Speaker 1: You see something's going to happen. What What's going to happen?
Speaker 2: What a.
Speaker 3: Cool Welcome to the Occult Rejects.
Speaker 4: This episode we got a very very special guest, somebody
Speaker 4: I can't even believe I got on the show and.
Speaker 3: This is very exciting.
Speaker 4: But before we get to Eg Baker, we will introduce
Speaker 4: the other rejects and with me today I got Ethan Indigo.
Speaker 3: What is going on?
Speaker 5: So?
Speaker 3: How are you.
Speaker 6: Well?
Speaker 1: Peace?
Speaker 5: Is an honor to be here and speak with you
Speaker 5: guys and learn from Mike. This is going to be exciting.
Speaker 5: I'm really really looking forward to this. Uh Ethan Indigo
Speaker 5: Smith on all the social media easy to find frequently
Speaker 5: writing articles and occasionally even books.
Speaker 1: So yeah, honor to be here with all of you.
Speaker 4: Thank you for making it, sir. I know it's like
Speaker 4: eight o'clock for you, so I appreciate it. And my
Speaker 4: man Jin then Ninja, what is going on?
Speaker 5: Sir?
Speaker 3: How I? What's up? Boss?
Speaker 1: Mister ninety three?
Speaker 7: I'm going to not famboy maybe well I probably will.
Speaker 7: So I'm a big fan of Ike show and I
Speaker 7: in general. And you know I did speak with Greg
Speaker 7: k yesterday as I subtle Bragg's pre recording, and we
Speaker 7: talked about Ike's book The Formless Fire and Quote. It
Speaker 7: is one of the best esoteric contemporary esoteric texts.
Speaker 1: Of probably the twenty first century.
Speaker 7: So you know, so it's big words and so I'm
Speaker 7: I'm just I'm a little bit in awe.
Speaker 1: So I'll try out to be a nerd.
Speaker 7: But if you want to follow me, you can follow
Speaker 7: me on Twitter x at woocomme Born w UK and
Speaker 7: g Reborn can follow me on Threshold Saints at Threshold
Speaker 7: Saints on both x I, which is the show, and
Speaker 7: of course The Gray Lodge the True Gray Lodge dot
Speaker 7: Com t r v E Gray Lodge dot com and
Speaker 7: Matt Mura is of course our my co host in
Speaker 7: that as well as the webmaster and he runs all
Speaker 7: our socials. So thank you so much. And yeah, I'm
Speaker 7: really excited. So thanks Snick for setting this up. I
Speaker 7: know we've talked about it for over a year, so wow,
Speaker 7: thank you. Hey, you know that'll problem. Hey, my man, Matt,
Speaker 7: I'm glad you can make it against her. Always love
Speaker 7: having you here, bro, so let everybody know in case
Speaker 7: they don't know what you're dealing with.
Speaker 8: Awesome, super happy to be here. As well, and I
Speaker 8: was checking out Ike's work and it's really fascinating. Let's
Speaker 8: have an amazing talk today. So again, Matt Mura always
Speaker 8: at mattmore nineteen on all socials that is Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, YouTube, Twitch,
Speaker 8: maybe some other places site for that. There's also my
Speaker 8: website Kabala dot com. That's k A A b A
Speaker 8: l a h dot com. A lot of cool updates
Speaker 8: there that I did last week. Really excited to coming
Speaker 8: back to working on it and also doing readings, So
Speaker 8: a lot of space to do readings now, which is
Speaker 8: kind of betas So if you get it, you're in
Speaker 8: for a good treat because afterwards, I'll definitely rise the
Speaker 8: prices because it takes a lot of work to do
Speaker 8: all this stuff. But I'll keep everyone that kind of
Speaker 8: started now in a grandfather state, so always getting the updates.
Speaker 8: And yeah there's the spaces as well. We will likely
Speaker 8: upload some older spaces in YouTube the coming weeks, and yeah,
Speaker 8: that's going to be really good stuff. Thanks again for calling.
Speaker 4: No of course, and thank you very much for joining
Speaker 4: us today, sir. And finally today we are joined by
Speaker 4: Ike Baker and No Jamatra heads. We are not talking
Speaker 4: about the Cabala of Nine Chambers. This is the author
Speaker 4: of a Formless Fire and Etheric Magic, and the mind
Speaker 4: behind the podcast are Canam. Ike's work lives right between
Speaker 4: the sweet spot between scholarship and practice, with a Western
Speaker 4: so teric history, initiatory traditions and the actual mechanics of
Speaker 4: ritual and theogy without the bullshit. He's also trained in
Speaker 4: energy work modalities like reiki and keegong, and his newest
Speaker 4: work builds a full system for working with the ethereal
Speaker 4: with the ether as a practical experience experiential technology.
Speaker 5: Uh.
Speaker 4: Very happy again, Like Jim was saying, we'll try not
Speaker 4: to fanboy this guy too much, but Ike, I'm very
Speaker 4: very happy to have you on the show. And anything
Speaker 4: that I left out, please let everybody know you know
Speaker 4: about yourself and where they can find all your amazing work.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Well, I really appreciate you having me on. Honestly, you
Speaker 2: guys have had some big guests. You've had some big guests,
Speaker 2: You've had some great conversations, so I'm really happy to
Speaker 2: be able to participate. Yeah, you can find me on
Speaker 2: ike ike Baker dot com. I K E B A
Speaker 2: K E r uh anything you want about me is
Speaker 2: up there. I've got uh my three latest you know
Speaker 2: podcast episodes. I've got the last documentary style presentation from
Speaker 2: the Arcanem channel, which you can see it in uh
Speaker 2: just below in the bottom left or right of my screen.
Speaker 2: A R C A n v M was foolish enough
Speaker 2: to use the Latin type setting, and uh uh that's that.
Speaker 2: You can find that on YouTube, Spotify and Apple podcasts.
Speaker 6: Uh. I like to keep things.
Speaker 2: I like to keep myself a little available right to
Speaker 2: to to an extent within within reason, to the public.
Speaker 2: So for anybody that that listens to this uh conversation
Speaker 2: we're gonna have today and wants to reach out and
Speaker 2: wants to have a few words on my website at
Speaker 2: the bottom right hand corner, there's a little chat widget,
Speaker 2: and whatever you write in there, please be nice, comes
Speaker 2: straight to my personal inbox.
Speaker 3: That'd be rough for me. It's it.
Speaker 6: It's rough for me.
Speaker 3: That's awesome.
Speaker 4: So I guess if you don't mind, I mean, I
Speaker 4: hate to just jump right into it, but uh, I
Speaker 4: guess where did you find yourself out one day walking
Speaker 4: down this path?
Speaker 3: Like was there a moment in history that you still.
Speaker 4: Remember or a thing that happened or whatever, like opened
Speaker 4: up a book and they're like, oh my god, this
Speaker 4: is it?
Speaker 3: You know, was it a gradual thing?
Speaker 6: Like you know, well, it's.
Speaker 2: It's a story. It's definitely a story. And I've told
Speaker 2: it a bunch of times. So anybody that's heard it, sorry,
Speaker 2: bear with me. No, no, no, it's you know, for
Speaker 2: your audience. I'd I'd love to tell it because it's
Speaker 2: kind of interesting. I as a kid, I had I'd
Speaker 2: always studied comparative religions. It was very interested and pulled
Speaker 2: towards the mysterious, the newminous. I liked being in religious buildings,
Speaker 2: temples and cathedrals and things that for some reason it
Speaker 2: it scratched aniche that I I wasn't fully aware I had,
Speaker 2: and as I got older, I began to study stuff.
Speaker 2: But the thing is, I wasn't you know, I'm originally
Speaker 2: from Long Island, New York, so it's you know, it's
Speaker 2: one of those things we're growing up in the late
Speaker 2: nineties and early two thousands in my neighborhood.
Speaker 6: What was available to me was like Dan Brown, occultism.
Speaker 6: You know, I didn't have.
Speaker 2: I didn't realize that I had little esoteric pockets and
Speaker 2: communities just yet when I was like, you know, seventeen eighteen.
Speaker 2: So I studied at a very topical level Cabbala, freemasonry,
Speaker 2: things of this nature, without being involved.
Speaker 8: And then.
Speaker 6: Things take a dramatic turn.
Speaker 2: I was about nineteen years old and my aunt had
Speaker 2: a tenant, very nice lady, very quiet, lady, kept to herself.
Speaker 6: One day she threw herself in.
Speaker 2: Front of a train, and my aunt goes down into
Speaker 2: the apartment and she sees that this lady was a hoarder,
Speaker 2: and she's got.
Speaker 6: These books, stacks of books.
Speaker 2: Like in the movie is Where You Got There's there's
Speaker 2: like pathways and things, journals still wrapped in the cell
Speaker 2: of Phane. So she asked me, over right, I mean,
Speaker 2: anybody that's interested in the occult, you know, heavy, the
Speaker 2: deceptively heavy.
Speaker 6: A box full of books can be.
Speaker 2: So she invites me over to to help her, you know,
Speaker 2: clear out the apartment. And I found this one book
Speaker 2: and it's still on my Kabbala shelf over there, and
Speaker 2: it was called The Oracle of Kabbala by Richard Sideman.
Speaker 2: And it's a very thin book. And I know this
Speaker 2: is weird, right, It's the dead lady's property. But do
Speaker 2: you mind if I take this? And she says yeah, sure,
Speaker 2: of course. So the next day I walk around my
Speaker 2: neighborhood in Babylon and I read the whole thing because
Speaker 2: it was very short. Now, when I was done reading it,
Speaker 2: I wouldn't say that I was necessarily educated to a
Speaker 2: greater depth or degree than I was before I read it.
Speaker 2: But something in me struck a chord. It was like,
Speaker 2: I know this is important. This is the untapped, the
Speaker 2: unopened drawer. Really to get into this, to really get
Speaker 2: into this, like, let's figure this out so.
Speaker 6: When people use these things.
Speaker 2: I went on the white pages or the yellow pages
Speaker 2: on the internet and I typed in Long Island Kabbala
Speaker 2: Study Group really guy's name and information came up.
Speaker 6: Reached out to him. He got back to me.
Speaker 2: He said that group doesn't meet anymore, but there's this
Speaker 2: other thing. And the other thing was the Hermitic Order
Speaker 2: of the Golden Dawn, and I didn't really.
Speaker 6: Know what magic was.
Speaker 2: I kind of stumbled into that door and it didn't
Speaker 2: It wasn't like it was like, oh.
Speaker 6: This beautiful path.
Speaker 2: Immediately I was actually a no call, no show to
Speaker 2: my first initiation, I totally flaked out because I was nervous.
Speaker 2: I didn't really know, you know, what the hell what
Speaker 2: am I doing here? These people think they're doing magic
Speaker 2: like Harry Potter wand waving shit like this is crazy.
Speaker 6: But several years.
Speaker 2: Later, my life suffered like a total collapse, and something
Speaker 2: in my gut, so I mean my entire body was burning,
Speaker 2: telling me you got to go back to these folks.
Speaker 2: And so I went hat in hand and I said, please,
Speaker 2: you know, I'm really sorry, but I feel like I
Speaker 2: have to do this, and they gave me another shot,
Speaker 2: and now the rest is history. I'm a senior Adept
Speaker 2: of the Hermitic Order of the Golden Dawn under the
Speaker 2: Cicero lineage, and I am the imperator of the North
Speaker 2: Carolina Temple that we run out of Asheville.
Speaker 3: That's wild. The guy moved from Long Island to North Carolina,
Speaker 3: just like me.
Speaker 4: Fucking bugged out. When I was talking him, I was
Speaker 4: just like, wait, what's going on right now?
Speaker 2: Yeah, Well, it's one of those states that if you
Speaker 2: move from a place like Long Island, it's not like
Speaker 2: depending on where you go.
Speaker 3: But I felt like I just moved to portion Road.
Speaker 6: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2: The suburbs down here are not not culture shock. They're
Speaker 2: they're not Yeah, it's not like too crazy. Although my
Speaker 2: fiance and I were living out in the country tree
Speaker 2: for a while and we lived but we had like
Speaker 2: amish neighbors.
Speaker 3: Was wow, yeah, my cousin's got that.
Speaker 4: He's like thirty minutes out of Rally, he's got like,
Speaker 4: you know, his neighbors were like, you know, the real
Speaker 4: country people. But yeah, by where I'm at, it almost
Speaker 4: looks like kind of like three forty seven or something
Speaker 4: like over my Stony Brook, like it's you know, still
Speaker 4: it's still got shit going on. It's just that, you know, ridiculous.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, so all right, yeah, you know what's I
Speaker 4: think the first book I ever came across, and it
Speaker 4: did pique my interest, and I think that's what actually
Speaker 4: kind of made me start like talking to other people
Speaker 4: in high school that were into magic or witchcraft.
Speaker 3: It was a fucking necronomicon.
Speaker 4: Actually, one of my friends had it, and uh, I
Speaker 4: don't even know where the fuck he got it from,
Speaker 4: but he had it and we started reading it and
Speaker 4: like one day it was just like, oh, like I
Speaker 4: think we're in his basement trying to do something out
Speaker 4: of it, and you know, who the fuck knows what
Speaker 4: we're doing back then. But that definitely did, uh, I
Speaker 4: guess interest me and make me think it was you know,
Speaker 4: possible or real.
Speaker 3: Stuff like that was real.
Speaker 4: So kind of like after that, I think I started
Speaker 4: become intrigued by other stuff and eventually I got.
Speaker 3: Into this stuff, I guess real. No, not not too fast.
Speaker 4: But these books that you have, uh, would you like
Speaker 4: to like at least you know, I would like to
Speaker 4: give you a chance to kind of promote them. I
Speaker 4: give people a little bit of an understanding of what
Speaker 4: some of them are about, if you if you want to.
Speaker 6: Yeah, we can talk about that.
Speaker 1: Sure.
Speaker 6: I did spend the last three years of my life
Speaker 6: putting them together. Yeah, I think it'd be worth it.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: My first book came out twenty twenty four, and that
Speaker 2: was Under Tree, a Prima press or, a Masonic imprint
Speaker 2: out of Phoenix, Arizona.
Speaker 8: Uh.
Speaker 2: You know the great Masonic astrologer Jamie Paul lamb Is,
Speaker 2: who was actually a mentor to me. Oh, he's been
Speaker 2: on here too, Yeah, Jamie's Jamie's like, Uh, that's my guy.
Speaker 2: If there's if there's no Jamie, there's no Ike. I
Speaker 2: tell people that all the time. But yeah, he said,
Speaker 2: they published my first book. And they basically said, you know, hey,
Speaker 2: would you well, you ever thought about writing a book?
Speaker 2: And I said, I'm an a cultist, of course I have,
Speaker 2: But like, what hell am I going to say in
Speaker 2: a way that is, you know, how can I contribute
Speaker 2: in a way that's as eloquent as you know, somebody else,
Speaker 2: one of these great authors in our tradition.
Speaker 6: But after a while, I was like, you know what,
Speaker 6: I checked in.
Speaker 2: I did some divination, I did some ritual and I'm like,
Speaker 2: this actually might be a really cool opportunity. Let's see
Speaker 2: what happens. Let me allow myself to be guided. And
Speaker 2: so I said, what do you want me to write about?
Speaker 2: And they said, you can write about literally anything. And
Speaker 2: then I just kind of arrived at this conclusion that
Speaker 2: if I if I can write about anything, I'm going
Speaker 2: to write about everything. So a formuless fire is laid
Speaker 2: out to give the history, theory, and practice of Western
Speaker 2: esotericism from the as far back as we can go
Speaker 2: in you know, Sumerian Mesopotamian cultures up until about you know,
Speaker 2: the nineteen sixties with the Orem Solis and uh and
Speaker 2: and the the Wick and Revival and things of this nature.
Speaker 2: But I really really dial down into a lot of
Speaker 2: different histories because I'll be frank, the person that I
Speaker 2: had in mind reading this was a new Mason, Okay.
Speaker 6: But the thing is, like that is a common trope
Speaker 6: in occultism.
Speaker 2: This new Mason kind of wanders in and he's you know,
Speaker 2: starry eyed, and he's he's got a lot of enthusiasm
Speaker 2: and and you.
Speaker 6: Know, very green.
Speaker 2: Doesn't matter how old you are, you know, but many
Speaker 2: of us come in and we're just like, oh, this
Speaker 2: is a new world. And then you eventually go down
Speaker 2: these these roads. You get shoulder taps to participate in Martinism,
Speaker 2: or one of the appendant bodies or one of the
Speaker 2: Rosy Crucian bodies, and you start discovering, oh, all these names,
Speaker 2: Ruis Kellner, Westcott Mathers, and you see all these Masons,
Speaker 2: all of them were Mason. These people who created you know,
Speaker 2: the Oto, the original Oto, Carl Kellner and Theodore's the
Speaker 2: Golden Dawn, the Societist Rosie Cruciana in Anglia, these guys
Speaker 2: were all Masons.
Speaker 6: They were very esoteric. So the thing is, now.
Speaker 2: All this stuff is is seeing a mainstream kind of
Speaker 2: uh appearance and somewhat of a support. So so now
Speaker 2: it's like it's not just not just Masons, but it's
Speaker 2: like like like early Masons, Masons early in their career.
Speaker 2: It's like almost anybody can come to this stuff and
Speaker 2: be looking around like almost overwhelmed.
Speaker 5: What is this?
Speaker 2: How do I get involved? How do I keep my
Speaker 2: my my footing sure? And so that's that's who I
Speaker 2: wrote the book for. So I give you really a
Speaker 2: very thorough contextualization of the entirety of the tradition to
Speaker 2: the best of my ability. So that goes through Platonism, Neoplatonism, Hermetism, Hermeticism, gnosticism,
Speaker 2: and all the way up into the occult revival and
Speaker 2: things of this nature. I go into Martinism Elu Cohen
Speaker 2: as much as I could fit. I got a couple
Speaker 2: of I got some pushback from the Barden people. They
Speaker 2: were like, oh, you should have written more about him.
Speaker 2: At that point it gets it turns into a slippery slope.
Speaker 2: I mean, the book's like almost five hundred pages as
Speaker 2: it is, but yeah, and then at the end there
Speaker 2: are I think eight or nine appendices with practical instructions
Speaker 2: for everything from preparation of an alchemical or spagiric preparation
Speaker 2: to the consecration of salt and water to middle pillar
Speaker 2: exercise and the lesser ritual of the Pentagram with my commentary.
Speaker 2: So it was quite an intense work, and Jamie edited
Speaker 2: it and so did Jake Treyer, and we.
Speaker 6: Put it out and it was immediately critically received.
Speaker 3: Well, so.
Speaker 6: There's that that's still available.
Speaker 2: And then E Theoric Magic I released with Lluellen Luellen Worldwide,
Speaker 2: that came out this year.
Speaker 6: In April, and.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that also has a kind of a funny story.
Speaker 2: I was at the Sacred Space between the World Conference
Speaker 2: I think in twenty twenty four, twenty three EVO Domingas
Speaker 2: had invited me to go up there, like kind of
Speaker 2: last minute.
Speaker 6: I had take off work.
Speaker 2: We're going to set Carpenter at the time, and I
Speaker 2: drove up to Maryland and I didn't really look at
Speaker 2: the schedule. I just had like three four days to
Speaker 2: get this whole trip together. I get up there for
Speaker 2: the morning of the second day and I look at
Speaker 2: the schedule. This is the first time I've laid eyes
Speaker 2: on the schedule and it's right there, like eight o'clock
Speaker 2: in the morn you got five minutes in a room
Speaker 2: with a Lleuellen editor to pitch them a book.
Speaker 6: And I was like, yeah, I'll do this.
Speaker 2: I didn't even know you could do this shit at conferences,
Speaker 2: but yeah, let's give an issh just so I get
Speaker 2: I get online and the line is dwindling. You know,
Speaker 2: I'm getting closer to going in and I realize like,
Speaker 2: oh shit, I don't have a book. I just kind
Speaker 2: of hopped online in my excitement and I didn't like
Speaker 2: think about what I was going to pitch.
Speaker 8: Uh.
Speaker 2: This is the kind of overconfidence I sometimes can have
Speaker 2: that my fiance will tell you all about. Just I'm
Speaker 2: the guy in the pool fully clothed while everybody else
Speaker 2: is getting their swimming trunks on.
Speaker 3: I just dive in.
Speaker 2: But it almost immediately dropped into my head. It's like, listen, dummy,
Speaker 2: what about the stuff you've been doing for the last
Speaker 2: ten fifteen years. Right, You've been a practitioner in the
Speaker 2: system of Western ceremonial magic, and you've also been a
Speaker 2: practitioner right studying and practicing Chinese medicine, body work. They
Speaker 2: make you take elective. That's how I got into chigung.
Speaker 2: I had to take chigung classes. I went to school
Speaker 2: up in.
Speaker 6: Sciacid at the.
Speaker 2: New York College of Health Professions, and I got my
Speaker 2: you know, my massage therapy degree. I went to school
Speaker 2: also in Stonybrook, very shortly for physical therapy. But really,
Speaker 2: my love, there was truly an acupunctured Chinese medicine.
Speaker 6: And with that came all the energy work.
Speaker 2: And I realized at a certain point, these are two
Speaker 2: things that need each other, you know, they are two
Speaker 2: sides of one coin. And in the West we don't
Speaker 2: have as sophisticated a vernacular and a framework and a
Speaker 2: system for working with the energy that ultimately empowers your magic.
Speaker 6: So I was like, yeah, talk to her about that.
Speaker 2: So I talked for five minutes, told her about this
Speaker 2: book idea. My editor said, sounds good. Send me your
Speaker 2: introduction and a chapter sample. I was like okay, and
Speaker 2: I went to the I went to the dining room
Speaker 2: and the conference hotel. I wrote everything there and sent
Speaker 2: it to her, and yeah, that book has done. It's
Speaker 2: done really well. It's being translated into into other languages.
Speaker 2: We're gonna do uh nice, Yeah, we're gonna We're gonna
Speaker 2: do a follow up too eventually.
Speaker 3: That is awesome. Uhboy, when I ask anything, Gin, you
Speaker 3: want to ask.
Speaker 1: Anything, Yes, I do.
Speaker 7: I've been waiting. Thanks Snaki obviously read my mind on
Speaker 7: the eighth wave. I this is tangent gentile to what
Speaker 7: you were saying, but I think it actually fits in
Speaker 7: perfectly with the theme of books. So on your episode
Speaker 7: on his show, recent episode with Greg as well as
Speaker 7: with Jamie, who's probably the.
Speaker 1: Best cabalist I've ever met, probably.
Speaker 7: And I always thought of myself as quite good, as
Speaker 7: Matt and Joshua both know, And it was a little
Speaker 7: bit of a shock, but I humbled myself beforehim.
Speaker 3: No, I didn't even know what to say to the guy.
Speaker 5: I was.
Speaker 3: Kind of blew my mind.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I totally agree.
Speaker 7: Jamie's extremely impressive and it comes up often on the
Speaker 7: show because of his like innovative way. He's pretty much
Speaker 7: redefined that astrogoetic the works that he outlines me, no
Speaker 7: one else is even comes close to what that is.
Speaker 7: And so that was a big honor to speak with
Speaker 7: him some. Thanks again, Nick, But you've talked about the
Speaker 7: importance of kabala as kind of a backdrop of the
Speaker 7: working reality. And this is something that we talk about
Speaker 7: in the Gray Lodge with Matt and the branch Joshua
Speaker 7: all the time. Matt calls it pop kabala. I call
Speaker 7: it speculative kabala. I know that's not quite the same,
Speaker 7: but there's an overlap that where we both understand each other.
Speaker 7: And I just want to if you have a few
Speaker 7: words on that, just simply because it's something that like
Speaker 7: we've done a whole kabala series on this show, and
Speaker 7: Nick and I obviously became friends because of it sort of,
Speaker 7: and you know, so I think it is under appreciated
Speaker 7: and under sort of articulated way to map both map
Speaker 7: Western esotericism, but maybe also map more universal primordial maybe
Speaker 7: if we want to be a little Evolian or because
Speaker 7: I'm not a perennialist, I'm really more of an ax list.
Speaker 7: But I just think that that's an interesting kind of framework,
Speaker 7: like you can map both things onto the tree and
Speaker 7: then you can also understand things through the tree.
Speaker 1: So I just wanted to hear your thoughts on it.
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, I know that's a quite I've got.
Speaker 6: A lot of thoughts on that.
Speaker 2: I just finished teaching a course over We did six
Speaker 2: sessions called Hermetic Kabbala for practitioners and initiates, and I
Speaker 2: was very successful. We went We're very very deep. We
Speaker 2: did a really really thorough deep dive. Now, the thing
Speaker 2: is this, You've got different categories of kabbala, right, which
Speaker 2: is sometimes a reduction and an oversimplification, but look, it works.
Speaker 2: People get on me, They get on my ass about
Speaker 2: the same thing I say, East tradition, Western tradition. We
Speaker 2: understand it's part of a whole. But if you want
Speaker 2: to be a really good mechanic, you can't call everything
Speaker 2: under the hood. Car Like, we need to be able
Speaker 2: to talk about this stuff and express distinctions so that
Speaker 2: we can compare and contrast. And so her Medic Kabala
Speaker 2: is quite different than Hebrew kabbala or ultimately derivative more
Speaker 2: so from Christian kabbala, right, because this is who the
Speaker 2: really the creators of What we understand is that her medicabala.
Speaker 2: They were reading Noir von Rosenwrath, they were reading Althanasius Kursher,
Speaker 2: they were reading Joannis roy Klin, and so they were
Speaker 2: also reading the Seffayette Seira, but very very small book,
Speaker 2: and it's it's that is much more Hellenistic than.
Speaker 6: Some of the other like say the Zohar, so her
Speaker 6: medicabala is something that is is where you it has
Speaker 6: been abstracted. Right.
Speaker 2: People say, oh, kabbala is Hebrew mysticism. I don't think
Speaker 2: that's accurate. I would say kabbala is a system of
Speaker 2: esoteric exegesis interpretation. They're taking this framework and they rabbis
Speaker 2: are applying it to their scripture nowhere else, and they're
Speaker 2: interpreting their scripture. Now the Christians come, they get it
Speaker 2: really through Pico della Mirandola, and they start they start
Speaker 2: drilling into Hebrew and Christian scriptures. The Hermetic caabaalist takes
Speaker 2: it out of scripture and say, okay, we can apply
Speaker 2: this to this, to that, to tarot cards, to everything,
Speaker 2: and so it becomes this great filing cabinet that really
Speaker 2: eventuates in the system of the Golden Dawn.
Speaker 6: That codification seven.
Speaker 2: Seven seven that Crowley put out was actually a Golden
Speaker 2: Dawn pamphlet that he took and published. But they had
Speaker 2: done many of those initiates had done that work to
Speaker 2: to sort of make these correspondences, and it goes back
Speaker 2: even to the sort of the French systems of esoteric
Speaker 2: masonry like Martinism and the Yelu Cohen, and not so
Speaker 2: much Martinism, but I would say more than the Yellu
Speaker 2: Cohen and things of that nature, stuff that has this
Speaker 2: quasi chivalric Masonic thing that were toying with the Kabbala
Speaker 2: in the eighteenth century and started coming up with these ideas.
Speaker 2: But really it reaches its perfection into how we understand
Speaker 2: it today through the Golden Dawn, and then it seeds right.
Speaker 2: Regordi takes it, the Unfortune takes it, Crowley takes it,
Speaker 2: Franz Barden takes it, very similar system to the Golden Dawn,
Speaker 2: and they proliferate it and so that you've got a
Speaker 2: lot of the tradition through that swath, and so that
Speaker 2: the key is to bring bring the pieces back together.
Speaker 2: But there's if you can understand the Kabbala as a
Speaker 2: system of correspondences through the gold and Dawn, you can
Speaker 2: understand any kind of Kabbala because it is it's the
Speaker 2: most i would say, rigorous, inclusive.
Speaker 6: At the end of the day, it's a framework.
Speaker 3: Yep.
Speaker 6: The biggest thing that I tell people is you come
Speaker 6: to this stuff and if you're too rigid, because at
Speaker 6: a certain stage in the Golden dawn work right, you
Speaker 6: drill down you all this rote memorization of what correspondences
Speaker 6: go where, and then that all gets turned on its
Speaker 6: head and everything gets put upside down and over here
Speaker 6: and over there.
Speaker 2: It's like, well, that's this left brained kind of approach
Speaker 2: to information that modern people have that doesn't work with magic.
Speaker 2: Everything has to be you have to prepare for this
Speaker 2: stuff to permutate, be used here, be used there. It's
Speaker 2: useful to ingrain that system of correspondence is memorize the tree,
Speaker 2: work with the tree. But at the end of the day,
Speaker 2: you've got to be willing to give up what you
Speaker 2: think you know about it because it's a framework, it's
Speaker 2: a scaffolding. It's a scaffolding. The Kabbala itself is not
Speaker 2: capital t truth. If anything, what you will experience through
Speaker 2: it is much more of an essentially true nature, particularly
Speaker 2: in your experience.
Speaker 6: So that's the whole key. You know, we don't want
Speaker 6: to over intellectually.
Speaker 2: I say this with hundreds of books surrounding me, but
Speaker 2: you really don't want to over intellectualized magic. You want
Speaker 2: to have a really, really firm understanding of what you're
Speaker 2: doing for context and for safety, yes, safety, But at
Speaker 2: the end of the day, you can't think your way
Speaker 2: into a transcendent state.
Speaker 6: You know, it's just not going to happen. So and
Speaker 6: then the the.
Speaker 2: Last thing I want to say about the Kabala is
Speaker 2: that you have to understand where it comes from. The Kabbala,
Speaker 2: the hermetic Kabala given you know as the lineal diagram,
Speaker 2: the vertical diagram of the tree of life, ten sphere
Speaker 2: oft the twenty two nety vault, the paths, and then
Speaker 2: you get to three, the the veils of negative exists
Speaker 2: since the four or really five worlds and the letters
Speaker 2: of the Hebrew alphabet with the tarot correspondence is that's it.
Speaker 6: That's the symbol system right there.
Speaker 2: But it ultimately comes from a Hellenistic background. All of
Speaker 2: this stuff actually has more to do with the Greco
Speaker 2: Egyptian innovations that carried over this Pythagorean tradition, right Gematria.
Speaker 2: In ancient Greece, this was called Isobseephi, right, yes, right.
Speaker 2: The cephi were the little counting stones.
Speaker 6: They didn't have.
Speaker 2: They didn't use numerals like we use Arabic numerals, and
Speaker 2: we've abstracted it. The Greeks were counting with stones and
Speaker 2: seeing what shapes do these numbers make. That's where you
Speaker 2: get this concept of triangular numbers, square numbers, oblong numbers.
Speaker 2: It's because they were arranging pebbles. So isopsephos means equal pebble.
Speaker 2: So you add up the numerical value of this word,
Speaker 2: it's got this many pebbles, and this one over here,
Speaker 2: this word has the same amount of pebbles.
Speaker 6: They're related.
Speaker 2: The word Goematria comes from the Greek hel matria geometry.
Speaker 2: So the Kabbala almost in its entirety, is Hellenistic.
Speaker 6: But here's the issue. We don't have the Hellenistic tradition.
Speaker 6: We have the philosophy, we don't have the practice. So myself,
Speaker 6: being a Hellenistic Theurgic reconstructionist the best of my ability,
Speaker 6: I just got back from a nine day excursion in
Speaker 6: Upper and Lower Egypt with a group of about twenty people.
Speaker 6: I reconstructed Theurgic rituals. We were on site.
Speaker 2: We had private access to the Osirion, to the Sekhmet
Speaker 2: sanctuary to Dendara. I taught astrological magic on the roof
Speaker 2: of the temple to hatorat Dendra, so we were doing
Speaker 2: all this Theurgic Hellenistic stuff. It was absolutely incredible. But
Speaker 2: at the end of the day, the Kabbala is the
Speaker 2: better system practically because it's full, we have it. It's
Speaker 2: a living system, it's a living tradition. Is extremely difficult
Speaker 2: to have a framework that works with the Western modern
Speaker 2: mind that is as effective and is as beautiful as
Speaker 2: the Hermetic Cabala.
Speaker 6: So that's why I still use it.
Speaker 3: Is an answer, jan.
Speaker 1: I think it was a great answer.
Speaker 7: I only differ with Ike on a small detail, is
Speaker 7: that I like, maybe this is untrue, maybe this is
Speaker 7: just a speculative idea. I always pausit the origin of
Speaker 7: the tree, or at least maybe it's reintroduction into the
Speaker 7: kind of Central Asian landscape in the first and second
Speaker 7: century b eighty in the exile period from Babylon. And
Speaker 7: I think if you look at what the Zoroastrians. I'm
Speaker 7: sure you're very familiar with the Sike, but if you
Speaker 7: look at what the Zoroastrians are doing in this emergence
Speaker 7: of the filosophy of religion and how they were applying
Speaker 7: qualities to God.
Speaker 1: I think it's very similar in some ways to.
Speaker 7: Like how Ramic was thinking about Kabbala much later on,
Speaker 7: and like where they were sort of congregating. I always
Speaker 7: talk about this as like Lake Baikal, and you have
Speaker 7: sort of the Buddhist hermitages contract Buddhists, you have the
Speaker 7: Kabalistic hermitages, you have the Tanngriest hermitages, all existing in
Speaker 7: this period of like the thirteenth to sixteenth century, and
Speaker 7: they're all together. And I'm not saying that they were
Speaker 7: speaking to each other, but obviously, as you're saying, they
Speaker 7: are speaking a language that is parallel that can be
Speaker 7: mapped to the tree, that can be understood as expressions
Speaker 7: of it, or maybe expressions that then can be discerned
Speaker 7: and categorized epistemically into the Saphra.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and that's why ultimately the tree is the better example,
Speaker 2: particularly because it's got the paths, whereas in the Hellenistic
Speaker 2: version you have the ten, but they're nested, right, they
Speaker 2: become the the the ogdoad or what we call later
Speaker 2: on the the anima mundi or the Thetolemaic model of
Speaker 2: the universe, so they're nested, whereas the tree of life
Speaker 2: extracts them into this vertical kind of hierarchy or analogy,
Speaker 2: and then it's the paths show these relationships. But I
Speaker 2: would say that first of all, there's this idea of
Speaker 2: Hellenic orientalism, which is very very apropos if you. But
Speaker 2: but to drill back to to my further point of
Speaker 2: why I think it had much more to do with
Speaker 2: the the Neo Pythagorean system is specifically this there are well,
Speaker 2: there's a couple of reasons. There are modern words in
Speaker 2: the in use in kabalistic circles today Hebrew Hebrew Cabalistic
Speaker 2: that Hassi them still use Greek words to discuss like
Speaker 2: hayuli highly matter. You know David Kyams Smith who is
Speaker 2: Micabala teach here where one of them. He's expressed this
Speaker 2: to me. He's like, you will find Greek stuff littered
Speaker 2: throughout their tradition. They even call him a heretic, which
Speaker 2: is the word apocauros. Apocauros is a corruption of the
Speaker 2: Greek word epicurus, like the philosopher, the hedonist, the materialists,
Speaker 2: they considered him. You know, a heretic in the philosophical tradition.
Speaker 2: So there's a lot there. But more to the point,
Speaker 2: when you look at the numerical relationships, particularly the Shira,
Speaker 2: it's the Tatractees, it's the Pythagorean toa Tractees. The principles
Speaker 2: still remain the same, it's just arranged differently and really
Speaker 2: get you get around the first and second centuries of
Speaker 2: the Common Era, the population of Alexandria, Egypt was between
Speaker 2: thirty five and forty percent Jewish. So this this period
Speaker 2: is called the period of Hellenized Judaism. You get the
Speaker 2: septuagen translation of the Hebrew Holy Books, you get the
Speaker 2: Merkaba tradition, which was Hebrew theorgy, you get the Hekka Lote,
Speaker 2: you know the palaces which are organized according to the
Speaker 2: this this nested system of cosmology, the same thing. And yeah,
Speaker 2: so you get all of that in this really interesting time.
Speaker 2: But to bring it back to your point, Pythagoras was
Speaker 2: from Samos. Okay, Samos is extremely close to Anatolia. He
Speaker 2: would have been more familiar with the Lydians than he
Speaker 2: would have with with Athenians or you know, people on
Speaker 2: mainland Greece. So one of the ways that this is
Speaker 2: represented is that Pythagoras's philosophy was East was influenced by
Speaker 2: this sort of like, I guess what we're calling the
Speaker 2: greater West now, you know, we don't want to necessarily
Speaker 2: break off the quote unquote Middle East. A lot of
Speaker 2: scholars are saying, well, they contributed to the history of
Speaker 2: ideas in the West, so it's the greater West. But
Speaker 2: either way, one of the ways that they represented the
Speaker 2: origin for Pythagoras's knowledge is to represent him as wearing pants.
Speaker 2: Very interesting thing they say that he wore pants. That's
Speaker 2: not Greek dress. Greek dress is Tunic hymation. They didn't
Speaker 2: wear pain would have looked and seemed ridiculous. And also
Speaker 2: some of the more popular depictions of Pythagoras in terms
Speaker 2: of statuary have him with a turbine on as well.
Speaker 2: So this again, this stuff is all kind of from
Speaker 2: all over the place. But the evolution is very very
Speaker 2: interesting to watch. And I do think because of some
Speaker 2: of the things you're saying, these qualities of God and
Speaker 2: this this verbiage that tracks onto the tree, I think
Speaker 2: that that is why the tree is still or not
Speaker 2: just the tree, but the hermetic cabalistic system is still
Speaker 2: the best practical framework for magic.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much.
Speaker 7: I I just want to say that the David Haym
Speaker 7: Smith book The Blazing Dew of Stars is probably my
Speaker 7: favorite personal favorite.
Speaker 1: Kabbalistic texts, So I just want to shout that out.
Speaker 6: David will like that.
Speaker 4: One thing you did mention before, and I know me
Speaker 4: and JUNI are both big fans of Pico. I think
Speaker 4: that was actually a very pivotal point too, like like
Speaker 4: what you're mentioning before, because I feel like when he
Speaker 4: did that, I feel like it just opened up the
Speaker 4: doors for many different types of people looking at the
Speaker 4: kabbala differently, Christians, Catholics, occultists, you know.
Speaker 3: And I feel like.
Speaker 4: Once they did that, like if you're kind of just
Speaker 4: for me, it looks like it was on and popping
Speaker 4: after he brought that stuffing. One thing I did want
Speaker 4: to ask from your opinion, and it's something I've kind
Speaker 4: of had other people talk about slightly here and we
Speaker 4: don't have to get too in depth for this, but
Speaker 4: in your opinion, do you see well, we'll put it
Speaker 4: this way. In my opinion, I think that Christianity, it
Speaker 4: was actually highly influenced by a lot of Neoplatonists and
Speaker 4: people that were actually kind of considered occultist in a sense.
Speaker 3: Would you see that as kind of being possible.
Speaker 6: Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, this stuff wasn't a cult.
Speaker 2: It wasn't esoteric until it was until the Enlightenment had
Speaker 2: its way with us, you know, I mean they were.
Speaker 2: There's so there's a tradition, i'd say, in the earliest
Speaker 2: eras of Christianity, right when we're calling it Christianities, right,
Speaker 2: this is a similar idea today. There's many sects and
Speaker 2: divisions in Christianity, but early on it was a group
Speaker 2: of what they call eCos which like ecosystem in Greek,
Speaker 2: that's how you say a house. There were house churches,
Speaker 2: people meeting in houses, little little, tiny, tiny communities. That's
Speaker 2: who Paul was writing to. And at that stage, right first, second,
Speaker 2: third centuries, you get a very very specific Platonic and
Speaker 2: Neoplatonic influence in the theology. In particular, let's not forget
Speaker 2: that the New Testament was written in Greek, which somehow
Speaker 2: a lot of people still don't know that. But again
Speaker 2: it's it is very Hellenized in that it utilized the
Speaker 2: specific Greek philosophical or metaphysical terms like logos. Right in
Speaker 2: the Joanine prologue one John in the beginning was the word.
Speaker 2: The word used there is logos, and logos means so
Speaker 2: much more than just word. It means order, it means pattern,
Speaker 2: it means you know, paradigm, archetype of the system. It's
Speaker 2: not just saying the word. And this is why God
Speaker 2: in Genesis, right, especially if you've read the work of
Speaker 2: this scholar who recently passed Russell Gimerkin. In Genesis, how
Speaker 2: does God create? How does God make the order? He
Speaker 2: speaks it into existence. God doesn't fashion light out of
Speaker 2: a light bulb. He says, let there be light.
Speaker 6: So there's this whole thing.
Speaker 2: It's a very very Hellenic and Hellenistic sort of tradition.
Speaker 2: But in the theology, which is not technically it's derivative
Speaker 2: from the scriptures. Not in the scriptures, you get the
Speaker 2: Holy Trinity, Father's son, Holy Spirit. Well Tertullian, who was
Speaker 2: an early church father, would have been swimming in these
Speaker 2: neoplatonic circles in.
Speaker 6: That time.
Speaker 2: He introduces this idea of the Holy Trinity, and he says,
Speaker 2: today persona I una substantia, three persons, one substance. This
Speaker 2: idea ultimately comes out of the Platinium neoplatonic idea. Of
Speaker 2: the three hypostheses, we have the one that is the
Speaker 2: three somehow the one is simultaneously three. God is creative,
Speaker 2: Deity has to uh simultaneously exist in the beginning in
Speaker 2: three phases of activity that are that are you know,
Speaker 2: coterminous code contemporary, it's all happening at the same time.
Speaker 6: So yeah, that gets brought in. Then you get the
Speaker 6: hierarchies that.
Speaker 2: Iamblicus was using, right the ae Ambleaki and hierarchies for theorgy.
Speaker 2: The the third century Neoplatonic philosopher Eamblicus of Calquis, who
Speaker 2: wrote on the Mysteries and gives us the whole textbook
Speaker 2: of Greek theogy that so much of our ritual is
Speaker 2: based on even.
Speaker 6: In the modern day.
Speaker 2: He comes up with this stratification of of uh spiritual
Speaker 2: ontology like a ladder of being, and he calls these
Speaker 2: the gods in the greater kinds, and it gets really
Speaker 2: really harry. If you want to know more about it,
Speaker 2: did a whole video of it called what is Theorgy?
Speaker 2: On the arcanean podcast. But long story, shirt is this
Speaker 2: guy that we now call Pseudodionysus. He takes that hierarchy
Speaker 2: and he changes the nomenclature. Okay, so in the pagan
Speaker 2: Greek system, they had angels and archangels, but they were
Speaker 2: lowered down, and then above that were these things called
Speaker 2: the en cosmic gods, the hypercosmic gods, the liberated gods.
Speaker 6: Well, if you're a.
Speaker 2: Christian, you can't call anything god but God. So he
Speaker 2: changes the nomenclature, but the way he describes them, the
Speaker 2: functions remain identical. So yeah, one hundred and ten percent,
Speaker 2: you get a tremendous amount of esoteric philosophy that completely
Speaker 2: shapes Christianity. And if you've ever gone to like a
Speaker 2: Greek or a Catholic mass, this is when they say
Speaker 2: the thrones arabeem, serabeam, seraphime, principalities, when they go down
Speaker 2: that whole archangel's angels. That's the pseudo Dionysian hierarchy that
Speaker 2: got taken out of Greek paganism. So so there is
Speaker 2: a tremendous The thing is like, you can don't get
Speaker 2: your wires crossed and think that they were stealing it's
Speaker 2: not what they were doing.
Speaker 6: If I wanted to swim from one from I'm on
Speaker 6: this part.
Speaker 2: There's water between me. I'm going to that port and
Speaker 2: I want to swim, or I want to row my boat.
Speaker 2: I'm rowing my boat. I'm rowing my boat. That's the technology,
Speaker 2: the technology of my you know, whatever I'm doing, my actions,
Speaker 2: my work. I'm trying to get there. If my destination changes,
Speaker 2: do I get out of the water and get a helicopter. No,
Speaker 2: I'm applying what I'm already doing to a new destination,
Speaker 2: because it's it's science to them, you know, it's this
Speaker 2: is this was their science. So they didn't steal so
Speaker 2: much as they reoriented the traditions they had in a
Speaker 2: new direction. And so, but later on, and this will
Speaker 2: probably cap my point. Later on you get like Thomas Aquinas,
Speaker 2: albertist Magnus, and these guys are the Scholastics, and they're
Speaker 2: much more Aristotelian, but still obviously they're theists. So there
Speaker 2: remains a very strong mystical and metaphysical component there. I
Speaker 2: would say Christian mysticism is almost entirely informed by the
Speaker 2: idea of emanation and return that we get from Platinus.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's why. It was another reason why I asked you.
Speaker 4: I had I don't know, maybe a month or so ago,
Speaker 4: maybe more than that, I did like a solo show
Speaker 4: on Platinus and there was just a lot of stuff
Speaker 4: on there that I was like, Yo, you really influenced
Speaker 4: the shit out of Christianity.
Speaker 3: And you know what I had noticed too. And again
Speaker 3: I just use this as an example.
Speaker 4: It's probably not the best for everybody because I haven't
Speaker 4: had the pleasure of going to an alcoholics anonymous meeting,
Speaker 4: but like, if you go there that's based on the
Speaker 4: Big Book, but then you will hear all these phrases
Speaker 4: that actually aren't in there. It's like, oh, you know,
Speaker 4: I don't even remember him anymore, but they aren't actually
Speaker 4: in the Big Book, but they sound great. I feel
Speaker 4: like a lot of ideas that a lot of Christians
Speaker 4: kind of have that technically aren't in the Bible is
Speaker 4: kind of like influenced by things that Plotinus and other
Speaker 4: people said. I think even one of them is maybe
Speaker 4: the idea of seeing you love the ones and they
Speaker 4: after life. It's not in the Bible, but that Christians
Speaker 4: believe that, and I think that might have actually came
Speaker 4: from Plotinus in a sense.
Speaker 6: Well, you know, it's that goes as far back as
Speaker 6: as as Egypt.
Speaker 2: But are the main myth that we have for it
Speaker 2: in the West comes from the book ten of the Republic,
Speaker 2: Plato's Republic, the myth.
Speaker 3: Of er Oh maybe it was played on.
Speaker 2: Yeah, still Tousinas. He expands the metaphysics of Plato tremendously.
Speaker 2: But the thing is this, uh, and this is what
Speaker 2: I tried to establish with a formless fire. We cannot
Speaker 2: underestimate the foundational significance that is still present, not in
Speaker 2: a vestigial way, but it's here now in our traditions,
Speaker 2: our entire way of looking at this stuff, whether you're
Speaker 2: a Christian or whether you're a ceremonial magic it's all
Speaker 2: predicated on Hellenic and Hellenistic philosophy. Now, all this stuff
Speaker 2: existed in sumer and in Babylon and in ancient Egypt,
Speaker 2: for sure, but we don't get it in a preserved
Speaker 2: sort of digestible format that is cognizable to the Western
Speaker 2: mind in the same way that say, the Platonic dialogues
Speaker 2: are or the writings of Proclus are. We have not
Speaker 2: inherited that, or at least it hasn't penetrated from academic
Speaker 2: translation into the mainstream.
Speaker 6: So really the water we're swimming in is hellenistic here.
Speaker 2: So all of those philosophies constitute what we would now
Speaker 2: post Enlightenment, post industrial revolution, what we would now consider
Speaker 2: esoteric or occult. But you know, classical arithmetic, you know,
Speaker 2: the quadrivium arithmetic, geometry, harmony and arithmetic geometry, harmony and astronomy.
Speaker 6: These were.
Speaker 2: Not separated from an idea of an essential metaphysic, so
Speaker 2: they they it. So only later did we kind of
Speaker 2: drain the the the blood out of the you know,
Speaker 2: our quote unquote hard sciences.
Speaker 4: Now, well, like even in the past, and most of
Speaker 4: these people that you see, like I mean I've even
Speaker 4: covered Saint Hildegarden, she was a polymath.
Speaker 3: I mean, you have all these people that are actually polymen.
Speaker 3: You know, there was a lot more.
Speaker 4: They looked at everything and like applying it to like
Speaker 4: every single subject that they studied, which hence is why
Speaker 4: I have bring so many people on the show, because
Speaker 4: I'm not a polymnize myself, so i gotta bring everybody
Speaker 4: with different things together try to make sense of something.
Speaker 4: So you know what I'm saying like, I think that
Speaker 4: is another huge problem too, is just the education system
Speaker 4: and the way that we look at things.
Speaker 3: It's just not the same anymore.
Speaker 6: Yeah, it is a huge problem.
Speaker 2: It's an existential problem for human beings in the twenty
Speaker 2: first century. We're really we can't it's hard to it's
Speaker 2: hard to talk about.
Speaker 6: So I'm not going to.
Speaker 2: But ultimately we really need a drastic reevaluation of education.
Speaker 6: But it's happening.
Speaker 2: It's happening right now, and it's happening in these spaces
Speaker 2: right I'm I'm currently studying the Severn Liberal Arts. I'm
Speaker 2: also teaching the Quadrivium and all of this is happening online.
Speaker 2: So I'm not going to a university. I'm not taking out,
Speaker 2: you know, paying Fannie May. None of that's happening. I'm
Speaker 2: sitting here. I'm not going to be twenty thousand dollars
Speaker 2: in debt. I am going to interact with a small
Speaker 2: group of people, you know, compared to a lecture hall,
Speaker 2: and we're going to discuss you know, uh, without bias,
Speaker 2: without reduction, reductive materialist bias and being afraid to feel foolish,
Speaker 2: you know. Like, but that's why i made my channel,
Speaker 2: because I saw a lot of scholars out there doing
Speaker 2: their thing, and I wanted my channel to be a
Speaker 2: place where belief was not a four letter word, is
Speaker 2: not a dirty word, and we come together in these
Speaker 2: spaces and we learn, you know, and we explore ideas
Speaker 2: of the the I would say antique or magical worldview
Speaker 2: maybe let's call it.
Speaker 3: I like that. Well.
Speaker 4: I do think it's a lot easier for people to
Speaker 4: actually find what they're looking for now, especially with the
Speaker 4: Internet like you're getting in.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, like the places podcasts like this where
Speaker 2: you guys are having so many people on it's I mean,
Speaker 2: and it's it's free, you know, people just can consume
Speaker 2: this stuff and get like a real education.
Speaker 6: It's it's very high value.
Speaker 3: That's what I try. That's what I'm shooting for. Thank you.
Speaker 4: I'm trying trying my best. That's what I got someone
Speaker 4: on like you. Is anybody here when I ask this
Speaker 4: guy any questions or anything? Before I keep going, I
Speaker 4: have a question.
Speaker 5: I really liked your uh, your bringing up how the
Speaker 5: Hebrews used the Greek words to kind of build on
Speaker 5: their understanding of what they may have been looking at
Speaker 5: prior to getting these new words for kind of new
Speaker 5: mapping of the system, if you will, and and to
Speaker 5: that them, these different streams of systems or information coming
Speaker 5: together and enhancing. I really like that you brought together
Speaker 5: the East and West to speak broadly, but just the
Speaker 5: different studies from the Eastern and West and traditions. And
Speaker 5: could you maybe expound on how that has helped you
Speaker 5: understand the different streams by you know, understanding the chigung
Speaker 5: and the reiki energy systems, and how you might have
Speaker 5: explored the Western ideas with the Eastern knowledge and maybe
Speaker 5: vice versa.
Speaker 6: Yeah, that's a great question.
Speaker 2: It's kind of, you know, my big project, I guess
Speaker 2: my life's work is trying to show because it's it
Speaker 2: can't just be done in a single book like in
Speaker 2: Etheric magic. It's kind of the introduction, but it's part
Speaker 2: of a larger conversation. And I spent a lot of
Speaker 2: years engaging in what I called, you know, spiritual exoticism.
Speaker 2: I went to the farthest parts East and looked at
Speaker 2: zen and looked at yoga because I didn't understand what
Speaker 2: was under my nose. But now when I come back
Speaker 2: to these systems.
Speaker 3: I see that.
Speaker 2: Culturally on like a cultural DNA level A blueprint level.
Speaker 2: I understand the Western system more than I understand the vernacular,
Speaker 2: the nuances, the subtleties of something like zen which was
Speaker 2: my first meditative practice.
Speaker 6: I studied with the Zen ro sheets says en meditation. Uh,
Speaker 6: And that's great.
Speaker 2: If you put a gun to my head and said
Speaker 2: you got to choose meditation or ritual, there's no way
Speaker 2: I could part with my meditation.
Speaker 6: You know, It's just I just can't do it. But
Speaker 6: the understanding of.
Speaker 2: These things really, for me, it starts from the Western perspective.
Speaker 3: So what have we got? All Right?
Speaker 6: I'm into magic. I love magic. Let's look at some
Speaker 6: of the the you know, the quintessential magical texts in
Speaker 6: the West.
Speaker 2: Well, you look at you got to read on the mysteries,
Speaker 2: because he gives the whole system of what he called,
Speaker 2: you know, Eamblicus calls sinthema da, which then Agrippa right,
Speaker 2: Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, writing.
Speaker 6: Like eleven hundred years later, he calls it the Latin sigillum.
Speaker 6: And this all means signatures. It's why you have a
Speaker 6: certain incense for a certain planet or a certain god.
Speaker 6: It's literally why use a certain herb. It's because their
Speaker 6: essences are diffused throughout everything in the cosmos. If you
Speaker 6: read what they were talking about the gods.
Speaker 2: The gods really are numbers, but we anthropomorphize them so
Speaker 2: that we can understand them through human like or you know,
Speaker 2: animal like images.
Speaker 6: But at the end of the day, it's very very abstract.
Speaker 2: They're the root essences of all causality that diffuse themselves
Speaker 2: and create everything in the cosmos. So a rose, for instance,
Speaker 2: the petals, the aroma, the silky texture, the color that's
Speaker 2: gonna be very Venusian or aphrodite if you like. But
Speaker 2: arose typically has thorns, not Venusian, very marshall, it has roots,
Speaker 2: very Saturnian.
Speaker 3: So this as.
Speaker 2: This is, it really has tremendous bearing on Agrippa's system
Speaker 2: of magic. That is where everything you know, especially Golden
Speaker 2: Dawn magic comes from. So then you start looking and
Speaker 2: you're like, all right, we've got all the theory, we've
Speaker 2: got all the philosophy, but where is the actual system
Speaker 2: And that is not as well preserved in the in.
Speaker 6: The West, in systems of like Chinese medicine.
Speaker 2: Really most forms of traditional medicine, particularly in the East
Speaker 2: these are kind of these right under your nose, secret
Speaker 2: agglomerations of this tradition of signatures, right, and we've kind
Speaker 2: of thrown it out in the West in favor of
Speaker 2: allopathic medice in the pharmaceutical industry, which at first was,
Speaker 2: you know, really really reliant on something like Paracelsian medicine,
Speaker 2: which itself relied on a humoral medical diagnostic system, which
Speaker 2: is based in the signatures. So if you go and
Speaker 2: you study Chinese diagnosis, Chinese medical sort of correspondence theory,
Speaker 2: you will then be able to go back and apply
Speaker 2: this stuff to magic. You'll have the system. Takes a
Speaker 2: lot of time, but it's there. And so like this
Speaker 2: is just an example. It's one of the ways I
Speaker 2: kind of accidental.
Speaker 6: I didn't know. I didn't know this was going to
Speaker 6: be the case, you know, but in one of the.
Speaker 2: Ways I kind of accidentally found that, like you, you
Speaker 2: have to bridge these hemispheric cultures.
Speaker 6: That's the only way you can get the whole thing.
Speaker 4: I like what you just said about I guess numbers. God,
Speaker 4: God's I don't I might self. It's kind of like
Speaker 4: I don't know. I guess maybe it's a little risk
Speaker 4: not risky but controversial to come out and say, I myself,
Speaker 4: I really don't believe all those things are like real,
Speaker 4: like I do think they're a little bit different than
Speaker 4: they than people look at.
Speaker 3: That's just my opinion.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, I've even gone into uh, you know, real
Speaker 4: quick and you're just weird question, And then I think,
Speaker 4: my boy, the branch over here has something he wants
Speaker 4: to ask you, only because you kind of meant we're
Speaker 4: kind of getting onto it now about the gods that
Speaker 4: maybe being real in that sense, and uh, and looking
Speaker 4: at being I guess a polymath looking at some other
Speaker 4: things that like Robert Flood has done or other people,
Speaker 4: you start seeing the brain in the eyeball popping up.
Speaker 4: Do you every think that any of that stuff is
Speaker 4: there any symbolism or cultism or whatever it might actually
Speaker 4: be like pointing at that type of stuff as well.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 6: Well, the thing is.
Speaker 2: This also can sort of reduce down to again Platonic philosophy,
Speaker 2: the relationship to cite and the mind in the Platonic,
Speaker 2: in the in the the Platonic and Neoplatonic, and therefore
Speaker 2: another system that was influenced by Greek words. A lot
Speaker 2: of people nowadays we want to sort of reinvest the
Speaker 2: Egyptian culture with its own sort of spiritual tradition that
Speaker 2: we understand. So we say, oh, the Hermitica is Egyptian,
Speaker 2: but the Hermitica is Hellenistic. It uses it, it is completely,
Speaker 2: It uses Greek philosophical term, does not use Egyptian philosophical terms.
Speaker 2: Logoss key, methampsychosis. All of these ideas come out.
Speaker 6: Of that tradition.
Speaker 2: But the key there is in book six and seven
Speaker 2: of the Republic when Plato'scrates describes the allegory of the
Speaker 2: cave right, which is the paradigm of all Western initiation,
Speaker 2: moving from darkness to light, and then he says, why
Speaker 2: the sun? Why is the sun your image of God?
Speaker 2: He says, because the sun is to cite what God
Speaker 2: is to the mind and knowledge. So there is a
Speaker 2: sun behind the sun that illuminates in here. It doesn't
Speaker 2: happen anywhere else. It illuminates in here, but the Sun
Speaker 2: itself as an emissary what we would call the you know,
Speaker 2: the body in Platonism in Theorgy, we would call the
Speaker 2: sun ilios. We would call that the body of the
Speaker 2: subluminary demiurge, and the purpose it serves is to give
Speaker 2: us a sort of express analogically the principle of illumination,
Speaker 2: so that we it gives us sight and it gives
Speaker 2: us knowledge. Right, you can't know something if you can't
Speaker 2: discern its characteristics, and we can't do that in the dark.
Speaker 2: So there's that relation that automatically comes to to my
Speaker 2: mind when you bring that up, because well, we know
Speaker 2: Robert Flood would have been very familiar with with these traditions.
Speaker 2: But also you know, that's that's kind of the that's
Speaker 2: kind of what I'm steeped in, So that's stuff obviously
Speaker 2: that that platonic hermetic sort of filter is what I'm
Speaker 2: going to be looking through everything at.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: I even think even in the Enneads, I think they
Speaker 4: had a thing on site, So yeah, they're even like
Speaker 4: kind of like getting about like the whole like relationship
Speaker 4: between like I guess, sight and what's in between even
Speaker 4: like what's in between here and the table I'm looking at, Like, yeah, Well,
Speaker 4: and the ancient study of.
Speaker 2: Light was called optics because the Greeks there were in
Speaker 2: terms of their their sort of physiological philosop of either
Speaker 2: medical philosophy or philosophy anatomy, it was.
Speaker 9: They were.
Speaker 2: Really of two frames of mind. You saw things because
Speaker 2: light entered your eyes, or there's this other really cool thing.
Speaker 2: You saw things because light was exiting your eyes and whatever.
Speaker 2: Those beams concentrated on broad knowledge. I mean, that's kind
Speaker 2: of cool idea to think about walking around with laser
Speaker 2: beams firing out of your eyes. But but so so yeah,
Speaker 2: this idea of light, illumination and sight are very very intertwined.
Speaker 6: I mean even in modern even in modern biological.
Speaker 2: Sciences, it's just you know, it's a little it's a
Speaker 2: little less focused on that relationship and it's more focused on.
Speaker 6: Anatomy itself. I would say nowadays.
Speaker 3: All right, thank you very much. I appreciate that answer.
Speaker 3: That was great.
Speaker 4: It's probably the most I got out of anybody I've
Speaker 4: asked that. Normally nobody weird some people out, so I
Speaker 4: don't think they'll come back on. Actually there's one or
Speaker 4: two people I did that too.
Speaker 2: I was like, sorry, I mean, these are these are
Speaker 2: awesome prompts. You guys ask great questions and and and
Speaker 2: and and give great comments.
Speaker 3: Thanks the branch.
Speaker 4: I think I saw you in chat. You were looking
Speaker 4: to ask a question and I don't want to leave
Speaker 4: you out, so you jumped in late.
Speaker 3: What's going on?
Speaker 9: Hey, guys, it's a pleasure to be here. It's nice
Speaker 9: to meet you. I likewise thanks for hosting me. Some
Speaker 9: of the things you discussed kind of jumped out at me,
Speaker 9: so I wanted to mention, Oh, first of all, Nick,
Speaker 9: what the polymath thing? They reminded me of how the
Speaker 9: Mason is instructed to learn the liberal sciences. So when
Speaker 9: you so, when Mike was talking about the classes he
Speaker 9: was taking, I was thinking, oh, well that's you know,
Speaker 9: what you're supposed to do as a Mason, right, is.
Speaker 1: To shape your mind. And but what is the purpose
Speaker 1: of that?
Speaker 5: Right?
Speaker 9: So I think it might be partly so that you
Speaker 9: can relate the correspondences appropriately and or teach perhaps. But anyhow,
Speaker 9: so you mentioned you were a carpenter, speculative Mason at
Speaker 9: the very least, and the magician. So I was curious
Speaker 9: you might be able to kind of answer a question
Speaker 9: I've asked other people before, because you did mention the
Speaker 9: body of Christ being like the sun.
Speaker 6: Right, so where they gather is the church?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 9: So I've always found it kind of strange. Why did
Speaker 9: the church change the way it did. From your opinion
Speaker 9: as a carpenter, maybe you have some insights because the
Speaker 9: temple door was supposed to face east right, and so
Speaker 9: with this relationship to the sun and the body of Christ.
Speaker 9: You know, I'm starting to wonder are we losing things
Speaker 9: like this, the little details in our communal ritual practices,
Speaker 9: because well, it's more convenient just to put it on
Speaker 9: the strip mall location, So we're not really pay attention
Speaker 9: to the actual blueprints that were provided to us in Litviticus,
Speaker 9: for instance. So as a carpenter, maybe you can answer
Speaker 9: that question, because you know how important blueprints are.
Speaker 1: That's the mind of God, right.
Speaker 6: Yeah, well, well that's the thing.
Speaker 2: I'm glad you brought up the several Liberal arts of
Speaker 2: the fellow Craft's degree. It's actually how I got interested
Speaker 2: in Jamie's work. He did a master work called Approaching
Speaker 2: the Middle Chamber that just totally floored me. And he
Speaker 2: goes through for the fellow Craft because a lot of
Speaker 2: times it's this midpoint in your Masonic journey and you're
Speaker 2: just like, Okay, get me through. I want the master Mason,
Speaker 2: and like, also, really, how you're going to learn the
Speaker 2: seven Liberal Arts? But They're really important because when you
Speaker 2: begin to understand them, and then at the same time
Speaker 2: as I'm learning them, right, I'm practicing carpentry, I'm I'm
Speaker 2: apprenticing under a master carpenter, and you begin to see
Speaker 2: that it's like we have this idea of like sacred
Speaker 2: geometry nowadays where we're sort of like reinvesting geometry with
Speaker 2: a kind of this this almost like quasi sci fi
Speaker 2: overlay and like making it like this really really sort
Speaker 2: of abstracted, strange thing that is is I don't know,
Speaker 2: it's part.
Speaker 6: Of the spiritual esthetic.
Speaker 2: And we have to do that because the geometry was
Speaker 2: was made, you know, post it started with euclid but
Speaker 2: after when we discovered non Euclidean geometry, we went completely
Speaker 2: hard science with this stuff. And what studying the Liberal
Speaker 2: arts shows you, right, because they're derived ultimately from Plato's Republic.
Speaker 2: He gives these seven sciences that the that the philosopher
Speaker 2: king must be educated in Aristotle kind of bears them out.
Speaker 6: And then you get.
Speaker 2: These official particularly in the Scholastic era that we were
Speaker 2: talking about earlier with Thomas Aquinas, and this is the
Speaker 2: way that they learned things and what was passed down
Speaker 2: from that philosophical tradition. That metaphysical tradition was the theology
Speaker 2: of number, right, the theology of arithmetic, the theology the
Speaker 2: metaphysic of geometry, the metaphysic of music and harmony. And
Speaker 2: it was inherent. It was completely inherent. So if you
Speaker 2: were to study, particularly as a modern person, the seven
Speaker 2: Liberal arts the way that they were traditionally taught, you
Speaker 2: would essentially the entire time be discussing the way that
Speaker 2: God creates the universe. This is very important to the
Speaker 2: master mason. And not only that, because it's constantly focused
Speaker 2: on a metaphysic, there is no point.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 6: So there's this really great guys h third third century.
Speaker 2: Mathematician Neil Pythagorea named Theon of Smyrna, and he wrote
Speaker 2: this really really cool short treatise but dense, called mathematics
Speaker 2: useful for understanding Plato and the big differentiation you see
Speaker 2: in this book. In the way that he wrote, he says, Okay,
Speaker 2: here's your arithmetical theorem, here's your geometrical theorems, here's your
Speaker 2: harmonic theorems. Right, But before he launches into all this
Speaker 2: this hard science, hard math jargon, he says, beginning at one,
Speaker 2: beginning with unity, beginning with unity. And what he's doing
Speaker 2: there is he's emphasizing the priority of God. He's emphasizing
Speaker 2: the priority of the absolutely doesn't venture into any discussion
Speaker 2: of mathematics without first invoking God. What do we say
Speaker 2: in masonry, You know, no man should enter into any
Speaker 2: greater or important undertaking without first invoking the blessings of Deity.
Speaker 2: So always bringing that back to the table. And I
Speaker 2: think that this understanding in general of the theological and
Speaker 2: metaphysical nature which is inherent to everything we do. Losing
Speaker 2: that we have sacrificed our understanding of any of our traditions,
Speaker 2: whether that's a lot of times occult, whether that's Christian,
Speaker 2: whatever it is. We don't we have inherited things that
Speaker 2: we don't understand how to use because we've basically taken
Speaker 2: the knowledge of that mechanic out of our lexicon, out
Speaker 2: of our brains.
Speaker 6: We don't think like that, We don't understand that. We
Speaker 6: don't know what they thought.
Speaker 2: Why because when we read what they wrote, we're constantly
Speaker 2: trying to filter it through our modern lens, you know,
Speaker 2: which that will just screw everything up. You'll know, ever
Speaker 2: understand what they're talking about if you keep trying to
Speaker 2: stick it through what you know. So the key is
Speaker 2: then to go back. And it's a tremendous undertaking, and
Speaker 2: I will do it for you, but but the key
Speaker 2: is to go back and to learn exactly what they learned,
Speaker 2: you know, learn it. Don't sit there and try and say, oh, well,
Speaker 2: you know, maybe they meant this and what if it?
Speaker 3: Shut up?
Speaker 6: Learn what they learned.
Speaker 2: That's it, Okay, Then you can then once you've assimilated
Speaker 2: that information and you've seen the way that their minds thought,
Speaker 2: the way that and then you've you've you've affected a
Speaker 2: restitution of the ancient worldview, of the holistic worldview that
Speaker 2: we're all trying to get our hands on reenchant our worlds.
Speaker 6: Right, I mean, it was, it's right there.
Speaker 2: But you've got to shut down and shut off this
Speaker 2: part of your brain that wants to, you know, reduce
Speaker 2: everything and make it fit one to one square peg
Speaker 2: square hole into what you understand, because it's not going
Speaker 2: to happen.
Speaker 6: You need to be re educated.
Speaker 2: So that's I mean, I don't know how that ties
Speaker 2: into I know how it ties into carpentry, because like
Speaker 2: I don't know why, but I can tell you definitively
Speaker 2: ninety degree angle is the strongest one and that you
Speaker 2: can use.
Speaker 7: Right.
Speaker 6: I don't know why, but that's a law.
Speaker 2: That's a law that exists regardless if there are ever
Speaker 2: any ninety degree angles ever anywhere. That's a law that
Speaker 2: exists independent of its material expressions. So in that way,
Speaker 2: I understand it was really cool to go through carpentry
Speaker 2: and this time of liberal.
Speaker 6: Arts at the same time.
Speaker 2: But in terms of Christianity, I think that's a big
Speaker 2: part of it, you know, I really think it's a
Speaker 2: big part of it. We don't really understand any of
Speaker 2: this stuff, and we're trying to we're trying to understand
Speaker 2: esoteric with our exoteric minds.
Speaker 6: Yes, that's not gonna happen.
Speaker 3: That's well said. I like that branch. Did you did
Speaker 3: you want to ask anything else? Was they could? Well?
Speaker 9: Yeah, maybe, and thank you so much.
Speaker 1: I appreciate that.
Speaker 9: I guess I would add to it a little bit
Speaker 9: because he's familiar with how a lodge looks, and so
Speaker 9: I've kind of always felt like lodges look more like
Speaker 9: what a church should look like, kind of for these reasons,
Speaker 9: because they kind of preserve some of those Old Testament things.
Speaker 9: So just by going and attending lodge and watching how
Speaker 9: you know the officers walk and ambulate and you know,
Speaker 9: never go between the worshipful Master and the altar. You know,
Speaker 9: there's a lot of different things you can observe and
Speaker 9: kind of glean over time, and you don't get that
Speaker 9: in church today because they've kind of sanitized everything and.
Speaker 1: Just did it's the death of detail.
Speaker 6: You know.
Speaker 9: So I was just curious if he had any particular
Speaker 9: insights maybe like does he ever go to church or
Speaker 9: if he has, because you mentioned like attending Greek Orthodox
Speaker 9: I think before, which I have as well in the past,
Speaker 9: and there are some insights to be gathered there because
Speaker 9: like they still have the Econostosis, for instance, which is
Speaker 9: kind of like the holy Holy Yeah.
Speaker 6: Yeah, those little those little saloon doors.
Speaker 9: Yeah. So yeah, just kind of of the opinion, like
Speaker 9: do you think that maybe in the future we're gonna
Speaker 9: because you know, think about it, magically, what the church
Speaker 9: slash temple is constructed of was actually prescribed, you know,
Speaker 9: and so we've replaced it with you know, discount drywall
Speaker 9: from the whatever and so on and so forth. So
Speaker 9: I think magically we've kind of insulated ourselves from having
Speaker 9: like an authentic religious type experience or a static experience maybe,
Speaker 9: And so I think that's something that some of the
Speaker 9: mysteries of the old days we're trying to preserve through
Speaker 9: their practices, and the Masons kind of have maybe, even
Speaker 9: if it's kind of become mundane. I think they were
Speaker 9: trying to do that in their own way as well.
Speaker 9: So I was just curious, you think we'll have like
Speaker 9: a revival of maybe a return to amples and churches
Speaker 9: looking at how they maybe should or having some type
Speaker 9: of morph of a focus on these structures.
Speaker 1: So I guess that would just be kind of a
Speaker 1: follow up.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, well, I would say from the practical perspective,
Speaker 2: there are not many people who are able to build.
Speaker 2: We don't use the same materials anymore. To your point,
Speaker 2: we used to use stone, marble, granite, et cetera. It's
Speaker 2: a totally different way of working with material We use
Speaker 2: wood now and various you know, composites, synthetics and things
Speaker 2: like this.
Speaker 6: By the way, no.
Speaker 2: Matter what anybody tells you, there is no such thing
Speaker 2: as green building. It's all very harmful. I don't care
Speaker 2: what anybody tells you there's no such thing as green building,
Speaker 2: but the understanding of things like archways and the ornamentation, right,
Speaker 2: think of how ornate even.
Speaker 6: Up until you know, early like the first quarter.
Speaker 2: Of the twentieth century, you know, in nineteen twenty five
Speaker 2: something like that. You know, we were surrounded in beauty. Nowadays,
Speaker 2: you know, we have a very square, you know, modular
Speaker 2: kind of minimalist aesthetic. It robs our brain of being
Speaker 2: able to see what has been referred to as you know, archete.
Speaker 2: Texture is frozen music, music is liquid architecture. So it's
Speaker 2: we don't really have that anymore, you know, we don't
Speaker 2: We don't have the beauty. And so I don't know,
Speaker 2: right because even in ancient Egypt, the intricacy and the proportionality,
Speaker 2: we don't think like that anymore. We can't, you know,
Speaker 2: And so I don't know that.
Speaker 6: It'll return to to that.
Speaker 2: But my question is is how important really isn't if
Speaker 2: if something else happens, which is what we're seeing. We're
Speaker 2: seeing a resurgence in in spiritual outreach. We're seeing the
Speaker 2: first time in a long time, we're seeing uh pagan
Speaker 2: temples being built in Greece. You know, the Greek government
Speaker 2: was given a little bit of a hard time. I
Speaker 2: think I don't really know the particulars of the whole story,
Speaker 2: but uh, you know, there's this resurgence. They're building these
Speaker 2: you know, uh, these Grecian style temples and and putting
Speaker 2: on ceremonial uh in there. And on the other hand,
Speaker 2: you've got something like the edifice of Christianity, which is dwindling.
Speaker 2: It's a good thing, and Ratzinger said this, the church
Speaker 2: will have to it's become such a monstrosity, it's become
Speaker 2: such a such such a caricature, a dark twin that
Speaker 2: it has no choice but to go through the alchemical fire,
Speaker 2: which will reduce it down to its most essential components.
Speaker 6: That means we might go back to house churches. That's
Speaker 6: that's the kind I serve it, right.
Speaker 3: I have.
Speaker 2: I have an ordination, a clerical ordination, and a pre
Speaker 2: Niceen church, meaning a church that practices to the best
Speaker 2: of our ability Christianity the way it was before the
Speaker 2: Council of Nicea. Okay so, and and it's small groups
Speaker 2: of people meeting and having the sacramental, theurgic, alchemical eucharists.
Speaker 2: Because that's the Eucharist, is all those things. It's theurgic
Speaker 2: and it's al chemical. Okay, So this is what has
Speaker 2: to happen before we start understanding, you know.
Speaker 6: How to And the same thing's happened in Masonry.
Speaker 2: I am so lucky that my lodge gets to meet
Speaker 2: at you know, eighty Broadway, the Masonic Temple in Ashville.
Speaker 6: It's gorgeous. But I've been all over this.
Speaker 2: Country in the last three years to talk to brother Masons,
Speaker 2: and they have had to divest themselves of the financial
Speaker 2: burden of their beautiful, beautiful building, the meeting in the
Speaker 2: basements of vfw haws.
Speaker 6: So that's happening too.
Speaker 2: The Masonic numbers are dwindling, the Christian numbers are dwindling.
Speaker 2: But getting back to a core that I think is
Speaker 2: really important, sincere earnest people that are there really looking
Speaker 2: for the heart of what it is, I think that's
Speaker 2: probably the most important. No matter what your spiritual path is,
Speaker 2: get back down to the elements, get back down to
Speaker 2: the foundations, and that should be the fire that we
Speaker 2: crowd around warm ourselves in this you know, spiritually arid
Speaker 2: and cold terrain of the twenty first century.
Speaker 9: And may I please follow up, but once more, since
Speaker 9: his vocation was a trade skill, I think part of
Speaker 9: what we're seeing is because there are fewer people going
Speaker 9: into trades, we're also losing the ability to create these.
Speaker 1: Things over time.
Speaker 9: Right, So it kind of reminds me of like the
Speaker 9: fourth Turning kind of principle, is like maybe we'll have
Speaker 9: a renaissance of some sort of occur. But I was
Speaker 9: going to ask the question itself, however, was how important
Speaker 9: you think labor is for somebody having a sense of
Speaker 9: purpose from a cabalistic perspective. Matt has made the comment before,
Speaker 9: like you can find kabbala and everything, you know, whether
Speaker 9: it be tennis, carpentry or whatever. As long as you're
Speaker 9: into it deep, you know you're going to reveal things.
Speaker 9: And so I was just curious, if we move into
Speaker 9: this future of like a universal basic income and things
Speaker 9: like that, do you think we're going to see a
Speaker 9: further degradation of spirituality or couple kind of be forced
Speaker 9: into these small house churches, right, And that kind of
Speaker 9: reminds me of the days when they met underground, you know,
Speaker 9: And I can't remember what those were called the mith
Speaker 9: Raim's or whatever.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, and you see that in Egypt too, they
Speaker 2: use particularly the mortuary temple of had chepstud has early
Speaker 2: Christian crosses on it because that's where they would have
Speaker 2: to go out to the Valley of the Kings, away
Speaker 2: from civilization, under cover of darkness and these ruins in
Speaker 2: order to practice mass. And so yeah, there's really cool,
Speaker 2: these these little hideaways, in these secret places. Is in
Speaker 2: the markers they left, they are still there, you know,
Speaker 2: after like, yeah, fifteen hundred years.
Speaker 6: But yeah, I mean, I don't really know. I do
Speaker 6: think that.
Speaker 2: Well, you asked, what how important is labor? Well, I
Speaker 2: say this from a cabalistic perspective. We are in malkout
Speaker 2: of Asaiah or Asia. Okay, Asia, the fourth or fifth
Speaker 2: lowest world is that it's literal translation is the world
Speaker 2: of making.
Speaker 6: This is what is meant in the Biblical Genesis. When
Speaker 6: by the sweat of your brow will you eat bread?
Speaker 6: You know, now is the time of toil. That's you
Speaker 6: must labor. You must labor here.
Speaker 2: And I'm not saying everybody has to go out and
Speaker 2: become a construction worker, but you have to embrace a
Speaker 2: life of physicality because it's labor. Just especially nowaday to
Speaker 2: not be very unhealthy physically. That's a kind of labor
Speaker 2: to keep yourself, keep your body functioning optimally.
Speaker 6: In twenty twenty five in America, so you know, especially now,
Speaker 6: a lot of us work online, sitting for hours.
Speaker 2: It's that's completely new to me. I've only ever worked
Speaker 2: as a humph. I've done manual labor my whole life,
Speaker 2: you know, And now all of a sudden, I'm sitting
Speaker 2: here eight hours a day writing and I'm like, I
Speaker 2: need to get out of this chair.
Speaker 6: These things are important.
Speaker 2: It sounds crazy, but I mean especially cabitalistically, and you
Speaker 2: want to you know, use that you know, Jewish or
Speaker 2: Judeo Christian mythology from Genesis and the expulsion from the
Speaker 2: Garden was really saying, look, you have chosen. You have
Speaker 2: chosen to enter into a world that requires toil. It's
Speaker 2: not punishment, but it's you have chosen to enter into
Speaker 2: a place that requires toil. So so yeah, I think
Speaker 2: labor is important. I think trades are important. Well, a
Speaker 2: lot of people don't understand. They think a carpentry is
Speaker 2: kind of like I think carpentry gets conflated with with
Speaker 2: general labor. You know, people that are like sweeping floors
Speaker 2: and Karen wheelbarrows. That's what you got to do when
Speaker 2: you start out. It's part of the apprenticeship.
Speaker 3: You do the grunt work.
Speaker 2: But carpentry is so incredibly intellectual. You are working with
Speaker 2: precision mathematics and then somehow you've got to get this
Speaker 2: out of the material. You've got to got to make
Speaker 2: no piece of no, no two by four straight, you know,
Speaker 2: but you've got to figure this out. You know, you're
Speaker 2: fighting with the materials and getting them into mathematical geometric
Speaker 2: shapes that a don't make you lose a lot of money,
Speaker 2: because when you screw up in carpentry, you lost mone
Speaker 2: and B that the house or building doesn't fall fall
Speaker 2: in on everybody, and then you've got a real problem
Speaker 2: on your hands. Okay, so so it's not even just
Speaker 2: the labor, but it's like the I think we are.
Speaker 2: Our modern civilization, especially the younger people, can really benefit from,
Speaker 2: you know, extracting the real time value of uh this
Speaker 2: mind body access and the interplay the intellect, and then
Speaker 2: taking what you've learned, taking that skill and applying it
Speaker 2: in real life.
Speaker 6: It will just help you be a I think a
Speaker 6: more effective person.
Speaker 3: That was great. Does anybody wanted to ask anything or
Speaker 3: set the wrap it up?
Speaker 5: I asked a question like your your treasure trove of
Speaker 5: wonderful was to the massay, and I wanted to put
Speaker 5: or give you some prompts of of the things that
Speaker 5: you've been touching on and maybe if you could put
Speaker 5: them together. Partly because of my obsession with the topics
Speaker 5: you mentioned the tetractus, I wonder if and sacred geometry.
Speaker 6: I wonder if you might.
Speaker 5: Be able to share with us how the tetragrammaton is
Speaker 5: related to the tetractus, and at least in depiction of it,
Speaker 5: and and and and so forth. I just wonder if
Speaker 5: you could build on the tetractics and the relationship to
Speaker 5: the Word of God another another thing you brought up.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, oh yeah, the Word of God, very very good. Right,
Speaker 2: So that's the ineffable name of God, is the Tetragrammaton.
Speaker 2: It's also Greek that word tetra for grammaton, you know letters.
Speaker 2: So you've got the tetractys. Uh, try and do my
Speaker 2: best here for somebody that that maybe has never heard
Speaker 2: or seen it before. The tetractice is in a example
Speaker 2: of what I called before a triangular number. Okay, why
Speaker 2: because when you put it's basically any time you add
Speaker 2: in numerical sequence. If you add two to one, you
Speaker 2: get a triangular number, right, because it's one two. You
Speaker 2: add three to two to that sequence, you get a
Speaker 2: triangular number. Get you add four, you get a triangular number.
Speaker 2: So one plus two plus three plus four arranged in
Speaker 2: a triangle, those little counting pebbles gives us tetractys, which is,
Speaker 2: it gives us ten one plus two plus three plus
Speaker 2: four those add to ten. The Pythagoreans who devised the
Speaker 2: system said, when you have ten, you have everything that
Speaker 2: is right, because ten is one on a higher arc.
Speaker 2: And there's I'm giving a course right now called musical
Speaker 2: universalis music as magic, and we're you know, it's a
Speaker 2: huge part of it. Is exactly what I'm talking about now,
Speaker 2: this geometric and arithmetical overlay that allows us to use
Speaker 2: harmony and sympathy at magic. But uh so we can
Speaker 2: get into some hairy territory. I'm going to forego that
Speaker 2: because I don't want to beat anybody over the head
Speaker 2: with this stuff. But the ten therefore was the attractees
Speaker 2: was therefore their conception of the sub totality of of
Speaker 2: the essential universal forces. Same thing with the spear oft
Speaker 2: on the tree of life ten right, and that's the
Speaker 2: whole cosmos. And it just refracts or fractalizes. Uh. Now,
Speaker 2: this figure, and here's something for the Masons, was reduced
Speaker 2: in Plato's Timaus to a series of numbers integers, and
Speaker 2: they called this Plato's lambda. And along the right side right,
Speaker 2: so it's essentially you would have the tatrackt these as
Speaker 2: a full triangle, but the lambda is just extracting the
Speaker 2: apex and two sides of that triangle and not the base.
Speaker 6: So it looks like a Masonic compass. It looks like compasses. Okay.
Speaker 2: And at the top he placed he Plato gives us
Speaker 2: a series of really random they seem random numbers one, two, three, four, eight, nine,
Speaker 2: twenty seven.
Speaker 6: And what he's doing there is.
Speaker 2: He's there are two branches that start right theannas Smirtna says,
Speaker 2: beginning with unity, beginning with one at the top. You
Speaker 2: move down the right and you have the odd numbers
Speaker 2: right three nine twenty seven. Powers you move down the
Speaker 2: left side, you get the even numbers two, four, eight,
Speaker 2: So when you arrange the tetragrammaton on this, you essentially
Speaker 2: have the yode right because we leave we read Hebrew
Speaker 2: right to left, you have the yode moving down the
Speaker 2: side of uh, the odd numbers which are thought to
Speaker 2: be masculine or positive. Now yode uh is if you
Speaker 2: want to talk about it in a hermetic cabalistic context,
Speaker 2: is it represents the root of the powers of fire.
Speaker 6: And then it builds, It builds out from that yode
Speaker 6: yode hey yodhey vob yodhey vav hey.
Speaker 2: And this is the sequence of generation, and it all
Speaker 2: goes back to this really interesting thing.
Speaker 6: We call it.
Speaker 2: We call it the tetragrammaton right, yes, thank you for
Speaker 2: putting this up. We call it the tetragrammaton four lettered name.
Speaker 2: There are only three letters in that name.
Speaker 6: One of them repeats, there are only three letters, and
Speaker 6: what did we say happens in the beginning? The one
Speaker 6: is somehow three that hey.
Speaker 2: Final, This is the window through which the eye peers
Speaker 2: out and perceives universe. It is a a new it's
Speaker 2: you could even picture yodey vav he kind of like
Speaker 2: walking through this window. This this this sort of thing.
Speaker 6: It's it's.
Speaker 2: The inevitable sort of fourth that gives birth to the
Speaker 2: new fractal permutation.
Speaker 4: Uh.
Speaker 2: And this is exactly what the atractice and this cycle
Speaker 2: of generation here, this arrangement of the words, this is
Speaker 2: what is trying to u to show you. But the
Speaker 2: thing is you you really need to understand what this
Speaker 2: meant to the to the Pythagoreans and neo Pythagoreans and
Speaker 2: the Platonists before you can understand everything else.
Speaker 6: And then so you'd get.
Speaker 2: One, three, nine, twenty seven, one, two, four and eight, right,
Speaker 2: which is just it's a sequence of adding numbers to
Speaker 2: other numbers. Adding one to one, you get two, adding
Speaker 2: one to two you get three. Then you go two
Speaker 2: to the power of itself, three to the power of two,
Speaker 2: three to the power of itself, two to the power
Speaker 2: of three, squaring and cubing, and essentially, as the lambda,
Speaker 2: it shows how God moves from a point to align
Speaker 2: to a surface. Right, that's why we call it a
Speaker 2: square number creates a square right. And when you've got
Speaker 2: that little three above it, that exponent three that is cubing.
Speaker 2: So we've gone from point to line to surface to
Speaker 2: solid object. Effectively, the lambda and its expression as the
Speaker 2: tractus and.
Speaker 6: The four elements of the name are showing.
Speaker 2: How the divine literally manifests, penetrates into three dimensional space and.
Speaker 6: Becomes something.
Speaker 2: So I don't know if that really answers your question,
Speaker 2: but I've just I've been drowning in this stuff until
Speaker 2: I've learned how to swim in it. Uh So.
Speaker 5: That was that was great. Thank you for sharing that.
Speaker 5: That that brought it all together. The word the tetragrammaton,
Speaker 5: the tech Tractus and Sacred Gem.
Speaker 2: Yeah, because the word is logos, right order, and that's
Speaker 2: exactly what the tetractus is trying to show.
Speaker 6: Order. It's how God orders the cosmos so that he
Speaker 6: can come into existence.
Speaker 5: It also reminds me of maybe you might be familiar
Speaker 5: with this. I've heard there's the Masonic equation or idea
Speaker 5: where they say that the four is equal to ten.
Speaker 2: Yes, yeah, absolutely, that's why it's called the tech tractys. Right,
Speaker 2: tetra is four in Greek, but there's but there's ten dots,
Speaker 2: but there's four lines. It's because again, four is the
Speaker 2: completion of everything, and because one plus two plus three
Speaker 2: plus four equals ten.
Speaker 6: And when if you have ten.
Speaker 9: You have everything, dopett May I ask that question real quick?
Speaker 3: Go for a branch please?
Speaker 9: Could this tet tracks also be a tool to look
Speaker 9: at when looking at the minor pip cards because they're
Speaker 9: all in tens of each suit's a ten, right, so
Speaker 9: is there anything there to glean?
Speaker 6: Yeah? I would absolutely arrange them, because again.
Speaker 2: We've got the tetractees is effectively representing the tree of
Speaker 2: life in a triangular Format's a precursor to the to
Speaker 2: the cabalistic tree of life. Okay, without the paths, it's
Speaker 2: but the thing is it's it's also drawn with paths,
Speaker 2: but they're angles.
Speaker 6: But we won't get into that.
Speaker 3: So what you do in the.
Speaker 2: Hermetic kabala is you take the pip cards and you
Speaker 2: put them by number into the sphere out It would
Speaker 2: be the same thing, right, All the aces go to Ketter,
Speaker 2: all the two's go to Hawkma, all the threes go
Speaker 2: to Bena, all the fours go to has said that,
Speaker 2: so on and so forth, Geble different all the way
Speaker 2: down to ten and malcout. Okay, so you could absolutely
Speaker 2: do that with the te tractors and the tattractice is
Speaker 2: essentially the biggest thing that I want to impress on
Speaker 2: people is that it's it's if you needed just a keyword,
Speaker 2: keywords for it's a formula of generation. That's how everything
Speaker 2: is created.
Speaker 8: Yeah. One thing I can add, maybe, Joshua, is if
Speaker 8: you look into the Tarot of Bohemians from Papus, he
Speaker 8: goes into like connecting the Tarrat with the judev of hey,
Speaker 8: like the tetragrammaton. And then if you know already that
Speaker 8: it's basically the same as the tractus, and just just
Speaker 8: make the associations yourself. I'd also want to ask something
Speaker 8: to Ike. I don't know if you ever went about
Speaker 8: the works of the Archeometer from Saint Eve's.
Speaker 3: I have the book here.
Speaker 6: It's he basically worked.
Speaker 8: With Purpose as well, who founded like Martanism and so
Speaker 8: on and on, and I found it very intriguing, very
Speaker 8: nice how it connects to what we were talking here,
Speaker 8: because the Archeometer goes about like it was basically saying
Speaker 8: Eve's idea of connecting all the like past mythologies, all
Speaker 8: the past you know, sciences and connecting everything in one,
Speaker 8: which like you mentioned, was already in the eighteen hundreds.
Speaker 6: But they really they they knew the Kabbala.
Speaker 8: So like he'll talk about Kabbala, but probably not the
Speaker 8: Kabbala that we know, because the Kabbala as we think,
Speaker 8: like tree of life with colors and whatever, the hermetic
Speaker 8: one when just came after it, right, So, but he
Speaker 8: gives a lot of nice examples, like we were talking
Speaker 8: about how you can construct things with angles, and then
Speaker 8: how maybe that angle will be connected to the same
Speaker 8: essence of a color or of a like a sound
Speaker 8: or something like. That's what the the thing shows here,
Speaker 8: like you connect let's say maybe one of the numbers
Speaker 8: is with one of the colors and one sound and
Speaker 8: one astrology sign and whatever. So but the only problem
Speaker 8: with I mean, now we kind of have yeah, that's brands. Now,
Speaker 8: now we kind of have an English translation I've found
Speaker 8: or Solar found one of our lodge friends. It's not
Speaker 8: really the best, but I don't know if you ever
Speaker 8: encountered it before, which I think you should give it.
Speaker 8: At least a skin through would be an interesting thing.
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah, I haven't looked at that.
Speaker 2: I'm definitely aware of sez Or's I.
Speaker 6: I'm gonna, yeah, emphasize your point there that the the
Speaker 6: sort of.
Speaker 2: Martinist and especially the French way of utilizing the cabala
Speaker 2: is to this day very different. You'll meet people that
Speaker 2: come out of a French system, uh, never worked any
Speaker 2: anything Golden Dawn derivative, and they have almost they have
Speaker 2: very different attributions to the tarot cards.
Speaker 6: But yeah, I absolutely I will check that out. I
Speaker 6: got to put it on the queue. Thank you very much.
Speaker 3: Nice.
Speaker 8: I think I'll send you on Instagram.
Speaker 6: Yeah, thank you. But does anybody have any questions about
Speaker 6: the Golden Dawn?
Speaker 9: Oh?
Speaker 4: Yeah, you know what, I was gonna probably leave I
Speaker 4: was probably just gonna leave that out because it's already
Speaker 4: been an hour and a half and so yea, yeah, no, no,
Speaker 4: you're good on that, dude. No, maybe I'll have you
Speaker 4: back on some other time to talk about that, but yeah,
Speaker 4: we'll just I think this conversation was better not actually getting.
Speaker 3: Into that topic. So good. Awesome, Yeah, yeah, this was great. Yeah.
Speaker 4: Was there anything else, Gin or anybody else here have
Speaker 4: anything you wanted to ask before we wrap it up? Well?
Speaker 1: I do have one, of course.
Speaker 7: So you touched on something really interesting that we've kind
Speaker 7: of played with as a speculative idea in the Gray Lodge,
Speaker 7: like the there's five of us, but there's three of
Speaker 7: us represented on the panel right now. But of the
Speaker 7: sort of aonic shift in religion, and so this is
Speaker 7: obviously a fall up to mass question, like sort of
Speaker 7: the decentralization, deinstitutionalization into these smaller networks, into these smaller nodes,
Speaker 7: you could even say, And I want your opinion on
Speaker 7: how that will also perhaps look in contemporary American magic
Speaker 7: or maybe even speculative in the near future of American magic,
Speaker 7: because you have a lot of people who many of
Speaker 7: whom or all of whom perhaps you've spoken with, talking
Speaker 7: kind of about like not necessarily that they're abandoning their
Speaker 7: system or their lodge or their you know, traditional sort
Speaker 7: of frameworks, but they are kind of going away from
Speaker 7: the dogmatic, as you said, the klipas of the institutions.
Speaker 7: They are kind of crumbling, They are destabilized, and they
Speaker 7: are not carrying forward into the future perhaps even the
Speaker 7: original or even the preserved meanings. So I just want
Speaker 7: to your appraisal of, like where do you think modern
Speaker 7: American magic is going to go? Do you see it
Speaker 7: being contained in a particular religious or traditional framework, or
Speaker 7: do you see something like new arising perhaps.
Speaker 6: Well you know, what usually takes place is a.
Speaker 2: Some form of synthesis between the push pull of diametric opposition.
Speaker 2: So where we find that in our communities, particularly regarding
Speaker 2: magic and occultism, that's going to define the boundaries the
Speaker 2: limit of the system, this opposition, and then somewhere in
Speaker 2: the middle they're going to meet and there'll be many
Speaker 2: manifestations of that.
Speaker 6: Magic in particular, it goes through these growth spurts, and
Speaker 6: for better or for worse, say, if.
Speaker 2: You look at it historically, at least since the eighteen hundreds,
Speaker 2: really happens right before a major world event that is.
Speaker 6: Not necessarily fun.
Speaker 2: Uh, but magic will kind of come to the surface
Speaker 2: because it's important, right, It's it's it's it's a way
Speaker 2: of of of healing the collective.
Speaker 6: It's an opportunity to heal the collective. It's not a
Speaker 6: way to heal.
Speaker 2: The collect because I feel like it's like anything else,
Speaker 2: it's up to the individual.
Speaker 6: How are you going to use this?
Speaker 2: Then that will determine whether or not it heals or hinders.
Speaker 2: But I would say there is a de institutionalization. But
Speaker 2: I see also in magic a thirst and a hunger
Speaker 2: for structure, and so a lot of people want to
Speaker 2: you know, kind of I don't know. It seems like
Speaker 2: they almost want to be like, they want to engage
Speaker 2: in a form of like esso territorism. Come into the
Speaker 2: Golden dawn for a little.
Speaker 6: While, see what that's all about.
Speaker 2: Structure sounds really nice, that might help. Then the thing
Speaker 2: is you get there and you're looking for this like
Speaker 2: confirmation bias. Instead of saying, oh, maybe this will change me,
Speaker 2: you're saying, oh, maybe I don't know, maybe more intellectually
Speaker 2: fat or something. And it's can be more information. Again,
Speaker 2: you can't think your way into this stuff. But there
Speaker 2: are a lot of people that are craving that structure,
Speaker 2: whether or not they can handle it. It's a different
Speaker 2: story we have as modern people. Look at us now,
Speaker 2: we're you know, a bunch of talking heads. On one hand,
Speaker 2: it's great that the internet can bring us together, and
Speaker 2: on the other hand, there's a generation of people coming
Speaker 2: into this world that are completely abstracted from traditional community
Speaker 2: and social dynamics.
Speaker 6: Okay, so people have a.
Speaker 2: Really hard time dealing with the fact that there are
Speaker 2: other people here, you know, like in my physical space.
Speaker 2: So we need to work on that because I don't
Speaker 2: I Magic will collapse if it becomes a bunch of
Speaker 2: solo practitioners that are just communicating via zoom, because the
Speaker 2: same thing, all the same eclecticism that ultimately never real
Speaker 2: never it goes to the fur, to the ends, to
Speaker 2: the degree it goes to its furthest possible extreme, and
Speaker 2: then completely dissipates rather than sort of crowding around. And
Speaker 2: I'm talking, you know, on a demographic level, not necessarily,
Speaker 2: I'm not speaking about individuals. I know for certain that's
Speaker 2: going to happen, but I was saying a demographic level,
Speaker 2: populations level. I see magic kind of turning into something
Speaker 2: completely different.
Speaker 6: And this A lot of this has to do with.
Speaker 2: Uh, you know, academia's sudden interest in what we do,
Speaker 2: which is not a bad thing, right. I have a
Speaker 2: lot of friends that are that are academics. I organized
Speaker 2: an academic conference in Egypt. But I would say that
Speaker 2: that somehow is going to in packed that and the
Speaker 2: sort of socially distant interactions is going to impact that.
Speaker 2: I do see people yearning for that group dynamic, but
Speaker 2: I do also find that when they get there, a
Speaker 2: lot of them, especially if they're younger, can't handle it.
Speaker 2: They can't like the gold You come into the golden
Speaker 2: dawn and it is not a democracy. It's a hierarchy. Okay,
Speaker 2: there are three chiefs in every temple and you have
Speaker 2: to do what they say.
Speaker 6: Now, we can't tell you to what diet to go
Speaker 6: on or who to hang out with, but it's still
Speaker 6: in that dynamic. There is a clear hierarchy.
Speaker 2: People don't like hierarchy anymore because they're insecure to the
Speaker 2: point where that makes them feel intimidated or uncomfortable. Whereas
Speaker 2: in previous relationships or previous iterations of communal interaction, it
Speaker 2: was nice to find a little spot where you fed in,
Speaker 2: fit in. This is where my job is, and I'll
Speaker 2: work my way up. People don't want to do that
Speaker 2: anymore to a large degree.
Speaker 6: So that's the trouble that we're going to have.
Speaker 2: They want it, but when the rubber hits the road,
Speaker 2: it's uncomfortable, and so they decide, I'm going to go
Speaker 2: and do something else, and then normally they'll don't get
Speaker 2: me wrong, some people unfortunately suffer abuse at the hands
Speaker 2: of others. But I would say, certainly, while that is
Speaker 2: an issue, you know it can happen anywhere, and I
Speaker 2: think that it's not necessarily the rule.
Speaker 6: I think it's the exception. But you.
Speaker 2: You hear from a lot of those people who get burned.
Speaker 2: You know, they go on campaigns where they're making sure
Speaker 2: everybody knows what happened, and so.
Speaker 6: I try to be a voice. It's look at golden
Speaker 6: do not perfect? Why because it's made of.
Speaker 2: People and everything people do, everything people make. There's a religion,
Speaker 2: if it's a company, if it's going to be indelibly
Speaker 2: imprinted with our highest potentialities and our lows. Okay, there's
Speaker 2: no escaping that. Welcome to duality. So welcome to the realm.
Speaker 2: So so you know what we'll see.
Speaker 6: It's an interesting question. You know, I'm not sure I
Speaker 6: have an answer.
Speaker 7: I think that's the perfect sort of way to respond
Speaker 7: to that is to just say, yeah, it's in flux,
Speaker 7: let's see what happens and let's serve with it.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 9: Do you guys think that maybe that's what motivated the
Speaker 9: kind of the some of the names that were mentioned
Speaker 9: throughout Iambickolis or whatever, people like that. There's stories about
Speaker 9: how some of these folks would travel to other lands
Speaker 9: and so in that new system that they're now in
Speaker 9: they were a big fish way back in Athens or whatever.
Speaker 9: But they go to Egypt and now it's like, well,
Speaker 9: now I'm a novice again, right, So do you think
Speaker 9: that that's kind of part of the hermit journey perhaps,
Speaker 9: is to seek out contemporaries or people that you can
Speaker 9: have fellowship with or something like that.
Speaker 1: Is there an element of that there perhaps?
Speaker 8: Yeah?
Speaker 2: And I mean, don't underestimate the support system it can
Speaker 2: give you. You know, when I was a kid, I
Speaker 2: used to see things people in my hallway, you know,
Speaker 2: probably in like third grade, this stuff started really happening,
Speaker 2: and I didn't like it. I hated it, so I
Speaker 2: blocked it out. And then years later when I undergo
Speaker 2: a gold initiation, lo and behold the doors are blown
Speaker 2: off and all this stuff starts happening again.
Speaker 6: So, you know, I'm waking up in the middle of
Speaker 6: the night.
Speaker 2: And there are people in my room, you know, the figures, entities, whatever,
Speaker 2: with a visible appearance. I then go to like a
Speaker 2: support group of between three to ten to twenty people
Speaker 2: that all have different experiences, different backgrounds, and all have
Speaker 2: a firm, rather firm footing in this stuff, and I
Speaker 2: can use them as a sounding board.
Speaker 6: Hey, should I go to a mental hospital? You know,
Speaker 6: like what what needs to be Am I losing my mind?
Speaker 2: And then you'll have people kind of you know, because
Speaker 2: the average person is going to might freak out to
Speaker 2: stuff like that, you know, and might really my first
Speaker 2: inclination was like I'm going crazy, but it was ultimately
Speaker 2: through the support given to me by people in my
Speaker 2: first Golden Dawn Temple. The whole temple, right like a
Speaker 2: village really really talked me through that stuff. And now
Speaker 2: it's to the point where you know, I can control
Speaker 2: it instead of it really being a consistently jarring experience
Speaker 2: for me. So I think support structures are are another
Speaker 2: way of apprenticing yourself to a path because ultimately, like
Speaker 2: it's not just about submission, it's to your point, it's
Speaker 2: very much about remaining an eternal student.
Speaker 6: But you should have I personally think you should have
Speaker 6: many teachers.
Speaker 8: Some would say at least one hundred and eight.
Speaker 3: I don't know.
Speaker 6: I don't have that much time, or I mean it
Speaker 6: depends who you're caught as a teacher.
Speaker 8: Right, if you go outside and you look at a
Speaker 8: tree and okay, you learn something.
Speaker 6: Yeah, maybe I can rank up that number.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and and this and in this world right, there
Speaker 2: are so many teachers from beyond the grave, you know.
Speaker 2: Big one for me was Deonnfortune and uh, you know,
Speaker 2: I visited her grave in Glastonbury probably about six years ago,
Speaker 2: and you know, I kind of did it like, oh cool,
Speaker 2: I've been reading her books for years. I learned a
Speaker 2: lot about it. And then I get there and I
Speaker 2: just got so incredibly overwhelmed emotionally.
Speaker 6: I was just bawling. I didn't even know why. It
Speaker 6: was like despite myself, you know.
Speaker 2: And and yeah, I realized probably afterward that like, this
Speaker 2: person is a teacher to me.
Speaker 6: I never met him, you know, never met her.
Speaker 4: Well I could understand that. Yeah, I guess everybody jin
Speaker 4: or mad or Ethan. You guys, good a breach too.
Speaker 4: We'll wrap it up then, yeah, sorry.
Speaker 3: Well thank you for having me on guys. Hell yeah, great,
Speaker 3: hell yeah, no, that was awesome. Sorry. We never did
Speaker 3: get to the Golden Door, but like I said, I'm
Speaker 3: quite happy with the way the show went. Anyway. I
Speaker 3: thought that was a good look.
Speaker 6: I say this a lot. I've been called many things
Speaker 6: in my life, but never brief.
Speaker 3: So that's great. It's awesome stuff. Jin real quick, do
Speaker 3: you want to remind everybody where they could find your stuff?
Speaker 1: Sure? So I want to say thank you so much.
Speaker 7: I this was honestly like one of the reasons I
Speaker 7: started podcasting was to have this conversation. And I've had
Speaker 7: many milestones like Nick and I have done lots of
Speaker 7: cool things, So thank you Nick. And also bringing and
Speaker 7: obviously it's led to open the door to bring people
Speaker 7: onto my show, so including Matt and Joshua and also
Speaker 7: the group show. We do the Gray Lodge, Speculative Cabala,
Speaker 7: speculative of colle Chakra, and speculative Narcissism every Friday night
Speaker 7: live on X So thank you guys so much.
Speaker 1: Obviously, Joshua had the branch.
Speaker 7: I will apologize because he was late because of me,
Speaker 7: So it was nothing to do with him or his punctuation.
Speaker 7: It was because I was late, So I apologize for that.
Speaker 7: But Joshua just had an episode drop on my show
Speaker 7: on Claymore So the Kabbala of Claymore. We go through
Speaker 7: the anime series and the manga series, so that's called
Speaker 7: Faint Smile. I have an episode with Solar, our other
Speaker 7: co host, and the Gray Lodge dropping either today or
Speaker 7: tomorrow morning with Gregory Peters who wrote the new a
Speaker 7: on Tantra and I have lots lots and lots coming
Speaker 7: up with lots of interesting authors and so thank you
Speaker 7: so much, and of course thank you Matt for being
Speaker 7: our webmaster and building out our site and all the
Speaker 7: hard work you do for the Great Lodge and keeping
Speaker 7: our YouTube channel like and subscribe and if you want
Speaker 7: to follow me at wokongribornwuk O and g Reborn on
Speaker 7: Twitter and then the show at Threshold Saints and anywhere you.
Speaker 1: Get your podcasts. So thank you guys, all the whole
Speaker 1: panel and especially I of course thank you.
Speaker 3: Thank you Ja. I'm glad you made it today, sir
Speaker 3: and Matt Moore. What is going on?
Speaker 6: Man?
Speaker 3: Let everybody know where they can find you a site
Speaker 3: and everything, for sure.
Speaker 8: Yeah, thanks a lot. Cho is a very intriguing conversation.
Speaker 8: I perspond with a lot of stuff. You the way
Speaker 8: you think and Swan so very good. Always nice to
Speaker 8: have these type of things. And yeah, everyone can find
Speaker 8: me at at Metmore nineteen. That's going to be on Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, Twitch,
Speaker 8: maybe some other place. There's also my website that's Cabala
Speaker 8: dot com k A A B A L A h
Speaker 8: dot com. A lot of stuff going on there. Just
Speaker 8: made some updates this week is also just opening myself
Speaker 8: more to reading because now it's much faster to do it.
Speaker 6: And so if you are interested in that, just DM
Speaker 6: me any of those.
Speaker 3: Thanks about me of course, thank you very much and Indigo, sir.
Speaker 5: Piece that was awesome, Mike, thank you so much for
Speaker 5: sharing all your knowledge and wisdom. I really appreciated that
Speaker 5: and everyone. I appreciate you guys so much. Easy to
Speaker 5: find on all the social media, and I appreciate people
Speaker 5: reaching out and communicating and articles dropping soon and writing frequently.
Speaker 5: So yeah, again, thanks so much.
Speaker 3: I thank you Ethan. I appreciate you making it again.
Speaker 3: It was early for you and the branch. What is
Speaker 3: up sir?
Speaker 9: Thank you for hosting Nick.
Speaker 1: It's a great pleasure to meet you again.
Speaker 9: Ike Jin did a great outro for me, so all
Speaker 9: I could add to that is I did recently do
Speaker 9: a blurb on Symbolic Studies soon to premiere video and
Speaker 9: Stagitty areas Symbolism, so check him out on Twitter and
Speaker 9: YouTube and does some really good work that's a wonderful
Speaker 9: gathering of people.
Speaker 1: I really appreciate being a part of this.
Speaker 3: Thank you so much for the invitation, of course, thank
Speaker 3: you for making it.
Speaker 4: And finally, if you want to let everybody know where
Speaker 4: they can find all your stuff again.
Speaker 6: Yeah, thanks so much guys for having me on.
Speaker 2: Truly, thank you for the work that you continue to
Speaker 2: do and to give to our communities some valuable Thanks
Speaker 2: everybody that tuned in for the live stream. If you
Speaker 2: want to know anything more about me, go to Ike
Speaker 2: Baker dot com I K E B A K E
Speaker 2: R dot com Again, use the chat widget in the
Speaker 2: bottom right corner. I've got a mailing list you can
Speaker 2: sign up for there. We actually just went through the
Speaker 2: Theology of Numbers. It's it's totally free. The emails are
Speaker 2: digestible that go out every Thursday. I've got courses going
Speaker 2: on every quarter. The next one coming up is Techniques
Speaker 2: of Greco Egyptian Theorgy. It's going to be a distillation
Speaker 2: of the work that I did in Egypt with that
Speaker 2: group of practitioners. So I'll be teaching that via zoom
Speaker 2: and you can reach out to me and sign up
Speaker 2: for that. And yeah, check out my podcast, I've got
Speaker 2: some solid guests. You want to learn more about the
Speaker 2: Golden Dawn. I've got two episodes up there about the
Speaker 2: history of the Golden Dawn, and I did an interview
Speaker 2: with my greatly honored chiefs Chicken, Tabatha Sisera up there,
Speaker 2: and you can hear about like you know them, with Israel,
Speaker 2: Regorty and and Grady McMurtry and things like that.
Speaker 6: So go check that out, write to me whatever you like,
Speaker 6: and I think that's it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, thanks guys, check out that episode myself. Yeah nice, Yeah,
Speaker 4: that's pretty cool man. I again, thank you so much
Speaker 4: for coming on it. Just really, I mean again, sorry
Speaker 4: we didn't get into the Golden Down. I'm glad I
Speaker 4: asked about your books at first, but honestly, the show
Speaker 4: went better than I could have asked or really am
Speaker 4: very proud to put the show out on my listeners.
Speaker 4: Hopefully we'll get you back on again in the future.
Speaker 4: But again, there was an awesome conversation, and I thank
Speaker 4: you everybody who came and made it again. It was
Speaker 4: a little earlier, different time zones for everybody here, but
Speaker 4: we made it happen and I still think it's fucking wild.
Speaker 4: Have we both moved from New York to.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I was gonna say, you know, we should do
Speaker 2: we should go to Pilot Mountain, Yoh yeah, yeah, it
Speaker 2: was it the Yeah, I told you right, I think
Speaker 2: I hit you up.
Speaker 3: I was like, oh, have you been there? Because I
Speaker 3: want to go there and record that shit and film
Speaker 3: it and just check it out.
Speaker 4: So it's like two hours from me, I'll go, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 4: we definitely all right, So definitely think we'll definitely talk
Speaker 4: about that in the future.
Speaker 3: But man, for sure for sure. But uh yeah, and
Speaker 3: thank you everybody in the chat. I don't know if
Speaker 3: I think there were some new faces in there.
Speaker 4: I don't know if it was from you maybe advertising
Speaker 4: it on your end or some listeners, but there were
Speaker 4: some people in there I don't think I've seen before.
Speaker 3: So I appreciate you jumping on whoever. It is awesome.
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, and uh again, that's why we go live.
Speaker 4: I do appreciate the comments, regardless if they're good or
Speaker 4: bad or different opinions. I do appreciate at least people
Speaker 4: jumping in and trying to give their idea on the topic.
Speaker 3: Uh yeah. And that's the end of another one and
Speaker 3: until the next one, everybody be well later