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Video Description
What is the difference between the grand, bookish magic of the ceremonial lodge and the earthier craft of the witch and shaman? In this wide-ranging lesson, Lyam Christopher explains where the old labels of high and low actually came from. High magic grew from the castle on the hill, refined language for ruling and projecting authority; low magic grew from the farms and wild places, where the wheel of the year turned with planting and harvest. Neither is truly better, he says, but the richest practitioner learns to walk in both worlds.
The deeper story is a healing one. High magic, he warns, can trap a person in the head, cut off from the body and the land, and he names that separation the wound of the Fisher King. The Grail legend describes a king whose hidden injury dries up the whole country into a wasteland, and the remedy is always the same: remember that you rise out of the earth and will sink back into it again. A magician who only banishes and thinks may become sharp but also brittle; the work of connecting gut, heart, and head makes the whole person alive again.
Then he offers two ways to picture any hierarchy. The familiar vertical stack puts one boss at the top and workers below, while the nested view shows the whole as a mother enclosing her many children, every part held and fed. Both patterns matter, he says, and learning to hold them together is what keeps the developed mind from turning into a tyrant. The full course of this gentle uniting is laid out step by step in Kabbalah, Magic & the Great Work of Self Transformation, and the closing counsel sounds almost like common sense dressed as magic: keep a body, keep a garden, get some sun, and let the land speak through you.
Full Video Transcript
Okay, it’s time for another video. It is Sunday evening, and this week we are talking about high magic and low magic.
This is a potentially triggering topic because a lot of what’s going on right now in the media and in entertainment is heavily focused on prejudice and racism and dividing people up into categories and things like that, right?
And when, as magic developed, I guess through the 19th and 20th centuries, the idea of high and low magic came about.
And this kind of parallels what was going on at the time with other ideas of high and low.
For instance, as the language of German developed, there was a high German distinguishable from a low German.
And primarily what that meant was that in the south of Germany, those were the mountainous regions.
And the people there spoke a particular type of German.
And then the people in the lower lands spoke a different kind of German.
And the two, of course, interacted. Those two groups of people interacted.
now the interesting thing about that is um that the people who lived on the higher ground
at the time uh they tended to live on land that was not as conducive to farming and so what tended
to happen is that the people who worked in the lowlands tended to work to produce the food for
the people who lived in the highlands okay it was a tendency it’s not entirely true because you can
grow food in the mountains um so um that idea of high german uh it went through some changes
apparently um high german became associated with the more refined more learned learned forms of
german okay uh the way it is now apparently the high german and um the same thing sort of happened
in english where you have the king’s english oh the high english and the low english right
um the king’s english like high class english and well those who could spend the time to
refine their thinking and their language and how do you refine your thinking you refine your
language okay those who would do that and who groom themselves to be leaders uh would be
conceivably better off speaking high german or high english or king’s english okay uh and uh the
less educated workers uh would not have that luxury of learning those uh types of that that
type of thinking that type of language okay um did that make the person who spoke a uh king’s
english superior to the people who did not speak it well of course not but that idea began to
develop as well and so the idea of the high forms of english being superior to the lower forms
becomes a problem okay and that’s pretty obvious you know um and so the same problem then begins
to infest this idea of high magic and low magic.
High magic and low magic pretty much evolved the same way.
The high magic is more sort of educated, refined, intellectual,
and the low magic tends to be the more pagan, the more rural,
possibly even hunter-gatherer, which is not as refined
as the kind of magic that a ruler would use.
So somebody who is in charge of a city-state
would learn a more refined type of language
as well as a more refined kind of magic.
And there’s some evidence, like in India,
that magic seems to have been sort of evil
and forbidden among the lower classes.
But it was, of course, the nobility could do what they wanted,
and so they practiced magic.
and they practiced apparently some of them practiced forms of magic that you know groomed
them and made them more powerful or able to project power charisma authority that kind of stuff um
yeah so the idea of going to charm school and learning good manners these are all sort of
associated with high magic whereas low magic is more the country folk who may or may not speak as
clearly or have language that has this the um the rigor of integrity that the higher forms of
language would have okay so yeah so high magic tends to become more intellectual more refined
and low magic is that of the pagans and the farm workers possibly hunter-gatherers all right um
is one better than the other no of course not however learning high magic is extremely
important okay it’s but for the way we live nowadays uh and we’ll go over why it’s important
and one of the things that we need to get past is this idea of higher being on top and like sort of
stuck up okay and then the on the lower form being on the bottom so if you really want to be
developed as a practitioner of high magic, you need to be full-bodied. You need to know
the realities of magic, which are all the way from the bottom to the top, not just the stuff
that’s on top. This is the problem that people run into when they practice magic. When they get
into ceremonial magic, a lot of it’s very uppity and philosophical and things like that, kind of
divorced from workaday reality and this this can be a problem especially because the uh ceremonial
magic has the banishing techniques which tend to be uh quite powerful at producing egotism and
paranoia and things like that because that’s part of the enlightenment process you know um
so the personality developing upwards sort of into this higher intellectual space that is part
of human evolution apparently uh the the evolution that’s happening on a cultural level now as we
develop ourselves cerebrally uh intellectually um and this gives us a great deal of power
and versatility that does not really exist in the lower magic you can see i’m going to be running
into lots of trouble here so yeah the idea was that the um those who lived in the highland or
the higher part of the land lived on the rocky terrain um and the people who lived on the lower
terrain um were the farmers the rural workers okay um there was an idea that the rural people
who worked on the farms didn’t have enough time to read and educate themselves that’s not necessarily
true. They did work really hard, but not during the winter so much. Yeah, they could read and
stuff during the winter if they knew how. Question is, were they educated or not? That’s another
question. But they did have time to develop themselves more intellectually during the
winter time. It’s kind of like we still kind of do that. The bookstores know that. There’s a
reading season where they the the more serious smarter intellectual introverted type reading
is more popular in the winter time and then the you know the more adventure oriented comedy
oriented romance mystery is more popular in the uh the summertime like a beach read a beach read
is casual not very challenging intellectually uh that’s because people during the winter time
at least up north will retreat into their homes and can’t really go outside it’s too cold
there’s not very much light and so they do more reading then so there was more there was time to
do that for among rural workers as well as for the sort of wealthy uppity nobility this is why
when you see forms of low magic or that’s really inappropriate isn’t it to use the word low magic
for wicca and paganism uh everything seems to revolve around agriculture pretty much
there might be a little bit involved with seasonal herbs and migration of animals that as well but
everything’s linked to the land and everything’s very agricultural uh when the harvest work is
done when the seeds are sown when the fields are plowed all the festivals that are related to that
there’s the wheel of the year that pretty much revolves around agriculture uh and um the higher
classes of nobility um would even um speak poorly of the lower classes um referring to their magic
as heathen heathenism even the people of the heath people of the farms right um i refer to um
paganus paganus is a latin word for a person of the land and pagan so these people who work the
land are the pagans of course and of course pagan eventually became associated with oh those are
the people who still worship the old gods they don’t worship this newer god of control and
management civilization right because there was an older form of connection to the earth
that is behind some of these pagan deities now unfortunately um the wiccan religion is based on
agricultural deities when when agriculture came along this was already a system of control so
the pagan the pagan religions that were being imposed upon you know people they were already
sort of fabricated as a means of control and the original traditions that evolved out of nature
the original magic traditions were shamanism and uh these were really linked to the land
okay but the people who were farmers they still had that connection to the land to their livestock
to their herbs and their their crops and their plants they would they could still be taught
remedies from the plants. The plants would actually talk to them. This is how close the
connection was. You can do this, by the way. You can grow plants and you can sit with them and see
what they have to impart to you. It’s not like they’re going to talk, but if you want to talk
to them, that’s a pretty cool practice. But yeah, just sit with them and notice that they do seem
to communicate. It’s quite interesting, actually, if you just give it some time. Anyway, so these
people who worked the land they were connected to nature in profound ways that intellectuals
lost they lost this thing this connection to the land this is really important now because
the the whole cycle of the grail myth is all about this loss of connection to the land
okay the wound of the fisher king the the king himself has become sick and it is because
he’s been wounded and they say well he’s wounded in the thigh or in his side or
something like that right so trying to indicate that he was stabbed in the
genitals or something like that pretty much his lower body was was hurt he had
a he had a wound in his abdomen and but that wound was symbolic really because
the wound is actually the split between the mind and the land between the king
in the land between a human being and nature so that split between a human being and nature is
the wound of the fisher king also called the wound of amfortas okay that’s a very important
thing in the grail legends and this is the problem of high magic because high magic tends to be all
uppity inside the head unfortunately and it needs to involve the body and nature and things like
that so a ceremonial magician could learn a lot from a pagan or from a wiccan let’s say or from
a shaman a real shaman um or from a farmer or a ceremonial a ceremonial magician could learn a lot
from living on a farm but at least having a garden and pets something like that uh and a pagan or a
low magic practitioner can learn a lot from a high magic practitioner and we’ll we’ll talk about that
in a bit that’s all this whole idea of the highlands and the lowlands this has not always
held true by the way um in scotland it was sort of reversed the nobility lived down below and the
the heathens the barbarians um the ones running around in the kilts were in the highlands okay
so it wasn’t all it didn’t always hold true that you know the nobility lived up on a hill
and then all the peasants live down below okay but that is the way it tended to play out and
that’s how we get this high and low dichotomy thing um but the high and the low becomes
problematic too because what’s higher seems happier what’s lower seems sadder what’s higher
seems more powerful more i don’t know more free and what’s low seems to be kept down how does
how did these things happen that’s so the idea of high class and low class begins to develop okay
and um if i were to tell you that the the manners and the etiquette and the education that a high
class high class person receives if i were to tell you that’s not important you would of course be
like well wait a second it is important but there there are just some problems with it okay why does
everybody still want to go to college um because they want to develop that sort of higher mind um
that is refined but problems develop from that because oh yes you only have a bachelor’s degree
and i have a master’s degree well now that means i’m superior right and um the interesting thing
is that um the things that are above and the things that are below tend to be referred to that
way so this idea of inferior and superior is in the language so if you look at medical texts
in the if something is in the upper part of the body it is superior and if it’s in the lower part
of the body it’s inferior superior seems simply means above and inferior means below does not
mean it’s better but you can see how this has sort of infected the thinking of the western mind
that which is higher is better that that which is lower is worse and um like the great lakes
that in the united states the the very large lakes to the north are called the great lakes
the one that’s farthest north is called lake superior surprise surprise and it was labeled
it was named superior because it was up above the others on the map anyway is it really above them
of course not it’s just north of them so we should do a recap of how religion evolved apparently
the original spirituality that evolved out of nature which was natural was pretty much in the
hands of shamans and when you had hunter-gatherers this is before agriculture when you had people
roaming about the land following the migrations of the herds moving to different spots where food
would be plentiful but based on the time of the year like you know back and forth back and forth
similar to the way birds do birds still migrate and uh in order to read the signs of nature people
got very intimate with the land uh and it tended to be true that that there was somebody very very
sensitive to the spirits of the land who would naturally tend to evolve in every group and that
was a shaman and we still get inklings of this today where where people get really really sick
and um seems to be one of the things that schizophrenia is involved with that schizophrenia
seems to be a shaman that’s trying to form um if we could understand that a little bit better and
take care of these people they might emerge um from their illness um with special gifts special
powers special abilities okay well but the shaman thing isn’t really a thing for us anymore because
civilization came along and people began moving into these agricultural settlements and all these
people living together in large numbers required order and behavior control and all the different
every tribe and every shaman sort of had his own connection to the land or her own connection to
the land which was different from the others kind of evolved this way and that way all over the
place and these shamans and these tribes would not get along and so the the king of the city-state
had to do something about it and the answer is not necessarily that pleasant i’m sorry to say
it is that basically they um either banished the shamans or killed them uh or they gave them a
place within a new kind of spirituality okay but a sort of marginal space in the in the new kind
of spirituality mostly they were banished and killed uh and they would move outside the city
they’d be okay get out like you’re you’re a troublemaker get out um being spiritually
enlightened is is makes you into a troublemaker actually if you’re not careful um and a bit crazy
uh or eccentric as shamans tend to be and and uh so people would would miss their shamans it’s like
what do you just kick my priest outside the city i guess i’m going to follow them oh wait a minute
the king of the city state has just appointed a new priest several new priests and these new
priests are all about the gods of the city and the gods of good behavior and the gods of honor
and duty and control and and and the kinds of chores and preoccupations that i have you know
like uh so that new deities were really more contrived uh still based on some of the old
stuff of course and uh the priest was not somebody who evolved naturally the priest was somewhat
somebody now appointed and the main goal was control and this is how religion formed
fundamentally sorry to say um it doesn’t mean that um religion didn’t become genuinely spiritual
here and there but the fundamental premise of it was we need to establish control because we’re
living in such large groups now and so this morality thing took over and good behavior and
all this stuff so uh and still to this day it’s really kind of astonishing like um when people
get all spiritual they get all moral and ethical and this is good and this is evil it’s like that’s
the moral dimension of spirituality is just one dimension of it and but yet people make the moral
dimension into all of it as though there’s nothing else to religion except being good and being evil
or being damned and being saved you know oh gosh there’s so much more going on than that you know
uh so shamans don’t really fit in anymore and what we have now is uh those who want some genuine
spiritual practice uh they turn to the the people who sort of developed uh as heretics heretics in
these traditions like in the within the christian tradition we have saint john of the cross and we
have saint teresa of avila uh we have meister eckhart these people um if they weren’t some of
them were burned at the stake actually um uh the three that i just referred to were not um saint
john of the cross was imprisoned and he pretty much pretty much killed him because he got really
sick after that uh yeah and some people were actually burned at the stake um so thankfully
that doesn’t happen anymore so you can out of sheer desire become more and more spiritual
but it doesn’t have much to do with religion anymore you can’t really go back to being a
shaman so well you take up some kind of magical practice what these magical systems that evolved
ever since civilization came about and so these magical systems that evolved they are
quasi religious in nature quasi shamanic maybe in nature and a little bit
questionable there’s a little bit of Charlotte charlatanry going on with them
like snake oil what is it exactly we’re doing when we do magic you know there’s
there’s so much smoke and mirrors and shadow play and things like that that’s
because we’re delving into the realm of the soul into the realm of imagination
and we’re starting to get past the things that appear real to us and
actually get to what’s really real which we’re not going to go into in this video
so if you want to become spiritual nowadays you you wouldn’t become a
shaman necessarily you could you could try but shamans tend to evolve naturally
in hunter-gatherer tribes you could become a priest and hopefully become
sort of a heretic you have somebody who kind of breaks the mold of the role of the priest
or you can basically become a ceremonial magician or a wiccan or a pagan or like a folk witch
something like that right and you can learn how to do this and one of the most important things
is that you develop both the higher and lower aspects of the magic okay the the magic that
was connected to the land which is the shamanism and the farming type wheel of the year type stuff
like connection to the land connection to nature and you develop the hoity-toity intellectual stuff
as well okay and the idea of the god and goddess you notice that we have high magic and low magic
notice how high magic tends to be dominated by the god by sort of christianity or yahweh of kabbalah
um so and then we have the wiccan traditions and the folk witchcraft witchcraft traditions
tend to be dominated by the goddess okay or more feminine oriented okay there are male and female
deities in the in the craft as well um what was associated with the land was regarded largely as
feminine and what was associated with kingship the person who lived on top of a hill in the
highlands right in the castle that was more of the god the male the masculine okay this is not
rocket science this is quite simple if you remember that image of the um the hilt the hilt
remember the image of a standing stone pretty much in the uh british countryside or there’s
like scotland and ireland we have the standing stones in the landscape they stick up from the
land uh this is the phallic so the standing stone is pretty much the male symbol and the land itself
that it sticks out of is the female principle okay and so connection to the land was very important
and remember that the illness that the king can suffer from is his detachment from the land he
has to remember that he arose from the goddess and that he will when he dies he will sink back
down into her again he is really nothing but an extension of the goddess okay and this is why
they would they will claim that the feminine principle is all important in the um in witchcraft
and in the pagan traditions for the most part um that isn’t necessarily true um if you take
the viewpoint of yin yang and dao this is daoism uh it’s the dao that’s usually the most important
okay so the yin is the female principle the yang is the male principle dao is the background behind
all both of them behind both of them and so and we’ve talked about this before so when when yang
sinks back down into yin both of them cease to exist okay you can’t have one without the other
you can’t have a foreground without a background you can’t have a background without without a
foreground so when when the when the when the the male principle withdraws and sinks back into the
land then you really there’s nothing to see because you have to have that sort of contrast
between these two forces in order to see something manifest there okay um it’s a very basic principle
of manifestation really uh it’s a system that’s a basis behind the cross symbol of the cross
all right so um now the the the male sort of principle rides rises up from the land
and therefore it’s it’s at the high principle the high magic and this is the low magic does
that mean he is superior to the goddess no it does not okay and it doesn’t mean that there’s
nothing feminine up here at all either in fact it’s all feminine because this is an extension
of the goddess so the the um the male principle is is really an illusion anyway as is the female
principle okay and so a king who does not take himself so seriously is a much better king and
that he’s the king who doesn’t suffer from any notion that he is a standalone entity if he thinks
he’s above the land or above the law um if he thinks he’s above the land um all kinds of bad
things can happen he becomes a tyrant possibly he begins to exert control over it he doesn’t
understand that um it’s what sustains him and this is what this is what produces the wasteland
in the um the grail myths the reason that the land has become a wasteland apparently
is because the king does not recognize his uh connection to the land and this is something that
we are suffering from to this to this very day of course uh and it’s something that ceremonial
magicians potentially suffer from a lot okay uh and it’s something very important to know too
because what are you doing why are you banishing earth every morning oh my god like what’s wrong
with bent so you want to banish the earth so you really want to make yourself like free floating
above it and just push it away and like you’re like you’re totally separate from it we’ve already
talked about the importance of vanishing earth every day and saturn for those who are in higher
grades of the golden dawn because that idea of that separation needs to be explored so that it
can be healed okay not so that it can be maintained like some kind of state of psychosis and so things
who are up in the sky tend to be then male and the earth tends to be female but this doesn’t
necessarily hold true um for people who are very solar in nature um who like the sun the sun god
things like that um if the if the blinders get too tight like in other words if if if um people
like that tend to be very i don’t know monotheistic my way or the highway must be this way this is the
one true god that’s the very solar archetype um that archetype is very useful but of course
it can get you stuck in terms of everything must be one principle okay and so when things
are more of the earth they’re more diverse so things that are of masculine nature tend to be
like this week we’re going to go this way uh and the things of a feminine nature means like let’s
go all these different ways both are very useful of course and one of the things that we um everybody
respect about the masculine force is its ability to set it to set aside all these other things and
focus on one thing at a time let’s do this surgically make a surgical strike then okay
let’s do that all right let’s withdraw back into the goddess and be comfortable again and and look
around and see lots of things and then we’ll it’s then we’ll decide oh now we’re going to make
another strike we’re going to go after this we’re going to take care of this okay i see nothing but
this i’m going to take care of this okay now i’m going to withdraw back and i look around again
do some damage control okay this is the male and female principles of the psyche at work
now the interesting thing is that we have evolved this way so we’ve sort of evolved
out of our gut into our heart and into our brain and so we’re kind of like standing stones okay
In fact, plants, the brain of a plant is its root system.
That’s pretty much the only brain it has, for the most part, and it has a rudimentary
nervous system as well, but its thinking part tends to be the roots, and that’s its brain.
People are the same.
We actually have three brains, okay?
The first brain to evolve was the gut brain, and that is the brain that is in the intestines,
and there’s several hundred million neurons down there that are actually brain cells and they they
form an axis with the um there’s the gut brain the enteric brain there’s the cardiac brain the
heart brain and then there is the head brain this cephalic cephalic cephalic brain and this is the
one that thinks it’s in charge uh the interesting thing is that a lot of your feelings this is
everything works together okay but a lot of your feelings are sort of in the gut
brain like a lot of happiness down there and if there’s depression going on it’s
a pro it’s very often a problem with the gut microbiome and that health of the
gut brain decision-making it happens a lot in the heart it’s if you want to
learn more about that I would suggest reading Stephen Herod Buhner the secret
teachings of plants it’s a really cool description of how the heart is makes it it’s a big part in
your decision making process um and in fact and the head tends to step in afterwards and say
oh i did that that i made that decision but it was really the heart that made the decision
um the the heart is not that sophisticated apparently uh it only has um maybe a several
hundred thousand brain cells in it whereas the um the the head brain the cephalic brain has like
billions and billions of brain cells yes the cephalic brain the cardiac brain and the enteric
brain it’s interesting to think about this too because if you get a heart transplant what would
that be like to be a different person it wouldn’t quite be the same person anymore and the interesting
thing is that when your gut microbiome changes your personality can change to some degree to
some degree it can, mainly in regard to depression, happiness, joy, freedom, things like that.
So now the important thing about high magic and low magic is that when you develop the
more refined forms of magic, it’s mainly about the vocabulary and the sophistication of the
concepts uh and maybe just a basic i can give a very basic example of why this is important why
the high magic is important um being just like being a low magic practitioner just being wiccan
pagan to my mind it’s fine it’s it’s okay but um those who do really well with wicca and folk magic
they also tend to develop a lot of the high magic stuff they tend to be really nerdy and smart and
organized or try to be um have a lot of mercury going on as well as far as the um intellectual
component a basic example would be um in my work as a reading learning specialist i work with some
people who have not been exposed to a lot of vocabulary in any language okay and then we’ll
do something with them where we will say let’s figure out the tone of this passage so we’re
going to read something what’s the tone of this um and and they’ll be what do you mean well this
this one’s happy this one’s sad this one’s serious this they have just the most basic words for for
tone and when you begin to teach them some other tone words um like melancholic or forlorn or
regretful or ashamed or celebratory and they begin to learn these terms it’s almost as though
they really weren’t aware of these tones or feelings or emotions until they had a word for it
and so learning more words for these various emotional states tends to wake up those emotional
states um we develop an awareness of them through language the the interesting thing about high
magic is that it’s very dependent on language and images by names and images are all powers
awakened and reawakened um now the interesting thing is that the high magic um would be more
the names and the low magic would be more like the images the primitive images okay uh so keep
that in mind so you develop these philosophical refined super refined ideas they begin to develop
some kind of consistency some kind of coherency and you begin to develop different powers of
discernment because of the high magic aspects of your magical work okay it’s not just about being
connected to land and things like that the reason i’m saying that is because um if you are practicing
low magic you’re going to mostly be it’s going to be more like a participation type thing you’re
participating in the seasons you’re participating in the flow and the ebb and flow of the tides
this is very nice but there’s not much awareness of it going on and so the real beauty of the high
magic is that that separation begins to form that that stone begins to rise and you begin to
advantage to get some kind of vantage point over nature this is really important when it comes to
enlightenment because um that that connection of the king in his control tower to the land
is ecstasy you can see it’s very sexual too right okay um so um that and that separation
from the ground of existence into that sort of um control tower up here in your brain
this is an ecstatic experience and you can’t really have that very much without intensifying
that separation and so if you like to complain about ceremonial magicians becoming assholes
because they get so stuck in their heads and they get stuck up um this is part of the process this
is part of the process that they that they go through um as that separation intensifies they
basically make the wound of amfertas that split between the land and the king they make it more
intense so that they can explore how the separation has come about and they can see that the separation
really isn’t real okay um what that brings us to is um the way that you heal this this is going to
sound really kind of i don’t know a little too intellectual maybe um there are two different
types of hierarchy that sort of come to the rescue here. And what we tend to get stuck in
in the West is the vertical hierarchy, where let’s say you have a paragraph and you have the main
idea. Each paragraph, let’s say, has a main idea, several supporting details, and maybe some minor
details, okay? So you have a paragraph has a main idea, some major details, and a minor detail,
Okay. Many people would put the main idea on the top and then the major details right
underneath that. And the major details support the main idea and the minor details then support
the major details like that. So the main idea is at the top. The major details support the
main idea. Those are the three, I guess, beige colored circles there, right? And then the gold
colored circles down below, those are the minor details which support the major details.
And this is a vertical hierarchy so that the main idea seems like the boss who’s in charge of the subordinates.
He’s in his tower or he’s on his hilltop.
He’s in his castle at the top of the hill.
And all these people in the lowlands are working for him.
This is not really the way hierarchies work.
But this is the model of civilization and organization that we have gotten stuck in.
okay you might even call this the patriarchal hierarchy uh it’s got the king at the top
the big daddy and he is in charge of his subordinates bossing them around and those
those um middle managers are bossing around the people below that’s a system of control
shit goes downhill that kind of thing right i’m exaggerating um okay so um now one of the
problems with the system is that is that it suffers from the wound of ampertas that king
at the top is completely cut off or seems to be cut off from what’s happening in that on that
lower level all you can hear is what his middle managers say you know so he’s not connected to
the land anymore let’s say okay um this is artificial though this is not real and so the
antidote to this is the nested hierarchy, which we could say is more matriarchal. This is the same
diagram as the one I just showed you. So I’m going to go back to the previous one. You’ve got a main
idea as the boss that’s on top. You’ve got the major details, which support the main idea. And
you have the minor details, which support the major details. Here, the main idea is the largest
circle it encompasses them all and you have the three major details the large the second largest
circles right and then the minor details are inside those this we could call matriarchal
because and then all the main idea is the big mother and all these other ideas inside are like
her babies okay they are part of her okay so a so a king who remembers this is absolutely in touch
with everything he remembers his connection to what’s going on on the lower levels okay he’s in
tune with the goddess okay so this is very important um uh when it comes to magical systems
because what eventually happens is this whole idea of elevating yourself up high that’s very nice
but ultimately it’s a matter of expanding out and encompassing everything also very nice a little
bit dangerous because it could be ego expansion right um or just that idea of dissolving into
everything okay or um the king remembers that all of this is supported by the goddess and he
and an interesting thing is that he becomes a supporter of the people it’s like in other words
i’m going to give you what you need to do your jobs to make sure you get it that he begins to
work for them and doesn’t have them just working for him okay now um now to look at the various
hierarchies in ceremonial magic this way is very helpful very helpful and the interesting thing
though is that within the ceremonial magic systems both the vertical hierarchies and the nested
hierarchies operate at the same time okay so there is a sort of stern attitude that somebody will
take with a lesser spirit let’s say okay but that stern attitude is not always going to be like
patriarchal like i’m looking at you from on high from up here i see you down there um it’s at the
same time it is oh i i envelop you i i take you inside me you have arisen within me um and that’s
that’s this whole idea of like oh something is arising me but i’m bigger than it it’s not going
to take me over it’s just one of my little babies right so when a spirit rises it’s more like um
this thing can’t take me over i’m i’m the entire universe it can’t possibly you know take me over
i am the goddess so it’s just one of my babies and so what does it need i need to take care of
this thing and help it do what it does okay whereas if you have a vertical hierarchy going
on it’s like oh no we have an uprising and this this lesser detail is going to try to
go climb up to the top and take take control of everything else right um uh and both of these
types of um hierarchies exist at the same time uh and it’s good to be able to to see the the
universe or various systems of control in terms of both types of hierarchies um and so this idea of
high magic make sure that you develop um you’re making sure that you develop yourself from the
bottom to the top not just all the top that’s all those intellectual concepts i have all the
intellectual concepts i need now i can control everything down below without having to think
about it or deal with it uh no no no no so um everything is part of you and that’s come the
idea comes to the rescue so every you can feel everything everything is to make you a better
boss too really so you’ll visit the subordinates you’ll see what they’re doing you’ll even take
part in what they’re doing to see what what it’s like you’ll make sure they have what they need
make sure they’re happy doing what they do yeah it’s good stuff so the idea of high magic is is
not um high at the top of the tower and that’s all there is to you you are the entire tower and
you’re also the earth that supports the tower okay and without those refined high level concepts
you can’t experience the the joy and the bliss and the freedom of the apparent freedom of being
able to i don’t know discern um to experience it’s sort of like you know god can’t really
experience himself unless he sort of gets lost in this sort of high-minded perspective so he can now
arise in this human type creature and look around um and this is the experience of like you you walk
through a garden and you’re looking at a flower and it’s like wow that flower can’t really quite
appreciate just how beautiful it is but wait a second it can it can do that through me and how
lucky i am to be this developed to experience that kind of bliss okay so now that’s why it’s
people who are refined and you know hoity-toity they also tend to have good taste they also tend
to be able to enjoy things to astonishing degrees okay otherwise um if you don’t develop that very
much you’ll end up more like sort of indigenous people who are kind of coasting along in something
called the participation mystique where everything is just totally immersed in the land and everything
is just kind of unconscious it’s like okay the um this is what time of year it is this is what i
need to go do i’ll go do it okay now now uh now this has happened now i need to go do that okay
there’s no time to really see things from that sort of detached perspective or that sort of
control tower perspective which isn’t necessarily real but it’s the essence of what it means to
really appreciate what it’s like to be living in the world and so and this is why we do the
middle pillar work because the middle pillar work is that connection from all the way from the gut
through the heart to the head so it’s not all head stuff and a lot of times for somebody who’s
especially intellectual um the middle pillar can be quite traumatic sometimes it can induce
the letting go experience which can feel like you’re being assaulted from down below
because you thought everything was pretty much up here and you had everything under control
which but you’re suffering from the wound of amprotas and as that wound heals then the energy
connects the energy connection between your gut and your brain let’s say becomes strengthened
which is going to annihilate the ego which which can be traumatic actually truly frightening
experience it’s like dying okay and that’s why the king in these old pagan myths would be sacrificed
for the good of the land right at least ritually sacrificed so he would ceremonial ceremonially die
and then be reborn from the land mainly just to indicate that to make that connection to the
goddess it’s like i’m nothing but an extension of nature here i don’t regard myself as being
superior to nature i’ve simply arisen in this role very highly developed in this role supposedly
and am am able to exert a lot of influence being so highly developed like this but only because
of my connection to the land okay and this is what ceremonial magicians need to remember
and that’s why we need to become gardeners and need to have pets maybe go live on a farm
need to exercise take care of the body those kinds of things respect the body respect the sun
the moon expose yourself to the elements get some sun for heaven’s sake it’s good for you
don’t listen to your dermatologist oh my god all right well hopefully that made sense so until next
time
Source: Lyam Christopher