R. J. Stewart

Author - Musician - Teacher

This is a book on the Male Mysteries; I hope that both women and men will read it, but the practical developments and exercises are specifically for men. It restates primal male magic through techniques for transforming consciousness and energy such as are found in humanity's perennial wisdom traditions. There is a special emphasis upon our vast inheritance of such knowledge and techniques from western sources, including those of ancient Greece, the Celts, western magic and mysticism, and the wide range of primal and shamanistic techniques found all over the western world. It is not a historical book, but a practical one, and in Part Three offers an original and unique working program of visualization for men, which has not been previously published.

I would not wish to be superficially accused of proposing any kind of return to outmoded male-dominated customs of social, political, religious, or sexual hierarchy: much of this book is intent on demolishing such hierarchies, and showing how deeply they damage us all, men and women. The exercises and illustrations are however, specifically designed for and about men, involving male energies and male responses to images in visualization. Thus there is an intentional absence of feminine aspects in some of the universal symbols used in the illustrations, such as the Wheel of Life, or the Tree of Life, in which emphasis has been given to the male aspects.

Anyone who has read my books over the last decade or so will know that they place a strong emphasis upon the feminine forces of the psyche (be they in a male or a female person) and upon the need for a continuing powerful revival of awareness of the Goddess. This awareness should be of nature, in humanity, of the universe itself, and without it we cannot reach balance, either individually or collectively. This book is a manual (no pun intended) for men who seek inner transformation, offering techniques that can lead to rapid and permanent results. There is however, both a specific and a running discussion of the relationship between modern men and the Goddess, and one of the deep levels of visualization in the work program involves powerful goddess images.

I intend to develop in two further books the subject of polarity working between woman and man (still crudely known as 'sexual magic', a much abused and misunderstood term), and the harmony of the Male and Female Mysteries. These books will deal in depth with practical work for groups, whereas this present volume deals in depth with individual visualization and male energy and consciousness. So certain essential and important subjects are, quite intentionally, set aside in this book, as they will be given full development in their own right.

How To Use This Book

While writing this book, I have been aware of the difficulty that modern men have in working with inner matters, with the arts and disciplines of consciousness and energy. Not that we are incapable of doing so, but that many of us are unable to find what we think are the right personal or social circumstances to do so, and, of course, that simple information is lacking. While there is a huge range of books and classes on both spiritual and psychological matters, there is very little designed specifically for the man who seeks by inner means to transform and emerge into the future. Much of that specific knowledge has been denied to us by history. This situation is dealt with at length in the Introduction and following chapters of Part One, so I will take it no further here.

I am particularly interested in a way of development, yet to be established, by which the individual or a small group can work without feeling obliged to enter into existing movements, schools, societies, study groups, or any of the alternative mystical magical or psycho-therapeutic systems.

As the reader will soon discover, I feel that any way ahead has to come from a restatement and simple redevelopment of some of the primal male magic that has been hidden, suppressed, or perverted by vested interests over the centuries. Men have a habit of becoming over zealous when they join movements or religions; the warrior urge and the religious urge are not that far apart from one another, no matter how much we might intellectualize or wish otherwise. Joining often amplifies our weaknesses, and gives us attractive and seductive excuses not to truly examine our motives and our deepest inner needs.

The practical work in this book, therefore, is designed either for the man working alone, or for a small group, possibly beginning from little or no experience of meditation and visualization. Having said this much, the exercises in Part Three are not simple tuition in such matters, they are powerful transformative tools, with many levels of possible effect. There are, of course, a vast number of handbooks on concentration and meditation, and some of these are listed in the Bibliography.

The key to development in the Male Mysteries is simple: calm regular work not upon but within one's self. The model of the Five Branches used in this book gives five categories of male energy and primal expression (Warrior, Poet, Priest, Prophet, King). All five are inherent in each of us, and have a further broad correlation to the human anatomy, subtle energies, and psyche. Their empowerment and unity is within ourselves, we are the primal man, the worker. As this simple fivefold model of male-being has resonances in us all, it is possible to develop exercises and visualizations which will work on progressively more powerful and transformative levels. In other words the inner exercises and visualizations do not progress from 'beginner' to 'advanced'; this is the type of concept and potential delusion that men need to rid themselves of, as it may imply meritocracy or divisive hierarchy.

A true hierarchy is a holism, in which all parts are integral to the whole and any part is, paradoxically perhaps, the whole. The Five Branches model works in this manner, and can be used by the man with no experience of inner arts and disciplines just as effectively as by one with years of training in visualization and meditation. The reader who is already familiar with some basic modern psychology will notice that the Five Branches used in our various visualizations are not the mythic or family orientated archetypes or life-phases so frequently found in modern publication and therapy. In this book you will not find extensive discussion of the roles of Father, Lover, Son, such as are given in men's studies or groups, in psychology, and in revivals of esoteric or spiritual and magical arts today.

To a certain extent this non-emphasis upon such life-roles is organizational and intentional in the context of this book, simply to avoid confusion of methods and terminology. But upon a deeper level, the pattern of Five Branches used here, the male images and powers of Warrior, Poet, Prophet, Priest, and Primal Man or King, have within each of them the archetypes or roles of Father, Lover, Son, and of course, the unifying role of Brother. Thus the images or Branches may act and react as Companions or Brothers (a role which we concentrate upon in this method), Fathers, or Lovers, just as any man may act or find himself entering upon during his lifecycle.

The deeper visualizations of the Mysteries involve encounters with Goddesses, who act as Mothers, Lovers, and Sisters. In this type of work, drawn from ancient traditions of empowerment, it seems to be the Companion, Sister, or Brother images (or gods and goddesses) that are required for modern work, prior to our real encounters with the universal Mother and Father images and energies. I would propose that this is a reflection of our current social and spiritual condition, in which there is a considerable imbalance between our male and female energies and modes of consciousness, and in which the collective and individual images of the Father and Mother are, as any psychologist will tell us, frequently corrupted and confused.

In the mythology, religions and initiatory arts of the ancient world, however, we still find this role of the brother and sister deities specifically emphasized, and we see them acting to assist, enable, and transform humanity, In a purely male context, it is frequently the sister-goddesses who teach warrior and poet skills, inspire prophecy and priesthood, and both curse and bless certain heroes who epitomize humanity seeking to develop, transform, and become truly (rather than mechanistically) civilized.

Whatever is embodied in mythology may be activated through the imagination, and will resonate in each and every one of us, male or female, if we do so. To restate and reopen the Male Mysteries, we need at certain stages to explore and experience the mythic patterns and powers described briefly above. For more detailed work with such patterns and powers, I will leave you to explore the visualizations and experiences offered in our later chapters.

There is an old eastern saying that 'when two masters meet, they smile'. This has hidden depths. Initially it means that when two men well versed in their own spiritual traditions meet one another, there is joy and not antagonism between them. It also means recognition, the smile of recognition that comes when two men from traditions that may be culturally separated realize that they share the same experience, even though they have come to it by quite different routes. If you work well with the methods given in this book, you will eventually become liberated from any one tradition, religion, or set of beliefs, and will come to recognize power when you meet it. This can often be in subtle guises, power for good or ill.

The culmination of the exercises in the third part of this book involves powerful sequences of visualization aligned to the Four Directions, of East, South, West, and North. Through the Mysteries, a man unifies the world within himself, and brings together all directions harmoniously. Before he can do this, however, he must also encounter the Goddess, the female forces of life and consciousness and the universe, both within himself and in whatever outer expressions She may take in his life. Without this essential realization of the Goddess within, no man can find direction or begin to unify the Directions, and no society can be at peace either with itself or with others upon the planet.

The first last words of the Male Mysteries are that of the ancient encouragement, or some might say warning, written over the Temple: 'Man, know thyself'.

INTRODUCTION

The aim of this book is to present some insights and practical methods towards reinstating the Male Mysteries for the twenty-first century. The material presented is drawn mainly from perennial esoteric or magical traditions, utilizing practical methods which enable the individual to attune afresh to ancient and specific mythic and transformative potencies. We shall be examining some of these potencies, in the forms of energies, images, experiences, and thresholds of inner transformation in our later chapters. Many of the concepts and techniques are radically re-examined in a modern context, and some new methods, proven by long practice, are included.

The traditions upon which these new appraisals and techniques are based, however, are the enduring wisdom traditions, particularly those of the western magical and transformative schools of development. The nature and purpose of these schools or streams of tuition and initiation will be discussed in several places in this book, for there are many inter-connected illusions and delusions, particularly in the realm of male spiritual development, that should and can be avoided.

What Are the Mysteries?

Throughout this book the word Mysteries is used repeatedly. It is worth briefly defining how the word is used in our text, for there are a number of different meanings found in modern literature, and a quite distinct historical and cultural meaning for the Ancient Mysteries of classical civilization.

In the historical sense the Mysteries of the classical world were organizations that claimed to initiate members to levels of spiritual realization beyond those of regular temple or folk religion or popular magical arts. They combined ceremony, imagery, fasting, meditation, instruction, and revelation. They were superseded by the growing religion of Christianity, and as formal organizations eventually vanished.

But a number of underground movements and traditions persisted right into the present century, in attenuated forms. These manifested in each century in different ways, and are often identified with certain religious movements, magical or initiatory orders and societies, and the perennial collective teachings found within primal or folk traditions in every land. While we cannot say that any one of these many examples is a true Mystery in the classical sense, they are all representative of The Mysteries in a timeless sense, for they all combine many aspects of consciousness-changing technique into certain formal groupings and traditions.

In this book the term Mysteries is used in the broadest possible context; it means any initiatory and instructional stream of consciousness with accessible methods. Such streams of consciousness may have outer members and meetings, or they may be accessed solely upon inner levels through meditation and visualization. They all begin where materialism, psychology, formal religion and common superstition falter and diminish.

The methods, potencies, traditions, images, and archetypes, employed in the Male Mysteries are shared by human consciousness worldwide, but manifest in various specific forms according to culture, environment, genetics, and, of course, physical and metaphysical gender or sexual polarity. The entire subject of gender and consciousness has attracted increasing attention in recent years, yet much of this has been entirely divorced from the perennial traditions or wisdom teachings which, in their own remarkable way, deal extensively and profoundly with such matters.

Throughout this book we shall be discussing many topics relating to gender, and its physical and inner or metaphysical reflections, polarities, and potentials. There is a popular delusion that physical gender is 'unimportant' in spiritual matters, or that we should 'rise above' sexuality in or through meditation and other spiritual disciplines. This delusion is one of the most enervating and poisonous traps for the individual, male or female, seeking liberation or enlightenment. Without an understanding of polarity, which is, of course, sexuality, our inner development or true balance simply cannot be achieved.

The very word 'enlightenment' is dependent upon polarity, for we may not raise our consciousness at the expense of any 'lower' part of ourselves or of others. Darkness is as essential to true psychic and spiritual realization as light may be.

So many stereotypes regarding males as light-bringers and women as dark waiting wombs are found in modern self-styled spiritual literature and tuition, that it is sometimes difficult to grasp that such concepts play very little part in the inner spiritual teachings of our world. The stereotypical roles derive from suppressive political religion, and though the originals from which they are corrupted are true and valid in themselves, such roles are only one fragment of a cycle of polarity, a fragment which can be extremely dangerous if taken out of its deeper context. Fortunately the spiritual and magical traditions worldwide have always shown how such cycles of polarity and balance arise, spin, and return to their mysterious Source. This cycle, or more accurately spiral of cycles, is reflected in the Mysteries of every man and woman.

During the middle part of the twentieth century, a powerful revival of the Women's Mysteries began, manifesting initially as a political movement. The feminist political movement, paradoxically perhaps, has some of its roots firmly in the convoluted esoteric and spiritual impetus of the Theosophical Society, whose great reformer Annie Besant worked unceasingly for womenÕs' rights in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Enthusiasm for this Victorian and Edwardian politico-spiritual movement should be carefully tempered with a clear awareness of its powerful elitist and potentially suppressive hidden concepts. As it set the scene for the current revival of interest in spiritual matters outside orthodox religion, we should briefly examine its role further.

The Theosophical Society, despite its many admirable achievements in the causes of womenÕs rights, racial equality, antivivisection, and ,of course, the liberation of India from British rule, had a surprisingly wide range of negative undertones. Many of these undertones were prevalent in other esoteric teachings and magical orders of the period, and have persisted unbroken to the present day, often re-manifesting in the New Age movement. We shall touch upon such difficult and potentially suppressive streams of consciousness throughout this book, but for the moment need to state the primary ones briefly.

The Theosophical Society, and related but far less politically influential magical Orders such as the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, placed a strong emphasis upon 'hidden Masters'. These were an elite of supposedly superhuman males, living in secret isolation and dictating the progress of the human race. To a certain extent this concept derives from a perennial teaching concerning Innerworld or spiritual masters, who are said to exist in, and act or communicate from, other dimensions, and to relate to humanity in many varying but generally beneficial ways.

The suggestion that such teachers are almost exclusively male, and that they are, in fact, super-physical beings moving secretly among humanity and steering our 'evolution' is a subtle but powerful twist to an age-old original teaching, and has many negative ramifications.

Such concepts are anathema to spiritual development, to equality and harmony of the sexes, and to individual emotional and mental maturity. At the most juvenile level they can lead weak misguided men to assume that they are, or soon will be, such 'Masters' but this is only the most obvious and trivial result. More subtly they presuppose that humanity is little more than a series of manipulated races or, at best, a collective entity being steered by higher forces and specific (male) intelligences. The worst extremes of this type of esoteric teaching merge imperceptibly with racism and fascism, in which superior male immortals cultivate a racial elite at the expense of other 'non-Aryan' or supposedly lesser races.

Much of this negative dross has permeated through into certain modern or New Age cults and societies, also claiming tuition from 'channeled' sources, hidden Masters, and the advent of an elect or elite within the present or next century.

This range of suppressive conceptual structures derives in turn from the political programming of historical or exoteric Christianity, carefully devised to generate belief in an 'elect' abandoning or even hostile to 'the damned', and firmly based upon male superiority.

Nor should we assume that movements based upon eastern (or more usually, pseudo-eastern) religions operating in the West are free of this long-term pernicious suppressive program; very often the veneer of eastern spirituality and the glamorous use of exotic words and half-understood practices, masks what is at root an essentially Judaeo-Christian outlook. The much abused and misunderstand concept of karma is a typical example of this, while the pseudo-scientific use of 'evolution' within esoteric, spiritual, and New Age teachings, be they eastern or western based, is another. We shall return to these subjects in our later pages, for both karma and evolution are central to the Male Mysteries, though not in the popularized and often perverted manner in which they are regularly presented today.

Clearly none of this suppressive monosexual elitism is adequate or desirable for the twenty-first century, and any man or woman seeking inner growth should be very cautious indeed of working with any movement or set of teachings that derives from such sources or suggests such ideas. The most dangerous concepts are often subtly hidden or cunningly disguised with several layers of camouflage, and are often only fully perceived through meditation and contemplation, rather than in a gross outer form, though such outer forms abound in the current expansive warm wet climate of consciousness.

In our present context of the Male Mysteries, men need to be particularly aware that many lines or streams of concepts, of imagery, involving hidden Masters and so-called spiritual evolution, are in fact linked to the negative suppressive shadow of enlightenment, a word widely used to loosely mean spiritual liberation. For many centuries this shadow has resonated and manifested through male-elitism, which damages men as much as it does women. We shall return to this subject in many places in the following pages, as it is one of the major problems that men must address if they are to recover a proper Mystery or process of true enlightenment for the coming century.

Light is defined and enabled by darkness, and this mutual state of polarized existence holds good throughout all worlds, states, conditions, and cycles of existence. A shadow, however, is cast by all entities or shapes within the light. Although we may not realize it, a shadow is defined and created only by light, while darkness absorbs it without distinction. There are no shadows in darkness: this is why the ancient Mysteries of Isis revealed the spiritual light of the Sun at Midnight, darkest of the dark, yet brilliant. We shall return to this important paradox again.

At this introductory stage, however, we need to consider briefly the existence of the converse or suppressive shadow of enlightenment, for it is not, and never has been, connected to the antagonistic dualism of 'good' and 'evil'. The inner traditions, regardless of gender, race or creed, all teach that evil is a projection, confusion, or agglutination, of misaligned universal energy, and not, as is so often propagandized within orthodox religions, an insoluble entity in conflict with spiritual qualities of goodness.

The shadow of male domination is a resonance, a feed-back pattern of collective energies on many levels, ranging from physical through to psychic to metaphysical. If we are able to untangle and realign these corrupted self-perpetuating energies, we make them available as sources of power which enable wholeness. The wholeness referred to is not any mere psychological or therapeutic integration, but takes form within the pleroma or holism of the universe, mirrored through octaves or images such as the planet, the land, the harmony of races, and the individual human being, male or female.

The late Robert Graves suggested that the legend of Alexander the Great (epitome of the powerful male stereotype), cutting the Gordian knot, emblem of the convolutions and weavings of the Mother Goddess, marked an important cultural and spiritual transition.2 Although Graves' writings have been used by modern pagans and followers of the Goddess in a manner which undoubtedly amused the poet himself, as his White Goddess is full of complex jests and satires, we can pursue this particular image further. It is, of course, one of the great classical historical legends, and did not originate with Graves or any single writer scholar or poet; like a number of mythic or legendary themes, the story of Alexander is full of emblems and images out of time, beyond yet rooted into history.

To amplify upon Graves' interpretation, we might consider that this event was one of the symbolic thresholds, in mythic terms, between the older cycle of collective humanity worshipping the Great Mother, and male-dominated individualistic humanity which sought to control through drastic divisive antagonist means that which should, in truth, remain whole.

Cutting a convoluted knot, which Alexander is said to have done to fulfill the prophecy that whoever loosed the Gordian knot would be a powerful emperor, does not untangle it. The two parts remain as halves of an unsolved problem, now further divided by the sword.

In a recent and paradoxical revolution of awareness, we have found that modern technology, one obvious example of divisive, antagonist streams of consciousness and energy manifesting into our world, has revealed to us its own devastating planetary effect. Through science turning against itself at last, as maturity begins to slowly dawn, we are collectively more aware of the terrible threshold upon which we stand - nothing less than the potential death of the planet as we know it. Even if we chop the knot or knots into the tiniest pieces, hacking away stereotypically and manfully and vigorously, we have still failed to untangle it. And besides, cutting a knot at one level merely disposes of that level, for its innermost and universal convolutions remain intact.

The advent of open, or at least theoretically open, access to and practice of paganism in the post-war period has led to a large revival of Goddess awareness and worship in western society. This shift of consciousness and revival of an ancient but by no means extinct form of worship or holistic world-view, has been enthusiastically taken up by both men and women.

Men, however, have not had much open opportunity to reassess the inner or spiritual transformative dimensions of male potential. These were originally represented by what may be broadly termed the Male Mysteries in ancient cultures, and no counterpart of such systems or organizations exists today. Psychology frequently lays claim to techniques of maturation and integration which seem, quite plausibly and often with adequate proof and examples from individual case histories, to provide a path of development suitable for men. The twentieth century outburst of radical feminine awareness and Goddess consciousness is indicative of the failure of psychological techniques to meet the true need and power of the female psyche, either individually or collectively. The same failure must now be discovered in the context of male initiation or inner development towards balance and full potential.

There is a considerable difference between a psychotherapeutic or psychological approach to male initiation and transformation, and that of the spiritual or magical traditions. Although psychology can find parallels between its own modern systems and those of the esoteric traditions, such parallels only reach to a limited horizon. Beyond that horizon, the esoteric traditions extend, while psychology and psychotherapy must, due to their inherently materialist and limited nature, go no further.

In the 1960s there was a deep undercurrent of political and collective transformation of consciousness for women, much of which continues to ferment through western society today. In the 1990s and 2000s this undercurrent touches men, initially from a psychotherapeutic standpoint, but ultimately as a re-evaluation and restatement of the inner magical and spiritual potentials of male entity. And beyond that, we must bring this potential out into the world at large, the world from which we can no longer artificially separate ourselves.

This book, however, does not take a psychological or anthropological approach, partly because these are represented in other publications and in practical work, but mainly because the perennial traditions of spiritual and magical transformation, available equally and without distinction to both women and men, have a wealth of material concerning male inner transformation, most of which has never been published or reassessed for modern use.

Towards a New Generation

During the 1970s and 1980s, a new generation of spiritual teachers for women has begun to arise. These women have often come through political feminism, but have attuned to spiritual traditions, bringing new possibilities of transformation for women in general. In many cases these new possibilities are restatements of native traditions, rooted in a deep collective stream of awareness that regenerates itself in every century.3 Can there be a new generation of teachers for men?

Before we can begin a proper answer to such an important question we must, once again, dispose of the sweetness-and light brigade. Kindly men with golden auras who exude loving brotherhood may, temporarily, give us some inspiration during dark phases, but they themselves are often locked in a backwater from which they cannot or choose not to emerge. Traditionally the Male Mysteries, regardless of the culture in which they manifest or the form which they take, are just not that easy. Teachers in native or chthonic traditions however, are notorious for being strict, devious, remorseless, and unkind.

We should carefully distinguish between this significant tradition of teaching in a non-sentimental manner, using perennial methods which aim to cut through all trivia and bring a true transformation within the pupil, and mere crudity or cruelty.

The crude and cruel methods, perpetuated among men in barbaric ways even today, are founded upon ignorance. The ignorance of the male-superiority ethic, the ignorance of the military mind, and, slightly more subtle but no less vicious, the ignorance of the meritocracy. The hard methods of spiritual and magical teaching, by comparison, are based upon deeper levels of understanding and wisdom, and have quite different goals, goals which might be incomprehensible to the man locked into aggressive superiority. Only when a man is able to realize that such aggressive meritocratic aims are delusions, can he begin to truly mature.

For most of us this realization is present as an inner unrest, sometimes vague and too-easily suppressed, but sometimes of such a demanding nature that it cannot be ignored. Suppressing and ignoring this realization of delusion leads to mental imbalance, to a reinforcement of the very traits that are the cause of our dissatisfaction. The vicious aggressive male ultimately destroys himself, but can wreak terrible havoc upon others before he does so.

The transformations and realizations of the Mysteries are not only enabled by, but are actually embedded within, techniques that have endured for millennia, and have acquired a considerable collective energy and effect. We shall return to this concept from time to time throughout this book.

We have all heard the suggestion and excuse that cruelty by teachers or parents is practiced 'for his (or their) own good'. Insecure bullying men have used this excuse for generations to allow themselves the thrill of imposing their will and physical strength upon younger men. This type of cruelty in training plays no part in the inner traditions. A wise teacher, though, may often seem to treat a pupil in a very harsh and uncompromising manner, in order to bring the pupil to a threshold of inner transformation. This does not ,at any time, involve imposition of will, and no one, male or female, can be forced into spiritual growth by another individual. The teacher may, and often does, create difficult situations or tasks which bring out the latent potential in the pupil. That is quite different to bullying.

If we are to develop a new generation of men, men who will be able to pass spiritual perception and balance on to others, men who will forego egocentric inflation for the sake of a future society of harmony, we need to challenge many of the preconceptions of male dominated pseudo-spirituality.

The wise elder is typical example of this problem. While many young men challenge and despise the false teachers of their childhood, those who imposed upon and indoctrinated them at school or college, very few of us challenge the root concept of the wise eider in its own right. We tend to accept that there must be (somewhere) older wiser men able and willing to teach young ones; indeed we tend to long for this type of teacher or leader, for not only is the delusion conditioned into us by our culture, but it plays heavily upon our weaknesses, our childish willingness to absolve ourselves of responsibility and to pass all serious matters onto the shoulders of another. Not for nothing have the world's most vicious dictators been hailed by their people as saviors, fathers, holy men.

The true situation regarding teaching is very different. We all, men and women equally, learn most from interaction. In ordinary life this is, hopefully, acquired through experience, and we may have to undergo many bitter personal experiences before such interaction truly changes us. Through inner work in meditation, visualization, and other spiritual disciplines, we may dissolve the illusion of the wise old man, and come to accept each teacher, inner or outer, simply for the quality and intensity of interaction, exchange and, hopefully, transformation, that he or she might have to offer.

Some of the typical polarities and scenarios are well represented in the Mysteries, in mythology, in legend, and in esoteric training. Some are amply defined by modern materialist psychology, though there is a tendency in psychology to limit the material to a very narrow range or to preconditioned and predefined potential. During the 1989 Merlin Conference, held in London, an open debate was held, based upon a motion that modern materialist psychology had, effectively, stolen a fragment from the spiritual traditions known worldwide. Much of this debate is developed by a group of contributors in Psychology and Spiritual Traditions (Element Books, 1991 ), but as psychology is still a male dominated and male orientated field, it is worth some special attention in the context of the Male Mysteries.

First, we need to be truly aware that psychology, regardless of any particular school or movement, is merely a model or variety of models of the human psyche. It has no validity other than as a model, and the different schools of psychological theory and practice can and do disagree with one another. One of the problems of psychology is that it was developed almost exclusively by western males without reference to alternative world traditions which contain other models of the human psyche. Psychology has become an alternative to religion, an alternative to inner discipline and spiritual development. It has a difficult inheritance from the nineteenth century, when male intellectual giants were attempting to reach beyond religion and superstition, yet were doing so in a society which was utterly conditioned by male-dominated Christian habits, behavior, beliefs, and attitudes of life. It was certainly a great achievement or failure of the bootstrap theory, depending on your point of view.

Students frequently cite C.G.Jung as being a bridge between spiritual traditions and materialist psychology, but his role is really that of an Autolycus, a snapper up of trifles. Fragments of eastern and western tradition have been loosely incorporated into Jungian, and then into post-Jungian psychology, often out of their proper life-context, merely because they are found to work in some respects, and can be fitted into the framework of the psychological system concerned. Those aspects of the same traditions that do not fit, however, are conveniently ignored. Modern psychologically based techniques now abound, many of them claiming to be heralds of a New Age, to be transpersonal, to restate spiritual truths for the modern man and woman.

If we look closely at these alternative therapies, they are often based upon a small number of very simple and effective techniques which originally formed a part, and only a part, of broader traditions of spiritual and magical transformation. Frequently the result of taking such fragments out of their deeper original context is that they can become sources of imbalance, addiction, temporary adjustment or even a cult-like pseudo-religious obsession.

Typical examples might be cited: primal screaming, rebirthing, encounter groups, psychosynthesis. These and other therapies all work, no one would deny their effect, but they are essentially fragments of techniques, either rediscovered in a vacuum, or deliberately borrowed from older traditions of transformation. Rebirthing, for example, is a very commercially orientated reworking of the extremely ancient birth and incubation techniques known to the classical and Celtic cultures.4 Apart from this important but conveniently ignored connection to a fragment of the ancient temple techniques of past civilizations, rebirthing techniques are still practiced today among primal peoples for spiritual and magical initiation. Note that they are used for tribal or family initiation, and not for commercial therapy.

Many of the highly praised or advertised effects of alternative therapies, and indeed of mainstream psychotherapy, are simply regarded within the magical and spiritual traditions as relatively minor results. In a modern commercial context the catharsis of rebirth or of sudden realization is held to be an aim in itself; in the perennial traditions such events were merely part of a series of thresholds leading to inner transformation. They were never ends in themselves, merely side-effects or transitional stages through which the individual passed.

In more customary and conservative fields of materialist psychology, we find the typical Victorian concern for labeling. If something can be labeled, it need not be understood. A label also distances us from the subject matter; we need not be involved in it too deeply, we can stand aside and consider it coldly, dispassionately; when we find something that we do not understand, something that instills fear or doubt or uncertainty, we try to fit it to our set of labels. Thus archetypes, gods and goddesses, mythic patterns, and the flow of energy in the human psyche and body, are all reduced to a set of labels within a conceptual framework. We have a comfortable feeling, thereafter, of knowing what we are talking about, writing about, experiencing, or, perhaps, avoiding experiencing. Victorian psychology and occultism share this entrenched attitude.

Now it has to be said that the same concern with naming names is true of genuine ancient and contemporary magical and spiritual traditions; the Mysteries (in any form worldwide) are replete with systems, labels, connective structures and so forth. They do not, however, regard the system, the label, as being of any value in itself; there is no reductionism in the Mysteries unless the individual chooses, in a typical modern sense, to reach no further than the labels themselves.

This apparent similarity between mythic re-tellings and obsessive listings is brought into proper focus when we realize that the original mythic epics and magical correspondences were not written down, but were vehicles of a living oral tradition. The use of images and verses from memory rather than from the printed page is an essential aid to transformation of consciousness: this is why magical traditions insist on learning by heart what seems, to the modern intellect, to be a mass of superficially indigestible lore.

Much of our response to ancient mythic patterns and magical or religious systems is heavily conditioned by that same Victorian obsessive labeling as materialist psychology; it is most unlikely that the lists of correspondences used in the esoteric traditions were ever regarded as scientific or authoritative in the nineteenth century sense that still dominates much of modern thought and practice. They were more in the nature of incantations, dream flows, protean collections that were used to attune the consciousness to holisms, rather than to reduce perception to series of items.

The Male Mysteries, like any branch of esoteric tradition, are essentially practical. The male-dominated elitist secret societies and occult orders of, for example, the nineteenth century, tended towards the intellectual, the hierarchical, and of course towards extreme obscurity. But there are older traditions, sometimes hidden within intellectual occultism and sometimes quite separate from it. It is the hidden traditions that we should restore for the present day, and it is in those traditions that we find the direct teachings, myths and legends of the Five Branches, and their empowering gods and goddess forms.

In the second part of this book we will examine the Five Branches of Warrior, Poet, Prophet, Priest, and King, and their effect upon the Worker or Primal Man who is both the beginning and end of the Mystery. In the third part we will use exercises in meditation and imagination that put us into direct contact with the god and goddess forms that empower each Branch, and we will develop a set of simple but powerful methods of working with such images for individual and group transformation and empowerment.

Back to Published Article Index