Readers, please enjoy this guest blog post by Jane Meredith, author of Rituals of Celebration and the new Falling Through the Tree of Life. The Kabbalah's Tree of Life is a complex symbol with many layered meanings. A cosmologist, an occultist, a poet, and a musician might all have different explanations of these ten circles arranged in strict relationship to each other, but in essence they would boil down to the same thing. This is how a glyph becomes effective—we all understand it in different ways, but those ways are doorways to a shared understanding. As a Pagan and a feminist, my understanding of the Tree of Life is to regard it as a living thing—evident in each actual tree,

Names and Magick One of the strongest aspects of magick is the use of names. By this I mean the use of one word or phrase to represent something much grander. For example, if someone were to mention my name, you might think of a blogger, a writer, a workshop leader, a hypnotherapist, an occultist, a magician, a Tantric, a musician, or something else. Perhaps you might think of several of those things. To me, my name is a representation of all of those things and more. The same is true of designing a word to represent a magickal goal. You don't have to think of "After doing a divination to show a positive outcome of doing a ritual, I'll be doing that planned rite to obtain $1,000 to

    As I described in Modern Magick, one of the important tools of a magician is pathworking. The concept behind this skill is simple. It holds that the Tree of Life is a map of the levels of the astral plane. The Tree of Life Design: Kircher  ——— Colors: Golden Dawn "Queen Scale" In my book I wrote, "Magicians can use this map to chart their way to meeting with higher spiritual entities, non-physical consciousnesses capable of giving any information needed." For this post, that leaves a lot of questions. First is the term "pathworking" itself. When I first became involved with the practice, the term exclusively described the process of projecting astrally up

There is more than one mythic history of the Tarot. It's important to note that by mythic I don't simply mean that the stories were made up and imaginary. Rather, myths are information conveyed in a story to indicate the importance of something. Aesop's fables, for example, are myths explaining timeless truths in simple stories. Although the Tarot has been used for hundreds of years, its active use as part of ceremonial magick really only dates back to the late 19th century. The key to this was the linking of the Tarot to the Kabalistic Tree of Life. This first appeared in print in an article by the Comte de Mellet in the 1781 book, Le Monde Primitif by Court de Gébelin, which noted