Hermeticulture

After two full years of deliberation, I recently resigned from the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.  I had been a member for more than a decade, almost half of it as an Adept.  I had been struggling with this decision for two years, after I had a falling out with my mother temple in early 2019.  At the time, I exercised my right as an Adept to unaffiliate with that temple and continue on my Path as a solitary practitioner.  But in doing so, I felt adrift.  I had effectively lost not only my chosen family of 10 years, but all of the people in my life I held dear who spoke my own native spiritual language.  I had already experienced the Golden Dawn tradition elsewhere, first initiating into a different Order back in 2005, and anyone can walk that Path alone if they so choose--so my resignation didn't mean that I couldn't pursue my own spiritual journey anymore.  But my chosen family was irreplaceable, as was the experience of doing lodge-style magic wi...

In my last post on this blog, I had reflected on the perspective voiced by the character of Henry Fogg in Lev Grossman's The Magicians  that the magician's inner pain is what makes them stronger: that they "burn it as fuel, for light and warmth," and in so doing have "learned to break the world that has tried to break [them]." I said at the time that I would leave an analysis of that question to my next post on the subject. It turns out there's no way to answer that question except through experience.  And if we hadn't already had enough inner pain as it was, the novel coronavirus has affected us all in our own disparate ways, giving us plenty more of it to deal with.  It's certainly left me with my own share of scars to bear. So, what deep truths have I learned about the nature of magic and pain?  Was Fogg right after all? Well, the jury's still out.  Do those of us who are called to the magical path experience pain more deeply than ...