I am famous for being blunt and the headline statement will
get a few people upset. I have said over a number of years that I do not
believe that astral initiation into the Golden Dawn work, but have not
said why.
I would LOVE astral initiation to work. As the head of an order,
it would mean that I could set up temples in the US or other far-flung parts of
the world at a great rate. If I was charging fees for this, I could make a bomb.
It would enable groups to be established without me having to bring people to
Rome for training. In short, astral initiation is a tool for empire building
rather than creating magicians. If MOAA used astral initiations there would be
a huge temptation to empire build.
None of the people I had ever met who said they had been
astrally initiated into the Golden Dawn had any experience which indicated that
anything useful happened. Those who claimed mystical experiences had none of the
signs in their sphere of sensation, nor did their experiences show that an
astral initiation had taken place. For
example one person said that during their astral initiation, they had seen a
pyramid and that was proof they had been initiated into the Golden Dawn. However, a Pyramid is not a symbol in the 0=0
and it is not proprietary to the GD. Others have just said new Age sorts of answers
like “I felt a white light” or “I was surrounded by love.” I get that when I eat chocolate, it does not
mean that Lynd hazelnut is a self-initiation into the Golden Dawn. If someone told me, “I felt scared shitless, I
could not speak, I felt like throwing up and then I felt Horus was banging a
sort on the back of my neck” I would thing you had something close to what a
0=0 is like.
Astral initiation is possible and takes place at a senior
level of magic all the time. However, it does not take place at an outer order
level. Firstly, because to be astrally initiated you have to be able to get up
onto the astral levels, which a beginner cannot do. Secondly, it needs an
initiating temple to perform a ritual on the astral plane at a correct time and
to perform the entire ritual without scripts or direction. For this reason, astral initiation is
traditionally carried out by a high-level contact to a student and is not something
which works in a structured group environment.
So let us look at two rituals which are being used for
astral initiation. The first is supposed to involve using the Golden Dawn Z
documents and sees the candidate as a talisman.
The candidate’s name is placed on a list of those who want
to be initiated, sometimes a photograph is used, or an astrology chart. This
list is placed in a black bag and “initiated” as if it were a talisman. The
logic is that since a talisman can be charged, then a human can be too by
proxy.
Intellectually this technique could technically work. The
talisman version of the Zdocs creates a thought form which is initiated with
force. The thought form would then slowly transform the candidate’s sphere of
sensation until it reached a standard comparable to initiation.
Practically however the Z docs do not allow a talisman to be
adjusted to a candidate - it was written assuming that you were fusing a spirit
to an inanimate object. If you look at the wording of the Z2 document, it is different
for a talisman with good reason. You are looking to tie the spirit of a
talisman to a physical object and not the complex operation of breaking down
the sphere of sensation which the 0=0 is supposed to be doing. Most of the
talisman ritual is focused on the talisman and the astral form of the force you
are trying to attract to it. A list of names or symbol of a candidate will
become charged (as a talisman) but the person will not. The best-case scenario is
that your talismanic list will draw the correct experiences to a candidate over
time. This is unlikely, particularly as it breaks the rule of having a talisman
focusing only on one or two outcomes. Your poor talisman thought-form could be
trying to reach two to ten different people at the same time and bring them an
experience which is supposed to be life changing.
So what about plan b? This method involves initiating an
astral form of a person using something connected to them. You create a simulacrum
of a person and then perform the 0=0 ritual on that. Afterwards, you send the simulacrum
to the person and fuse it to their sphere of sensation.
This requires you first to build a particularly dense astral
body and then build the thought forms for the Golden Dawn ritual as normal. You
could not do that for a list of people. It would have to be a two-part ritual
which involved a rite to build a strong enough astral body. This thought-form
would have to be built from the energy of the officers and would be quite
draining. They would then have to carry out the initiation proper.
It would take a great deal of experimentation to see if this
worked and there would be some problems.
The 0=0 requires the purification and consecration of the candidate.
In this situation, you would be purifying and consecrating the thought form.
There is nothing to make the thought form do the same thing to the candidate’s
sphere of sensation. Even if there was, it is difficult to see how a thought
form would manage it.
Then there is the oath which has to be administered to the
candidate and tested and sealed into their sphere of sensation. In this situation,
the oath is being said by a thought form and NOT by the candidate. The thought
form will be bound by the oath and tested by the 42 assessors and not the
candidate. Then there is the splitting of the sphere of sensation to the four
sons of Horus, something that I consider an important part of the 0=0. What
would be split here is the thought form’s “astral form” and not that of the candidate.
This means that not all the problems of leaky spheres of sensation which plague
most candidates would be fixed.
On the plus side, a thought-form could perhaps bring an awareness
of the Higher Self and perhaps make some changes to the sphere of sensation but
this would be nothing like the experience of a physical initiation.
I mentioned that astral initiation does exist and I can say
that there have been a couple of situations where it happened to me. Neither case involved a ritual at all, all
where while the initiator, and myself were in an astral state. I was wasted for
some weeks afterwards. It gave me no status in any order other than in my own
personal development.
In the MOAA correspondence course, we use a form of astral self-initiation
but it takes more than a year’s worth of preparation before the 0=0 grade
initiation takes place. It connects the candidate to the forces behind the Golden
Dawn and their Higher Self. However, it does not involve any ritual on our part
at all, nor does it count as a 0=0 in MOAA. It has an effect (although it is
not as good as a 0=0) because the candidate is forcing the connections and the
contacts are doing all the ritual work. In the astral work, the candidate sees
what happens to them and interacts with it. I think it is the closest you can
come to an astral initiation, but it takes a long time to build up to that
point. One thing I find interesting
about this particular method of astral initiation is that the people we have
put through it soon found a source for a physical initiation.
There are some other problems with Astral Initiation. Given
that most candidates either do not feel anything (or are not trained enough to
feel anything) it requires a lot of trust that the group is kosher. Ten years
ago I wrote how a group was making a fortune by doing mass astral initiations. A friend who lived around the corner from the
group’s house applied for a fake astral initiation. He was told that the ritual
would take place at a certain time and he would have to tune into it. Instead,
at the time he went around to the house where the group met. He was invited in
and found the entire group drinking beer and watching Gerry Springer. In other words,
they were collecting the cash and doing nothing. Not only is astral initiation
good for empire building, it can be a good source of income for the
unscrupulous.
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| Watching Dr Who will connect you to the GD better than astral initiation. |
One of the excuses made for astral initiation is that it
gives people a chance to experience something if you cannot get to a physical
temple. However, if the thing does not work then what is the point?A candidate
would be better off meditating on their own than carrying out a bogus astral
initiation. In fact, I would say it would be more challenging and fulfilling
for a candidate to watch a good episode of Dr Who than to pay cash for an
astral initiation and have nothing happen.
Within the Golden Dawn or Stella Matutina there was no
practice of astral initiation. It was used in the AO as a Mathers money making
exercise to squeeze cash out of rich Americans (and it is not clear what, if
any, ritual or astral work was done for this). It had the bonus that allowed
them to establish US temples, but there is no indication that they worked.
