24

associated with (thinking with) Tarot and that were subject to almost endless variation to suit different purposes (more thinking). On the other, each of these focused directly upon the imaginative processes of mind. Then there was all that talking. My informant likes to talk, and the main practice I engaged in with him as a student and "fellow Qabalist" was talking. Yes, there was eventually the demonstration of "shielding" (see Chapter Two); and there was once an egg used to show the spin of The Fool—zero—as it became not just "one", but in being now both zero and one, "two" (see Chapter Five); and there was sometimes pizza; and there was even the march on Washington we attended together— but mostly there was talking. Certainly from the recipient's end, a Tarot reading is mostly in the talking. Ultimately, there was a discourse of Tarot that made up its theory that (like so many folk practices)—much like ethnography—was embedded entirely in a methodology invisible to those not in the discourse. Some of the method/praxis was physical, some was more abstractly intellectual—yet still, awkwardly, practice—but mostly the physical and intellectual came packaged together or at least referenced each other imaginatively, involving a fusion of linguistic, mathematic, and visual processing. Finally, all in all, in the text of Tarot-speak there was very little prose, and what there was, was often squeezed into the contortions of a poetics through rhythm, metaphor, repetition, puns, and sometimes even rhyme. Here is a brief textual example involving a favorite saying of Balthazar's amongst the lore of what I'll call "favorite Tarot ditties" that Balthazar spouts when we are in Qabalistic discussion. This one he calls, "a sentence in the Tarot to represent the Knight of Discs" (a "Court" card, counted amongst the Lower Arcana); it is

25

followed by a brief excerpt of a conversation surrounding it in which "B" = Balthazar and "R" = me: The first curse a mother gives to her child is, Don't believe in your imagination. It's only pretend. And there draws the fine line from beginning to end, for as a child plays, they're acting out their incarnations in every way. But you take the imagination away and call it pretend, the third eye closes then, and so ends the vision. And without the vision, the child is lost. So great is the cost (Life History Tape 6: 10). This particular rendering of this poem came up while we were discussing the icons on his altar and the making of a "genii". He went on after this recital to discuss how the "consciousness" of such "vision" is both universal and eternal, a latent capacity that he compared to art, for which everyone has a basic capacity:

B:

It's just as much as every child has the nature of being a yogi and bending around, and if you encourage it, it becomes very easy to them. So be magic. As a little girl or boy you have these little dolls, and they're your friends in so many ways, and you dress them up and you play with them. You tell them your stories and you take them to bed with you. And then somebody tells you that they're not real and they're not true. And you put them away on the shelf, and the spirits wait for a long time. Sometimes the spirits go away.

R:

How did the spirit get there?

B:

Because the people believed in the spirit being there. The child always knew it. And then you go and get knocked around with all these conditioning patterns, and then you find out that those little belief systems that you had before someone called it pretend were the keys to magic and making a genii. Somebody said, Oh, the laws of physics, and all things are energy, and it's just a different form of energy and a different form of motion. And you already have a conceptual energy because it's been formed as a statue, and the more dense it is the more powerful the energy could possibly 26

be in it. So you could add your conceptual energy in and make a pact with this statue that is now your friend. You can put it up on a shelf and it has a spirit in it, and you can make a pact with it and play with it just like you did as a little kid, but now you can call it magic and you can be all mature about it [laughs] (Life History Tape 6: 10-11).

There are many complex, yet familiar layers of belief here that must be extracted as propositions, as Hufford says, but for now I want instead to examine this on a different level. In the conversation above, Balthazar is quite articulate and speaks directly about belief, imagination, and conceptualization, even comparing magic to childhood play. Had I done so without his prompting, this might have appeared to be "condescending." Clearly he does not see it so. The poem is one with which I am at this point intimately familiar and can recite "by heart," having heard it called up countless times to define many different topics in magic: astral projection; the general metaphor of visualization; aspects of magical memory, temporality, and reincarnation; conjuration (as here); the limits of the imagination; and more—all contained within the rubric of what he calls "a sentence in the Tarot to represent the Knight of Discs". I have also witnessed him recite the poem in the context of a Tarot reading for a person not otherwise involved in Tarot discourse as an exegesis on a particular point raised by elements in the reading. It is notable that Balthazar does not claim authorship of the poem. As with most of his information on Tarot, he attributes it to the Tarot, i.e. that he has read it there. According to Balthazar the cards have very specific semantic meanings whose basis is mathematical. Any other more impressionistic "reading" of the cards is "mere divination". His system is "magic" because it is based in a sacred, mathematical system attributed to Hermes Trismegistus. 27

However, the vocabulary generated ultimately by this mathematical system—i.e. the semantic meanings of words delivered in a Tarot reading or in the poem above—are the end result of a process of bringing a much broader indexical and relational symbolism derived from Hermetic Qabalism into the realm of semantic meaning. Thus on the one hand the cards contain clues as to vocabulary, and on the other they contain whole stories and elements of stories, such as the poem above, with almost endless combinatory possibility. These are all subjects that I will attend to in later chapters. However, the more I listened closely to the meta-conversation in Tarot, it seemed not merely to engage mental processes but quite transparently to be a dialogue about mental processes. Ultimately "magical thinking" passed Hufford's litmus test: Balthazar accepted the term as semantically encompassing important aspects of his own concepts of agency. This sent me back to the subject of "magical thinking" with a new question: what was "magical thinking", but a name for a form of cognitive process? In many ways, Tarot magic's dialectic seemed, in its self-consciousness, if anything, a precursor to or, more properly, a form o/cognitive study. Was it—or could it be conceived to be so? This was ultimately a question I sought to answer in my dissertation, and if so what is the relationship then posited by Tarot Magick between cognition and consciousness?

5. Magic and Cognitive Theory

The concept of experiential grounding is the foundation of Hufford's cognitive theory of belief. This is a very general, practical application of cognitive theory, upon which more nuance can readily be built by simply shifting grounds the way Tarot magic

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notably shifts experience to a cognitive ground. The basic dynamics of the cognitive ground of magic has recently been mapped by anthropologist Jesper Sorensen in a book simply and directly titled, A Cognitive Theory of Magic, published in 2007. (Yet another dissertation text, and the one that gives the most precise, concise history of the configurations of magic as it has been addressed in the social sciences, while also providing a thorough outline of cognitive theory as it has been understood and applied in the social sciences.,) Hailed by Pascal Boyer, himself a theorist in the cognitivity of religion, as "the most thorough investigation to date into the workings of magic," in the text Sorensen first divides the aspects of human categorization into domain-specific and domain-general categories. "[The] domain-specific approach entails that different areas of human learning and cognition might be constrained by different principles, not only in the organization of knowledge, but also in the mechanism selecting and processing information" (34). This includes the physical domain, the "biological or animate" domain, a "mental or psychological" domain, and the social domain. These domainspecific features were generated by psychologists and have been employed previously by anthropologists using cognitive modeling. Conversely, the domain-general approach is more responsive to domain-external information, providing a counter-balance of cognitive flexibility. Domain-general features include basic-level categorization, based on "bodily interaction" and "the formation of perceptual gestalts, image-schemata, forcedynamics, and "Psychological essentialism, ascribing hidden properties to entities as a defining character" (43). These domain-general features were generated by linguist George Lakoff and philosopher Mark Johnson in Metaphors We Live By (1980) and subsequently developed in later work. It is by the cross-indexing of the domain-general 29

approach that "Humans everywhere seem to be able to connect different domains, treat physical objects as animate and intentional, animals as humans and social groups as intentional agents" (39). Then, through an example of cultural models provided by Malinowski's Trobriand Islanders, Sorenson shows how event frames, such as ritual, provide the mental maps for "conceptual blending." Conceptual blending is "the projection of structures and elements between different domains of knowledge." Notes Sorensen, such "Metaphoric projection is one of the basic mechanisms guiding the construction of complex concepts" (51). As Sorensen states, "The importance of blending does not lie in the fact that it combines structures and elements from several domains of experience, but that it facilitates the emergence of a new structure and a new meaning not found in any of the domains and mental spaces" (53). This capacity governs the functions of identity, metonymy, and index; metaphor, similarity, and icon; and role value. In conceptual blending, input spaces, constructed from both domain-specific and domain-general knowledge domains, combine to form an emergent blended space, but the blended space represents only a selection or partial projection of attributes from the input spaces, not a full index of all of their qualities. While the blended space is "a temporary mental and discursive construct," "[a] blended space may solidify and become a conventional mapping or even a conceptual domain" (61). Sorensen then maps how in ritual, through combinations of sensual agents, actions, objects, and linguistic markers, "essences" from "sacred" domains are transferred to "profane domains" through basic "essence" and "container" metaphors which form a fourth "generic space" and by whose agency the blend is ultimately accomplished and the profane domain transformed due to its perceived contact with the sacred. Sorenson's 30

basic cognitive model of magical agency is ultimately applicable to every level of Tarot magic. J. Peter Sodergard similarly models semiotic and cognitive processes in what he calls The Hermetic Piety of the Mind in the discourse of Hermes Trismegistus located in the Hermetica, "a religious discourse stemming from Hellenistic and Roman Egypt.. .intended to capture and transport the mind of the reader into a particular story world, thereby conveying a persuasive 'presence' of the unlimited and divine, so that this fictive world became the true version of the world" (Sodergard 2003: iv). Drawing on psycho-linguistic and postmodern sources which examine the cognitivity of reading and its linguistic expression, Sodergard describes how, "deictic shift"—changes in the selfworld/space-time orientation of the speaker of a narrative—in this case "Hermes Trismegistus"—affected by declaratives such as "I am here now", alter the cognitive orientation of the reader and potentially the author, as well. Notes Sodergard, "A Hermetist attributing the text that he is writing to Hermes Trismegistus himself exemplifies the latter deictic shift from the perspective of [in Umberto Eco's terms] an Empirical into that of a Model Author" (43). Sodergard quotes Erwin M. Segal's summary of Eco's analysis in relationship to deictic shift theory: "Diectic Shift theory states that in a fictional narrative, readers and authors shift their deictic centre from the real-world situation to an image of themselves at a location within the story world. This location is represented as a cognitive structure often containing the elements of a particular time and place within the fictional world, or even within the subjective space of a fictional character" (44). Taken together with Sorensen's statement that, through processes of cognitive blending as exemplified in, for example, shamanic practices, 31

humans can be identified with and even "understood as genuine incarnations of gods, demons or spirits" (66-67). Sodergard's analysis has potentially rich implications for the study of Tarot magic. Further, like Sorensen, Sodergard maps a basic source and target domain schemata of deictic shift. Despite that Sodergard only mentions in passing magical applications of Hermetic doctrine, his overall analysis of Hermetic conceptualization is fully relevant to the topic of this study. A related, but more generally-oriented cognitive study of linguistic processes, also highly relevant to the cognitive processes involved in Tarot magic, was done by anthropologist Dan Sperber in Rethinking Symbolism, published in French in 1974 and first published in English in 1975, in which Sperber contrasts the infinite, unbounded aspect of symbolic representations to the bounded domain of linguistic knowledge to ultimately argue against a semiological concept of symbolic representation. Symbolic representation, says Sperber, is "an autonomous mechanism that, alongside the perceptual and conceptual mechanisms, participates in the construction of knowledge and in the functioning of memory" (Sperber 1974: xii). Like our capacity for spoken language (part of our conceptual mechanism), but separate from it, it is innate to cognitive structure, not induced—as for example reading written language is—by experience, i.e., one does not have to lay down neural pathways to initially "read" symbolism as one does to "read" written language, as described in detail by Maryanne Wolf in Proust and the Squid: the Story and Science of the Reading Brain (2007). Symbolic representation occurs spontaneously. Symbolic representation is, in effect, says Sperber, a conservationist effort of the brain to retain and sort all traces of potentially useful information and comes into play verbally specifically when the scan of linguistic memory 32

fails to produce a match. "A representation is symbolic precisely to the extent that it is not entirely explicable, that is to say, expressible by semantic means" (Sperber 1974, p. 113). Symbolic representations in language thus place words in quotes, as a form of reported speech. While symbolism is a form of knowledge holding, says Sperber, its results are not "meanings" in the semantic sense. In fact, says Sperber, ultimately "meaning" can only be said to be semantic while knowledge, more generally, is of the world. I will go into greater depth about these separate insights on cognition represented by Sodergard's cognitive analysis of deictic shift and Sperber's cognitive analysis of symbolism, and bring them into specific relation with Tarot Magick, along with Sorensen's basic source and target domains schemata, in later chapters. Then in Chapter Five, I will bring these separate analysis together through the unlikely vehicle of a fourth general cognitive analysis provided by Jill Bolte Taylor in My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist's PersonalJourney (2006), in which, in discussing her experience of having a stroke, she maps the neurology and areas of control of the brain's left and right hemispheres, over which she then lays a personal narrative of the experiential level of her stroke and what she is able to infer of her cognitive orientation during the stroke and her process of recovery. It is my contention that this schemata of the brain's two hemispheres, their separate functions, experiential orientation, and even personalities and their ultimate mode of interaction is the missing concrete link at the foundation of the other more abstract, linguistically based models, and perhaps provides the ultimate model for what the discourse of Tarot magic is and ultimately what all magic does.

33

4.

Final Notes and Outline of Chapters My main problem initially in setting out to write this dissertation was that I had

been, in fact, so immersed in studying my informant's system of Tarot that I did not know how to pull back and, as one of my readers put it, "get some distance". Thinking clearly about magic, for reasons already alluded to, is difficult, and in sorting out my third wish as it was transformed by a cognitive study of Tarot magic, I gained new appreciation for the use of analogy employed by many other theorizers of magic. Greenwood, invoking Tyler's notion of "participation", as well as "consciousness" and a concept of the "otherworld" (her corollary to Hufford's more systematic four-point "order"), ultimately came down to an analogy of "transformation" for magic (Greenwood 2007). Styers, similarly, (evoking Jarvie) used the analogy of "change", while also pointing to an aura of "desire" and "transgression" (Styers 2003). Lehrich, in a move similar to Cantwell's, points out that "magical thinking" plagues academia, but that not all of that is bad, for example, thinking by analogy, the primary method of Structuralism. Lehrich's own admirable rehabilitation of Structuralism in his own work (in fact a notable trend in the social sciences, formally acknowledged by Jean-Michel Rabate's "Introduction 2003: Are You History?" to the third edition of John Sturrock's 1986 Structuralism), led me to see Belief Studies as, in fact, rooted heavily in structuralist theory and suggested my own subsequent approach to this dissertation. Lehrich locates the "otherworld" of a prehistoric Egypt, already lamented in late antiquity and echoing down the lane ever since in European imagination ("7a mari—Egypt, beloved land" as I once read on an inscription on an urn containing an Egyptophile-mystic's ashes),

34

temporally, rather than spatially, as Mud tempus, a land of lost origins, and in a final move plays out an analogy based in Mauss's General Theory of Magic that he then transposes onto Derrida's differance to illuminate aspects of the workings of magical thinking. I will engage these analogies and experiment with some analogy making myself in Chapter Five and Six. Further, other than the judgment (or belief) based statements in Seital's rebuttal of Cantwell's article on the Smithsonian Institution's Festival of American Folklife, the observations made by both Seital and Cantwell about magic, when stripped of associations of any negative bias, characterize certain properties of magic extremely accurately. Thus, in the end, I decided to shift between specific and general claims about magic to find their common ground, and from this to form a grid for my own analysis of Tarot magic. The four vectors that I've thus chosen to address are: mental processes, practice, symbolism, and manifestation. Another person may have chosen a different set of keywords from admittedly closely related terms to mark out topic areas. Putting my theoretical background reading and training in dialogue with the information emergent in my specific case study and eliminating value judgments (and for the moment historical issues), my choices are based in an attempt to honestly locate a common center of gravity in the discourse on magic. In so doing, I have worked to find the best technical root terms that are themselves not analogies. It has also been my determination to stay as close as possible to practitioners' emphasis and emic terminology, while maintaining a terminology accessible to etic worldviews and vocabulary, i.e. terms neutral enough, but that my informant can relate to, would himself use, or would not find objectionable. They are also based in a decision 35

to further illuminate a certain redundancy factor inherent in the discourse on magic involving the intangible and the tangible. Thus "mental processes" and "practice" are meant to roughly lay in a set of co-ordinates which evoke the mental and the physical, while "symbolism" and "manifestation", which partake implicitly of this previous orientation but have further, specific yet polyvalent (multi-vocal), qualitative associations, are meant to stand in orthogonal relation, both skewing that initial Cartesian duality and, in conjunction with it, creating a destabilizing field dynamic. It is my contention that from these four coordinates, all of the other terms can be mapped. The process of this mapping is the project of this dissertation. This dissertation is structured as four chapters, each associated with one of the four grid fields designated above: mental processes, practice, symbolism, manifestation, respectively. However, the subjects shift between chapters, as well, as the subject of magic necessitates they do. Chapter Two provides a life history of my informant, Balthazar Spreng, in which statements about his coming to be a magician, his relationship with his teacher, and the development of his magical practices are focused upon. This chapter also provides an introduction to Tarot reading through a short first Tarot reading example to orient the reader to the language of Tarot. Chapter Three takes up and examines issues raised in Balthazar's discourse in the previous chapter by providing a cultural history of Tarot Magick through the aperture of Neo-Paganism, Balthazar's home religious orientation, and in so doing delves into the relationship of magic theory and magic practice. Chapter Four is focused on an extended transcript of an entire one and a half hour Tarot reading, proceeded by an interview in which my informant lays the groundwork for the entire fourteen Tarot reading series to date on his arrest and followed 36

by an interview transcript of Balthazar's exegesis of the reading, plus my analysis of the mathematical system employed for vocabulary construction and it's play and solidification in the reading interpretation process. In Chapter Five, Tarot Magick theory is re-addressed through an exploration of cognitive issues implied by a "third personality" or "multi-dimensional consciousness" which Balthazar describes as resulting from his magical practices. Chapter Six contains some further reflections on this subject of multidimensional consciousness as an organizing cultural ideal in Tarot Magick that attempts to understand and incorporate the "other" through the aperture of the otherworld. Throughout the dissertation I use the spelling "magick" to indicate Tarot Magick and it's parent school Ceremonial Magick, while I maintain the spelling "magic" to indicate all other uses to the word. Similarly I have used multiple spellings of Qabalah to indicate different uses by different cultural groups. This is discussed in Chapter Three. I have also chosen to capitalize the word "Tarot" to indicate its centrality in Balthazar's belief structure. In expressing the dichotomy of realms of experience indicated by Tarot Magick, I have also opted to use Greenwood's terms "lifeworld" and "otherworld" rather than using Hufford's "spirit world" to address the magical realm accessed by Balthazar in his practices, as this term has broader application to include the divine, spirits, and other active powers, while locating the central issue of differance. Finally, I must note that Balthazar's Tarot system and larger discourse on magic intersects with other practices ranging from the I Ching and astrology to quantum physics and genetics, but as these subjects fall beyond the scope of this dissertation, I do not address them beyond mentioning them here.

37

CHAPTER 2 LIFE HISTORY 1. Beginnings

The author-historian Studs Terkel was an extraordinary interviewer, renowned for his oral histories in which he captured the life and voices of ordinary people, i.e. the folk. He melded a boarding-house bred sensitivity to the human condition with a lawyer's training in recognizing the inherent political discourse in every human situation to exploit the limitations of a radio newscaster's primary data collecting machine: the tape recorder, which diffuse focus on verbal detail creates the baseline of his unique documentary style of social observation and cultural critique. Amongst his signature moves, he presents long monologues that capture the voice and narrative style of his informants in their own words that he cobbled together from endless hours of interviews—his own bricolage. Before I fully realized that there were still real, live Poets (with a capital "P") or that Margaret Meade, my father's advisor at Columbia (and had he listened to her, rather than succumbing to the pressures of being a Wharton School graduate cum New York advertising executive with 5 hungry mouths to feed, I would have been brought up in Bangkok), whose books for children had been a staple of my childhood, was an ethnographer (much like the character in another of my favorite childhood tales, The Casual Observer), I spent my time ostensibly training to be a magazine journalist. It was the poet, however, always obsessed with voice, and the as yet unrecognized brewing ethnographer (begun as a double major in philosophy) who, having recently moved in my casual reading from the Russian short story writers to the 38

Russian playwright Chekov, took note of Terkel's texts when I stumbled across them in my college library. I am no Studs Terkel, but as a budding poet-journalist in training, I immediately set for myself the task of going bookless on public and always speaking to strangers—a practice I continued long after The Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars eclipsed my journalistic ambitions and I unknowingly began the long road that has become twenty-one years of college teaching. The long and the short of it is that, when time rolled around for me to take on a Folklorist's mantle, conducting ethnographic interviews came easily to me. To this I added extensive experience in transcription, working while a graduate student for The Balch Institute of Ethnic Studies, The Philadelphia Folklore Project, and numerous other individuals and groups (of all of which, doing the transcription for John Szwed's So What: the Life of Miles Davis was the most fun). I include this information to provide some transparency as to my own training and inclinations in deciding to write this Life History chapter with a partial Studs Terkel approach. As stated earlier, my informant likes to talk—a good quality to have both as a Tarot reader and as an instructor in Qabalah—and being tape recorded was not new to him. He routinely tape recorded both his readings for others and for himself, classes he taught (on Tarot in the Continuing Education Program at Temple University), lectures he gave (on Qabalah, Tarot, and ancient Egyptian religion as a pyramids monitor in Egypt with Power Places Tours, and as a result, subsequently in California and Japan). He had also tape recorded his sessions with his teacher when he went eventually to meet him, face to face, in Bavaria. In his home, past the front door now locked with a chain, a sticker across it asking: "Is it fascism yet?" while another proclaims: "It ain't over 'til 39

your brother counts the votes," past the cobalt blue hallways sprinkled with gold stars, on the third floor in his studio is an entire wall of boxes of tapes of him speaking in one milieu or another. In the summer of 2008, he was allowed in under police guard to fix the roof and remove necessary items. I accompanied him, taking the time to survey the wall of tapes, photo albums, and journals. I, myself, have a deep filing cabinet drawer filled with tapes of our year and a half of lessons for the book on Tarot. One could say that Balthazar has a long standing archival sense of mission, and that the lecture format— or perhaps more accurately oratory—is his native mode of expression. When I switched gears from a book on Tarot to a dissertation on magic, I set up a series of Life History interviews with Balthazar, but I was nervous that the formal interview setting and my now coming with prying questions about his life, rather than strictly about Tarot, might be met with resistance. I needn't have worried. Once my informant knew what he saw as the basic gist of what I wanted to know, he developed lectures around the information in advance of our meetings, and much like our earlier student-teacher sessions, when I asked prepared questions, he incorporated his answers into the next lecture. He even provided the tape recorder that he uses to tape record Tarot readings for our first and subsequent interviews, as it was better than my own. Perhaps it is cliche and even suspect to say that my informant wanted to talk and that he found me to be a particularly apt listener, but he did, peppering our interviews with such statements as: "I'm also very pleased to say, as abstract as my mind is, it's very rare for me to find anybody in my life I can communicate to, and you're one of those people" (Life History #3: 13). Cliches exist for a reason, and this was not the only one encountered in my fieldwork. He was particularly excited to relay his practices, the 40

delivery of which he saw as leading potentially to another book to follow up on the book on Tarot, a practicum built upon the theoretical foundation of the first:

This for me is an extremely special opportunity. I have really never in detail explained to anybody these practices before, nor have I really ever instructed anybody before. And I can honestly say that this practice has been very satisfying for me. Like I said, if my whole world collapsed and everything went wrong, would I give up this practice? Actually not because it makes me understand, and it does raise my consciousness. It's satisfying in itself without intent (Life History #3: 15).

Thus, all in all, while I was met with some obtuseness about how the story around the practices was in fact integral to the story he had initially prepared to tell, gently redirecting the conversation back to my inquiry was all it took for him to supply this foundation, and the stories flowed forth. Finally, he was not shy. I have necessarily removed the more graphic, personal details, as they are not relevant to this dissertation, though I've left in an expletive or two, both to accurately convey his style of speech and to maintain his focus on the heightened moments they inevitably frame. In all, I conducted nine Life History interviews between March 7, 2008 and April 24th, 2008. I did not, however, transcribe these interviews until December 2008 and January 2009. In between, in the summer of 2008,1 attended, recorded, and transcribed the last of the fourteen Tarot readings Balthazar has done on his personal situation to date, including two interviews, one summarizing the reading in the context of the thirteen readings that preceded it and one an exegesis of the reading and his interpretation of it, all of which form the basis of Chapter Three. In this time period I also transcribed an assortment of other Tarot readings of clients who had allowed Balthazar to share their 41

readings with me during this time, as well as smaller "Moon Readings" which Balthazar does weekly as part of his regular practices, but which I have in the end declined using, though they have informed my own overall "reading" of Tarot Magick, as have the readings I witnessed while accompanying Balthazar to parties and pagan gatherings in our initial years of study. Finally, that summer was when, under police supervision, I removed photo albums, tapes, journals, and files from his home as my husband and son helped him to re-tar his roof. Then, between late August and October 31 st , 2008,1 worked with a mutual friend, Michael Manthey, a German-born, Philadelphia area artist-jeweler who exhibits his work downtown at Wexler Gallery (Balthazar seems to know nearly every full-blooded paganleaning German in the city), to translate a cache of six letters and assorted mailed materials from Balthazar's teacher, Franzel Meyer, that span the years 1980 to 1990 and eight tape recordings made by Balthazar during his two visits to Franzel's house in Bavaria in 1989 and 1990. The letters are not long, containing mostly salutations and basic news, thus appearing, overall, superficial in content, to the point that my translator assessed them as worthless and had to be pressed to revisit them and, with Balthazar and I both present, to spell out their contents, word for word. This proved fruitful. When thus assessed and correlated to related events, they turned out inevitably to reference magic and often to have supplied magical materials. Some letters, for example, contained an inner envelope which indicates that on a certain day it should be opened and the magic square contained within should be placed in the bottom of a pot of geraniums or rosemary, just over the seeds, so that the plant would grow up through it and thus, as stated in one of their visits "the magic would grow as the plant grows" (Franzel #6: 18). 42

The tape recordings likewise contain mostly friendly conversation, drawn out due to the need for almost constant translation (as it turned out, an apprentice was present at each occasion to translate between Balthazar and his teacher) and the fact that they seemed invariably to be held over a meal—as Balthazar marvels on one of the tapes from 1990, "They fed me four times in four hours!" (Franzel #5b: 3)—with occasional, long interludes of Franzel playing the zither. My translator, again, saw this as frivolous and breezed through them, generally summarizing the material with his own self-imposed topic headings—for example, at a point where Franzel is demonstrating levitating a cane he summed up to me merely that they were engaged in "parlor tricks"—and fast forwarding to new subject areas. We covered all nine tapes in just two sittings. It was hard to get him to stop on occasion to back up and give me a word-for-word translation, especially when, at his pace, I couldn't get a handle on what was going on. I'm not sure what my translator expected—even when, in the opening act of the very first tape, we came across a ritual calling forth of the demon who was plaguing Balthazar, it didn't seem to live up to his expectations—and I don't know why I didn't expect this reaction, though in the end he did provide some crucial translations not provided by the translators at the time. Such is the paradox of magic. It is as easily dismissed as nothing as considered overkill. I paid him, wincingly, what he asked for and set out the painstaking task of transcribing the tapes in full myself, thankful for the presence on the tapes of the apprentice-translators for the majority of the subject matter. I regret that, in the name of focus, I cannot, in the end, include much of these actual transcripts here beyond noting their place, as he notes them, in the process. The time capsules of these archival documents, however, add nuance to Balthazar's narrative, 43

corroborating events in the greater narrative, adding details and providing (if oblique) entrance into key conversations, lessons, and rituals. Most remarkably, Balthazar had apparently not listened to the tapes himself over the years, not even in preparing to transfer them to my care, and he was excited as I reported my findings to him. Unexpectedly, one of greatest values to these tapes for this project are, in 1990, three diary excerpts, in which at night Balthazar used the tape recorder to record his thoughts and feelings, generally of awed appreciation for his teacher, repeating ritually at each entry: "This is the best day of my life!" Finally, in November 2008, Balthazar produced from amongst the summer salvage operation his 1989 journal, through which a clear time line of the first visit to his teacher could be established and in which we found the diagram of the reading he had done for his teacher when, after arriving unannounced on his doorstep in Bavaria, a diagnostic for an exorcism having been expediently performed, Franzel-—meeting in person his student for the first time—told him essentially to show him his stuff. I asked Balthazar if he could read me the reading from the diagram, which he did, and we recorded, and I then duly transcribed. This transcript can be found at the end of this chapter. We later decided to re-enact the reading in full. Thus, a few days later, the cards put in order, Balthazar read the reading according to proper reading protocol: from the cards themselves, laid down card by card, layer by layer on a red felt blanket before his altar. The original reading which he had performed for Franzel in 1989 had been interrupted by Franzel and never resumed—despite that he still declared Balthazar the best Tarot reader he had ever encountered—for the reason that Balthazar had introduced some of his signature expletives into his interpretation of the placement of certain cards, 44

and Franzel, a "pure soul" had flat-out objected, stopping the reading there. In our first re-enactment, Balthazar stopped the reading where Franzel had stopped it. In our second re-enactment, however, Balthazar completed the last level of the reading, the spiritual plane, which his teacher never heard. The transcript of this second, full re-enactment forms the final section of Chapter Four. It is from this perspective that I returned to transcribe the Life History Interviews in December 2008 and January 2009 and experienced in the process a pronounced double vision, an experience which I then compounded when, in tandem with finishing transcribing the Life History tapes, from January 8, 2009 to February 9, 2009,1 conducted six additional "Travelogue" interviews with Balthazar, during which we went through his photo albums of the time period surrounding and including his visits to his teacher from 1989 to 1990, revisiting again the same terrain, which, like an echo chamber or desert mirage, kept repeating the same, slightly shifting story. These were more spontaneous discussions, but invariably Balthazar launched again into lecture format, assuming now the role of tour guide or historian, in which Egypt became, a Id Lerich, a land of lost origins, while Bavaria and the larger German countryside became another where there are always rainbows and people fall in love everywhere— Again, I regret that these interviews contain information far exceeding the scope of this dissertation to include the bulk of those transcripts here, but pieces of this narrative do appear alongside those of the Life History transcript materials. To capture Balthazar's own voice and narrative style, this chapter is presented in a modified Studs Terkel format, cobbled from various transcript excerpts. As Balthazar's focus was on his practices and mine tended to be on his life, our conversations see-sawed 45

back and forth, within and between interviews, with him pressing ever forward and my circling ever back. For the sake of presenting a life history, however, chronology seemed the best argument. I have not changed Balthazar's own wording. I have, however, grouped like information. I break the material roughly into time periods and subject areas, whose general parameters I characterize historically. There are long swathes in which I try not to interrupt Balthazar's narrative, except to introduce new subjects or bridge areas as necessary. After all, for the majority of the interviews, I was, in fact, silent. However, at times background information is necessary. Then I break into the narrative to provide such commentary. To differentiate clearly any overview or commentary, even when this, too, is based in transcript information, I have left the larger narrative in interview format. Further rather than break the flow of the narrative, I don't site each change in transcript source within the narrative. Transcripts sourced are, rather, noted at the end of each section as Life History, Travelogue, Franzel Visits, and Franzel Letters, followed by the tape or letter number and page numbers if applicable. Thus the resulting chapter should be looked at not as a series of single, untouched transcripts, nor as a fiction of my own making, but as a Studs Terkel-esque narrative, condensed and spliced out of thousands of feet of footage, and transparently aware of its own construction, but not in the end presenting a much different package of data than a traditional Folklore ethnography. In Chapter Two I will extract, analyze and recontextualize the propositions and problems presented by this narrative. Lastly, I note that Balthazar's legal name is Paul Spreng. It is the name he was born with and the name on all of his legal documents. Balthazar is not, however, an alias, as much as it is a chosen name. It is not uncommon for people to change their names—or 46

to have their names altered for them—to indicate spiritual transformation, and, in fact, is a widespread—culturally, geographically and historically—and often ritual "Rite of Passage", not limited to either "Neo-Pagan" reclaiming or Christian baptismal practices. "Balthafar" (with a tall, German "s") is, in fact, the name of Balthazar's paternal grandfather, a name he adopted after his visits to Germany, while conducting business as a Tarot reader at the Pennsylvania Renaissance Faire. At an earlier point in his development he had taken the name of "Chi" (which means "energy" in various eastern spiritual systems), but Balthazar "King of the Gypsies" is what stuck and is how he refers to himself still, which is why, no matter what the time period, I refer to him throughout this dissertation as "Balthazar." It is the only name I've ever known him by, and, in fact, until May 12th, 2004,1 did not know he had any other name.

2. Youth & Family Life

Balthazar was born Paul Joseph Spreng on Friday, August 13th 1948, with the seer's veil (caul) over his face, and both hands making auspicious signs (thumbs between the fore and middle fingers, said to ward off the evil eye).

B:

I was born on Friday the thirteenth at the witching hour with four planets in conjunction in the house of the occult in the 12th hour. The witching hour is the time between dark and dawn. It's where the sun's just about ready to come up. You can see the stars, and you can see the daylight. The sun's just below the horizon. So the horizon is the first house. If your sun's in the first house, it's just come up. My sun's in the 12th house at 27 degrees or something like that. So I have four planets in a straight line— fire, air, earth, and water—and of course you have no oppositions. I'd have a divine perfect chart if it wasn't Saturn in the first house, the 47

beginning of all restrictions. Therefore I'm not all-powerful. Things just go wacky for me. I can remember in my family's history on my mother's side that there was a tradition of people being born on Friday the 13th: my grandmother, her mother—and my mother was born on Thursday the 12th. We would have been four generations. And they always thought it was very interesting. And they talked about dear old Uncle Jake, which was my grandmother's brother. He was an artist, and a very good one, too. I have some drawings somewhere of his. I don't know what to do. But he used to do things like work very well with that Ouiga board that was passed down the family and my grandmother then sold to an antique dealer. I can't believe it.

His grandmother's Ouija board—an unusually large, four person model designed to rest intimately on the player's knees— was a source of entertainment at extendedfamily parties and reunions until, as Balthazar reports, his grandmother sold it as "junk" (taking care, however, to preserve her kitsch Hummel figurines).

B:

Everybody used to raise tables, putting hands on them and calling in the spirits of the dead. And my aunt had a tendency to want to go to seances or at least mediums once in a while. And the conversation would be you would have to move from one town to the next or at least join the church because you didn't want to them to think you were different. And my mother used to say to me, as hillbilly as can be, she always wanted another child, but she was just blessed with me, and what she meant was she didn't want to have one of those. I think my mother was a muggle want-to-be [a reference to the popular Harry Potter series]. She had the problem of getting down on her knees and being a very devoted Baptist and praying to God and then suddenly voices coming out of her of another tongue and of a spirit with no control, and she'd just stand up all startled. Or looking at the altar in the church and having her third eye open up and seeing a vision, uncontrolled. That's about as far as she ever really went. But you could see those tendencies around. I always had a little friend; his name was Johnny Tell. His mother was Ruth Tell. [Growing up, she lived with her grandmother.] They lived next door to my mother, and they were playmates together. Her 48

grandmother was a medium. Ruth Tell read cards very well. My mother and Ruth Tell stayed friends their entire life. She used to read my cards, and she was very good at it, and it used to be like a parlor game.

These cards were regular playing cards, which are, in fact, derivatives of Tarot cards, though Balthazar did not know this at the time, and under her tutelage, Balthazar was soon able to master this visually based divinatory practice.

B:

The house that my grandmother lived in, my mother was raised in. They'd lived there for two or three generations. It seemed that everyone was German. Germans kept coming over. My grandfather's side of the family was Black Forest. My grandmother's side of the family was Prussian. The Prussians started coming over around the civil war. However, they kept coming over. The area of the land had ghosts on it. It was thirty acres, went down to seven, but what it was, was an Indian sacred burial ground and Indian tribes lived there, and there was a creek, and the Indians used to come to the family and give them—not pay, but thanks that were allowed to set up camp on the acres of land and do ceremonies.

R:

Where was this?

B:

Hammonton, New Jersey, halfway between Philadelphia and Atlantic City. So I had that level of peculiarity, too. And of course—listen, I was raised to be confused. There was no explanation to any of this, nor interest in it in my family. My father was a German communist, a crazy person. His first wife died, and he married my mother, in my opinion, because she looked like his first wife, and then tried to convert her to be the first wife and drove her nuts. My mother, on the other hand, was a guilty Baptist virgin. Why they stayed together I think was economics, but it was combative. They had absolutely nothing in common whatsoever. What does a Baptist have in common with a German communist atheist? I have no idea. My father was insane, and I don't want to go into it.

49

Balthazar's father, a Bavarian, came over in 1929 at the age of 19, having spent his youth in WWI Germany and its aftermath. Noted Balthazar, as we leafed through a photo album of his 1989 trip to Germany:

B:

This was the barn my father was raised and lived in. He slept between two cows in the winter to stay warm. He had long underwear, and instead of buttons on it, they sewed it up, and he took no bath until the spring when he could go into the creek. When the horse died in the village, everybody quick got it and cut it up and ate horse meat and had something to eat. For penance [on Good Friday], he wore a crown of thorns and they beat him with a whip as he carried a cross from Mailing, Germany into Ingolstadt, from one church to the next....He was starved, he never got an "I love you," my grandmother kept popping out kids 'cause they were good Catholics, you know? No wonder he was an atheist! No wonder he became a communist—because the communist at least would divide the food up!

Delving further into Spreng family history, Balthazar notes their arrival in Ingolstadt [coincidentally, the home of Mary Shelly's Dr. Frankenstein and the Bavarian Illuminati]:

B:

When the French attacked my castle and drove us out—one of the castles that no longer stand on Sprengenberg—my family went to Ingolstadt, Germany, and were not accepted to Ingolstadt because there was no room in Ingolstadt, so they camped outside the castle wall. And where they camped out they made a farm, and that farm is that suburban block outside Ingolstadt's wall to this day. Here's the original homestead, and you have then properties touching like that, and then this was sold off and that was sold off, but you still have that original plot right there of where they moved in the 1600's, the family outside the castle wall. We had the same great-great grandfather [as everybody else] in the town. It's just you keep walking around, "I'm a Spreng." Oh yeah? So's everybody else in the area. Here's the church my father worshipped at. But I mean, shit man, the Virgin Mary sitting on the moon—that's I sis!

50

When his mother married his father, they moved to Philadelphia. His mother refused to speak German because she did not want her son to be ostracized growing up in an all Jewish, Northeast Philadelphia neighborhood. This, however, did not prevent her from bringing him up as an evangelical Christian.

B:

My mother was a very loving person and a dumb twit. I love her—God I love her, but I mean I would rather believe in Cinderella than the stupid stories that she believed which did not manifest any level of security or happiness for her, and it's too bad.

His father, on the other hand, insisted on speaking German in the household. Balthazar thus persevered through the McCarthy era where he was pressured at school to turn in his father, but never attained above a 4th grade reading level in either English or German due to undiagnosed dyslexia. Not uncommon for such cognitive predispositions, however, Balthazar showed advanced artistic abilities from an early age, which his mother fostered, supplying art lessons throughout his youth.

B:

That was my lineage all the way up until life began when I got to go to art school. I was already dysfunctional. I was hardly able to read. I'm dyslexic and I'm ADD. I'm whatever. I had 23 periods of art a week in high school. I formed a father image with my art teacher in high school. I was in a learning disabled class. My parents were not very literate, period, and they basically gave me the lowest self-esteem any human being could have. I was told I was a piece of shit and a rotten human being from the day I was born by their religion or by my father. It didn't matter. I was an emotional mess. I was guilt-ridden. I accepted Jesus at 14, but the problem was that that didn't work either because I kept getting sexually attracted to women, and it made me very guilty, especially when you're in a class painting nude women. So what are you going to do? So I dumped Jesus and took up pot and acid and went to art school. It was fabulous (Life History #6: 16-19; Travelogue #3: 8-9).

51

3. Emancipation

"Where do all the hippies meet? South Street! South Street!" —The Orlons

In 1966 Balthazar left home "the typical German way" -by having a physical fight with his father—and got an apartment of his own, supported by his paper route, and in the fall of that year entered The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts on full scholarship, after having been accepted to "the three top art academies in the world": The Royal Academy of Amsterdam, The Royal Academy of Vienna, and The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (PAFA).

B:

The one thing that was incredible about art school was that I was away from my parents, these crazy people that were constantly fighting with each other, that I could draw and I could excel in something, and I didn't have to feel stupid. And suddenly I was doing well. I didn't have to read because there wasn't any classes there that required you to do anything like that. There wasn't any test. Your work was evaluated. That was it. It's the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. I wasn't the best there. It humbled me. But I was very good. But they gave me a challenge of something in art school that I never had before. They said: "You're going to figure out how to express yourself, what's your voice, and how you wanna paint. We can teach you a craft." The first two years was classical painting, and the third and fourth year was you're on your own to show us what you are as an artist. Now this had no practical application to making a living after you got out, but it was incredible therapy. You got some attention, you got some love, and you started excelling. And art school just blew me away. I mean Jesus Christ—going to art school and having LSD legal!

52

At the Academy, he found freedom, friends, direction, and another father figure in his teacher Lou Slone, who took him out every Monday night to eat and taught him to cook and take care of himself. Balthazar has a large painting by Slone, acquired in a trade, hanging in his kitchen. In December 2008, Lou Slone died. Balthazar was somber and silent after attending his memorial service at the Academy as he had not kept up with him in recent years due to shame over his arrest and had hoped to reconnect once his trial was over. But back in art school he had entered another dimension entirely—

B:

I started finding myself and honestly I hate to say the truth is I dropped acid and it was the first time in my entire life that I really laughed and felt good about myself and understood about having fun. I was painting beautiful colors, and I was excelling, and it was this wonderful hippy experience that you can't put down, but what happens is that after art school it continued. I moved to South Street where everybody's a hippy. The whole community tripped. And I lived with people that were going to the Academy of Fine Arts. So I continued going there and going to some of their later classes and having the same type of connections, but it became more expansive. To have that type of experience and then to move [to what] would be Greenwich Village—of course it was called South Street. There was a road called The Crosstown Expressway that was going to go down the center of this commercial district, and it was a bad idea, and it became all abandoned buildings from the Schuylkill to the Delaware River, and then it became commercially zoned straight in the middle of Society Hill, but still the expressway did not go through. It went against traffic patterns. It surrounded Philadelphia center city so high that it would have been uninhabitable. But hippies had moved in, and it became a free zone, and I got a building in the middle of center city for $ 100 a month. And I had a commune of a bunch of other crazy, tripping hippies, practicing magic and having a great time. And all my neighbors were doing that at the same time. And it was a surreal experience to think that something that open and that advanced and that interesting spiritually could take place in America. Nobody will understand the early 70' s without understanding the spirituality.

53

I started painting these very psychedelic, mystical, symbolism paintings. And then a very strange thing happened. I had this course with Morris Blackburn on sacred geometry that analyzed paintings [according to the classical belief] that certain geometric forms created certain human emotions. And he showed me how they applied to other paintings and ancient studies, and things started making sense. And then I saw a Tarot deck, which was of course floating around the art school quite a bit. And then I connected onto a really good Tarot deck, which was just I saw a print of it in black and white, which was Crowley's, and it started connecting in.

Recognizing that the playing cards of his youth were derivative of Tarot cards, he found he could expand his understanding of the system he already knew by visually "reading" the symbolic imagery of the Tarot cards, which amongst other things, clearly incorporated the same Sacred geometry he had learned under Morris Blackburn: "I learned how to read the Tarot instinctually, quickly, and before I really was very literate in English." Quickly Tarot was incorporated into his life. In addition, the Crowley deck, which touts itself as The Book ofThoth: Egyptian Tarot, and incorporates classic Egyptian imagery, helped him to comprehend the symbolic content of Egyptian hieroglyphs with consistent accuracy. He began to read people's Tarot cards for money. "It all seemed to make sense. It brought up an inner consciousness. The cards were like channeling." A sense of overall integration, "connection", and "synchronicity" enveloped him.

B:

This is where we get kooky. I had a dream that—and this is not the most unusual thing because this was only around the corner from my apartment on Summer Street. There were two streets. I was on Summer. Spring was the next one to it. I don't know where Autumn and Winter went, but 54

now there's a big plaza there. It doesn't exist. But there was a place called Center for the Whole Person, and I used to pass by it and knew nothing about this place, and I had a dream that they needed a bus driver. And I'm out of art school by about 2 weeks, and I walk into the place and they say, "No we don't need a bus driver." But I hung out there the whole day. They had this library on the occult and Blavatsky and all this rest, and they're talking about this place in May's Landing, New Jersey and that they're psychologists. And I said, "Well, fine. I'mjustoutof art school. Here's my address. If you need a bus driver, let me know. Goodbye." Then I go home, got stoned out of my brains. I'd been doing painting all night, and I just crashed, and then the phone rings: "Our bus driver just quit, and it's an emergency. Can you come in?" I said, "I just crashed. Can you call me later?" They call me two more times. I get out of bed. I get over there. They hire me. Come to find out that the guy who showed me the bus and the stuff, I'd only seen "B. Shortly". Now his name is Bill Shortly, and he's an LSD therapist, and he's talking about what he wants me to do. And he wants me to drive these kids around to the seashore, and we have a summer camp now that the adults can go play at this center called Center for the Whole Person at May's Landing, New Jersey that they had started. And it's a psychedelic school—oh great! Psychedelic lights? Wait, what's this place that I just drove to down this dirt road at May's Landing, New Jersey that you just guided me to? And now I go in, and the kids are coming in. They're all jumping in, and there's this swimming pool indoors with a light show going around, and they're all playing in it. The little children? The little children, yeah. They're not dropping acid. And "What's this about, Bill?" "Well, we have basically nude encounter groups here, tripping on acid with psychedelic lights. We lose our inhibitions, and it's this type of therapy we do here." "Oh really?" Very interesting! [laughs] "Do you want to get married? We'll have an orgy around you here." "Well, I'll ask Patty if she wants to do that." This is how I start becoming aware of what my boss is into. Not that it wasn't right up my ally, but the whole thing started with I had a dream that I was a bus driver at this place, and you don't often get jobs like this! What else can you do with acid besides go to art school on it?! I'd begin to be introduced to LSD therapy is where it's at now. Well, they had isolation chambers sort of mocked up—and what I mean mocked up was

55

that they were trying to design them, to build them themselves. Samadhi Tanks just started coming into existence. That's the name of the company.

Samadhi Flotation Tanks, as it happens, is still doing business, and their website can be found at http://www.samadhitank.com/index.html. "Samadhi," states the website, "is a Sanskrit word that means: a state of deep contemplation; a state of extraordinary lucidity, deep meditation, concentration; becoming one with the object of meditation; an enlightened bliss state in Zen Buddhism and Hinduism." Samadhi Flotation tanks, states the site, have been "used for meditation, visualization, rejuvenation, self observation, creativity, time travel, prayer, solitude, rest and relaxation since 1972," when it was invented by John Lilly. "Before," notes Balthazar, "he went crazy on angel dust. He was a psychologist working at Esalen with Stanislov Graf. He had many books, and he was working with dolphins and people playing with dolphins. He was one of the early LSD experimenters. He's California School." The website describes the hypotheses which led to Lilly's initial experiments with sensory deprivation:

B:

Many scientists wondered what would happen if a person were cut off from all sensory stimulation and from interactions with the world outside. Scientists influenced by the "behaviorist" school, thought of the brain as an organ that reacts to stimuli. They predicted that if all outside stimuli were cut off, the brain would cease its activity resulting in a condition resembling coma, or dreamless sleep. An alternate hypothesis was that in a state of profound isolation from stimuli and interaction with the world, the brain would continue operating and generating experiences.

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According to Samadhi Flotation Tanks, Lilly's findings were the following:

In the isolation tank, Dr. Lilly found that he could relax his mind and dream, but his consciousness was always there, ready to take charge. He could choose to relax and let things happen, in which case the images would freeassociate, moving as if randomly from one to the next. Or he could choose to program what would happen, in a process similar to lucid dreaming, but with an even greater degree of control. He could invent a scenario ahead of time with his consciousness fully focused, and then relax and let his brain carry out the program... Somewhere, deep within the brain, was a mechanism capable of generating internal experiences completely independent of the outside world, and this settled the issue of what happens in profound physical isolation. The mind does not pass into unconsciousness, the brain does not shut down. Instead, it constructs experience out of stored impressions and memories. The isolated mind becomes highly active and creative. This was the principal discovery that Dr. Lilly reported in his first three scientific papers on the isolation tank research, published in 1956, 1957, and 1958.

All of which trickled down into Balthazar's world through The Center for the Whole Person.

B:

So I was working for the Center for the Whole Person and I was their bus driver, and I drove a bus with flowers all over it and a big smile on it, saying "leaves of grass", and had a lot of little kids that I babysat while their psychology students and psychologist parents dropped acid together and had orgies in large psychodelic swimming pools. And such other days when I didn't have to do that, I was hanging out at the Center, and a roof needed to be done with this guy. So I was putting on a roof, and then afterwards we were hot and sweaty.

57

The Center was located in the most ideal space because it was in May's Landing at the lake, pretty isolated, next to a nudist camp. So you could drop excessive large amounts of acid, go screaming in the woods naked, and run into a bunch of naked people. The whole lake therefore was monopolized by either nudists or psychodelic tripping hippies. It was not a very large lake, and I don't anything about whatever happened to the Center or anything more than that. But we showered up and then he says—at that point LSD was hard for them to connect to, and they were very glad that I was dealing acid, and I had a good connection for it, and I had just dealt a lot of acid to them. So we decided to try some out and go into this primal tank.

The Samadhi Flotation Tanks website describes the tank as follows:

The float tank is a little larger around than a twin sized bed and chest high. It contains 10" of water to which so much epsom salts have been added, that when you get in and lie on your back, you are pushed to the surface so you float like a cork, weightless as an astronaut in space. There is a lightweight door that you can leave open, or if you want to get rid of the distractions of noise and light you can close the door.

Notes Balthazar:

B:

And it was a very, very wild, wonderful, incredible, emotional experience. Because I went back—very far. What's interesting about the experiments with this—this is totally off the wall, but they were finding that people go into these primal tanks, have not been told what they're going to experience 'cause these were psychological studies, and come out all with the same experience of going back into the womb and coming out and seeing the light as a baby and retracing their life. Some would each time go further into past incarnations. Some would go into certain creation myths, and it was found that the Egyptian Book of the Dead became a good guide then for the creation myths that they started recording seeing. And then they had aquaphones doing the creation myth in the primal tank that you could hear it in the water and be guided through. And you started developing that ceremony.

R:

What do you mean by that? I've never done acid in a primal tank. I've never even been in a primal tank. 58

Oh fuck. You'd better do it! In the Egyptian, in John the Baptist, and in many occult experiments it's very common to trip your fucking brains out, get into a heavy salt body of water, and then you float around easily, you leave your body, and therefore you become infinite and see the universe, and it becomes like a born again experience because it's a weightless state and we go to the mother. It's even described in the creation myth in Egypt, where, you know, how does it go? "All things come from the primordial void, the Pool of Nun. A mist within the heavens. So mote it be. For a light did shine, and this light crystallized this mist. And we would call it a ray, but they called it Ra. And the light began again to shine. It passed through Ra, and it crystallized again. It was now the person we call Atum-Ra. And Ra and Atum-Ra circulated around each other, and life began in the Pool of Nun." But at that point, LSD became illegal and the place was raided. And it was disbanded, sort of, because it re-established itself in its sister place, which was Esalen, Big Sur. Alan Watts did work at the Center for the Whole Person, and I was not aware who Alan Watts was until years later, unfortunately. But some refugees from Center for the Whole Person opened up Float to Relax on South Street two blocks down from me. So I spent a lot more time in primal tanks on LSD [laughs] as a community adventure. It was a wonderful thing. And I was continuing experiments and having some marvelous, unbelievable results with the Tarot. And when I say marvelous, I mean I was doing like three different readings a day. I mean I was living in a house that I ripped out to south and the windows and made into a periscope and knocked out all the walls and it was just wow! And things were happening like voices coming out of me, visualizations and after one good old fashioned conjuration the first love of my life, who thought she was quite unworthy, left me. I would really like to in detail record what this visual conjuration was like because I've never been able to do that again. It was just one of those fuckin' things where what I was having was the more I was reading, the more I was rhyming. And it's not uncommon now that in any Tarot reading I do I rhyme mostly all the way through. It's like an incantation and a trance, but what took place with this reading was it was the first time I did that. And I rhymed with such an incantation, and of course she was about ready to commit suicide, so she wanted to see what was on the other side of the door. Who was? Bunzy—Bunzy Penrose. I don't know what the complications were, but she wanted to kill herself and so she wanted to see what was on the other side of the door of death. So we had God in the Heavens, reversed the Death cards in the mind, and on the physical plane I forgot what she chose. And we did the reading. We set up the question, we did the reading, and she got the answer. And basically 59

it was a manifestation—and here I am going, "Holy shit! Holy shit!" because your ego wants to make some comment on all this stuff that's happening, but my aura crystallized and we were able to see a God, Baal, with flames around it and the full Akasha like one of these Tibetan paintings. And this other voice came out of me, that where it ever fuckin' came, it was surprising me. And I was rhyming all the way through and said: "I'm the God, Baal!" At that point, after the entire manifestation and all that incredible stuff that was taking place, her mouth dropped open, could not speak. Then she split and left me for another guy who was a real putz and a nothing. R:

[laughs] I'd like you to go back over what you were talking about, about the full conjuration again because I don't know that I picked up on the details of what you were trying to express. What I got from what you expressed was two things: that you had a visualization, and that the visualization—

B:

Well, it was like I was inside the visualization, and we were able to see what was happening.

R:

What do you mean?

B:

The question was, "What is on the other side of the door of death?" She wanted to talk to God. And a god appeared. Another voice clearly came out of me, and since we're all tripping, quite clearly. If you were to imagine if you were to see one of these Tibetan mandalas with the flames and the blue around the Tibetan mandala, what I was seeing was a radiant white light in the center, a dark image, red flames, dew drops inside the red flames kind of like smoke, but they weren't like flames—it was just like a red radiation—into a black Akasha around with white dots in it. And I'm going, "Holy shit!" And this voice is coming out in a rhyming incantation way.

R:

So you became the figure in the center of this image, and you saw it from the position of being inside of it, and she saw the whole tableau, the whole thing.

B:

Yeah, she saw the whole thing. That had not happened before. That did not happen again. And I have had other conjurations, but I was never inside of one. And it said "Bael". It was just basically an entity, and it told her in detail everything that was going to happen and the decisions she needed to make to bring things into course.

R:

And was that the Tarot or you speaking?

B:

That was—what was speaking out of me was the reading of the Tarot, but at that point it introduced the God form, and she could talk to it, and she saw it. And what happened the next day was that the reading told her what was going to happen, and it all happened in synchronicity. She's looking at me totally shocked 60

with her mouth dropped open for about 24 hours, and she told me she would never come back to me until I stopped rhyming, [laughs] And I haven't stopped rhyming—I mean, as you well know. From that reading on I started rhyming, and I haven't stopped rhyming. Everything I said for a year or two was in a constant rhyme. I mean that was it. From that moment on it was rhyme (Life History #5: 10-11, Life History #6: 19-22; Life History #7: 2-7).

4. Structures of Recognition

B:

So any way I was all broke hearted and a mess, and one day I was walking up 4 Street, and this guy with this radiant smile—this beautiful black guy with a red turban and like a shiny, Indian type of coat that goes out like this—drew near and comes up to me, walking down 4th Street, and he bows down to me. He says, "I was told I was going to meet you." Now at this point in my life I had a long red beard, and it was a long beard, and long hair. And this guy had a long black beard, and they called him at that point Nico. Now this man is Nico, it's Omi, it's Puschi, it's Om Pushpindar Chatwell—all the same person. Don't ask. I don't know. But at this point he bowed down to me, "I was told I was going to meet you," and then he says, "Everything will be okay. We know what you have done. You've done a conjuration. We know about you. I was sent to you." He says, "You are from Bavaria, aren't you?" I said, "Well, no. My family's from Bavaria. I was born here." He says, "Yes, you're Bavarian, yes." He says, "And I was told I would meet a Bavarian in this city that is doing magic and has a long red beard. And you are a painter, too." I said, "Yes." This happened right above Lombard Street on 4th Street where it was a vacant lot at the time, which is now the community center, and I know that spot. It was the spot that changed my life. And this man named Nico ended up that there was an Indian store at 3 rd and South owned by a man named Safia who had a restaurant across the street called Punjab, and this man was hired to be the chef. And he lived with Safia and then got a green card by living with somebody else around the corner. And we formed an incredible rapport with the Tarot and magical rituals. And we laughed, and we rolled, we smoked, we laughed, we smoked— and he had stories. But the fact was that he had come over, and I was having a rapport with him that I never had before with anybody. I could talk about my experiences, and they were similar. My isolation chamber, my Tarot, my Qabalah, and it seemed that he came from an understanding of an ordered system that these experiences existed and had been systematized on how to get these experiences, and there's schools around this mysticism, rather than just doing a bunch of LSD and having them and having no relationship to reality.

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Look, I'm illiterate, and I was more illiterate then than I am now. And books like Franz Bardon or formal Qabalism, Manley C. Hall—I didn't hardly know at all. I just knew how to read Tarot and conjure spirits and have people and things talk through me and channel and do visible conjurations and do yoga three times a day and live on a bowl of rice and just be a total nut case yogi, dropping acid three times a week. I was really out there, with a lot of knowledge, but I had no formality. I mean, I didn't know how to cast a circle. I didn't know any of the structure that a normal person would know coming up through the ranks. I needed some grounding and some structure. So he started pulling out some books on me, and one was Franz Bardon's Initiation into Hermetics. And he started talking and making sense about systems. Now, I had the whole system down— I understood how geometric forms could come out on themselves from zero to ten.

By which he meant how in geometry the numbers, rather than being produced through a process of addition, are produced through division of an original circle into sub-units, yielding fractal, geometric forms. In Sacred Geometry the 360 degree circle becomes the symbol of wholeness, which in the mathematics of Qabalah becomes the number zero, the alpha and omega, the nothing in which all is prefigured and contained.

B:

But to solidify it all into a mathematical pattern—I wasn't able to do it, but I was able to do the full Tarot reading in that same mathematical pattern because it was so evident.—but I didn't have the reference points of the Tree of Life, Sephiroths, so many things, correlating the sounds of Hieroglyphics to Hebrew to Sanskrit, or the stories.

The Tree of Life, familiar to most as the second forbidden tree in Genesis, is in Qabalah (mystical Judaism), the basic structure of the creation, alternately God in the creation. Formed as God uttered God's own name (the unpronounceable "tetragrammaton") in a mystical moment of inspiration—or more aptly expiration—and

62

conceived of phenomenologically as a realization or revelation of being and being's power, it is the starting point of space-time, the be all and end all of all manifestation: God bringing himself, and with him all created things, into being from no-thing. Formed of God's breath—beth (his consciousness made manifest)—out of the breath (inhalation, systole, contraction) before the breath (expiration, diastole, expansion)— aleph (undifferentiated raw potential, chaos)—the Tree is the basic object of meditation, the mandala of gnosis of the Qabalist, which in many ways sounds like a poetic account of the Big Bang theory. The Tree of Life is conceived of abstractly as composed of the letters of the Hebrew alphabet which chart a series of transformations of energy into matter/life as they unfold from this origin to their logical conclusion, creating ten glowing spheres of confluence or connection between them in their wake—way stations bearing directional signals for the meditant, as for the transforming electrical impulse of creation—called Sephira, which are comparable to the whirling spheres of the Hindu chakra system, though less apparently linear. The letters contain within them the keys to all knowledge, for life and knowledge, the two poles of God's consciousness (or trees in Eden), are ultimately equivalent, nested forms, much as in Einstein's famous equation e =mc2 matter is ultimately just slow energy out of which it folds and re-emerges continuously. In fact, the rigorous visualization process linked to metaphoric, semantic meanings and mathematical conceptualizations physically reconstruct the neural pathways of the meditant, such that the Tree of Life can be lifted imaginatively into 4dimensional reality, where it is revealed to be the biological code of man and, indeed, all things—the creative matrix that lies beneath the structure of the atom, the DNA molecule, the largest galaxy, and the universe itself. Thus, within us and accessible to 63

consciousness are the keys to all creation and union with all things, including the path back to God. Or at least, says Balthazar, according to the Heidelberg School of Hermetic Qabalah (henceforth called "Qabalah"). The eastern focus on the breath and the western focus on the blood are fused in Qabalah at the initiation point of manifestation made tangible by beth. In Qabalah (which, in naming the aspects of God and domains of the Creation, integrates Pagan pantheons, particularly the Hellinized Greco-Roman-Egyptian, with the traditional Hebrew angelic dominions), beth, both pulse of life and word, is the externalized mind of God as force in the world. Beth is the first stroke of The Tree, mirrored in the ganglia of the human nervous system as it extends from the first, supernal sephiroth Kether—the sphere of the god Hermes, God's mind made manifest, if only conceptually—through three successive emanations/spheres to the material plane, designated by the tenth sephiroth, Malcuth, the bride, throne, or kingdom—earth—the point of confluence or landing pad whereupon manifestation, the fourth sphere, is complete. To this Western Mystery Tradition Puschi added distinctly Eastern systems, not part of his teacher Franzel's systems, yet which were easily synrectized or harmonized with a recognized, already present Hindu or Hindu-friendly thematic in them.

B:

He started introducing me to other forms of yoga that started making sense to me along with my experiences, siddha yoga with Baba Muktananda, who just happened to be coming to New York City and was going to open up an Ashram near New York. And he's starting teaching me about astral projection and stomach exercises, and it was making a whole lot of sense to me. It really was. The way I astrally project is that there is an exercise in yoga where you create— they call it nahli, and that's when you stand up, put your two hands on your knees so you're bent over, you take your tongue and you turn it like a tube, blow all the 64

air out, suck your stomach up that it's no air, then drop it down and swing it back and fort [and then] in a lotus position you bounce it up and down. And what this does, it activates the Siddhis, or the Power Center. In yoga there are seven charkas, and therefore there are seven different practices of yoga. Each chakra has a different practice. Hatha yoga: the breath. Jana yoga: the Mind. Bhakti yoga: the heart. Tannic yoga: the sex glands. Raja yoga: the stomach. The work with Siddha yoga and astral projection is dealing with the chakra called the Power chakra, and it's the yoga that is the chakra that is your belly button, or navel. It is said that if you take a Kirlian photograph of a person's aura, you will see a spot where there's a hole in the aura, and that hole is the umbilical cord where you were born. Siddha yoga is magic, and it talks about astral projection and going out of your own aura and projecting through the hole in your aura, actually even doing tricks with your electrical system—your electrical field around your body, too—but it's constantly working on that. These are some of the exercises that you need to have mastered before you can even think about astral projection. What I am doing medically is I am lowering my heart rate and putting myself almost totally to a point where I am unconscious, knocking myself out for lack of air, but being so conscious in a practice that I can project my body in a clean, clear thought form.

The Power chakra in yoga is a lesser chakra, seated in the solar plexus, the body's "second brain", a nexus of nerve ganglia located about two inches below the navel, where we get the winces of intuition called "gut feelings". Between the stomach and the sex organ charkas, it partakes somewhat of both energies, the drawing in of nutrition which turns food into life force and the expressive force of procreation. Notably in Qabalistic magic the astral plane of "sublunar" (signifying both "earthly" and "mirror") forms, upon which one begins when working magic, is seen as seated in the ninth se^hiroth, Yesod, the Foundation. This corresponds to the genitals on the human body, and the Hebrew letter Yod, which both visually and semantically indicates seed or sperm. It is represented by the ninth Tarot card, the Hermit, whose image is a male celibate or virgin (Virgo), a holyman carrying a lantern in the dark, and signifies the conscious (i.e. 65

systematic) building and focus of energy and focus/deposit of it in the creation of manifested forms. Just as yoga's chakra system is built upon a central pillar corresponding to the spinal column and thus certain posture, the Qabalistic Tree of Life also has a Middle Pillar corresponding to the spinal column, which when read from top to bottom, Kether to Malcuth, is the formula of decent of the Creation, and when read in reverse, from base to crown, is the sequence of meditations/ revelations/ initiations for the inward and upwardly tuned devotee who wishes to come into the knowledge of God. It is these two directional motives or moves which denote the difference between the two trees in the Garden of Eden. Thus the magician who wishes to harness the power of creation must align, balance, and access the powers of the Middle Pillar. These include, in ascending order: the tenth sephiroth, Malcuth, corresponding to the base chakra, located at the perineum when seated and the feet when standing; the ninth sephiroth, Yesod, corresponding to the sex organs chakra; the sixth sephiroth, Tipareth, Beauty, corresponding to the Power chakra; the invisible eleventh sephiroth, Da'ath, corresponding to the heart chakra; and the first sephiroth, Kether, the Crown, the Mind, which notably begins at the throat chakra or mouth in the first of three waves or emanations from which it ascends upwards to the third eye (located in the pineal gland at the geometric center of the brain, directly behind the eyes) and the crown Chakra (the top of the head, conceived of as an opening that can extend into the aura for seven or more charkas upward), incorporating in mirror form the three-fold, mystical motion within nothing—the pure consciousness of God—from which the pulse of life and Tree of Life began. These mystical pathways by which nothing becomes something, symbolized by numbers, images, letters, words, stories, and sounds born one out of the other in 66

unfolding sequence are some of the things the Qabalistic magician contemplates as he performs his magic.

B:

Now in the exercise I am talking about, I'm taking it, of course, out of context of a whole experience of a ceremony and a meditation. But a great deal of Qabalistic meditation is dealing with, not trying to suppress the mind of thought, but trying to short circuit the mind by thinking so much. Not in a repetitive way, but in conceptual ways that it's such detailed, concentrated thought that you have no thought of your own, only the thoughts of God. I'm not trying to get to la-la-ed away—and this is nothing to say to people who do Bhakti Yoga or Hatha Yoga as a practice where you're supposed to get just totally in the note and totally in the sound and the vibration that you are so involved in chanting that the thought goes away—but with Qabalah you're trying to get so involved in the meditation of the conceptualization at the SAME time you're doing the mantra.

As Balthazar explained to me, a mantra can be either a phrase, such as the Hindu Om manupadme hum, traditionally spoken to invoke the gods of compassion, or a single word such as a god form or angelic name (the angels, after all, representing the facets of God's powers in its 360 degree circumference) like Elohim, Adonai, Adam, or Raphael. These words themselves are constructed, letter by letter, as interconnected concepts which when spoken emit sound waves that affect the consciousness of the aspirant like a key applied to the mind to access the next level.

B:

So I'm being trained, and I'm told in Bavaria, but he never told me who the guy was who told him about me. He never mentioned the name "Franzel". He was just preparing me with all this knowledge. So I was, one, being introduced to siddha yoga, number two, not being told about Franzel. But I was being initiated and formed a rapport of magic with him, and he was checking me out. And then I was told more about Franzel and a school in Germany and it went further—three to six months I would say. At one point then, after some time, not immediately, I 67

sent a letter of introduction, sort of—I would call it a letter of confirmation that it's happened. It was like, "I met the guy you sent me to meet." And a communication was made. At this point I was really, really, really, REALLY into going to the Met and reading hieroglyphics, tripping my brains out. [laughs] And I was really into the Book of the Dead. And I've already had the conjuration, which was just a few weeks before, and just met Puschi. And what had happened was that I went into the isolation chamber, and The Book of the Dead reads like this: "All things come from the primordial void, the pool of Nun. And a mist, a gas, floated on this pool. And a light did shine. And the light did shine upon the pool, and they called that light ray, or Ra, and it crystallized the gaseous void within the pool, and they called that crystal Atum. And the light of Ra, a ray, passed through Atum, and they called that Atum-Ra. The two crystallized each other and looked at each other. The two spheres of crystals circulated around each other. The pool started moving, and all life began. And the breathing took place. And the slow evolving took place. And the light shined upon the pool. And the light that was circulating in the life that was created by them circulating around each other felt the warmth of the light and crawled up to the light, and from the amoeba, from the sperm, from the fish to the man, to the womb, to the new light" that you're coming once again out of the pool of Nun, the womb, the primordial void—and the scream of being torn away from all knowledge. And we have the Aeon, the god form within all of us, aware of our past, and with the curse of the adults: "Don't believe in your imagination. It's only pretend." Well, I was really, at that point, involved in that mythology, and I got into the pool, and I did it. I did it. I did it. I DID it! I started realizing that all—that thinking is a mental disease, and if you can give up thinking from an objective point of view of consciousness, of personality, and could eliminate the feeling of life and death and just be in the consciousness, the consciousness would pass through you, and you would part of an overall consciousness that would transmit through you. And I started seeing the universe swirling around in the pool of Nun from the two crystals—but no, it was just a negative and a positive. It was the pool moving. It was a sperm. It was an ameba. It was a fish. And I could start seeing the pool creating a wave that became the breath of a fish and moving up out of it. And then I saw a bright light coming out—because they opened up the tank, of course—and I was into the consciousness of being a baby, and I didn't know how to eat. This is not uncommon because that was the experience many times at the Center for the Whole Person, where a person would be brought down on so much LSD they were reconstructing themselves that much. But the thing was it was the objective consciousness I had because I was watching and experiencing this at the same point. Tales for a Topographic Ocean describes this entire experience— Yes. 68

R:

Yes?

B:

Yes. The group. The disc Tales for a Topographic Ocean was created for the primal tank experience to be played inside it when you come out to regulate this experience. This was a typical experience that has been recorded many times by Lilly, and it was a very typical thing of being that dosed out at center for the Whole Person, and people picking people up and rocking them as babies until they were totally brought back into this reality out of the primal tanks. But for me to go through it was my own experience. And even though this kind of experimentation with LSD and primal tanks has long gone by the wayside as soon as Ronald Regan got in, in this country, I have gone to Amsterdam. I have been to the Mecca of hippies. I lived there four and a half months. I have been there eleven times. But you can walk into trip stores where you can choose ecstasy— which I think is a very bad drug—psilocybin mushrooms, peyote, or acid to the various degrees sold over the counter, go back in cushy places, look at light shows, and they have primal tanks for rent, and they will do an acid guided trip for you. They'll pull you out, and it's not unusual for these people—they're trip therapists—that people get rocked as a baby until they come back into their reality. And that was my experience, but it's now such a non-unusual experience that now they have stores selling this experience in Holland! The only difference is the way I related to this experience, I was seeing it in correlation to Egyptian mythology and the Tarot, of course.

Balthazar had begun teaching Tarot in small circles and work on a book when he had another visionary experience. He was aware through Crowley's deck that the Tarot cards, and therefore the Tree of Life, produced a calendrical map with twelve months of three ten-day weeks each, corresponding to the astrological signs of the zodiac and their decans, plus five additional holidays, all of which matched the ancient Egyptian calendar (which he would later see, when he went to Egypt in 1989, was the same calendrical map laid out on the ceiling of the Egyptian Temple of Dendera, a temple primarily dedicated to Nut, Nuit, the night sky, the zodiac sign of Aquarius, keeper of the akashic record). He also noted the curious fact that each zodiacal sign was represented twice, once in the Higher Arcana and again in the court cards of the Lower Arcana, all of which he found, 69

were represented as constellations in the sky, exactly where the Tarot indicated they should be. He saw that the zodiac belt, both in it's core mathematics and it's tableaux, mapped out in twelve, 90 degree constellations the same principals of Sacred Geometry, but that the constellations recorded both Greek and Egyptian God forms and their related mythologies, fossilizing ancient debates in mysticism in the clearly Hellenized calendar. All in all, twenty-eight cards of the Tarot were mapped out in constellations in the sky, thus mapping out the cycle of the moon, as well, along with the four elemental directions of the traditional magical circle. However, one night, lying out, looking at the stars while doing LSD—he cannot remember where exactly, perhaps a Rainbow Gathering—he saw the constellations move—that is, he saw that they were meant to be imagined multi-dimensionally as larger than life characters moving together through time and space in a transformational sequence. Rendered necessarily two-dimensionally, they formed a series of overlapping pictures, acting in relationship rather than in isolation, and telling a larger story or master myth. Images might pivot so that portions of one constellation might belong to two mythic tableaux simultaneously, as when he saw, for example, the constellation Andromeda in one tableau in chains, enslaved, pivot to the next where she had broken her chains and was being pulled aboard Pegasus, freed. "So it's an overlapping map of the Gods in the heavens looking down on us and the four directions, covering the entire Higher and Lower Arcana cards." He realized then that astrology, clearly present in both Qabalah and Tarot, was not about the influences of the stars but of a mathematical system which had been drawn over the available stars as a memory system, and included many poetic ironies, for example 70

the Knight of Discs, which Tarot card depicts a Knight (again Virgo, the harvest) staring into a black disc (the disc used in magic for astral projection), is a constellation with no stars. This he found to be a consistent "pun" with the four cards depicting some form of "visionary" state or astral Travel (the others being the Queen of Cups and card VII of the Higher Arcana, both Cancer cards, and in fact indicating the same "constellation", a sort of fuzzy glowing area, and the Queen of Discs, Capricorn, who herself does not exist amongst the stars, but representing the backwards glance over the path of life, looks out over the River constellation). This star map had many intricate features, mapping also the solar system, certain stars, and key features of the galaxy such as the "light hole" of galactic center and the black hole which balances it, the two foci of the galaxy's elliptical orbit, which appear on the Tree of Life as Tipareth and Da'ath, respectively. His research showed that the map thus indicated correlates to the Age of Ares, about 2800 B.C.E, but seems to represent an updating of an older Egyptian or pre-Egyptian calendar whose origin date is uncertain but which contains references to the ages of Taurus, Gemini, and Leo, most recently updated to follow the Greek labors of Hercules. However, it follows a slightly different, as yet unexplained, ecliptic, aligned to the stars in Orion's belt (to the Egyptian's, Osiris) at the same angle as the great pyramids of ancient Egypt. Finally, the star map also seems to map geographic structures and even ancient cities below on Earth—the Taurian mountains, for example, falling beneath the constellation Taurus, and the isle of Hades in the Bermuda triangle falling within the eye of Capricorn (represented in the Tarot as the Devil card, card XV of the Higher Arcana). While this may seem farfetched, David Ulansey, in The Origins of the Mithraic Mysteries: Cosmology and Salvation in the Ancient World (1989), which grew out of his dissertation, has shown a 71

similar star map to be present in the surviving cave frescos and iconography of Roman Mithraic cults (an important competitor of early Christianity). Meanwhile, Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha Von Dechend take up a similar theme in Hamlet's Mill: An Essay Investigating the Origins of Human Knowledge and its Transmission in Myth, and while they go far afield into literary reverie (in moves akin to Burke's theory of genres or Bachelard's elemental poetics), their impetus from statements such as Aristotle's that every god is a star is sound (Santillana 1969: 4). The star map is what Balthazar worked on refining, with my help, in the summer of 2007, but the initial insight which led to it dated to his Samhadi Tank days and his initiation by Puschi into The Heidelberg School of Hermetic Qabalah.

B:

But I was also, during this period of time, connecting up to an overall length of consciousness, meaning my past lives were coming into one. I was starting to see myself as just consciousness—and having events to support it! Like people in turbans with native jackets bowing down and talking to me about me in the street. Or conjurations and people seeing these things. You know, I was having support systems. So this was like a life. And I consider this period I'm talking about as a very high point in my life, and quite frankly my goal being, once I get done this nightmare that I have right now and I get the bucks, what I'm doing is I'm going to set up my studio with an isolation chamber, and I'm going to go back to these type of studies. (Life History #1, Life History #2, Life History #3, Life History #4, pp. 11-15, Life History #6, Life History #7: 7-12; Life History #9: 3; Travelogue #2: 7-8)

5. Crisis 1: Arrest

B:

It took about nine months before Tina [Bunzy's sister, who had been living with them and continued living with Balthazar when Bunzy left] and I got together, and I did a bunch of Tarot readings if we should get together, and they all said, "No, it would be the stupidest thing you ever did. She's too much of a codependent person and she'd ruin you," and therefore I did. And we had about a 72

seven-year relationship. I think the first two or three were good. We were yoga princes. And then cocaine entered the scene, and I could have had a parrot that said, "Can I have a line?" Or I could have had a tape recorder that played it over and over again because that's what she did. And the acid slowly started disappearing, and the coke started coming in. We're talking now about the dawn of cocaine coming into existence on South Street and not knowing that cocaine is bad for you. I want to make some references here that we didn't trust the government too much about the Vietnam war, and we didn't trust them about marijuana. You'd be tripping and watch Nixon on TV—I mean you've fucking gotta be kidding me! You look at evangelicals and you can see on TV they're so phony. And one of the thing about urban psychedelics is that, I don't know, you start seeing that reality's a cartoon strip, and most people are living themselves as archetypal forms of what they think they should be rather than who they are, and there's very few real people that look really real. And you starting getting a different viewpoint of reality, especially when you decide to trip in the middle of Philadelphia a lot. And of course you start finding that there's the people that are objectively looking at everybody being a cartoon strip, and they all meet every New Years on the Philadelphia College of Art steps and watch the Mummers Parade go by. And each year they get less and less and less and less. Cocaine took away the fantasy and made everybody edgy and crazy. Well, to be really quite honest with you, cocaine impairs your judgment and was starting to bring everybody into the downhill land. It makes you a nervous wreck. And as I was stupid enough, somebody that I was introduced to that was very trustworthy, ha ha, introduced me to somebody else who was very trustworthy, who wasn't very trustworthy and that person wasn't either who was a narcotics agent, and I sold him 3,000 hits of acid and got my ass busted. Now I'm trying to keep the conversation entirely around my relationship with Franzel, but this is when my relationship with Franzel really started taking place. Here I had all these initiations and all these experimentations, and I say to Puschi, "Who was this guy that sent you to me anyway? And does he know how to do miracles?" And he says to me, "Man, this guy will do a miracle for you. He'll get you out of this. I was sent to you—" and he comes down with the whole story. And we write him a letter, we call him up on the telephone, we get information, we tell him the situation, we tell him we were totally fooled, but want to know what to do, and I get instructions on how to get my ass out of this bust. This bust lasted a year and a week. Phew!

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And that's when learning how to do miracles rather than study started coming about. R:

What do you mean? What's the difference between studying and doing miracles?

B:

Well, I got busted, and I wanted to get out of the bust. So he told me how to do it by making a battery and charging it constantly and communicating with him and making a genii that would work for me in the trial—leaving me off to what I'm doing now, which my life studies have been ever since God only knows when is to get these books out with the inability of doing them. And therefore he talked to me about shielding (Life History #7: 12-14, Life History 9: 1-2).

6. Practices 1: Astral Projection

The Internet has in recent decades added a new dimension to Folklore studies, and also to the sharing and swapping of magical information amongst magic practitioners, challenging the definition of Folklore as "face-to-face interaction in small groups," as well as the parameters of magical communities. However, long before the internet, magic has dealt directly with a level of interaction and communication that goes far beyond the immediate, physical or temporal. While Hermetic and Qabalistic study groups, lodges, or covens gather to provide support and instruction for members (Greenwood 2003), practices shared therein often have to do with "work" or "travel" on the "astral" plane. Defined as a mental world of images and archetypes, deliberately constructed and explored by participants, the astral plane is used as a bridge between the "lifeworld" and the "otherworld", traditionally initiated in ritual through the casting of a circle. Widely disseminated trade books by Hermetic Qabalists such as English mystic Dion Fortune and German mystic Franz Bardon (German and English being the two main branches of the modern Western Mystery Tradition) speak directly of the astral plane and 74

astral work, alternately called the akashic record, while a broad variety of texts in this and other traditions, including Grimoires and other books of shadows, speak of this borderland dimension of othered image and language as a window or portal, a crossroads, or in other similar journeying terms. While Franzel had a lodge—apparently a Rosicrucian order—around him which met regularly at his home in Meisbach for study and rituals, astral communication between members was a normal, formalized part of Franzel's group's practices. Thus, in correlation with learning the Qabalistic structure of the Tree of Life, astral projection— the foundational principle upon which all other astral work is done—was the main practice that Balthazar learned and honed under Puschi's guidance in his initiations. Balthazar initially learned astral projection under Puschi through Franz Bardon's book Initiation Into Hermetics. The book does not have a table of contents, presumably because the initiate is expected to follow through the book systematically from beginning to end, but the book is divided into two parts. Part 1 is Theory; part II is Practice. The section on theory is a scant thirty-one pages which opens with a quote attributed to Hermes Trismegistus: "That which is above is also that which is below" which is indicated as the ultimate signifying device of Qabalistic magic. In this section basic attributes of the Tetragrammaton, or Tree of Life, are defined, starting with its elemental nature, which is divided familiarly between fire, air, water, and earth, plus the etheric element of Akasha. Next aspects of the human body are defined and aligned with these elemental principals, ending with the Akasha, which governs the soul or astral body. From here the remainder of the theory defines the Astral Plane, a spiritual-mental "fourth dimension" of imagination, ending with a note on God and Religion. The larger portion 75

of the book, the 236 pages on Practice, take up a sequence often steps, broken into further lessons for work on the Astral Plane. In all, Bardon's book borrows heavily from Hindu spirituality. As in Siddha yoga, psychic training is located to the solar plexus, broached first in Step V. The Steps elongate as the practices develop. The magic mirror, the primary device used by Balthazar for astral travel, is first broached by Bardon in Step VII but instructions for its construction and use do not appear until Step IX. Magic mirrors of various kinds are used in a great many spiritualist traditions, primarily for the purpose of "scrying", or seeing visions. They can be essentially any semi-reflective surface, which is to say not a fully reflective, silverbacked mirror, but more often a dark one, such as a pond with a mud bottom or a black bowl filled with water. These only partially reflect images from above in impressionistic patterns, while also reflecting a "world", or depth, below which the eye falls into. A crystal ball, while not dark, can be similarly used, as can smoke, due to its ethereal, yet three-dimensional properties, and is often used to enhance scrying along with the diffused light of candlelight or moonlight. The concept behind a magic mirror is that while the eyes are kept busy searching the surface for recognizable forms, the third, or inner, eye is activated to present alternative information from another "dimension", the Astral Plane, which can be apprehended by the imagination. In this act, both "sights" fuse in a sort of intellectual synesthesia, producing a prophetic parrhesia, commonly referred to as visions and sooth-saying. Additional factors such as odors, objects, sounds, and kinesthesic elements, all of which trigger further conceptual shifts and elisions, are often also involved. Bardon notes that the magic mirror represents a transit-gate, a transmitter and receiver, a protective implement and ray-emitter or projector—in short "a television set" 76

(Bardon 1976 [1962]: 223). Balthazar's magic mirror, a black disc, is constructed to Bardon's specifications.

B:

Now, the implements I'm using for the subject, of course, are upon the altar before me: a black candle, one, two, and three—there are exercises for one candle, for two candles, and for three candles—and a black disc. I have never had the ideal black disc. I have a good one that I love very much. It's a two foot round disc of black glass, but the perfect black disc is about three feet—one cubit—round, concave, made of black metal polished so deep that the candle light itself when it reflects looks upside down inside the disc. The reason a black candle is best is because you just want to concentrate on the flame. You don't really want to see the candle. Now, we can talk about candles and the ceremonies you have to do with the candles. We can talk about the invocations you've done before you're going to astrally project and what you want to conceptualize and see, but that's for another time because we're only talking about meditation and stopping the mind and doing astral projection in reference to how I was able to obtain astral projection and then communication. So I sit with my Mala beads of one hundred and eight.

Mala beads are used like rosary beads to count out mantras. The traditional number 108, derived from the 360 degrees of the circle, is "360 minus the zero, or 36, times three, which is the three circles" that precede creation, the triple-motion of nothing as it comes to the point (the inward breath of the aura condensing to the Atman or atom) which initiates One, the Tree, and all creation—delimiting the two poles of its limitation. Mantras, unlike prayers such as "Hail Mary" traditionally used with rosary beads, are essentially incantations. Mantras can be phrases or they can be god, angel, genii, or other spirit names. They are traditionally chanted, a speech form between speaking and

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singing in which words are vibrated—for example Ra-pha-elllll or Mi-cha-elllll—to evoke, draw down, or summon a spirit.

I might have a red blanket around me and a red hat on, too. I might have some incense going. It's very helpful, it's true. And I have one candle that I'm looking at, and I'm doing my mantra and I'm doing my breath in a constancy. And I have my eyes open, and I look into the candlelight, and in the outer points of the candle I imagine a 5-pointed star. And in the center of the candle, the most whitest point, I just look in there for a long time. Sometimes the eyes get strained. Tears come up, salty tears. They might start being blurry, but still go in there. You might see striking visions, but still go there. You go there for a long time. And that's one of the exercises. Now, after you're done your 108 [mantras], take your tongue, curl it, blow out all the air, and lift your stomach up. Drop it down, and there's certain levels of exercises you can do. And that fluctuation of the stomach is your first chakra, and you're basing it on the lowest point in your body. You're meditation of your energy is your lowest point, and you get your conceptualizing, looking into that disc, into the candle, into that light of what you want as the final conclusion of what you want manifested or just the energy from that chakra and what it's going to reveal to you. Go into that then. And after you've pounded your stomach that number of times, take a breath. That many times—what many times? Well, there's a mathematical equation of 50 conceptual stages of the Tree of Life as going through the Torus, which is a mathematical formula that comes back upon itself and through, and it's been discussed in notes that I have done with you. And each breath you conceptualize the mathematical point and watch it go totally through. And then you take your breath in. So you know all 50 of them by each breath, and you watch the movement, conceptualizing that, in the light of the candle. Others get lazy and just do as many as they can. But when you take that breath in, you hold it. And you hold it. You're not gonna die! There's plenty of air out there. You've got some air inside. And you hold it. Until you feel a cold sensation, like red hot on the tip of your ears. And that light that you're looking at so closely, you're no longer looking at the light of the 5pointed star, but you're looking at the next step. There's two lights, one in the mirror and one that's before it. I want you to concentrate on the space between them. You might often go to the further one, and one could go further yet, but I want you to play a game and just control your astral projection this time. And I want you to concentrate so slightly on the space between the two lights and look at that, going through one light into the next, and look between the two, and make your connection there. And you're gonna start feeling—like a drunken man often

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first feels a little sweaty, except it will feel so centered. And you're going to start feeling an electrical energy pulling straight towards you. Now before you do all this exercise—I'm not saying that there aren't other exercises for astral projection that prepare you for this, but this is the beginning of the hard core of what you do in front of the disc. This is part of what I do every night, sometimes twice a day. But this is what I do, and I hold it, and I go into that. And then you start feeling an electrical tingle going out, and you go: "Oh, I've got to take another breath." And you breathe—you let all that air out from that one breath that you have in, and you pull your stomach up and you do the pounding again. And you do fifty, and you take in your next breath. And you're up to your next chakra. The dharma chakra. Your fertility chakra. You're there. And what you're doing with each breath, if I haven't mentioned the techniques of breathing, is that you're chanting the name of God, your mantra, continuously, but without breathing. You have one breath in. And this time, you know, you're concentrating through that light. You're projecting now. Andifyouhavea ceremony, if you have an incantation, if there's something that you want on your dharmic plane, you're projecting that image straight through the light, and you're seeing it. "Oh, I've gotta take another breath!" And you let it out. And you do another fifty. And you're pounding your stomach, and it's going so hard. And this time it is the navel chakra. It is your belly button. It is big time coming in. And you take your wand—which mine is a perfect caduceus—there are many wands, but mine is a perfect caduceus—and you pick it up, and you put it to the disc, to the flame, right to the front of the flame that you can see the crystal light of the flame through the crystal at the end of the wand. And you have the pulsation of the electrical field touching your pulse. And you take your next breath in, you hold the wand out like that, and you hold your breath in, and you project. Really what you're doing—I mean, if you want to analyze it—is that you have held your breath for so long your heat rate is going lower, and through meditations of looking into a black disc you're tricking your sense of balance, your pineal gland, and with your mind you're focusing at a far distance on a same thought, probably the mantra or whatever, and you're able to start expanding. And I mean if you go into the metaphysical teachings of these things, the first thing that anyone tells you when you're getting ready to die is, "Go towards the light! Go towards the light!" But what you're really doing in this entire exercise is going towards the light! You have this black disc with a black candle with a flame, and you're looking at the furthest flame possible. You're concentrating it as a symbol around it. And you're doing your mantra. And you've already done the breathing exercises where you have short changed yourself on breath that finally now you're just 79

holding one breath at a time, and now you're breathing so slow, and you're going so far. And you've done all these various mathematical rituals that have basically calmed you down. Calmed you so down. And you've done these stomach exercises, and your power center in your aura is right at that chi point for all those exercises. So you get your heart rate slow, and you've got your chi pretty good, and you've got your concentration, and you've tricked your little pineal gland, and you're floating like you should and feeling very stable. It's a wonderful experience."

This is the basic outline of Balthazar's astral projection practice, to which there can be variations. For example, Balthazar generally uses the mantra Om Manu Padme Hum, which he states has "a trick in it to make the Siddhis open." Notes Balthazar, "If I use that mantra enough and I get into the mantra, I lose my body, and I channel, and the spirits talk through me, and I see different things. I don't see things now that I see then." However, for about a year during his most recent arrest he switched to the mantra Lama Keyeno. "When you do astral projection and you use that mantra you're calling a high teacher to help you, and I was on the astral plane going: 'Help! Help! Anybody? Help! Help!' Nobody came." Another major variation is the use of different numbers of candles.

B:

The most important exercise really is the two candles, one on each side, and the trick is to bring the two candles as one, go through it, and look at the further one in the mirror. And you do that while doing your 108 [mantras]. And then doing the process of the stomach [nahli] and the drawing out of the air and holding it in all the way up to the top. And the practice is the same, except drawing two together means that what you've done is brought the concentration here [top of the head]. Now, there's two processes that are very interesting in meditation. First of all, instead of going all the way down to base, you're going down to the navel, and you're circulating your energy in the front of the navel and up the back of the spine and through the top of the head and up. So you often feel a flickering here 80

[top of the head], which is often described by many Buddhist statues as the little flame you see at the top of the head there. And that's what you're talking about, and you always can feel it. And it's absolutely amazing. And between the eyes you feel a pinching feeling. It's the third eye opening. And you can feel it. And you look through the third eye, and you're going—you know, you get into the third personality. And you take a breath and you cross your heart with your sword and your wand, and you remember what the teachings say. You just let your mind wander. And you sometimes get to the point that—of visions. Sometimes its just voices you begin to hear. But you just go, and you listen to the advice, and you feel very secure what you projected. First you're doing your mantra, next you're concentrating on the vision, and the third thing your ego is saying, "Holy shit! Holy shit! Holy shit! This is really deep shit!" And you always get into this because what happens is that you're allowing the spirit now to come through the top of your head and visualize into the disc. Now, there are these times, and it happens to some people, where the disc, because you're looking into the light so much, it starts to get a silver tone on it. It's a beautiful thing. That's called the Shekinah or the Pure White Light. You'll often see this pure white light on everything when you're tripping. Tripping's a lot easier than doing all these years of meditating practice to get you to that place, but you can get to that place. And I'm not trying to say, "Oh you should do this because it's without drugs, man." No, do the drugs, and then do this! You'll realty take off! I am a criminal that advocates LSD and has done my practices through LSD. The thing that LSD or ungoverned psychoactive drugs do is it can make you crazy. Therefore you should have structure around them, which are religious structures that have gone on for thousands of years, like shamanism or many other religions—but we live in an evangelical, puritanical theocracy! The third exercise is even a little more complicated, but I find it more easy. Three candles, one on each side, that you bring into one, and one in the center. So what happens when you bring these two across diagonally to the center, the one that you're looking on at the center goes back to the other two. This tricks your pineal gland big time! Now, you can do all sorts of things because there are a lot of mental exercises in doing these things. One of the most practical ones for me as an artist is to paint, do the exercise, envision this, and then go to bed. You dream the painting. You wake up in the morning and wonder if you painted it or you did it. This was a very good one for Franzel to start me out on. It was the simplest, and I use it a lot. It's said in the Rig Vedas if you can hold an image for 12 full breaths after doing this exercise into the light and hold that image, it will come into full manifestation. He knew it worked for me easier than other people because I spent my whole life painting. R:

Was he an artist, as well?

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B:

No, he was an electrician. (Life History #4, Life History #5)

It was upon this foundation of astral projection practices that Franzel and Balthazar built a direct channel of astral communication, able to traverse the miles of continents and ocean and time zones between them, to guide Balthazar through his crisis. All of the related magical practices surrounding Balthazar's arrest hinged upon astral projection, including communication with Franzel and the otherworld.

7. Practices 2: Constructing a Battery and a Genii

The first thing Franzel told Balthazar to do was to construct a "battery". As it is beyond the scope of this dissertation to fully address the practices of creating a battery and a genii, I will instead at this point note only the terminology used and its relationship to these two other practices which remain the baseline of all of Balthazar's magical practices today. The concept of a battery is again related directly to the concept of the tetragrammaton—the four letter name of God (Yod-He-Vau-He)— which forms the Tree of Life. Lon Milo DuQuette, who has emerged in magical circles as the reigning expert on Aleister Crowley and Hermetic Qabalah practices in general, with characteristic wit and clarity describes the tetragrammaton of the ancient Hebrews, manifested by the ark of the Covenant (whose construction is prescribed to exquisite specification in Exodus 25) thusly:

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It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that a wooden box with a double lining of gold and closed with a slab of gold, containing pots of mysterious substances, heavy plates and rods submerged in a pan of liquid, was in all likelihood a highly unstable battery. The two cherubim on the lid served as the anode and cathode, and a spark or "arc" (the flaming presence of God) jumped madly between the tips of the two highly conductive golden wings (2001: 76-77).

DuQuette notes how the box was noted to zap with lightening and even immolate anyone who haphazardly touched it, occasionally belching voluminous amounts of smoke, and that it was insulated with cloth and leather and essentially imprisoned in a special vault and generally treated as a lethal weapon. He also makes amusing speculations as to what happened to the priest who yearly ritually placed his hands upon it, momentarily diverting the arc of electricity into his own body. While not described quite as DuQuette does in terms of ancient Hebrew rituals, in my days as a "student" learning to write a book on Tarot, the tetragrammaton—the four letter name of God—was defined to me by Balthazar quite literally as a four-polar magnet. Composed of alternating positive and negative "charges", the letters designate an elemental square or sphere, that, when in motion (signified by time, timing, rotation or relation), generates a donut-shaped torus through which center an elongated double helix/ spiral/ lightning bolt/ sword swipe-shaped serpentine field forms—depicted graphically as the caduceus of Hermes or the Tree of Life. Drawn over the human body, the torus forms the body's aura, its sphere of magnetic influence, while the tree forms the more solid form of the body itself. In this equation of matter and energy, where consciousness is the underlying energy source, expressed as electro-magnetism, the force by which

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forms cohere and eventually transform, lies the ultimate malleability of forms, especially those which have yet to come to be, the spectral forms of the future. Through the creation of a battery, made of both physical and astrally constructed "materials" in the likeness of the tetragrammaton, the bearer, Balthazar, could, in combination with astral projection, bring into being the object or events willed through what in the end amounts to time travel—a projected intent eventually meeting up with the bearer in a future time. The battery was "charged" with the help of Puschi eleven days before and eleven days after the full moon during a ceremony in which Balthazar astrally projected into a black disc to connect with Franzel and send him his "od", or energy, for which, in return, on the full moon he would receive od from him in the form of knowledge or a lesson in how to fix his situation magically. To receive this lesson, he had to construct a genii. Here the concepts of constructing, summoning, or conjuring are considered to be essentially the same practice, as the entity, conceived on the astral plane, is itself only a temporary meeting grounds, temple, or form for an aspect of the unlimited divine or otherworld essence to inhabit. This Balthazar did through certain ritual, meditative practices, projecting his energy and intention in a manner identical to astral projection into a metal statuette of a God form with which he made certain binding pacts, placing the statue on his altar before his black disc, which he then kept charged through his other regular ritual practices. Once the trial was over and the extended ritual thus complete, he placed it into a triangle of form and released it. The genii was used in the full moon ceremony as an intermediary through which Franzel could "speak" to him. 84

B:

I had the name of the genii which then I called and did a reading, forming the cards with making the name of the genii, did the shuffling correct mathematically for it, and had it come to give instructions on what needed to be done in my case. And that was the process that I used to get through that first bust.

Balthazar relates the outcome of his first arrest on one of the tapes from his visit with Franzel in 1990. He is speaking to Anderal, FranzeFs apprentice, and a woman, probably Anderel's wife, Rosie:

B:

The ceremony that Franzel did for me many years ago when I got arrested was amazing because at the trial they needed a chemist to testify against me that what I had sold was LSD. So the first chemist had a nervous breakdown and refused to testify. So they got another chemist to do a test, and he cut his thumb. So he couldn't come. So they got another chemist to test it, and he cut his thumb. So he couldn't come. So they got another chemist to test it, and he got lost coming, and finally showed up late, you know? And come to find out they did not do the tests right. What they did was they ran out of the stuff. They normally have the clinical LSD next to the stuff that was sold, and if it's the same, it tests out. Well, what they tested against was stuff they bought off the street against mine, what I had sold, so there was no proof by the time it got there. And because of all this paperwork, the trial should have lasted a week, and it lasted a year and a week. And all the way through the year, it kept getting worse for me. They kept finding more evidence against me, and I thought I'd be in jail for 30 years. It was just getting worse and worse and worse, and we'd call up Franzel, and Franzel would say, "Don't think about what's happening. Think about the end result. Because the end's going to work out ok." I was going crazy. I found out they tapped my phone illegally. They had all the conversations, but it got confused where they couldn't use it as evidence. And Franzel said, just: "It's ok." And by the end, it was ok. And finally they were just like pulling out their hair. They couldn't do anything. Everything went wrong for them. And finally they gave me a sentence that was comparatively light and a fine of $10,000, and the paperwork for that got lost, too. [GENERAL LAUGHTER. FRANZEL LAUGHS LOUDLY.] (Life History #4: 5, Life History #6: 11-16, Life History #8: 8-13, Franzel 6: 15-16)

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8. Practices 3: Afterward

B:

And now I'm doing active magic, and it seems like you really learn how to do a lot of magic when your life's on the line. And this is when practicing got really intense. And unfortunately during this practicing of the ceremony, this is when Puschi went to the dark side. From the light he went to the dark real quick. The problem with the process was that coke got in the way. Puschi by the end was on crack. I was nowhere near dropping it yet. It was called freebase then. My cocaine habit started when High Times had Santa Claus sniffing on the cover, the famous one. And of course the head of NORML was found doing cocaine in the White House bathroom during the Jimmy Carter administration, making that a complete disaster for the legalization of marijuana, proving that it leads to harder stuff, and the whole marijuana movement in the '70's fell apart from that point on. It destroyed them. But unfortunately cocaine, powdered cocaine, has a five year addiction. So it lasted about eight years, and the people stopped doing it, and it became passe because people's lives were ruined. I gave up cocaine about a year after the bust was over, but Puschi went in it the wrong way. Nico became Omi, Om Singh Pushpindar Chatwell. He brought his family over, and his family was a bunch of saints. His father was a living master. It must break old Deet's heart to be in the heavens and see what his son has become. It's the greatest tragedy I've ever seen for a man to have this much enlightened knowledge and be studying under some of the greatest masters of all of India, and then to get involved in black magic just to do crack. It is the greatest shame that I've ever seen in my life that a living saint went that bad. But by the end of my initiations and the letters and the information I was getting from Franzel was starting to get very perverted by Puschi. His addiction meant that he could draw energy and the knowledge I was sending or interdict it or I don't know, but several years after this bust, when cocaine was over and out of my life for sure, I started having some of the weirdest shit ever happening in my life, and it became one long struggle in my life to get any of my purpose or my dharma done.

Puschi's involvement with black magic and manipulation of the relationship between Balthazar and Franzel, however, was not evident to Balthazar at the time. This information didn't begin to surface until after his first face-to-face meeting with Franzel in 1989 and was not fully clarified until their second meeting in 1990. Meanwhile, once 86

Balthazar's legal situation was over, his now close, if primarily "astral", relationship with his teacher continued, as did his daily practices in astral projection.

R:

So you learned about projecting into the black disc under Franzel—

B:

Oh yes.

R:

—but you've said to me that you were already astrally projecting prior to that.

B:

Well, it's very hard not to, especially when you're doing LSD.

R:

Since you've defined astral projection to me in terms of what you do with the disc, can you just define it retrospectively in terms of what it entailed before you began using the disc?

B;

It's very simple. One's called control, and the other's called LSD in a primal tank and seeing what you get.

R:

So you're saying spontaneous astral projections instead of deliberate.

B:

Yes. I mean I was having things like doing past life readings and having other people's lives pass through me and voices coming out. But what I am literally talking about, astral projection, is being able to be a controlled channel right now and direct where you're putting your energy into another dimension before it materializes, but will materialize in the future if willed.

R:

So it's kind of like a fetch?

B:

Yeah. I am sending my astral body through time and space as energy to cause events that eventually time will meet up with right now in my situation. I wish I'd stop astral projecting so far! [laughs]

R:

Can you give me one basic definition for astral projection then that would encompass both spontaneous and structured astral projections?

B:

It's funny, you want to describe astral projection—in words. Right! Oh well. No, I don't know what to describe astral projection as, actually, because it's a constant, to me, feeling of expansion. One of the things is that I do the astral projection at night. Then when I go to sleep, my astral body can work for me, with such a level of concentration of where to go, but in such a state of peace. I'm an artist. I paint. It's always very funny when you get up in the morning and have to look at the painting. Did you dream it or did you paint it? 'Cause you can 87

actually dictate your dreams to yourself. I need information on how to work up this painting. This is the problem. And then a lot of times you find your dreams very much conform to your dictations of your astral projection. You get that astral body doing what you wanted to do, and you don't know what kind of trouble you can get into while you're sleeping. R:

So you're saying that you can get information through the dream process by astral projecting before going to sleep?

B:

Absolutely. Absolutely. I find it most productive right before bed. But the point of defining what was taught by Franzel and what came along with me has a large gray zone in reality. Coming back to my point, the grey zone is that when you astrally project and commune with a being, a conscious being like Franzel—we talked about an energy called shaktipat, and that's exactly what's happening.

Shaktipat is a Sanskrit term referring to the direct transference of energy, knowledge, or information from one consciousness to another (the Vulcan mind meld and Stranger in a Strange Land's grokking). It is usually used to refer to an action in which a master touches a student's third eye and sometimes also the base of the skull, which Franzel did, circulating their energy through the student. On one of the tapes from his 1990 visit Balthazar has just received shaktipat from Franzel and responds ecstatically: "I'm lightheaded. I feel a total change. Thank you." To which Franzel casually answers in English, "Don't mention it." Later that night, recording his thoughts on tape, Balthazar recaps the event:

When Franzel touched me, he changed my electrical energy around. I actually felt the energy in my brain transforming. Probably I'll be able to use both sides of my brain now, which is incredible. Got me very dizzy, very shaking, very high. Man, shaktipat from Baba Muktananda didn't do this. This was great! Boy am I a new mensch.

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From seventeen years distance, he recalls:

Shaktipat with him was very similar to me as to a good hit of windowpane acid where you see that white clear light, the Shekinah light, over everything and everything has a glow to it, and I was having a lot of those same reactions. It's very good for a person especially with A.D.D.. I was very good in conceptualizing. Therefore I was very good in meditation because of being an artist, but paying attention I'd never had. But transferring knowledge—it made it a lot easier! [laughs] I received shaktipat three times from Baba Muktananda, but Franzel gave shaktipat!

Balthazar indicates that astrally communicating with Franzel is in many ways the equivalent of receiving shaktipat. The experience, produced through astral projection, generates, on the one hand, an immediate physiological sensation and on the other a longer-term, unfolding process of revelation. In astral projection, he describes Franzel as acting as a "seer" going ahead of him, a guide walking point and giving him directions or preparing the way.

B:

So when we're talking about astral projection: "What did he teach you this time? Did he give you a homework assignment?" No, he gave me an imprint, and suddenly I became aware of something. So you go to like a seminar, of course a magical one, and they say something about the Qabalah. And then you have an experience that relates to it, and events start confirming and teaching you. Suddenly you're ready for one thing, and the energy is communed to you by the higher being, and events around you instruct you. "Oh, you mean he really wasn't giving you lessons?" Well, actually, it was different, the type of lessons. We were connecting because I could know what he was doing that day and stuff because he was imprinting that, too. So I was becoming familiar with Franzel as a person experientially at the same point as he was giving me information. So do I know about him? Of course I know about him! Ia/whim! I've experienced something of him. He would possess my heart, my consciousness, and my awareness, and what needed to be known. 89

R;

So it was a whole milieu. It sounds almost like he's a movie cam in a way.

B:

Right—like being with him and trying to explain it to you in the normality of an education system and how learning is done, it's not the same way. I am going to drift off into the subject, but I have to talk about it. You have in siddha yoga you have the ghee where you have the dark eye, which is the same which the pharaohs had, with the electrical crown and all the instruments, and they have the T that they hold for meditation which is that you're aligned in your meditation that you're connecting your electrical body and you're passing divinity—darsan it's called—to others. So one receives a blessing of knowledge by being in the presence of a living master. That's what it was like being around Franzel. You became pure. You start communing on an astral plane consciously with a higher conscious being that transfers energy to you that his consciousness starts coming into manifestation. So I'm constantly receiving this energy of an imprint of an aware being in consciousness.

R:

And in this case the higher being you mean is Franzel.

B:

Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. So I am being prepared—It's like this. He says, "You'll understand this by the next time you see me," and I have all these events and lessons in life, and I come back and say, "I understand what you were talking about." Now, therefore there's a synchronicity around you teaching you because you're communing with this person through the black disc. It's a different teacher relations: "Here's the exercise. Tell me when you find out the answer. Come back with it, and I'll tell you the next question." I can only say that he didn't teach me, but he arranged the experiences a lot of times.

In addition to his nightly astral projection ritual, he still had three astral projection appointments with his teacher a month, eleven days before and eleven days after the full moon and on the full moon itself.

B:

When I did that with Franzel I would have either a piece of stained glass with Franzel's picture behind it or just a disc in the center or have the two [candles], but I'd bring the lights together and visualize him and send my energy SOLELY—not for anything else, except to give him energy. I did this always eleven days before the full moon. So during this period of time he would receive od from a circle of people that were his responsibility to initiate. So as I understood it, that day was a very special day because a lot of people would be 90

sending him od. But this is to charge his battery. And you're breathing, oh yes, so slow, and you're looking so far into that disc—so far—so far—and then suddenly I'd hear Franzel [laughs] 'cause he's doing the same damn thing! The full moon was various other ceremonies. Sometimes it was just studies. One of the things I did after sending the od, on the full moon I would do a reading to contact him. R:

A Tarot reading?

B:

Yes. And it would be certain code cards that he would come through and there would be information that he would say.

R:

So as you structured your question, essentially, it was to contact him.

B:

Exactly. And he would be giving us lessons. Then those practices that he'd give us through the cards we would do.

For example, the genii ritual for constructing a genii and making a pact with it:

B:

I got this information of how to play with my dolls, a genii ritual, through asking the cards to teach us. Therefore the system of education from books was actually from the astral plane, and therefore it's a method of contacting the Akasha that the cards can speak through us. Then Franzel taught me how to conduct it further." So we would then come back to him, and this is it—we'd also have a conversation—phone, letter—upon my experiences that I'd received, and once I'd achieved the experience, he would know to send more information to me. Eleven days after the full moon, I would do the same ceremony. However, when I would go to bed I would wear red silk. Sometimes I even had silk wrapped up with a book on me or a seal on my chest that I would sleep that way. And information would come into me. I would dream information. I would wake up having experiences that the dream would feel like it was so real. And I had it. And therefore I would have astral projections. I would have controlled knowledge given to me by a master that way. So I worked on a level of having a teacher astrally project when I was asleep into me information. And how it was basically really explained to me the reasoning of how you can make or draw energy or work energy with a statue was first of all being able to project electrical energy through conceptual points and to make it come alive, 91

two, relate to it, and three, it was a lecture like this that was given to me: "You have a Tree. It is life. It takes energy from the sun. It is cut down. It was put on fire, and it has flames. It's changed the energy from solid now into flames and then radiates off heat. All this is just one energy that continues and has changed form. Since energy can change form, you can charge energy, possess energy, conceptualize energy, and make it perform or formulate or manifest." I like metal statues. Light statues—plastic, hollow ones, they don't hold the same energy for what you need. You feel this energy. It can possess a lot of energy because it's heavy metal, and it's conceptual energy because it's art. The energy has been transformed into a concept. So on the full moon I would get confirmation of various things or whatever it happened to say. But anyway, so that was my structure with Franzel (Life History #3, pp. 15-16, Life History #4: 17 & 20-21, Life History #5, p. 3Life History #6: 6-12, Life History #9: 1-2, Franzel 7: 39).

9. Crisis 2: Dematerializations and Discovery

B:

One full moon he told me to go to hell. He didn't want to bother me. I was a waste—I was a cocaine head and was blowing my life away. Unfortunately that was true. What can I say? I drew curses down upon myself that now I'm paying for to this day, but which I think I should be forgiven by now. But after my bust, more or less a short period thereafter, Franzel just said, "I've had it. You've gotten into bad drugs. You're an idiot. Goodbye." Every full moon with Larry Gerhart [a member of Balthazar's study circle], we would set up the reading in such a way that we could talk to Franzel and get a lesson. So I got one lesson he said: "Listen, you guys aren't listening. You're boring to me. All you do is this stuff." That's essentially what the reading said, and he cut himself off from me.

R:

So when you say he cut you off, you mean you guys tried to do the reading the next month and it said go away?

B:

I did a reading, and it finally just said, "You guys are poopy. I'll send you another teacher when you're ready. I can't deal with you. Goodbye." It was a bad reading.

R:

So you didn't try again after that?

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B:

Well we did.

R:

And?

B:

Nothing. He says no, he says no

R:

What was the difference in the reading when he was present and when he wasn't?

B:

For one thing his card would show up.

R:

Which you said was the Prince of Cups.

B:

Right. And I did not meet up with him. Pulled my life back together, went to Insight, fell in love with a woman named Sarah, and we were married just a short time when she got sick, some immune disorder called Candida. But what is worse than that, about a year into the marriage, things started dematerializing. It made no sense to me either because things can't just disappear. Even if you do two Tarot readings, and the second one says you have demons—of course the first one did, too—and stories are structured all around this that went on for about eight years before the marriage blew apart entirely because we were both too fuckin' sick, and during that eight years we probably had about fifteen dematerializations. We were in a horrible situation of both being sick and having things like when you throw holy water around the house, sulfur appears in the air. It's nuts, and it sounds like—it sounds like bullshit, except that it isn't. Money disappeared, and so did objects, too. Situations happened, and people got sicker. What you gonna do? So finally I sold the house that I had bought on South Street for a big amount of bucks, straightened out my life financially, and split off and threw myself of the feet of Franzel. When we sold South Street, we decided before we go to Europe and see Franzel, we have a little chump change now, so we will go on a trip. Sarah looked up Power Places Tours, run by Toby Weiss, and we decided that we would throw a nice celebration party—because we sold the place like December 12 , we threw a New Years party, and then like 2 days or 3 days after New Years, we went off to Cairo, Egypt. You land in Cairo, then go down to southern Egypt, which is called Upper Egypt, to Luxor. In one of the temples there was a guide, actually an Egyptologist there—you were not allowed to lead your own tour. You have to hire somebody. That's the law. So you hire an Egyptian Egyptologist. It was a guy named Emil Sagar, and he's reading stuff off the wall, and I'm ready to go by and I go, "Well, why don't you read the rest." He says, "We've been trying translate it for 40 years. We can't figure out what some of these words say and some of the meaning of why they're doing these things." And I said, "Well, that's simple. It says this." [laughs] And he went, "Oh, really? That makes total sense." And I said, "Yeah."

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R:

What was it that you could read?

B:

Well, basically, I don't know what they didn't understand, but I understood that "shin" [a Hebrew letter] means "spirit", which is abbreviation for "Aeon" [the ancient Egyptian term for a zodiacal "Age", i.e. the period of time, approximately 2200 years, when the sun appears on the vernal equinox in a particular constellation of the zodiac; "Aeon" is the term used by Crowley for the twentieth card of the Higher Arcana, which is correlated to the letter "shin", and is defined as "consciousness" or "God consciousness"]. They didn't know that. It was in the temple of Hapchitzu when I first got into this because Hapchitzu—gezuntite! [laughs]—has pictorials of them having large amounts of henna to henna their body that they don't get sunburn because these Egyptians were white, just like Hapchitzu may have been white or partially Greek. Who knows, I'm not gonna say, but she had to henna her body. And they tried to understand certain things about the structure, why they put the things around the eye, and [I explained that] they called it the siddhi eye or the eye of the spirit which gave shakti, and this is what that sentence said—basically that she was preparing her body to become the god form with the siddhi eye to give shakti or blessings of the light. And they went, "Oh wow!" I said, "Yeah, this is siddha yoga," and they said, "Huh?"

R:

And how could you read that in the hieroglyphs themselves?

B:

That's what it said. I was able to make associations and fill in words. Just a few years before I was at Baba Muktananda's ashram and I've seen them use the same implements the pharaoh uses, but god forbid an Egyptologist connects up with it. So I happened to mention that that's what that's for. They said, "Oh, we thought it was a walking stick." I said, "Isn't it a bit short for a walking stick?" He says, "Yes, we've always wondered about that."

He made similar observations at the Egyptian Museum.

B:

Just like in any art museum, they don't talk about aesthetics, which makes painting, or anything about art. They talk about the history of the artist. Unfortunately in Egyptology that's what it's about, and therefore they never apply, in my opinion, to Egyptology the religion. And of course if they do, they apply religion the way an agnostic analyst from a Western culture would: They 're obviously crazy people because they worship a lot of things that they carved in stone, and therefore their religion has no bearing on reality like ours does, that we believe somebody's going to come down from heaven on four white chargers and the earth's going to open up, and he's going to throw evil into it and rule for

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a thousand years of peace on the throne of Jerusalem. Not like our religion which is rational! From that rational perspective, they write about Egyptology. And of course all my understanding of Egyptology—I was a person that learned how to read Tarot cards before I learned how to read English and was initiated in those forms. I'd now seen enough symbols that I associate with Tarot cards because I'll see the statue of the Tarot card; I'll see the symbol under it. So I was reading my own form of hieroglyphics. The problem was, what I was reading was correct, and they couldn't figure it out. They didn't have the flash cards. I was using Tarot cards as Egyptian flash cards. So I started arguing immediately. I was being a German, knowing it all.

one photo of a statue from this trip he notes:

Here we have the crook, we have the wand, we have the generator or the battery that goes around him which is that of Osiris—and of course it's the same batteries that I'm working with here and the things I've learned. It is a prince. That is the princely curl. He has received the third eye. These hollow beard pieces that they say, "Oh it's a beard. It's a beard." No! It's an echo chamber for the invocation of the energy of the vibration. No, they never picked that one up. I make note that I found the most perfect magical black disc I've ever seen in all my life's history in the Chicago Natural History Museum. They had a little showcase with "This is an Egyptian kitchen" and had four people around it eating off of it, not realizing that it was a magical black disc and one of the most important magical finds and instruments in Egyptology's history ever. It's concave, it's about this big, it has the four corners marked on each side so that it will be hung correctly. It goes by the absolute perfect tradition, and it has the places for the candles—it's absolutely magnificent! And they said, "And Egyptians ate together." They have these manikin statues dressed as Egyptians in their kitchen eating off of this, and it's sort of funny because the Louvre has like the greatest case of Egyptian magical instruments. They have a whole section of it. You know, they recognized the practice of magic. And Chicago Institute has the finest piece I've seen in my life—better than the Louvre, better than Cairo— the piece! The piece! And they have little manikins eating off of it. And the practices that I'm talking about with this black disc that go all the way back to this culture. They have the absolute best disc I've ever seen and I want it! And they don't know what they have.

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Such discoveries lead to Balthazar being hired by Toby Wiesse as a pyramid monitor, which in turn lead to his being "discovered" as a psychic and traveling to California and Japan to do Tarot readings and lecture on Tarot and Qabalah. He received the phone call while he was staying with Franzel.

B:

We didn't get hired to work with Toby Weisse until we were in Europe, but he was very impressed with me. He said I was the finest Tarot reader he'd ever met, and he's met psychics throughout the world. He said I could be internationally famous and he wanted to set me up with an international tour. All I had to do was get the books done.

This is the essence of a message he would receive over and over.

B:

We went home in March and we left for Europe in July. So I was gonna throw myself at the feet of the master, and I grabbed Puschi, took him to a Rainbow gathering, put him in a sweat lodge, and tried to get his life totally straightened out, paid for his way and paid him also to come and introduce me and be my translator (Life History #4, p. 4, Life History #7: 14; Life History #8: 8-13, Life History #9: 1-7; Travelogue #3: 3).

10. Europe and Franzel: 1989,1990

A draft of a letter to Balthazar's mother in his 1989 journal records the itinerary of his first trip to Franzel's:

When we came to Europe, London was hell. The rich and the poor. More of the same game as the United States. Holland however is the nicest country I have ever been in. The people were lovely. And some openings for Sarah to sell art. We will go back again and again. Next Belgium, just passed through. Luxembourg, a small country. A very small country. Picked up Om at the 96

airport. Went to Heidelberg, Germany and then to Meisbach, Germany below Miinchen to see Om's teacher. Stayed for two weeks and back to Holland to get the truck inspected. Ten days in Holland and the truck papers were messed up. Trouble. Could not get out of the country with the van we bought. So we made copies of the old papers and have the right papers sent to Christa's in Germany. We went through the wine country of Germany. Camping all the way. So here we are at Christa's. Oh yes we lost our tickets to get home. Hope we can get them back.

The hot spots were Holland, Heidelberg, and the German countryside. Holland was "the coolest place in the world. People don't hate each other." Full of gypsy dreams of houseboats, princesses' doll houses, wooden shoes, and cobblestones cut from the same quarry as the cobblestones in Philadelphia due to William Penn's having been in religious exile there from England, a urinal Rembrandt and Balthazar both used—"Now that makes me feel like lineage!"—windmills and rainbows—double rainbows—and let us not forget the hash bars—the sun literally never went down on Holland. Even the bikers carried teddy bears. Heidelberg meanwhile boasted the biggest beer vats in the world and the castle which gave its name to the Heidelberg School of Hermetic Qabalah.

B:

It's amazing that they gave these conventional tours of Heidelberg where they totally eliminated the Qabalah, the rituals, the history. Now this really fascinates me because when I led tours in Egypt, I had multiple groups from the Heidelberg area that were doing ritual magic in castles. It's inundated with magical, Qabalistic groups. But you go to Heidelberg castle, and they talked nothing about the mysticism which is what Heidelberg was attacked and burnt to the ground for.

R:

Why did you think they were going to tell the esoteric history?

B:

It's part of the history! What established that castle was the fleeing school from Florence, Italy settled in Heidelberg under Christian Rosencrantz, and the castle was used as the center for the Rosicrucian order. And what made Heidelberg and intellectual center was the various professors that were refugees from Southern Europe coming there and becoming professors. And it was a major point of 97

institution, and this is how it started. And it should have been something mentioned about their history and what they did there. Giving a guided tour, I would have at least said that Heidelberg was a major learning and art center that was not part of the Inquisition, but with its own culture in itself, and it was attacked for a lot of its learning because of the Catholic Church being against it. I would have briefly said that, even without mentioning Qabalism.

On the other end there was the German countryside, where, between Rhine wine, straw bale houses, and castle tours—"Sarah asked, 'How many castles are there in Germany" and I started laughing: 'That's like asking how many apartments there are in New York!"' —there was Trier.

B:

Trier has some of the weirdest vibes for a pagan on earth. 1050, the Council of Trier decided how to translate the bible. They really did a number on it: Purgatory, Limbo, Hell literally, last judgment, second coming of Christ—all those things that today the evangelicals believe in. Up until then the second coming of Christ looked very much like an allegory. The book of Revelation was sort of like a side book. Up until this point it wasn't translated like "You're gonna go to hell if you don't pay your taxes." And here they started the beginnings of the Inquisition and the crusades. I also went to the Trier Inquisition Museum. They were serious. I mean, I'm going through an Inquisition now, but this was just nuts. You definitely wanted to stay catholic. This is the room where the Council of Trier met, and behind their altar in the church they have this big thing with big sucking crystals around it. You know what they claim this to be? The body of Matthew, St. Matthew.

They purged the experience of Trier by visiting the castles of Balthazar's adoptive king, Ludwig.

B:

My king, King Ludwig of Bavaria, had basically a lot of castles. This is called Linderhoff. The Linder's a flower, and it's the house of flowers and that of love, It wasn't much of a castle. It only had 12 rooms. It wasn't much of a kingdom 98

anyway. But it was the most beautiful place I've ever been in my life, except there was so much faux there. It was modeled after Versailles, except he couldn't afford the inlaid stone. He was also a pagan. He had so many altars to Venus and to the gods. This guy knew how to fuckin' live. He was also a major pothead. This is a pot castle! This is what my king built to smoke his pot! He thought pot was so great that he got a throne like this, shaped like a peacock, with a fountain in the center and people sitting around passing hookahs and joints and belly dancing. He invited all the royalty of Europe, and he had them all dressed up in silk gowns and turbans. It was fun. He carved out a cave for Wagner's operas, and the king would get into this golden boat and be pushed through the grotto as they're singing the operas of Wagner around him, and it would be echoing off of the stalactites. Look at this. This is what he sat in, all stained glass, with a large turban on, passing a joint around. This is how you should smoke pot! You understand me? And they say it in the tour. They can't deny it. Some people know how to live! He was gay, by the way. He never had sex, but he was gay. I've often said my failing in life is not being born a gay Jew.

In between Heidelberg and King Ludwig was Franzel's home in Meisbach, where there were still May Poles, organ grinders' monkeys, and of course the Bavarian Alps. When they first arrived to Meisbach, they went to Muti's, a close friend of Franzel's from the Rosicrucian Order whom he was no longer willing to associate with because she had the habit of tricking him into going into trance. Puschi had been telling him for years that he'd left books there which were "materialized from the other side." Balthazar found only books "printed by human beings, rather than materialized out of the ether or books on sheep skin written with magical handwriting and telling ceremonies on materialization and how to get the philosopher's stone." He was disappointed, but didn't dwell on it. "I didn't suspect him of lying at this point." That night Balthazar gave Muti a reading instructing her how to channel the information she wants from the Akasha herself. "How come people 90-years-old in Germany have more energy and they wake up at six in the morning, go down, get the fresh food, bring it up, and make you breakfast, after 99

channeling all night and getting to bed at three in the morning?" asks Balthazar. Muti called Franzel and informed him of their arrival. Then, finally, they went to Franzel's.

B:

You go down a driveway. It's not a long one. It's about 100 yards, and you see his house, which is more or less a house on a slope going down to another house, down to the woods, and a creek. I was surprised when I saw him. Short guy. You think these monumental magicians! Such a humble, good guy.

Franzel lived on two acres of land overall, with a large garden in front of the house, ducks, and pasture land he rented out. He greeted them warmly, fed them, and hearing Balthazar's troubles, immediately took him to his magical hut—a small shed behind the house—and performed a ritual to diagnose the problem. The tape begins with a few minutes of relative silence, marked only by the scraping of furniture as they set up for the ceremony. As the ceremony begins, Franzel speaks in a combination of German, Latin, and Hebrew, after which point he speaks in English, though about halfway through the ceremony he lapses back into German. Franzel calls upon the spirit and commands it to perform various feats—announce itself, open doors, move a ball. In response, the tape records various knocking, thumps, clicks, the sound of doors opening, and at the end of the ceremony the sound of doors closing. At one point Franzel names the demon and commands: "Your dream spirit shall make itself known!" Throughout, Franzel makes various observations: "That is not a demon of the first or second level. If so it would have grabbed the ball." At times Franzel's voice changes, deepening, channeling the spirit: "Keep your ball!" To which Franzel notes, his normal voice returned: "This is not a demon, but s spirit from a deceased person. It is a spook—a spell." Finally Franzel

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moves into full channeling mode. His voice deepens and begins to rhyme (not conveyed in this English translation):

You knew me. I knew you. It's been years ago. The house that was in the woods. Half drunk, half recovered. The thief who betrays you, you will know him. Through the power of your own soul, we could take everything if it so pleases and accommodates us. As a demon, you can know me, but I am not of that kind. They then make themselves worthwhile/paid for. He carries the ghost in the bottle. Without a cork. Goes in and out. You notice it by the effect. It would be the best if it was only appearance, shine. He has used the power of the soul on the physical level. And because of that it either blossoms or the blossom dies. Take home King's fern. Then do a smudging. Takes away the magic. But not all at once. He has eaten too much. You shall not forget him. Sometimes he leads humans by the hand. That can be proven. He can enter the houses at night and in fog. A good heart, a good soul is powerless against those circles. But we cannot write names from the spirit world

The spirit then demands cognac, and Franzel closes the ceremony:

We put the cognac down here and leave the room. Go back where you came from and depart from us in peace. In the name of the all powerful, Adonai, the Tetragrammaton, Yod-He-Vau-He. Let's part in peace. Let it thus be.

The tape is turned off and briefly on again, as Balthazar calls out, "Puschi?! Translate, please!" before the tape is turned off again. When the tape is turned back on again, Balthazar and Puschi are discussing I Chings. It soon becomes clear that some days have passed and Balthazar has given Franzel a reading. They are in a tent on Franzel's property cooking. What is noticeable on the tape is that Puschi sounds hyper. He alternately flatters and criticizes Balthazar, 101

then works his way around to demanding Balthazar's silence about what he has taught him, even to Franzel. He starts off telling him, "I just would prefer that you give me the privilege of maintaining absolute secrecy of our relationship." He tells him that there are repercussions, karmically and psychically, for "blabbing". Finally he gets Balthazar's agreement:

P:

You just don't tell. You break the circle. It's just out! And anybody who asks or tries to, he's just left outside. And he's just left outside forever. One wrong word, and he's left outside forever.

B:

Ok.

P:

And you made it after whatever happened once. You know what I mean?

Apparently he is referring to Balthazar's arrest, suggesting a connection between an indiscretion is selling LSD to a police officer and in telling people about magical transactions, to which Balthazar begins to object, probably as Franzel helped him through that situation.

B:

Franzel—

P:

It's gonna be a different scene.

B:

And it's not to be conveyed to anybody.

P:

It's never to be communicated! From now on you're gonna imagine and realize some powers. You do what you have [claps] to do with your own [claps] respon-[claps]sibility and your own [claps] feet. Never to mention—never this—nothing.

B:

You've got my word on that.

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P:

Right on. And I'm sure when you tell Sarah—I'm sure she's overhearing everything we're talking about—she'll agree with me.

In this, Puschi was correct. The next portion of the tape records him having an even more pointed conversation with Sarah. There are only two more tapes from 1989. Mostly there are conversations in which Balthazar and Sarah talk to Franzel further about their situation, and there is one formal Q & A sessions, in which Balthazar asks Franzel questions, Franzel answers patiently, and Puschi translates. Balthazar's questions range from questioning his skills in reading Tarot since he is otherwise virtually illiterate (to which Franzel assures him that his form of visual reading and vocabulary is correct—a subtle irony there) to the meaning of the angles of Egyptian skirts in ancient Egyptian art. Not recorded is an exorcism, performed on the full moon, to relieve Balthazar and Sarah of a demon—"A creature with horns standing seven feet tall" whose "hands were that of bones"—which had appeared to them during a Tarot reading after the four Princesses of the Lower Arcana, cards designating the four elements in their elemental form (as their constellations do in the heavens), came up in the reading, thereby, Balthazar explained, casting a magical circle. The demon told them to sell one of their properties to get out of debt, which they did, but said he would return, and after six months there were more dematerializations. When they've finished describing the event to Franzel, he suggests the exorcism, then casually asks, "Do you want to drink a beer?" Also recorded is the lesson in which Franzel taught Balthazar shielding. Unfortunately the tape turns on and off throughout, but the overall exercise is none-the-

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less clear. I will return to shielding later. Unrecorded is a return visit to Franzel, after they have visited Balthazar's family and sent Puschi home on a plane. Disturbed by Puschi's behavior, Balthazar decided to break his vow of silence. He did not tell Franzel much, but he told him enough.

B:

So when we put Puschi back on the plane, we came back to Franzel, and I said, "Let's get a better translator here." And he says, "Puschi's a vampire! Stay away from him! He's done much black magic in India. Treat him neutral." Then we got Anderel over—Anderel speaks English and German, too—and found out that Puschi was really fucking things up for me. Franzel did the correct magic. Then I went home. Then I went back to Egypt. And then I went back home. But then dematerializations started taking place again. So I went back to Franzel.

The second trip to visit Franzel occurred in September 1990. He arrived and immediately Franzel performed an exorcism. The event is recorded in diary form by Balthazar at the end of the first 1990 Tape:

B:

Today is one of the most incredible days of my life. Before I go to bed, I want to record everything that has happened to me in my own words. September 1st, as I arrived at Franzel's House, Anderel, was here already and we just walked out. The preparedness of these Germans to feed me first and then to make sure I have the ceremony immediately. But what he had done is he had took his dowsing rod, and he even needed a chair to get all the way up there, and he doused me. He found a blockage in my third eye, my power chakra, and my root chakra. He said something's definitely there. He brought out then a chair, and this chair's made of leather—beautiful chair, but it was even more than that. He had all this lamb's wool on it. It's an electrical chair. The lamb's wool connects the energy. And then he began the ceremony.

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Right out of a book, which I will probably soon read into this tape, he pounded his sword. He made his stars, his pentagrams. He invoked in the name of Yehovah. He did all this dressed in his green robe and a biar hat—would you believe!— coming to a point. Nice wool hat. As he touched each chakra at an earlier point in the ceremony with his sword, I could feel the electrical energy coming through. Boy was I shaking! And now I'm going to read out of this book, which is an amazing book. Any word I cannot say I'm going to spell into this anyway. It's written in Old English script. It's one of those books called G-o-e-t-i-a. It's the Book of Geometry? Geomera? Goematic? Toe? G-o-e-t-i-a of Solomon the King, written by Aleister Crowley. This is the book I am looking at. Written in 1904. This page is interesting. It has conjuring circles, the pentagram, it has the four alters, has the directions. Published by the E-q-u-i-n-o-x Booksellers and Publishers, Ltd. 4 Holland Street, London, West Eith. Printed by the Garden City Press, Ltd., Ledgeworth, H-e-r-t-f-o-r-shire S-h-i-r-e. S G 6 I J F. Edition: 1976! Let's see what he says. On page seven: "I invoke the boneless one, the that didst create the earth, the that d-i-s-t create the earth and the heavens. The that dist create the night and the day. The that didst create the darkness and the light. Thou art d-s-o-r-r-o-n-o-p-h-r-i-s whom no man hath seen at any time. Thou art I-a-p-6-s. Thou art d-i-s-t-i-n-g-u-is-h-e-d between the just and the unjust. Thou dismayed the female and the male—thou didst make man and female. Though didst produce the seed of the fruit. Thou didst for men to love one another and to hate one another. I am"—god, here's a hard!—"M-o-s-h-e, the prophet unto whom thou didst command thy mystic ceremony of Israel. Thou does produce the moist and the dry and that which nourish all creatures. Hear thou me for I am the angel to P-a-p-h-r-o." That last "O" has a hyphen. "O-s-o-r-r-o-a-p-h-r-i-s is thy true name, named down to the prophets of Israel." Then it has the letter Nun. If no-one knows, that's number 13. "Hear me." I don't know the letters. "T-h-i-r-o: r-h-e-i-b-e-t: a -t-h-e-1-e-b-e-r-s-e-t-h: -i-a-t-h-a: a-b-e-u: e-h-i: t-h-i-a-s-o-e: i-b: t-h-i-a-o. " And then he announces it in the Tetragrammaton's name. This was the ceremony. Bless the world for Sir Franzel. This man's amazing. I'll put this book aside. I'll have to get it myself. Om Shanti Om.

The tape is turned off, then on again.

Oh yes, they fed me three times in four hours! Once before the ceremony, and twice after. No, we had kugen and cake twice and a meal and once before the 105

ceremony—they fed me four times in four hours. They fed me four times in four hours, plus did the ceremony! They eat a lot around here. Bye!

The chair which Balthazar was seated in is called an "od chair". According to Balthazar, in Bavarian tradition a child is given a lambskin which they then keep with them their whole life to collect their energy, or od. Then when they are adults, the lambskin is made into a chair. By putting Balthazar on Franzel's od chair, they were putting him within Franzel's aura. The entire ceremony, the script taken from The Goetia, was performed as he sat in the chair. As stated on the back cover of a 1997 edition of The Goetia:

Since classical Greece, Goetia has meant "low" magic as distinct from the high magic of theurgy, it is "applied" rather than "pure" magic, addressing practical human concerns—from obtaining advancement and wealth to finding love and knowledge. The manuscripts from which this edition was prepared circulated in the spiritual underground of Baroque England. They were written in English vernacular rather than the Latin of scholars, further evidence of the popular character of the grimoire. It is a manual of Solomonic astrological sorcery that gives detailed instructions for the ritual precautions, requisites and incantations necessary to evoke the aid of its 72 spirits, which are described in detail. This book is the work of the two most influential magicians of the late 19th and 20th centuries [Aleister Crowley and Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers].

Demons of the Goetia can be evoked to cast spells, and they can also be evoked to undo them, as in this case of exorcism. Balthazar says that at the end of the ceremony, when Franzel said, "Come out!", the spirit threw Franzel back and the front door opened. Then Franzel and Anderel pushed the spirit out with brooms.

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The 1990 tape recordings begin right after the ceremony. Franzel, through Anderel as translator, instructs Balthazar in "discharging" energy he may have picked up in the form o f Tmagaspores" (imagination spores) during Tarot readings by running his hands under cold water or putting them in earth, when Franzel suddenly cries out, apparently falls to the ground. He starts speaking in trance in Russian, addressing Balthazar as if he is seeing him in a past life as a Russian mystic, "Raskolnikov." Once Franzel came back to his normal self, they played back the tape to him and he translated it, but they were unable to record his translation as the tape recorder was in use. Says Balthazar of the experience in the diary portion of the tape:

A spirit came out of me and struck him flat against the wall, and he started speaking Russian! Man, here I was—the spirit in me is a Russian mystic! Gave the name earlier on the other tape. At first the spirit came out of me, it was quite surprised that I didn't understand Russian or what he was saying. But what he said was that I was a very good man and a very powerful magician, that I was in the direct path in the course, and the information was given of a certain stick, a certain wood, that I had to wear around my neck to absorb certain energies, and all would then be correct.

No mention seemed to be made of the fact that Raskolnikov is the protagonist of Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. The wood was elder, and much of the remainder of the tape is taken up with trying to determine the English word for it and if it grew in the United States, which Balthazar maintained it did not. However, Elder does grow in the United States, and Balthazar planted some in his back yard when he returned home without having to smuggle some as he had done with the King's Fern spores he had gathered at King Ludwig's castle in 1989. Similarly, much of the next tape concerns

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trying to find the English name for "geranium" and describing how magic squares which Franzel would make for him could be placed in pots of geraniums, the pots kept at certain distances from each other, to bring him wealth and his wife a child. Throughout most of the tapes they eat a lot, they drink, friends come and go, and Franzel plays the zither. Conversations wander as Balthazar tells Franzel about rainbow gatherings and gets Franzel to bless everything from his mala beads to a lock of Sarah's hair. Franzel explains that while he was never married he lived with a woman for seventeen years, to which Balthazar counters that he's lived with five women that way, which causes a lot of laughter. Of the more significant conversations, three stand out. In one, Franzel is describing to Balthazar the "opening of the gate" exercise which yogi's demonstrate to their students to show them how the kundalini rises and finds that Balthazar has already experienced it. They then compare notes and discuss samadi, a Hindu term for a state of enlightenment. Franzel notes:

If you're connected with samadhi, you see the atom, you see the cosmos, and all is one. Once in my life I was in that state. There's the subconscious, and there is the over-conscious, and that's when I saw it. It was a fraction of a second, but it changed me.

He goes on to explain:

The student knows that the world is a theater. In the body, he channels the power into the thumb, and if you touch the other men on this point they cannot hear, only see. But he sees more than normally, and that's when he notices the world is only theater. 108

Here Franzel is speaking of shaktipat, the Hindu practice of the direct transference of energy from one consciousness to another. I asked Balthazar if the practice was similar to a laying on of hands, but he said no. Later in the visit, Franzel gives Balthazar shaktipat. I will present this material further in the next section. The next significant moment is not so much a conversation as Franzel's demonstrating levitation with a cane. "Is he a good man?" Franzel teasingly asks the cane, apparently suspended in mid-air. "Yes," is Franzel's reply. Meanwhile Balthazar excitedly proclaims, "The cane is shaking it's head yes!" There is a loud clatter, followed by laughter. Balthazar states, "It fell on the floor! It must be a stoned man!" Silence. Then Balthazar proclaims, "He's rubbing the cane now, and he's levitating it!" Franzel asks who he's talking to, and Balthazar replies, "I'm talking to the machine." Then gasps, "My god, this is amazing!" Someone offers him a beer. Balthazar asks Franzel to show him how to do it, Balthazar tries, and there is another loud clattering sound, followed by more laughter. "Doesn't do it with me," says Balthazar, to which Franzel replies with a German rhyme: "Art is hard. Art comes from'can', to be able to do. If it came from 'wanting to' it wouldn't amount to much." The third significant moment is a long exchange in which Balthazar finally comes forward with the specifics of some of what Puschi has taught him. Now it is Franzel's turn for excited exclamations. I have presented the conversation in transcript form (B = Balthazar, F = Franzel, A = Anderel):

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Puschi told me to discharge to put my hands in salt water. This is not discharging! This is charging! And then he told me— That's the opposite! Well, this is what he told me. I'm sure. And then he told me to go down two times. Once— That's not from me. It's what Puschi taught him. And then you put your hands in the water again. This is wrong. This is not from me. And do it three times. That is from Puschi? Yes. Not from me. Ok. Well, this is what Puschi told me you had said. No! This is not from Franzel. Impossible! This is charging. That's the opposite. This way you make it stronger. Franzel never told Puschi things like this. So I was charging and making things worse. Yeah. I knew the Tarot was right. It said that a black magician went after me or a black cult. 110

F:

[inaudible]

A:

He said nothing is more sensitive than the human testicle. And if there is a black magic on you, you would be impotent.

B:

I was impotent for three years with doctors testing me out, and before this last disappearance I went impotent for a month before.

They discuss more things Puschi has taught him.

B:

I have been doing the Sator Arepo Tenet Opera Rotas after my meditations with two other lines. The two other lines are Ropena Parot Sharena Rasha, which is making an X over them.

F:

The form is wrong.

B:

I have been doing it that way for fifteen years. Maybe not fifteen. Maybe it's thirteeen years. But as long as he's been doing the crack.

F:

Including the two other lines?

B:

Yes.

F:

That is False!

It turned out that Puschi had instructed him to undo the protective spell as he was making it. And it went on and on. Franzel had to correct the instructions.

B:

Let me tell you how I met Puschi. I had just done a ceremony with the Tarot where I had done a visual conjuration of the God Baal. I mean, you saw the flames, the Akasha fire, and another voiced came through me. This is before I met Puschi. Then a day or two later I am walking up the street, and I meet Puschi with a red hat and a long beard, and he comes up to me and goes, "I was told I was going to meet you. He said that Franzel in a trance said that Puschi would go to America and meet me. Ill

F:

That's true.

B:

He was a good man then. Puschi was a good man. His first teachings were good, I think. We made the battery with the Rattan reed and put it in the water at the bend—in the curve—

F:

That's good!

B:

—and it helped me. Well, at least he did one good thing. He told me about Franzel, and I've seen him.

Balthazar went home both relieved and shaken.

B:

So I had to go back to Franzel to get the things taken care of to go back home that I could go to California to then go to Japan to go back to California to go home again, and then I felt really sick, and exhausted, and that was the end of the relationship. Sarah and I were just two diseased people laying in bed sick next to each other with Candida and the Nile Virus, too. And we had dematerializations still taking place. What could we say to each other, except she looked at me and said, "I hate you," [laughs] and abandoned me. I was so fucking sick it was ridiculous. And after I got so sick, I got better! We weren't transferring a disease back and forth, and I got correct doctors and tried to pull my life back together. And broken hearted as I could be, Franzel died right before that. His lasts words were that he'd come over and try to help me. Then he died. Prostate cancer. That's it. That's my relationship. After he died, I only talked to him like two or three more times, [laughs] Sarah and I broke up. Dematerializations did not stop. There was about two more about them. But I continued doing the shielding exercises and everything else. I had a connection with Mantak Chia, spent the weekend and another day or two extra with him when he was teaching in New York City learning some more shielding, pulling it more together. And then, recent history, dematerializations stopped.

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About three months later on his next trip to Egypt with Power Places Tours, coming out of the Great Pyramid one morning at sunrise after eight hours of ceremonies, the 70-year old psychic and yogi from Oregon, Lutie Francesca, who knew nothing of Franzel, told Balthazar she had an impression that in his last life he had been a Russian mystic named Raskalnikov. (Life History #6: 6; Life History #9: 1-7; Travelogue #3: 2-7 and 10-11; Franzel #l-#8)

11. Practices 4: Shielding

Balthazar's face-to-face meetings with his teacher were few, but they were to him pivotal, as was his larger trip to Europe in general.

B:

We had a structured lesson each day I was there. When I say Yee-eye-oh-va, that whole thing that's structured my life was one lesson with Franzel. Just one. I mean he was amazing.

Balthazar is here referring to his first visit to Franzel, when Franzel taught him "shielding", a process of building himself in the likeness of the Tetragrammaton, much as he had previously been taught to construct a genii or battery or how he would conduct a Tarot reading. This process places the magus in the position of creator who creates the world through creating himself. This, said Franzel, is the highest form of psychic selfdefense.

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B:

"I got the keys of the Tetragrammaton, of Yee-ah-eye-o-vah, from Franzel—the sounds. I even have it on tape, the lesson. After that I went home. Then I went to California and Japan. Worked as a psychic in Japan. Casa, my translator's job was to translate psychics for the Emporer. He was working with Mantok Chia. I told him about my problems of dematerializations. He says, "I know a guy who can shield you up and has been studying this stuff. I've been his translator. I'll talk to him, personally, and set up a meeting." I then went home to Philadelphia and Mantok Chia was teaching a seminar [laughs] the next month in New York City. So I went up to him at the seminar and said, "Casa said—." And he said, "Oh yes, I was told I was going to talk to you. What about?" And he basically said, "Listen. You have to combine shielding if you're going to practice magic, too. You have to learn this." And he gave me some information, and I went: Ok. And I did it—and he was wrong. Because what he was saying where the nervous system was and where I was saying the nervous system was—how would I say it? Franzel said to me that my drawing of the Tree of Life was the first correct one he has ever seen.

R:

And what you mean by that is its placement in the human body.

B:

Yes.

R:

You've told me that most people put the power center over Da-ath, and they lift everything up, probably because they think it should line up with the Chakra system, and it doesn't—or not quite. You've said it's a different, but compatible system.

B:

Like they've got Kether out of the head. Right. One of my reasonings is that since they didn't draw a picture of it for a thousand years, everybody lost the image of what it's about. So anyway, I then got the information, did some of his exercises, and started modifying it to the information I got from Franzel, and went back to Franzel and got the seal of approval. I just had to go around the world to get it.

R:

So you took what Franzel told you. You also spoke to Mantak Chia. He gave you exercises. Your reorganized them to your knowledge of Qabalah. You went back, you showed Franzel the full form, and Franzel said, "That is correct."

B:

Correct. Ginnel.

R:

When he said, "That is correct," did he mean: ok, you've uncovered the thing that I do and that other people do, or did he say you have uncovered a truth that is truth for you?

B:

I did it. It was right.

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Balthazar then demonstrated shielding to me by isolating the stages.

B:

I liked how my Tai Chi instructor did the whole form, and you could practice along, and then he said: "Now let's just break down each movement." Then he'd go through one of the 108 postures a week. So it took about two years. Tai means "peace", chi means "energy", and it's the martial art that has no combative form. You can't do anything in Tai Chi to hurt anybody, but if they throw a punch, you can take their force of energy and add yours to it and come back to them. So it's always drawing their energy into a solid form. It's the most intellectual form of martial arts because you don't have to be strong to be powerful. All you have to be is mathematical. And he would break it down scientifically. He'd break it down as an exercise, a movement of energy. And then he'd break it all the way down to its application in self defense. And of course he might even have a story about it, too. Mythology. What the story's about.

R:

So the same sort of teaching method that you would use if you were describing Qabalah or Tarot.

B:

Yeah. And of course it's like how they describe the lotus flower or the sacred artichoke. You keep peeling it away until you get to the heart.

The process of shielding begins, like most magic, with casting a circle.

B:

The directions are as follows, according to the great Map of Nut, which is what the gods wrote in the heavens: east is water, south is earth, west is air, and north is fire. I am a fundamentalist pagan! The calendar starts the first day of Spring as the New Year. The directions are there, in the heavens, written very clear, and I can't change what the gods wrote.

Balthazar makes this distinction because the Heidelberg School of Hermetic Qabalah does not cast the circle in the same manner that most pagan groups do. While the 115

directions and polarities demarcated within them remain essentially the same, the elements are reversed. Thus for example for Wicca east is air, south is fire, west is water, and north is earth. Both have logical explanations why their system is correct, mostly having to do with associations of the seasons, wherein east is spring, south is summer, west is fall, and north is winter for each. Balthazar claims that his reasoning, while it includes this, ultimately supersedes such associative logic because it is written in the star map indicated by Tarot. The constellations which Europeans follow to this day date back to the Babylonians and the pre-Egyptians and thus from a perspective from somewhere along the crescent of the Black Sea region to the Middle East and North Africa. Wicca and most other Neo-Pagan practices today, meanwhile, borrows from primarily Celtic and Icelandic traditions far to the north. Perhaps this accounts for a difference in associations and other reasoning. What is notable, however, is that the essential polarities remain intact in both versions.

B:

You have your disc before you, an altar that is well charged with magical instruments, stones, talismans, so many various things. Now the Hebrew name for God is El, but basically you have this sound that everyone does: Aum, shalom, amen. It's the eternal sound of Aum. Aum is water and you're facing east. Right behind it is west, air. And you've got the light-giving power from the north, and you've got the dark in the south. So you've got a positive and a negative, north and south, and you've got a power of a vibrational wave going through, and when it come back around, to the east the sum total of this vibration is the radiant vibration of Aum, the consistency as an outer shell of an aura around you. But then within that is "Yee-ah-aye-o-vah". Now it goes like "Eeyaom— Yeeahayeov" [vibrates voice]. I mean if I was to pluck a rubber band or a string, you always get this vibrational sound like this. And what it is, is that you've got "Yeeeeeeeee" is a rising sound. It's the sound of fire. An expanding sound from the lung area is air: ''AWmhhhhhhh''. A contracting sound, water: "Eyee!" And a sound going down: "Ooooooouuu", earth. So you have E, A, I, O, U as the vowel sounds of the fluctuation of the name of God and that vibration sound gives off the sound of Aum. Yee-ah-aye-o-vah—you feel that vibration all over. 116

Aum—you feel that expansion of energy. And it's very nice to go "Aum" and visualize the water and it's flow. The magnificent Pool of Nun being stirred in the black disc. And therefore what I'm creating here in my own mind as I'm waving my wand, I am saying that the mathematical form of creation is happening with these vibrational sounds. I am seeing a vibration come off and create two polarities of negative and positive that then have to be pulled together in a flux and come through and go As Above—and as it shoots up, it then pulls down on itself by the mere force of one direction causes a reaction to the other: So Below. And you see yourself now as a Tetragrammaton looking into the black disc. Anexiton Pyramiton Tetragrammaton. And you wave your wand, and you draw out the conceptualization. Anexiton—what does that mean? "I draw out." Pyramaton—"the energy". Tetragrammmaton—in the name of the form of the Tetragrammaton, which is what I am sending out an energy into. So here I will say, "Anexiton, Pyramaton Tetragrammaton, god forms that I have served and served me so well, by divine providence, I, the voice of Hermes Trismegistus, invoke to you and pray unto you." You have to recognize that you're doing a schitzophrenic thing. You are God commanding the forces, and you as a human are presenting yourself as a human to the gods, all at the same time. What a situation to get into—a multidimensional consciousness of recognition of each word and how each sentence is implied and can progress. I do my seal of the Sator Arepo Tenet Opera Rotas. I've done my request. I then put my wand down. But we have to conceptualize the four elements: water, earth, air, and fire. We have to conceptualize As Above and So Below. And therefore what we have put ourselves in is a contained field. But what we really have done is look at ourselves as the mathematics of the Tree of Life. And doing that we are creating a Torus around us, which is the mathematics of the completion of the entire Tarot. We are now a four polar magnet, which is the Tree of Life in the center being manifested. We are also eliminating the consciousness that, "Duh, I have to go to work tomorrow," and instead we're manifesting the consciousness that we are gods. And therefore we don't have a concept of suffering or being born or dying, as much as we are realizing that we are using these mathematical forms of energy—the Tree of Life, our electrical nervous system—to project an energy that was done at the dawn of creation: the conceptualization of matter. And we are going to send our electrical energy into a black hole and come out and be manifested. That's what we are going to do—as an exercise.

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Once the circle is cast, completing the construction of one Tree, the Tree is then constructed twice again. First the magus, assuming the position of the devotee ascending the spiritual planes, constructs the tree from bottom to top, the traditional position of the human aspirant who starts from earth and ascends to heaven. What follows is an amalgam of Balthzar's verbal commands and my incorporation of his gestural maneuvers.

B:

There is a common stance in Tai Chi known as the Deer Stance. This is when you can imagine a triangle where your two legs are parallel, a little further out than from your shoulders, and you've taken your tail bone and turned it in. And you say, "I draw Malcuth up to Yesod, the Foundation and the Strength." When you draw Malcuth in up to Yesod, you take your right hand and you push up at the perineum and in a straight line, you line yourself up, breathing up to the top of your head. Then you take your hand, and what you're doing is your rubbing the line of nerve [from the crotch to the hip], and you say: "Hod, the Glory." Then "Netzach, Victory," and you're doing the same thing. [Folding hands now over stomach] "Tipareth, Beauty." And you then take from the hole— from your belly button—a strand [between thumb and forefinger going out to each side]: "Geburah, Justice; Chesed, Mercy". [Then bring hands together] "Da'ath the heart". Da'ath is the heart, and you put your hands [in prayer position] over the heart chakra. [Pivoting then at the elbows so that each hand comes back out to the shoulders:] "Binah, Understanding; Chokma, Wisdom" and [hands back in prayer position, but positioned now over the nose and mouth, thumbs bent under the nose so that the fingers cover it] "Kether, the Crown." The Crown ends up being the first chakra that you breathe into three times through your nose. [Hands are then kept in the same position, but moved up so that thumbs rest on top of bridge of nose and eye sockets.] Then you take your two thumbs, you push [the thumb knuckles] into your third eye [the point between the eyes], and you push for three more breathes, and the two conceptual points, electrically, are your palms. Your third one's here [the third eye]. You then put it [the hands in the prayer position] here—top of the head [like the flames in Buddhist paintings he has mentioned before]—three more breathes, but breathing up through the top of your head, and you're going to feel an energy in the palms of your hands.

The magus now begins the final step of constructing the tree from top to bottom. 118

B:

You then take the energy, go up, then down like this [separates hands, turning palms outward, and brings hands out and down, arms not fully stretched out from the shoulders, then pivots arms at elbows to bring hands in front of the chest, palms down, fingertips about an inch apart], and bring the two fingers to here, over to the throat chakra, and you feel that electricity out of the palms of your hands, and you go, "Yeeeeeee," and you raise your hands all the way up [circles hands forward, up, and out, then down again in front of him], and what you're going to try to imagine is fire coming out. You're going to start feeling electricity shooting out, and that's the fire. You then turn your palms going out and go "Ahhhhhhhh" [circles hands forward and out until arms are fully outstretched at the shoulder, palms pointing back towards the body]. Here you're visualizing wind, clouds, air. [Moves into a squat, with hands clenched, fingertips digging into palms, and elbows pressing into inner thighs]. This exercise now is called The Crow. It's written quite well by Mantok Chia. But what you're doing here is you're grabbing the energy in. You're going to try to tighten now every single nerve ending in your body. You take your fist and you push on your two conceptual points [of the palms, digging in with the fingertips], you go down like this [into a squat], and you let all the air out. You're drawing your stomach up that I can't talk to you while I'm telling you how to do this! You're drawing your stomach up. You blow all your air out. You're in a bouncing position, and you're looking at the black disc, and you've got your stomach totally tight [envisoning rushing water], and the sound is "Iiiii!" And at that point you draw in the two candles as one and go straight into the disc and shoot. You're sending your chi straight through the disc. Hold the position as long as you can hold the breath, and after that point, you turn your palms down [reaching forward, circles hands out and down, then back in] and say, "Ouuuuuuuu" [envisioning now the earth below].

The magus is now standing above the Earth, now formed by him beneath his feet—the vantage point of God.

B:

You then take your hands up like this [hands brought up to Da'am/heart chakra, in prayer position] and make the sound "Shhhhh" [sound made by forcibly exhaling with tip of tongue curled up to touch the roof of the mouth]. You're now circulating the energy, and calling the spirit in. The sound of the spirit is Shin, and you let the spirit go through. It's like the death rattle when you die. When the spirit leaves you, you hear it. And that's Shin. What this basically is, is you're practicing to die. But you're always trying to keep yourself on the level of experience of consciousness between life and death and ruling in it, living in it, 119

conjuring in it, drawing the spirits from the other side and you being the channel from that borderline of consciousness. And that's the whole purpose of the exercise. And now pick up your wand and sword. I want you to imagine yourself as a mummy [crosses arms over chest in traditional mummy position]. Dead. But the whole thing is that you're feeling the opening at the top of your head, and I want you to pretend that you're a pendulum. That the string is so high that you're at the bottom of a pendulum and you're in your mummy and you're looking at that white light, you wanna go there, and you're feeling your spirit with a long strand of trying going so far, high to infinity. Some people put a dot on their ceiling right in front of their altar to look up at. But you project up to that point, and you feel your spirit just go phewww. You are releasing your spirit to the highest point possible right out of your body, and you're going up. And you can feel the breath coming in and the spirit leaving out, and you're looking at that point so high on the ceiling, man, so high in the stars, that star straight above you. Got a big breath. Time to hold! And you go down. And you let your shoulders drop, like back, and you're feeling a magnetic pull through your system. And you have your wand and your sword like this. And you have that little statue picking up that magnetic form 'cause you drew the spirit all the way down through you and into that thing. At this point you make your arms into a circle, palms pressed outwards at the level of your eyes, fingers slightly spread, not quite touching, and looking between them into the black disc—or I have a statue with a genii in it in front of my black disc, and you can use this either to conjure your energy into the disc or a spirit into a statue, and with my first breath I say, "Raaaaaaa", and with the second I say, "Maaaaaaa." Looking through the space between my fingers. Charging up my genii. And what you should see is a blue light surround the statue or it's head or come out from it's eyes. Ra, which is [the Hebrew letter] Resh, light. Ma, [the Hebrew letter] Mem, manifestation. Light manifestation. And you're looking at the black disc into the light, and suddenly you lose your balance and take a step forward. And at that point when you step forward what has happened is that the spirit has now drawn you into the black disc and given you permission to do the next step. At that point prayer is good. I usually say, "Listen, forgive me for blowing the opportunities of the past. Thank you for the opportunities of the present. May I not be so stupid as to miss the opportunities of the future." Sort of covers everything. I mean, prayer is a pretty personal thing. You know? (Life History #3, p. 24-25; Life History 4: 7-8 & 19-20; Life History #5: 14-26).

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Shielding was placed at the beginning of Balthazar's nightly routine to psychically protect and connect him, uniting within him both poles of creation, the creative and the receptive, and thus engendering him as magus, the alpha and omega of his reality—a fitting prelude to the astral projection in which he manifests his own and God's will as one.

12. Final Notes on Franzel

B:

You'll find him to be a very loving, delightful guy. What I admired most about Franzel was that I get so pissed off, for example, at somebody that's hurt me. I'll think about that and get emotional about it. And he can have an opinion, but he won't gain emotion. His mind doesn't create extra emotions. He's very focused and direct. He wasn't hard. He was very sweet.

R:

Who was Franzel's teacher?

B:

I don't know. He was born being able to read Latin and do these things. He had a habit, as far at least as I was told by Anderel, as a child of moving things around.

R:

Of having psychic powers to—

B:

Move things. He would play with toys, and toys would move for him.

R:

Ok, so you don't know what his particular—who his teacher was, how he was initiated, etc., but, by what he has said, he comes through the Heidelberg School.

B:

Well, he is a Heidelberg—that's the school. I mean his lodge and whatever it's at.

R: B:

So his lodge being the lodge you were initiated in? I guess so. Obviously I haven't followed up a lot on this. My life has become very complicated.

R:

I understand that. I find it interesting that this was never at issue or—

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B:

I wasn't worried about lineage as much as trying to have these dematerializations stop in my life and piles of sulfur and all this bad fortune. I was more interested in saving my ass frankly!

R:

You came with certain knowledge of the Tarot before you met Franzel.

B:

Oh absolutely! I was able to do a full conjuration of a spirit—visible—and I was able to do the Tarot in such a degree that it's more than you've ever seen me do— way beyond. I was just going full blast—the whole show.

R:

And Franzel confirmed things you had done.

B:

Yes.

R:

Did he also teach you new things with the Tarot, besides connecting to him?

B:

No. I was better than him. I could teach him. Let me say a few things about Franzel. The one thing we can say about mysticism is that the modern age has brought it down that they believe it's pure superstition, and they're looking at it curiously. At the same point, a lot of mystic traditions have grown up separately from each other, without communication—yoga and Qabalah, for example—and they're starting to blend together because the world's knowledge is blending together. Please under no circumstances should you think that Franzel is a master yogi. Nor could he do the yoga positions I do or did he read Tarot. I am a different mystic than he is.

R:

He didn't read Tarot?

B:

Oh, yes he did, but no where near as good. I mean I developed my entire form of knowledge of the Tarot by tripping my brains out without any contact with Franzel.

R:

Prior to meeting him?

B:

Yes.

R:

And so when you met him, you had already developed this form?

B:

Yes.

R:

And when you showed him the form, which I assume you did—

B:

I showed him most of the form.

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R:

His word was, "That is correct.

B:

Or, "Wow." Listen, Franzel's a traditional magician. I am a total idiot next to him. Franzel could have a Ph.D. plus. I mean, look, he spoke all these languages, read all these biblical languages, did all these ceremonies and various things, knew Crowley inside and out and ancient manuscripts on top of it inside and out, and the spirits listened to him. Where this guy came from—and he was incarnated to be able to do this. He was amazing. At the same point, I'm an LSD hippy that had an incredibly mystical chart, that was very dyslexic, but very conceptual, and I got involved in mysticism. It made sense. My tradition was no tradition, except diving into it, with no real intent. It was just my nature. My nature went so far and needed instruction, and I was proud to say that somebody cared enough to send somebody to get me, except I messed that up, too. I would have loved to have been intelligent enough to study under Franzel seriously. Maybe another incarnation. But at the same point I mean—he was a seer. He was a mystic. He was a man that went into trance a lot, and he was a seer. He had little inventions around the house that made electrical energy do this or that. He was a conceptualist. He had—you know, the thing even about magicians or magic or the psychic work is that the way that our entire society approaches it is like a circus. "Oh you're psychic! Tell me something about myself!" And the unfortunate real truth about magic is that things usually happen that you have no control over (Life History #2, pp. 27-8, Life History #4: 8, Life History #5, pp. 26-28).

13. Franzel's Tarot Reading

NOTES ON TYPOGRAPHY: This reenactment begins with Balthazar speaking generally about the reading. I have indicated when the actual reading begins with the words: [BEGIN PHYSICAL PLANE READING]. This reading has two levels, the physical plane and the mental plane. Normally a full reading has three levels, the third being the spiritual plane, but Balthazar was not able to finish this reading, as he explains. The ending of the physical plane level of the reading and the beginning and ending of the mental plane level of the reading are similarly noted. Asides—comments on the reading or otherwise made during these portions of the reading—are noted in italics. Otherwise, extraneous comments, such as those with which Balthazar begins are not similarly italicized. Line breaks indicate stylistic pauses in the reading that segment the information. 123

B:

It's funny, it's such a bizarre story, it could be totally as a fairy tale. You could tell the story without any of this documentation, and people wouldn't believe it. But here it is. And I have told about this reading, So he said, "Give me a reading." And I was gonna give him one that knocked his socks off. Frankly, I did. He told me it was the most evolved, advanced reading he had ever seen by anyone able to do it on the planet. Too bad I was only a third through it. But he sat down and he chose The Magician on the physical plane, Love and Security [on the mental plane], and Wisdom spiritually. He was concerned about moving to a retirement community. He was getting old and all of that. I have the reading written down before me.

[BEGIN PHYSICAL PLANE]

Within the mind we do define the Ten of Cups. This is bliss, and it is of the holy, sacred Tetragrammaton overflowing to be able to give, the power to put demons in their place. Such power one has, and the light of the spirit of that of bliss. Accept this, oh spirit, for this is thy destiny to be so blessed as to put demons in their place and purge misery, Straighten out messes for people, magically. You should be pleased, Pleased in your spiritual awareness that you have the state of bliss and the creative force of surprises about ready to come. The place you're in, you're retired. In your home there's a nice energy of good feeling, surprisingly. You love to play, and it's a very fulfilling life now. The spirit is flowing and moving, too, and you are happy in being able to bless what you do. You, in the past, YOU, were pleased. The fourteenth card in the fourteenth place! Tsk tsk tsk tsk tsk tsk tsk. An ill-created space. The hand of God is working with you, it is true. It's restricting your happiness and your bliss. You're ability to bless, to straighten out all these messes. For YOU in the future are going to have heaven's hand come upon you 124

And Die. Tsk tsk tsk tsk tsk. A Transformation—abundance of feelings of such revealings and a giving up of one's life. One's wish: one would love to play, but the spiritual fantasies—hey. Giving up life is death, and The judgment is: that's the end of fortune. The reasoning is—it might be crazy a bit, Not being able to see, but what it really is is a strong Transformation of the end of energy and action. Yup, that's what death is. [laughs] I believe the card in the 21st place is VII, and it says: The Energy is now going to be depleted. You're gonna be dead, but the reflection is, it'll be in harmony with nature and all things will fall in harmony.

[END PHYSICAL PLANE LEVEL OF READING] That's not what I wanted to hear at all! [laughs] Oh shit! I finally get to meet the guy in the body form, hang out with him. What do I get out of it? I'm selfish. I have dematerializations. My life is being ruined. I can't function in making a year with a profit in it because I'm just so panicked at this point, too. Even if it stopped, I wouldn't know it stopped because I'm so freaked out. It's just I believe the laws of physics should apply in my life! So he shuffled the cards again. It's interesting right now in the one I Ching. The Creative, you mean? Um hm. So he shuffles the cards again.

[BEGIN MENTAL PLANE LEVEL OF READING]

To reflect all this— And I really wish I could have read the healing part and told him how to continue living. It would have saved my ass, and it would have saved his, too. And I have something to say about my teacher, and I believe it's true, and it's one of those things that you just don't want to say because you don V want to be struck down, but anyway. 125

The reflection of all this is all things are in harmony. To oneself your energy's being cut off. It's called the state of Death. The thought to this thought of your own being is: this may take you by surprise. It might even stop you from being at a state of Bliss of spirit. "Why?!" It would draw out the playing and the feelings that you do have, for in action you have to really deal with this. The fact is that it is the path of life. No longer to be able to play, you'll have to give up what you used to do in many ways. This is pretty funny 'cause I conjured him once after he was dead. Your reasoning? You might fantasize or desire things that are different, it is true, and that might take a very strong will, but unfortunately—well, unfortunately, what is coming to you is— is just—is a high, sacred, holy new experience and act of consciousness, for you are moving into, from what you desired to be— you're moving into your judgment and where you shall succeed— what consciousness you shall advance to in the next life. This is getting pretty heavy. Ace of Cups. You are fulfilled. This is a good decision, what you've done in your life. You've enjoyed it. You like to play. Seven of Swords. In all due belief, you're a very sensuous and good feeling person. You've felt a lot, and in this you have succeeded to even your own surprise, how much you've enjoyed life. Goodfor him! I wish I was him all the time in my life. Now you're going to take some time. You may be in a slight state of confusion, but all shall be fulfilled for you may think of this as a bad authorization, but the value you do see, before thee, of your own being, You have been going into something that— it's like a seductive thing that draws you out and hurts your own being— like a ball buster, and draws of your own being. 126

[END MENTAL PLANE READING] I said to him, "My conclusion is, you can stop this, but there are outside forces drawing you in, except your death would be anyway. But there are certain things you need to do." You'll note his card is upside down. I remember making an issue and actually getting an appropriate I Ching to read to him, but we never got that far because I had described the Princess of Wands in the genitals upside down as a whore—outside influences—and the Queen of Swords, which represents ball busting, upside down in the genitals, as a ball buster, and that's probably what messed up the reading, but that was the way it was to be read, and I couldn't have read it different. I have always regretted how I conducted myself, which is crudely with such a refined human being and teacher, but I've also been raised to be a street thug, and quite frankly I'm worse now than I was then. I personally think that Franzel blew it and could have prolonged his life in this translation. His negative cards was basically the mouth, which was talking about the turning of energy around and bringing things into harmony, and outside influences upon him. And therefore it talked about creating forms of magical practices. He didn't live much longer. What can you do? I blew it. I really did. Ok, so that's his reading.

14. Postcript

After Franzel's death, Balthazar continued to make his living primarily as a Tarot reader. He worked summers at the Pennsylvania Renaissance Faire until 1996, performing a cultural identity in fact in no way his won, but whose histories with Tarot intersected, as, Balthazar, King of the Gypsies. He also taught Tarot classes through Temple University's adult school program from 1998-2000, during which period of time he met his second wife, Nettle, and took her to Germany. 127

B:

We went over to Germany for about two or three weeks. We stayed with Anderel.

Mysteriously, Robin and his other traveling companion fell immediately into a sound sleep from which they could not be woken. It was at this point that Anderel took him to see Franzel's house.

B:

And then, to my surprise, in such a crowded place as Germany—in such a crowded place that you cannot build a new house unless it's on an old foundation because there's no land—Franzel's house, I walked in, and it was the same way it was, ten years later, with a little altar to Franzel. There's his books, and his place is clean. Ok, his magical hut was no longer a magical hut. It was turned into a chicken coup. It was willed to his nephew. But there's meetings, and things were happening at Franzel's place still (Life History #5, pp. 29-30).

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CHAPTER 3 OCCULTURE

1. The Tradition of No Tradition

"Are you experienced?"—Jimi Hendrix Balthazar presents a complex of initial factors by which he became involved in magic which revolve around three central factors: being an artist, encountering hippidom, and therein encountering LSD. Certainly as much has been made of the relationship of art and magic as of magic and love, and the sixties were, theoretically, all about that. However, while Balthazar states that he encountered magic and Tarot within these overlapping communities, there is a notable lack of distinct narratives about any of these initial encounters, nor there any clarity as to what kind of "magic" it was. It just seems to be "happening"—"Everyone's doing it"—whatever that is. The most we know about his social activities outside of art school and vaguely communal living situations is that he attended Rainbow Gatherings—hippy retreats likewise focused on anti-capitalist values and a vaguely articulated if overarching sense of spiritual seeking, which he credits as the origin of the modern pagan festival culture. His photographs of Rainbow Gatherings show mostly naked, painted people (alternately, people partially clothed in tie dye), sometimes holding hands in what may be a circle, sometimes coming out of Native American styled sweat lodges or meditating in yoga poses, but mostly just camping out, accompanied by dogs with bandanas and children playing in the mud. There is a sense in

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the sheer quantities of exposed flesh that the people photographed have dropped their inhibitions, and the consistent pattern of large smiles suggest they have experienced some form of bliss, perhaps similar to how sociologist Don Latin, in Following our Bliss: How the Spiritual Ideals of the Sixties Shape our Lives, describes Esalen—the think-tank sister-school to The Center for the Whole Person in Balthazar's narrative, circa 1963:

[It was] ground zero for a revolution in consciousness, a place where the young and hip would soon take off their clothes, drop their defenses, and revel, wail, whine, and dance around whatever came forth from the psyche, spirit, or soul. It would be silly, serious, spiritual, sensuous, selfindulgent—all at the same time. It would be religion, California style, and would spread across the country and around the world. It was about workshops, not worship, seeking your true self, not spiritual salvation. It was experiential, not theological (Latin 2003: 14).

Latin uses Esalen as a jumping-off point for an account of the sixties cult scene, examining particularly cults influenced by either Buddhism or Hinduism, formed, as he sees it, in reaction to fifties conservatism, while other sociological and religious studies texts focus on the boom in Christian cults, like Generation of Seekers: The Spiritual Journeys of the Baby Boom Generation by Wade Clark Roof (1993), a sympathetic sociological study of seven baby boomers, in which Roof reports one Molly Stone's laments: "Magic and mystery appeared to have been lost in a culture that had become excessively rational, objective, scientific, or, as she says, 'dead-like to the spirit,'" so she went out on her own, eclectically accumulating "inner experience," notably bookmarked by Jung, LSD pioneer Abraham Maslowe, Twelve-Step programs, Star Wars, and

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"Native-American and eco-feminist spiritualities". She also "had expressed interest in the paranormal" (63-85). Latin's book, meanwhile, oscillates between the highs and lows reactionary-ism will get you, with chapters devoted to "God and Sex," "God and Drugs," and "God and Rock 'n' Roll." Each of Latin's chapters is about riding a high wave for a while and crashing. In a sense, this is historically true. Balthazar blamed it on cocaine, while a series of texts such as pastor-turned-scholar Ronald Flowers' Religion in Strange Times: Hie 1960 's and the 1970 '$ (1984), historian of Religion Erling Jorstad's Holding Fast/Pressing On: Religion in America in the 1980's (1990), and William Hutchinson's 2003 Religious Pluralism in America: The Contentious History of a Founding Ideal analyze the rebound effect of an ensuing wave of conservative Christianity, ironically ushered in, in the late seventies by "born again Christian" Jimmy Carter, cemented in the Reagan years, and invigorated under the brief presidency of George Bush, Sr. (Notably, the two Bush presidencies have governed the times and policies of Balthazar's two life crises.) Meanwhile, historian of religion Jeffrey Kripnal's two books, On the Edge of the Future: Esalen and the Evolution of American Culture, edited by Jeffrey Kripal and Glenn Shuck (2003) and Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion, published by Kripal only in 2007 (and involving a lot more full disclosure of tantric sex classes, sex with angels and aliens, and plain old sex in the hot springs) address the subject of the still thriving, enormously successful think tank's place in cultural history, ultimately praising the "democratic mysticism" behind American's theoretical separation of church and state for allowing such experiments as Esalen to continue. Wouter Hanegraff comments in his opening essay in Kripal and Shuck's On the Edge of the Future: "We see a steady 131

evolution into what we now know as Esalen: a growth center that merges insights from Eastern religions with a quintessentially American suspicion of hierarchies and guru traditions and a deep appreciation for the human body as the privileged site of the sacred" (Kripal and Shuck 2005: 8-9). But in none of these LSD and birth-control-pill fueled narratives do we find accounts of overt "magic" being practiced, even where the occult is mentioned as an interest or influence (usually literary). Nor do we get close to defining the kind of spirituality Balthazar means when he ardently declares that, "Nobody will understand the seventies without understanding the spirituality!" But to be fair, neither does Balthazar. In fact, Balthazar's mushy account of hippy spirituality as loosely involving altered perception, crossing boundaries, "losing oneself, and becoming "one", combined with the considerable redundancy of pretty much all sixties narratives, makes it seem that, in fact, the foundation of the spirituality to which Balthazar's narrative taps in was in fact just as it appears to be: sex and drugs and rock 'n' roll. Sex as boundary project, socially and spiritually, physically and "psychically" has, of course, a long history. The use of erotic tropes of self-obliteration/dissolution/ death and conversely rebirth/transformation/enlightenment are baseline points of initiation, easily aligned to Van Gennup's classic tripartite ritual structure of separation from daily life, testing, and reintegration into society in Rites of Passage (1909) and elaborated on by Victor Turner in The Ritual Process (1968) and also consistent with the social classifications assigned to consumption discussed by Claude Levi-Strauss in The Raw and the Cooked (1969). Sexual liminality as analogy for a variety of social processes of enculturation, as well as mystical union with the divine, is at least as old as 132

Sappho, the Psalms, and the Babylonian Epic Gilgamesh. In Mysticism After Modernity, Cupitt notes that tropes of dissolution of both halves of the equation into one "zone of exchange of information" (to borrow a phrase from Robert St. George, borrowed by Cantwell), including "secular" narratives such as the "democratic mysticism" invoked by Kripal, are prominent in postmodern religious experience. Cupitt dubs this "the mysticism of secondariness" for its lack of privileged, originating perspective. Says Cupitt:

The mysticism of secondariness accepts universal pure contingency, goes with the flow, and trusts the processes of life spontaneously to generate form and meaning. Let it come. And—it does! The world is created, not by Reason and skill, but by contingency and play. Let it be: let the world make itself (Cupitt 1998: 95).

Similarly, the now classic LSD narratives by Aldous Huxley, Stanislav Graff, and Timothy Leary, along with the many other autobiographical outpourings of the beatturned-hip generation, continue the liminal narrative, focusing on altered perception and mystical union. The most distinctly spiritual of these, Carlos Castanada's 1969 The Teachings of Don Juan, became the navigational guide for native (and magic mushroom) inspired "shamanic" experience, where identity becomes malleable through imaginative identification. In 1986, ethnobiologist R. Gorgon Wasson would even postulate that soma mushrooms were the origin of religious experience itself, coining the word "entheogens" meaning "God within", while hipsters tended towards the fifties-coined term "psychodelic", meaning "mind-manifesting" (Devereux 1997). More recently a trend in sixities reminiscing has churned out books like Breaking Open the Head, where 133

journalist Daniel Pinchback admits he thought Castenada a phony until he had similar experiences on drugs (2002: 277), and Houston Smith's Cleansing the Doors of Perception (making obvious allusion to Huxley's 1956 The Doors of Perception), which Dionysian narrative of trying on and removing social masks like so many articles of clothes or layers of paint begins with his part as a subject in Timothy Leary's Harvard LSD experiments and ends, like so many baby boomers narratives of their long-haired days, with his walking away from it. Pinchback, however, lingers, noting in his final chapter, suggestively titled "Magical Thinking", that magic and mystical texts made sense of his earlier drug-induced perceptions and convinced him of something "eternal":

I feel, I still feel, as though I had activated some circuit of Nietzschean 'eternal recurrence,' recovering something I had known before... Yes, it is ridiculous, but here it is: I have had the classic spiritual awakening, catalyzed by use of psychodelics, those blighted chemicals that symbolize the crushed hopes of a failed era. I have become a "crazy fool," one of "them," the ones who have been discarded by this world, whose visions are greeted with mockery, dismissal, or fear. And I am much happier for it (Smith 2002: 187-290).

Of course, as Cupitt notes, even the sips of tea employed by Buddhists during meditation or sips of wine by mainline Christians during worship can induce the beginnings of such fuzzy boundary making, the pre-cursers to ecstatic experience (1998: 19-20)—or as Dorry Noyes experiences in Mules and Men: Struggling for the Body Social in a Catalan Corupus Christi Festival—large gulps! In her ethnography, Noyes recalls a mother yelling to a bewildered three-year old: "Patum I mam!" giving him a swig of booze and a push into the roiling crowd. Notes Noyes, '"Patum I mam' [Patum

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and booze] is the battle cry towards a transformed self, and internal fire equal to the circumstances.. .is a direct assault on the barriers between persons and groups" (Noyes 1992: 189). Noyes sites Gregory Bateson's commentary on the role of alcohol in western culture in creating community. Notes Noyes, reflecting on her own bracing up for the loud and unpredictable festival encounter: "Alcohol helps: it dulls the vigilance of one's fellow drinkers as it releases one's own inhibitions; it takes away factional consciousness by a common process of transformation" (190). On the Rock 'n' Roll end of things, Cupitt discusses the variety of methods of eliciting altered states of consciousness through rhythmic and other physical means whose use has been recorded as far back as Paleolithic times: "Music, for example, is everywhere used in religious contexts because of its power to induce a light trance, to precipitate ecstatic states, and to sway communal feelings...Dancing, like drumming, can make one 'high,' and the wearing of an animal mask can help to take you out of yourself and into an animal [or other] identity" (19). Again, folklorists should be well versed in these subjects as regards ethnomusicology and performance. Ultimately, the combination of rhythmic structure and other sensuous aesthetic elements with a sense of "shape shifting" is found throughout the arts, from the "timing" in painting by which the eye is directed across the shapes on a canvas to the meter in poetry where language is made to slip and slide through a cascade of contingent, indexical meanings through sonic allusion. It is found, as well, in a broad variety of religious observances that use chant, call and response, rich imagery, incense, flickering candle light, and bells. Balthazar describes the process of channeling Hermes as he reads Tarot as arising from a similar core experience: 135

B:

It's me reading the cards in such a way that as soon as I start rhyming it becomes an incantation, and now I'm in trance.

R:

So, on the one hand, Hermes is activated or accessed through his documents, his words and images—

B:

Yes. His structure...You go into the consciousness. It's like a mathematical system that connects you into the consciousness. That's it (Life History 3: 29).

The noesis achieved through tapping into inherent indexical meanings syncretized through image association (visualization) in poetry is well known. Balthazar's experience, however, suggests that the noesis achieved through acts of recognition (memory) and computational thinking involved in elementary mathematics may also be related to the aesthetic satisfaction found in engaging rhythmic structures in logical systems in general, even triggering visualization, perhaps providing a segue between "artistic" and "scientific" thinking. As part of the effort to separate magic from religion, many have tried to ideologically separate magic from mysticism. However, this is not profitable for describing magic. Certainly, in describing his magical practices, Balthazar, notably, employs the word "mysticism" more than any other word. Which came first, experience or meaning, mysticism or magic is hard to say in parsing Balthazar's narrative, but I am tempted to agree with Pinchback here: drugs, I think, came first in either case—even before sex. What sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll all have in common, however, is that they provide a fairly intense contact zone for imaginitive participation, engendering a heightened sense of experience and encounter. "Participation," as I have used it here is a

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term developed by philosopher Lucien Levy-Bruhl to refer to the associative, unitive pattern of mystical thinking—a term which has been rehabilitated by anthropologist Susan Greenwood to describe the overall nexus of engagement involved in magical thinking. As generations of academics thinking into the subject of magic have vouched, it is a fuzzy nexus, often described as "incommunicable in words" (Greenwood 2005: 3), which fits well with the gappy, yet blanketing details of sixties and seventies spirituality. Cupitt provocatively locates the birth of post-modern religion's overall mystical bent in the crucible of sixties spirituality, a muddle of unbounded ecstatic impressions perhaps best—and most humorously—stated by novelist Darwin Fall in a journal excerpt quoted by Kripal in his paradoxically titled coda chapter "The Future of the Past and the Mystical Idea of America": '"Oh Jesus,' I sighed. 'I don't know. I just don't know. The whole thing is so fucking complex' " (Kripal 2007: 449). In the end, what we do know about Balthazar's introduction to Magic, prior to being initiated, is essentially a negative theology—that despite having unwittingly conjured a god, Balthazar claims not to have known even how to cast a circle until he was initiated by Puschi. After initiation, of course, everything changed—the stars literally aligned—which he summed up as a change from "study" to "making miracles." "The student is non-experiential. The initiate is," says Balthazar (Life History #3: 23). Though experience roughly underlies both states, Balthazar refers here to the move from a general, diffused level of experience to one of specified practice within a particular tradition and the level of invested participation that implies. As Greenwood says, "Magical consciousness is developed through magical practice" (2005: 2). With practice, participation is honed and developed and meaning becomes focused and fused 137

with certain acts. For Balthazar, upon initiation, experience became more clearly instructive as practices were aligned to a specified structure, and a special communicative bond between initiates was clearly central to this new level of experience. Says Balthazar, recalling the early days of friendship with Puschi:

And we formed an incredible rapport with the Tarot and magical rituals. And we laughed, and we rolled, we smoked, we laughed, we smoked— and he had stories. But the fact was that he had come over, and I was having a rapport with him that I never had before with anybody. I could talk about my experiences, and they were similar. My isolation chamber, my Tarot, my Qabalah. And it seemed that he came from an understanding of an ordered system that these experiences existed and had been systematized on how to get these experiences, and there's schools around this mysticism, rather than just doing a bunch of LSD and having them and having no relationship to reality.

Golden Dawn co-founder Dion Fortune expounds on the process of initiation in her aptly named The Mystical Qabalah:

[Initiation, which is the forcing-house of evolution, bringing faculties to birth out of due season, brings the consciousness of the adept within reach of vast apprehensions which are as yet below the horizon of the human mind. These ideas, though clearly apprehended by himself in another mode of consciousness, cannot be conveyed by him to anyone who does not share this mode of consciousness. He can only put them forth in symbolic form; but any mind that has in any way had experience of this wider mode of functioning will be able to lay hold on these ideas on their own plane, although it may be unable to translate them into the sphere of conscious thought. In this way, therefore, in the literature of esoteric science there are scattered seed-ideas such as 'God is pressure' and 'Kether is the Malkuth of Negative Existence'. These images, whose content does not belong to our sphere at all, are as the male germs of thought which fecundate the ova of concrete realization. In themselves they are incapable of maintaining more than the most fugitive existence in consciousness as a flash of realization [sic], but without them the ova of 138

philosophical thought will be infertile. Impregnated by them, however, though their substance is absorbed and lost in the very act of impregnation, growth takes place within the formless germ of thought, and ultimately, after due gestation beyond the threshold of consciousness, the mind gives birth to an idea.. ..The invocations of an initiation ceremony are designed to call down this impregnating influence upon the consciousness of the candidate, Hence it is that the Paths of the tree, which are the stages of illumination of the soul, are intimately associated with the symbolism of initiation ceremonies (Fortune 1988: 35-36).

Though not specifically stated as a text for "magical" practice, The Mystical Qabalah was part of the mandatory reading assigned to me by Balthazar when I began my "study" with him. Read together, what Balthazar and Fortune's statements suggest is that, through ideas "seeded" during initiation and corresponding to ongoing practices, an overall structure of belief is formed—or, in Balthazar's words, "crystallizes". In the archaeology of Balthazar's mind, from the point of his initiation, structures begin to build upon themselves and intertwine, forming an integrated semantic circuit, and belief begins to be more clearly articulated in his narrative. Notes Balthazar: "I was really out there, with a lot of knowledge, but to solidify it all into a mathematical pattern—I wasn't able to do it." This language is notably similar to how he describes Tai Chi, which he combines with Qabalah in shielding: "So it's always drawing energy into a solid form. It's the most intellectual form of martial arts because you don't have to be strong to be powerful; all you have to be is mathematical." Thus the vagueness of "Magick" gains one clear parameter: mathematics—from which a cascade of related ideas and practices ritually follow.

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2. We're All Pagans Here

I went to a Rainbow gathering, which is the pagans, the—you're a pagan; I'm a pagan; we're all pagans here. There were 3,000 people there chanting the name of God. We had one night when we were dancing at the fire, and I mean people were going into trances—everybody was going into trances (Franzel 4: 25)!

The tape blips off as side A ends. When side B resumes, Balthazar is explaining, "It's like the old gypsy camps, you would say." There is no indication of Franzel's reaction to the word "pagan". Perhaps if asked his sense of paganism at the time, he might have answered, much like Fall, with his own summary of "hipperspace": "It's a small mystery. A riddle. Aretzle. It's an inner awareness—something which is not yet defined in the higher sense" (Franzel 5: 3-4). While a handful of folks like Balthazar and Margot Adler, journalist and author of Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids, Goddess-Worshippers and Other Pagans in America, first published in 1979, may have been floating the terms "Pagan" and "Neo-Pagan" in the late sixties and the seventies, the contemporary popular religious movement which would come to bear the name would not gain real momentum until the internet took off in the nineties. According to Adler, Kerry Thornley, a.k.a. Omar Ravenhurst, founder of a series of surrealist Neo-Pagan societies dedicated to the Lady Eris, Greek goddess of chaos and strife, was, in 1966, "perhaps the first person, at least in the United States, to use the word Pagan to describe past and present nature religions", though she notes that the term was already in use by Witchcraft covens in England and the U.S. to describe the Craft revival. This does not, however, mean "witches" were the first to use the term in a modern 140

context. The idea was also in use by the broadly influential late 19 century British occult revival group, The Golden Dawn, who crafted much of the nexus or, as Fortune might say, "seed" of what Neo-Paganism would become, not only by syncretizing and synthesizing the broad array of western occult "schools" into one Hermetic "Western Mystery Tradition," recasting what had been for almost 2,000 years a distinctly Christian magical core as "Pagan", but by codifying a basic format for Ceremonial Magick as well as producing "the three most important Tarot decks of the modern era, those of Waite, Crowley and the Golden Dawn" (Wang 1990: 10). Historian Ronald Hutton notes that fin de siecle conservative critic W. F. Barry in 1891 was one of the first to use the term "Neo-Paganism", and he used it to characterize what he saw as a shallow and corrupting "exuberance of eternal nature, all rhythm and harmonious evolution, a great unceasing festival of flower and lights and easy sensuous love" particularly exemplified in the outpouring of poetry of the times and specific Victorian characters such as Oscar Wilde. From this platform, he then went on to decry libertarianism and extol the virtues of Christianity (Hutton 1999: 28-29). Jerry Falwell's claim that 9-11 was caused by God's retribution against pagans, abortionists, feminists, homosexuals, and the ACLU, is reminiscent of Barry's criticism. Both Barry's and Falwell's comments indicate the political context of an assumed alliance of fringe religious groups with particular cultural trends and political ideals which together create the underground whose political hallmark has the cultural-religious flavor of "paganism." As Adler's and Lewis' titles indicate, since its inception, Neo-Paganism has been closely bound up with the pagan witchcraft revival, which is understandable as the formation of Wicca, the first organized Pagan witchcraft revival religion, pre-dates the 141

organization of the many disparate branches of Neo-Paganism under one titular heading, and it has continued to be its largest, most vocal, and most definable denomination. However, as Balthazar proves, Neo-Paganism is not limited to Wicca, despite that almost by default Neo-Paganism continually references witchcraft. Neo-Paganism is rather a broad umbrella category containing a wide variety of theologies and did not in any way start out as a concerted, organized phenomenon. Rather, Neo-Paganism is the result of the unification of many separate philosophical-religious groups that can themselves be roughly organized into three basic categories. The first, though not the earliest, is what Chas Clifton calls "homegrown American Paganism" (Clifton 2009: ix). The Church of All Worlds can be seen as a model for such early Neo-Pagan groups. Its inspiration came largely from literary sources, including sci-fi author Robert Heinlien's Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert Graves' The White Goddess, and, not without its ironies, the rather right wing ideas of Ayn Rand expressed in her novels Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead, and Anthem (Adler 2006: 300-334, Zell-Ravenheart 2009: xiii). Says Adler, "Jerome Tucille [sic], in his witty, tongue-in-cheek tour of the libertarian right, It Usually Begins With Ayn Rand, could not have been more precise in his choice of title. He noted that Rand's works were particularly appealing 'to those in the process of escaping a regimented religious background.'" This included Neo-Pagans. Adler comments that "It was easy to be swept up by the intense struggles of Rand's artists and creators, who stood larger than life, battling government and bureaucracy," adding, "The novels of Rand were seed that sprouted and bore many strange fruits, most of which must have horrified her" (2006: 305). Of her ethnographic inquiry into Neo-Paganism, Adler also notes, "In my travels I 142

came across four well-known science fiction and fantasy writers who were members of Neo-Pagan groups. Of the four, only one—Robert Anton Wilson—was public. The remaining three did not wish to have their identities disclosed" (302). Finally, it should be noted, that in addition to noble visionary idealism and wholesome family camping, homegrown American Paganisms could be equally dramatic, bawdy, and seriously silly, as Omar Ravehurst's surrealist societies indicate (335-354). Adler credits Tim Zell, a.k.a Oberon Zell-Ravenheart, founder of Green Egg, the seminal Pagan journal established as a newsletter for the Church of All Worlds in 1968, as the "catalyst to create a sense of collectivity around the word Pagan... CAW and Zell, by using terms like Pagan and Neo-Pagan in referring to the emerging collectivity of new earth religions, linked these groups, and Green Egg created a communication network among them." (311-312). Thus these small, scattered, "homegrown", for the most part Hellenic-leaning (as were the Renaissance magicians) American groups were, in a way, the first official "Neo-Pagans" who called out to what they saw as related pagan-leaning groups to come together under their auspices. The second, and arguably earlier group, are the adherents of the first full-fledged modern Pagan religion, Wicca, a witchcraft revival which was created almost singlehandedly by lay anthropologist Gerald Gardner n Britain in the mid 20 century. However, until the late 1990's, Wiccans suppressed this evidence in favor of a romantic ideal of a European pagan folk survival. The illusion was, however, formally shattered when, in 1999, historian of religion Ronald Hutton published Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft in which he delineated precisely how Gardner crafted Wicca, as per standard "Western Mystery Tradition" practice, as a pre-Christian 143

survival and distinctly not his invention, while in fact inventing it almost whole cloth. As is usual in The Western Mystery Tradition, Gardner in fact did not create all of the elements of Wicca, but rather gathered and recast them. In so doing, however, he borrowed heavily from the practices of Ceremonial Magick over any actual accounts of folk (family or cultural) traditional practices, for example incorporating such Ceremonial elements as the casting of a circle, which do not typically show up in folk magical practice. However, Gardner seemed to read into Ceremonial Magick another account of witchcraft's survival, which allowed him to appropriate Ceremonial magical practices with abandon while simultaneously claiming an indigenous, folksy, English countryside origin of Wicca. It should also be noted that before publishing Witchcraft Today after the repeal of the Witchcraft Acts in 1951, Gardner wrote his ideas in the form of a novel, High Magic's Aid, which gained its own following immediately. Gardner, in turn, was heavily influenced by anthropologist Margaret Murray's 1921 Witch Cult in Western Europe and later publications in which she speculated a surviving pre-Christian Witch Cult. Like Gardner's personally invested reading of Ceremonial Magick practices, Murray's fault, well articulated by Folklorist Jacqueline Simpson in "Margaret Murray: Who Believed Her, and Why?" was largely in "selection and distortion," leading to grand reductionism. In the figure of the Devil, extracted from inquisition testimonies, she saw "a human coven-leader dressed in black or in an animal mask; witches did not turn into hares or cats, they put masks on and mimed animal actions; their 'mark' was a tattoo; their flying was mimed by hopping along with a stick between their legs," though Simpson notes, "Her manipulation of sources is sometimes so blatant as to be naive" (Simpsonl994: 90-91). 144

Murray herself was influenced by James Frazer's The Golden Bough, which had already spurred popular interest in folkloric "fertility cults", and the ideas of Jules Michelet and Jacob Grimm, who likewise believed in a witchcraft survival (Adler [1979] 2006: 310, 43-64, also Hutton 1999: 132-150, 205-240, Mogliocco 2004: 46-54, and Clifton 2006: 11-36, 71-94). From here one skitters hard and fast into the legacy of Romanticism, of whom the German Romantics in particular, appropriating and developing Kant's transcendental idealism, were ardent in associating their ideals with that of pre-Christian paganism and the volk, whom they imagined as existing in a static countryside, quixotically unaffected by modernism. In so doing, the German Romantics sought to distinguish themselves from the French in the wake of disillusionment with the fallout of the French Revolution (seen by many as the inauguration of the modern era), particularly French Enlightenment positivism (its hallmark) with its ties to Renaissance humanism (Waldron 2008: 51-76). Thus through Romanticism and folkloristics, European nationalism became bound up with notions of paganism, and one might go so far as to call the eventual revival of pagan religion inevitable. As Mogliocco notes, the roots of Neo-Paganism are "deeply intertwined with those of folkloristics" (Mogliocco 2004: 4). Gardnerian Wicca was brought to America by Raymond and Rosemary Buckland, who later divorced, leaving Rosemary in charge of their Gardnerian coven, while Raymond modified his own practice, creating his own denomination of Wicca and encouraging others to similar inventions (Waldron 2008: 40). According to anthropologist David Waldron, author of The Sign of the Witch: Modernity and the

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Pagan Revival, citing Pagan Scholar Issac Bonewitz's 2000 Witchcraft: A Concise History:

Raymond's stamp of approval on self initiated, home made or, at least, non-Gardnerian traditions...led to a population explosion of Wicca based movements across the US [and] most of the Anglophone world. Raymond's embracing of eclecticism also left the way open for the integration of the rigidly hierarchical and secretive Wiccan covens with elements of the sixties counter culture and the US tradition of Hellenic Neo-Paganism (Waldron 2008: 141).

A far more detailed account of key figures in American paganism can be found in Chas Clifton's Her Hidden Children: The Rise of Wicca and Paganism in America (Clifton 2006), but this will suffice to indicate Wicca's influence on the larger culture of NeoPaganism. The third group, and arguably the oldest, but perhaps the latest to formally join the Neo-Pagan movement as such, are the practitioners of Ceremonial Magick, inheritors of the late 19th century occult revival, in particular the widely influential Golden Dawn, itself a Rosicrucian revival. Rosicrucianism is the convergence point of The Western Mystery Tradition, and its affects are broad ranging, with many occult organizations bearing its name. A pause is thus necessary to briefly contextualize the subject of Rosicrucianism.

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3. The Rosicrucians

Rosicrucianism was, by all accounts, created through the publication of two anonymous manifestos, the Fama and the Confessio, in 1614 and 1615, followed by a third pamphlet—alternately described as a ruse and an allegory—in 1616, the Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosencreutz, which has been traced to Lutheran pastor (albeit with "a liberal interest in Calvanism") Johann Valentin Andrae. Both the great hope of the German Protestant cause and cultural Renaissance revivalists, the marriage of Princess Elizabeth, daughter of James I (inheritor of Queen Elizabeth I's Tudor throne), with Frederick V, Elector Palatine of the Rhine on 27 December 1612 and their ill-fated court at Heidelberg castle would become the setting for an alleged earlier strain of Rosicrucianism set in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The manifestoes were rife with Renaissance Hermetic symbolism. Says Yates, "The hero of the manifestos is a certain 'Father C.R.C.' or 'Christian Rosencreutz' who is said to have been the founder of an Order of Fraternity, now revived, and which the manifestoes invite others to join" (Yates 1972: 30). Rosencreutz is himself a mysterious figure of an "illuminated man", a "traveler [who] learned the 'Magia and Cabala' of the east, and knew how to use it to enhance his own faith and to enter into 'the harmony of the whole world, wonderfully impressed on all periods of time.'" (Yates 1972: 43-44). The Rosicrucian pamphlets were a hit, and Rosicrucianism appears to have begun in earnest with the formation of Rosicrucian-styled lodges. Like Murray, Yates, who postulates a variety of direct connections between key Renaissance occult figures and the Rosicrucians, has been criticized for seeing in the 147

"Hermetic Tradition" a form of survival, rather than strictly a revival of "Hermetic wisdom" from late antiquity through to the present. However, Christopher Lehrich points out that Yates' naming a "Hermetic Tradition" is not in itself invalidated by this error. Lehrich agrees that a distinct Hermetic theme can be found in occult groups and ideas throughout the modern age, and that this structural "family resemblance" is worth pursuing, a sentiment echoed by historian Florian Ebling in The Secret History of Hermes Trismegistus: Hermeticism from Ancient to Modern Times. Ebling cites the pseudographic attribution of authorship by Hermes as itself binding the divergent texts (Ebling 2007). Eliot Wolfson takes a similar tack in defining Jewish Kabbala as "the deposit of a 'school tradition' which incorporates elements from widely different periods" (Wolfson 2005: xii). Says Wolfson, "We would do better to replace the modernist notion of origin with the idea of geneology articulated by Foucault, a tracing of lineage that recognizes ruptures and divergences in the process of extending the line" (Wolfson 2005: 3). In these regards, Hermeticism and Kabbalism have an innate similarity, which no doubt is partially responsible for their eventual convergence in Renaissance magic. Like most revivals, Rosicrucianism included some key modifications to the Renaissance Hermetic ideal, in particular the addition of alchemy to the Hermetic blend, which had already absorbed Jewish Kabbala to produce a distinctly Christian Cabala. This "Rosicrucian tradition" was in turn re-paganized by the Golden Dawn in their own revival effort, which took the Hermetic Tradition to a whole new syncretic level, on the one hand introducing elements of mid-19th century Theosophy (itself a development of Spiritualism, Mesmerism, and other related mysticisms, though redirected by the 148

injection of dominating eastern concepts of karma, reincarnation, auras, chakras, and the akashic record), and on the other refiguring the "powers of God" by syncretizing Hellenized Egyptian god forms to the Sephira of the Tree of Life and, in tandem with this, drawing fully into the Hermetic fold yet another occult practice: Tarot. Tarot decks, which first appeared as an Arab import to Italy and simple parlor game in the 1370s, experienced subsequent modifications in France and in 1781 become correlated to Egyptian magic by Count de Gebelin in 1781, a notion popularized by cartomancer JeanBaptiste Alliete, alias Etteilla. Tarot had by then already acquired the reputation of being an Egyptian artifact due to their association with gypsies, who had attempted to smooth their own entrance into Europe by claims of an Egyptian ancestry, while in fact, gypsies seem to have encountered Tarot in Europe, promptly adding it to their fortune telling trade (Dummett et al. 1996; Decker and Dummett 2002). In a final twist, Elphias Levi correlated Tarot to Cabala in the mid-nineteenth century. Whatever the historical route by which Tarot first acquired an occult divinatory use, the Golden Dawn completed its Hermetic transformation, fully correlating and codifying it into a complete package of magical theories and practices that summed up "The Western Mystery Tradition" to date. In so doing they officially replaced both the Hebrew "k" and the Christian "c" with the hallmark "q" of a perfected Hermetic Qabalah, to which they added the Victorian era's burgeoning psychological perspectives and penchant for theatricality, recalling the German Romantics earlier dramatic flair. As Robert Wang, author of The Qabalistic Tarot, points out, "Those who criticize the Golden Dawn for its theatricality should appreciate that it emerged from much the same social forces which were producing the modern theatre, to say nothing of modern 149

literature, modern art and modern music. This was the stage of Ibsen, of Stravinsky, of Henri Bergson (Mrs. Mathers' brother [i.e.Golden Order co-founder S.J. MacGregor Mathers]), of William Morris, Oscar Wilde, of Rimbaud and Verlaine, of Van Gogh and Gaugin" (Wang 1990: 11). Pagan and magical movements and artistic movements have, I fact, historically rubbed elbows in the underground where they have freely swapped ideas, if not practices. Edgar Wind's Pagan Mysteries of the Renaissance, examines this cross-pollination evidenced in the works of the Renaissance masters, while folkloristanthropologist Sabina Mogliocco examines the centrality of artistic expression to NeoPagan belief in "Ceremonial is my Chosen Art Form: The Creation of Ceremonial as Folk Art Among Contemporary Pagans" in Magical Religions and Modern Witchcraft, James R. Lewis, editor (Mogliocco 1996), and in her own Neo-Pagan Sacred Art and Altars: Making Things Whole (Mogliocco 2001). Certainly Omar Ravenhurst's surrealism also bespeaks an artistic-philosophical foundation. The overall historic dimension of this cross-pollination is perhaps best evidenced in Tarot cards, whose decks have long exemplified the artistic schools of their era. At one point during our Life History interviews, Balthazar recited this history of Tarot and Qabalah:

B:

When the Age of Truth was about ready to end—the end of Gemini, which represents the Garden of Eden and all peace and wise men, the beginning of the age of Taurus—the wise men all went into a deep meditation and said, "How can we preserve truth with men?" And they all came out with the same answer: "We shall preserve truth with vice, for vice shall always be with men." So they took the holy sacraments and made laws against them, and they took the sacred prostitutes and made laws against them, and they made the sacraments of intuition into gambling, and they preserved the symbols of truth in the language in cards and made games of 150

them, for they knew that if man was true to his vice it would be true advice to him. And to preserve the truth, they put it also in the stars, because they knew they would erase civilization, they'd change history, but they could not change the stars. And they knew that wise men would not look to men for knowledge but to the Gods in the heavens, for only if you had a vision that could read the stars could the Gods speak to you then. And that is the point of the formation of the Tarot. The Jews carried it to Morocco, and the Gypsies picked it up and traveled with it to Europe. Napoleon's wife, Josephine, turned it into a fashion. The difference with the Moroccan ones and the ones that were found in Europe was the Strength card and the Lust card. The Moroccan ones or the Northern African ones had the card XI as Lust, and the European ones had number VIII as Strength.

Meanwhile, Qabalah was preserved in Judaism.

B:

What happened was 400 years of the dark ages of Egypt where Egypt no longer existed, and the Jews wrote their history: "Our God is better than your God. We kicked your ass!" [laughs] And therefore the Book of Exodus was written, from that point of view of a history of the Jews. What they then had was the Qabalah. Now, it wasn't saying that the Qabalah wasn't a continuum from every religion that existed before that and before the fall of Egypt, but they really had all the scholars that were left— whoever was a Jew at that point. I mean, whatever that meant. And they had the school, and they had the knowledge, and they had the prototype of the ancient Egyptian religion without pyramids, which was an intricate part of the ancient Egyptian religion, but they just couldn't bring 'em along with them. So they had to try to make some variations. And they had this great monopoly of building these libraries and all this, and they wanted to make sure that there was nobody in total power. So each tribe had its own mystical secrets that came in representation of doing the magic. And anyway, you know what happened to Israel: they got broke up. Jerusalem was burnt to the ground, and the Romans had a scorched earth policy and made Israel a desert, and the environment of Israel has never been the same. This land of milk and honey became a desert. It wasn't a desert before that period of time. The Romans order was to burn every living plant to the ground in the entire land of Israel that the Jews 151

would never come home again and would never have a place to live. There would be nothing there. And the Jews went in all different directions, but what happened basically was about 1300's Jew met Jew in the school of Madrid. And in the school of Madrid, 600 years after the New Testament was bound together, the Old Testament was bound together then, too. Oddly enough the Old Testament is newer than the New. So what happened was that they sat down and they wrote the Zohar, and they got the Qabalah, and they blew themselves away because they finally got their religion back together. And it made so much sense finally. Because some had the Psalms and some had the Zohar, and they wrote companion books, and it got all together—and then Isabella of Spain broke up the University and they had to split out. And they split out in three major directions from that Exodus. One was into Morocco, which a lot of the Qabalah mysticism fell into good hands. The others fell into Brittany, and it went also to the University of Florence Italy by the Medici court, which had just set up a school of Greek Philosophy. The Medici School took in all of the professors that taught mysticism and the Qabalah and anything else from the closed School of Madrid at the Jewish Exodus. He hired them. And what happened then was it was the first time that now the completed Qabalah and Jewish mysticism had gotten together and met the Hermetica—or re-met for the first time since the burning of the archives of Alexandria, Egypt. And this was great! I mean it was like the Pope was freaking out, and there was this competition of which was the capital, Florence, Italy with Hermetic Qabalism—the Jews were hired to turn the Qabalah into Latin mysticism and train the kings, now, of Europe into this ancient mysticism of how Christ did the enlightened anointing. And it was a great school. What happened then in history was Rome got pissed off and attacked Florence and the Medici court. And the school was left with the Inquisition and reformed in Heidelberg, Germany. The Medici court had bought what they thought was the oldest version of the Hermetica from ancient Greek to establish their school, which carried it to Heidelberg, and it was a magical instrument. They said it was in perfect condition and could not be destroyed. And it had magical secrets in it that the whole school was developed from. And what had simply happened was that the Rosicrucians became quite powerful, and there became a mystical branch of the Catholic Church that combined the miracles of the Christ through Hermetic Qabalism, Bavaria being the main center for it. Still today. Like the residents museum in Munich, Germany. I mean all the magical instruments there. That was the center powerhouse of this level of 152

mysticism opposing to the authority of Rome and the Catholic Church, which is the Inquisition. And therefore it became an underground form of mysticism. And the Pope and the Inquisition got stronger and attacked Heidelberg, and it went underground at that point and went over to—most of the teachers fled and went across into England. That's how the Qabalah truly spread up there. So you have the underground schools which now exist all over Heidelberg. The schools still exist, except the original school, the castle was blown up by the French, [laughs] They packed the turrets with dynamite—the whole turret, all the way up to the top, and then lit it to knock the castle walls down. The true work of Hermetic Qabalism is German, and German and Jewish Qabalists are never going to get along for some reason. But the Jews are wrong, and we're right. And that's as simple as where it's at. Never to draw the Qabalistic Tree of Life down and only describe it verbally to somebody means that they lost the exact drawing of it. And therefore major things like the structure of the DNA molecule and the structure of the entire Qabalah has gone to the wayside because Jews don't draw it down. You think the Tree of Life that we have now is Jewish? It's not! It's from Heidelberg (Life History #2: 20-28).

What this folk history primarily confirms is that The Heidelberg School of Hermetic Qabalah is an order on the Rosicrucian model. It provides corollaries to passages, such as those on the life of Christopher Rosencreutz in the Fama, Confessio, and the Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosencreutz, that can be found in Manly Hall's The Secret Teachings of All Ages, a compendium of the Rosicrucian blend—or as the title page states "An Encyclopedic Outline of Masonic, Hermetic, Qabbalistic and Rosicrucian Symbolical Philosophy" (Hall [1928] 1989). When I once asked Balthazar about "the fictional character" of Christian Rosencreutz, Balthazar said simply and with finality, "What about his tomb?" He then suggested that I read The Secret Teachings. Balthazar has confirmed that Franzel was a Rosicrucian, though other lodges met at his home, as

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well. Notably the order's chosen Tarot deck is Crowley's, on the back of which cards is boldly emblazoned the rosy cross. Interestingly, Ebling, who received his Ph.D. from Heidelberg, affirms the existence of a second strain of Hermeticism radiating from Germany, north of the Alps, whose history is somewhat separate from the Italian Hermeticism which was based in Ficino's translations of the Corpus Hermeticum. This other Hermetic strain's textual basis was in the Tabula Smaraginda and other Arabic Hermetic texts whose focus was "practical" alchemy which it called Ars Hermetica (Ebling 2007: vii, 44-45, 119-121). This history bears curious echoes in the Rosicrucian mythology, which states that a young Christian Rosencreutz, on pilgrimage, like Apuleius before him, tarried on the road to Jerusalem, stopping in Damascas and Damcar where he was initiated by Arabian adepts. Later he returned to Europe carrying certain books (Hall 1989: CXXXVII). Moreover, this German order's distinct basis in Arabic Hermeticism and practical magic may account for the unusually high development of sacred geometry in the Heidelberg School of Hermetic Qabalah. When I first began this dissertation, I asked Balthazar if there wasn't another, catchier title for his Heidelberg School. After a pause he threw out the term "Bavarian Illuminati". He clearly had no knowledge of the full implications of that phrase. Upon further questioning he stated that Franzel had once called them "illuminati". According to Vernon Stauffer in New England and the Bavarian Illuminati, the "Illuminati" were founded by Adam Weishhaupt in Bavaria in 1776 and were affiliated with Freemasonry. The Illuminati's stated mission was to wage a universal war against "superstition, despotism, and tyranny." Unfortunately, after some infighting that drew negative 154

attention, in 1784 the Elector Palatine, Carl Theodore, influenced towards clericalism, launched the first of many edicts against the lodge. This led to confessions and resulting judicial inquiries and criminalization. By 1787 the order was demolished, but like so many others, its life only really began once it was dead and gone. Its legend grew, according to Stauffer, largely due to the Rosicrucians who took on the Illuminati cause. Ultimately it became credited with causing the French Revolution and became a hysteria causing imagined threat in New England, America (Stauffer 1967: 142-228). Aspects of this story, indeed, also seem interwoven with Balthazar's folk history, and the initial rise of Rosicrucianism. However, in David Katz' account in The Occult Tradition, illumines was a term originating with a French Masonic splinter group with a Swedenborgian doctrine called The Martinists who interacted with other fringe occult groups, which Katz notes, curiously "tended to originate in Germany (or Switzerland) and then migrate to France, which made them seem like a sinister foreign invasion" (Katz 2005: 79-80).

4. The New Age

In re-paganizing Ceremonial magic through Hermetic Qabalah, the Golden Dawn mated the long-held European worldviews that placed Egypt as the origin of Western magic and Persia as the origin of Eastern magic, views represented by Pharoah's magicians in Exodus and the three magi from the east in Matthew and reinforced through the folk history of Tarot (Iverson 1961, Hornung 2001, Fowdon 1993, Kinney 2004). It is a move perhaps mirrored by Balthazar, who traded in his given name as a disciple of Christ (Paul) for that of one of the magi (Balthazar). The Golden Dawn's resulting 155

template for Ceremonial Magick would become the standard for a host of magical schools. Whether or not Balthazar's Heidelberg School of Hermetic Qabalah existed before the Golden Dawn is unclear. However, it adopted its texts and specifically Crowley's Tarot deck. Gerald Gardner also used Aleister Crowley's texts as a model. Further, as Adler notes, "[DoreenJValiente, who, according to her own account, was initiated into the Craft by Gardner in 1953, writes that Gardner joined an occult society, the Fellowship of Crotona, which had constructed a community theater called 'The First Rosicrician Theatre in England.' Among the members of this occult fraternity was the daughter of Annie Besant, the Theosophist and founder of Co-Masonry, a Masonic movement for women" (Adler 2006: 58). In all, the essential hybridizing, syncretic, and theatrical force of Ceremonial Magick is perhaps its greatest bequeathal to the Neo-Pagan movement, forming the template for an ongoing cross-referencing and cross-pollination which would create much of the "family resemblance" within Neo-Paganism. This family resemblance is further reinforced by another major influence on NeoPaganism: the New Age movement. The New Age has a shared root in the sixties counter-cultural movement, and as such can be seen as a parallel, if intersecting force, with further entangled historical roots in the late nineteenth century occult revival. As Philip Jenkins notes in Mystics and Messiahs: Cults and New Religions in American History, the New Age phenomena of the sixties was in fact the aftermath of "the first New Age" which began in the 1920's and "Most of the ideas of the American religious fringe of the 1920's could be traced directly to the occult and Theosophical world of the late nineteenth century that in turn grew from a mid-Victorian boom in Mesmerism and spitualism. The chain could be traced back still further to the Hermetic and Neoplatonic 156

thinkers of the Renaissance" (Jenkins 2000: 71). While this mix may seem identical to Neo-Paganism, the New Age movement, though also stemming essentially from Golden Dawn-type influences, contains a greater accent on a Theosophical inheritance than Rosicrucianism. Witchcraft notably found expression in both. In the wake of the sixties, the New Age dominated the occult stage, becoming assimilated into the mainstream in the late seventies and eighties. A review of The Occult in America: New Historical Perspectives, published in 1983, sums up well the New Age flavor: "Noting the complexity of the connections among various occult movements and schools, they compare the situation to 'a historical hourglass in which the sands of witchcraft, popular ghostlore, memerism, Swedenborgianism, and scientism pour through the channel of spiritualism, then... disperse into Theosophy and parapsychology'" (Burson-Tolpin 1985: 365). To this list we might easily add others, most prominently Jungian psychology and Jung's theories of anima, animus, archetype, and the collective unconscious. Jung's universalizing methodology helped legitimize the New Age yen to appropriate freely, a yen that can be seen on both sides of the fence, but in the case of the New Age fed directly into American consumerism. Without differentiating Neo-Paganism from the New Age, Mircae Eliade suggests another root of sixties esotericism in the "the decisive and illuminating contributions to the understanding of occult traditions [that] have been made by historians of ideas. As a matter of fact, one can almost say that the fantastic popularity of the occult which started in the middle sixties was anticipated by a series of fundamental scientific books on esoteric doctrines and secret practices published between 1940 and 1960." Here Eliade refers to Gershom Scholem's work on Kabbala, Henri Corbin's work on Islamic 157

mysticism, and various works on European occult lodges and secret societies. Eliade also notes, "Of course, we must keep in mind that two of the most famous discoveries of the century brought to light a number of documents emanating from secret or esoteric groups. I am referring to the Gnostic library of Nag Hammadi and to the manuscripts found in the Dead Sea caves, which most probably belonged to an Essene community" (1976: 54-55). The renewed esoteric interest in all things Egyptian in the Victorian era had also come on the heels of Napoleonic archeology and the deciphering of the Rosetta Stone by JeanFrancois Champollion in 1822, which fed both the long-held semiotic interests of northAfrican-and-middle-eastern-leaning European Magicians who were fascinated by hieroglyphs and sigils and the interest in universal-solvent-styled- glyphs held by the comparative religions approach of more eastern leaning Theosophists. Meanwhile, orientalism, especially Zen Buddhism, "got a boost," says Jenkins, from the World Parliament of Religions held in Chicago in 1893, and by 1900 American Vedanta societies had been established and swamis were in such vogue that Swami Abhedenanda, arriving to a New Thought national convention, was introduced to President McKinley. By 1910, says Jenkins:

Eccentric religious and mystical ideas became commonplace... As in the hippie era, this earlier cult milieu had its greatest strength in the western states, particularly California, but fringe groups were able to popularize themselves nationwide through a vastly expanded mass media and novel forms of marketing and advertising. By the 1930's, the concepts of this first New Age were being sold in packaged form through new religions claiming to offer the wisdom of the ancients. The period between the two world wars produced a model cult explosion, which in turn set the scene for a major social reaction against cults and the threat they were believed to pose (Jenkins 2000: 70-71).

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This, of course, would be the fifties, against which the sixties would then react, swing the pendulum back in a decidedly occult direction. The concept of a "New Age" is in fact a magical term, based in astrology. As Lon Milo Duquette notes in The Magick ofAleister Crowley: A Handbook of Ceremonials ofThelema:

Yes, this is coincidental to what astrologers and songwriters call the Age of Aquarius and what millions of others refer to simply as the New Age. But it would be a mistake to view the new aeon as simply another tick on a great cosmic clock. The Age of Aquarius, profoundly significant as it is, is only one aspect of a far greater spiritual age.. .A more intimate, more magical perspective may be had is, rather than considering the ages as mere astrological epochs, we instead view them as gods" (DuQuette 2003: 14).

To Crowley the New Age meant specifically the Aeon of Horus, "the Crowned and Conquering Child". Writes DuQuette of Crowley's perspective:

As the child is the physical and genetic product of both its parents, so too the Aeon of Horus reconciles and transcends formulae of the two previous Ages. Since the turn of the century we have seen the fall of colonialism and the destruction of the vestiges of the overtly patriarchal rule of kings in Europe, The temporal power of the Pope is gone, and the illusion of the omnipotent spiritual power of the Church has become diluted beyond hope of revival. The earth mother worshipping formula of the Aeon of Isis (violently repressed during the Aeon of Osiris) has been transformed by the evolution of our consciousness, and resurrected as the earth-respecting environmental movement, the Woman's Movement, and the resurgence of the cult of the Goddess...

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We are the child who has just become self-aware. We still love our mother and father but we know we will never be happy as long as we exist only as an expression of their lives. Now that we are conscious of the continuity of existence, now that we perceive the universe as a process of continual growth, now that we recognize the individual as the basic unit of society, we will never return to the flawed and incomplete perceptions of the past (DuQuette2003: 21).

One can see in this ideology the marriage of enlightenment and romantic traditions, and perhaps concordantly of Freud and Jung. The specifically religious aspects of this concept of the New Age were shed in the popular counter-cultural-rather-quickly-turnedmainstream movement which would come to bear its name, but the overall Gnostic viewpoint and focus on individual and societal evolution was retained to create a mostly secular—spiritual, not religious—New Age. Sociologist Helen Berger, who helped to compile the first national survey of NeoPagans, notes that the demographics of Neo-Pagans and New Agers are almost indistinguishable. Yet Neo-Pagans and New Agers alike tend to insist upon a distinction. In particular, Neo-Pagans tend to perceive New Agers as consumer-oriented and faddish, buying into a "quick fix" approach to spirituality, though Berger notes that New Age and Neo-Pagan products are often sold at the same stores (2003: 23-25). Overall, the NeoPagan critique of New Agers reflects the difference between a distinctly religious viewpoint and that of a greater spiritual secularism. This can be seen in the more generalized New Age concentration on astrology, the paranormal, health, and healing versus the Neo-Pagan concentration on affiliation to "traditions," the term by which NeoPagan denominations within the larger umbrella category of "Neo-Paganism" are called.

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The distinction between Neo-Paganism and New Age also has overtones of the conflict between Paganism and Christianity. As sociologist Michael York points out, what is probably the main difference between a Pagan religious worldview and both Christianity and the New Age is the degree of Gnosticism. York states that from a Gnostic perspective the divine is seen as transcendent, while from a Pagan perspective the divine is seen as imminent. In keeping with these generalized distinctions, Gnostics tends to see divine communion as selective while Pagans see the divine as more readily accessible by all. One might liken York's Gnostic-Pagan distinction to sociologist Daniel Lawrence O'Keefe and anthropologist Susan Greenwood's distinction between Western monothesim's supernatural divine, as opposed to a magical worldview which posits the divine as explicitly natural. However, as York takes pains to analyze, most religious ideologies contain some admixture of Gnostic and Pagan ideologies. The question then becomes the degree in the blend. Ultimately York posits assessing religious worldview by plotting religious orientation on a grid with axioms of Gnosticism and Paganism and of Monotheism and Polytheism. Assessed therein, Hinduism, for example, laden with dualisms that require transcendence, though polytheistic, is clearly Gnostic, and Buddhism even more-so. Christianity is also Gnostic, and more so in Protestantism than Catholicism. So ultimately is New Age ideology, which may account for its more ready assimilation, counter to Neo-Paganism, as well as the new Age movements overall lack of cohesion into a distinct alternative religious body: it did not need to do so (York 2003: 157-168). When played across the trends of history, York's Gnostic-Pagan axis can be seen to play out in the Enlightenment-Romantic divide, and New Agers can also be seen more 161

as heirs of the Enlightenment tradition and Pagans more as heirs to the Romantic tradition. However, as York himself suggests, it's not that easy to untangle ideologies:

The categorization of Gnostic and Pagan religions is complicated by the inclusion of Pythagoreanism, Platonism, Neoplatonism, Cabalism, and even Theosophy as pagan religions. In the theological classification that I am suggesting, all of these are Gnostic. They each postulate an ultimate source that at the same time becomes the ultimate goal. They identify an actual omega point and then identify it with an alpha point. Evolution or progress is not open-ended but is instead circular and returns to where it began. While this spiritual perspective frequently entertains the notion of reincarnation, the cycle of birth-death-birth is invariably something from which to escape, something from which to be released. Rebirth is not a product of a cosmic joie de vivre but a cause of Weltschmerz (2003: 160).

Thus within York's classification system, Balthazar's Heidelberg School of Hermetic Qabalism is certainly Gnostic, and Balthazar's own particular blend might more properly be defined as New Age than Neo-Pagan—if it weren't for the complicating factor of personal election. Balthazar does not deplore the New Age, but rather speaks of it as a phase he and the rest of the nation went through, whereas he chooses Paganism to define his religion. Looking at how exactly Balthazar's perspective fits into a New Age-NeoPaganism continuum, Christianity becomes a form of lightening rod that simultaneously diffuses and complicates. As York notes, a major factor of Christianity's ascent historically is that, unlike the other religions of Late Antiquity, Christianity countenanced no compromise with other religions. While Christianity (at least technically) demands "acceptance" that Jesus Christ is one's personal savior and the one and only God, the New Age has no one creed, sharing with Neo-Paganism the "many paths" perspective. However, its tendency towards 162

a diffused universalism is different than the "tribalism" of paganism, which aims for a federation of democratically organized local affiliations. In addition, one can often detect a more explicitly Christian gnosis in New Age ideology, where Jesus Christ is often seen as a teacher and enlightened—or in Theosophical terminology "ascended"—master. This is similar to the concept of the enlightenment of Gautama Buddha: men who, through conscious revelation "knew" and thus embodied divinity, which is somewhat different than the divine Renaissance model of Jesus-magus, though bears clear relation in the magician's own emulation of Jesus. Typically, Balthazar takes this one step further, differentiating a historical Jesus of Nazareth who democratically liberated Kabbala from the corrupt priests and gave it freely to the masses from a "false" all-conquering mythological Jesus Christ—at which mention always ensues the curiously evangelical reminiscent, litany: "Jesus Christ, son of Satan, whose mother is a whore...!" However, ironically, Balthazar also simultaneously sees the name "Jesus" itself as a development of Kabbalistic Gematria, whereby, by inserting the letter "shin" into the center ("heart") of the tetragrammaton, Yahweh became Jeshua, the ideogram of the pentagram, the fallen—embodied—star resurrected as an enlightened man. All of which, as far as I can tell, simply affirms that nothing survived 2,000 years of Christian ideological domination—Paganism not excepted.

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5. The Cultic Milieu

In the nineties, the technology of the internet "connected up" the scattered small "circles" of varied Pagan or would-be Pagan groups, while "connecting in" many new, younger members, elevating a sixties-generated underground counter-culture movement to an updated, multi-faceted Pagan presence with a distinctly oppositional political ring. Soon thereafter came Hutton's Triumph of the Moon, which laid out in far greater detail many of the historical points made here. However, Hutton's exposure of NeoPaganism's revivalist nature did not cause Neo-Pagans to fade back into the underground, for, though it may have taken a moment to digest the distinction being made about academic criteria, acceptance of the designation "revival" over "survival" did not much change how Neo-Pagans felt about their religion. However it had come about, NeoPaganism worked for them. Externally, for the most part it seems Hutton's work resolved the tension between the academic and Neo-Pagan camps, allowing room for growth in both arenas. A major resulting development internally was a clearer differentiation between eclectic Pagan revivalism and ancient Pagan reconstructionism. Otherwise, Neo-Pagans seemed to embrace a newfound imaginative freedom, and the movement has continued to grow exponentially, such that it is one of the fastest growing religious movements in North America (Mogliocco 2004: 60, PEW 2008, ARIS 2008). If anything, Hutton's revelations accentuated to Neo-Pagans that they had hit upon something timeless and true in the perennial pastiche of magic and mysticism—something that perhaps finally truly

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united them under one religious umbrella, and as a result academics have turned new and concerted attention to this now clearly post-modern phenomenon. In 1972, however, sociologist of religion Colin Campbell wrote an essay "The Cult, the Cultic Milieu and Secularization" which, in fact, provides an antecedent to this revelation. States Campbell:

The cultic milieu can be regarded as the cultural underground of society. Much broader, deeper and historically based than the contemporary movement known as the underground, includes all deviant belief systems and their associated practices. Unorthodox science, alien and heretical religion, deviant medicine, all compromise elements of such an underground. In addition it includes the collectivities, institutions, individuals, and media of communication associated with these beliefs. Substantively it includes the worlds of the occult and the magical, of spiritualism and psychic phenomena, of mysticism and new thought, of alien intelligences and lost civilizations, of faith healing and nature cure. This heterogeneous assortment of cultural items can be regarded despite its apparent diversity as constituting a single entity—the entity of the cultic milieu (Campbell 2002: 14).

While not focused on solely religious cults, Campbell cites mysticism as the glue that stimulates and unites the various subgroups of the cultic milieu. Mysticism, he notes, is "ecumenical, super-ecclesiastic, syncretic and tolerant in outlook" and yet, "Although it is separated from the mainstream of religion by its rejection of the importance of the fellowship of believers, it does in fact include a belief in a spiritual fellowship but one mediated by the divine." Campbell credits secularism with creating the social changes that ironically give rise to cultic culture, finally suggesting that a "society of seekers" may in fact be the most typical form of the cultic milieu, rather than

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the cult, wherein a "displacement of goals" in which they "accept seeking itself as a primary end" often leads them from thing to thing to thing (Campbell 2002: 14-18). Christopher Partridge argues in The Re-Enchantment of the West that "the term 'occult' describes the melange of beliefs, practices, traditions, and organizations more accurately" than does "cult". He thus redubs the cultic milieu "occulture," which he describes as "combining magic, the occult, and an idea of 'mystical collectivity' common to mystical religions" which he directly links with Neo-Paganism (2004 62-87). Meanwhile, in The Occult Tradition, David Katz suggests that Campbell's collecting of cults under one umbrella category itself has its antecedent in a statement by George Orwell in 1937 in The Road to Wigan Pier about the eccentricities of socialists: "One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words 'Socialism' and 'Communism' draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex maniac, Quaker, 'Nature Cure' quack, pacifist and feminist in England" (Orwell in Katz 2005: 5). Mircae Eliade similarly links the perennial rise of occultism with cultural fashions (Eliade 1976). That what are essentially Neo-Pagans can be at once compared to Libertarians and Socialists, a Turnarian liminal society and a fashion statement is perhaps in itself an advertisement for Campbell's quick hit list of criteria for the cultic milieu: "At the basis of the unifying tendencies is the fact that all of these worlds share a common position as heterodox or deviant items in relationship to the dominant cultural orthodoxies... Syncretization is then further facilitated and reinforced by the overlapping communication structures which prevail within the milieu.. .Lastly, the cultic milieu is manifestly united by a common ideology of seekership which both arises from and in turn 166

reinforces the consciousness of deviant status, the receptive and syncretistic orientation and the interpenetrative communication structure" (Campbell 2002: 14-15). Without question, Neo-Paganism fits this bill in the current era, and offers the opportunity to update Campbell's observations which were made during Neo-Paganism's naissance. The very reclaiming of the name "Pagan" is a clear indicator of heterodoxy and has proved successful in provoking knee-jerk reactions to the always contentious issue of religious pluralism. The concept of "paganism" itself is, of course, essentially a Christian contrivance, originating, says sociologist Michael York, as "a Roman reference to the 'countryside', explaining the rural populace as the last to be converted to a new religion that first took place in the urban centers of the Roman Empire." Pagani meant "people of the place," indigenous groups "who preserved their local traditions" (York 2003: 6, 12). Pagani thus largely denoted "country bumpkin," a designation with which political implications Folklorists should be all too familiar. That it then became demonized was a later development. The term "pagan" as exported globally through Christian evangelism harkens back to this indigenous designation, creating a sense of religious social Darwinism, while simultaneously supporting the meme of European pagan survivals so useful for galvanizing Christian homogeneity. The Neo-Pagan political agenda is perhaps made most clear by the February 2010 launching of the pagan blog PAGANS + politics which following up on the inclusion of Neo-Pagans in the 5th Parliament of World Religions held in Melboure, Austalia in late 2009, which officially recognized Neo-Paganism as a world religion. The organization of Neo-Paganism into a full-blown post-modern religious category in turn points to a now familiar trope of post-modernity: the cultural tyranny of 167

Christianity in modernity and all its spin-offs. This lack of historicity in Campbell's observations is redressed a decade later by Sociologist Daniel O'Keefe who turns the spotlight squarely on magic, stating:

As eclectic magics accumulate from one civilization to another, a countercultural heritage grows. The anti-magical obsessions of Christianity, perhaps caused by its own repressed, led it to categorize all these magics as demonic, and hence unify them intellectually as a kind of opposition party. In the West, therefore, magic becomes an underground, antiestablishment tradition, which occasionally erupts, and some scholars like Tiryakian think its eruptions play a creative part in Western cultural change. An occult upsurge in the Renaissance perhaps changed the course of science; the current upsurge seems aimed at expanding the powers of the individual mind. Because the Western establishment patterns magic as the opposition, it tends to hang together so that when one aspect wins acceptance this accrues to the benefit of the others. Thus we have "occult revolutions" and these historical sequences resemble each other. What usually happens is the following: 1. There is some magical outburst, resulting from seemingly new (but usually old) method for weakening the objective frame. The people involved have been dipping into the old magical literature. 2. The prestige if the new phenomena accrues to all magics. These are tried out again and the new phenomena are produced and widely reported. 3. If the civilization is ripe, there are large numbers of semi-literate masses who are alienated. They provide a market for a publishing boom. What James Webb calls "the secret traditions" are searched anew for titles. They are translated anew and published in cheap editions. This happened in the Renaissance, in Nazi Germany, in the Soviet Union and in the United States at the present time (1982: 524).

O'Keefe's incisive analysis puts some play in Campbell's list, enhancing Campbell's hypothesis that the cultic milieu acts as "a major agency for cultural 'diffusion' facilitating the accommodation of 'alien' cultural items into a host culture" (Campbell 2002: 20) by focusing on how multi-culturalism is connected to secularism and syncretism. Looking back to the Hellenized world, the Renaissance, and other hot

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spots of cultic activity, including the present, one cans see active the multi-cultural forces of emergent globalism. The 2009 American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) which put Neo-Paganism on the mainstream national religious map indicates a ten point drop off of self-identified Christians in the past two decades and a corresponding rise in secularism, prompting Newsweek editor John Meacham's to write a widely circulated speculative article "The End of Christian America" (Meacham 2009). The survey results (or perhaps Meacham's article) seem to have prompted a backlash on the part of the Christian Right, prompting Russel Shorto's recent article "How Christian Were the Founders?" in The New York Times which addresses the Christian Right's effort to essentially rewrite American History, attempting to control the political arena by, amongst other more overt political activities, rewriting American children's text books. Shorto's admonition that this is being done by "nonacademic experts" is, ironically, much in the vein of Hutton's critique of Neo-Paganism in Triumph of the Moon, but one senses in the Christian Right a greater immunity to this criticism, no doubt built into the very foundations of their faith (Shorto 2010). Secularism as a broad cultural setting for toleration clearly allows for the gamut of religious identification, from liberal pagan cults to fundamentalist Christian cults to atheism and a wide variety of quasi-political orientations not strictly identified as religious but with that cultish or "spiritual" twinge, is specifically enacted as a provision for divergent beliefs. Co-existing divergent belief systems, especially religious belief which itself encompasses entire worldviews, may be said to follow the model of cultures in contact, even if they may be subcultures of a national identity. Syncretism, hybridity, creolism that are of course typically symptomatic of cultures in contact. Cultures in 169

contact mix. One has to be vigilant to not go a little native in most social settings. Thus it is understandable why purists such as the Christian Right would vehemently oppose both the protection of Neo-Pagans rights under the first amendment and secularism. Both provide an environment rife for heresy and damnation. Meanwhile, Christian Right prayer groups target abortionists and political figures. Of course, the Christian Right does not represent all Christian thought. There is a voice for Christian tolerance, but more to the point, there is also the prevailing force of Christian magic. As both David Katz in The Occult Tradition and Owen Davies in Grimoires: A History of Magic Books make clear, despite the orthodox demonization of magic categorically—or one could argue because of it—the majority of magic in the west since the invention of Christianity has been Christian, and before that there was plenty of Jewish magic, which was, of course, appropriated by Christian magic, as was Greek and Egyptian magic and the magic of pretty much every culture with which it has come into contact. As Wang points out, Hindu magic entered England via colonialism, and as Davies points out, the Holy Bible may not have been intended as a grimoire, but it has become one. Finally, it was, after all, Christianity that created Hermeticism as we know it, the foundational model of magical thinking in both the modern and post-modern western world. In The Limits of Interpretation, Umberto Eco labels the Hermetic penchant for syncretism "Hermetic drift... according to which every item of furniture of the world is linked to every other element" in a form of "unlimited semiosis" (Eco 1994: 24). Similarly, as Chas Clifton says in "The Unexamined Tarot," "In tarot history, any connection is fair game.. .In other words, the more things they can glue onto tarot.. .the 170

'truer' and 'lighter' they are" (Clifton 2004: 44-45)

As Katz points out, syncretism in

a magical worldview is not merely a matter of appropriation and adaption. It's getting back to the garden. In this magical worldview, the universe is a single organism where everything is ultimately connected, if by invisible forces, and in harmony. Syncretism in such a belief system is a story about origins as well as the ultimate synthesis and goal. In "Whose Spirits are They? The Political economy of Syncretism and Authenticity," Raquel Romberg questions the blanket academic use of the term "syncretism" to explain global and transnational processes, suggesting that the native attitude towards these categories should be assessed as determinants before etic value judgments regarding authenticity are made. In addition she adds that "any theory of syncretism must be part of a more general theory of the human ability to use symbols" (Romberg 1998: 78). Of course Regina Bendix had fairly blasted a hole through the topic of authenticity in Folklore a year prior with In Search of Authenticity: the Formation of Folklore Studies. In an interview, Balthazar linked the subject of syncretism in Hermetic magic with the overall structure of Neo-Paganism:

There may be pagans that follow one path. I've never met a pagan that follows just one path in America. Everything is so combine. I remember you asking me about having different cultural gods on my altar, and I said that I thought that was of the mentality that you're not seeing what the gods are for. These are systematic tools, and they're—who the fuck cares if you've got an Egyptian next to a Hindu next to a Roman god? What's the difference between Lakshmi and Fortune, you know? I really don't know the Shiva god in Rome, but you worship or you use the archetypal form as a meditation for the purpose that you're meditating, not for what culture you're from. I'm definitely not Hindu, nor Roman, and I have no fucking idea where the German gods are!

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He then immediately shifted to a very different example of cultural syncretism:

Pardon me for throwing in the weirdest thing I think about Germans is that the biggest fad in Germany—it's gone on for generations—is American Indians. There's whole communities—large communities—where they go out on the weekends and dress as Indians, beat drums, and live in teepees for recreation, all throughout Germany. It's like Civil War re-enactors here. They don't have gladiator re-enactors; they don't have barbarian reenactors; they have Indians (Travelogue #1: 3-4).

Point taken. While in a post-colonialist atmosphere we might wince at such cultural appropriation, culture travels and usually in a romanticized, commercial manner, especially when its point of origin is lost to the seas of time. Extra kudos added if it has been exterminated or is near dead, but hanging on. The subject of cultural syncretism and the sheer promiscuity of magic as a symbolic system in transnational processes translates as well to the larger subject of cultic heterodoxy, for in fact Neo-Paganism in it' own internal structure values multiculturalism and divergent opinion, eschewing orthodoxy to such a degree that one could say that this becomes an overall orthopraxic political stance. This in turn has spillover into the category of "seekership." While it is true that a "surfing" mentality can certainly be seen amongst fringe "seekers" and activists (often leading to burnout) especially amongst youth, in Neo-Paganism the emphasis on finding your own path brought into the context of orthopraxic heterodoxy almost mandates dabbling. This results, if not in an ethic, then certainly in a tendency for an ongoing, unfolding membership in multiple groups. Even Franzel, who stuck to a strictly European Ceremonial Magick diet in a clear Christian context, hosted in his small Bavarian house a variety of occult magical 172

groups of which he was a member, as befits the historic intertwining of such groups such that different academic styled occult histories tend to report one or the other group as merely a branch of the other. This is especially true of Rociscrucians and Freemasons. In keeping with Campbell, Balthazar calls American Paganism "ecumenical," a quality well-exhibited by Balthazar's wife, Nettle, who began as a Buddhist, moved on to Hellenic Polytheism, has studied various strains of herbalism including shamanic ones, is initiated in at least one witchcraft tradition, and is currently a practicing Druid. NeoPagans also tend to be willing to work ritually or magically with Neo-Pagans of other denominations. This is especially evident during Pagan festivals where large groups of Neo-Pagans from a variety of traditions gather to camp, attend workshops and rituals, and play and dance together. Balthazar's own actions, despite strict adherence to a particular tradition, exemplify this. Following his arrest, in order to garner specific magical support for his case, Balthazar and Nettle created a small circle dedicated to the goddess Hecate, Greek/Thracian goddess of witchcraft, amongst whose many realms of governance is Justice. The idea of centering the circle on Hecate was initially Nettle's. Thus for this collaboration to happen, Balthazar had to fist assimilate the figure of Hecate to the Qabalistic structure. This was, in fact, easily accomplished, as Hermes and Hecate are associated in Hellenistic magic. It was also aided by the fact that one of Hecate's feast days is Balthazar's birthday. (The other turned out to be another member of the circle's, cementing her involvement.) Balthazar then incorporated Hecate into his practices by assimilating her to a Tarot card—the XlVth card of the Higher Arcana, the "Arts" card or "Witches Cauldron." Once this intellectual accommodation was accomplished, the essential structure of the ritual was created by Nettle and then adjusted by Balthazar again 173

to fit a Qabalistic schema. This included an adjustment of the elements assigned to the cardinal directions and the inclusion of a Tarot reading. The Hecate circle is now in its fifth year. Over time ritual objects have been gathered and dedicated, including a specified Tarot deck, chalice, and statuary, and various adjustments to the ritual have been made along the way, reflecting ongoing research and practice, as well as fluctuating membership.

6. Neo-Pagan Self-Identification

In her first (1979) edition of Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids, Goddess-Worshippers and Other Pagans in America, Atwood introduced one of the first formal definitions of Neo-Paganism, widely disseminated early on by Tim Zell, cofounder of The Church of All Worlds and the Green Egg, and still the most often used definition of Neo-Paganism today: Earth-based (or Nature) Religion. The same year (1979), however, another definition was being given by Starhawk in her seminal introduction to feminist witchcraft, The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess: Goddess Religion. This definition was also promulgated early on by Tim Zell who in 1970 had what he calls his "TheaGenesis" vision where he identified "Mother Earth" as a living organism, giving the earth "the status of a goddess" and in so doing fusing the idea of a goddess-centered religion with an earth or nature-centered one. This idea was secularized and popularized by British scientist James Lovelock's as "The Gaia Hypothesis" (ZellRavenhart 2009: xiii, Clifton 2006: 51). In turn, what Clifton calls a "Gaian nature" orientation developed in American Neo-Paganism as a whole. 174

This, in turn, fed back into Wicca, which in Britain had originally been associated primarily with British ancestry as the "Old Religion". The transformation complete, Wicca, too, became ecologically oriented. Says Chas Clifton, "Instead of spell-casting, Wicca was now nature religion", and this ideology, in turn, was transported back across the Atlantic, affecting British Wiccan identity, as well. Clifton notes that the sacralizing of nature in the U.S. has its antecedent in the Transcendentalist movement and the Hudson River School, themselves following in a Romantic tradition. These Europeanstock citizenry, having no erstwhile ancestral connection to the land, seemed to feel a need to forge one, says Clifton, and in so doing they often employed Pagan religious themes (Clifton 2006: 37-45, 50-58). Bron Taylor calls this "dark green religion", exemplified by Rousseau, which he differentiates from P.C. environmentally friendly behavior exhibited as religious obligation or "green religion" (Taylor 2010: 10). Clifton, along with Lippy and others, meanwhile also notes that the back-to-nature style Pagan festival has its antecedent in earlier Christian revivals which took to the wilderness for a collective transformative, charismatic experience. Apparent in the reformation of Wicca as nature or earth religion, is however, also revealed a third, and in fact earlier, if not original definition of Neo-Paganism: magical religion. Magic has long been synonymous with paganism, and it was magic that originally defined both Wicca and Neo-Paganism. In reorienting to an ecological ideology, both, however, began to identify less as magical religion, essentially displacing one antinomianism ideology with another. The appellation "magical religion" begins to show up in more recent academic works, such as Religious Studies scholar James R. Lewis' Magical Religion and Modern Witchcraft (1996) and anthropologist Sabina 175

Mogliocco's Witching Culture: Folklore and Neo-Paganism in America (2004). However, the first internal reference to Neo-Paganism as distinctly "magical religion" that I have found is Iron Mountain: A Journal of Magical Religion, first published in 1984. In his blog, "Letters from Hardscrabble Creek," Clifton calls The Pomegranate: The Journal of Pagan Studies "heir, in a roundabout way, to Iron Mountain: A Journal of Magical Religion and to Gnosis: A Journal of the Western Esoteric Tradition " (Chas Clifton, Letters From Hardscrabble Creek, comment posted August 1, 2003). These references to "magical religions" reflect Ceremonial Magick's coming back to the fore in the popular boom time of the New Age in the seventies and eighties—just in time for Balthazar to find his trans-Atlantic spiritual connection in the form of a redturbaned Sihk who was a member of a Bavarian occult lodge walking down South Street. LLewelyn, one of the largest New Age publishers in the country, describes on its web page its own place in the seventies esoteric publishing scene: "It was during this era that Llewelyn began to appear on the radar screen of general society, which wanted to know what all this 'magic stuff was about." Owner Carl Weschake's Gnostic Festivals were "a huge hit" and the publishing house added titles by Crowley and Fortune, publishing Crowley's Thoth Tarot in 1972. In their statement about the eighties, they focus on a flourishing "Wiccan/ Neopaganism" movement and their own corresponding growth in those areas. However, in that era they also published a "High Magick" series featuring Ceremonial Magick authors such as Israel Regardie, a member of one of the successor orders to the Golden Dawn, and Donald Michael Kraig, about whose work a jacket blurb from Modern Magick: Eleven Lessons in the High Magical Arts states "Thus unusual book might well have been written by Aleister Crowley himself." 176

The imprint page about the "High Magick" series in Modern Magick gives us quite a bit of information about the popular perceptions of Ceremonial Magick at the time:

Natural Magick is performed with the aid of ordinary, everyday implements, is concerned with things of the Earth and the harmony of Nature, and is considered to be magick of the common people. High Magick, on the other hand, has long been considered the prerogative of the affluent and the learned.. .There was a time when, to practice High Magick, it was necessary to apprentice oneself to a Master Magician, or Mage, and to spend many years studying, and later practicing.. .In recent years there has been a change from the traditional thoughts regarding High Magick. Average Westerners have a much wider education than people of four or five centuries ago. Minds attuned to computers are finding a fascination with the mechanics of High Magical conjurations. The Llewelyn High Magick Series has taken the place of the Mage, the Master Magician who would teach the apprentice (Kraig 1996: iii).

On one hand, the aura of class that has always unspokenly clung to the Christian distinction between theurgy (religion, mysticism) and thamaturgy (magic, witchcraft) were being eroded. A democratization of High Magick is taking place in the eightiesoriented series imprint. This transformation in perception is prefigured by a transference of the meaning of the word "High": "High Magick is the transformation of the Self to the Higher Self. Some aspects of it also consists of rites designed to conjure spirits, or entities, capable of doing one's bidding." The terminology "Higher Self, prominent in Golden Dawn literature, especially Fortune (who was raised a Christian Scientist) is heavy with Hindu (Gnostic) Theosophical influence and is, not surprisingly, common jargon amongst New Agers. Relating "High" to "Self," as opposed to class, catches a certain wave in popular American post-modern bourgeois sensibility in general and the 177

Human Potential movement of the sixties in particular, modularizing Ceremonial Magick into instant accessibility—a move that apparently took off, creating another whole tier of cross-pollenization between the branches of the Neo-Pagan movement and brought Ceremonial Magick formally back into the fold. With this, there is also a post-modern shucking of the early modern notion of apprenticeship in the "High Magick" imprint, a necessary move in dealing with a literary market of predominantly solitary practitioners—relatively solvent, educated, contemporary urban and suburban Americans distinctly not in a coven or lodge, but rather at home, alone, reading books and apparently communing socially with or at least through their computers (the mechanics of which is being likened intriguingly, though vaguely, to the mechanics of magic)—and thus for the creation of a virtual community, notably not unlike Balthazar's astral lodge. While not fully in line with Balthazar's Heidelberg School tradition—a European tradition, where an emphasis on a direct teacher-student relationship is still advised if not required—Balthazar does own a copy of Modern Magick and put it on my suggested reading list. He also projects himself as a similar such author, continually stressing that anybody can do this; they just have to learn how. Notably, Balthazar hopes that one thing the publication of the book will do will be to generate a circle around him. In the meantime he has found a magical community largely through Pagan gatherings. Clearly coming back out to Neo-Paganism tapped Ceremonial Magick authors into a readily available publishing nitche, but it also provides a real community for such modern souls in exile in a post-modern world. Their stepping back into prominence in the Neo-Pagan community in dialogue with "Natural Magic"

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(which, vamped up via Wicca is, in reality, not that different) in turn spurred a refocusing of the Neo-Pagan community back on their magical religion. The Llewelyn "High Magick" Series notably no longer exists. One now finds such texts, designated by the subheadings Alchemy, Enochian, Gnosticism, Golden Dawn, and Kabbalah, under the simplified heading "Magick." These texts are notably separated from the category "Nature-Based and Pagan," which none-the-less contains subheadings for "Books of Shadows," "Spells," and "Folklore & Natural Magic." As with the "k", "c", or "q" of qabala, the "k" in the heading "Magick" is significant. Crowley put the "k" in "magick," designating specifically Ceremonial Magick. A Llewelyn representative in Customer Service whom I spoke to on the phone stated that he had worked there "a long time" and was not even aware that the "High Magick" series ever existed. My reprint is from 1996. A later Kraig text, Sex Magick, which picks back up on the sixties thread of the experiential and the potential for change of consciousness through sex, published in 1998, is not in the series, suggesting the interval in which that series became history. Notably, Llewelyn is releasing in November 2010 by Lon Milo DuQuette Low Magick: It's All in Your head... You Just Have No Idea How Big Your Head Is, a text about Goetic Magick, now referred to as the conjuring of "spirits," which in an earlier day were called "demons." The overlap within the three designations—earth, goddess, and magical—besides showcasing another matrix of heterodox orientation to mainstrean Christian culture, in many ways reflects the overlap and continued cross-pollination between the main branches of Neo-Paganism. The introductory statements of a special panel presented by Wesier Books, "Earth Based: Are We Really" at Pantheacon 2010, one of the largest 179

Pagan conventions in North America, provide an excellent illustration of this. The panel was moderated by T. Torn Coyle, an eclectic Neo-Pagan witch in the Feri tradition and author of Evolutionary Witchcraft, who recorded the panel and uploaded it to her Elemental Castings Podcast at the T. Thorn Coyle Blog, some of which I have transcribed below. Coyle posed the question of whether Neo-Paganism is "still" earth-based, as she'd noticed her own cosmology had shifted to something she'd call more nature-based and which included the cosmos. The first speaker, Diana Paxson, is a fantasy novelist and practices Heathenism or Asatru, a reconstructist Pagan religion, in this case of Ancient Norse Religion, which she designates as a folk religion and distinctly earthbased. In her statement, Paxson spoke in a traditionalist vein of the spirits of all things— humans, animals, mountains, plants, the hotel—and a need for concern for the environment. She sees Earth as "a dwelling place" and the need for "harmony" with earth spirits. The next speaker, Zee Budapest, spoke from a Dianic Wiccan feminist pagan revival perspective. She directly equated women with the earth, making the statement: "If you want to get on this earth, you have to go through a lady," which drew considerable appreciative laughter. The rest of her statement focused on issues of violence against women and the earth and an as yet unattainable democracy. The third speaker, Orion Foxwood, is a practitioner of "Faery Seership", an eclectic melding of Appalachian, Celtic, and "other Witchcraft" traditions. I noticed that his book, The Tree of Enchantment: Ancient Wisdom and Magic Practices in the Faery Tradition, also clearly employs a Qabalistic Tree of Life format. Drawing on evolutionary language, Foxwood spoke of following a "Life-based religion," "eco-spiritual magic," and "the deep place" which he defined as a place of connection and feeling: "And feeling is the 180

rhythmic language of creation. Thoughts form. Feelings give life, as we know when we feel." Foxwood could be said to represent the homegrown Neo-Pagan perspective with all its sixties experiential packaging. The Fourth and last speaker, Lon Milo DuQuette, is the Ceremonial Magick representative. As it states on his homepage: "Since 1975 he has served as a national and international administrative officer of the Ordo Templi Orientis, one of the most influential and controversial societies of the 20th century. He is an acknowledged authority on the life and magical work of Aleister Crowley, the O.T.O.'s most celebrated and notorious leader, and since 1994 has served as the order's United States Deputy Grand Master" (Lon Milo Duquette 2010). Befitting his tradition, Duquette read from a prepared essay, titled "Seek earth, and heaven shall be added unto you", which recounted a moment of embarrassing high sentiment during a drive through the verdant English countryside, marked by the exhaustion of a 7-day lecture tour, which none-the-less yielded a true spiritual vision which he then funnels through Ceremonial Magick's perspective within Neo-Paganism:

...for the first time in my life I realized deep down to the very core of my soul that the earth is a living, breathing conscious being, an intelligence, a goddess, and that I was her child—my flesh her soil and mantle, my blood her rivers and streams and seas, my bones her stones and mountains, my heartbeat her molten core, my soul one with her soul. What more palpable deity could humanity seek? What god more wonderful, more worthy of our awe, our gratitude, our prayers? We must certainly honor the sun as the ultimate source of light and life, but without earth to reflect the solar glory, without the earth and her manifest creatures, Sol Invictus would remain eternally a god unworshipped. Moreover, is not the Earth herself sunlight made manifest? Earth is the climax of spirit's decent into matter, the magical lowest low 181

that contains not only the spark of the highest high, but also everything in between. Earth is the alchemical laboratory that transmutes light into life. Earth is the crowning finale of creation, and we are conscious creatures of this Earth. As such, you and I possess, we embody the secret of spirit's return to godhead. As it is written in the Emerald Tablet of Hermes, that one only thing after God is the father of all things in the universe, his power is perfect—AFTER it has been united to a spirituous earth. It is humanities most ancient and self-evident fact of life: the sun is our father, the earth is our mother, and no matter how gender neutral our culture may strive to become, it is the mother who first hears our cries, it is the mother who first responds to our needs, it is the mother who first answers our questions. Does the term "earth-based religion" define my personal quest? No. But I most fervently believe that as long as I live and breathe in this body and in this dimension, I shall seek earth, and by doing so heaven will be added unto me.

DuQuette's statement reflects what Clifton calls the "cosmic nature" orientation of Ceremonial Magick, common to astrologically oriented systems, also present within the seasonal observations of other branches of Neo-Paganism, including Wicca. Astrology, as numerous scholars note, is in many ways the universal solvent of "nature religions" and forms, along with other forms of divination, a steady interface with popular culture. Ultimately Clifton differentiates three types of nature religion orientations: "Cosmic Nature," "Gaian Nature," and "Erotic Nature" (again, another matrix of heterodoxy). In the observations of a calendar clock, however, Cosmic Nature blends into Gaian nature. Erotic nature Clifton identifies predominantly with Wiccan sacred sexuality in which "Wicca and some other types of modern Paganism enact 'nature religion' at the level of the human body, rather than at the level of the cosmos or the planet." Clifton states: "Many pagan religions include invocation of and possession by their gods. Wicca, in particular, extends possession to sexual acts, whether literal or 182

metaphorical, and significantly refers to them as the Great Rite" (2006: 44-66). However, this sense of "Great Rite" is abundantly evident in the cosmic nature outlined by DuQuette and is often explicitly sexualized in Ceremonial Magick, as witnessed by Donald Michael Kraig's very popular 1998 title, Sex Magick, further depicting the intertwining of both theory and practice throughout Neo-Pagan tradition, while Owen Davies notes in Grimoires: a History of Magic Books that sex magic is "a strong theme in German ritual magic" (Davies 2009: 247). Certainly Crowley, who brought over the O.T.O. from Germany, was notorious for his sexcapades and coded writings on sex magic. Thus I would say that one cannot credit Wicca with carrying the brunt of Erotic Nature. However, in reimagining fertility cults through the lens of feminism and as such reclaiming an age-old eroticism attributed the female body, they definitely feminized it. Thus in modifying Clifton's statement, I would say that, again, these three forms of orientation towards nature can be associated with the three main branches of NeoPaganism for purposes of illustration, but in fact they intersect and are to some degree shared by all, and Ceremonial Magick prefigures all of them. In the playing out of inherent Ceremonial Magick themes in the context of various developing Neo-Paganisms these attitudes have, however, developed unique flavors. As Duquette's ultimate answer to the question of being an earth-centered religion indicates, Ceremonial Magick retains a distinctly urbane personality within NeoPaganism. DuQuette's literary eloquence, as well as a martini he wryly mentions earlier in his essay, may be emblematic of this distinction. For while one can mistake many a Neo-Pagans aspirations as downwardly mobile if you don't factor in the good middle class income it takes to maintain all that belly dance and cowboys and Indians chic, not to 183

mention extensive soft-bound libraries, the attitude of Ceremonial Magicians can be down right bourgeois. A top hat and tails is de rigeur, and like the Goth crowd, they favor the plush velvets and smooth, shiny satins of a hybridized Medieval-Victorian garb. All in all, when Ceremonial Magicians go camping at Pagan festivals, they're not necessarily so focused on communing with nature or the typical mud, spit, and glitter form of pagan artistic expression or even, as Clifton says of Gardner, "nude sunbathing tinged with occultism," though they may well imbibe (Clifton 2006: 41). More likely they are highly aware that they are taking a nostalgic pastoral vacation with perks (everyone likes the music and the fire spinning) and they're packing martinis, or very likely they're on a business trip. But the real bottom line of why Ceremonial Magicians choose Neo-Paganism is magic. Yes, in the end, it is still magic that gathers the far flung corners of the NeoPagan movement. And it seems that it is deeply enjoyable and fulfilling to do magic together, to talk about magic, and to compare practices and experiences. This magic can be theurgic, thamaturgic, or shamanic, involving gods, angels, elementals, "nature", or just plain the human psyche, but it is this active perspective of magic that brings Ceremonial Magicians, as a whole, out into the woods and book shops to hang out with a bunch of touchy-feely diviners and visionaries.

7. Full-Circle

Ultimately Balthazar provides his own definition for Paganism: Paganism is practice-based religion, which he differentiates from faith-based religion, especially 184

Christianity and Islam. Jews, he notes, however, like pagans, follow a primarily practice-based religion. Jokes Balthazar, "Jews just don't know they're pagans." He has made similar points about Buddhism: "What the Hermetica has in common with Buddhism is it doesn't matter whether the Buddha exists or not; it is the practices of information that makes it a living religion that keeps evolving and the gods keep speaking to man," because in both cases, "It teaches you a mathematical system of channeling the God that the book is continued. It is a practice" (Life History 1: 21). Similarly, he shrugs off the label of "cult", stating that the original meaning of the term simply designated a set of religious practices, sharing with "culture" a root in "cultivation." This viewpoint of the practice-based orientation of Neo-Paganism is confirmed by other Neo-Pagans such as Gus diZerga, a Garnderian Wiccan, who in 2009 became the first Pagan blogger for Beliefnet. In his first post at the site diZerga warns his presumably mostly mainstream readership:

I need to emphasize that this is A Pagan's blog. We are a spiritual tradition whose members are held together by common practices far more than by common beliefs. It has always been so in Pagan cultures.. .NeoPagans be they British traditional Wiccans, Celtic Reconstructionists, Asatru, Druids, or any of the many other new traditions, may appear bizarrely eclectic and turbulent from a scriptural perspective, but we fit right in with our own history. We do not so much fight or argue over dogma, unless someone ventures to speak for us all on those matters. I do not want to try (di Zerga 2009).

This distinction between "practice-based" and "faith-based" religion aligns with Hufford's distinction of cognitive belief—belief that—from faith-based belief—belief in, which, ironically, Balthazar calls "superstition," usually citing as a prime example "Jesus 185

Christ died for my sins." As per the Rosicrucian creed, Ceremonial Magicians can be monotheists, polytheists, pantheists, panantheists, agnostics, atheists, and many, like Crowley or DuQuette or Balthazar don't clearly distinguish between them. Amongst Ceremonial Magicians the word "God" or "gods", "spirits" or "beings" has incredibly mobile valence, as evidenced in this oft-quoted definition of Magick from Crowley's Magick in Theory and Practice:

MAGICK is the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will. (Illustration: It is my Will to inform the World of certain facts within my knowledge. I therefore take "magical weapons," pen, ink, and paper; I write "incantations"—these sentences—in the "magical language" i.e. that which is understood by the people I want to instruct; I can forth "spirits," such as printers, publishers, booksellers, and so forth, and contrain them to convey my message to those people. The composition and distribution of this book is thus an act of Magick by which I cause Changes to take place in conformity with my Will (Crowley 1991 XIIXIII).

Borrowing presumably from the name of a small square in Rabalais' Gargantua and Pantagruel, Crowley created the religion of "Thelema", a magical cult devoted to Will, while DuQuette humorously calls himself a member of "a solar phallic cult." Balthazar, whose Heidelberg School of Hermetic Qabalah, lies in the domain of these traditions, makes a point of stating that he has no definite position on the existence of God or gods. What he believes in is a structure of mathematics. Even gods or demons are only manifestations of this structure, as are you or I, a seahorse or a flower, a mountain or an atom, and I suppose Christian Rosencreutz. To this end, he notes:

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The consciousness of the Gods could be just in the symbology that the Gods are before us symbolized in mythology and in mathematical form above us, and that's all we're talking about. Or are there Gods that are transmitted? Or is it a consciousness of this mathematics all around us that reflects in us, and therefore the definition is the same. I have nothing to debate about it (Life History 2: 29).

In "The Occult Underground: Strategies of Power and Antinomianism", Henrik Bogdan addresses the practical nature of occultism:

These techniques, which often are of a highly ritualistic nature, include evocations and invocations of angels, demons and other entities, astral journeys, meditation on symbols such as tarot cards, sexual magic, and (to a lesser extent) the use of drugs for a spiritual purpose. Apart from these dominantly Western techniques, it is also common to encounter mystical techniques of eastern origin, such as various forms of Hindu and Buddhist yoga. What all these various techniques have in common is that they are practical as opposed to theoretical. In other words, occultism is often something which is practiced. The practical orientation of occultist forms of spirituality such as magical currents is often emphasized by the chief exponents of these particular currents (Bogdan 2009: 104).

Bogdan's definition of Occult practices conforms to those of Ceremonial Magick. Yet while Bodgan is clearly correct in emphasizing the practical nature of occultism, such practices as he lists do not come without a burden of theory behind them. It seems that Bogdan is conflating theory with faith and yet at the same time is suggesting in this practice the type of lack of reflection often associated with faith, as suggested in Theodor Adorno's assessment of the "secondary superstition" involved in the popular use of astrology, in which a wide variety of people accept the veracity of astrological predictions without showing any interest in its justifications simply because it is there in

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the newspaper column (Adorno 2002). Hufford would label this form of faith a belief in authority. The authority of astrology described by Adorno is in part based in the vehicle of the newspaper, but also in astrology's popularity itself. Though the circularity of such thinking is evident, as Hufford points out, we are all well-trained into a belief in authority, and such faith-based belief does serve a practical purpose. However it also crops up in dubious ways within larger constellations of beliefs. Balthazar's belief in Christian Rosencreutz is definitely a belief in the authority of his order's stories, for example. His belief in a mathematic structure of the universe, however, is more complex. It is also certainly shared to a degree by prominent mainstream groups. He has received teachings of a varied nature in these regards, which, while overlapping with scientific information, is more eclectic and tied to more esoteric streams of belief, including, through his training in art, aesthetics. Finally, however, it is not an appeal to authority but to his own observations and experiences that make these teachings true. At the same time, such truth becomes linked to other experiential truths, such the perceived efficacy of magic, thereby legitimizing it. This brings up two levels of necessary distinction regarding magic and belief: 1) as practice-based religion suggests, there is no indication that faith-based belief has no part in magical religion, especially as a complete negation of faith-based belief as outlined above is almost humanly impossible; however, in keeping with Neo-Pagan democratic principles, what elements of faith are present are not generally exhibited as dogma, and it is ultimately the veracity of practical experiences that lend credence to the faith-based elements in a tradition; finally, even such faith-based sounding elements as "God", "gods," "spirits" and the like are more commonly referred to as "theoretical," at least within Ceremonial 188

Magick, and 2) when a magician is practicing magic, it is not these things about which he is thinking. Magicians, in fact, often employ this bi-part structure of theory and practice in instructional texts on magic. Take, for example, Aleister Crowley's Magick in Theory and Practice, already mentioned. Then there is Franz Bardon's Inititation into Hermetics which, as noted in Chapter Two, is divided into two parts: Theory and Practice. Part I, Theory, is, however, only thirty-two pages long, while Part II, Practice, is two hundred and thirty six pages long. A slightly more balanced approach is taken by Lon Milo DuQuette in Chapter Five of Aleister Crowley's Illustrated Goetia where, after about 43 pages of historical and personal introduction, there is just over a page devoted to theory and just under a page devoted to practice, but then the "practice" subsection is really, a la Bourdieu, a theory of practice, and the entire remainder of the text—189 pages—is intended for practical use (DuQuette et. al. 2007). Each of these books are, in the end, a tool. None-the-less, as in structuralist parlance, which—coincidently?— arose in the same time period (much like the Hermeneutic sciences derived from the Heidelberg School in the late 19th)—theory comes first. What is this theoretical grounding in? Usually, as in the first chapter, numbered zero, of Crowley's Magick in Theory and Practice, a theory of the laws of the universe, which in Crowley is an explicit treatise in mathematics, especially the numbers one to ten, with particular focus on Dualism, Monism, and Nihilism, the formula of the tetragrammaton, and man as microcosm. These same subjects, albeit in varying detail including less of a mathematical orientation, appear in the theoretical section of Bardon's Inititation Into Hermetics. Not surprisingly, this body of theory will be the subject of the 189

first of Balthazar's treatises. However, the majority of theoretical research is left to the individual reader/practitioner. Practice remains the focus of these texts—i.e. the application of these theories within the experiential mode. Thus we come to item number two. While belief cannot be entirely escaped in magical practice, whatever meaning proceeds the pattern or emanates from it, whatever charts of correspondences are borrowed and/or developed in one's own book of shadows, whatever scripts are prepared and memorized and ritual objects consecrated, a conscious focus on belief is erased in the experience-based orientation of practice. It can be argued with good reason that all of these activities are in fact part of magical practice, however, it is useful to separate out the moment of performance itself as regards Ceremonial Magick. To this end, in The End of Magic, sociologist Ariel Gluckrich argues, based on fieldwork performed in India, that belief has little to do with magic. He notes, "Belief implies a set of intellectual assumptions and conclusions that is bridged by uncertain means" (1997: 11). He then goes on to address the western concept of belief as applied to magical practices encountered in his research in Banares:

This process plays no role in healing, cursing, or the other forms of magic I observed. Few magicians and clients in Banares ever ask themselves why their magic works or what it means. It works as a matter of nature. A man who inserts a key in the ignition of his Honda and turns it does not believe the engine will start as a result of some causal chain. The act of turning the key and the firing of the engine are one event.. .Magical acts are performed because they are connected to certain natural phenomena, and this connection is sensual and intuitive rather than intellectual.. .Act and result are perceived as part of one pattern, like the repeating forms in the apparent chaos of fractals or the blended figures in Escher's art. No

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mental speculation—belief—forms a part of the perceived connections in this complex event (Gluckrich 1997: 11).

Like Bogdan' use of the term "theory," "belief to Gluckrich apparently means "faith." Yet Gluckrich's findings explicitly confirm that magic operates precisely through the structures of cognitive belief. In keeping with Gluckrich's findings in Banaras, for all his mathematical conceptualization, Balthazar is, as he makes clear, for the most part is thinking of nothing having to do with "belief as he performs any of the variety of his magics. He is thinking about structure—a structure whose efficacy, as Gluckrich states, is reliant on its "naturalness", which is what makes it "correct." Like Stanislavski's practical advice to actors, phrased as an admonition that you cannot "act" abstract emotions or ideas—you must act actions*— the complete identification with the practical elements of magic entails the disengagement with elements that might traditionally be called "belief." This displaced focus is perhaps most aptly compared to the athlete, the musician, the martial artist, who exists in a state of preparation and expectation within a given structure, yet must perform in the moment, acting faster than "thought." However, to give this problem one more turn of the screw, bringing it in effect full circle, this does not mean that theoretical models are wholly absent." Rather, as Fortune suggested regarding the seeding of ideas during initiation, they are embedded at a deeper level within the practices themselves. It is easy here to turn to psychological models, but unfortunately these tend, as Hufford notes, to reduction. Ironically, the psychological models provided by Ceremonial Magick itself are far more rich. Thus I 191

will turn for now instead to the equally troubling topic of embodiment. Paul Connerton, writing about the bodily performance of cultural memory (specifically the French revolution) in public ritual in How Societies Remember (1989) and Robert Ferris Thomson writing about formally embodied religious and cultural gestalts in Flash of the Spirit (1984) examine the feedback loop of embodiment in a historical perspective, while ethnographies such as Sally Ann Ness' Body, Movement, and Culture: Kinesthetic and Visual Symbolism in a Phillipine Community and Dorry Noyes' The Mule and the Giants: Struggling for the Body Social in a Catalan Corpus Christi Festival (both published in 1992) examine it in lived context. Acknowledging that the magician is certainly (deliberately) a cipher for the transmission of received cultural knowledge in his tradition, I would like, however, to transport this subject of cultural performance in magical practice back into the domain of hybridity (touched upon slightly by Thompson) briefly by highlighting an article by Folklorist Deborah A. Kapchan on anecdotal remixing and revoicings of cultural texts. Kapchan concludes "Hybridization and the Marketplace: Emerging Paradigms in Folkloristics" as follows:

The repetition of discourse... accrues authority and receives the label of tradition. When the notion of genre is reoriented from being a closed and resistant form to an open and mutable one, however, the way is then clear to investigate the transformation of categories that mediate impressions of the world. Revoicings play a crucial role in this process as they change the shape of authoritative discourse by introducing a different time-space orientation to words that carry their own historical reality into the present. [The speaker] has appropriated a phrase from tradition and infused it with a new meaning without erasing the traces of the other voices which have historically embodied the words.. .it is a transformation of genre in the largest sense of the word, that is, a linguistic transmutation of chronotope, 192

of world view. This transmutation is grasped not only in the juxtaposition of genres or how the speaker embeds them in levels of discourse, but in their revoicing, their internal transformation in both time and space. This is the process that Bhaktin had in mind when he wrote about hybridization (Kapchan 1993: 319-320).

In other words, in ritual performance, but also in the daily construction of reality and personality and in telling the stories which mesh our experience with a tradition, the body is a vector of hybridity, parsing the relationship of self and culture, time and space. Just as each good grimoire, like good poetry, steals from its predecessors in order to slightly tweak the information, ostensibly for a new generation who is ready to receive a newly revealed piece of the system, the experiential mode of magic taps into this level of authority. As Donna Haraway notes in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, regarding personal narratives, experience is both product and means, and as such it is "constructed and mobilized as an object of knowledge and action" (Haraway 1991: 109-110). Awkwardly, however, physical and imaginative experience are in many ways indistinguishable in the common reality-building vortex called "experience." We not only rewrite history, we rewrite the present. As phenomenology shows us, you can't remove the perception from the experience, and as Cuppitt notes, phenomenology smacks of mysticism. In the semiotics of experience thus meaning making accrues at the "subliminal" level. Magic capitalizes on this. In the first chapter of Postmodern Magic, an aptly named book highly recommended by many ceremonial magicians (though not, I believe, known to Balthazar), Patrick Dunn devotes his first chapter to the magical "attitude", which he

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divides into three skills—imagination, introspection, and authority (which he further defines as self-confidence as applied to will)—and four paradigms—the Spirit Paradigm, the Energy Paradigm, the Psychological Paradigm, and the Information Paradigm. The goal of the proposed skill set is to help the would be magician to switch over from an empirical mode of thinking to an intuitive mode through which to access a system of recursive cultural symbols or "semiotic web." This intuitive skill set has an implicit emotional component that can be charged or diffused at different levels of magical engagement. The paradigms, he then shows, are in fact interconnected metaphors for a general sense of an invisible, intangible medium of exchange that he essentially collapses into the Information Paradigm (2005: 3-35, 45). In short, without getting into Qabalah, and from a decidedly post-modern perspective, he none-the-less lays out very much the same microcosmic-macrocosmic structure, albeit it now distinctly in a social sphere, and provides navigational guidelines for locating and using otherwise free-floating cultural signifiers and signifieds. Not surprisingly, quite a few contemporary ceremonial magicians have backgrounds in linguistics. Stepping back now from this active mode of magical behavior, there is also a receptive or meditative mode that as Balthazar makes clear, ironically, is triggered precisely through the aperture of active engagement in symbolic action and visualization. We could call it the opening of a second channel of communication or, borrowing from the electro-magnetic metaphors so dear to magic, an alternating current. Balthazar calls it trance. Thus within magical practice, through various acts of displacement and engagement, a state of trance occurs and a witnessing mode akin to darsan— the Hindu religious mode designated as "pure perception" where visions of the divine are received 194

directly by merely being in the presence of an icon, literally "seeing"—ensues. Darsan implies that "information" is transferred implicitly and holistically through the absorption of the gaze, yet below the explicit, definitive level of language. This concept of unmediated gaze is voiced in the Paul Valery quote, "Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees." Yet as Connerton and Ferris's work reminds us, such images are in fact heavily culturally encoded through the aesthetic medium from all entrance points along the continuum. Thus, the vision, experienced as a form of affirmation, ultimately confirms underlying theoretical models. In the end, the measure of the efficacy of magical practice seems to be that the magic feels right to the magician and as such makes sense. Dunn calls this afterglow of satisfaction "post-magical euphoria" and suggests that it is in fact the primary goal of magical practice, whereas the fulfillment of the magician's desire is a secondary outcome (Dunn 2005: 7-8). Apparently, Dunn has never faced a ten-year prison sentence, for Balthazar would sorely disagree. Yet, in keeping with what may ultimately be Dunn's point, Balthazar often expresses such satisfaction to be proof of a magic's efficacy. In a related vein, when I once asked him if, in banishing a circle, he shouldn't proceed in a counter-clockwise direction (as Wiccans do), he answered that he would try it and see if it felt right and let me know. Gluckrich's example of starting a car is, in fact, an exact equivalent of a definition of "faith" given by Balthazar during a lesson called "The Manifestation of the Tree of Life from the Atman." Before he began this lesson, Balthazar reminded me of our very first lesson, "The Three stages of The Fool." The term "The Fool" refers to the first card in the Major Arcana, whose numerical value is zero. Balthazar explains that the term 195

"fool" is essentially a pun on the idea of being "empty" or "innocent", hence "zero".

In

the building of the Tree of Life from principles of Sacred Geometry, the Fool represents a circle, and more specifically the "Atman", from which Platonic form precipitates the Tree of Life itself. For this first lesson, Balthazar had employed as a prop a piece of paper, on one side of which he wrote the number "0". This he held up, noting simply, "We have a symbol for nothing." He then turned the paper over to its blank side and said, "But this is closer to nothing." He then yanked the paper from his hand with the other hand and, pointing to the now empty space the paper had once occupied, said, "But that is really nothing." This was an obvious illustration of a paradox in which the concept of nothing frames the unconceivable. The lecture "The Manifestation of the Tree of Life from the Atman," however, proceeded in reverse order, from a blank piece of paper to a circle and beyond. To begin the lecture, Balthazar pressed the anchoring point of a compass into a large pad of manila drawing paper, then removed it. This, Balthazar said, was the first stage of the Fool, indicating the dark indentation in the paper as a negative space or "point of concentration." (Later he called it an inhalation—" the breath before the breath".) The second stage of the Fool he depicted next by reinserting the compass point and with the pencil circumscribing the point. This circle, said Balthazar, represented the outer limits of the point's "aura", which he called "a thought and its expansion." (The exhalation.) For the third stage of the Fool, he drew a line with a ruler from the central point to a point on the perimeter, a radius. Balthazar then instructed me to rethink the stages of the Fool more rapidly: as a point of concentration which, in its next move, extending to its outer "limitation", creates simultaneously a radius (symbolized by the number "one", 196

graphically representing a point in motion, masculine/positive—the phallic part—a "magic wand" and the second card in the Higher Arcana called "The Magician") and a curve, the circumference of a circle (iconic of the number two/feminine/negative— mirroring the placement of zero in the dyad of zero and one—and the third card in the Higher Arcana called "The Priestess"). This image or "glyph", he explained, conveyed the same information as the Egyptian story of Atum-Ra, the allegory of primordial energy. Then, pointing to the third stage of the Fool, the radius or "Magician", from which the Tree rapidly blossomed in a series of overlapping geometric forms, he said, "And that's faith". "In Buddhism," he noted, "it's called a dragon"—which he defined as "any line between two points." Years later, recounting "The Manifestation of the Tree of Life from the Atman" and using a new prop—the index fingers of both hands held up like twin antennae— Balthazar ran the lesson of the "Three Stages of the Fool" by me one more time:

Before the space between my fingers existed, my fingers did not exist; that's the absolute nothing. Then it's the space between, and then it's the probable, which is: I have complete faith that I'm going to be able to walk through that door. I haven't done it yet, but it's a knowable; it's a probable. Some people would call that level of faith "logic" (Travelogue 6: 5).

Ultimately Balthazar's definition of "faith" seems to be the unknown quantity of energy that turns one moment into the next, churning form out of the template for form. In this equation, "faith" is clearly elided with magic itself. As Balthazar says, "I know what magic is; it's God that's unexplainable!" (Life History 6: 4-5).

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In a recent phone conversation on January 19, 2010 Balthazar stated that the Hebrew word for faith means emanate, indicating that God should work through you, not for you. To illustrate this problem, he compared two Tarot cards: the 6 of Swords, which he noted is the card of "science", "the ordered structure", and the 7 of Swords card, which is called "faith." Depicted on the 7 of Swords is a large, central sword surrounded and being attacked by six smaller swords. This, said Balthazar, represents "intellect aligned against faith" buoyed by the prevailing belief system that "the good can work through you." Or as he stated as we stood at the end of the hallway overlooking the city, waiting for the courtroom doors to be opened and the trial to begin and discussing the D.A.'s mode of attack, "Yes, but what they don't know about is magic." His faith was clear, just as the image of the magic wand in the lone long sword is clear. Speaking retrospectively regarding his case, he said, "I had to make a simple choice: do I believe in the readings? Do I believe in the I Chings? And the fact of the matter is I do." Following up this conversation on January 21, 2010, he told me, confirming his practice-based religious orientation, "I've come to the conclusion that the probability is faith, not the inconceivable." Of course there is a great irony to the concept of "the probable" when the person speaking to you is calling from prison—a result which they actively, magically worked to avoid. Balthazar is well aware of this irony. "I've learned a lot about faith in prison," says Balthazar. Then he adds, jokingly, a plug for the book: "Do what I do and you'll end up just like me!" Like so many of his sayings, he has made this joke before. Not surprisingly the oracles keep stating that the solution to the problem is: do more magic—believe in the magic.

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CHAPTER 4 MAGICK IN A TIME OF CRISIS

The virtue of the mind Is that emotion Which causes To see —George Oppen 1. The Gender of Tarot Magick

Balthazar states directly that his is not the only path of "Hermetic study or study in the occult." However, it is the one he knows, and it is from this perspective that he defines magic—or, more properly, Magick. In so doing he delineates two essential branches of occult studies: his path, the Magician's path, the path of Ceremonial Magick, and the Priestess's path, the path of Clairvoyance. Here we run into semantic blind spots, for if all other ways of making contact with the spirit world or tapping divine consciousness are by this definition forms of Clairvoyance, and Clairvoyance is not technically "Magick" in the strict sense, then who, besides a ceremonial magician in his tradition is doing magic? Often it is easier to say what magic is not than what it is. Balthazar had this to say about Clairvoyance:

B:

So who's a clairvoyant? Usually it's a nutcase who thinks they're psychic and they don't need study. And then there's other ones that write books on how great you are and you really don't need to know anything, you just have to feel it. I have met some excellent clairvoyants and mediums that don't work in a structured way, but I come from the thinking and the school that talents are not 199

abilities, and by the way I believe everybody's psychic, just as, as an artist, I believe everybody can draw. But a clairvoyant is able to feel. Now I have to say that my teacher was a clairvoyant. He was also a Tarot reader, and he practiced Ritual Magick. But a clairvoyant can pick up the energy out of an object and start feeling and saying things. One of the things I most object to about clairvoyants is that there's, especially in this country, no legitimate forms of schools and practices to teach people to do this. I don't deny that they exist. I just happen to say that I was Balthazar, King of the Gypsies at the Pennsylvania Renaissance Faire where I had a concession where I used to hire psychics. Oh my God! Most of these people needed psychiatric care! It's a way of really going off the deep end because there's so little structure around it. And since there's no legitimate schools of practice and structure, it's hard to check on a lot of these people. I mean, there are people that do meditation and get up there and raise into the higher chakras and channel. This is not a hard thing to do, and this is the basis of being a clairvoyant, and I have honestly been able to channel by doing these exercises, too. But most of the clairvoyants I've met in the United States— 99% of the people I've met in the United States who are in the New Age movement or the Pagan movement don't have any structure around what they're doing. I've been seeing structure forming over the past twenty years, but it's not like the type of structure I've seen in Europe that's existed for thousands of years. That's as simple as that (Travelogue 5: 3).

Always the basic issue for Balthazar seems to be: do you have structure? By which he means: mathematical structure. Judging by his own work in, for example, the Hecate circle, it seems that he extends the terminology of "magic" to cover certain basic—perhaps residual Hermetic— structural elements in Neo-Pagan magical ritual in general, such as casting the circle, which to his mind has an inherently mathematical form. It soon becomes clear that Balthazar sees structure itself as an expression of mathematics. It is thus ultimately, as his wording designates, ritual that determines the Magician's path, by which he does not mean mere stylistics. He means the proper use of symbols that align the microcosm to the macrocosm, the lifeworld and the otherworld. It

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is the magician's job to connect worlds. To do so he must give them form, (re)producing symmetry and correspondence. Thus for Magick in the strict sense to be achieved, the use of symbols must transcend eclectic, provincial personal/intuitive "feelings." Symbols must be universal, the arbiter of which is mathematics. Thus syncretism becomes "synchronicity", an extension of sympathetic magic. Crowley calls this process "Love under Will." In Ceremonial Magick, gender is an element of structure with an inherently mathematical basis, the expression of an inherent binary structure representing electromagnetic charge. This binary structure originates in the essential dyad of macrocosm and microcosm, represented by zero (The Fool), which as "nothing", a stage which precedes being, has a negative charge in relation to I (The Magician), shorthand for the Tree itself, which has a positive charge as expressed/manifested form. This binary structure is then repeated in the relationship between I (The Magician) and II (The Priestess), where it becomes gendered within the manifest structure of the Creation. In fact, three genders are represented by the numbers zero, I, and II, or perhaps more correctly four, for zero, the Atman, is neutral, containing both masculine and feminine essences that become expressed in the creation by the Tetragrammaton, the four polar magnet that has the charge structure exhibited in Figure 1 below.

—

+

+

— Fig. 1

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Here gender is configured as a criss-crossing relation that might be best called masculinemasculine (the relationship of zero to one), masculine-feminine (the relationship of one to two), feminine-feminine (the relationship of two to three—the third card of the Higher Arcana is the Empress), and feminine-masculine (the relationship of three to four—the fourth card of the Higher Arcana is the Emporer). Thus gender operates throughout the Qabalistic number system as a transformative structuring dyad which, in evolving more and more numbers out of these initial combinations, goes through many twists and turns, each gender tempering each other, and in so doing revealing subtler interpretations of gender than are apparent here. Lastly, these gendered electrical charges are mirrored in the Pillar structure of the Tree. The Tree contains three Pillars designated by how the Sephira stack up into three vertical lines. These Pillars provide structure for initiation and particular paths of Hermetic studies. The two outer Pillars, the Pillar of Hermes and the Pillar of Venus, represent the path of Magick and the path of Clairvoyance/ Divination respectively. Dion Fortune urges students of the occult to take the Devotional path, following the Middle Pillar, which she points out is less complicated and less dangerous because intrinsically balanced. However, devotion, like faith, is not everyone's spiritual path. Balthazar as case in point has chosen the spiritual path of Magick. None-the-less, Balthazar, like Fortune, specifies that in performing Magick one must always balance the energies of the two outer pillars. The root of his criticism of Clairvoyance seems to be that it is not similarly balanced. In the image of the Tetragrammaton as a four polar magnet, structured energy (life force) on doubling upon itself, emanates a force of magnetism which expresses a 202

coherence/integrity which can then hold (contain) life. This electro-magnetism emanates, however, beyond the physical boundaries of the enclosed structure, forming an invisible force field, the aura, another container or "wombsack". Thus the circle is "squared." The aura in turn defines the image, if not the actual space, of the Atman, creating an overlapping of spheres, the microcosm aligned with macrocosm, the originating "structuring structure" (to borrow a phrase from Cantwell borrowed from Bourdieu) whose simple axioms formed by a binary pulse of breath made blood generates a structured energy of life that circulates, stabilizes, and finally physically manifests as the Tree of Life. The point of origin of self, of life, and thus of touch down/connection between aligned microcosm and macrocosm is the power chakra, essentially the belly button. This is precisely the model of creation that the Ceremonial Magician evokes in performing Magick, and is precisely the model for performing (Ceremonial) Tarot Magick in a Tarot reading. At every level of a Tarot reading, Balthazar aligns the Atman and the Tree—his own, to access the power of reading, and the querents, to be read. Thus the Tarot reading builds a semantic sphere within a cosmic sphere of influence in a continuous feedback loop between God and man. In so doing he becomes God, the voice of Atman and keeper of the askashic record, the annuls of cosmic history which are the revealed mind of God called "Hermes", and the querent becomes the Tree being read now by the very structure that created it. That at least is what a Tarot reading is for the reader. Thus for the most part, gender in Tarot Magick is a metaphor, but to Balthazar it is also in some ways literal:

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I also find females to be far better clairvoyants than males because their intuition level's by far more hyped, in my opinion, and they use it more! I mean they just do! And the Priestess is the expressive, intuitive type. And there are other areas of magic that the Priestesses also do that are not suited for men, like seduction, like the introduction of tantra (Travelogue 5: 5).

To Balthazar, Magic is "intellectual", involving an active thrust or reach to learn, to know, a deliberate outward motion of mind, and thus is gendered male just as with electrical gadgets like plugs and sockets the thing that sticks out is called "male" and the thing that you stick it into is called "female." Clairvoyance, which he further qualifies as divination, is not so much its opposite as a complementary form of knowing, perhaps more accurately a form of "holding" or even embodying, deemed "intuitive" and, by this same logic, gendered female, designating the "receptive." With clairvoyance, says Balthazar, you just open the gates and let it rip, and anything that wants to come can come in. Therein lies the danger—also the opportunity. This same gendered structure is found in The I Ching (Balthazar's second favorite divination tool which he manages to incorporate into his Tarot readings), in the first two hexagrams, Heaven and Earth, where Heaven is designated "the Creative" and has the attributes of time while Earth, which has the attributes of space, is designated "the Receptive", its "compliment", completing Heaven. States the I Ching: "The four fundamental aspects of the Creative—"sublime success, furthering through perseverance"—are also attributed to the Receptive.. .Only because nature in its myriad forms corresponds with the myriad impulses of the Creative can it make these impulses real" (Wilhelm/Baynes 1997: 11-12). Heaven and Earth, the spirit world and the life world, inform each other. Magick, a midwife to creation, enables or hypes that link by locating the creative flow and directing it. 204

The magician can, and in fact must, access an intuitive clairvoyant state through his practices, but the clairvoyant cannot perform Magick without a mathematical structure. Says Balthazar, "I mean there's more forms of magic, too, but the two basic structures are Magick and divination" (Travelogue 5: 5). When I questioned Balthazar about the significance of Hermes being a male god, he stated:

It's a male god because you're doing it through a structured mind. It outthinks your thinking. It arrives to such a finite point that you tilt. And it contacts more than just thinking. It contacts the body; it contacts the visual senses; it contacts how you should move, your tonality; it contacts all of that as a reading goes, structurally. Pantomime: to act out the mind. And that's exactly what you do. And you get into those points where suddenly you go, "Holy shit!" The first thing that I notice when the spirit really takes over me, the reading becomes an incantation, and an incantation means it rhymes, it puns, and it has wit. And it's something that's smarter than what I'm able to do [laughs]. I can't do that on call! But when it gets to that point, it becomes visual in my mind and I see things. Now the first thing you see is like if you dropped LSD and everything is looking like through a shine. And that's called the Shekinah light. That means that there has been an electrical spark that has opened up a nerve in my third eye, and you can feel the third eye twitch, and you start seeing visualizations. You don't describe the visualizations because you're too busy talking doing the reading, but you can see this stuff, and you're into this full trance state where it is now beyond. Because what you've done is done so many mathematical overlays with 36 cards that are overlaid so much in so many complicated ways that it has built up on itself that you've lost yourself entirely in the math. It's what I'm personally addicted to with Magick. If I have to say my addiction point it is the magic of the Magick. It's the unexpected that can't be recorded or understood what's going to happen. And I can look at the person in a place of such compassion and see where they hurt and how to help them relieve their pain. I recently read an autistic person who looked at me after I read him and said, "You're the first person that's ever been able to understand what I see and talk to me in that language and communicate to me." And it restructured this person's life so much that it was amazing. I have had the opportunity in only a few 205

readings that I've done to have such electrical energy pass through me that I was able to straighten out people's electrical energy and give the Shaktipaat. But this is all through the structured Magick AND—and if their cards were laid out the same way, I would be able to read the reading over again and have the same effects (Travelogue 5: 6-7).

Thus, we reach a point of redundancy as the logical circuit closes on itself. Quite plainly, structure itself is gendered male in Tarot Magick, signified by the number I, the first stroke in the sequence of all numbers and thus the initiator of all form. I will address the other elements in this statement after the discussion of gender is complete. The gendering of "energies" embodied by a Priest (Magician) and Priestess is common in Neo-Paganism, where often the eclectic choice of gods and goddesses from a variety of pantheons do not so much represent specific domains as they are stand ins for this basic bi-part God and Goddess structure. Balthazar's tradition can be seen as straddling this Gnostic, New Age tendency towards universalism and utilizing a more strictly reconstructionist Pagan approach which prizes localized tribal gnosis and specified deities. What all of this primarily suggests to me is that it is time to put the "k" back on Magick in order to clarify perspective.

This perspective, though, has many

layers. In Tarot Magick, the words Magician and Priestess, are the names of cards I and II of the Higher Arcana. In the language of Tarot Magick's cosmic sacred geometry, these cards represent complementary centrifugal and centripetal forces which act to contain the initial thrust of primal consciousness (God, spirit) towards form (matter), represented geometrically as a point in multi-dimensional motion (singled out for conceptualization as a line) intersecting with the curve of the outer limit of its own aura, 206

which ultimately blend in synthesis, circumscribing thought in both word and deed: a circle. This circle has, without, the feminine curve of an impinging space-time continuum, and within: the radius of that initial thrust still surging forward, now in time, that will, by the temporal fist over fist mode of cause and effect, break through this shell to recreate this pattern at the next level. And so on and so forth, again and again, forming a spiral growth pattern that will play these dynamics out to its largest bi-part formation: a body (matter, context, the Tree of Life) and soul (spirit manifest, Shekinah, Atman—the dwelling place of divine presence, and thus awkwardly also a pinhole through to another dimension, that Platonic anti-matter womb called God and place of the akashic records)—heaven and earth in microcosm, between which shuttles the mercurial force of mind, the glue that binds: manifest consciousness.

All of which are states of energy at

various levels of vibration, whose echo is evident in the pulse of life in blood and breath. As such the Magician and the Priestess prefigure the alpha and omega of creation, life and death. In the language of Tarot Magick's eroto-mythology the image of creation as descending vibration becomes, through the binary structure of gender, procreation. Seen in fast forward, the blossoming of the Tetragrammaton depicts a god and goddess, who, like Isis and Osiris, flanked by shadow sister-brother-selves, making love in the womb, are born as their own son, Horus, is born, the material love-child of God: man. Meanwhile, in Tarot Magick's magical semiology, the Magician is the Word pressing forth as icon/adjectival noun. The Priestess then gives the word expression/verb with swerve/adverbial, descriptive form. Together they generate the syntax of an event.

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In the Tarot reading the querent supplies the context—what Wittgenstein called a form of life, or, as Foucoult said more directly: a body. But in each of these forms of reading, first they are numbers. Only from there does each level of the story unfold. Says Balthazar in these regards:

One thing I've said multiple times in learning to read the Tarot is that we have words that are derived from numbers: as above, so below. Zero: the highest form of number that can possibly exist, which is the Fool, which is Nothing, which has three aspects—how would that manifest on the physical plane? We put it in a space in the reading and then the zero has context. What does innocence or purity or nonknowing mean on the physical plane? Maybe a baby, maybe a new beginning. Zero can represent a period, a dot. Now that's not "something." It's an end, and zero often represents "ah," the end of a sentence. Or sometimes you put a zero in another place and it represents something else. I've always said in a reading the card that falls in the appropriate place has the hand of God working. Of course zero falling in its appropriate place means it's the form of nothing that's beyond our knowing (Travelogue 5: 1-2).

By this Balthazar refers to the 22" place of the Physical Plane portion of the reading. When Balthazar does a Tarot reading, there are three "planes" involved: the Physical Plane, the Mental Plane, and the Spiritual Plane. The first plane, the Physical Plane, has 22 places defined by the Tarot cards of those numbers in the Higher Arcana, which themselves stand for the 22 Hebrew letters. Of course, there is no card numbered 22. In Tarot Magick, however, it is, in fact, commonly understood that zero has multiple numerical iterations, including the number 22. There are many highly poetic and complicated reasons for zero equaling twenty-two, but the simplest for the purposes described here is that to count in the manifest world, one must begin with the number

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one. Thus in a sequence that begins with one, yet must still account for all numbers/letters/cards, zero is placed at the end of the sequence, fulfilling in many ways the role of a period. Zero, the Fool, becomes an end point that circles around to its own point of origin, now posited in the future and thus still mostly inconceivable. Thus before handing over the cards to the querent for shuffling, Balthazar always ritually moves The Fool card to the end of the deck, symbolizing that Omega point of Alphaensouled matter. In so doing Balthazar shifts his focus from the Atman, or underlying Platonic forms of the otherworld that structure the lifeworld, to the Tree of Life, its manifestation. That the mythological character posing as The Magician is meant to be Hermes has significance in both literally standing for a beginning and the Word, which, after all, is what everyone is waiting for in a Tarot reading, as well as triggeringyor the Tarot reader an identification with Hermes through this momentary concentration on his image. This, like the underlying mathematics, is not something detectable by the querent, but is instead a private, internal process for the Tarot reader. This moment of darsan is one of the many ritual acts that literally transform the reader into the voice of Hermes in the prophetic mode. But this all comes after many other things are done, and still there is more to do before the actual "reading" commences. Says Balthazar about the process of reading:

So I add up these numbers, and what the whole thing is—it's more important than what I am saying or who I am reading or what the reading is for—it is more important for me to add up these numbers because they're a conceptual story, and I make words out of it. And I say: "Word!" And then my mind says, "You said that word just then!" I'm hearing it just as the reader is, except I'm participating in it.

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Now the cards in themselves are more involved than that because they tell me how high my voice should go and how I should move, even what facial expression I should have as I'm saying it. So suddenly I'm reading this person and they're going, "Holy shit! Wow! He's sounding like me! He's acting like me! This is ridiculous!" and we both know it! And that instant, that twinkle in the eye of that person I am reading and myself suddenly getting that charge to say, "Wow, isn't this hot shit? Isn't this neat!" That this is happening and we both know it—it's Magick! That's Magick.

Thus the ultimate transference occurs: the magician, laying out the cards in particular patterns said to recreate the Atman prior to the reading, first identifies himself within the structure of the Atman and then, in reading the Tarot cards in the reading, identifies the querent with the Tree of Life. As such, the reading becomes a reading of the querent, body, mind, and soul—an identity the Tarot reader, by synrcetizing himself to the querent as macrocosm to microcosm, not only reads but mimes. This is the Magick, heightened by the active participation of the querent in building the story, a final element of intellectual syncretism that can reveal the master myth more fully:

And you know, you get these people: "Well, if you're psychic, man, I really don't have to tell you anything." You dumb shit! Ifyouwanta good reading, give some information that I can know I'm going in the right direction! I'm here to work with you! I'm not here to prove to you a game! You want to have some benefit or not? Listen, if I pick the card The Magician and it falls into place and it means three things—business, education, and health—I will say, "business, education, health." But if you happen to tell me it's business, then I can know how some of the other things can apply better, too. You build up a story on a foundation. I was lucky enough that my teacher never accepted money for his practices, and he really did Magick. And therefore Magick is this spontaneous thing of synchronicity in the universe. Suddenly you're in 210

harmony with somebody, and suddenly you have a better relationship because it's love because you see the twinkle in the eye and you know there's just something more there—that's Magick (Travelogue #5: 1-3).

Thus Tarot readings involve a lot of talking or processing as the querent opens up and discusses how the reading applies to their life and together all parties present create the final story's meaning. The remainder of this chapter focuses on the last of fourteen readings Balthazar did on his own legal situation over the five years between his arrest and his trial. In this case, Balthazar is, by definition, reading his own mind, which may seem redundant, but because of the function of prophecy is technically not, as his role as channel for the god Hermes is the real point of any reading, and as he says, as the reader he hears it as the querent hears it anyway. None-the-less the recursive possibilities involved in a Tarot reader ostensibly talking to himself, channeling a god to get answers to his own traumatic life situation, is enormous. Because Balthazar's claims of a god's-eye-view relies entirely on the mathematical structure of the reading which he guarantees will produce the same reading time after time, I present the reading in two versions which can then be compared: the original reading performed on June 13, 2008 and a re-enactment performed in an interview five days later for points of comparison. To facilitate this comparison, for each plane of the reading, I provide first the original transcript and then the re-enactment so that the two can be read more closely in tandem. For the Physical Plane portion of the reading I also provide the mathematical notation for the words for both, so that not only the vocabulary and syntax can be compared, but the underlying

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mathematical structure therein, said to yield consistency, can be directly interrogated. I have not extended the already lengthy transcripts by applying this mathematical notation to the other planes. One plane should be enough for an analysis of this aspect of the reading. The isolated numerical script for the Physical Plane portion of this reading, written by Balthazar and based only in the card order, not how he may have actually read them, is provided in the Appendix, Figure 15. As Christopher Lehrich says in "Tarrocco and Fugue, "Even without fuller analysis, however, it should already be clear that a structuralist analysis of Tarot is, in a sense, pointless. Such analysis merely reveals Tarot as itself an analytical mode, a kind of simplistic and overdetermined structuralism, and the attempt top analyze it through what amounts to a variant of itself leads into a methodological hall of mirrors" (2007: 146). Lehrich illustrates this well, showing the futility of attempting to construct a LeviStraussian Mythologies of Tarot by comparing the logic of Court de Gebelin, the original populizer of the occult Tarot, to that of a closely related source, the count of Mellet, both of which rests on the same allegorical principle: "A fixed number of elements are understood as both allegorical tableaux and pieces of a larger allegory. These elements can be recombined in various ways according to rules, albeit not very clearly stated ones. Tarot divination is an interpretive and creative endeavor, requiring the diviner to construct a new allegory out of the various elements and their intersections, which allegory serves as an explanation of some stated problem, dream, or myth" (142). Both of the men, like Balthazar, provide a "dictionary" of sorts which points to an exponentially larger internal structure: an encyclopedia of world knowledge—in short: a belief system. De Geblin interrogates the referentiality of language as fossils of a 212

fractured unity. De Mellet constructs a history of man through the ages of the Fall. Both analyses involve clearly enjoyable free falls into the unlimited semiosis of this crisscrossing system of words, numbers, and images, such that it makes one tempted to begin constructing ones own mythology of the Fall as allegory for just such absorbing mental games—and, according to Balthazar, this may be precisely so. Ultimately, says Lehrich, "The interrelations discovered by de Mellet are thus primarily diachronic, those in Court de Geblin synchronic" (145). De Geblin and de Mellet's view of Tarot cards as essentially hieroglyphs containing glimpses, as through a magic mirror, of ancient Egyptian religious and cultural ethics would become the foundation of an accumulating Tarot lore. In an actual Tarot reading Balthazar lifts such theoretical templates into their oracular application, constructing allegories by placing Tarot's potential unlimited semiosis into a circumscribed context and, theoretically, limiting it. Thus a Tarot reading provides a showcase for the intersection of theory and practice in action. In this chapter, I will be primarily concerned with the allegory he constructs for his particular situation to date. For it is clear that without sticking close to Balthazar's meanings in the reading, I risk creating my own form of Tarot Magick. Thus, while in this dissertation as a whole I have sought to expose the underlying structures that unite Balthazar's varied experiences and practices into a belief system, my goal in this chapter is primarily to examine how that structure now plays out and into Balthazar's overall worldview through a particular Tarot reading. What the reading says is only a springboard, ultimately, for it's interpretation, and as such, like most experience—in this case a highly participatory narrative experience—is knit back into an overarching belief system, no matter how disruptive to that system the information contained within might 213

appear to be. In chapter four I will come back to the structural elements of the reading as applied to an analysis of Tarot Magick in general. An actual reading is very lengthy, involving a lot of side conversation, circling back and re-reading, and about a half an hour of reading from the I Ching alone. For this reason I will summarize certain key elements of the reading outside of the actual reading of the cards themselves. In fact, I was unable to attend the final portion of the original Spiritual Plane reading as Balthazar did a lot of purging-style processing prior—a common practice to help the reader focus—in this case evoking a lot of supportive interaction which altogether got us started very late, and I had to get home to my child. I will present the reading primarily in transcript form. However, before presenting the reading, I will present an interview, in transcript form, that I performed with Balthazar a month after the reading in which he summarizes the arc of all fourteen readings, providing what he sees as the context of the 14th reading. This gives a way a bit of the punchline of the reading, but as suspense is not really the focus here, I do not see this as an issue. This will put the readers of this manuscript closer to Balthazar's position in going into the reading and provide a longer narrative of his unfolding processing of his situation.

2. My Life in 14 Tapes

When you are a Tarot reader, a single reading cannot define even a moment in your life. It is rather the placement of any reading within the series of readings that have followed like a doppelganger the course of events of your query. Thus a Tarot reading 214

within a series itself follows certain of the fluid, context-oriented laws of syntax, while pointing to the larger structure of a belief system, which Dan Sperber suggests accrues off the page, beyond strict definition, an invisible fluid that flows between the descriptive, symbolic entries in the cultural encyclopedia, much as Levi-Strauss suggests that the meaning of or belief system embodied in any myth occurs between the cracks, so to speak, of each of the related stories within the myth family structure. Showing great restraint, as he states, over the four years since his arrest, Balthazar did fourteen readings on his legal situation. Each of these were spurred by some new development in the case. At the time of his fourteenth reading, he believed he was going to trial that December. We had at that point completed the Life History interviews and had not yet begun the "Travelogue" tapes. These began after the December trial was deferred. It was Balthazar who instigated this interview, for which he had planned one of his lectures. The lecture turned out to be an overview of the fourteen Tarot readings, up to the present. He wanted me to have the arc of this larger myth straight to ultimately show the magical hand behind his certain, now matter how deferred, victory. The lecture, that Balthazar titled "My Life in 14 Tapes," mostly speaks for itself. During the lecture, he sat at his kitchen table with the fourteen tapes stacked before him. The transcript begins with his exposition of Tape #1, simply titled "Balthazar Bust: 7-2504," (B = Balthazar, R = Rebekah):

B:

So I come out of this hellhole, and we're going to do a reading. I mean I've lost—Jesus Christ! I've lost everything, I've been tortured, the place is a mess. So anyway, when I got out, we did our reading, obviously on the case, and we wanted to know what was going to happen. And we chose the Law case on the Physical Plane [VIII]; The Fool and the Wish [0 & X], Mental, of course; and 215

Destiny [VIII & XVII], Spiritual. And we got the Hexagrams Preponderance of the Great—that they went too far, I was going to be found Innocent, and it was going to take a long time; be of good cheer anyway. And even when they said it was gonna take a long time that it would come back on themselves. Well, a long time to my lawyer was October at that point. And suddenly I just had to do another reading. I don't know why. It was September 25th [INDICATING TAPE #2, "Do Nothing—Heal—and then move on": 9/25/2004] This one was July [INDICATING TAPE #1]. And I threw a reading, and it was a really important reading because I wanted to know how I could go out and make a living. It was of qualifications. At the same time, realistically, I didn't have a fuckin' right arm! It was just getting worse, and I needed to get that repaired. Which was from [CAR] accidents you had had prior to that? Two of 'em, yeah. I am officially—my 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, & 7 vertebrae at the top are smashed. My 3 rd one is not herniated as much; otherwise I'd be paralyzed from the neck up. This is a fact. And I got this reading on what to do and it says: "Return—stay at home, heal yourself, there's not much you can do." That's always so encouraging to have a reading that says basically nothing to you except go sit on your ass, and you're going to have to heal up at home 'cause you really can't get a job. You're unemployable. Probably am. My mental state—what was I gonna do? Teach math? Anyway, as a normal tradition then, on Halloween I often talk to the dead. Not every year, but most years. And I talked to Franzel. [INDICATES TAPE #3, "Franz—What's New: 10/31/2004."] I called him up, to the other side, and it says: "The person that you seek is no longer in contact with you. However, the spirit world is very willing to help. But you must be very—your conduct, you've made some big mistakes." Thanks! I didn't know that. So anyway, I got that. Well, I figured, oh good, I'll do a New Year's reading, since it's past the time, and thing's are startin' to look like they're startin' to carry on. [INDICATES TAPE #4, "What's for the New Year: 1/1/2005."] And I got the basic thing of the New Years: Before completion, After Completion, and the Inner Light. It looked like a year of nothing happening. I didn't wanna hear that at all. It talked to you about meditating and building your inner strength up for a fight. That's all! And it just is a nice meditative reading, and I'm going: "This isn't what I wanna hear! This doesn't say I'm going to Canada and selling everything, and everything's gonna work out this year!" I wanted to hear that reading differently. [TAPE OFF BRIEFLY. WHEN HE RETURNS HE RETREADS TAPE #4.]

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B:

Ok, so we're entering the New Year. It's now 2005. Gee! And I do the New Year reading, and it's boring. And then they uphold the warrant, and I go: What the fuck is going on?! How could they uphold a warrant like this with no evidence on suspicion? This is unconstitutional. And I actually went around and had eleven lawyer's independent opinion—eleven!—ho all said the same thing: they can't see how a judge ever made a decision like this. So anyway, this is a lousy reading! [INDICATES TAPE #5, "Do Magick to help the court case: 3/19/2005"] Because it's got Oppression and let your light still shine; Darkening of the Light—oh, go to hell! Pushing Upward—things will turn out all right, but this is gonna have to now be a long-term process it said. Oh great. I'm at the beginning of the drama where at this point I wanted to be at the end of the drama, have my books done, paintings, spiritual center set up. Nope! Ok. Well, what're you gonna do? [INDICATING TAPE #6, "Things Will happen: 5/28/2005"] This just proved that Steve Morrison's dumber than I thought. I had thought this was totally reversed. That on May 25th there was a decision by the judge that they entered the warehouse illegally. They entered through the wall, not knocking and announcing. In this process, this mess up, we did a reading with great joy, thinkin' this would be over, and it said: "This is gonna take a long time. Standstill—nothing's gonna happen; it's just gonna remain the same for a looooonnnng time." We had Standstill, Nourishment, and the Well. If I can't get three more Hexagrams setting me up—it's unbelievable." Now—I've gotta check a date.

[TAPE OFF, THEN ON AGAIN, AS BALTHAZAR RETRIEVES HIS DIARY.]

B:

Diaries help. I thought Steve had already made a deal, and then the warehouse fell through. But according to this they knocked out the warehouse on May 25th, and basically it said it would take a long time. On September 19th, 2005, Steve Morrison cut a deal and became a rat. It was very stupid of him because he was going to walk, and he confessed. And turned in everyone he ever met. I mean—smoked with, he knew smoked—anything. He didn't stop talking. And he got nothing for it, except to be set up that the whole trial is around him, and they win no matter what. Because if I go free, that means that Steve Morrison was the king pin, and they win. And if Steve Morrison testifies against me, and I go to jail, that means they won. So they covered their asses on making sure they would win either way. 217

That's settin' yourself up to be a fall guy. We thought it was such a bad deal that even the lawyers discussed if Krazner had actually done a deal with the D. A. for another client by giving them Steve. Because it didn't benefit him at all. He didn't get any of his possessions back and house arrest where time wasn't even considered served—until he gets what he gets. This is a Fall Guy. And I did a reading after that [INDICATES TAPE #7, "It's good to die for a cause: 9/20/2005"]: The Receptive, The Creative, The Gentle, & Work on What Has Been Spoiled—and it says: "There's nothing you can do now in this standstill period except Magick." Oh great! Isn't that nice when you're so helpless that you can do nothing except Magick? Well, I guess that's pretty powerful then. So—which made no sense. Because if the warehouse was thrown out, we were walking! [Pause] Well, I decided to then, again, try to contact the other side. [INDICATES TAPE #8 "Do not lose your power—do for the higher cause,: 10/31/2005"] Of course, I tried to contact Franzel, and again it said: "You're not gonna talk to this man anymore." But it said that: "You doing your own Magick, you're gonna find the power now within, and therefore you can call the spirits down to do this now." What was the date on that? October 31 st , 2005. Halloween reading. Yeah. I haven't been doing Halloween readings anymore [snorts]. [INDICATES TAPE #9 "You will go into a new business—not the old,: 11/25/05"] Basically, this was Thanksgiving, and I decided to do a reading. And this reading was one of these readings that, you know, it's unfortunate if I don't teach people how to read by the time I die and know the wonderful skills I have because I'll never be able to convey what I'm talking about! That is, this is a remarkable reading. I got five 5's, V in the 5th place, and four 2's. And you know what that means! You're one of the few people in the universe I can talk to. But I got Justice and I got Wisdom. And it was the wisdom of the Gods working through this law case. And it told me that I have to meditate, allow them to come through, it's favorable to go to court, and don't be afraid: the best things are going to happen because of it. And it says: "You are nothing more than an archetypal form."

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Now what started happening different in my meditations, instead of doing Magick for self, we have got a lot of readings for Hecate and other things that started saying: "Think of yourself as a larger energy of the whole, and ask for the greater good and your part in it to work out right." And I started realizing that I was the archetype. I started realizing that I had this—this in itself was more than just a simple bust. This is something illustrated for me to be the archetypal form and deliver the message of Hermes Trismegistus and a servant of the God Thoth. And I was going to be doing miracles in the situation. And that's what the reading said. So here I am now really crazy! What could go wrong did go wrong. The warrant's upheld. A friend that I had for so many years made the stupidest deal a human being can make. I mean he could do better than that. He could have gotten something for becoming the fall guy. And he's gonna be hated by both sides the rest of his life. If I go to jail or not, if I get the proper publicity, I mean there's gonna be so many things that's gonna make me a celebrity and a noted person that I won't be treated bad. On the other hand: this guy's a rat, he's stupid—it's gonna be publicized the other way. The karma's unbelievable. And I'm starting to see the higher archetypal form. And you start backing off from doing readings. So that was done on Thanksgiving vacation 2005, and my next reading was May 2nd, 2006. [INDICATES TAPE #10 simply titled "Balthazar Tarot,: 5/2/2006"] I don't know, it was just like—I forgot why we did this particular reading. I really do. Maybe it was just I was tired forever and ever and ever and ever of waiting for them to appeal. And it said Duration—things are getting better slowly; you've just gotta be calm and wait this out. Thanks a lot! More being calm. More waiting it out. More doing holy works. So do you notice a certain redundancy in your divinations? Yeah. But you get tired after they tell you Standstill. And I point out that Standstill happened to be like May 28th, 2005 [REFERS TO TAPE #6], and now it's May 2nd, 2006 [REFERS TO TAPE #10]. How long is this Fuckin' standstill going to be? And then I go—this is unbelievable. [REFERS TO TAPE #11 "They did not file,: 5/17/2007."] Because what is is that the D.A. goes up to my lawyer, and they have failed filing four times, lost the right for oral argument in front of the court. He says he doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell. Nobody's been assigned my case because Shotzberger's off of it [The original D.A. on the case], and nobody wants to touch it. And we're going to win, and they didn't file. And there was a good suspicion that the next decision, if the court case of the Superior Court was in my favor, which the chances were only 2% that it wouldn't be—and they conceded that the cops were coached and moved evidence around, 219

without even any protest of the evidence—they conceded that—we felt that they were gonna drop the whole case for lack of evidence. So I get this reading: Receptive, Possession in Great Measure, Coming to Meet, The Well. My opinion was we had everything together, but there was going to be some trouble, and that's the way it is. And I would love to see those two lines of Coming to Meet. So what I'm going to do is, I'm going to give a— R:

It's a Hexagram that always makes you nervous.

B:

Oh, yeah! One should not marry the maiden. The maiden is powerful. And blah blah blah, the blah blah blah! I'm glad I'm a speed-reader in the I Ching. But we got the first line: [NOTE VERY SLOW READING] "Things are slippery, dangerous. You have powers here, and the situation is an unnatural one."

R:

Those were the lines?

B:

Yes. Very quick translation, but correct. Possession in Great Measure, 5th place: You have truth. Access to your truth will be your key in getting' out of this situation. Access to your truth is the key of victory here. I think that's interesting. Coming to Meet, 4: "No fish in the tank. This leads to misfortune. You need to [pause]—situation is that you've got inferior people working—this is interesting. Insignificant people must be tolerated in order to keep them well disposed. When we can make use of them if we should need them. If we become aligned"—[CAN'T READ FURTHER, ASKS FOR MY HELP] What is this word, Rebekah?

R:

"Insignificant people must be tolerated in order to keep them well disposed. Then we can make use of them if we should need them. If we become alienated from them"—

B:

Alienated.

R:

—"and do not meet them halfway, they turn their backs on us and are not at our disposal when we need them, for this is our own fault."

B:

Ok. I think actually when I'm reading this, this might even be how I'm dealing with Patrizio [his lawyer]. It was prior to that. I think that was interesting. "He who meets with horns: humiliation". When you go ahead and it's the wrong time to go ahead, you will be thrown back. And The Well: things will just remain the same. And here we had, they did not file, and there were several warnings that things still did not look 220

good and things were not going to be well, and I had to deal with inferior people, use them at my disposal because of the situation. Well, the next Hexagram was the answer to that hexagram. [REFERS TO TAPE #12, "They said what?! 11/27/2007"] Not only did they file late, saying they weren't gonna win, but the judge's decision got overturned. And I heard it two days before Thanksgiving. And the warehouse was back on the table WITH Steve Morrison testifying against me and a warrant upheld, and you can't argue the warrant or the validity or how much these bastards fucked me over in front of the jury now. It only has certain information that can be allowed to be presented to them. So all their wrong doings will be glossed over. That's for another court to decide, if ever. So I'm so overwhelmed screwed, and I say: "They did WHAT?!" And it says: "Listen, man, if you're going to be so uncool as to be upset because things aren't going the way you want, progress is just going to made in gradual steps, and anyway things are gonna go ok. But if you're gonna act like an asshole and let your mind cause you to be really upset, we're not gonna play with you anymore," the god's say. "And anyway, you're halfway through. So you can't turn back. So it's all gonna have to be on your attitude." So I got scolded by the Gods for being upset that everything has gone completely wrong to the greatest magnitude possible. So what happens? My lawyer ends up being a complete fucking jerk off who has no interest in my cause, me as a person—all he's interested in is writing appeals to the nth degree and taking as much money as possible and literally trying to extort money from me. He is—no one has EVER treated me this bad. EVER! He has called me a liar, a thief, have no integrity—right to my face. I wanted to get rid of the bastard. [REFERS TO TAPE #13 "Need a new lawyer: 1/22/2008."] The Gods worked this out very nicely. They told me I had to keep the guy because I'd go to jail otherwise, and that it is meant to have this guy. And I ended up hiring another lawyer for Richard, which watches my ass with this guy. So now I have two lawyers that are watching my ass with the guy they think is best to handle the case. Fine. But I've even got words from Kenny Young just in court the other day, yesterday, that this guy's working my ass off for me and I should let him alone. I haven't said anything to him! Anyway, I now—my lawyer wants to appeal to the Supreme Court of the United States. I don't trust my lawyer enough, and he's just gonna add me more time on house arrest. My properties are deteriorating, and it's not the appeal we're most likely going to win because there's some major precedence of them taking knock and announce—even they were gonna go after denying me due process of law by how the courts made irrational decisions. I wasn't into it. For some reason I'm 221

making a decision about this—this is just another two fuckin' years in house arrest more before we get back to this place maybe? Come on. Help! And I did the reading. [REFERS TO TAPE #14, "Time to take control and be the star: 7/13/2008."] And the reading came out: come on out fighting. This fucking law system sucks so much that you're not going to get any justice. Come on out fighting and you're going to win. And it has been the first reading starting to see an end. And it said: "Man, you've gotta get people behind you, remain focused, and then get the fuck out of here!" So, trial date: December 1st. Two newspapers interested in the story. Oh my God, that'll help my trial very much. And I believe things are on the way. And you know? I mean this has done a whole lot for me. Oddly enough, I've learned a whole lot about astral projection, Magick, realizing that I'm a prophet. I mean, it said it. And that this is my will to teach, and they're putting me in an archetypal situation for great notoriety. I believe we're gonna win this, and I'm gonna have the holy books come out, too. And it's gonna move me up to a spiritual teacher level, and that's what's happening. It's putting me as an archetypal form behind major causes, and that's what's happening. Now, I could be as upset as my lawyer is at the situation. Or even more. But I'm not. I'm believing in the Magick and what we're doing here. And that's that! I mean I'm very pleased that—I'll tell you, I'm very, very, very, very, very, VERY pleased of how I've gotten on the star map and on the research. I do think it's a two to three year project getting it done correctly. I think the cards are about seven years, so it gives me ten years of working on the thing. But goddamn, I have learned so much about the stars. This map has become incredible. If I say the truth of what I do believe, it's another subject for a tape. But there's the 14 readings. And we're now at the place where it's been prophesized that this is gonna get bigger than myself, that I'm an archetypal form for a higher cause, and I must present it that way and get out and do it. Why is it that these things always need priestesses? The soft touch. Is that your life in 14 tapes, then? That's it. The 14 tapes are done.

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3. The Law of Love

A Tarot Reading begins with ordering the deck. All of the cards face up for this process. First the Higher Arcana, representing the paths of the Tree and letters of the Hebrew alphabet, are ordered from zero to XXI, then the Lower Arcaca. The court cards are arranged: Knights, Queens, Princes representing constellations of the Zodiac, and the Princesses, representing the elements. Then these are stacked on the numbered cards, representing the sephira in the four elemental worlds, which are ordered from one to ten. Then the Wands, representing Fire, are stacked upon the Swords, representing Air, are stacked upon the Cups, representing Water, and these are all stacked upon the Discs, representing earth, as per the four worlds in the Shielding exercise. Finally the Higher Arcana are stacked upon the Lower Arcana. The deck is now ordered, with the Fool card on top. A red wool blanket is spread on the floor before the altar where two black candles are lit, doubled in their reflection in the black disc mounted on the wall. The Tarot reader will sit facing this disk through which he has travelled many, many times before. Generally, incense is lit, but there is no music or other distractions. Next the reader lays out the formation called "The Law of Love". This formation uses only the Higher Arcana and represents the structure of the Atman, the spiritual foundation of physical reality. There are three planes to this layout: the physical, mental, and spiritual planes, corresponding to the three stages of the Fool. By now these number patterns and terminology should be quite clear. (There is a high redundancy factor in Tarot, a deliberate structural cross-referencing and resulting semantic criss-crossing built into the 223

foundational image of the circle and played out in the transformational number sequence which always comes around. This then becomes compounded in the reading as the cards in play click into spaces defined by the meanings of the cards.) For each plane, Balthazar states the definition of the cards on those planes and the querent chooses cards which represents the nature of their inquiry. These cards are then turned upside down, and the querent is asked on what plane they want the reading to be read. The plane they choose and the numbers of the cards they chose on those planes will then determine the number of piles the querent will have to turn around during the cutting of the deck which takes place next during shuffling. The presence of upside-down cards in a reading signal areas of strife that the reading ultimately, in revealing, seeks to correct. Formulating the question and turning piles around during shuffling creates this factor in the reading. However, prior to shuffling, Balthazar puts the cards back in an order reflecting the order of the cards in the Law of Love on the plane the querent chose. The Lower Arcana cards, representing the Tree of Life, are then inserted between the cards which were chosen on that plane of the reading. The Higher Arcana cards are then read, first frontwards and then backwards, skipping the Lower Arcana cards which are there to represent the Tree of Life nestled in the Atman. This initial reading is meant to represent the querent's state of mind in asking their question and forms a pronouncement of the situation according to the Law of Love. For his reading Balthazar chose VIII on the Physical Plane, representing Law, IV and XIV on the Mental Plane, together representing Planning, and IX and XVIII on the Spiritual Plane, together representing Prophecy. "So we have the Law and what to do with it to make the Prophecy come into full manifestation," said Balthazar. 224

Balthazar

chose to do his reading on the Mental Plane, focusing on creating a Plan of Action, and the cards were stacked up accordingly. (B = Balthazar, Itallics indicates side comments, Capitalized words indicate card meanings.)

B:

Here I am, passing through—da da da da da— The Universe, Pure and Simple, into the world I was Born. Into the Wheel of Fortune— ah!—as it spins. Such Passionate and Ambition given. Freely one does express this Creative Gift. This thought form, that of Life and Regeneration of that of Light, and what has written Fate has Dictated to me. And I need some Clar-i-ty. I'm always so Emotionally Upset [laughs], and my Planning usually doesn't—I don't have it! It's Inhibiting Creative Force, my Creativity. Everything seems to be getting more and more Complicated and Not Going Right, at least in my Archetypal way that I think it should go in that level of consciousness of higher level relations where I pull all things into harmony. To my complete Naivety, things keep Exploding around me! And becoming more restrictive as the energy does flow, to what I believe my Destiny is—I know? With the great Anxiety of Justice, and the sword so raised, Primally so Bound in one's Feelings that Heaven's Deep most Primal Sensitivity and one does Scream to the Relationship to say:

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I really would like to have some Devotion to the Light and have everything go absolutely Right in some level of Consciousness! Oh Gods, please hear me! / thought that was very good the way I read that. I would give myself a pretty high score there. In the 90 's—high 90 's. I mean here we have God Consciousness—did everyone understand that?

That this portion of the reading is in fact a petition, places this opening portion of the Tarot reading in the category of prayer such as can be found in Sappho's "Hymn to Aphrodite" where a situation of need is laid out and a god's aid is petitioned. Notably Sappho's poem shifts from evocation to invocation, where, after recalling Aphrodite's decent and aid on previous occasions, including a recollected dialogue with the goddess that mercurially shifts into present tense, the poem ends:

Come to me now: loose me from hard Care and all my heart longs To accomplish, accomplish. You Be my ally (Carson 2002: 5).

One is left to imagine in the next frame of the story, which occurs offscreen, the Goddess' entrance. What this meant in the context of Sappho's poem is unclear. Evocation is the calling forth or producing of affect or inspiration usually through a description of certain attributes. This can be configured as a purely "literary" attitude. Invocation, on the other hand, is specifically a summons, and in a magical-religious context can indicate possession, prophecy, or self-deification, i.e. a summoning of the god within. In any use it has distinctly religious force. Whatever practical uses of the

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poem one can conjecture, Sappho is following a religious format of petition in the poem. Within this Tarot reading, this is one of the many shifts through which Balthazar, invoking the god in word and deed through his form, becomes the voice of Hermes himself. As part of this process he then reads the cards in the opposite direction:

B:

God Consciousness' manifestation, send thy Light to us Relations. First Deep going into the Primal level of such level of Insanity [laughs], such Heavy Emotions come upon my Psychic Ability constantly and Bound me up into this Legal Law case that causes such Anxiety upon my Destiny of What is Going to happen and Where I'm going to go. For this level of Restriction, of great Shock and Woe says: I don't know what's happening! [laughs] I would like to have everything in Harmony. Nice relationships, Things Pulled Together the way I'd like, make some Decisions in my life. At least in the Archetypal world in Ceremony. But things don't go right there either. They get more Complicated, [laughs.] [Breathes heavily, theatrically.] I'd really like to know what happened in the heavens. I remember at the beginning of this bust when I got home and threw a few I Chings of how it would all go, it said it would be dropped and I would be starting to go to Canada. Ha ha! What's to say to that after all that, you know? I feel there is some Psychic Restriction on me, some 111 fate that is Dictating to me, and I would like to avoid it, even unto the fate of Death. But rather than that, I would like to Regenerate my Life and really Devote Myself to the thought forms that I've understood to be most precious that I Express, which is freedom, Great Passion, Giving of Magic and of Self to my Destiny and Goal, Pure and Simple. That's what I see. 227

Another poem of religious petition, "Psalm 22" by King David, begins very similarly to this one. The bulls of Bashan surround him. He has all but lost his faith and turns to his God in clear invocation:

But you, O Lord, do not be far away! O my help, come quickly to my aid! Deliver my soul from the sword, My life from the power of the dog! Save me from the mouth of the lion!

Then follows a curious ellipses. Like in Sappho's "Hymn to Aphrodite" we are left to imagine the entrance of the god. However the poem, unlike Sappho's, continues. In the very next stanza the poem states, at first in seeming wonderment:

From the horns of the wild oxen you have rescued me. I will tell of your name to my brothers and sisters; In the midst of the congregation I will praise you; You who fear the Lord, praise him! All you offspring of Jacob, glorify him; Stand in awe of him, all you offspring of Israel! For he did not despise or abhor The affliction of the afflicted; He did not hide his face from me, But heard when I cried to him.

This ecstatic revelry culminates in a frenzy of absolute dominion and devotion:

To him, indeed, shall all who sleep in the earth bow down; 228

Before him shall bow all who go down to the dust, And I shall live for him. Posterity will serve him; Future generations will be told about the Lord, And proclaim his deliverance to a people yet unborn, Saying that he has done it (Metzger, et. al. 1989: 434-435).

That, according to Matthew, Jesus' last words on the cross were, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?—the first line of Psalm 22—make the sentiments of this poem particularly relevant to the Renaissance-styled ceremonial magician cum Tarot reader, particularly one brought up in an evangelical household. In his analysis of ancient hermetic discourse, J. P. Sodergard says that prayers introduce a liminal landscape. "Prayers—including incantations and spells—are thus one of the most common types of religious discourse for the actualization and maintenance of plausible fictional worlds. Prayers unite God(s) and human(s) in various ways, and they create, through their narration, a liminal and metaphorical landscape in which the world of the 'magical' hisotiriola blends with that of the empirical world, so that the latter conforms to the mythical model... The recitation of prayers is the medium of the blending, and praying is hence the verbal copula that unites the reader with the God" (Sodergard 2003: 122-123). In a Tarot reading, the function of the Tarot reader fills in the ellipses that in "Hymn to Aphrodite" and Psalm 22 occurs off-stage. However, like these poems, inertly written down, the Tarot reading once transcribed loses the sense of the god's presence that Sappho recalls so vividly and King David, as witness, proclaims. Thus, looking at the transcript, we are left to imagine that through the symbolic language of the Tarot cards and the Tarot reader who voices them, the god is present and hear his voice as deed, 229

a force of reckoning in the world. For in the Tarot reading, it is the presence of the god that brings forth the cards themselves. In this manner, the Tarot reader also fulfils the role of affirmation that the second half of Psalm 22 does by providing further discussion, commentary and interpretation. In the Tarot reading re-enactment, Balthazar did not repeat this initial petitioning portion of the program. This portion of the ritual was unnecessary, for in the reenactment he was no longer calling forth the cards from the Akashic. He was reading a pre-composed literary text in the form of a stack of cards whose order had been preserved for rereading and commenting upon it. If in the reading he was Hermes-Balthazar, in the re-enactment he was Balthazar-Hermes. However, a light trance was still reached. However, the affirmation portion of the reading was greatly expanded and honed towards particular conclusions as he had had ample time to ruminate on it.

4. The Law of Fate: Physical Plane (Law)

After the petitioning portion of the pre-reading ritual, the tape recorder is usually turned off. Here the querent "puts their energy into the deck" by holding the cards and shuffling them. Then they cut the deck into three piles in a vertical line with the hand they do not usually use. At this point if there are piles to turn around, these are turned. Then the cards are picked up in a pattern specified by Balthazar. This entire process is repeated three times. Each of these moves is said to emulate the energy of the Tree of Life as it comes into formation, re-circulates its energy, and descends into manifestation. After each cutting of the deck Balthazar records a line representing yin or yang for both 230

the initial formation of the cards and the result once piles have been turned. The shuffling before the Physical Plane reading thus creates the lower trigrams of two hexagrams. The cards will then be shuffled again between the Physical and Mental Plane readings, at which time the hexagrams will be completed and looked up in the / Ching. Once the initial shuffling of the deck is completed, the Physical Plane portion of the reading commences. The Tarot reading itself from this point forward, on all three planes, is called The Law of Fate. The Physical Plane reading consists of 22 cards meant to represent the paths between the sephira on the Tree of Life. The spaces the cards fall into themselves reflect the order of the Higher Arcana, their numerical values and definitions. Figure 17 in the Appendix depicts the Physical Plane template, which shows the 22 places and their corresponding meanings. The layoutis not linear, but rather reflects various twists and turns in the geometry of the unfolding Tree of Life, ending up looking somewhat like an arrow. Here then is the Physical Plane reading as Balthazar read it during the actual reading on June 13th'. I indicate the numerical values of the cards and their combinations below the words indicated by them. This has been done as follows:

•Higher Arcana are indicated by Roman numerals (I, II, III, etc.), excepting The Fool which is marked 0, as is indicated on the cards. •Lower Arcana are indicated by standard numbers, as is indicated on the cards, accepting the Aces and the Court Cards. Aces are marked by A. Court Cards are marked as follows: Knights = K, Queens = Q, Princes = P, Princess = Ps. All such indicators are followed by a letter indicating suit: W = Wands, S = Swords,

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C = Cups, & D = Discs. So, for example, the 7 of Wands is marked 7W, the Ace of Swords is marked AS, and the Princess of Discs is marked PsD. • Reversed cards—cards which appear upside down in the reading—are indicated with an R after the above stated values. Thus, for example, The Magician card Reversed = IR, the Princess of Discs card Reversed = PsDR. NOTE: When cards are Reversed, this affects the definition of the card and the definition of the Computed Numerical Value of that card in combination with other cards. See Appendix 2 for Card Definitions. • / indicates that this is a point where one normally ends a sentence or completes a thought in the reading before turning to the next point/area of the reading. » Underlining indicates language associated with the template space. • I have also Capitalized the First Letter of Words Associated With the Numerical Values of Cards or their Combinations • + indicates that certain cards in combination have additional assigned meanings indicated here • # indicates 4 of a kind, which indicates the activity of that numbered Sephira • *indicates that a card falls in the spot indicated in the template, which indicates "the hand of God working"

B = Balthazar N = Balthazar's wife, Nettle R = Rebekah Itallics indicates side comments

B:

Within my mind I do find the Archetype [laughs]— V the Archetypal Mind. V You see, when you fall into the flow of consciousness, it's just the extension of the manifestation of consciousness.

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And therefore upon the physical plane. What's Given is A Mess, 7C but the Mess is a Purging of a Miserable, Fucked up, Horrible, Terrible 7C 7C 7C Bleh!!! / love 7 Cups of Green Slime Overflowing Into A Bog of Stench; it's such poetry! And you know, since I've been doing the practices of Hecate, I've been understanding the wonders of stench and nightmares and like the beautiful forms of hate that one can have that can exhilarate and and and and stuff like this, because this is what this card is—is Hecate healing and getting rid of this shit. And it's number XII, so it's: One's Given a Total Mess and one's Given an Archetypal (12) 7C (12) V Consciousness— two 7 's already— Given an Archetypal Consciousness of Learning (12) V 7D of the Freeing and the Defining of the spirit, and the Refining there of. (13) 8D 8D It's Archetypal Consciousness that is Given— V (12) yeah, the Lessons that Is Given to the Archetypal Consciousness 7D (12) V that is now such a Mess 7C upon the physical plane. Great Shocks continue to Grow. (16) 9D Bigger Vibrations, such in the flow. (16) 9D And in the past, much Money and Dough. 10D What is Written about these lessons, though— (17) 7D this is interesting— is one's fortune—seven— (10)

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work. 3D Mind's work. 3D One's fortune: one's mind's work. (10) 3D And there is much work to be done. 3D Much to be Learned of the Spirit, but now 7D the Archetype is Working. V 3D A place for an Evolution. 2D A Change— (2D) ha ha ha ha—at least I don't get Standstill— N:

[laughs]

R:

[laughs]

B:

of Passion—oh good!—and happiness in the home (11) 9C and Given Work to be done. (12) 3D Maybe even get a job—great. Woops! And one's Wish: one's Out of Harmony and Bound to what one's got— VI-R VI-R Ok, I've got a Commitment of where things in my Work has to be is what VI-R 3D it really says. Very Strongly, because it's the Archetype of Confusion 9W (15-R) and doing nothing less than Straightening the Confusion out of the 8W (15-R) world into Order with Great Strength and the coming out of it better. 8W 9W (17) 234

Three 9 's. So the future. What Is Written, is that there's an incredible amount of (17) Energy— 9W I turnedfour piles upside down—very few upside down— of Thinking and of Learning of the spirit. 7D and What Is Given to the Archetypal Form (12) V is to Draw Out this Miserable Fuckin' Mess (12 ?) 7C and Straighten something out of it. (14) / Three 7's. For in the past such Noble Abilities of What is Written of such High Moral Values 7W (17) 10D and Making Money, 10D and what is Light and Right, (19) (19) that of a Holy Man, IX and a Holy Man given now to such Energy IX (16) and of spiritual Failings and Learning of lessons now to 7D 7D the Archetypal Form of Purging a situation— V 7C / don't want a card upside down here— that now It's Out of One's Hands, [laughs] I-R There's so much Work and stuff that has to be done, 3D 3D

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but you got to initiate it to work on it's own. (4?) 3D I Don't Know How to Deal With It All. I-R It's going to happena not the way I want, but it's going to happen 9C (10-R) 9C maybe even a little bit better? Because it indicates quite Happiness. 9C But it hits to the Deep Primal Consciousness of the Feeling of Being Bound up in such levels of Commitment— VI-R VI-R yeah, what does this mean? Places I don't want to be. XI-R Void of Destiny. XVII-R* +VII-R Notice it's XVII in the 17th place, so the Gods is willing to Void you of Destiny, meaning it's theirs. Sorry, you don't have any rule in the situation. And it's such Desirous, Passionate Relations— XI-R (28) I would love to be someplace else— VII-R But what you are Destined is for No Energy to Move, XVII-R*+ VII-R VII-R and this is where you must be. And where you are going VII-R is that this is goingjo be feeling like a Deflation of Energy to be here. VII-R Ha ha, thank you very much. I already know that. And one's Reasoning—

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the way I would like it to be— (17-R) is very Painful and Egotistical because 10S-R basically it's not right anyway, so you may as well give up your fucking (19-R) reasoning and accept the situation the way it is. 9S# Ok already, I get the point. N:

Is that the fourth 9?

B:

9 of wands, 9 of swords, 9 of cups—yeah, four 9 's.

R:

Yeah.

B:

And you know what else is interesting is that I have two cards in the correct place upside down. And therefore the place that one's in— Ok, don't get on my case, Gods! I already got the spanking from the last one: Youthful Folly. You have to accept the place you 're in. And therefore the place that you are in, without purpose and fear of one's great ruin maybe your action be. XVII-R* = VII-R 9S-R 10S but the place you're in. like it or not—and most likely not [laughs]— is your Destiny. XXI-R* It might feel very Draining and a lot of need for Complaining. (30-R) Painful in many ways, but Remain very Focused. 9S-R/(19-R) 10W It's important, [laughs]

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In presenting this same portion of the reading in our re-enactment on June 1 8 , 1 will be using a paragraphing format rather than the ethno-poetic outline I used for the actual reading. Partially this is for reasons of conserving space, partially it is to differentiate the two modes (actual reading and re-enactment). In addition the intensity of the actual reading was more elevated and dramatic as Balthazar did not then know what it would say. In the re-enactment, he now knows what it will say and his tone is less pronounced overall. The residual poetic qualities remaining in the reading come through whether in the prose. The prose format also helps to accentuate the story telling mode the reading assumes as it attempts to explain the elements of the situation and their outcome, an element that he has at the time of the re-enactment dwelled upon and thus it is in fact the element of the reading that is accentuated in the re-enactment. An excerpted script of the physical plane of this reading, rendered by Balthazar, can be found in Figure 15 in the Appendix.

B:

So here goes. Anything. Um, we were talking before we turned the first card down about thinking about being the archetype. And I started realizing that when I was really astral projecting into the black disc, I realized that I was God. Now individually, that's ego. But what I realized was that I had to be so selfless as a human being to realize that I was an archetype of consciousness in a situation that God is arranging. Divine provenance or destiny has put me in a situation to work something out in the level of God consciousness. Now, does God have a body? No. Consciousness has a form. And consciousness is a formula. And it is an awareness that is now working through me as an archetype form. Do I believe that there is a meeting of consciousness in human destiny? Oddly enough, I do. But I can't explain it all to you. But I realized that Ijust had to give up to the situation and work through to even get this reading. Because, you know, like a scared person would try to delay the inevitable as long as possible. And what it's saying is: I could be a scared person. I've been on a razorblade quite a bit. And one of the readings has said 238

recently that ifldidn 't totally have total faith and went off of it, I'd kill myself So the first sentence—I delved into the discussion before, and we laid the reading out. And then I laid the first card out, which was that of the archetype, and we all went [smacks cheek, eyebrows raised].

Now Balthazar lays out the cards of the reading and a re-reading begins.

Saying that one is given into such a mess. The mess is not in its negative, so (12) 7C 7C it's not something you're stuck in and overwhelming and bringing you down as much as that you as the archetype are changing a messed up situation that V 7C you have been given, and what you have been given is to note a lesson, a (12) (12) 7D spiritual lesson, about the thought form and the concepts and defining (15) 8D certain concepts and refinements about, maybe, pot. (15) 8D 8D R:

[laughs] Right.

B:

In such a way that these lessons, through this archetypal ceremony, can help 7D (15) clear up a horrible situation that is very bad, war-like, upsetting about 7C (16) something growing. Now in the past there is a great deal of value to what is 9D / 10D written about my lessons, and my wish is to get on with my work. The (17) 7D (10) 3D / change is, happily, that my work is that I am totally bound by contract to my 2D 9C 3D VI-R wish. Ok. I might not be right, but with great strength, with all my might, I (15-R) 9W 8W am going and connecting up with what is written exactly, and that is thought (15) forms of lessons about being an archetype now to straighten out a mess. 7D V 7C / My ability in the past of making money being a holy person is my lessons. 7W 10D IX 7D 239

And therefore the archetypal ceremony of clearing this up in the future be V 7C that I'm not exactly sure how this is going to work out for me. I don't even I-R know what I'm gonna do. But I wanna be happy, and right now my ambition I-R (10) 9C (20) is fantasies. It doesn't really exist. I'm bound up in a situation, and what's XI-R XI-R VI written here, in essence, I'm restricted from knowing—knowing about my (17) (23) XVII-R relationships, my passions. I'm restricted entirely in my own destiny and (28) XI VII-R moving energy, and my energy is really stuck in a situation that I don't know VII-R (17-R) what I'm doing, and things haven't gone right I'm afraid, and I feel like I'm (17-R) 10S being drawn into a black hole, a vortex that is draining me that I keep going (19-R) (19-R) 9S-R XXI and going and going and going and going and going and going and going and 10W-R going on [pause]. (30)

So that is the Physical Plane situation.

A brief conversation followed the Physical Plane Reading:

B:

Ah, my two wonderful friends, tell me what this thing said to me objectively then.

N:

You have a lot of work, and it's gonna kind of suck, but it' 11 work itself out okay.

B:

Yeah.

R:

It feels very dramatic.

N:

Yeah. 240

B:

Oh yeah! It looks like you come out stronger and better for it, and a lot of things you're not going to even know how to deal with, but you'll be quite happy. You desire other things to happen, but it's not going to happen that way. You're stuck in this destiny which is going nowhere, except you have to accept it.

N:

It's not going to go the way you want it to go, and it's gonna be a lot of hard work, and it's gonna be kind of a mess, but it's all gonna work out.

B:

I asked for some prophecy.

N:

Um hm.

B:

I got some.

5. The Law of Fate: Mental Plane (Planning)

The tape recorder was then turned off as Balthazar shuffled and cut the deck again and recorded the final hexagrams on the tape jacket. Then the Hexagrams were read and discussed. The hexagrams, Preponderance of the Small, Limitations, and Retreat seemed to mirror much what the Tarot reading had said, though Balthazar found additional prophecies in each:

B:

Three Hexagrams that have been given. Of course the most frustrating one is Preponderance of the Small, which means you usually can't do anything at all. Limitation, even though it has the most incredible commentary in it that I'd love to live my life by perfectly, I have gotten four lines in, connected with the Hexagram Retreat.

N:

Oh, that should be interesting!

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B:

So, this is the court case [indicates the first hexagram], and this is what happens after the court case [indicates the last hexagram]. This Retreat, depending on how this layer is laid out and the lines of the hexagrams here could mean one of three things: 1)1 can go to jail, 2) we're leaving, or 3) we're fortifying ourselves. What I—

N:

They're pretty much the only three options anyway, aren't they? [laughs]

To this Balthazar assented, but added in the uncertain issue of destiny. He then turned to reading spread out on the red blanket before him, pointed to the final card, the 10 of Wands, whose meaning technically has to do with "order":

B:

I have taken notice that even though the line of unity means stuck because of great Fear of Change of Lack of Purpose and the Draining experience of Focus Hard, I look at this card particularly strong as the word Retreat, and we'll see how things fall upon it.

N:

We'll see how things fall, yeah.

B:

As a reader, I explain these things—

N:

You're trying to predict the future ofyourTarot reading, [laughs]

B:

Well, of course I am! I'm a Tarot speed-reader! When you can get such a thing where the sentence before we put it out, which is in the plane of nothingness, was talking about me being the Archetypal Form and the Vision I was seeing from the Black Disc, and then I picked out the number V first, I go AH! The next sentence was what it is.

After this discussion, Balthazar took a break, then returned to read the Mental Plane reading. In the Mental Plane reading, ten more cards are overlaid upon the Physical Plane reading orthogonally, representing the ten sephira of the Tree of Life. The overlap pattern can be seen in the bottom portion of Balthazar's diagram of the reading,

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Appendix. The Mental Plane reading proceeds backwards from the 22" card of the Physical Plane reading to the first card of the Mental Plane reading, which is laid down overlapping the 7th, 9th, and 10th cards of the Physical Plane reading. A see-sawing motion follows for the remainder of the Mental Plane reading in which the reader then goes back to the 20th card of the Physical Plane reading and then to the 2nd card of the Mental Plane reading, laid over the 10th, 16th, and 17th cards of the Physical Plane reading, and so forth until both ends meet in the middle of the far end of the Physical Plane reading. In so doing a sense of heavily convoluted mirroring is achieved as small snarls or eddies pool briefly in the language stream as the cards are knit anew into further iterations and interrelations. To this are added two cards, placed back to back in a cross formation overlapping the 21 st and the 22nd cards of the Physical Plane reading, representing the Knight and Princess of the Lower Arcana court cards, and two more in a V formation, overlapping the 13th, 6th, and 14th cards at the other end of the Physical Plane Reading, representing the Queen and Prince. For this portion of the reading I have not included the numerical values of the cards and their computations as this process will certainly quickly become too mind boggling to follow beyond the redundant point that this is the occult practice being followed. Here then is the Mental Plane reading:

B:

Da da da da da. Stay focused. This is the Hexagram of Limitation, but it's the Hexagram of focus and knowing what one's duty is. And even the place that you're in, you feel like you're being sucked into a black hole and being drained out, 243

and the thought of that is that there is a heavenly work—da da!— a heavenly work, a holy work. Your wish you're consciously bound to, as like a contract, and so be duty, in thinking. But the place that you're in in your home, there will be happiness. Going into a great lesson of great money that was made, and now much work, and in understanding—hey! The thought form that brings great happiness one's bound up in much now, too, of great life being kept together in actions with great fear that one might be stricken down and consciously bound. Void of destiny, fantasies of mind, lack of passion we find. Ruin in reason. Please! Not the fortune one's wanted. Not the right thing to make one happy. Bad judgment of passion and void of destiny and able to move— oh woe is me—get over the drama, please! Not being able to move, and great sorrow and reason of ruin. Void of destiny at what one is doing, communicating with such fear and lack of movement here, with no passion deep within, and have to accept this as my action. That's bad. [laughs] One's next step: a strong one, to make a change. Yeah! That's a great idea! I don't want that one! [laughs] My next step is to change that. Let's see, do I really want to read that over again? Yes, I do. Ijust want to emphasize how absolutely doom and gloom that sounds. Stay focused, for you're in a situation that you feel like you're being drawn in by a black hole, 244

being totally sucked in. your reason being a very heavy one. You're pulling it together and your work together to meet lessons that need to be learned about money that's of great concern. And now your work that you have learned is based in a contract that you are so stuck in. Happiness within your environment, it is true, but such fear in actions that have come down upon the place you're stuck into that is due, based in not knowing one's destiny or how one can get one's reasoning, passion, movement, umph! Together ever ever ever EVER such again. Feeling ruined in one's reasoning by such misfortune. It is not what one wants to make one happy to be stuck in such a situation of bad judgment of passion that comes down upon you—ick! [pause] That you are stuck in with such great woe that your reasoning says, "Ohhhhh! My reasoning is total ruin! This is not the way I think it should be!" And communicating that in such fear and having to accept that—clear? That is really weird. That was my sentence.

Balthazar's final statement again reflects that the 22" card of the Physical Plane, 10W, has the definition "order" which he has rendered as clarity. Balthazar then processed this portion of the reading, reviewing highlights:

B:

Ok. What is so strongly going to happen? Well, in my mind the situation's gloomy and needs to change. Bound in a situation that you have to remain focused, and you would just not be sucked into such misfortune and black hole, be cause it's not what is really going to make me happy. And the thought of my happiness is to take command of this black hole situation 245

and get things focused. Focused! I mean, enough of the contract! The changes that need to be made, even though my thinking sometimes goes against myself, I have to be very strong. Wa wa wa. Soo—so? Behind me so—behind me so—ohhhhhh! Remain so focused. I feel like I am being drawn in by a level of great impatience. Ok! Gee, I'm impatient. Four years. Oh dear me! Oh. You know what I like about that card? It's not dying right away. Maybe I'm going to die, but what I see before me is me getting free, [snorts] Based in, well, is it worth this? I'll be drawn down into this bad hole, but the fact is that I'm seeing myself free, because what is written: I can take command of the situation. I like that sentence. So nice to place all the miserable first, [snorts] And what I'm really glad to hear is that, yes, I'm stuck in the situation, but within the situation, of course, what does the Limitation Hexagram already say? That if one accepts one's situation and applies oneself to it, one can transform it. And I know the line because it says I can regenerate out of that into a new situation. And I ESPECIALLY like the ruling of innocence in the ear when I turn that around! That was a speed read ahead. This means that they're going to offer you a deal that you won't like, but that will still lead to you getting what you want. It will still lead to you getting money and freedom. What I don't want is to be in this situation and it take a long time, but I'm going to tell you something. Bottom line, this is going to be further than we all did expect. I have to say something else it says. I love when I turn the thing around when I have to do the facing card. It's the card of business, and I have to face the business of making money in my life and coming back.

now is the Mental Plane reading in the re-enactment:

In other words, you're focused on situation that's completely draining you, and it's becoming very heavy, and you're pulling now some resources and things together of what I should do and how it works, what lessons I've learned about the money that is my concern, and pulling things together about situations that I'm really stuck in, and the thought forms of my own happiness. Afraid as I can be, shockingly to shock this contract, this bind that I happen to be in, even I don't know and are totally fantasies. I feel very ruined because my fortune is Boom! What is right about my happiness is that I can't even move. I can't even move with great sorrow it 246

be that my higher reasoning says I am not free, and my destiny I cannot know. Therefore, I've got to communicate, even if I might be afraid to. Look, about my fantasies, it's saying I'm stuck, and things are going completely crazy bad, bad luck. Quite strongly the situation I'm thinking sucks, and I've gotta make a change. And therefore the contract I'm stuck in, there is a moralistic situation about making judgments upon me that I really don't want, and it's keeping me stuck here. So happily, I am gonna free myself and take some command. Take some command of a situation that the Gods willed that has drawn me in and shocked this contractual situation. The change to be, even though it might go totally suicidal against me, is to get now some strength, {hums} Get some strength, let's see. Strength that there be, the thought that is now behind me is that I did have a business. I'm impatient to go. It feels very caused much strife now and ahs been drained into a hole. And to take command of my own freedom in this moralistic world, I have to see that in the past there is a blast. Money—I liked it. It let me quite free to be very sensual. But life I was keeping together. I didn't have ot together then. And that is my situation.

At this point in the re-enactment, he paused to discuss the I Chings:

B:

My observations, quite honest with you, is it said: listen, the more force you use, the stronger they are. You cannot do much. The situation is stronger than you, so you better just stop fighting it, and now start gathering people and taking it to the streets that you can neutralize them, because it is the best you can expect. I was very pleased that I saw nothing in this reading to say that I was gonna get heavy jail time or in any other. It said it would be cushy. I always understand that type of shit, because it's all such a show to scare you, and they don't even think you did a crime. They just want you want the respect of authority, which I can't give them.

During the reading of the I Ching "Limitation" he paused again to comment extensively:

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So the Limitation Hexagram—listen. It's one of my favorite Hexagrams. I know it by heart, and in my heart. It's number 60, and it says: "Galling limitations must not be persevered in, for when things get too severe, people have a tendency to rebel." But it also says: "But limitations are necessary." And my favorite lines are in the commentary: "Unlimited possibilities are not suited for man. If they existed, his life would only dissolve in the boundless." For example, how many rich people have all the unlimited possibilities, and they become drug addicts. They have mental problems. "To become strong a man's life needs limitations ordained by duty and voluntarily accepted." Aye aye. "The individual obtains significance as a free spirit only by surrounding himself with these limitations and determining for himself what his duty is." The more focused you are, the more you'll get done. The more you know what you have to do and do it, the more fun. Ok, aye aye captain. Nine in the second place: "not going out of the gate of the courtyard brings misfortune." When the time is right, the time is right, and if you don't go out with all your might—and by the way, the time you're asked the question about is the time, right?! If you're always going to guess that the time is right, you're gonna bring misfortune to yourself. You better know what's right. It's right! Well, how do you know if it's right? It's right! I'm telling you. We have to do—we have to! We can't wait! There's no such thing to do. "Well, I'm willing to keep you," Nettle did say to me. "I don't care if it costs us five more thousand dollars. We can borrow it." I'd rather borrow $5,000 on publicity! On my case! Get 200 people there and the press, too. You know? Anyway, it is the time. The time is right. Anyway, I think it says that it is because now 6 in the third place: "He who knows limitations will have cause to lament. And individual is bent on only his pleasures and enjoyment." This is basically saying you have to not shirk the responsibility of the situation. You can't just think about your ass, and you can't just think about "Woe is me." And you've gotta get strong at some point and see what has to be done. You need some guts. "Contented limitation. Success." This is the situation. Six at the top: "Galling limitations. Perseverance brings misfortune. Remorse disappears." This means they've gone too fuckin' far! And you're going to win. That's what it means. Then Retreat?

248

B:

"Retreat. Success. In what is small perseverance." Now basically, look. lean read the whole commentary, but this is where we got—where we said they're too big too confront. Therefore, you remain small, and you raise up your army by publicity and a moral thing. "Mountain under the heavens. The Image of Retreat. Thus the superior man keeps the inferior man at a distance, not angrily, but reservedly." And this is where we have to gain the people in rising them up in what is right.

R:

And Nettle's content with it, too?

B:

She made the decision, even at the reading. That's the nice thing about this, even if you have a question and you think, you read on further and it corrects you. And what I love about these I Chings is they always say the same thing as the reading does!

Figure 16 in the Appendix depicts the card layout for this reading that Balthazar recorded in his notebook. This shows the formations of the Physical and Mental plane and the cards which fell into those positions. The entry also includes the cards Balthazar chose to formulate his question, the I Chings his shuffling and cutting created, as well as a notation that he got the four 9's and cards XVII and XXI in their proper places.

6. The Law of Fate: Spiritual Plane (Prophecy)

At this point I had to leave, but the rest of the reading, the Spiritual Plane, continued to be recorded. In the Spiritual Plane reading no new cards are added. Instead cards are moved again in a see-sawing motion to touch, overlap, and fill in gaps, creating a further nested figure which ultimately is meant to be representative of a human in the fetal position. After an initial go through, any cards that are upside down in the chakra column are turned around and read right side up. Thus a card that had a negative

249

meaning will now be read in its positive meaning. Balthazar says that this heals the energy of the situation by correcting energy imbalances in the querent's soul-body. This occurs not so much sympathetically through merely manipulating the poppet of the human body that has been formed, but rather through hearing the situation differently, i.e. as what it would sound like if it were "correct". This listening to the revised story corrects the structure of the Atman, the soul, which in turn orders the Tree, the lived reality. Physical manipulation is not required because both the Atman and the Tree are conceptual matrixes. The querent needs only to activate his own power of conceptualization, linked now through the magician-reader's word-vision to the vantage point of God, to have the power to make change in their life for the better. As a final part of this process, two squares made of six interconnecting cards each are made to fall over the head and heart centers. Each of these squares at its center has the two sets of cards which in the reading are already back to back. As a final flourish of the reading, the outer cards of these two squares are knit together and the squares are turned over to reveal the cards that have been hidden from view throughout the reading. These cards represent the occult powers of the heart and mind, now clearly elevated and linked. Notably the card in the place of the heart center is the first card laid down in the reading, which is taken from the power center, and represents I, the Magician, the Tree of Life, and the core of the Atman which puts it all together: the Self. An example of the spiritual plane layout can be found in Figure 24 of the Appendix. Here is the original Spiritual Plane reading:

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B:

My fantasies or passions true are not right. I'm stuck. What else can I tell you? [laughs] What do you think it said? So let's put myself in this situation. It's a thought form. It's a relation. It's miserable. It's terrible. I'm stuck in a miserable, terrible situation! But it's getting better... [laughs] For what I've been given to do is the archetypal form that I am now. I become a symbol. Of spiritual lessons such due, learned. Okay, they 're parallel. It says—remember the spiritual lessons and the consciousness and the people and the respect—okay, fine, got that. That one has thus learned and been so well defined. That such power now has drawn you in because of your impatience and mistakes in business then, and you were not focused. Bound up to where you are now, things just don't seem to be worth while. It's all this moralistic suppression stuff drawin' me in. This is not what I want in my happiness, but here I am now, taking command of the situation. And there's a lightening bolt to a situation that you are stuck in that you are not harmonious with, and that is you are seeing your freedom before you and a transformation. [Takes a large breath.] You are being drawn into such a black hole that the power against it all and the defining of such refined vines of that of the marijuana plant and the spiritual life that it be and lessons that gives to the archetype and in society that it does heal and could purge so much. Purge so much that you are now stuck in. That this consciousness does grow and this understanding that one does know. That understanding that one does know and is your work. So before you, what do you see? You being free. Taking command of the situation in a moralistic way. Being free because what you're attracted to is the thought form of the past that is a value that continued to last and freedom that has such sensuousness of holiness— wait a second. You now have a life of such nobility—hm. [Sings:] You have a wife of such nobility. [whispers:] There's a line in there of praise for you. It says: [resumes normal intonation:] 251

Good, now you can pay much more attention to your wife. When you had all the sensuousness and everything you weren't around as much. Now you're forming something else. [whispers: unclear. B kisses N.] Hmmm. So, what one does know, one goes in that the future is from the lessons you have learned much work, to your concern. Ohhhhh there is commentary I do want to say, but I think I'll continue on my way. Commentary! Next step so strong of a horrible situation that needs to change, There's energy that's being connected to the work about that is growing. And—yay!—yes, such strength of nobility that there is definitely money that you are being drawn into. The change that there shall be: you're thinking has quite often gone against thee but will go into more of a seeking of a meditation because there'll be such many in relation that you'll now presently start to grow. Even though the future is, is that the change will be that you have little control over the situation, the work you're in is such defined that you are being drawn in, bottom line. Impatient though you have been, you need to be refocused then. There will be much definition about the spiritual value of marijuana, its value, its work, the lessons to be learned, the archetypal concerns of its healing powers. And the situation will be getting better about its growing and its understanding. And therefore—and its sensuality and sensitivity. There should be a shock to the contract that you are bound in from such values of the past and money that will have continued to last— interesting— and what is such understanding that there be, that you are right now just going into a situation and keeping your life together. It's not what you want, but it works, and it's going to continue to. Good. I like a little security in relationships.

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[BALTHAZAR NOW BEGINS TO REVERSE THE NEGATIVE CARDS IN THE CHAKRA COLLUMN FOR THE HEALING PORTION OF THE READING.] Stuck in a situation of moralism—no, of virtue. And what you are right and your purpose, and remain focused in it. Your misfortunate, but you will be happy for now you are taking command of the situation with great enthusiasm of purpose, remaining focused, and there is going to be a shake up in what you are bound to. Hey! You may be transformed. That's it, based in your virtue, you will take command of the situation and see that you will become a leader in it. Very focused and have a purpose dealing with what has been so well defined and what is, bottom line, lessons to be learned about its value and the work—this is your work in the situation. To become an archetype of purging a situation that you are stuck in. Good, [laughs] Okay, if you wanna go after me, I'm gonna go after the whole law and the whole world's attitude towards it. And of growing and an understanding about it. That will be a lot of feelings out there about this just being too stuck and also stuck with the bucks and people just wanting to get it together—woops, I read a sentence I had. And going into a situation where there is a lot of feelings about it and people just barely getting together. Having life together and not knowing at all. And one is seeing an opportunity in it—I always would, [laughs] -see it with mine eye be opened as a business, and I am free.

Thus ended the reading on a high note. The reading finished, they, of course, discussed it, but they were both tired, and Nettle was clearly feeling reserved:

B:

Shaken up means, once I get the attention, things are gonna start developing in such a way where I could see us starting to go. And it does say I am going to be found innocent and made free.

N:

Umm.

B:

It SAID that! It said that in the Innocence card here based in the Freedom card touching it. I will hear the words "I am free." 253

N:

[softly] Good.

B:

I will hear the words I am free, and I will get more freedom from it by promoting it.

N:

[softly] Ok.

B:

I will reread this. Believe me, I'm writing this down and rereading and analyzing it. Are we done? No more talking about this?

N:

No more talking about this.

Here now is the Spiritual Plane reading in the re-enactment:

B:

In my mind I have many fantasies that might want to be, but the fact is none of them are right I can see. I'm stuck. Ahhh! Stuck in my reasoning of ego and fear. Stuck exactly right here. In such a mess, I do think, that I have to straighten this mess out before I can do anything. To give myself into this mess fully and heal it up as an archetype. [Sings the following:] / am an archetype. I'm not the person. I am an archetype [stops singing] that has been given a lesson, a lesson in thinking so well defined spiritually and refined spiritually, even divine, about pot. And now what's, with all my might, I'm being sucked into a black hole that I was focused into a business of this black hole and this pot. I am bound now in a contract of moralistic engagements that are sucking me in that I don't wanna deal with because of my own happiness. And my happiness says now is the time to take command, with great anxiety, of the situation that I need to be focused on and disrupt the contract. And free myself from this moralistic situation. So now this black hole sucking me in, so well defined, as I know the lesson, bottom line, that I am now then archetypal form of healing up a situation so born that I am now stuck in that is constantly growing around me and something that I do understand that is my work. That's what I need to do. I freely see that there was much money and sensuality in my life that I was keeping together in the past. Eh, the ability of a holy life. I like holy lives like that. In the past thinking, much money, fight. Is that the way you 'd bring that in? Eh, yes I do. Do I 254

wanna do it that way? Yes I do. Um there was much money to do, but my reasoning, there was an ego. This is true. In relationships a fantasy and a lesson needed to be learned about my work. I'm not going anywhere. I'm just gonna do my work right now. Ifeel always like making a commentary of these things and these analyzations, but I have to talk about how this has struck me as the situation. The one thing that I've really learned here is it's a very selfless situation that lam in, and I've been given myself as the archetypal symbol to fight a wrong or an evil in consciousness. And therefore, one thing you have to learn if you 're going to be a holy man is that it's not just that you have some great knowledge that you can share with somebody, it's that you have to be the manifestation of that knowledge. And therefore what I've been seeing in the black disc is this being the opening to my spiritual teachings, being a spiritual teacher in my life. By walking the talk and standing up and being in full sight. But the fact is my next step, a very strong one, a terrible situation needs to change. Is that right?...change. In the future I'm going to connect up an energy to my work that is growing and happening right now, pulling resources together. Next step, so strong, is that the past nobility of such money and such refinement defined, it's now drawing me in. Drawing me in. This is a very interesting part of the reading because it was prophecy coming to the end, saying that this situation was drawing me in that I made money from the past, but I will make more on it that will continue to last, becoming this archetype. I don't know what door's open, but it's mentioned that. It says the place I'm making change, it might go totally against myself, but being very strong and very holy and knowing of great value about what needs to grow, and in the future the change will be is—I don't know. I don't know what I have to do! But the fact is that my work has been very well defined. Purpose in life—I can't move away. The heavens will drag me there screaming, or I can realize I can go there strong and make it happen right. So what you're saying is you've felt a change or strengthening of your way of viewing what you need to do in this situation. Yeah, of course. We can go to trial and make this a big fuckin' issue and neutralize these people. The best we can do in a state of retreat is neutralize them by slowing them down until we can prepare to make a counter attack by raising a grass roots thing and neutralizing that it will be as soft on me as possible because of the publicity. That's what it says.

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Balthazar paused to give an overview of the healing portion of the Spiritual Plane reading, after which he finished the reading:

B:

The cards that are upside down are past business, being nervous about, and being sucked into a whole. The mouth, the past thinking. One ear of moralism. And the world outside of me. My life. That was not a whole lot of cards, and the things that I would like to do is that you can first recognize—I mean I'm going to read this whole thing now, but the cure sentences will be: you have to accept your purpose in Life. This is beyond you, what has happened. It is for a reason for you. And once you can see yourself as an archetype, that you 're not being sucked into something, but that this is your purpose to be in this place fully, and that your past business your being nervous about is that you should be in harmony with it that you are a leader and remain focused. And as for fearing judgments against you, you are going for the heart and what is right. Within thy mind we do define you are the Archetype. So far you've been given deep within a mess to clear up that you have accepted then. To clear up this mess as the archetype you be is the lesson of such value as your work, the higher consciousness of thought, of such power of purpose and impatience of business to want to teach in the past. Remain focused now, and it will continue to last. For the contract you're bound in by these moralistic things you're always hearing, hear what is virtuous and now good. Remain focused as you should. You don't want—yeah, you don't want your ego to get into the way. Be happy, need I say. Take command of the situation. Make it happen. Be focused then. 'Cause a bit of disruption on the situation. See yourself as free, found innocent. And let's face it, you've got a purpose and a lot of business and impatience to do. Remain focused, it is quite true. Define the situation and the lessons you need to teach. Draw money forward into your work, yes. I'm in business! I'll write this up, and it says I'm gonna make money on it! And there will be money behind it for the causes, too. I said we should do the whole story afterwards and put the contents of the reading in it, too, as a novel and hand them the book on how to do and—[exhales strongly]. For you are the archetype of curing the situation you're stuck in about growing. And it is growing now, and a great deal of its understanding is happening.

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It is a great deal of understanding that what you've gotta face, you've gotta face—[sings] you've got to face, yes you do [stops singing] based in your purpose, you've gotta remain focused, but make a business out of this and start becoming a leader, being willing to be that. I mean do what you have to, be the leader, but now see if thine eye be opened you're facing your major transition. You are dead or alive. You've given up the need to be alive. This is way beyond you, and what you are seeing, beyond you is the sensuality that you will get life really together, and you will manifest what you want. Halleluja! That's right, abundance of feelings and shock to the situation one's bound in, with much value, money—yes!—and life! Life is happy, but it's not the way you wanted it. You wanted to work and get it really defined of what your values are. And bottom line, if you were growing or not, if they convict you, then you can sell a book on how to do it [snorts]! [laughs] And that's exactly what it says, and that combination really got me because you have the pot card touching the money card touching the work card touching the grow card. How do you read around that and not say what I just said? Like it said to me, there's gonna be a lot of money in because you 're gonna start drawing money for this whole thing for a lot of purposes, and beyond this you 're gonna make money doing it. I've got a novel here—sure, give me a few years of house arrest, make me a spiritual teacher and all the rest, and by the way I'll write a book on how to do it! I'll become an authority. Screw it! Thank you for the publicity. I'm now a spiritual teacher, too. I've put out books—wait a second! Isn 't this the guy got all that publicity with that trial, and he's got a book on the Tarot out? He's got a book on proving it was developed in the Age of Taurus but revised in the beginning of the Age of Ares? And he can trace human history going back to 4200 BC? And he's got a book out on how to grow stuff, and he's got a book out on meditation—this guy's a pretty interesting character that's coming out into the lime light right now, I can see. And we 're putting the lessons that need to be learned is: don't be afraid; it's only your ego. [laughs] Put your mind in the Archetypal Mind, you're stuck in here, and bring out a real fucked up, messed up situation you need to be broken free from by presenting the information out to people that really dig a nice life, and they think that this is a mess and want to change this situation and are along with you. Thank you, hallelujah Thought! Hallelujah Thoth! Hallelujah 257

Seshet. Hallelujah Ra and Isis. Hallelujah Maat, Hecate, and all the angels, amen. Ok. I read it very quickly, and what I really liked about it, like I always said, I love reading these things. I really like reading these things the second time because it came out so much better than the first. I love this tape. It's a good one. Wanna tape a photograph? RZ:

Yeah! Why don't we take a photograph. Isn't that a good idea?

B:

/ thought it was my idea.

7. Grass Roots Magick

As Balthazar himself readily assents, the major difference, structurally, between the original reading and the re-enactment is the formation of fully coherent sentences. As a result, within the original reading, he re-reads the mental plane three times, first to make it more stream-lined and fluid, and then to elaborate its meaning. At first touch down of math into language, phrasing is simply rough semantically and highly constrained, and the attempts made by Balthazar to smooth this with rhyme and by filling in with information generated by space signification or standard phrases often results in back peddling and an exacerbation of the semantic issue. This, however, is not such a problem during an actual reading itself. The sheer suspenseful building of drama in the reading sphere mostly obliterates gaps as the listeners are, after all, listening for a story to develop, and as such actively receive all information as story elements. As the reading develops and a master storyline is fleshed out in the Physical Plane reading the reading smoothes out considerably. This is especially evident by the Spiritual Plane when no new cards are introduced. As Nettle noted, it seems, that by "speed reading ahead," 258

Balthazar has already made up his mind about the overall meaning of the reading by the end of the Mental Plane and thus focus instead on elaborating the details within. He is also apparently thinking ahead about how to manipulate the cards so that the story will become in its final iteration the best possible news. As the purpose of the reading is to reveal and correct imbalances, such positive reformulations are in no way considered "cheating". They are Magick. And in fact this is one of the key innovations of Balthazar's system, besides just the overall elaboration of the story line through the use of an additional 25 cards and the elaboration of Hermetic structure in the reading. The Magick is not just the drawing down of the god oracularly or even reading the querent's mind. It is a process of healing and thus ultimately of changing events in the lifeworld. However, the querent cannot be simply rescued by either prophet or god. Rather the cure is in being made aware of how to perceive a situation differently. From there the querent can do the healing themselves by the corrective power of "rational", "objective" thought. As The Law of Fate-Physical Plane Script states:

The mind defines the actions and structure of the physical self... To realize this is to consciously create Prophecy. Sense the exhilaration of this knowledge. Know that this exhilaration is the ability to see completely the soul. Higher reasoning is the enlightened ability to teach yourself to be conscious in your actions. Consciousness is created from outside the universe. It is the Universal law of nothing

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This holds just as true for Balthazar reading himself as for reading someone else—if not more-so, for as another line in the script says, "You love this philosophy." Such perceptual changes notably involve full reversals. A given situation cannot be simply subtly changed, but must, because of the card structure, be changed to its opposite, the card literally turned around. Yet the "opposites," in fact, like genders, are subtler than one might think. Thus, according to Balthazar's reading: he must bring a situation to which he is bound into harmony, he must be able to handle a life he feels he cannot handle, a life that is inhibited (or, by the card's definition, fucked) he must embrace passionately and have the energy (currently lacking) to move forward his destiny (currently void of course), as such he must go from a place of unknowing to knowing, ego and self involvement must turn to pride and standing for a larger cause, fear must turn to reverence, bad judgment must turn to good judgment. Objectivity in Balthazar's Tarot reading is thus not so much about neutrality as it is about neutralizing, implying that an equal and opposite reaction will cancel out the original negativity and set things right. This formula has two fallback positions, abundantly apparent in Balthazar's narrative: 1) if you don't do it, its not going to happen, so it's on you, not the reading and 2) negative things happen for a reason, they are not punishments, they are lessons, therefore if the results in the lifeworld are negative no matter how hard you tried, it was meant to be and you must find the good that can come of it, for that is its real purpose of any reading and any life. Aspects of this poetic composition process of interwoven formula and theme can be compared to Albert Lord's analysis of oral epic performance in the Balkins in The Singer of Tales, which he conjectured was probably the same format used by ancient 260

"authors" such as Homer to recall vast stores of oral literature and adapt them to particular performance settings. A major difference, however, is that the narrative the Tarot reader constructs a re-construction or re-iteration, per se, of an extent cultural composition, but is rather a bricolage of inter-related themes drawn from the varied mythos of the full cultural encyclopedia pieced into a novel construction. It is not the thematic elements that remain consistent in a Tarot reading's structure, but the temporal ones, designated by card placement, which itself follows a pattern of numerical development—i.e. not the plot but the generic narrative structure itself. Comparing the Physical Plane Reading in both versions to the Physical Plane Template (Figure 1, Appendix 2), the sequence of card spaces and their meanings which format the basic narrative structure are followed consistently, though in the actual reading Balthazar sometimes dallies over cards, stringing together multiple terms or meanings for a single card, relating them to nearby cards (which, within the Tarot schema is absolutely permissible) or back tracking to reread areas in light of new information, all to tease out further significance and connections—i.e. further development of the narrative, giving us a glimpse at the unlimited semiosis that can be achieved within an ordered structure simply by continually subdividing it by fractals. Lehrich likens the structure of Tarot readings to fugue, which, while "never a particularly rigid structure in the history of Western music" has certain distinctive characteristics: "First, it rests on imitation, in that the subject (the initial theme) undergoes formal imitation, transposition, inversion, and so on, which then become answer, countersubject, and so forth. Second, it is polyphonic, which means that several voices, entering successively, play parallel parts; importantly, these parts are internally 261

driven, rather than depending mainly on the other lines as in pure harmony." Fugue he subsequently likens structurally to Levi-Strauss's definition of myth: "Fugue is like mythology, in that it depends on concurrent melodies (diachronic expressions) that have their own internal rhythmic and harmonic logic yet simultaneously refer to each other synchronically through the scale." All three, thus, have a diachronic armature and a synchronic pattern played out therein, which together yields a message (Lehrich 2007: 149-150). Put back into the specific territory of Tarot, notes Lehrich:

On the one hand, each card has its own meaning, in several senses: the trumps relate hierarchically (and indeed are numbered), have their own independent meanings outside of the deck (as images, concepts, and so forth), and relate at the level of a cosmogonic cycle. At the same time, they appear in a new, random order within a given spread, and this new order is essentially linear. By aligning the various levels and seeking to formulate the spread as a "score" made up of these elements, we have a musical activity, a mythological procedure. (153)

Given this tendency to elaboration, mirroring, and transformation, enhanced by the fact that individual words have, by the process of hermetic drift, a fair cascade of divergent yet related terms and, in fact, entire ideas associated with them—and always the possibility of more as those ideas are adapted to a given context—quite a good portion of the terminology is repeated verbatim in both readings. The main difference is syntax, the exact placement and emphasis on certain words in a given sentence. This occurs, despite adherence to the template structure, because words still must be filled in to create actual sentences. This difference did create shifts in the direction of the derived statements. Thus for example, in the original reading in the first words of the Mental

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Plane Balthazar is ordered to "stay focused," while in the re-enactment he is told, "In other words you're focused." This phrasing significantly points to the change in Balthazar's temperament from reading to re-enactment, at which point he had decided not only what the reading meant, but he had further deliberated his subsequent course of action. Thus where in the original reading the redundancy factor at times approaches a stutter, the smoother, more poignant re-enactment is the result of a more focused narrative. By the Spiritual Plane the two readings are internally highly consistent in their focus on five main themes and their related signifying terms: being an archetype, a transformation taking place, taking command of the situation, seeing his freedom, and making money off of it. These themes notably correspond with Balthazar's major concerns going into the reading: not being worthy (why had the gods let this happen?), nothing changing (it all looking bad), loss of freedom, being powerless, and losing all he had accumulated/his worldly possessions. The idea of being an archetype is particularly relevant to the Tarot reader who is accustomed to seeing Tarot reading as stories drawn out of the archives of human drama and thus in a strange sense not personal, but rather generic. In the original reading these ideas culminate in two related statements: "There will be much definition about the spiritual value of marijuana, its value, its work, the lessons to be learned, the archetypal concerns of its healing powers" and "Okay, if you wanna go after me, I'm gonna go after the whole law and the whole world's attitude towards it." It does not take long for him to state outright what he means by this: he will organize a grass roots movement. What is not overtly stated, but alluded to in and around the Tarot reading are all of the elements of a three-pronged defense cum offense: 1) he 263

didn't do it, 2) the police and court have proceeded unconstitutionally, and 3) marijuana should be legal anyway; marijuana prohibition is a manifestation of Christian religious bias and cultural persecution at home and abroad, and he is against the drug war. He had at this point already formed liaisons with NORML, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, and FIJA, the Fully Informed Jury Association, who had worked with NORML before and who were both interested in his case. There were rumors of a website, demonstrations, leaflets that might be distributed outside the courthouse, newspaper articles. He had gone into the reading with these ideas already present, but uncertain as to whether seeking such publicity was a good idea that would draw able helpers or a bad one, drawing more fire from the law. The reading confirmed his inclination to fight. Further it told him that he had to do it for a higher cause, and he had to become "a manifestation of that knowledge": a hero, a holy man, a symbol. "I am an archetype. I'm not the person. I am an archetype," he sings during the re-enactment, fighting "a wrong or an evil in consciousness." In relation to the legal system, it is easy to not feel like a self. The experience of the courtroom, which he had now had over and over, and I with him, is, to say the least, disorienting. To be attacked, stripped of your properties and freedom, defamed, and quite literally abused—by strangers— when you truly feel very strongly that you are a good person is confusing, terrifying, nullifying, enraging, and humbling. It is thus in many ways the perfect setting for a spiritual experience. This is, at least, what I witnessed with Balthazar over the years and the many Tarot readings. At the sentencing hearing his psychologist would say, as if in agreement, that she thought it had been a good experience for him, actually, but that he had learned his lessons and should not be jailed. 264

Finally, through processing the 14 Tarot reading, he determined that this bust, too, was part of his life work. Prior to the bust, he and Nettle had been making plans to move to Canada. "I'm not going anywhere," said Balthazar at the re-enactment. "I'm just gonna do my work right now." Don't be afraid, the gods told him. You will manifest what you want—and the last words of his reading, spoken in a pure visionary state: and I am free. As it turned out the Trial was deferred until May 2009. Once the trial began, things went badly quickly. Balthazar did three readings over the course of the trial as he tried to get his bearings, which he recorded in his notebook. The first, on May 23 rd , is titled "Things not going the way I thought they would!" As the trial dragged on into June, a reading on June 2nd is titled "Bad day. Guilty. Shit!!" Another on June 5th says : "Four 5's—Justice." This is followed by a short "to do" list:

1. Be real about your meditation. Stay calm. 2. Just do it. 3. Just do what you are told. 4. Do magic. Get off your ass and do something.

After this he threw many I Chings asking over and over again: "Am I going to jail?" "Will I get my properties back?" In the end he was convicted, but allowed to return hime until his sentencing hearing in mid-August. Balthazar, Nettle, and I walked back to West Philly from Center City, during which he obsessed on fallback position #1: not enough was done, the word didn't get out properly, plus the whole thing was rigged, and his 265

lawyer didn't care about anything but money—while Nettle kept reminding him that at that very moment he was still free. In his journal the steady stream of I Chings continue: "Will this go to a new trial?" "Will I go to federal appeal?" "Will this be over this year?" "Will it be over in the year 2010?" And finally returning to the point of origin: "Am I going to jail?" and thus cycling back through the same questions again and again. "What is going on?" The journal begins to show anger, a faltering of belief, then negotiation, then finally, right before his sentencing hearing, re-affirmation. Finally, on August 19th, he did one last reading six days after his 61 st birthday. His notes in his journal beside the I Chings say:

1.

Jail for a short time

2.

Appeals will work

3.

Fight because you are in this fight.

4.

Wait for appeals.

5.

Get friends and help lawyers.

6.

Friends come. Help you.

As he got closer to the sentencing hearing his interpretation of the 14th Tarot reading shifted to fallback position #2: lessons. A 3 rd fallback position also began to formulate: wait to see what will be revealed, this is not over yet, the reading may as yet become fulfilled at a higher level. To the academic point of view, Balthazar's distinction between Magick and divination is essentially semantic, one based in visionary belief. There is no special 266

objectivity to his system of mathematics linked to words that clearly describe and thus delimit a rather Utopian worldview whose ideas, evidenced in a certain redundancy pattern, form the semantic web of an occultic encyclopedia of belief. Still the distinction is important to Balthazar and his tradition, and as Balthazar says: it isn't over until it's over, which could very well be your whole life and then some. With the blocky Tarot reading skills he has been able to teach me, I can perhaps draw from the definitions of the cards a simple trajectory of the magical worldview which sustains him, and which might go something like this:

Magick expresses life's form, a philosophy of harmony, energy, balance, I II III IV V VI VII VIII seeking what you wish for passionately, given freely, creatively IX X XI XII XIII XIV bringing it all together to manifest (& thus reveal) a transformation XIV XV XVI of destiny, psychically. This is called enlightenment— XVII XVIII XIX God consciousness: a good decision for a new beginning. XX XXI 0

At the sentencing hearing he got 5-10 years, with the expectation that he would have to serve seven of them. He handed his brown suede jacket to Nettle, and the guards and court clerks apologized softly, effusively, calling him "sir," as he was handcuffed. Then he disappeared behind the beige sound proofed wall that closed around the door's seam as if it had never been there. His last entry in his journal shows the Hecate 267

ceremony performed the night before the hearing, August 20, 2009. On the facing page in my handwriting is the Hecate reading for September 20, 2009. (See Appendix, figure 20.) In prison, fallback positions #2 & #3 have developed to a new level of understanding: the purpose of this all is to make him finish the book. Thus he has begun to order painting supplies.

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CHAPTER 5 THE THIRD PERSONALITY

We must be clear that when it comes to atoms, language can only be used as poetry —Niels Bohr

Inner Speech cannibalizes all genres—Robert St. George

1. The Third Personality

In performing a Tarot reading, Balthazar knows he has "connected up" when he hears what he is saying as an external consciousness as he continues speaking. In his meditations, during astral projection, he knows this is accomplished when he feels a sensation of "electrical energy" in his head, alternately described as a "flickering" or a tingle or being hot and cold at the same time, and a sensation of being both pulled towards a light and out of his body, at which point he often encounters another presence there who gives him some sort of information, a teaching or psychic wordless communication. At various points he gives that presence different names—Franzel, Hermes, his personal guardian angel or higher self—but what is consistent is that experience of connection and telepathic communication which he calls communion. He describes the overall experience as "a constant feeling of expansion" during and after which he can often see a glow on everything—"the Shekinah light." The only thing he

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can liken it to is doing LSD in immersion tanks, which he described as the sensation of being in the womb and then being born. Doing LSD at Rainbow gatherings, he described a feeling of connection to everyone and everything, the whole world a joyful liquid jewel of shine. Franzel meanwhile describes a similar experience of samadhi, though with somewhat more remove where the world became a theater: "If you're connected with samadhi, you see the atom, you see the cosmos, and all is one. Once in my life I was in this state.. .It was a fraction of a second, but it changed me." Both Balthazar and Franzel's experiences are in fact consistent with the longstanding literature on mystical experiences as well as with Near Death Experiences (a term coined by Richard Moody in Life After Life: The Investigation of a Phenomenon— Survival of Bodily Death), both of which are usually perceived as positive experiences. However, Balthazar's account also shares characteristics with The Old Hag tradition, the experience of haunting, and other supernatural experiences, reported on extensively by David Hufford, which are often perceived as negative experiences. As Hufford writes in his commentary essay on Genevieve Foster's experience in The World Was Flooded With Light: A Mystical Experience Remembered, the particular valence of the experience must be understood in terms of the culture and individual to whom it occurs. Yet the experience itself seems to have some universal characteristics. Mystics have often used practices of meditation as a process of "getting in touch" with a "deeper" consciousness filled with boundless love, peace, and a sense of connection—a sensibility that has haunted the genre, prompting Freud's disgusted repudiation of "oceanic humanity." Artists and new agers slinging pop psychological terminology have often called this deep place "the unconscious." Always it is described 270

as somehow distanced and difficult to access, but well worth it when you do. In general such visions have been considered sacred and intensely meaningful, though in a fuzzy, wordless way. In Why God Won't Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief, Andrew Newberg and Eugene D' Aquili describe how, in hooking up electrodes to subjects in meditation and prayer, they have found that during such states the attention and orientation associated areas of the brain's left hemisphere show significantly decreased activity, while the right brain becomes highly activated (Newberg and D'Aquili 2001: 110). From a quite different perspective, Jill Bolte Taylor came upon very similar information which she writes about in My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey. Unlike Newberg and D'Aquili, Taylor was not in pursuit of mystical experience at all. Rather she was 37 year-old Harvard-trained neuroanatomist going about her usual hectic business and had a stroke. The stroke was in the left hemisphere, the lobe which processes temporal orientation, that categorizes and organizes and sees the self as a separate individual, that creates a past and projects a future possibility and performs such functions as language and math, all of which contributes to what Bolte calls "I am" language—or what we call "intellect." This left her stranded in the right hemisphere, in the purely spatial, visual domain of picture-feelings we colloquially call "intuition." Lodged in that perspective she experienced an expansive sense of self that did not fit inside her body. She saw everything—herself, the objects in the room—as streaming pixels of energy that all merged into an enormous glowing world of same. There was no sense of time. It was an eternal present in which she felt "complete well-

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being and peace," enveloped in a loving sense of presence and connection to an unspecified everything. Into this euphoria, however, some nagging portion of her not fully drowned left brain managed to insert the idea "I think you're having a stroke! Must get help!" This understanding had two parts: on the one hand she was fascinated to know what a stroke was like and determined to catalogue her experience and on the other the slow realization came that she would die if she didn't do something. Thus she mustered all of her energy and somehow managed to make a phone call by matching the image sequence which she knew was her boss's telephone number—despite that she could not understand their meaning and had to hold her fingers over the other numbers in the sequence so as not to confuse them, all of which took a very long time to accomplish—to the images on the phone pad. However, she had not accounted for not being able to speak when her boss answered. (Speech is a left brain function.) She made instead a garbled sound, though luckily that was enough for her boss to send an ambulance. The remainder of the book discusses her recovery, but also her unwillingness to fully revert to her former perspective and in fact her inability to not be, as Franzel said, changed by this entirely different perspective, the perspective of the right brain (Taylor 2009). Taken together Taylor's experience and Newberg and D'Aquili's findings suggest that whatever is happening when people have what is generally considered a "mystical" experience, they may very well be, in fact, honing in on right brain functions. Conversely, this same data suggests that such "mystical" experiences of right brain functions may have patterned the discourse on the sacred and supernatural. In general the opposition of the otherworld and the lifeworld has been defined in terms of the 272

limitless, noncorporeal, and eternal vs. the limited whose defining points of difference are corporeal existence and death. One might pause to wonder where the idea of the limitless and the eternal come from and how people have become so certain that it exists. Without reducing such experience to pure materiality, I posit that this knowledge is generated from right brain oriented experiences, though not from the right brain operating in complete isolation by any means. The right brain could never make up the story to tell us about it. For the lasting story of this experience we need a witnessing left brain with a temporary gag rule that it can eventually overcome, bringing consciousness back down to the finite and analytical and thus to language—or as best as it can. For it is precisely such a function of iconic memory that lies just beyond language, suggests Sperber, which generates symbolic language. Sperber provides solid evidence that there can be non-semantic cognition which irrupts in language through symbolism. Sperber sees symbolic language as an economic function of memory that takes snapshots of scenes and events in order to archive all potentially useful information, including what escapes strict semantic, definitional meaning. As such symbols, according to Sperber, are a kind of fossil. This does not take us much beyond Freud who believed that the processes of thinking in images in dreams is an act of censorship in which socially uncomfortable information is concealed from the waking mind by a condensation of linguistic knowledge into metaphor, metonymy, and other awkwardly displaced symbols. While Sperber upgrades the visual mind functionally, he may be making the same oversight as Freud in understanding more basic brain functions. This, I would posit, is due to an inherent left brain bias in Western culture. As a corrective, I would suggest, rather, that if the mind can think in images 273

outside of the domain of language, as Sperber indicates, it makes sense to look to the part of the mind that thinks in images to explain this form of processing, and that would be the right brain. The above experiences indicate that, while the left brain normally dominates routine lifeworld functioning, during mystical—and I posit magical—experiences, the left brain is disengaged and the right brain dominates. Freud's astute observations about the visuality of dreams suggests a similar reversal during dreaming and a similar struggle upon "waking" and returning to "normal" consciousness to put such experience into words. No doubt there are other experiences that, to greater and lesser degrees, tap into right brain functions, including aesthetic experience, visual and otherwise. While the left brain is temporarily silenced, it is not, however, blinded, but is rather passively aware of this curiosity: the curiosity of an awareness of the right brain. In Tarot Magick's language: the one becomes two. An otherness is detected, that which Sperber says escapes definition and can only be described or pointed to. I posit that what Tarot Magick ultimately does for the magician is naturalize this process and provide techniques to make this experience controlled and, for the most part, enjoyable. Over the years, Balthazar has given me two images for the Egyptian Hermes, or Thoth, the embodied mind of God (in man). The first is a chattering monkey, representing the processing mind, always busy telling stories, talking to itself, orienting itself to it's surrounding, remembering tasks, calculating trajectories—working. The other is a white ibis which plunges its long beak into the Pool of Nun, the Primordial Nothing, and pulls out a glittering fish. This represents the meditative, receptive, and ultimately creative mode of thought. While Balthazar has not named them as such, these 274

can be readily seen to represent left and right brain functions, respectively. What Balthazar's narrative and the language of Tarot Magick say is that it is impossible to emerge from this otherworld experience without feeling changed. The perception of otherness creates an othering of self-identification at the cognitive level. Judging from Balthazar's testimony, it is possible that continuous practice may create a long term shift in perception wherein the right hemisphere, if not prominent, is not so fully recessed and therefore more readily accessed and noticed during routine functional processing. For as Wolf states, neural impulses follow the path of least resistance. Habit can thus change reality. For the remainder of this chapter I will seek to tease out some of the cognitive factors underlying both Balthazar's magical practices and the operative language of Tarot Magick. This language provides an interpretive framework for Balthazar's experiences. The experiences in turn result in a sense of encounter with an otherworld and the after effect of a mystical glow of a deeper knowledge and power. It seems from the outset that Balthazar's two central magical practices, astral projection and Tarot reading, produce two different types of events. None-the-less, Balthazar clearly articulates that there is feedback between them and that these two practices support and enhance each other. On the one hand, Tarot reading is often part of his meditation practices, usually an opening move, after casting the circle, that then moves on to astral projection. On the other, his meditation practices such as astral projection, are, he says what ultimately gives him the "information" which enhances his skills as a Master Tarot reader—though, as he points out, by simply using the mathematical system of the cards, anyone can read Tarot. Still, there is reading and there is reading. I can do some of the visualization exercises 275

Balthazar does, but they are very simple, and I can "read" Tarot, but only the Physical Plane and my associations are limited to the "dictionary" definitions, so I tend to sound somewhat like a computer writing poems. It should thus come as no great surprise that I have not had the experience that Balthazar has of self-deification or transport. Though it is clear that Balthazar would very much like me to, I have not tried to put the visualization practices together with Tarot reading nor to "connect" with an otherworld through astral projection, and it is clearly this layered experience which produces the gestalt effect of Tarot Magick. However, I can, in the words of Tarot, "illuminate" some of the things it outright says about itself and attempt to put this in line with Balthazar's stated experience. In these last words I have put one foot in the magical world. What does Tarot say about itself and how? To answer the first half of this question I need first to answer the second half. On the one hand, as Balthazar has already made clear, Tarot Magick is composed of practices. These practices, as Balthazar says, "structure experience." This does not mean that they provide all of the content of the experience, but they do provide the methodology, which, as Balthazar himself makes clear, itself instructs, while also producing experiences that instruct—and perhaps these are to some extent the same thing for they loop back upon each other in practice. If Tarot shouts about any one thing the most in its rather transparent ongoing dialogue about consciousness, it is a belief that it is the very physicality of embodied experience that is spiritual, and the appearance of objects in the mind only enhances this intensely physical locus. It is in fact in this very back and forth between these two states of awareness of embodied being and

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disembodied mental objects from which the core of Tarot Magick's spirituality arises, and this can be expressed as an awareness of multiple perspectives. A Tarot reading begins with the second card, representing the mental plane within the Atman. To shortcut the implied message in this move and to return to a previous conversation: the mind is "two". This "two" is represented by the interplay of the cards I and II, the first and second cards of the Tarot template, representative, as discussed at the beginning of Chapter Three, of the faculties of intellect and intuition. These cards are laid back to back and a third card is then crossed over them representing "the spirit passing through" of consciousness. The iconic information in this aspect of the Tarot reading essentially repeats that of the lecture the Manifestation of the Tree from the Atman where the emergence of nothing into manifestation gave "birth" to both perspectives simultaneously, represented by the intersection of line and curve, space and time, linear and circular reasoning, to create the eternal circle of the Fool. An image of manifest consciousness, The Fool in its integrity is none-the-less bifurcated by the line which acts both as firewall and zone of interchange or connection. For the self-described job of Magick is to connect the dots of a multi-dimensional consciousness. This is expressed in Tarot Magick by the equation 0 = 2, another visual pun wherein the line that divides is also the path back to unity. Tarot Magick recognizes above all things an essential binary structure of cognition that is mirrored in the outward formation of the physical world. We have already encountered this as gender, but it is perhaps most simply stated as "As above, So below." This can equally be expressed as "As within, So without," or in any binary structure. One of the most popular of these in Tarot Magick is the dichotomy of the 277

Heart and the Mind, wherein the Heart is seen as the seat of the divine spirit, while the Mind represents the human soul. These in turn return us to cards I and II. "All trouble begins in the mind. The Mind should never tell the heart what to feel," recites Balthazar frequently. "The Heart should tell the Mind what to think." Ironically, of course, the heart does not think, and in her most recent publication The Anthropology of Magic, I believe Susan Greenwood makes a mistake in taking the heart locus literally, suggesting that there is a level of bodily feeling-thought that is on par with the mind, when in fact the locus of that bodily feeling-thought is in the right hemisphere. Crowley appeals to the dictum "Love under Will" to describe this "law" which demands no less than jumping the fire wall and uniting left and right brain functions, while Sodergard notes that the Hermetica adjure the initiate to "immerse the heart in the bowl of Nous" or "mind," producing a glow called "understanding." Taylor notes that even in layman's terms the quality of "Heart" is regularly attributed to right hemisphere functions, which are deemed, amongst other things, to be more emotional and more "deep." The right brain is clearly just as active as the left brain in our regular functioning. What changes during meditative, mystical, and magical state is our awareness of it at all. Tarot Magick is entirely geared to make us aware of the bifurcated process of our cognition and to forcibly override this innate division which results in a lack of direct awareness of a full half of our cognition and thus, according to Tarot Magick, capacities. A schemata of different right and left brain capacities, is represented throughout Tarot, as is their fusion. This comes up, for example, in the Higher Arcana in the representation of XIX, the Sun as intellect (gendered male), and XVIII, the Moon as psychic ability/clairvoyance/intuition (gendered female), which lead up to the unified card XX, 278

God Consciousness. Clearly, according to Tarot Magick, attaining access to and control of Right Brain functions grants one psychic ability. This psychic ability, defined as accessing the otherworld, must then be mastered by the intellect to bring it into form and make it functional in the lifeworld. The intellect goes by the name of Hermes or Magick. In the model of the Atman presented in the first three cards of a Tarot reading, cards I and II, the intellect and the emotions/intuition, depicted back to back, across which the spirit of Consciousness as Life passes through, it is hard to not see this as the Brain's two hemispheres. Mapped over the human face, this Consciousness falls over the "third eye" and represents what Balthazar calls "the third personality," an otherworld consciousness which he believes gives him an objective perspective. The third perspective is, as the math games of Tarot Magick tells us, the result of the equation 0 = 2. For in Qabalistic math 0+1+2 = 3, both as discrete numbers and arithmetically, and once you have 3 you have the Atman. Whether this is logical or not is not what matters. What matters is that these number games are mnemonic devices. And it is no coincidence that the Magician, I, is also called "the juggler of life" who juggles three things. Nor is it a coincidence that in the Spiritual Plane portion of the reading, these three cards which form the Atman and speak of the mind will be lifted from the Power Chakra and placed over the heart. In the configuration of the triad of math, word, and image, language goes left, image goes right, and math is expressed directly as the connective spirit passing through. '"God is mathematics,'" quotes Balthazar, attributing the statement to Hermes Trismegistus. While technically a left-brain function, math in Tarot Magick indicates three separate modes: simple arithmetic, sequencing (space holding within 279

transformational templates), and most importantly geometry. In the March 14, 2010 "Opinionator", an on-line commentary feature of The New York Times, Stephen Strogatz discusses why geometry is everybody's favorite high school math subject: "people enjoy it because it marries logic and intuition. It feels good to use both halves of our brain." He goes on to explain that the geometric equations called "proofs" really yield areas, i.e. iconic representations of spatial relations. A good proof—one that is "elegant"—says Strogatz, "does far more than convince; it illuminates. That's what makes it 'elegant'." And Strogatz points out, echoing Balthazar's painting lessons from his Academy days, these images produce feelings in people . When temporal and spatial thinking converges, it creates a mystical glow. What is happening is something called cognitive blending.

2. The Cognitive Blend

In The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind's Hidden Complexities, Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner (2002) propose a model for conceptual blending that has become the standard and is used by both Sodergard in The Hermetic Piety of Mind and S0rensen in A Cognitive Theory of Magic. The conceptual integration network active within their standard model of cognitive blending involves four mental "spaces": two input spaces, a generic space, and the blend. The generic space locates abstracted principals that govern the mapping. The input spaces are where the mapping occurs. The blend is where the projected map "manifests". Notably the blend does not contain all of the elements of the two input domains, but is instead selective, containing 280

on

ly the elements being brought into relation. The conceptual blend is illustrated in

Figure 2 below.

Key:

Generic mapping Mapping ----- Projection

Fig. 2

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In A Cognitive Theory of Magic, Jesper Serensen (2007) posits that magic follows this model of cognitive blending. For Serensen, magic is always marked my ritual activity. Thus S0rensen's use of the term ritual is more diffuse than that employed by Ceremonial magicians, yet is in keeping with Neo-Pagan views of magical practices in general. Sorensen models a series of examples from classic ethnographies by Malinowski and Evans-Pritchard as well as creating come of his own to show that, in fact, what occurs in magical practice is an exteriorizing of the process of making cognitive metaphors. He notes, "This can be equated with the role of conventional metaphors in conceptual blending of mental spaces found in linguistic discourse [which are] part of the structure defining a cultural conceptual system.. .Magical rituals are, therefore, intimately related to entrenched conceptual structures where certain connections are more likely than others." These include concepts of "essence" and image-schemata. The purpose of magical ritual, according to Sorensen, is "confirming existing structures of meaning" (2007: 171-177). Magical ritual concretizes belief by drawing from cultural registers. In adapting the standard cognitive model to magical ritual, Sorenson attributes the "Profane" to input 1 and the "Sacred" to input 2. These are the domains that are mapped over each other to create the blend which is completed by the ritual frame through which the qualities of the items categorized in the unlimited "Sacred" source domain are mapped over those in the limited "Profane" target domain, for it is investing the life world with the essence of the spirit world that "charges" the ritual space elements with power and agency. Notably, in some of the maps, the objects and essence listed in input 2 are not specifically listed as "sacred," though they clearly have acquired a heightened 282

status. Rather, a clearer definition is that they are "other" to the primary category of input 1, indicating that the perspective orientation of the mapping originates here. This "otherness" gives input 2 inherent sacred or magical attributes that may be viewed either as supernatural or entirely natural, such as the power of fecundity or creation. For example in a Trobiand mapping between women and garden, input space 1 is "Human" while Input space 2 is "Soil". Below I have created a synthesis of the various qualities of each domain extracted from S0rensen's many models, minorly adapting the compilation to get a stronger sense of what these domains in fact capture.

Fig. 3 283

Applying this model to the process of self-deification either in a Tarot reading or as Balthazar, for example, does a shielding ritual we can see that a combination of essence and image-schemata in the generic zone cause the transfer of properties of Hermes as Creator of the physical world, magic (and Magick), and the word in input 2 over the properties of Balthazar as Magician and Human being in input 1 to produce God consciousness/prophecy/the 3 rd personality or perspective of the Ritual blend. In this case the essence could be described as consciousness itself as a form of "energy" where god consciousness is mapped over human consciousness, while the image schemata of the tree of life activates the transfer by rectifying the human consciousness to that of the god consciousness. Once this is accomplished Balthazar himself occupies input space 2 for a second blend structure, while the querent occupies input space 1. However, in this case the effect of a "backward contagion" follows in that the querent's "energy"/ consciousness is placed into the cards which then, through an essence link, Balthazar "reads" and "heals." In this cognitive model the blend can be seen to represent the "third personality," or perhaps better termed "third perspective." A good linguistic representative of the third perspective is myth which, though bearing the sign of the "other" in relation to the strictly diachronic chronotope of history, in fact, as Levi-Strauss notes, blends diachronic (historical) and synchronic (a-historical) temporalities to project the timeless sense of what Lehrich calls Mud tempus, the lost place of origins, erected in the ritual present (Levi-Strauss 1955: 430, Lehrich 2007: 1-17). Notably, these two time senses map over the two brain hemisphere functions, the diachronic or temporal to the left hemisphere and 284

the synchronic or spatial to the right hemisphere. "Thus myth grows spiral-wise," says Levi-Strauss, unwittingly evoking a central motif of Tarot Magick and Neo-Paganism.

3. Casting the Circle

The schemata of left and right brain functions in Tarot is perhaps most clearly represented by a bifurcation of the Mental Plane within the Lower Arcana into the suits Swords, signifying air and intellect (gendered male), and Cups, signifying water, intuition, and the emotions (gendered female). This bifurcation graphically depicts how three planes in the Atman become four elements in the Tree. In Tarot Magick the mind is seen as the change line or point of transformation that splits and skews an otherwise unified Spiritual-Physical continuum. Thus while in the Atman the Mental Plane signifies duality, in the manifestation of those principals within the Tree that duality is expressed literally. Within the Tree of Life the mental plane is therefore set orthogonally against the Spiritual-Physical continuum, both dividing it and by which it is itself bisected, a repetition of the central Hermetic axiom As Above So Below now expressed on a horizontal Mental plane as As Within So Without. This in turn creates the four polar magnet structure of the Tetragrammaton, which, by switching perspective from field to axes, generates the four directional elements and "wheel of the year" of the Ceremonial Magick circle:

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Spiritual/North/Winter/Fire-Heaven/+

. Intuitive-Emotional/East/ Spring/Water/-

Intellectual/West/Autumn/ Air/+

Physical/South/Summer/Earth/-

Fig.4

In the cybernetic code of Tarot Magick, the circle always represents the Atman, while the line represents the Tree. According to Balthazar, the Atman represents the Hermetics while the Tree represents Qabalah in the formal marriage of the two traditions. The Hermetic circle structure achieves celestial proportions as the projection of the earth's equator is cast against the heavens to form the ecliptic on which the map of the zodiac rides. Here the gods literally look down upon man, carrying within their code the mathematics of creation and therefore destiny called the Akashic record. Within this circle resides Earth, the target domain of Heaven, fruit and paradoxically root of the Tree, whose electro-magnetic field forms a torus which arcs from the core of the magnetic poles projecting a sphere composed of intersecting spheres. The circle as a symbol is evocative of the meaning of "Hermetic": self-enclosed or sealed, and the best evidence of Neo-Pagan's inheritance from Ceremonial Magick.

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Below I have combined the standard cognitive blend map and the Tarot Magick Tetragrammaton/Wheel of the Year, adding a few more details for discussion points:

\

Generic Space (Spiritual/North/Winter/Fire- Heaven /+) Abstract/Limitless Consciousness Occult Culture \

Input Space 1: Profane (sociafp (Intetlectiial/West/Fall/Air/+) Abstract/Limited Logic/Word/Sign Magic Habitas

/ Input Space 2: SacredX (mythic)(Intuitive/East/Sprmg Water/-) Concrete/Limitless Analogic/Image/Symboli Mysticism / .Ethnomitnesis /

\

/ \

\

^ .

/

Ritual Spaced (Physical/South/Summer/Earth/-) Concrete/Limited (embodied) Intellectual-Intuitive \ Mythic Word-image Magical Religion culric practices/Traditior

Fig. 5

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Casting a circle, both in folklore and folk practices, is traditionally seen as creating a portal between the divine or spirit world and the life world—"characterized as unscrewing the barrier between these dual existences" (Menefee 1985: 14). If we apply Serensen's cognitive model to the ritual aspects of casting a circle, this assumed, but rarely well explained, doubling process can be explained by the two inputs, sacred and profane, which produce the cognitive blend. In addition, placed into the conceptual blend map, the two forms of cognitive process represented by air and water in the Tetragrammaton, which I have located to the left and right brain hemispheres, respectively, immediately stand out, dominating the field by the lines of direct feedback between them. Unexpectedly, this mapping provides a fairly accurate image of how the limitless, for example, an "idealized" quality of the "sacred," becomes concretized as applied by the left hemisphere to the right hemisphere, the zone of "enlightenment," while the delimiting directly referential quality of (none-the-less abstract) language (signs) clearly orients to the left hemisphere, from which perspective we have "othered" the right brain perspective. We can project how aspects of each brain hemisphere perspective are selected and mapped into the cognitive blend. The primary category of input 1 indicates that the perspective orientation of the mapping originates from a left hemisphere perspective. Ultimately, I would thus suggest that it is the presence of right hemisphere "other" schemata within the blend that marks the ritual space as sacred, space. This is reminiscent of a move made by Lehrich to suggest Derrida's differance as a metaphor for magic:

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Because magic is at once fully outside of and entirely caught within reason, magic exercises a disturbing analogical influence on those who study it. This is not to say that magic is irrational in the sense usually meant; rather, magic is properly speaking non- and anti-rational. The analogy of difference helps us to see this, for it is a fundamental point in Derrida's work that difference, because it is a precondition of logic, cannot be thought within logic, and similarly because it is not identifiable as a unity it cannot stand at the center of an episteme—in fact it makes the center of any such episteme decentered" (Lehrich 2007: 177).

I would say that Magick inherits differance from the presence of right hemisphere perspectives within the cognitive blend. This is also where the association of symbols with magic originates. The blend itself, the ritual perspective, is the actualized third personality. The Jungian "collective unconscious" may be in fact an apt alternative for the sense of the essence-word "consciousness" in the Generic sphere, as it is Magick's job to make the "unconscious conscious" or "unknown known"—i.e. to the left hemisphere originating perspective—conscious/known/experienced. In this mapping, a direct line of decent from Heaven to Earth in notably bypassed, however, and consciousness, the operative essence of the Generic zone and buzzword of Tarot Magick, is projected as entirely a mapping project of the two mental spheres, corroborating the layout of the first three cards designating the Atman in a Tarot reading where the spirit of consciousness passes through. Similarly, "Earth," though "concrete," is in its qualities also wholly projected by them. While many see the social sphere as concrete, Tarot Magick rather sees it as abstract, governed by the archetypes of the collective unconscious—as Franzel said: theater. Thus the aspects of "collective unconscious" in the Generic zone get there

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via the left hemisphere, while the heightened state of "enlightenment" originates in the right hemisphere. While I do not know that the tetragrammaton means to map the human brain itself, it does explicitly aim to map human consciousness, and thus can be considered a crude cognitive map that happens to play well in this overlay of models. Moreover, by adding the Tetragrammaton to the standard cognitive metaphor mapping, along with an interpretation of these qualities as mapping left and right brain functions, one further possibility suggests itself: that the innate process of making cognitive metaphors may in fact involve linking left and right brain functions by which a symbolic "holding" or belief performs a transfer of meaning over the fire wall of semantic common sense through the vehicle of figures of speech and perception. I have playfully placed a few additional items in each zone to illustrate a larger principal of abstraction and concretization played out by the concepts of latency and actualization implicit in the -/+ schemata of the Tetragrammaton, which I again see as inherently related to perceptions of right and left brain qualities.

4. Conceptual Closure

In explaining his use of Derrida's term differance to define the mode and role of magic, given Derrida's own overall objections to magic and the occult, Lehrich states:

To be sure, magic cannot be defined as differance, but it often plays the part of its sign or, to be more precise, coexists with the thinking of or toward difference... magic lends itself to a kind of permutation and 290

manipulation, allowing the possibility of thinking differance within the order of signs, things, and actions. In this way, the extension and intension of magic collapse into a unity: what "magic" signifies is always a system of differential relations that at once depends on magic for its foundation and also encloses magic within itself as a structure. Magic works by analogies and comparisons, yet at the same time it attempts to think itself and in such a way that it might escape its own formulation (Lehrich 2007: 175).

Lehrich is getting at how, paradoxically, by the globetrotting effect of analogical thinking and successive sequences of magical transformations, magical thinking somehow ultimately "comes around" to achieve what I will call: conceptual closure. As demonstrated by the myriad cross-listed entries in the cultural encylopedia of Tarot Magick, magical thinking operates by clustering, essentially evoking a sense of unity by acquiring critical mass—not unlike the clustering of traditions under the umbrella of Neo-Paganism. As a series of manifested thought forms appearing in a target zone, this critical mass can and does crystallize, which, as Masrilyn Motz points out in "The Practice of Belief," is in fact the job of Ritual: "in order for ritual to succeed, it must crystallize belief in its participants" (1998: 340). Ritual enculturates, or, alternately, as Connerton and Thompson and Cantwell suggest, manifests both cult and culture. In the chapter "Mind" in the handbook Theories and Methods in Archaeology (Bentley, Mascher, and Chippendale 2007), Laine Gabora, in pondering the origins of culture, suggests a model for the human mind based in a biological model of a "autopoetic" primitive replicator. In biological primitive replication a closure space is created by "a set of points sufficiently connected such that it is possible to get from any 291

one point to another by following the edges (connections) between them." This process of cross-mapping turns a cluster into a self-contained organism. "An autopoetic structure is one in which the parts reconstitute one another and thus the structure as a whole is selfmending or self-replicating," says Gabora, "With primitive replicators the chicken-andegg problem is solved because self-replication occurs through happenstance interactions of molecules more primitive than either DNA or proteins. [Thus] inheritance of acquired characteristics is possible, and replication has a low fidelity because of it." In other words, the various parts are co-emergent, like the Atman and the Tree in Tarot Magick's creation model (Gabora 2007: 14). Applying this biological structure to the functions of mind, Gabora proposes that the human mind is likewise a primitive replicator "that emerges through a self-organized process of conceptual closure" (14). In this model, concepts are clusters and the associative paths between them act as edges. The more associations that are made, the more an integrated conceptual web develops. Though Gabora speaks abstractly, this is consistent with the neurological model of acquired reading fluency posed by Wolfson. Notes Gabora:

A mind reaches a stage in which it is conceptually integrated when it becomes a primitive replicator. Integrated structure enables it to reason about one thing in terms of another, adapt ideas to new circumstances, frame new experiences in terms of previous ones, or combine information from different domains (as what happens in a joke). It should be stressed that it is not the presence of but the capacity for an integrated worldview that the human species came to possess. An infant may be born predisposed toward conceptual integration, but the process must begin anew in each young mind. The manner in which a worldview replicates is not all-at-once but piecemeal, through social exchange, often mediated by artifacts.. .The process is emergent rather than dictated by self-assembly 292

instructions, and therefore characteristics acquired over a lifetime are heritable (15).

Gabora's thinking is based in her "examination of spatiotemporal patterns in the archeological record." This she says "reveals not just the pronounced appearance of symbolic artifacts, but evidence that they build on one another in cumulative fashion; that is, they exhibit the ratchet effect. Indeed some believe this to be the most distinctly human characteristic of all. It is indicative of conceptual fluidity, which involves combining ideas in new ways and adapting old ideas to new circumstances, and requires both the complex operations characteristic of analytic thought, and the intuitive, analogical processes characteristic of associative thought." Gabora goes on to speculate about the origins of culture brought about by this resulting flexible intellectual capacity to adapt to others perceptions in a social environment, but ultimately her argument is "that integrated worldviews evolve in the same primitive sense as the first living organisms, through an emergent, self-organizing process, resulting in a structure that can be mathematically described as a closure structure (15). This model of conceptual closure which capitalizes on the analogic mode of magical thinking poses another level of Hermetics in which the circle is cast not only from without as a basic container, but emerges organically from within as a radiating force of integrity—which is, in fact, exactly the model of the Atman. Notes Dion Fortune in The Mystical Qabalah, "The Tree of Life.. .is not so much a system as a method; those who formulated it realized the important truth that in order to obtain clarity of vision one must circumscribe the field of vision" (Fortune 1988: 29). Conceptual closure can be 293

achieved by playing out the full sequence of an alphabet or 78 cards or 64 hexigrams within which recursive system it can near infinity. As a poet, I have certainly experienced how the imposition of form forces a compression of language from which strings of intuitive associations emerge, i.e. the very stuff that makes poetry poetic. Within this image of conceptual closure, echoed in the magical equation of 0 = 2, the structure of the Atman, Fool, or Hermetic seal of the circle, is an emergent metaphor of globalization. Examining the metaphor of globalization, John Sallis muses in "The Dream of Nontranslation," "Consider that the very name designates a kind of unlimited translation, translation of everything across all borders"—an apt metaphor for the sort of universal cultural solvent magic proposes to be and perhaps intrinsically is (2002: 6). As Balthazar says, "A lot of mystic traditions have grown up separately from each other, without communication—yoga and Qabalah, for example—and they're starting to blend together because the world's knowledge is blending together." Certainly Neo-Pagan magic's dream of globalism bodes forth in a overtly literal dimension.

5. Lazy Machines

As Sodergard notes, referring to the work of Lackoff and Johnson in Philosophy in the Flesh: the Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought (1999), the basis of most conceptual metaphors for even our most abstract thoughts are in sensory-motor experience, which is perhaps the best evidence for the right brain's involvement in the metaphoric process, for the touchy-feely is the domain of the right brain, while the conceptual closure which puts a lid on these feeling impressions, drawing them together, 294

locating, defining, and quantifying them, is the linguistic touch of the left brain which speaks our held knowledge into story. Some of the dominant metaphors, themselves miniature stories, Sodergard finds applicable in the Hermetica are: Knowing Is Seeing, Change Is Motion, and Communication is Guidance. In each of these cases elements of physiological perception are projected upon more abstract concepts. Sodergard notes that the container schema, widely used by people in general, is apparent throughout Hermetic discourse both enclosing and making discrete abstract domains and ultimately leading to metaphors of embodiment such as The Mind Is A Body that in turn leads to such further developments as Thinking Is Perceiving and Ideas Are Entities With An Independent Existence (Sodergard 2003: 151-161). These schemata are readily apparent within Tarot discourse. Sodergard notes, for example, that Knowing Is Seeing evokes the image of light. In Balthazar's discourse this becomes fully Enlightenment and can be seen in the following thin script for IX, The Hermit, in the Law of Love: The Holy man (Physical Plane) Seeking That of the Light (Mental Plane) Has Whole Sight (Spiritual Plane). This sequence is meant to describe how meditation (as practice) leads to enlightenment (a right brain experience) and thus to broad, divine, or prophetic understanding (the third personality). Change Is Motion can similarly be seen as the operative metaphor in both the permutations of the numbers two and seven in Tarot. In the Law of Love, II follows the following script: Physically II is a curve, said to represent movement. Mentally, II signifies emotion, a pun about the energy that moves between in relationship. Spiritually II is thus seduction: an invitation to union, collapsing the differentiating force of I into a new structure. In the Lower Arcana, 2 represents change (Discs, Earth, Physical Being), play (Cups, Water, 295

Emotions)—itself a pun on motion and interplay, communication (Swords, Air, Intellect), and finally dharma or duty, the linear aspect of destiny (Wands, Fire, Spirit). Similarly VII, The Chariot, goes through the following thin script in the Law of Love: Travel/Energy (Physical) becomes Travel and Destiny (Mental) and ultimately Psychic Ability (Spiritual Plane). Taken together this follows a source-path-goal schema, revealing that Destiny is ultimately a plot structure. Already this is exhausting and I have barely touched upon the excess of semiotic and symbolic content of these cards. Let us thus bottom line it to say that Communication Is Guidance clearly underlies the entire structure of a Tarot reading and Thinking Is Perceiving underlies all of cognitive feedback loops intended by magical practice. Further the various ways in which metaphors for consciousness, energy, movement, and communication are interwoven lead to the metaphor Thought is Action, the very definition of magical thinking, as well as Ideas are Entities With an Independent Existence, which creates the explanation for an otherworld, contact with the otherworld entirely through "consciousness," and Magick's efficacy. Almost 20 years ago I wintered in Maine and as a result listened to NPR quite a bit. One essay I remember well was on a breakthrough in robotics. Robotics had been plagued by the idea that it had to give a lot of information to a robot in order for it to do even a simple task. The paradigm of anxiety for robotics programmer was the idea of a fully operative prosthetic human hand. The bottom line was they weren't getting too far, until someone decided to study cockroaches. Cockroaches have about one neuron worth of brain and yet they get along just fine. In the end the fellow created a robot that worked by giving it basic functional parts (a body and six legs) and only three commands: follow 296

wall, avoid objects, find door. I don't think it even had eyes. They didn't tell the robot how to use its cockroach legs, but they made sure the wiring was lain to enable the robot to do so should it try. And low and behold the robot moved according to plan with just those three commands. You can now buy cheap knock offs of these little cyber pets in any electronics catalog. Academic scholarship has similarly recently shifted away from the idea that magical rituals are heavily scripted. As Magliocco notes, what amounts to thin scripts, however, yield complexly textured experiences for the participants. The point of play lies in the large amount of input required from the user. Following Umberto Eco, Sodergard calls Hermetic texts likewise "lazy machines." Eco observes that "Any narrative fiction is necessarily and fatally swift because, in building a world that comprises myriad events and characters, it cannot say everything about this world. It hints at it and then asks the reader to fill in a whole series of gaps." Notes Sodergard, "they not only let the reader fill in with knowledge and needs from the actual world, but even promote and expect a participation in nous, which would transport the reader from the corporeal to the incorporeal, viz. from the empirical/actual world into the imagined and fictive world of the story" (Eco 1994: 3, Sodergard 2003: 48). Nous is the distinctly Hermetic term for Mind and the capacity of understanding in the Hermetica, designating a spiritual meeting grounds for Divine Mind, the human mind, and the foundations of all physical reality akin to what Balthazar means both by the word "consciousness" and the third perspective. The process by which the thin scripts of Hermetic narratives achieve transport is diectic shift in which the reader identifies with the perspective of the narrative and thus 297

shifts their consciousness to that point of view. This type of deictic shift is clearly apparent in a Tarot reading, both for the Tarot reader, who through the narrative structure of the Law of Love identifies himself as Hermes and thus shifts into prophetic mode, as well as for the querent who becomes a listener to a narrative about their lives, a communication which they are to take as objective truth and guidance in answer to a stated question. Sodergard calls Hermetic discourses "initiatory texts" (Sodergard 2003: 23). An ultimate synthesis occurs when Balthazar, through becoming Hermes, then taps into and mimes the querent's mind. This process of deictic shift can also be understood as a shift from left to right brain structures achieved through imaginative processes of identification. The two basic capacities of categorization by which all meaning is made and all magic performed are sameness and difference. It is easy to see the unitive function of sameness as related to the magical sense of participation which both Balthazar and Greenwood site as integral to magical consciousness and to see this as stemming from right brain perception, while difference is a capacity for discretion unique to the left brain. Sodergard specifies, "The texts are preparatory and didactic in the sense of providing vicarious experiences and the mythologized context for such experiences. They mediate possibilities that may or may not be actualized in the mind of the Empirical Reader as something 'real' and experienced 'by me', rather than something that is merely referred to" (Sodergard 2003: 76). For Balthazar these experiences include projecting astrally across oceans and to talk to the dead. This may seem like a tremendous feat of imagination, but in fact it is a standard trope of fiction, triggered perhaps by the framing device of narrative that by effectively putting the entire text in quotes as reported speech, 298

makes it symbolic. In Dreaming by the Book, Elaine Scarry addresses in minute detail the thin script: transparency, light, and motion by which fiction has classically passed as lifelike. Scarry shows how descriptions of simple stock images of flowers or a glass of water raised up to catch the sunlight tap into the reader's existing cognitive patterns of memory and association to ignite a scene in streaming animation. Through suggestion built off of these simple, layered images, a sense of dimensionality, substance, movement, and ultimately "life" within the story-world is activated in the reader's imagination. What is particularly noticeable in the examples she culls are how the objects and gestures that appear in the mind are most often simply named and yet, as Wittgenstein pondered, through "an occult process" of "pointing" the object or quality of movement appears in the mind (Scarry 2001, Wittgenstein 1968: 19). Sperber points out that evocation is a symbolic quality. Here small strings of words like beads produce the ultimate interface of the hemispheres within the act of poetic compression. Magliocco notes, "As Starhawk is fond of saying, "Magic is thinking in things'" a statement highly reminiscent of modernist, imagist poet William Carlos William's famous dictum, "No ideas but in things." In fact, Scarry observes, "the imagination is remarkable for being the only state that is wholly its objects" (Scarry 1985: 162). By this she is clearly referring to the right brain. Gluckrick likens this "thinging" technology of mind to virtual reality: "The VR machine model suggest[s] that magical experience results from the way the participants—not just primitive hunters—are 'linked' to their world"—another right brain capacity (Gluckrich 1997: 99).

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As can be seen in Balthazar's shielding ritual, "words of power"—i.e. names—are the principal elements of evocation in Magick rituals. Even in a Tarot reading, the cards refer to stock phrases and words whose value is symbolic and indexical, rather than semantic. The semantic portion must be improvised, provided by the reader, which allows for a great deal of play in the reading's ultimate presentation. Though Balthazar calls his script for the meaning of numbers in Tarot a "dictionary," rather than putting ideas into context and defining terms semantically, it points enigmatically to other words. You could call it a thesaurus if the connections between the words were not quite so enigmatic. Thus, in the end, the words themselves act as symbols—quotes, as Sperber would say, from the cultural encyclopedia representing belief, rather than definitions. Tarot Magick consists of an almost endless supply of spontaneous scripts produced by the modularity of individual numbers which become responsive social actors within any sequence. As Levi-Strauss says, "since the purpose of myth is to provide a logical model capable of overcoming contradiction... a theoretically infinite number of slates will be generated, each one slightly different from the others" (Levi-Strauss 1955: 443). There are as well a series of traditional scripts. Most can be found in the Law of Love. One such script lies within the technical name for the Three Stages of the Fool, the Ain Soph Aur, which translates as Negative Limitless Light. Like my first lesson in the Three Stages of the Fool, this script is clearly meant to be read backwards. As such we travel from the known, "light", which brings up in the mind an image of brightness, perhaps of the sun, towards a qualifying idea called "limitless", in which the brightness becomes spread over the entire retinal image. With the next word, "negative," the screen

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suddenly goes black, replaced by a disembodied feeling as the idea of negativity remains tethered to the idea of the "limitless."

6. My Religion

Levi-Strauss said that the meaning of myth did not reside in any one myth but in the spaces between them—an apt metaphor for Tarot Magick and the process of Tarot Reading. Belief systems are hard to pinpoint. They exist not only between symbols but between people. Tarot Magick has developed a reflexivity over large swaths of history with input from many people who have lined up under the sign of the third personality, Hermes or Hermetics, examined themselves, examined their societies, and collectively said: hmmmm. Balthazar represents one star in that constellation, an aperture through whom all of these accumulated revoicings and "rectifications" are to be handed on to the next generation. He has tried to teach me that tradition, and I have been sometimes a very good student and other times a very poor student. In the end I feel that I am a better ethnographer than I am a magician. One exercise Balthazar used to have me do was to call him on the phone and say whatever it was I had to say entirely in numbers, and he would speak back to me in numbers. It was a very surreal experience involving mostly large, ambiguous, blocky ideas - it was almost impossible to talk about truly mundane things in a language set up to discuss enlightenment, but by the time we had done this for a few weeks and he'd reversed it to having me remember phone numbers and other numerical codes by their symbolic Tarot meanings, the association stream was almost 301

unstoppable. When I saw a muppet skit with Elmo rapping about the number 5,1 was transported, and I still cannot get the association of Elmo with 5 out of my head. Such excitement is as contagious as magic. Thus in honor of 5, Balthazar gave me one last lecture by the washing machine one day (B = Balthazar, R = Rebekah):

B:

One of the things that I miss about the beauty of the grin den and how much we do have in common is that we would get really into these tranced states, and I would spend an hour talking about a number conceptually. And suddenly you say, "God, I'm not thinking, I'm relating to this as a conscious thought." And therefore thought doesn't become personality or a personal idea or discovery or even the experience of "Wow, I'm in the flow, and the flow's working through me." We're actually just talking about definitions of consciousness. Nothing too exceptional, except the book that we are writing. And one of the things we started talking about was nothing. [HOLDS UP TO FINGERS, ONE ON EACH HAND, ABOUT 10 INCHES APART] And we said that before my fingers existed, the space between my fingers did not exist because there was truly nothing. And therefore it's the unconceivable, the probable, and the visible. Because visibly there's nothing between my fingers. You can visibly see nothing between my fingers, right? Right. You know things that have not come into physical reality. That might be called faith, but that is believing in something that is not in existence. That's nothing. That's the conceptual. And you cannot understand in your mind what truly nothing is before all creation existed because there was no measurement intellectually to create nothing, but it existed because it's the unconceivable. So there's three concepts that existed in consciousness within nothing. Even if my fingers did not exist and it was beyond our conception, just that realization has the other two concepts existing within it. And therefore there are three points to the expansion of nothing. Now, in that, we played with little diagrams, showing the expansion of nothing, but what we got basically was that just the very movement of nothing from the measurement of nothing from the point in the center to the outer edge caused the movement in itself, which created a form. And therefore there was a triangle of these three thoughts because there was a breath, aleph, the concept of nothing. Or the non-concept. Or the unconceivable. Or the knowing that I know, even though I haven't made it yet, I'm gonna be able to step there. [STEPS] Told you so. But I knew that what did not exist could come into existence. And therefore just that movement of just the breath of nothing created an egg form, it created a spiral, too, it created the triangle, and therefore the triangle became the symbol of birth. So suddenly we had a symbol of nothing within a triangle, which was the 302

conceptual triangle of form, where truly nothing could come into existence. Or do we have the triangle within the movement of nothing? And suddenly we're asking is there a dividing line between one, two, and three and zero? Do they all exist as one? Which came first, the nothing or the nothing? Another thing to note is if you had zero, one, two, and three, the number of numbers you had is four, and therefore there was always a continuum, even though it might fall back on itself, inward. And then, therefore, we talked about, at that point, four being different than zero, one, two, and three, which were of themselves and could be contained within nothing. And we talked about the power of creation, and how four was just such a fantastic number. And we suddenly realized you had a six-pointed star because four had six sides to it with eight points to it, expanding out. And therefore we understood that there was a harmonic vibration immediately as soon as you have one, two, and three—as a geometric solid, we looked at it. So assume that as we move into four/form, we get two six-pointed stars, and therefore the Tree of Life at least implicated as creation coming into existence. And you had the polarity twice of male and female. You had a four-polar magnet because you had male and female consisting in it twice, at two different levels. There's two different rates in the growth of a six-pointed star expanding, and therefore, from that six-pointed star we had the intent of the Tree of Life constantly expanding in 6 different directions at least, with the spheres coming out of the eight points at the point of the square. And in this an implication, if we were truly wanting to draw, therefore, an expanding Tree of Life, we would have to start drawing it in six different directions at one time. So it was decided by the Qabalists, somewhere in the universe, not to be repetitive. One side of it was enough, and it might be the only side that matters. Therefore came into Qabalistic school of thought at that point and the discussion of four with Qabalistic masters: were there parallel universes to our own? If those lines were connected. And how to connect them. This type of thinking and thought form has gone on for thousands of years in Qabadibulism schools, but you've got top be really high to talk about such shit. Especially if you're a Jew, and you're not allowed to draw anything down! Thank god, I'm a Hermetic Qabalist and an artist, too! Well, the way I always understood it, the numbers go: one, two, three, four, FIVE, and six. And what have we understood five to be? Well, one of the things that we had talked about in the drawing of the Tree of Life, which is so routine at this point, was that four is created because it was not the triangle, but the outer form—the movement and the measurement of the lines. But five was indicated by a spin. It was the uniting of the masculine and the feminine into the archetypal form, symbolized in many ways. The two basic principals that we have taken note in the Tarot and the mathematical systems is the Tree of Life, which is the 303

analyzation of the spin, or a spiral pattern, and it's expansion. And the Torus, which is the golden section coming out, which is five. The mathematics of a fivepointed star is the mathematics of the rate of growth of the Golden Section. And it shows the points where that comes into existence. So what else can it be, since it is a Torus/Taurus? And therefore the point of where the spin takes off is also the point of five coming into existence. Not as five as the stagnated concept of where the Tree is now, which is the outer point, but where it came into existence at that point of it's creation. But there was also a harmonic vibration, and the Golden Section being created, the Atman then came into existence, which is the expansion of the invisible sixpointed star. So now I have the door of when Taurus, in the relationship of the Tree of Life, and the Lower and the Higher Arcana meet and the point of creation of the Lower Arcana. The Atman was non-existent until that moment. And the Torus came into existence then and started expanding out. The Golden Section coming out from that point. So Torus is Taurus? Umm hm. And it will come out in four different ways, which makes a Torus. It would come out as a box form. And if it came out in six different ways, one would have to shoot up the center of the spiral that already exists, and the other would shoot down, which would be following just the normality of the spin. But the four different rays in four different directions, it would create the Torus. Excuse me for being extremely repetitious, but the hard part about this type of trance book is you always have to start out from nothing. You just can't say, "Oh, you remember that spin? Well, I'm gonna correct it, and that's the point where the Atman was created and the mathematics of the Torus." But that's what it was. And that was the point that I've been skimming over and thinking about in my mind, of five—I have been thinking my whole life about where the placement of the Torus comes into existence! And I was looking at NASA photographs, and sometimes you'll see the galaxy spinning out like this, and you'll see the light shooting in one way and the light shooting out the other way in the center form the black hole, and that's the mathematics that basically the Qabalah is. And I say, I wonder, is that black hole point the number ten? I mean Malcuth. Where does it come into existence where that spiral starts shooting mathematically? Where do I put the ring of the Torus on the mathematics of the Tree of Life? And I've been thinking about it. And I've been thinking about it my whole life. And I have now come to a conclusion that has opened up a brand new door in my Qabalistic meditations. This is what I get when I'm doing these meditations into the mirrors! This is the information I get. And when it comes into existence—of course! It had to start out between the combination of four and five. It just had to expand out—the Torus had to expand out at that point.

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But now it's opened up to five times two is ten. And Malcuth is at the bottom. It might give me a great deal of information on the creation and manifestation in Malcuth with that key now of knowing that the Lower Arcana can be applied to five, six, seven, eight, nine, and ten. And it's just what a person thinks about when he's not thinking and he's astrally projecting into a black disc. Hey, maybe by the time I'm dead I'll have the conclusions of this subject, and somebody will have to read all the books prior to it to go: "I totally dig it! It makes sense!" [Laughs] Because I mean the whole point of the meditation now is that my religion is not here to make you stupid. My religion is that in every aspect of when I created that circle and do a five pointed star, I realize I have a Torus, and I'm writing out the mathematics of the Golden Section and it's sound in each direction and it's aspect. My religion believes that the person whose doing the spin and doing that is not me, but I'm imitating a mathematical form and pretending that I am the Tree of Life, which I mathematically am, and I'm forgetting this bullshit about living or dying. I am doing a fourth-dimensional, mathematical writing with a magic wand of a mathematical formula around me that stops me from thinking. And I'm thinking about the mathematics and the structure of the entire universe. My religion says that when I go Yee—ahhh—eye!—ooohhhh, this is all mathematics related to the subject of that expanding Tree of Life in the middle of the Torus that I've just created. And when I go to a black disc and I do all that stuff, that's all mathematically talking in the structure called the Qabalah and the universe. And I'm thinking about that. Now other religions say you've gotta do this that you suppress thought, and therefore you go through all your problems and finally you're in a state of bliss with no thought. I'm a German; I can't do that! I have to outthink my thinking. So you've done this whole thing with your breathing and everything, and it's all you're thinking about. When you're doing your Chi Kung stance, you're thinking: Well, let's see, the two points to the second Tree of Life that is expanding that comes from here, going down here, are there. And this is the mathematics of the triangle going out to that point, which is Yesod, there, going up to—and, ok, therefore I have to tilt back here because it is a four polar magnet and the other poles are behind me and I only have two legs, so I'm only half of the Tree of Life. But now I'm in the center of the second one, and ok, now the tongue has to be here, and these are the sounds that that would make in that complex way. And my religion is really, really hard to do! And when somebody says, "What are your spiritual practices and what do you believe?" I go, "None of your business. This is too hard to tell you. You really wouldn't be interested in it anyway. It's not meant for you. Find your own path!" I believe in raising my consciousness, and it's not an easy thing; it takes practice. And raising my consciousness means that I am uniting now, not to myself as a 305

little guy in a position like this, but I'm relating to myself as a mathematical form that's as big as the center of our galaxy. I am thinking myself as, Oh, I AM God, and I've just created the entire Torus Zodiac around me! And now I'm calling for manifestation, mathematically. And when I sit down and I astrally project, I'm not just going and circulating my energy here. And therefore I'm bringing energy from the highest point through me that I believe that I am something special, [laughs] By divine providence, the archetype of God is working through ME! I mean if I ever went around and said, "I am the way and the truth and the life," nobody would come up to follow me! That's bullshit! Well, I am the way, the truth, and the life, and by the way God's working through me, and if you wanna connect up, you've really gotta really raise your chakra all the way up to the highest point possible and circulate it down and give up yourself and think of yourself nothing more than as a mathematical form. But other than that, that's called Qabalah, and that's alright.

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CHAPTER 6 REFLECTION

"Ah the perfect listener yes I dreamed I would one day find her —Anne Carson, "The Minnermos Interviews I"

1. Nonsense

Susan Stewart wrote the dissertation I wanted to write. Nonsense: Aspects of Intertextuality in Folklore and Literature is not a dissertation on Magick, but with only the mildest adjustment—i.e. replacing the word "nonsense" with "Magick" throughout the text—it could be, and it is filled with precisely the philosophical, textual meddling that my dissertation readers warned me against: a discussion of the reversals and inversions, play with boundaries, play with infinity, uses of simultaneity, and arrangement and rearrangement within a closed field of all that constitutes "nonsense," all neatly packaged in a Turnerian liminal landscape and capped off with a statement of change's sensibility. Like nonsense, Magick inverts and reverts reality, crossing socially agreed upon boundaries. It plays with infinity, eternity, and a chaotic, analogic simultaneity. It jams things together based on surface similarities. It's a catch-all. It's paradoxical. It rhymes. It uses crazy, made up, foreign words. It is a bridge over the stopgap of linear thinking. It is fecund—the forced wiggling of static intellectual forms that, as Sorensen graphically depicts, generates thought. It's Mardi Gras complete with 307

puppets, naked girls, and men in drag, and "Crimes of Writing" (to quote the name of Stewart's second book on graffiti) all rolled into one. And through its existence—kept alive within the semantic conceptual domain of commonsense—it substantiates the commonly agreed upon closed circuit of the mundane world by providing its alternative, like "nature" does for "culture." However, Magick does not fold down so easily into this semantic, commonsense perspective—at least not for its practitioners. While, nonsense operates on the principal of linguistic transparence that the rules are made up to help us navigate an ultimate reality beyond our control within a social sphere that is within our control and so can be negotiated, Magick comes by similar social and linguistic means to an inverted conclusion: that the rules are very real— transcendently, Platonically real—and from them all reality is constructed in streaming digital, including social reality, and therefore by knowing the code and, as Crowley would say, applying proper Force, reality can be co-created/hacked. According to the magical worldview, the good news is that the code is everywhere, apparent in the very weft and weave—the form—of reality. Gaze at a galaxy or nautilus shell or the human body and you have the code for the entire universe. To make matters easier, it has all been written down in shorthand in the Tarot deck—and if you lose that, all you need to do is look up to the heavens and read the pictures that have been written there long ago over the same swirling structure of the heavens, for they are the self-same realities. So thoroughly are nature and culture one. It's a lot like The Matrix, except without the computers-turned-against-mankind meme and when you get "out" you don't find your unplugged body holed up in a cave just outside of town with other co-conspirators. You're uploaded directly into the matrix/universe itself to experience that level of 308

consciousness "forever"—not that anyone is sure what forever means either inside or outside of a time/space continuum, except, as religion seems to consistently tell us, it's all about Love. In short, you're dead, your body is discarded like so many recyclable containers, and this lack of limitation is pure expansive, non-judgmental bliss, not bound by moral law, but by harmony—an inclusive, not exclusive integrity. And thus begins a whole other familiar trope of the mind expanding qualities of love which bring annihilation to the individual psyche and ultimately, through procreation, eternal life. Which returns us to the Turnerian liminal structures by which the individual is in fact further integrated into the larger culture. Magick, as it makes clear, is a Fool tradition—which is to say a "Wisdom" tradition with all the trapping. It is serious play, full of stories and bawdy puns, jokes and riddles through which life's more serious lessons are framed and moved along. Hans Christian Anderson writes:

Wise men of ancient times ingeniously discovered how to tell people the truth without being blunt to their faces. You see, they held up a magic mirror before the people, in which all sorts of animals and various wonderful things appeared, producing amusing as well as instructive pictures. They called these fables, and whatever wise or foolish deeds the animals performed, the people were to imagine themselves in their places and thereby think, "This fable is intended for you" (Anderson 2005: 48)!

Just as Balthazar starts any Tarot reading by saying, "These cards were given to us by the great sage Hermes Trismegistus. He called them pages in the Book of Life—by which he meant your life."

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Fool traditions, like the carnival atmosphere of vaudeville, exploit the oppositional-connective potential of the dyad. Outside of the role of the court jester, they tend, however, to be more meditative than slap stick. Consider Lau Tze, whose name means "Old Boy" or Socrates insistence that he knew nothing or the idiot savant "Rain Man" and you will have more of the ironic subtlety of the magician. By reaching back to the unformed, the xm-in-formed proposed origin of all things, Magick calls down all the potential power of a child god in one inspired moment where anything can happen. Thus the Mind of God turns out to be, shockingly, human. What is inhuman is that it knows that it is pure—pure consciousness: in short, that it is God. Thus Magick, as Greenwood has been saying all along, is about consciousness, and, to add to that, consciousness is itself about integrity. This is the lesson of the Hermetic circle. Knowledge is a tricky term often subdivided into intellectual knowledge and intuitive wisdom, as it is in Tarot Magick, alternately between holding and doing. The union of both of these sets of faculties is a stated goal of Tarot Magick, termed "Understanding," and signaled by the Third Personality. The Third Personality can be said to occupy the zone of the abstract, the non-point source of cult, culture, collective, spirits, gods which, through embodied rituals, is reflected, reflected upon, and made manifest, allowing the sense of integrity to be felt as relational at all levels. For magicians such as Balthazar, this feeling is of social power, but one closer to the pen than to the sword, and deeply married to a highly personal sense of justice and longing for belonging. Styers says that magic is a catch all of blame by which modern society stigmatizes whatever makes it uncomfortable, calling it primitive, calling it wrong. Lehrich turns this around, suggesting that magic functions as an antecedent to Derrida's 310

deconstructionism (despite Derrida's abhorrence of magic), a parallel discourse critiquing social norms while yearning towards a perfect past that never was. Greenwood says magic involves a participatory consciousness which believes in and accesses an otherworld. Harold Bloom suggests Kabbala is a school of rhetoric (1975), while Eliot Wolfson suggests it is a school tradition of phenomenological, linguistic theory. Sodergard says that Hermetic dialogues both employ and substantiate a philosophy of mind rooted in cognitive belief which transports the hermeticist into a fictional otherworld. S0rensen says magic is the ritual enactment of cognitive metaphors. I have posited that Tarot Magick is a form of cognitive theory which takes part in each of these meanings as it posits the recognition and incorporation of a multi-dimensional consciousness. The sheer fact that there are so many tangential means by which to accurately describe magic seems to uphold this view, while pointing towards the necessity of magic's continual presence in society. It has been seven years that I have been discussing Qabalah with Balthazar. Even without practicing astral projection, through simple suggestions provided by images and words in juxtaposition and practicing some of the less involved imaginative exercises such as shielding or a "Moon Reading" which help to synthesize larger gestalt conceptualizations, I have gained practice in thinking further and further with these principals over time, and in that process my discussions with Balthazar have become more and more mathematical, but they did not begin that way. When he first threw out the numbers one to ten, they had no mathematical meaning to me because of the tremendous amount of storybook language flowing all around them. In a strange, flip-flopped logic they were just 311

semantic meanings, words, designating mathematical symbols, to memorize and assign. They were not then for thinking with. It was only when my conception changed to seeing all the seemingly semantic language around the numbers as symbolic of (a highly redundant) mathematics did the number become "real" to me, and when they did it was like an explosion in my brain. It happened with the number four. I had begun to write the dictionary for our projected book, transcribing lessons and crunching language, but it was tedious; nothing caught. I wrote the definitions of one to four this way, hating every word. And then, as so often happens, after I'd put it down and given up, all at once in a flash it came to me—and I rushed to write out the rapid, rhythmic flow of what I call poetry and Balthazar calls incantation. Though my Tarot revelation did not happen within a formal initiation, it was none-the-less a conscious experience of a new way of thinking. As a poet I have experienced the state before that Balthazar calls "trance", but I had not experienced it as a mathematical conceptualization. I have used the word "as" in the preceding clause because when one is in this state, one becomes intensely aware of the object of one's fascination, "absorbed" in it, as if it has somehow been vaccinated into one's consciousness. From that moment our conversations changed. He could see that I could actually write, and I now knew what he was talking about. From that point my understanding underwent a period of exponential growth. Now when he spoke about a number, I spontaneously saw the corresponding geometrical form. Given a sequence, I could see the unfolding pattern as shapes built upon each other, flipped, vibrated, spun, and the Tree of Life was born. I could see it "breathe," I could see it 312

from all angles, and I enjoyed it. This type of engaged visualization began with stories whose vivid imagery, often reliant on a single gesture—a unicorn's head bent to eat out of two children's uplifted arms, a woman pulled up on a flying horse— fused, and their meanings lifted out into a higher level of abstraction which became, like memory theater, fused to mathematical ideas. Others might have had difficulty learning to read Tarot for reasons of belief or simply because there is 50 much to memorize. I think that as a poet I had a special capacity for it, and I did not approach learning Tarot from a belief perspective of any kind, so this was not at issue to me. Nor was wearing a necklace made of hematite and crystal that Balthazar made for me (but I paid for)—though I more often forget to put it on, as now. Nor is filling Balthazar's roll as the Tarot reader in the Hecate ceremony or participating in magical ritual in general. But then my father was Jewish and my mother was Catholic and I was raised Quaker, a primarily practicebased religion, so I learned how to oscillate between divergent religious practices early on. Then again my brother gave me a bottle of beer to open only when I was finished my dissertation, and I drank it a year ago. So maybe I'm just not good at following the rules. I admit to being a failure at this type of magical thinking. However, I am a sucker for a beautiful story. The otherworld in Tarot Magick houses many forces, human, inhuman, and divine, even aspects of oneself. Part of the drive for a multi-dimensional consciousness in Tarot Magick is the attempt to penetrate the mind of the Other in order to understand, as Balthazar says, one's fate in the social web where no other power but understanding can lead to correct action and healing from life's inevitable wound as we jostle and 313

shove our belief systems against each opther. Of acute interest to Balthazar is the subject of social Justice. The view of Justice proposed in Tarot Magick is perhaps more succinctly expressed in the hexagram "Inner Truth" in the / Ching:

Wind over lake: the image of INNER TRUTH. Thus the superior man discusses criminal cases In order to delay executions. Wind stirs water by penetrating it. Thus the superior man, when obliged to judge the mistakes of men, tried to penetrate their minds with understanding, in order to gain a sympathetic appreciation of the circumstances. In ancient China, the entire administration of justice was guided by this principle. A deep understanding that knows how to pardon was considered the highest form of justice. This system was not without success, for its aim was to make so strong a moral impression that there was no reason to fear abuse of such mildness. For it sprang not from weakness but from superior clarity. (Wilhem/Baynes 1997: 236)

In his own pre-sentencing statement to the judge, Balthazar appealed to this sense of Justice:

Dear Judge Schulman, I stand before the court having been found guilty by a jury. Since I have protested my guilt and will be filing an appeal, I am in the unenviable position of being sentenced without being able to express remorse. I would like to thank you for not sending me to jail right away. Each day I have out is important to me. To be with the people I love and my loving wife means everything to me. I am also glad you recognize me as a nonviolent person. I am truly sorry that I have put myself in this situation. But I am ready to accept my fate, even though it is hard for me to reason with it...

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The past five years have been a real nightmare. I am disabled in my right arm due to three auto accidents in 2002-2004. I was told by the doctors that I would never paint again. In 2003 we lost my only child, who was an infant, to a rare genetic disorder. Then, in 2004,1 was arrested... I have watched my life fall part and my properties fall into disrepair... William Riley, one of the greatest artists I ever knew, was also arrested in connection with the case. Shortly after his release, he died from cancer. He did not receive chemotherapy treatment while in prison. This is a loss that I will feel every day of my life... I believe in love and peace and try to obey the Golden Rule.. .Please have mercy on me. Please allow me some hope that I will be able to continue my work. Respectfully, Paul Spreng

It took integrity—by which I mean the integration of thought and feeling—for Balthazar to compose these words. This understanding of integrity in Tarot Magick entails that there is always purpose to fighting valiantly for one's ideals, but that simultaneously one must submit nobly to life's lessons. The key is never losing passion—and at the same time having compassion, especially for oneself, but even for one's enemies. As Balthazar says, "What did Jesus say on the cross? 'Father forgive them. They're really just stupid" (Life History #7: 7). Which sometimes translates to thanking your enemy for sacrificing himself for the greater good as you burn a wax effigy of him upon which are inscribed the words that by their own deeds they will undo themselves. Understanding means turning to your friends who have successfully talked you out of suicide and saying, "I'm going to need a lot of support while I'm in jail."

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Understanding is telling your lawyer and your wife you will not make a deal and fighting for the appeals, while mailing home your written prayers to be read and burned at the Hecate ceremonies still held in your honor. Understanding means waiting seven months until you are in your "home" prison to begin to order painting supplies so that you can begin again the task of painting the illustrations for the book that you have been carrying your whole life and which you have ironically calculated should take you seven years to complete. In her pre-sentencing hearing statement, Jean Meston, Balthazar's psychologist, appealed, I believe, to another factor: that she, the judge, and Balthazar are all approximately the same age, concluding, "In the almost 16 years I have treated Paul, he has been open about his beliefs about marijuana and psychodelics. He is like a Rip Van Winkle who fell asleep in the 1960s, only to wake up to a very different world that he does not fit into." She also attempted to explain Balthazar's religious belief system, a topic I had carefully stepped around in very delicate language in my own statement. In her brief she made two statements on separate pages in these regards: 1) There are two characteristics or facts about Paul that have seriously impacted his life and may illuminate parts of who he is not otherwise revealed. These two are: his illiteracy and his psychic activities and beliefs. The latter could be considered illusions of grandeur or as genuine genius. 2) Central to Paul's belief system is his experience of himself as either being an incarnation of the ancient teacher, Hermes Trismegistus or of perhaps just channeling him." When Meston stood to speak at the Sentencing Trial, the judge pretty quickly cut her off, telling her she'd read her brief, then reading portions of it aloud to her, and 316

finally turning accusatorily to Meston, stating that apparently Balthazar thinks he's a god and Meston agrees with him. While she butchered the name Hermes Trismegistus, I was surprised that she knew that he is a god and wondered if she'd googled it. Meston had clearly not come prepared to defend herself, was confused by the judge's confusion of her statements, and never recovered her poise. When Balthazar's wife took the stand, her first words were, "Judge, I know my husband's beliefs may sound strange to you, but believe me, he's harmless." When Balthazar himself took the stand, his first words were, "Just for the record, I don't think I'm God." At this point the D.A. stood and said, "Just for the record, Mr. Spreng is not on trial for his beliefs." The law governs practice, not belief. According to the lawyers, the piece of evidence that destroyed him was in the video footage produced on day one of the trial which showed him entering a hydroponics store. As my fieldnotes from the trial show, my own memory of the footage was based in other lieux de memoire:

The spliced police footage of his home pans his personal meditation altar, complete with black disc, in a closet in his third floor studio. Balthazar says that the arresting police officers asked him if he was in a "cult." The video does not include the insides of other closets. However, a tee-shirt depicting Ronald Reagan as Hitler has been removed from one of them, draped over a chair, and videoed in such a manner that it is impossible to tell that the subject is Reagan; you just see what looks like Hitler. The camera also picks out and pointedly lingers over a skull on his drawing table. The objective eye of the camera does not similarly undress the nearby painting of Balthazar's wife as the Queen of Cups which lies demurely under a towel. The camera is, in fact, blind to the sheer proliferation of art materials, the huge canvases and many statues—except for the studio bathtub, storage place for palettes and jars of brushes, which as the camera eye drops into looks more like so many dirty dishes.

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On the second floor, the master bedroom, emptied and draped in plastic, the ceiling in the process of being painted in layers of cerulean clouds, appears trashed and abandoned. The camera never pans up. Nor does the evolving visual equation include the vast evidence of a lifetime of being a mystic. Entire walls of labeled tapes, books, photo albums, business cards, brochures are erased, invisible to the camera, which, however, stopped to capture the plaque of the Roman magical square "SATOR AREPO TENET OPERA ROTAS" by the front door in the opening frame. Cats, people, food, coats on coat racks are mysteriously omitted, flattened by the medium. In their place: phantom hands and an occasional panarama of the backs of squatting policemen, who will, after turning off the camera, proceed to empty everything into a giant pile in the middle of the floor. For its finale the video abruptly cuts from the contents of a small safe on the third floor to a bin of green leaves allegedly found in a unused refrigerator in the basement (evidence that will later be thrown out). In another building, off camera, a doorknob is put right through a panel of William Riley's final painting, a triptych in progress of a woman kneeling before a sunflower.

In watching the judge chastise Balthazar, Jean Meston, and various others and, in pronouncing his sentence, turn to the crowd of well-dressed professionals, cancer patients, hippies, and express real bewilderment as to what integrity we could possibly see in him and that perhaps they really did not know what she knew about his activities, I realized that she had no idea that this crowd of supporters, much like Balthazar, did not, in fact, agree with the law itself which she and the prosecution represented. She really did not have a clue as to the differance of this counter culture assembled before her because she could not see it as such, except perhaps the hippies. I did not write this dissertation to vindicate Balthazar. I do not see him as a martyr, though I understand why he sees himself as one. A lot of people have benefited from both his success and his demise, though different people in each regards. I do, 318

however, see him as a vector of a very timely social discord that lies at the very foundation of Justice in any society. In Tarot vocabulary, Justice has two meanings. In its positive it is Balance. In its negative: Revenge. Skewed by individual perspective Justice achieves a multi-faceted dimension. Classicist Anne Carson, commenting on another ancient cannon, discusses the essence of this problem, and it is with her words that I tend to agree:

Violence in Agamemnon emanates spectacularly from one particular word: justice. Notice how often this word recurs and how many different angles it has. Almost everyone in the play claims to know what justice is and have it on their side.. .The many meanings of the word justice have shaped the history of the house of Atreus into a gigantic double bind. No one can stop the vicious cycle of vengeance that carries on from crime to crime in its name. The bloodyfaced Furies are its embodiment. I don't think Aiskhylos wants to clarify the concept of justice in any way.. .The play shows that the word makes different sense to different people and how blinding and destructive it can be to believe your "justice" is the true one. This is not a problem with which we are unfamiliar nowadays. As Kassandra says, "I know that smell" (Carson 2009: 7).

Hagiography: Portrait of a Magus In Sounds So Good to Me: the Bluesman 's Story, Barry Lee Pearson (1984) addresses the question of why bluesmen's narratives all end up being essentially variations on "the standard rap"—a repetition of a theme of what it is to be a bluesman and the types of stories that bluesmen tell. On the one hand, he grants, they've had similar lives, born out of a shared expressive subculture and what W.E.B. Du Bois called a "double consciousness" manifested within "the veil" of institutionalized racism that has

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all the markings of an underground. On the other, as musicians "coming up" within a tradition which has grown up alongside the mainstream American media, they are wellversed in the genre of the interview-formatted "life story" and so, postulates Pearson, in addressing their life story immediately assume the "mask" of the bluesman. In so doing they focus on the same themes and ideologies, their speech styled with the same rhythmic structures, found in Blues music itself. It is, suggests Pearson, a complete identification with a genre in which the Bluesman embodies the Blues. Historical models lift into inconography—a two-step becomes a three-step becomes a boxed set—enveloped in the closed narrative set of the Blues. There are many subcultures within such large cultural entities as a nation or, god help us, "Western Civilization" en toto. Indeed, "the underground" has many facets glittering like dark diamonds on the underbelly of culture. What is perhaps most surprising is how they do link up, social circles overlapping like pieces of chain mail or cells of a fish net stocking. The underground as a whole is like a map of the blogosphere: subtle and pulsing nodes of confluence/influence where individuals make the transfer of information form site to site to site, forming the unquantifiable dark energy of the cultural universe. Psychologists may call its function within the larger container of culture "the unconscious", and depending on which branch of psychology you're in, this has different meanings, potencies and potentials. Demonologists might call it "the spirit haunted world". The politically oppressed might call it the place of our yearning—which is not an entirely abstract or immaterial zone, but bubbles up into the larger culture quite visibly through expressive culture and political action. Magicians see it quite practically (and quite subtly) as a stage for action, and as such a state to be evoked, creating a 320

"dimensional" shift, more often than not involving shifts in perception, wherein lie portals to "the otherworld". The magical subculture stands out in the confluence of the underground as a place of disappearing and reappearing, blinking faerie lights that invite a certain excitement my mother would aptly call trouble. Balthazar is no Blues musician, but he avidly reads Rolling Stone , which, along with The Nation, he has taken to recycling by handing on to me— "everything you need for a good, basic liberal education"—and he clearly knows the life story format outlined by Pearson. Moreover, within the double consciousness of his chosen subculture, he is well schooled in both the literary and lived persona of the magician in society. On my first visit to his home, his annual Christmas party where we cemented our book deal, a semi-formal/semi-costumed lock-down affair. Balthazar opened the door in full Belle Epoque top hat and silk-lined cape, ushering us into his velvet-draped parlor to admire his tastefully trimmed fir tree, piquantly topped with a winged phallus. As party favors, he gave all the ladies little, scented, Victorian "pillows" to tuck between their breasts. Down the star spangled hallway, in the kitchen, "house elves" purveyed "sacraments," while the third floor was darkened and flung with cushions for a non-stop ceiling light show. Apuleius, born in the middle of the second century of the common era, could not have written Balthazar's narrative better. Apuleius lived during a time of flourishing mystery cults of various religious persuasions—indigenous Roman "paganisms", imported Persian Mithraism, Judaism, and early Christianities—all vying for membership like so many social clubs, and by some accounts Mithraism nearly won over Christianity (Ulansey 1991). Unlike most ancient authors, we know a great deal about Apuleius 321

because he stood trial for witchcraft—charges partially informed by his novel The Metamorphosis (called today The Golden Ass), which involves the transformation of a man into a donkey by a witch—and we have his eloquent, scornful speech which won him his freedom. In his defense, he claims that he is a scientist, philosopher, and initiate of certain mysteries (specifically of Isis and Osiris). He admits to writing erotic poems, but asks, "Does the mere fact of being a poet turn me into a magician?" He also admits to owning a "mirror", talismans, and several "theatrical" outfits, but denies using them outside of his "rites" and an interest in science—at which point he goes on about light refraction, prisms, and the effects of concave and convex mirrors in a manner that should surely pique the attention of an initiate, but fall upon deaf ears in a courtroom-classroom setting. In short, he dazzles the court with his cultured sophistication by dancing around a clearly ambiguous definition of and attitude towards magic, which is apparently divided into two categories, thamaturgy and theurgy, practical magic and religious mysticism. Notably, in Apuleius' defense statement, religion is not determined by faith, but by practices, and while intentions may be implicated, it is perceived outcomes which have brought Apuleius to trial—that he did harm via magic, not that he intended to, nor even that he practiced magic, though without proof of the latter the former becomes moot, as in so many witchcraft trials. In discussing his practices, Apuleius' language puns and elides like so many magical "blinds"—mostly double entendres—by which magicians work around the rules of openly discussing avowed secrets, such that in the end we cannot be sure he fully shares the values he espouses. (There is little evidence that magicians typically only engage in one branch of practice and not the other.) We can only guess, and judging from the evidence of such residue as soot and feathers, laugh 322

along with Apuleius as he makes his hasty retreat. Notes Metamorphosis translator Jack Lindsay, "He deals with the actual charges in tones of amused contempt, yet seems not averse from being considered one of the great magicians of the world" (Lindsay 1967: 9-11). And this reputation has lasted like a heroes exploits do. Augustine suspected Apuleius of being the Latin translator of the Asclepius, one of the core texts of the Hermetica, and notably the one which most incensed Augustine for its description of how to animate statues—a process which Augustine felt compelled to copy word for word, permanently recording it into the church annuls, as he denounced it, and thereby ensuring its passage into the modern world of magical practice. He was wrong. However, Apuleius' lingering reputation as a Hermetic adept and dissembling attitude in court would become the hallmark of magician's narratives, reaching perhaps it's fullest expression in the figure of Aleister Crowley, the most notorious member of the Golden Dawn and its most prolific author. Crowley, however, despite his heady reputation, skillfully avoided the law, writing, for example, a treatise on sex magic (and in those regards apparently the withdrawal method) in the guise of ritual child sacrifice, as ironically, it was legal to write about murder in Victorian society, but not to write openly about sexuality. Crowley's writing is characterized by punning poetic devices, fairly dripping with irony. He enjoyed theatrics, like the artists of his times. And like Balthazar, he grew up in an evangelical household where his mother called him "The Beast 666" when she was angry with him—a title he happily assumed as an adult as part of his magical persona (DuQuette 2003: 1-12). A magician is never short on pride, which often includes a deep seated faith in ones own personal gnosis. According to Balthazar, Franzel's final word on Crowley (despite using his texts) was: "Crowley— 323

that putz." This was due to Crowley's decision to rearrange the Tree of Life (he switched the position of two letters in the Hebrew alphabet) after a drug induced vision in the Temple of Dendera. In any culture, including subcultures, one eventually comes to a boundary marker of inviolate law. Then you have hit the axioms of that culture, the "truths" which bind that culture conceptually as a thought form. For the Heidelberg School of Hermetic Qabalah, that would be the basic mathematical structure of the Tree of Life. According to Franzel, Crowley broke it. Meanwhile, Balthazar has added four new cards to the Tarot deck which account for the planets Earth, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto and has greatly expanded the standard the basic Tarot reading format. However, both Franzel and Balthazar have seen much of Balthazar's work as correcting some of Crowley's mistakes and finishing the work he left undone. Like a bluesman, when telling his life story Balthazar assumes the roles of teacher, preacher, self-promoter, and poet, weaving Tarot lore in with his own personal life story. And like a good Tarot reading, at its base, it is a heroic narrative. However common life stories qua life mythologies may be, Balthazar's successes, set-backs, and failures are larger than life—larger at least than most people's winning moments or legacy of petty disputes and betrayals. At the same time, though studded with guest appearances of demons, gods, and figures in the popular spiritual movement, the narrative does not for the most part project a self-image as monumental or as public as, say, a rock star's—the "gods" of the sixties—and even bears a trace of humility along the lines of a 1960's sparked "human potential movement" narrative in which everyone is their own personal growth project—or for that matter almost any innately moral narrative 324

of human perfection/ripening. As anyone familiar with mythological narratives knows, heroes are not gods. Or not initially—but they are close. Heroes are demi-gods—the semi-divine "royal" types, "Aryans," for example (tribes clustered under the constellation Ares) who struck out from the Black Sea region in three directions—India, where they became Brahmins, Egypt where they became pharaohs and perhaps Abrahamans, bringing with them their signature wartime invention: the chariot, and one tribe that went north, mated with the Icelandic warrior Viking tribes, and became the Germanic people. Heroes are: three wise men from the east, yogis, who recognize the dawn of a new age when they see it and declare it, giving it form, calling forth the spirit of the new aeon by inserting the letter shin, "spirit", into the center—the heart—of the name of God, thereby transforming the divine tetragrammaton, Y-H-V-H, into the manifested pentagram, Y-H-S-V-H, to create "Jeshua", or Jesus, the awakened man. Heroes are the mystic Jews who toiled through the dark ages, and within the tradition of classical prophecy materialized from the ether books explaining their religion, only to be dispatched from Spain into exodus again, and finding exile, patronage, and a chance for further cross-pollination in Morocco, Brittany, and the platonic court of Cosimo de Medici. A hero is a Renaissance magician cum pharaoh—or Jesus of Nazereth even— who, having reassembled the Temple of Solomon from pieces of a fractured Adamic knowledge—/>re-Hebrew, /?re-Egyptian, pre-Babylonian—knows how to draw divine potential down into his human "heart" to achieve the unachievable, for the common good, so help him God—and so receives the keys of immortality, his name inscribed by Hermes upon the Tree of Life—and as the Book of the Dead says: "your heart shall live 325

forever." The hero is the soul awake in samadhi, with access to universal Mind, all the breezeways open between incarnations, the memory of origins pouring in—a wish/destiny/completion—all winging by on psychopompic heels, under the cocked Phyrigian cap of invisibility and the authorizing erotic-cthonic rod of prophecy, into the underworld and out again—the primordial return. The hero is an avatar, a spiritual warrior who carries with him books, a piece of a great library—greater than Alexandria— the akashic record itself. He can read the morse code still tapping out its message across the ghosts of dead stars and in the bathtub silence of the heart, writing to a generation as yet unborn. Heroes are always in diaspora, lightening poles of culture, parsers of tradition, purveyors of recursive, syncretic, hybrid systems that work in a perennial milieu of an ever-emergent globalism. Heroes can think on their toes. Heroes get knocked down, stand up, and are reborn again. And as the tales so often tell us, such heroes are most often disguised as common men—or so says a certain magician I have known, engaging in the age-old repetition of classic themes. Like a good novel, Balthazar's life story revolves around a series of twists of plot, the layered thresholds of encounter and revelation, "rites of passage" or initiations, which, on the one hand, seems to be how we tell story, period, when we assign the gesture of meaning to our lives, and on the other is heightened by being marked as such within the genre. As such his life story is centered on how he has overcome and has yet to overcome extraordinary set backs with extraordinary measures, all the while developing his own personal power and following his dharma to achieve his predetermined—we might say genetically encoded—life's work: to bear a long-awaited gift of knowledge to a world in turmoil whose underlying message of a mathematical 326

harmony—which reads the same in hippy as in Qabalah—of "peace, love, and understanding" just might save the world. Or at least it might save him.

The One You Seek Is No Longer Available:

So long as you are doing well on Earth, Everybody wants to be your friend, But when you are in trouble, All your friends are dead. —Franzel in a letter dated May 19,1983

"It is time to state the obvious. The problem of consciousness is deeply interwoven with the problem of death," says Jaron Lanier in his article "Death: The Skeleton Key of Consciousness Studies?" Continues Lanier:

Interminable constructions of thought and image have been created by countless generations of people in response to what is nothing more than a perfect point, a thing with no quality and no content. It is a tale outofBorges. A shelf of mathematics books devoted to one numeral alone. A vast museum that displays only one pixel... To consider consciousness by itself is entirely undemanding. It is a pea. There is nothing to describe. An attempt to account for it in context, however, forces the construction of every shifting, elaborate adventures of thought (Lanier 1997: 181).

Lanier is right. Death is a subject that haunts life and all mystical narratives. Tarot Magick, which includes a "sentimental" belief in reincarnation and within reincarnation 327

the repetition of underlying patterns, according to Balthazar is entirely in preparation for the moment of death. In this case we strongly see the influence of Hinduism and the concept of samhadi, wherein the promise of reincarnation does not heal all wounds and in fact exacerbates some. There remains a desire for transcendence. Says Balthazar about his practices:

The Hermetica is a constant, living book. It is a continuous creation, and that's what we're doing is reconnecting the continuum.. .1 keep looking into this black disc and seeing this light and getting my breath slower and slower and slower so that the day I die what'11 happen is I'll just leave my body and be so used to doing the practice of going towards the light that when I'm born I come back with all this information. This is why Franzel could wake up being the magician and knowing Latin. This is why I can know these things about Tarot. It's a transfer of consciousness and a continuum (Life History # 1: 21).

"Consciousness is at best a wildcard," notes Lanier. "It is utterly unclear how consciousness 'binds' to the empirical universe." And yet, says Lanier, exposing the problem, "It is the only thing that would be just as real if it were somehow shown to be an illusion or a mistake" Lanier 1997: 182). Franzel's death had a profound affect on Balthazar who would have liked to believe he could have prevented it, and of course he would have appreciated Franzel's continued help, but mostly Franzel was a role model and a link to a tradition which helped Balthazar to make sense of his experiences and beliefs, who understood. Thus I've chosen to end this dissertation with the transcript of the full re-enactment of Franzel's reading which Franzel never heard and which was a very emotional experience

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for Balthazar. The compelete mathematical structure of the reading, written out in Balthazar's own hand, can be found in Figures 18 & 19 in the Appendix.

B:

Franzel, nice meeting you. Within thy mind we do find the card of Satiety and of great Blessings and that of the Tree of Life Overflowing, For your mind is that of the Blessings of being able to channel and give through the holy sacredness of the Tree of Life manifested in the Torus. A Tamer of Demons, great deliberation and execution of thought forms Blessed by being given the Tree of Life And the spirit that passes through you is an Enlightened state of Bliss. This man's amazing to me. I saw what a man that was sane was like and how I was not sane because, for example, I'm still pissed at Patrizio. That has nothing to do with me right now at all, and it's all history. I would never even think of it again if I was him. But he doesn 't think of it. He just stays in the now. And therefore what is written in the spirit: You are stuck. You are stuck and must accept that you are in a state of Bliss, being blessed by the Tree of Life and being able to be blessed to give, to tame demons, and to know how to think, as a rational human being. And therefore you are able to purge messes. And even from a sickness, you do have the ability to purge yourself from all sicknesses and clear up messes around you. This was the line that disturbed me the most that he did not allow me to complete this. It would have enabled me to tell him what to do to save his life. And taking note that these are Scorpio cards, and he's a Scorpio. In the past you've been pleased. In some sense you've had a life of ease because your thinking has been sane. [LAUGHS] And it has brought you a state of Bliss of consciousness. And what's been created before you is a surprise. Something unexpected. Unrealized. For to you, you have now time—he's retired—of luxury. And to your home, an energy of thoughts and feelings and great revealings and a surprise to come that you will have to deal with

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That there will be such as you wish, an energy of love, support, and friendship around you Of great blessings and friends. And the future shows that what you've got together in your life you can be very fulfilled with. Boy, is that a good reading! [AN ERROR WAS MADE IN THE CARD PLACEMENT. THIS IS CORRECTED.] Future: Fulfillment—Ace of Cups. Your future spiritual commitment: to let the fulfillment of friends and fulfillment pass through The spirit of Bliss and that of Light, That of the spirit of being able to give and Tame Demons. For in the past, you have been you. You have been you, even to excess, and it would continue. You have been you, and therefore have great pleasure, But by the will of the gods! In the spirit in the past there has been complications. Gee, you had to go to war with the Nazi army? There has been spiritual conflicts, Things that you have felt that have restricted your past. He had mentioned that his youth was taken, at that point with that card in the reading. He talked about that his youth was very complicated in morals, and it was taken away by the war. But still you've maintained a state of Bliss, Happiness, Blessings To be able to take the demons. And what does the future hold for you? [PAUSE] You are going to die. You will die. This might be very upsetting For now you know, in the confusion of the mind, that you must give up your life. It will be complicated to continue relationships with friends [LAUGHS], Friends that love you very much. And you dying Will restrict it a bit In the fulfillment of continuing relationships. Such fantasy, Such death, giving up life, Is your fortune 330

And your misfortune, too. So, your higher reasoning, it's crazy. Crazy that you can fantasize that you have to give up. For upon the physical plane what is written: You will have to deal with this thought form of the loss of energy now. For you are going to die, free yourself up. The energy was gonna be depleted. And the future shows: there is still much love And you would like to bring all things into harmony And into the passing. [END PHYSICAL PLANE] Ah. It's interesting to me as a reader for me to observe the first thing it notes is he's going to die. One of the questions he did ask was if he should move to a retirement community, and I had told him, "I think it would be a bad idea, because you 'd be dead before you got in. " But there was the conflict of the suffering of continuing relationships that he loved so much and missing them, being dead. Oddly enough, if he had let me continue the reading there might be some resolution in that problem. So there might be a point where I can say, "Franzel, I know what to tell you! Talk to me!' [LA UGHS] Who knows. I always look at it, being a Leo, for what's in it for me. But we 're going on to the mental plane. I'm going to reach for a magic wand. [BEGIN MENTAL PLANE] The thought from all of this that does reflect—God bless us!—is that of love and bringing all things into harmony And how dying cuts energy off from those that you love. The thought of the thought is one's very being. Going into the unexpected. One is quite happy and pleased And this unexpected event— One loves unexpected events. One loves one's friends and play and abundance in so many ways And in actions to now deal with this, This thought form of what is very natural and beautiful, too— But there's fantasies of saying, "Dying is going to cut off so much of what I really like to do!" And therefore your reasoning is a bit nuts. For the thought is that you will. You have abundance of thoughts of the way you feel. It's true you will be giving up what you know, 331

And it is your fortune so. And from your fortune you will discover— You might be crazy for what you fantasized is true. I'm surprised he didn 't know what death is like as much as I do. But what you've fantasized, There's nothing you feel you can do with this fortune and this fate. But let me tell you something, deep within— You're gonna reincarnate. / thought it was interesting when I read these two, and it says you could very possibly be born anew, but you will reincarnate. As from spirit you will go into, And hat your reason is now is it's something you really don't have to deal with. Your next step of fulfillment Is actually a conscious decision in time, The place you're in now. For your wish is to have love, play, and that of friends, And believe me, Even though you feel your energy will cut off, Have faith. Your death will continue your love and your harmony and your relationship with your friends. Really? For you have a strong will, and there's many feelings and thoughts about you. Yeah, there really is, still. The most influential person in my entire life. So all these thoughts and feelings about you Is of much knowledge that you've pulled together and given. And many people will miss that type of energy, That natural, playful, wonderful energy, and they'll feel much has been cut off And they'll fantasize about you, too. It'll take time For you're not exactly right. The transformation will be very fulfilling And will not limit your power or your might. For in the past Things you didn't feel went always right Drew out from your love and took energy away. What else can I say? And before you What you've believed has been a great treasure of knowledge and transforming, You should be pleased about these blessings. But it seems what you've gone into, A lot of people have drawn energy from you, And there is something from past incarnations, Maybe of such creative relations, 332

But it looks like it's still draining from you, And it could definitely bhe asexual affair. It might not be here, But it's drawing an energy upon you, quite clear. A ball-busting affair. You took pleasure in it then, but not now, And it made you happy to get rid of it. I tell you it's way past when—from a past, But it is of the will of the gods that this complication still exists. I do not know what to say about this. We will talk about it later. We 're going to do the spiritual plane. Because of time restraints I'm not going to read the negative all the way through and then the spiritual. There are a few cards that need to be turned around, actually only four. And therefore there's a way I can speed read through, and everything will be on time, but we won't really miss a sentence. [BEGIN SPIRITUAL PLANE] Unfortunately one is discovering That one's higher reasoning really doesn't make sense. I mean based in that you're fantasizing that you can deal with this fortune, Give up. The spirit does say it's insane to deal with it in any way. For the fact is you're a pure spirit and can deal with the devils With great blessings of the Tetragrammaton In state of ease and such bliss And you should accept it. But there's an energy that you feel that's depleting. And what's really depleting— Is that you are saying the energy's depleting. What you need to accept Is that there is an energy you believe in and the basic science, And it's not your energy. It is the energy of the science that needs to pass through To bring you free from this fate And bring harmony for you. For in the past it has been said that something has altered, a negative, to deplete energy for you. Understand that the past needs to now be redirected And you must see With great value Your faith in your science and the energy it pertains. 333

I'll make a comment about the black disc after that. And face that you must go to the altar and change the situation and accept this. Quite happily, the Tree of Life! You have the power to deal with any demons. And so does the spirit. And then even the spirit that you may be. For the situation Speaks Of misery. But a misery for yourself that can be healed up—surprisingly? So let's face it, you must go to the altar With the energy In harmony And free yourself from the situation with the knowledge you have And the belief systems Against all odds. Yeah, really. You can come over to my house and help my life. Always about me, the Leo! And see with thine eye be open Much value in this. Be pleased That you realize that there is forces that are drawing out in certain areas that are damaging to you. Energy. It may have lost you pleasure in the past. It might be the will of the gods of a punishment for a pure person. Godforbid, if all the things I've done are supposed to linger and last and damage me, I would be dead. Looks like it's going to be dead to him, master. One needs to see that something's drawing out, And you are pleased to know this information. You have been pleased with your life in a state of bliss. Go forth into a state now of the unexpected. One's next step is to fulfill and make a decision. There is still time. To let the spirit flow into the unexpected and cure you. So the next step in fulfillment you very clearly perceive, Please, accept this information of great value. You have time. The devil is drawing energy out Of a power that has come down upon you of past complications In such a level of relation. Please, it is time to cure the situation. There is time. To avoid this Will bring on death. 334

Quite unexpectedly, you must accept. That quite happily, be pleased About this unknown of the unexpected. You have the power— The Tree, the Tree, the holy Tree of Life!— To tame the devil with the purity of the spirit that you would be And cure yourself, your being. You're now going into situations that are draining you, Fucking you, busting up your balls! Something is drawing! Go in With your very being And with the passion that draws your friendship and play, This beauty in every way, And be pleased and be at ease That you can go in Like a warrior And correct the situation With the purity of your will In this unexpected relation. In other words, cut it off. And accept this unexpected That the spirit would be very pleased in doing this That you would be cured. So let's put deep within the spirit. The spirit is that of bliss. But in actions you're not dealing with this, Which is nuts. Crazy in your reasoning. Put out of your mind the blessings that you find of all the Tree of Life, too, And bring out, yes, what I tell you. You must deal with the demons, and this is what you can do. Sator Arepo Tenet Opera Rotas. [END SPIRITUAL PLANE] My observations, if I had to give direct advice to you, Franzel, a little bit too late, is number one, you have the power to do it. It's letting the power channel through it. The ceremony to the altar must be done. A correction from the past. If it's just a blemish in your life that has caused it or it's a past life, I do not know. But there's something really draining all the energy out of you at the balls, and it's got to be stopped and cut off, and therefore action has to be done. And no action is crazy. Get that area checked. Do the ceremony, purify yourself, and you '11 be 335

able to live. Yes, you will be connected with your friends continuously after your incarnation, and you will not lose any experience, but you will be reincarnated with your friends locally, in the same area and time. There will be a lot ofdeja vus that will continue, and people will say, "Huh!" This is also true. But this is for another reading, I tell you. This is the end of your reading. I wish you had allowed me to carry it through. I apologize for those words, but there's no other words to say "fuck" than "fuck" or "ball buster " than "ball buster ". Andfalling in the genitals and drawing out your energy, certainly meant something around the PROSTATE! If it be a fact, if it be an archetypal situation of going to bed like with a whore that gave you a disease, which it possibly could represent—not necessarily you, but it's the same effect of having something sick down there that needed to be correct. I'm sorry we did not detect it in this reading, then or before. What you went to do is to correct the past curse, not the curse that caused the effect. They both had to be dealt with. I say this not with ego, but with my knowledge of the Tarot. If you are to be incarnated or are already incarnated, which I think you are from the indications of what it said, I'd still like to meet you again. Goodbye.

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INDEX

Adler, Margot, 141-143, 145, 156 Agrippa, Cornelius, 9 Akasha, 60, 75, 91, 99, 111 Apuleius, 321-323 Arrest, 2,173, 211, 215, 218, 221-222, 257, 315 Astral projection 4, 6, 27, 64-65, 71, 74-81 Baba Muktananda, 64, 88-89, 94 Bardon, Franz, 62, 74, 76-77 Bavaria, 39, 42, 44-45, 50, 61, 67, 98-99, 106, Belief Studies, 8 Bolte-Taylor, Jill, 33, 271-272 Boyer, Pascal, 29 Buddhism, 5 Cantwell, Robert, 7, 19-21, 133, 203, 291 Center for the Whole Person, 55, 57, 59, 68-69 Casting a circle, 288 Church of All Worlds, 142-143, 174 Clairvoyance, 199, 202, 278, Cognitive science, 29-33, 280-289 Conceptual closure, 290-293 Conjuration, 6 Crowley, Aleister, 8, 94, 105-106, 141, 154, 156, 159,176, 179, 181, 323-324 Cuppitt, Don, 11,193, Darsan 90, 194-195,209, Derrida, Jaques, 35, 288-290, 310 Diectic Shift 294-300 Differance, 288-290, 318 Divination, 182, 202, 204-205, 212, 266 Earth religions, 21219, Eco, Umberto, 31,170 Esalen, 56, 59 Exorcism, 44, 103-106 Foster, Genevieve 18, 270 Foucault, Michel 10, 148 Gardner, Gerald, 143,-145 Genii, 74, 77, 82-85 Goetia, 106, 189 Gnosticism, 161-162, 179, Goffman, Erving 23 Green Egg, 143, 174, Greenwood, Susan, 9, 21, 24, 33-34 351

Hahn, Robert, 16 Heidelberg, 147, 152-156, 162, 178 Heidelberg School of Hermetic Qabalah, 7, 186, 189, 324 Hermes Trismegistus, 5, 28, 135-136, 148, 173, 202-203, 205, 209, 211, 219, 227 Hermetic Qabalism, 28 Hermetics, 75 Hinduism, 5 Huford, David, 14-18, 34, 185, 188, 191, 270 I Ching, 101, 125, 198, 204, 214, 220, 231, 247-349, 265-266 Isolation tanks, 57 Jarvie,I.C, 11, 18,34 Kant, Immanuel, 11 Kellenberger, J., 17 Lazy Machines 294-300 Lehrich, Christopher, 8, 212-213, 261 LSD, 58-61, 68-70, 81, 85, 129-130, 132-134, 138, 205, 270 Manifestation, 35,186, 277, 285, 305-306 Mantok Chia, 14 Marijuana, 2, 73, 86 Mathematics, 5,136, 139, 186-187, 199-201, 209, 267. 279, 286, 304-305, 312, 327 Mayer, Franzel, 7 Meditation, 5, 6 Modernity, 7 Murray, Margaret, 144-145,147 Near Death Experience, 270, Neo-Paganism, 13, 36 New Age, 13, 155-163 Old Hag tradition, 15 Otherworld, 34, 200, 209, 272, 275-276, 279, 296, 311, 313, 321 Pagan Studies, 9 Participation, 34, 136-137, 210, 297-298 Phenomenology, 22 Post-modernity, 10, 193 Reincarnation, 27,149, 162, 327-328 Sacred geometry, 5, 154, 196, 206 Samadhi, 56-57, 108 Seitel, Peter, 19-21 Shaktipat, 88-89, 109 Sodergard, J. Peter, 31-32 Sperber, Dan, 32, 215, 273-274, 299-300 Stewart, Susan, 23 Styers, Randall, 8, 34 South Street, 52-53, 59, 73, 93 Star map 4, Tetragrammaton, 62, 75, 82, 163, 89, 201-202, 207, 285, 287-290, 325, 333 352

Third Eye, 26, 279 Third Personality, 269-279, 284, 289, 295, 301, 310 Thoth, 54, 176,219,257,274 Tree of Life , 2, 4, 62,-63, 66, 69, 75, 82-83, 114, 117 Wicca, 21, 175-176, 179-180, 182-185, 195 Wolf, Maryanne, 32, 275 Wolfson, Eliot, 148, 311, Yoder, Don, 13

353