MacGregor Mathers

The teaching

Taught from The Kabbalah Unveiled (1887), the Abramelin (1898) and the rituals he wrote for the Golden Dawn.

The three veils of negative existence

The introduction to The Kabbalah Unveiled begins above the Tree. Before anything can be said to be, there are three veils of negative existence: Ain, nothing, of which nothing can be thought; Ain Soph, the limitless; and Ain Soph Aur, the limitless light. Out of the limitless light the first point of being concentrates itself, and that point is Kether, the Crown, from which the other nine sephiroth flow one from another down to Malkuth, the Kingdom.

The sephiroth stand in three pillars: mercy on the right, severity on the left, and between them the pillar of mildness that balances the two. The whole system, for Mathers, turns on that balance.

The countenances and the bride

The books of the Zohar he translated speak of God in faces. Kether is Arikh Anpin, the Vast Countenance, the Ancient of Days, seen only in profile and all mercy; the six sephiroth from Chesed to Yesod make Zauir Anpin, the Lesser Countenance, the King; and Malkuth is the Bride and Queen of the Lesser Countenance. The Greater and Lesser Holy Assemblies describe these faces feature by feature, the hair, the brow, the eyes and the beard, each part a mode of the divine life.

He takes from the same books the teaching that the divine is male and female. Elohim, the name of God in the first verse of Genesis, is a feminine word with a masculine plural, and the translators, he says, have hidden the fact that the creative power is both, as the first human beings, made in its image, were made male and female.

The kings of Edom

Before the balanced world, the Zohar tells, there were kings who reigned and died: the kings of Edom, who reigned before any king reigned over Israel. Mathers reads them as worlds of unbalanced force, made and destroyed before creation came into equilibrium. Unbalanced force is the root of evil, and the work of the magician, as of the universe, is to bring every force into balance with its opposite.

The literal Qabalah

The introduction also teaches the three ways of reading letters. In gematria every Hebrew letter is a number, and words of the same sum are held to share a meaning: the promise in Genesis that Shiloh shall come, YBA ShILH, adds to 358, which is also the sum of MShICh, the Messiah. In notariqon a word is read as the initials of a sentence, or a sentence is gathered into its initials, as AGLA is made from Ateh Gibor le-Olahm Adonai, thou art mighty for ever, O Lord. In temurah the letters are exchanged by rule, the first of the alphabet for the last and so on, and by this Sheshach in Jeremiah is read as Babel.

The sacred magic of Abramelin

The Abramelin he translated sets one work before all others: the knowledge and conversation of one's holy guardian angel. In the version he used it takes six months of withdrawal from the world, with prayer growing longer and purity stricter as the months pass, in an oratory kept for nothing else. Only at its end does the angel appear, and only under the angel's guidance may the magician go on to call the spirits of the lower world and bind them to good uses by the squares of letters the book gives. The grimoires, this one among them, are taught in The grimoires.

The book warns that its power turned to harm recoils on the one who uses it, and that the work asks a life few can lead. Its austerities are taught here as the book's demand and not as a practice: no one whose health a fast or a long seclusion could harm should attempt any part of it.

The formula of the Neophyte

For the Golden Dawn Mathers wrote most of the rituals, whose grades and rites are taught in The Golden Dawn. His teaching in them is that one formula runs through every kind of work. The ceremony of the Neophyte, which brings a candidate out of darkness into light, is also the pattern of a consecration, an evocation, a divination or a work of alchemy: the same steps of purifying, consecrating, declaring the work, invoking the powers and closing are followed, and only the matter changes.

The order's papers tie the kinds of work to the letters of the name YHShVH: evocation to Yod, the making of talismans to He, the works of invisibility, transformation and spiritual growth to Shin, divination to Vau, and alchemy to the final He. Over all of it stands the rule Mathers took from the books he translated, that the work is to purify and exalt the magician's own nature, and that magic turned to harm binds the one who works it.