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The Gospel of Matthew Chapter 5, Verse 6


Patterns

As we reach the Fourth Beatitude, it's worth reconsidering the previous three, and seeing how they work together and build on one another.

The Beatitudes aren't random statements, and they aren't separate from one another. They should be seen, rather, as a program.

A program for the achivement of what?

Of what Jesus has been talking about all along: Changing our Nous and attaining the Kingdom of Heaven. Obviously, all of them should be practiced together, but we can also suppose that they are in the order they are in for a reason. If that's the case, then they can be seen as a set of steps, or a ladder of spiritual development. Each Beatitude is its own particular practice.

The First Beatitude: "Blessed are the poor in spirit." We begin by practicing spiritual poverty, which we defined as the total opening of the soul to God, embodied above all in the Blessed Virgin's statement "My soul magnifies the Lord." Consider those words again: They convey the image of a soul which is like a glass through which a light shines clearly and appears to be magnified, so that we not only see the light through that soul, but see it more perfectly.

The Second Beatitude: "Blessed are those that mourn." In our post on this Beatitude, we mostly focused on mourning or grief as particular acts. This isn't wrong, but it isn't all there is to it, either. If the Beatitudes are a spiritual program, then each Beatitude is a practice. This means that, in a certain sense, we must practice mourning all the time. From this perspective, the world itself is a kind of tomb, and our fall into matter is a death to our true life in the world of spirit. To mourn, then, means to be aware of our condition, confined in the tomb of the body, and turn our attention toward our heavenly home.

The Third Beatitude: "Blessed are the meek." Yesterday, we discussed briefly what is meant by "meekness." To briefly summarize, it isn't weakness or servility, but the kind of gentle strength that comes from having tamed the bestial part of ourselves.

All these build on one another. We begin by opening to God, and rejecting the life of the material world. We continue to by overcoming the lower part of ourselves, the desiring part or epithymia. But do we totally mutilate that part? Do we amputate our desires?

No. Jesus has come like a physician to heal ourselves, not destroy them.

To Hunger, To Thirst

We aren't to destroy the part of ourselves that desires. Instead, we are to direct it-- insofar as this is possible, while we still live in a body and must provide for its needs-- toward goodness, or righteousness. Now righteousness means good deeds, but it means more than that. In the Scriptures, it also refers to God's faithfulness to those who keep his covenants. 

Dikaios



It's worth considering the Greek word here. It is δικαιοσύνην, dikaiosunēn, from δίκαιος, dikaios. Plato uses a related word, Dikaisyne, to describe the virtue of Justice in the Republic. As we've seen before, in the Republic Plato describes an ideal city, with three castes of people: Workers, Warriors, and Rulers. Now, each of these corresponds to one of the three parts of the soul: the Appetite or Epithymia, the Strength of Will or Thymos, and the Reason or Nous. In a just state, each member of each social caste is content to do his own work, ruling or being ruled accordingly, not rebelling against the others; in a just soul, then, each element also is content to do its own work. 

For one who follows the Path of Jesus, the Epithymia, or Appetite, is given a new job. Not only will it hunger for food and thirst for water, but it will turn its desiring power toward the work of Justice itself. In this way, even the lowest parts of us are raised up and re-created in the image of God.

I probably need to return the title of these posts to "Daily Reflection," as I'm now tempted to post less regularly without that prompting. On the other hand, last week was one of the busiest that I have ever lived-- that Mars-Venus conjunction aspected my natal chart in a rather direct way-- so maybe I can be forgiven for the light posting. But, as I like to say, you can have the best excuse in the world for failing to water your plants, and they still won't grow, so let's get back into it. 

The Gospel of Matthew 5:4

Why they that mourn?

After praising the "poor in spirit," Jesus turns his attention to those that mourn. They too are "blessed"-- happy, blissful-- for "they shall be comforted."

This saying is very simple, and, to my mind, at least, it feels both straightforward and somewhat emotional and saccharine. I am, if I'm being honest, tempted to skim quickly over this verse, in the hopes of coming quickly to something that feels a little meatier, maybe even a little manlier. (You know, because tough guys like me don't cry.) 

To do so would be to miss something vital. To understand what that is, let's consider what it means to mourn, and what can come of it.

The Vale of Tears

Life on Earth isn't easy. There is a reason that this world is referred to as the "Vale of Tears" in traditional Christian and Jewish literature. In the modern world, with the enormous range of material comforts we have available to us, it can be easy to forget this. Indeed, we put a great deal of energy into ignoring, suppressing, or downright denying both death and pain. The very idea that we have to die seems almost insulting to us, as though the universe ought to have made an exception to its general rule for people who have air conditioning, television, and smart phones. 

Indeed, I thought at the time, and think now, that much of the complete insanity that we saw in the response to the Covid-19 pandemic had to do with exactly this realization: Despite our technology, despite our wealth, and despite the fact that we really, really don't want to, even we have to die. And so a viral pandemic that would not even have been noticed in earlier times caused us to lose our collective minds and shut ourselves in our houses for more than a year.

We all die. But, what's worse, everyone we love dies, too. Sometimes they die before we do, even when they're younger than we are. Even when they're our children. And then we stuff down the grief like some people do, so that it explodes later on, often in the form of anger; or we go crazy, like modern Americans facing a modern pandemic--

Or we allow ourselves to mourn. 

I want to talk about mourning from three different angles, and then bring it back to the Beatitude.

Kisa Gotami

Once there was a woman named Gotami. She grew up in a poor family and was very thin as a consequence, and so people called her Kisa-- that is, "skinny"-- Gotami. Over time, Gotami's fortunes changed for the better. She married into a wealthy family, and soon became pregnant with a child. When her son was born she was overjoyed, as any mother would be-- and more, because in her place and in her time, bearing a male heir solidified her social status.

But then, when the boy was 2 or 3 years old, he took sick and died. Such things were not uncommon, then-- and, in truth, they are not uncommon now, though we do our best to look the other way. Gotami was distraught. She wept, she held the dead child to her breast, she demanded that someone find a doctor who could bring him back to life. Anything but face the truth.

Finally, someone told her that a man was in the area who was known as a great healer and even a miracle worker. That man was Gautama Buddha. Filled with hope, Gotami went to the Buddha and begged him to restore her child to life.

The Buddha said, "Go into the city and talk to people until you find a house where no one has died. When you find this house, bring me a pinch of mustard seeds from it, and we will see what we can do.

You can imagine how Gotami felt when she went into town. The Buddha was a magician, a miracle worker-- all he needed was a bit of mustard-- he would restore her son to life! And so she went from house to house. At every house, they had mustard-- but everywhere someone had died. "I'm sorry, but my mother died last month." "My brother died last year of the plague." "My son was killed in the war." "My father is very old, he is lying ill this very minute, he is breathing his last, he is dead."

House after house, everyone had lost somebody. Gotami never found a house where no one had died. But she found something else-- or, I think, she found something, and she lost something. She gave up her hope of bringing her son back to life, and, indeed, she gave up her attachment to the material world, and all its joys and miseries. But I think that she also found a new sort of connection with her fellow human beings, as she sat in their homes and shared their stories of loss and grief. Grief is the great leveler, death is the great uniter; when people share a death, very often they weep and hurt and lean on one another, and differences in status are forgotten.

Gotami went back to the Buddha and became a nun, and is today honored as a great saint. 

The God of the Golden Age

In an earlier post in this series, I discussed the nature of Saturn in mythology and astrology:


Saturn is the God of Death, and the God of Sorrow. All those that mourn are ruled by Saturn, in their mourning. And yet, Saturn was the High God of the Golden Age, and at Saturn's feast, the Golden Age returns, and all normal social hierarchies are abrogated-- for a time.

Consider this in light of what I said about, about the way that grief and mourning brings people together, often regardless of station, and suddenly it makes sense. In tragedy, we are forced to turn to one another, and to lean on one another-- and on God.

They Shall Be Comforted

The people I know who are the most joyful, and the most serene-- the calmest, the least prone to overreaction-- are also the people who have suffered most. It's not that everyone who suffers much learns joy and serenity. Many don't. Some go mad, sometimes in very large numbers. But it is the case that nearly everyone who attains personal serenity does it by facing and overcoming serious hardships.

If you've ever spent any time around people who've done work to recover from drug or alcohol abuse, you know that they very often have two things in common: a reliance on their fellow addicts, and a reliance on God. But it's not just that community or spirituality leads them to kick the habit or whathaveyou. It is, rather, that by going through the pain and terror of addiction, they find a level of community and a commitment to spirituality that they would not have otherwise, and that is often well in advance of people who have never dealt with addiction. 

Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted. 

By whom?

By one another, and by God. And in this way, too, they begin to lose their attachment to the material world, seeing that the things of the Earth are born only to pass away, and begin to turn their eyes toward permanent things.

This is another way of saying that they begin to attain the Kingdom of Heaven.  

The Gospel of Matthew Chapter 4, Verses 12-17




Whither John the Baptist?

There are three things that I want to extract from this section.

First, note the imprisonment of John the Baptist. This will end in John's execution by beheading. We're a long way off from there, but for now I want to draw attention to it, because it's going to be important.

Order and Chaos

Second: The people in darkness have seen a great light; light is sprung up in the region and shadow of death.

The Timaeus is Plato's account of the creation of the universe. It's a difficult text, but well worth reading in detail. (Also, and as an aside, if you want to get a sense of the sanctimonious idiocy of 19th century scholarship, you could do far worse than to read Benjamin Jowett's introduction at the link provided; it's on full display.) In any case, the important thing for our text is how the creation is accomplished in the Timaeus. Creation does not begin out of nothing. We begin with a formless void, the Chaos. The work of the Most High God-- called the Demiurgos, the Maker or Craftsman God-- is to assemble the world out of formless darkness, rather than create it out of nothing.

The same process of creation occurs in the Cosmographia, a 12th century epic poem written by Bernardus Sylvestris. Cosmographia is basically the Timaeus Christianized, and was considered orthodox enough at one time to have been recited before the Pope. In Sylvestris's work, Creation begins when Nature turns up in Heaven to complain to God that Sylva-- that is, physical reality-- is formless chaos. God-- or, rather, his interlocutor, Noys, "Divine Mind," consents to bring Sylva into ordered regularity.  Here again, creation consists of bringing form to formlessness.

The Book of Genesis details this same process. The only difference is that Genesis 1:1 moves the second hand of the clock back one tick. And so we get:

We've already discussed what these words mean. (If you missed it, head back to the discussion of Matthew 3:1-2.) The important thing for today is that they are the same as the words John the Baptist used. This confirms for us what we've already seen: Jesus is initiated into a magical current by John the Baptist; and, that Initiation is not complete until he faces down Satan during his 40 days in the wilderness.

 Today, let's have the whole of Matthew, Chapter 3

Whether or not one accepts that interpretation, or the view that Jesus was always the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, the Christ and Son of God, begotten of the Father before all ages, the point of his baptism is clear. God saves, and Jesus demonstrates that salvation through his life; God graces, and John demonstrates that grace through his work. By Baptism one is initiated into the magical current of Christianity, one which extends backward in time to Jesus himself, and before him, through John, into the ancient world.

The Gospel of Matthew Chapter 2, Verses 13-23




The Holy Innocents

The story told in these verses is the tale of the Massacre of the Innocents. King Herod has learned from the Astrologers where the new king will be born, claiming that he wants to go and worship him. But he's lying: Feeling his own power threatened, Herod wants to destroy the child. Failing to do so, he settles for killing every child under the age of 2 in his kingdom.

Historically, the Feast of the Holy Innocents was celebrated on the 28th of December, as part of the Christmas Cycle, and many interesting customs were attached to it. In many countries, whatever day of the week the feast fell upon was considered unlucky, and so for the rest of the year, no work at all could be done on that day. In other places, whipping customs were attached to it-- these were odd traditions whereby parents beat their children, or children beat their parents, or servants beat their masters, or boys beat girls or girls beat boys. In most cases, the beating was returned with sweets, wine or some other sort of treat, and whoever was doing the whipping often had a song to go with it-- "Fresh green, fair and fine, gingerbread and brandy-wine!" and the like. In most cases that I've read about, it was important to use branches from a particular tree or bush to do the whipping-- fir in some cases, rosemary in others, birches in a third. (All of these have magical properties, by the way. I've found that rosemary sprigs in particular are excellent for cleansing the aura; use one to trace a line a few inches out from your skin, covering your whole body, and discard it afterwards. See how you feel.)

These are among the many barbarous customs from which the Protestant Reformation, the Counter-Reformation, and the reforms of Vatican II have saved us.

Myths and Dreams

It is said that, in a dream, every character is you, in a sense. Now, this is only said by those psychologists who don't realize that spirits can appear to people in dreams. But it's worth considering-- most of the time, the contents of your dreams are from your own unconscious mind, and so the characters in a dream are indeed aspects of your own personality. Even when other minds intrude into your dreams, the image which they inhabit in the dream is drawn from your own imagination.

A myth is like a dream shared by an entire culture. We saw yesterday that myths are stories that "never happened, but always are." Leave aside teh question of whether the events recounted in the Gospels ever happened; whether they did or not, they always are. This means that myths describe processes in the worlds of nature or human culture that are ongoing and always active. Thus, in the same way that every character in a dream is a part of you, every character in a myth is relevant to you. Including the bad guys.

So let's talk about the Gospel's first Bad Guy, King Herod. Other than the fact that he's a jerk and we shouldn't be like him, what can we learn from his story?

Two Kinds of Kings

Herod is a king--a political leader. He is threatened by Jesus, because he wants to maintain his power, and you can't do that if there's another king running around your country. So he tries to kill him. He fails, but succeeds in killing all the children in his country-- the future of his own kingdom.

Herod's mistake is that he does not understand the difference between political power and the true power of God. If he had, in fact, gone with the magi to worship Jesus, would Jesus have overthrown him? Of course not; instead we'd now be talking about Saint Herod, the good king who tried but failed to protect the messiah from the Sanhedrin and the Roman soldiers.

In Chapter 1 of the Doctrine and Ritual of High Magic, Eliphas Levi tells us that:


So a magician must be a king. But does that mean that he must be a political leader, like Herod? Emphatically no:


Magical kingship is divine: it is power which comes from God and which shares in the Power of God. The sort of political power that Herod has is a lesser thing. It is the same type of power that silverback gorillas and alpha baboons have; the same power that the queen of the beehive has. It's mere human power, which is another way of saying animal power.

Most of us will not ever have the political power of a king or a president; most of us won't even be mayors or city councilmen. But all of us participate in social groups of various kinds-- groups of friends, professional associations, social "scenes," sports clubs, families, internet forums. All of us will, at one time or another, be given the chance to attain power in those kinds of groups. What will that look like?

Human beings are social primates, and the social structures that we form naturally and informally are identical to those of our cousins, the chimpanzees. Every group of chimpanzees is led by one or two alpha chimps surrounded by a small circle of beta chimps. the rest of chimps are gamma chimps, with no particular power. The way you become an alpha chimp is by overthrowing the previous alpha chimp. The way you get into the circle of beta chimps is by overthrowing one of the other beta chimps, or by proving your toughness by brutalizing one of the gammas. No one wants to be a gamma chimp, but if you want out of it, you have to have to play the chimpanzee game. You have to be willing to turn on your fellow gammas, to find another gamma chimp weaker than you and hurt or even kill them.

To attain power in a group of humans you have to become Herod, and murder the innocent.

But who are the Innocents? In the story, they are the children of Judea; in human social dynamics, they are people who are weaker than you. But insofar as all of these characters live within you, the children are you too-- they are your past, the innocence you slay; and they are your future, the salvation you abandon.

These things always are. At times, we have all been Herod.

When worldly power and popularity tempt you, always remember: The top dog in any dog pack is still just a dog.

Right Use of Power

Notice that Saint Joseph, the great wizard, once again receives a warning in a precognitive dream, and so flees with his family to Egypt. Joseph is the head of the holy family, the guardian of the Blessed Virgin and foster-father of Jesus Christ. As Head of the Holy Family, he is an icon of God the Father, and the model of Christian leadership and Christian fatherhood.

(Please remember that this is a discussion of the Bible as a magical text, and the word "Christian" should be understood to refer to magical initiates in the lineage of Jesus Christ.)

The Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 1, Verses 18 to 25

Read along here.


Once again, there's a lot going on in these few short verses.

The Enchanted World

In Act I, Scene I, Joseph is planning on breaking his engagement to Mary, but then an angel appears to him in a dream and tells him not to do it, because the child is a miraculous child.

As I've said, there are modern approaches to the Gospels (Thomas Jefferson's is the most famous) that attempt to edit out all of the miraculous events and leave just the part that the editors find important-- the moral teachings or whatever. To do this is to do immense violence to the text. From the getgo, this is a world in which God exists; spirits exist; spirits can interact with human beings; and dreams can be sources of accurate knowledge of the most extraordinary sort.

In other words, this is the magical universe.

The House of Wizards

I said yesterday that I think St. Joseph must be seen as a wizard from a line of wizards. This passage confirms this view. Consider: It is not at all unknown for people to encounter spirits of various types, and it is not unknown for people to be able to do this in dreams. I have a friend, for example, who has had vivid dream-encounters with other friends of ours who have died, and has been able to convey useful information from them to their relatives who remained here.

But most people can't do this. It is a psychic ability, and psychic abilities are either inherited or else gained through spiritual practice. Or both. St. Joseph is a magician, and it might be worth noting that Levi describes the magician as "a priest and king."

As a magician, he must have been a great one indeed to have been given the care of the Son of God.

How much greater must Mary have been, to have born him?

Miraculous Births

Children of divinities are not uncommon in the ancient world. Pythagoras, who we met last time, was considered by many to have been the son of Apollo. Iamblichus tells us that this is not literally true-- rather, Pythagoras's birth was announced by the Oracle of Apollo, and his spirit was a hero in the order of Apollo.

Quis ut Deus?

Since this is-- er-- a Bible study, we're going to have to talk about God. And it would be helpful, therefore, to know exactly what we mean by that word "God."

For our purposes, then, here are three definitions of God:

1. "A God" is a type of being, which exists outside of time and space and benevolently governs and cares for the material world. "God" as a singular noun, in this case, specifically refers to YHVH, a God whose role is or was to govern the Jewish people.

2. The Most High God, a being who is higher not merely than all other Gods, but who stands in relationship to the Gods as the Gods stand in relationship to human beings. This being may be identical to the Jewish YHVH, but may also be the being called the Maker or Demiurge in the works of Plato, or the Soul of the Universe in the thought of the Stoics.

3. The One, as described in yesterday's post. The One is that by virtue of which everything which exists, has existence. "The root and beginning of all things in this world" is how it's described by a later author; "the sole truth and unique unity, and from it, anything united receives its unity."

Any of these definitions will do. But let's add one more, before we go on:


This is from Eliphas Levi's Doctrine and Ritual of High Magic. What does he mean?

"Azot" or "azoth" is the universal solvent of the alchemists. This is the substance which the first matter is dissolved, in order to begin the process of transmuting it into the philosopher's stone. Levi hints at this by calling it "the efficient and final principle of the great work." What does he mean by that?

First, "efficient" and "final" principles are technical terms, derived from Aristotle. For Aristotle, there are four types of causes. The efficient cause is the necessary precondition for any given event: in order to knock the water cup off the table, the cat had to sit on the table and reach out with his paw. The final cause is the purpose of the event: the cat wanted to get the human's attention, to remind him that he needed to be fed. (Or given water. Or a toy. Or just to be an asshole.)

The Great Work, meanwhile, for Levi, "is, before all things, the creation of man by himself, that is to say, the full and entire conquest of his faculties and his future."

God, then, is that power by which the bonds that tie us to the lower things-- the wills of others, the prejudices of our society and our era, the body and its passions-- are dissolved (Azoth); and the power which allows us to create ourselves, by ourselves, emancipating our wills and our psyches.

Let's keep all these definitions in mind as we proceed.

What's in a Name?

The child born in Chapter 1 is given two names: "Jesus" and "Emmanuel." Both of these are meaningful, and we need to discuss their meaning--

But before we do so, we need to discuss the meaning of "meaning." Yesterday we talked about the significance of numbers in a magical context. Words are significant in exactly the same way. Words and their definitions are, to a certain extent, arbitrary-- it doesn't matter whether you call the delicious, bitter black fluid I'm drinking café, coffee, or 咖啡; it's the same stuff regardless. But in the magical worldview, meaning is always present to everything. Moreover, "meaning" isn't as simple as "definition" or as abstract and powerless as "a sense of significance"-- the two ways of thinking of it that are common in the modern world. "Meaning" is present to everything, and it points to the underlying reality behind material things.

Consider the coffee again: Its color (black), its flavor (bitter), its effects (central nervous system and cardiac stimulant); the time and circumstances of its consumption (ritually, in the morning) all form a pattern which underlies the simple act of drinking liquid from a cup.

Ultimately, even the seemingly random syllables used to identify it are not meaningless, either-- though we need a system of some kind to decode them. This is where magical alphabets and similar systems come in. For example: "Coffee" in Hebrew is קפה, Qoph, Peh, Heh. In the Golden Dawn tradition, the letters of the Hebrew alphabet are related to paths on the Tree of Life, and also to Tarot cards and astrological symbols. From that perspective, this is what "Coffee" means:

Qoph: The Moon, the 29th Path, the sign of Pisces
Peh: The Tower, the 27th Path, the planet Mars
Heh: The Emperor, the 15th Path, the sign of Aries

One way to read this: Coffee begins in Pisces, the watery sign of Neptune, Lord of the Great Dark Sea. This refers both to the great sea of sleep in which our day begins, and to the dark liquid itself. In the imagery of the Moon card, we see the sort of strange landscape through which we wander in our dreams. Then the lightning strike comes: This refers both to the dawn which shatters the night and wakens the sleeper, and also to the sharp, bitter taste of that first sip of coffee. Mars, the planet of energy and war, is active here in the caffeine which fuels us like the lightning in the Tower card. So empowered, we are able to attain the Empire of ourselves, like the Emperor in his card, beginning our day with the power of fiery Mars within us as the sign of Aries begins the year with the power of Mars.

God Saves; God is With Us

And so we have two Names here. One, "Jesus" means "God saves." The other, "Emannuel," means "God is with us."

It's worth noting that the words being used for "God" in each case differ.

In the case of "Jesus," the actual name is "Yah-shuah," which is the origin of the English name Joshua. "Yah" is short for YHVH. YHVH is known as the "Tetragrammaton," the 4-letter name. The exact meaning of YHVH is debated by scholars. We know that it is related to the verb "To Be." According to the Encyclopedia Brittanica, "Many scholars believe that the most proper meaning may be “He Brings into Existence Whatever Exists” (Yahweh-Asher-Yahweh)."

"El," meanwhile, simply means "God," and was used as the name for the Most High God by Semitic cultures, including the Jews.

Here, then, is what we learn from the Names of the child born in Matthew, Chapter 1.

1. God is with us.
2. God is that which brings into existence anything which exists.
3. That which brings everything into existence saves.

4. These three concepts are embodied in a single man, Jesus of Nazareth. Therefore, the study of his life and teachings will allow us to understand the presence of God

Please consider all of these ideas in light of the definitions of God I gave before, especially Eliphas Levi's.

From what are we saved?

"For he shall save his people from their sins."

The word translated as "sin" is "hamartia." Many people know that the word "hamartia" relates to missing a mark or target.

But what are our sins-- or, to say it differently, what is the target that we are missing?

Let's return to the idea of God found in Eliphas Levi for a moment.

If God is Azoth, and Azoth is a solvent, then God is something which dissolves. The traditional saying which summarized all the works of Alchemy was "Solve et Coagula," which means "separate and combine." Any alchemical operation is divided into various stages. The first stage is always separation-- the bonds that hold a substance together are dissolved, rendering it into its constituent parts. These parts are then purified, and then recombined into a new substance which exists on a higher level than the original. Lead is turned into Gold.

In spiritual alchemy, what is the substance that we are working to purify-- to turn into gold?

Our souls, of course.

And what are our souls?

The principle of life within us, meaning especially the sum and total of our willed actions and mental experiences. 

And what are the bonds, then, which must be dissolved?

Those which keep our souls enslaved to the habits, norms and prejudices of our particular culture, time and place; to the passions and instincts of the body insofar as these interfere with the operation of our reason and our will; and to the wills of others who are not working for our evolution, but for our enslavement-- whether those other wills are human or nonhuman.

Another way of saying this is: The World, the Flesh, and the Devil. 

By freeing ourselves from these, we become the beings that we were meant to be. Another way of saying this is, we do the will of God. 

Alchemy

The life and example of Jesus allows us to free ourselves from bondage and to accomplish the Great Work, to transform spiritual lead into gold, and to attain the immortality of the alchemists. 

New Daily Reflection Series: The Magic of the Gospels

Introduction

Welcome to the newest continuing book review on this blog. Now that we've finished Sun Tzu's Art of War, I want to move on to another popular, and, I think, misunderstood, spiritual text: The Gospel of Saint Matthew. 

My hypothesis is that Jesus, whatever else he was-- spiritual teacher, heretical rabbi, political rabble rouser, adopted son of God, living embodiment of the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, eternal Divine Logos-- was a great magician. The aim of this series, then, is to explore the Gospels from the perspective of the Western Magical Tradition. 

What This Is and Is Not

I'm not the first person to take this sort of approach to the Gospels. There is a long tradition reinterpreting the Gospels in the light of some person's philosophy. This ranges from enlightenment rationalism in the case of someone like Thomas Jefferson to moderately-diluted Hinduism in the case of most contemporary "Christian esotericism." Other authors find everything from astrological allegories to whatever half-baked theology was invented last week at the First Church of Jesus Christ, Nebraskan. 

So I want to be clear from the outset that I am not setting out to discover "what the Bible really says." Everyone who sets out to do that only ever discovers what they want to discover, and the enormous range of different interpretations is enough to show us that we simply don't know "what it really says." We only know what happens when the strange, ancient stories of the Gospels interact with the minds of particular human beings, in particular places, in particular times.

So that's what this is: An attempt to look at the Gospels from my own particular perspective. That means, first and foremost, the perspective of the Western Magical Tradition, as I understand it. The best modern exponents of this tradition, and the most influential on me, are Dion Fortune, Eliphas Levi, and the founders of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.

From Levi, who wrote in the 19the century, the tradition runs backwards through Cornelius Agrippa, Renaissance Neoplatonism, the Picatrix, medieval Jewish Cabalism, and from there into the Hermetic, Gnostic and Neoplatonic traditions of late Roman times, as well as early Christianity and Jewish Merkavah mysticism; and from there to Plato and his immediate predecessors; to Pythagoras, who was initiated in the temples of Egypt; and from there back into unknowable antiquity. 

It is popular in modern times for people who do not follow Christ to either deny his existence or to claim that he was "just a teacher." This was not the approach of any of the opponents of Christianity, Roman or Jewish, in ancient times. The question then was not whether Jesus existed or not or whether he had performed miracles or not, but how he had performed his miracles. For Christians of all stripes, he was the living Son of God; for Romans and Jews, he was a dangerous magician. 

My view is that if he was a magician, then we should certainly be able to use the tools of modern magical theory to understand his teachings and his miracles. And this is all the more so if he were the son of God, as all true magic is theurgic magic, the manifestation through the acts of the magician of the will of the Divine. 

If that sounds interesting, join me tomorrow when we'll be looking at The Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 1. 

Today we're going to wrap up The Art of War with some closing thoughts. 
 
Sun Tzu doesn't give us any sort of conclusion in Chapter 13, like a modern author would. He finishes his discussion of spies and sends us off without so much as a fare thee well. We could do the same thing, but I want to end this series with some sort of conclusion.

To my mind, the most important lessons of The Art of War are as follows:

1. Intention. 

Let me say it again.

Intention, intention, intention, intention, intention, intention. 

Before you undertake anything at all, have a clear image in your mind of what you want to accomplish. When you formulate a plan for action, ask yourself, "Will that accomplish my purpose?" Someone offends you, so you lash out at them. What did that accomplish? Are they less likely to offend you in the future? If it's a stranger, maybe; if it's a family member, you've probably made the situation worse. You gratified your passions for a moment and in so doing lost your cause. What do you want to accomplish? That's your question, and it must be asked before any undertaking. 

2. Knowledge. 

Before any undertaking, you need to know as much as you can about what you're getting into.

I've repeatedly discussed The Art of War as applied to what Eliphas Levi calls the Great Work: The conquest and mastery of our own souls. To do this, you need knowledge of the terrain, which means that you need knowledge of a. souls in general and b. yourself in particular. A is provided by a map of the soul, and there are many of these; my personal favorite is the tripartite model provided by Plato in the Republic and elsewhere. B requires reconaissance, which means self exploration, which means meditation. 

Self-mastery is the great work, but it is not the only work. Whether you're looking for a job or a date, once you know what you want in general, you need to know the particulars of the situation. Are they hiring? Is she available? What is it like to work there? What does she want in a man? 

3. The Spiritual Life

Sun Tzu regularly talks about allies, about the sovereign, about the general. There are different ways to look at each of these terms, but to my mind the most important thing is that no man is an island. We can't do it alone. Levi talks about the conquest of our souls and the mastery of our wills, but how is this to come about? It's my view that we ourselves are mere generals, in need of a sovereign. the highest part of the soul is called the nous in Plato. Eastern Orthodox thinkers describe the nous as "the eye of the soul." An eye, let's note, is a receptive instrument: It sees. What does it see? Light. What is the light which is seen by the soul? In Platonic terms, the light is the Idea of the Good, emanated by the eternal spiritual Sun, which is the Good itself; in Christian terms, the light is the Light of God; both of these are the same and are the Sun of the alchemists. Seeing the Good, or God; the nous is divinized; divinized, its command of the lower faculties is perfected, the will is conquered, the self is mastered. Read spiritual texts, pray, meditate and study. What you contemplate you will imitate; what the nous gazes upon will manifest in your life. Let the general follow the commands and the purpose of the sovereign, and in this way accomplish the Great Work. 

 Why should we be concerned about restraining our passions? Sun Tzu tells us:


I have a bad temper. Astrologically, it makes sense; my Mars is in Cancer afflicted by a square to Saturn. My natural response to events not going my way is to lash out in fury. It very rarely works out for me.

I think I've told this story before, but let's have it again, because it illustrates the point.

A few years ago I took my cell phone to a Verizon store to have it looked at, because it wasn't working. The salesman I talked to quickly got past my defenses and got me to buy a phone I didn't want. I've never seen anything quite like it, and I'm pretty sure he had learned some basic magic tricks-- the second he approached me I became discombobulated, confused and clumsy, repeatedly dropping things and having items fall out of my pockets. I left in a state of mental confusion with a phone that cost several hundred dollars that I didn't want to spend.

Two days later, the pone broke. Oh, and my old phone started working just fine again. Of course.

At this point I was furious. I'd been tricked by this little weasel shithead, screwed out of money I never wanted to spend, and made to look like an idiot in the process. And I'll be goddamned if I was going to allow it.

So I did the thing anyone would do. I ritually invoked the Celtic thunder-god Taranis, made sure that my look said something like "violent guinea bastard," and drove over there in a wild red fury.

Well, I never got my money back, but on the plus side, I'm no longer allowed in the Verizon Store on State Street in Santa Barbara.

Learn a lesson from me, kids: If you're angry, it doesn't mean you should act, it means that there is a fire in your camp and your soldiers are burning. Figure out what you actually want to accomplish, and don't do it until you calm down.