The sephirothic ritual technique described can be used to design an enormous variety of rituals quickly and easily, as the basic format
can remain the same. A ritual involving Yesod should have an utterly different feel and effect from a ritual involving Tipheret, and yet the basic construction of the two rituals can be iden-tical. The props will change, the intention will differ, and the attitude will differ, but the basic steps remain the same.
Because a ritual can be quickly carried out (not necessarily easily, but certainly quickly), sephirothic ritual can be used to add clout to other magical and mystical techniques, such as meditation, divination, scrying, oath-making, prayer, concentration and visualisation, medi-umship and so on.
Sephirothic ritual is a tool which functions within a well-developed and very broad frame-work; the beginner has very little to learn ini-tially, but that little is sufficient to accomplish a great deal.
I wanted to provide in these notes approxi-mately the same information as I was given when I began to study Kabbalah. The person who gave me this information said “You don’t need to read lots of books, just go off and do it.”
This was sound advice. When you want to learn how to build a bridge, you should read books about building bridges, but if you want to learn about yourself, the largest library in the world isn’t going to help a great deal.
“Doing It” consists of invoking the sephiroth and asking to be instructed. It consists of jump-ing in with both feet when somethjump-ing new comes along. It involves trusting your intuition and conscience. It requires you to question eve-rything. It also requires countless meditations, concentration and visualisation exercises, self-examination, rituals, dream-recording, prayer, whatever you want.
There is no prescription for this, and each per-son tends to find their own balance. As a chronic reader I found the advice about not reading books on magic and Kabbalah hard to take, but I took it, and for something like ten years I lost the habit completely. I’m glad I did, because I developed the self-confidence to trust my own intuition and found for myself the tech-niques best suited to my temperament and dis-position. What works splendidly for one person may be totally inappropriate for another.
There is almost enough information in these notes to go off and “just do it”. The information I have withheld I have done so deliberately, as it consists of little things which any person with a small amount of common sense, initiative and trust in themselves can work out. For example, you don’t need to learn other peoples’ rituals:
trust your own imagination and creativity, how-ever insufficient they might seem, and write your own.
You need to trust yourself, and that is why I haven’t provided a detailed prescription. If you think Kabbalah should be more complicated, then make it more complicated. If you think it is
essential to learn about the Four Worlds, or the four parts of the soul, or the beard of Arik Anpin or whatever, then learn about them, but I don’t think it is essential to know these things to begin with, and there are better and quicker ways of learning Kabbalah than running off and buying the Zohar.
If you trust in yourself, you will learn what you need to know at the rate at which you can learn it. Kabbalah is only a map (but for the record I believe it is an accurate and useful map), and the entrance to the territory lies within you. In my experience the sephirothic magical rituals are the key to everything else. If you want to continue to study Kabbalah, by all means go out and buy other books, but do not imagine that the quality of the information you will receive will be higher than what you will learn if you simply invoke God through the Powers of Malkhut and ask them for instruc-tion.
If you are afraid of ritual that is fine ... lots of people are. If you make mistakes in your rituals, that is not an unusual problem, because every-body does. If you are afraid of ritual but you invoke the Powers with the attitude and respect that is their due, and you are not afraid to give freely for what you get, then you will get a great deal, and almost certainly a great deal more than you would have expected.
12
In Conclusion
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