temple of high magic

I am so glad I chose to be born to parents who were both practising Christian Spiritualists. This meant, among other things, that from the age of ten I was thoroughly at home with manifestations of the afterlife and the continuing journey of the soul through many incarnations. I was still at school when our first home circle experimenting with spirit photography metamorphosed into a regular weeknightly gathering where my mother in deep trance channelled higher wisdom, such as I had never heard before, from one of her guides whom we knew simply as Father. Sixty years later while staying overnight after speaking in a distant city, I discovered a book about Plotinus and recognised there the neoplatonic vista opened up to me in more than one of those trance addresses.

I have read fluently and voraciously since the age of four. At first I was part of the common impression that if it’s in print, it must be authentic (though I ought to have known better : a photograph of [old fashioned] beehives in an Elementary School text was at variance with my actual experience of working with bees and their hives in a relative’s garden). Only in middle age did I come to appreciate that books which purport to set out The One True Way can be dangerously misleading. On the other hand public and university libraries – as well as the irresistible attractions of bookshops – are a veritable treasure trove, an open sesame to realities and insights on many different levels. Always I found it important to go beyond the printed words on the page and to compare them with my experiences in the worlds of physical reality.

That first commentary on Plotinus, coupled with the remembrance of my mother’s guide, led me under the right conditions to explore some of the resources perceptible to a more intensified consciousness. I would have said I began with Wicca, but it was always Wicca illuminated by my experience of Spiritualism. And that Wicca, when it first discovered me, was of the variety still known then as The Old Religion – with its ramifications set out so nicely in my 1974 purchase of What Witches Do to which I soon added Dion Fortune’s Mystical Qabalah. Half a lifetime later and I discover the esoteric possibilities of a priest and a priestess – just the two of them – working together tuned in to the same wavelength. So it was that in my most recent series of workings, which concluded a while ago,  we used elements of Alex’s ceremonial, a drawing down of energies through the frequencies aided by the immediate focus of chakras and enhanced by a vibrant Sephiroth. The re-enactment of the myth of the Chalice and the Blade prepared us for stepping through the portal into the Halls of Learning and beyond.

Now in my solitary state the Inner Bookshop provides me with a copy of The Temple of High Magic in its 2010 English translation of the 2007 Dutch original. I find so much here which, with its differing perspectives, throws new light on my past practices and understandings. Quite deliberately it offers guidance to individual explorers who lack the presence of a neighbouring Magister. A small number of similar individuals able to combine within a common mind are also invited to make use of this strand of esoteric enlightenment passed on, as it is, in a direct line from Dion Fortune via Ernest Butler and Dolores Ashcroft-Nowicki. Further back in time it passes through the myths and legends surrounding the year 1453 to the ancient scripts of the Hermetica. We are back in Alexandria with the school of Plotinus and the insights of neoplatonism. A good solid foundation on which to build.

 Ina Cüsters-van Bergen
The Temple of High Magic :
 Hermetic Initiations in the Western Mystery Tradition
 ISBN 9781594773082
 UK 14-75. USA 19-95.

francis cameron, oxford, 26 october 2010