Zhongyongdaoist

In the decades of my interest in Chinese esotericism I built up a large library on these subjects, some of them may still be in print, others could be found used. I will pull them out and post titles of some of the more useful ones. A good practical resource is Delemme software, which has good programs for calculating astrological charts and doing numerology. I'm busy, but I will try to post more shortly. ZYD

Humor is always welcome, but it should be good humor, and I didn't think that this was: Was good humor. Leaving the question of why Laozi is out "walking in the rain without an umbrella or a raincoat", we find him meeting a student with an umbrella who asks Laozi, why he is out walking in the rain without an umbrella. Laozi responds that when it is raining "the Tao is to get wet", his trusting student having "immediately gained enlightenment" throws away the umbrella and leaves, "Smiling in the Rain", for which act Loazi calls him "a fool", indicating that what was gained was certainly not "enlightenment", but folly and then picks up the umbrella, apparently for his own use. As written this is not: But pseudo Daoist fraud, which is confirmed by Laozi calling the trusting student a "fool" for falling for the ruse that, when it is raining"the Tao is to get wet", in order to gain the trusting student's umbrella under false pretenses, and since it required Laozi to say "the Tao is to get wet", it is not: Wuwei. Wuwei either, since saying something is a form of action, and the DaoDe Jing considers Wuwei "Wordless Teaching". Rather this piece of "humor" portrays Laozi as someone, who for whatever reason, finds himself caught in the rain and thinks its a fine idea to fool a trusting student into abandoning his umbrella so that Laozi could use it himself. Apparently sharing was not an option for reasons not disclosed, and that's why I don't think this is good humor, but bad humor, which for the above reasons, I didn't find funny, which is part of why I liked Cobie's response above, the other being his emphasis on Compassion, as aspect of the Dao often neglected. ZYD

As for this: I did find the quote I was looking for, it is however, long and dealing with it will take sometime. It does support what dawei said though without looking at it more, I am still not sure that "flow" is the right word. Among other things it uses the word 志, zhì (aspiration / ambition / the will) instead of yi as I mentioned in my post. I'll have more to say soon. ZYD

When I said this: The above is fundamentally correct, though I will try to expand a little on it in a later post. Right now it is almost one am where I live and time for me to head to bed. I meant that I thought that dawei had mentioned the basics, but I was not completely happy with with how he had written about them. In particular "Mencius said, Qi flows from intent.", puzzled me. It has been twenty years since I did my principle study of Mencius and qi and I don't remember anything exactly like this, but dawei may have been hurried and working from memory. However dawei does mention intent, derived from the Chinese 意, yì (idea / meaning / thought / to think / wish / desire / intention / to expect / to anticipate), which is used as a technical term for an ability inherent in 心, xīn (heart / mind / intention / center / core) to use imagination to "form" qi and to imbue it with a specific intention or purpose. A typical example of this would be the creation of a "thought form" examples of which can be found in the books of Professor Jerry Alan Johnson. This ability is used in Daoist Healing, Martial Arts and Magic and becoming skill and adept in its use is an important part of Daoist training. As far as Mencius and qi goes his quote about the "floodlike qi" is well know and I quote it in the topic "Confucian Qigong": There is another quote which I will look for and post. as regards this I agree with that. The question then is: does that intent arise before Existence? I was only quoting dawei and as I noted above I am not in complete agreement with it, however what you seem to be asking is if there is something real that precedes existence which can in some sense have "intent" and possibly even be a creative power influencing existence. Is that a correct interpretation? ZYD

The notion of qi as life force is a common oversimplification of a word with a lot of possible meanings. In posts that I made in a Topic called "A Science of Wuwei?" a few years ago I examine the meanings of qi in a wider context than the merely biological which should provide a good context for discussion. the first post is here: and my last post is on Page four Posted November 30, 2018 Reading these post will give one a much better sense of the larger meanings of qi as well as some useful background in Chinese Cosmology. It is a real pleasure to see dawei posting here again, as he has a profound knowledge of Daoist belief and practice: The above is fundamentally correct, though I will try to expand a little on it in a later post. Right now it is almost one am where I live and time for me to head to bed. ZYD

The Character which is translated as "Compassion" is 慈, ci ( compassionate / gentle / merciful / kind / humane, MDGB Chinese Dictionary) and this comes out of this passage from Chapter 67 : 我有三寶，持而保之。一曰慈，二曰儉，三曰不敢為天下先 Translated as: But I have three precious things which I prize and hold fast. The first is gentleness; the second is economy; and the third is shrinking from taking precedence of others. The above reference is to The Chinese Text Project website and its translation to which you can go by clicking 67 above. Searching for 慈, ci, in the Daoist texts on the Chinese Text Project Website gives a total of 35 occurrences in several early Daoist Texts including Zhuangzi and Wenzi, which indicates the importance of the concept in Daoism before the arrival of Buddhist texts. I hope this information is helpful. ZYD

A good quality PDF and other formats, can be downloaded from Archive.org at this link: The Teachings of Taoist Master Chuang Happy Reading, ZYD

I'm sorry to be so long to get back to this. As it turns out I was busier than I thought I would be, but I did try to work in some time to think about this matter and then figure out how best to address it. You can help me give you better answers by telling me a little more about your background in this, like how long have your studied this, do you have other books of Professor Johnson or others and information like that. Without knowing that I can prepare some very general comments, but I would like to address your own needs in this regard, as well as general interest. ZYD

I am very busy now and will be all this week and won't be able to make any posts here for several days, probably the weekend at the earliest. ZYD

Thanks for answering. Book title: Daoist internal alchemy: neigong weigong training. Page no 453 You're welcome, I had thought that was the book to which you were referring, but I didn't feel like going through it to find the reference. As I had expected there is more to this than just three colors and that the important part, the Three Pure Ones as being left out. One of the most important parts getting the Three Pure One to descend into your body was left out. In Daoism the Three Pure Ones are the primordial powers of creation, as you can read about in the Wikipedia article on the Three Pure Ones. The actual meditation involves a lot more than just visualizing the three colors that have been mentioned here, but involve the starts of the Big Dipper, where the Three Pure Ones hang out and other things which I suspect need to be learned about and connected to before one can effectively perform the meditation and actually have the Three Pure Ones descend into your body and then working with them to recreate yourself. Simply breathing colored qi into the three Dans is a waste of time and if you are lucky will not do anything, if you aren't lucky you could create a bad condition of qi stagnation, which you don't want. This is the last meditation in a whole section of the book and based upon what I know from other sources the material that leads up to the section cited should be worked through first. That this is the case is somewhat confirmed by some sections at the very end of the book. The material there is much too complex to summarize here. I hope this is helpful. ZYD

Professor Johnson has written many books, almost all of which I have. What you are saying sounds like an over simplification of what he has written. If you could give the book title and page, I could comment on it in more detail. ZYD

I read Women In Buddhism by Diana Paul some thirty or so years ago and was appalled by what it said, here is the short summary from the University of California website, which originally published it back in 1985: As a man, who even as a teenager back in the late Sixties understood the deleterious effects of misogynist ideas and attitudes in society, I was, as I said above, pretty appalled by this book about a religious tradition for which I had previously had much respect. When I compare it to the Platonism, which basically advocated a relationship of equality between men and women, documented in Plato's Republic for almost 2500 years, I can only wonder what kind of enlightenment one gets from Buddhism. Daoism also has had issues, but Confucianism, about which I have read more than most Dao Bums, seems to have had a more complex attitude, which I don't have time to address here, but I don't think many aspects of misogyny in the far East can be fairly blamed on it, but rather on the preexisting patriarchal social structure, which regrettably seems to have been and still be, a worldwide problem in both East and West. I have Posted on Plato's attitude to women in my thread Plato and Platonism 101. Zhongyongdaoist

You're certainly welcome. I'm glad that you found it informative and hope that others will too. There is a reason why I chose that long quote, aside from it aptness as an example, to illustrate the Great Chain of Being and I will return to it later when I examine how reading Agrippa's First Book of Occult Philosophy was to open up a hole new way of looking at magic and how that was to affect how I thought about the Golden Dawn and ritual. ZYD

I have given a lot of thought to these books and how they might help you and came to the conclusion that what you want to do is research is an idea called The Great Chain of Being. The Wikipedia article deals with it in the later Judeo/Christian form, but the ideas go back to Plato and Aristotle and the efforts by the Middle Platonists to unify the thought of both Plato and Aristotle into a unified cosmology, thus the references in my post below to "ideas" derived from Plato and "forms" derived from Aristotle are placed in a cosmological structure the maps out a descent from the highest levels of the Cosmos to the earth where the ideas become forms which are made manifest in our world. The following post is the first post from: Agrippa's Doctrine of Occult Virtues, a core concept examined and explained First I would like to quote from Thomas Kuhn, the man whose book, The Structure of Scienfific Revolutions, introduced the concept of the paradigms and their shifts: After finishing his discussion of the elements with a discussion of the Virtues dependent upon the elements in Chapter 9, Agrippa introduces the Occult Virtues in the following way: to attract Iron: the attraction of iron to a lodestone was one of the primary illustrations of occult virtues, while we now explain this in a certain way, there is no rational reason why considering it also a manifestation of the "virtues" or "powers" inherent in lodestone and iron is not valid and an example of looking at things in the context of a different paradigm. these vertues are a sequell of the species, and form of this or that thing: Though I was not completely familiar with Aristotle's Four Causes at this time, I was reading texts in alchemy in which Aristotelian terminology was used and in which the medicinal "virtue" of an herb could be viewed as the result of extracting its "form" through "spirit of wine", i.e. alcohol. I will examine the most important of these texts as I go along and this idea will make more sense after the second post in this series. these vertues having much form, and litle matter, can do very much: It is a matter of learning to extract the virtue or power or to enhance the activity of the virtue through appropriate action. Again more in the next post. they are called occult qualities, because their Causes lie hid, and mans intellect cannot in any way reach, and find them out. Wherefore Philosophers have attained to the greatest part of them by long experience, rather then by the search of reason: They are "occult" because hidden and unlike elemental virtues, which can be deduced from the qualities of the elements and the proportion of their compound, the occult or "hidden" virtues must be found out by experience. Those who were following my discussion of Aristotle's Four causes may now realize why in a humorous response to Descartes criticism of Formal Causes I said: Agrippa outlines the cosmological setting for this in Chapter 11: Platonists say that all inferiour bodies are exemplified by the superiour Ideas: At the top is "God" or "The One", depending on ones ontological commitments, the ideas as conceived of by Plato, are rooted in this one and then they exert an influence all the way down, through the forms as envisioned by Aristotle and into our world, where they manifest as the occult virtues or "hidden powers" of natural things. Ideas in this sense are active and creative powers, not mere abstractions present in our consciousness. they define an Idea to be a form, above bodies, souls, minds, and to be one, simple, pure, immutable, indivisible, incorporeal, and eternall: On the highest level they are simple, but as they descend they mix with each other and become more complex. they place Idea's in the first place in very goodness it self (i.e.) God: While Agrippa my mean God in a circa 1500 Roman Catholic sense, this is not to be confused with god as thought of by your local neighborhood fundamentalist yahoo and it can also be separated from any taint of Abrahamic revelation by being conceived of as Plotinus' One, or even the Dao. In the second place, they place them in the very intelligible it self (i.e.) in the Soul of the world: Here they are on a lower level and are a part of the animating power of the Universe. It must be remembered that a Platonic world is a living soul, filled with souls, not a mechanical universe consisting of dead matter. They place them in nature, as certain small seed of forms infused by the Idea's: Here we start to get closer to our own world and this idea of a seed of forms was to prove “fruitful” as I began to look at them as “seeds of power” which the Platonic Magician learned to cultivate, both in him or herself, but also in the external world. For Idea's are not only essential causes of every species, but are also the causes of every vertue: This simply reaffirms what I said before, the causal efficacy of the “ideas” is manifest all the way down to our world, where they manifest as “power” that can be harvested and harnessed. This cosmological structure going from ideas in the “Mind of God” to their manifestations as physical objects here on earth, is called “the Great Chain of Being" and was the fundamental idea of how the Cosmos functioned from the Hellenistic period to about 1800. Its History and development have been admirably chronicled by A. O. Lovejoy in his book of the same name, The Great Chain of Being. For the moment skipping over chapter 12, we will quote from Chapter 13, where the Great Chain of Being is further examined: Therefore Plato, and his Schollers [scholars] attribute these vertues to Idea's, the formers of things.: Again affirming the causal power of the ideas. The Form therefore, and Vertue of things comes first from the Idea's: The form in the Aristotelian sense is the idea manifesting as a "formal" cause. There is therefore no other cause of the necessity of effects, then the connexion [connection] of all things with the first Cause, and their correspondency with those Divine patterns, and eternall Idea's, whence every thing hath its determinate, and particular place in the exemplary world: Again the Great Chain of Being. At the top is the One, which differentiates on down the Hierarchy to manifest in our world. And every vertue of Hearbs [herbs], Stones, Metals, Animals, Words, and Speeches: It is noteworthy that Agrippa includes words and speeches as a potential manifestation of “hidden powers”. He ends his First Book on the subject of "Words, and Speeches" and then expands on it in later books. These two sections are Agrippa's basic exposition of a cosmological structure that occurs in other places in the Three Books and is an important part of his “theory of the practice”, the base cosmic circuit board, you might say, of Platonic Engineering. All cited references to Agrippa's Occult Philosophy are from Joseph Peterson's Twilight Grotto, a very useful site. So to get back to your question the basic ideas go back to Plato and Aristotle, they were worked into a cosmological model "the Great Chain of Being" and this cosmological model became a standard one during the Hellenistic period which would have been used by anyone wanting to rationalize and explain all sorts of things including magic and alchemy. One primary example would be the integration of the Chaldean Oracles with late Platonism with the development of Theurgy in Iamblichus and Proclus As long as the above is, it just scratches the surface of the subject, but I hope that it will prove to be a helpful and fruitful starting point for you. ZYD

There is a large literature of scholarly work on the subject. I was always interested in history, however, especially after I read the first book of Agrippa's Three Books of Occult Philosophy and realized that there were significant differences between traditional magic as practiced in the Renaissance and magic as it developed and practiced in the "magical revival" of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, I became very interested in intellectual history and the practice of magic in the Renaissance, and I read widely in the history of magic in the Renaissance and Middle Ages. About 1976 I realized based on what I knew of Platonism from this reading that Platonism seemed to provide a rational framework for the practice of magic in the sense that Agrippa wrote about it, and widened my historical reading back to the Hellenistic period and I am quite familiar with the literature written before 1990, and I am sure that the literature has continued to expand since then. Offhand I cannot think of a single work that details the whole of the period that you mention. As an overview of the whole period Lynn Thornike's eight volume History of Magic and Experimental Science was and probably still is considered to be the scholarly standard, and can be downloaded from Archive.org, this will link to Volume One. As an overview and possible source of more recent scholarship the Wikipedia article on Western Esotericism and a special article on the Academic study of Western esotericism look like a useful start. I hope that this is helpful. ZYD

Lesser Banishing Pentagram Ritual In the original Golden Dawn it was the first ritual that the member was taught and has become kind of standard starting point for the Western Ritual tradition. I first came across it in Crowley's Magick in Theory and Practice which I bought in the Summer of 1963 when I was twelve as I have mentioned elsewhere on Dao Bums. I did not actually start using it or doing any magical practices until the Summer of 1968 because sometime in 1964 I looked at my cute little library of magic books which I think at the time was about ten to fifteen books, and decided that it was too early to start doing things like that and I stopped buying books and just did Hatha Yoga, which I had started in the Summer of 1961 watching Richard Hittleman's Yoga for Health television program. I became interested in Yoga because of a Superman comic book that I read in which Superman had had to deal with an alien from a distant galaxy who practiced astral projection to explore outer space and came here to earth. In a note the c0mic mentioned that Yoga practicioner's practiced astral projection, and I decided I want to do it too. By the standards of the time I was a strange kid, there was no Harry Potter then like there is now to inspire young would be magicians, with twin interests in magic and science and intended to be a physicist and magician when I grew up. In the Summer of 1966 my brother came back from college and brought with him the Tao Te Ching, as it was still called at that time, the I Ching and Tai Chi Chuan, which started my interesting in Daoism and Chinese training methods. I started buying books again that Summer and started practicing magic using such things as the Lesser Pentagram Ritual and the Middle Pillar exercise in the Summer of 1968, when I figured I was old enough to start training in magic. I will explain more about what happened from 1968 to the early Seventies in later posts. ZYD

The following presumes a good understanding of the Microcosm/Macrocosm relation as I outlined above. In this discussion I will be looking at two principles fundamental to Sadhu's Hermetic perspective and which he talks both about and around in many places in the whole book, which taken together actually give a fair picture of what he is trying to both convey and hide. These terms are defined in a glossary that is part of the introduction as follows: Page 26: Egregor: is a collective entity, such as a nation, state, society, religions and sects and their adherents, and even minor human organizations. The structure of Egregors is similar to that of human beings. They have physical bodies (that is, collectively all the bodies of those who belong to the particular Egregor) and also astral and mental ones; the Egregor being the sum total of all these elements. Page 29: Tourbillons or Vortexes: are astral creations of force which are the bases of all astro-mental realizations. Tradition ascribes the funnel like forms to them. Knowledge of the laws ruling over the tourbillons and their construction, is one of the foremost principles of magic. Although it CANNOT be given in open language to the public at large, it has been sufficiently described for initiates in this course, under the veil of Kabbalistic structures. The most guarded secrets of Hermetic magic are: finding the point of support for the tourbillon on the physical plane, and the formula of transition from the astral to the physical world. The first thing to note is that egregor as used in this classical sense is not to be confused with egregor as used in Chaos Magic. In chaos magic an egregor is solely the creation of human beings which starts out as a "thought form" and evolves to higher levels until it becomes a "god". This is a collective entity like a classical egregor, but a classical egregor is considered to also consist of spiritual beings who have an independent existence and are not considered to be creations of human beings, and can range from Gods and Archangels down to elemental and nature spirits, as Sadhu says on p. 250, "into the Egregor—apart from the pentagrammatical beings of evolutionary type (living men and elementars)—the energy of the elementals, Spirituum Directorum (leading spirits) and even Angels should also be attracted." The modern tendency is to dismiss such notions as irrational fantasies, but there are worldviews such as Platonism in which they are parts of a very complete and rational model of reality. The concept of egregor, sometimes spelled with a final "e" as in the link I am about to give, is quite common in occultist circles as this site on Egregores outlines. As I studied Sadhu I came to the conclusion that an egregor could have only a single incarnate human. as he says on page 80 in an analysis of magical operations, “the person acting uses as his starting point of realization, just the third, that is, the physical plane. it can be the body of the operator himself, or outer objects.” and the rest of it be made up of spiritual beings, thus a single person performing a ritual such as the banishing ritual of the pentagram could be viewed as creating a temporary egregor for a specific magical purpose and I started to view ritual as creating a "unification" of microcosm and macrocosm which was in a sense special, and to which I gave the name of "intercosm" to represent its aspect of unifying microcosm and macrocosm in a single cooperative action. The training which Bardon gives however, does not involve this type of interaction, but rather a training of the microcosmic abilities of willpower and imagination. Even the parts of Bardon that do mention "ritual" training are not training like this, but rather a conditioning process within oneself. The procedures which he gives for manifesting "god" are more complex and their application in his book on magical evocation does involve summoning a spirit, but the core is still purely an exercise of the power of the microcosm through willpower and imagination. I will deal with these practices in a separate discussion due to their complexity. As I thought about these things I began to wonder if there was something special in ritual training involving this union of microcosm and Macrocosm that was unique and could not be duplicated by the purely microcosmic training of Bardon, or for that matter similar training in Crowley or other authors, though the matter is more complex in Crowley and will require its own discussion. Just to make clear Sadhu himself taught exercises for development of the microcosmic development of willpower and imagination and had a book titled Concentration which was devoted to such exercises which he considered essential to mastering his Hermetic teachings, but it existed in a wider context than Bardon, so such exercises can be used with material such as I am expounding here, but they should also be complemented by the ritual experience such as I have outlined above. This is part of the reason why I believe that Bardon type teachings and Golden Dawn practices are not mutually exclusive, however, as I will develop in future posts, they are not necessary to success in these practices either. As for Vortexes in Sadhu they are closely related to egregors though the relation develops in various discussions spread throughout the book which the reader must synthesize through diligent study and reflection. They are an important part of manifesting magical results in the physical world, which is Sadhu's reason for talking around them so much. They are important in the Golden Dawn and I will be dealing with them in more detail in future posts, mostly from a Golden Dawn perspective, which since it was originally not intended to be made public, is more revealing than Sadhu's discussion, though all taken together reveals a clearer picture and I will examine them more in future posts. I realize that the above is rather condensed and I hope that I have been clear enough. Question are naturally welcome and will be answered, just as further posts will be made, as time permits. ZYD

I am about to start posting on my early experience with Golden Dawn material and my analysis of Franz Bardon's material here: Bardon and Golden Dawn I am almost done withe the first post and will be posting it in the next twelve hours or so. My plan is to follow it up with a whole series analyzing the issues in detail. ZYD

To banish and not invoke is a "popular" mistake. The purpose of banishing is to create a clear space, so that invocation can proceed in a "cleansed" area. The banishing Ritual of the Pentagram should always be followed by the invoking one, and I have always taught my students to follow both of these with the Rose Cross Ritual, a less well known, but extremely valuable ritual, which provides definite benefits. ZYD

One of the difficulties with writing this is that I haven't looked seriously at Bardon, who is being critiqued, or Mouni Sadhu, whose ideas I wish to cover in a positive way, for decades, but in the case of Sadhu his material became a fundamental part of my thinking about certain things, so I can write about it easily, but I want to cite the sources in his book, The Tarot which means finding the necessary passages in the book. Fortunately I have a good PDF copy of The Tarot and also good software for extracting the information for posting here. I have finally been able to set that up, though it does require me to go back and forth from two computers each of which has its own idiosyncrasies that make them less than idea to work with. One of the things that I needed to do was to review certain parts of The Tarot to make sure that I was in point of fact remembering them and interpreting them correctly, I have finished that review and yes, I am correct, however reviewing the actually writing reveals a real difficulty in that Sadhu's discussions are in the technical language of late Nineteenth Century magical theory and any direct quote would make little to no sense to anyone who was not already fluent in that technical language, and I would have to be writing long commentaries on each such quote, so I have decided that the only way for me to proceed is give my interpretation give page references to the discussion on which it is based and let people take it from there. I will begin with recounting my reasons for favoring the ritual procedures of the Golden Dawn and Daoist qigong training to Bardon's system of training. I'll start this shortly. ZYD

I started with the post on the Microcosm/Macrocosm doctrine largely because of the influence which Mouni Sadhu's the Tarot had upon me. While it certainly deals with the Tarot, it deals with the Tarot as a guide in symbolic form to the "Hermetic Mysteries" and analyses all of them in some detail while describing their relations and how they relate to Hermetic theory and practice in as much detail as he thought possible. He did not believe that such things should be revealed clearly in a public form, but that such things should be the fruit of study, hard work and disciple. So the book is not easy reading, but as I noted here: I put a lot of study and work into it. I even used to dream about it in that period. I consider all of the work to have been worthwhile and for reason's which I noted above: was to prove very valuable in understanding aspects of the Golden Dawn that were not well understood by later members because as the Twentieth Century developed in English at least the field was dominated by authors who insisted on psychological and even neurological interpretations into magic. The approach to magic that Sadhu espoused was maintained in French in the works of Papus and other authors who names are sprinkled throughout his work. Among other mysteries of Twentieth Century magic that are clear to a person who understands Sadhu's material is why Mrs. Macgregor-Mathers expelled Dion Fortune out of the Golden Dawn successor group, the Alpha et Omega, or a least the reason she stated, there may have been other issues in the background. I'll talk about that shortly. ZYD

My brother gave me a copy of C. C. Zain's book on the Tarot for my birthday in 1966 or 67, in either case it was early enough that I was interested enough in their perspective by the Summer of '68 when I graduated from high school to spend a large amount of graduation gift money on more books by Zain and also on Burgoyne's Light of Egypt, I also applied to join, but by the time that they got back to me telling me that I was accepted, I had moved on to other perspectives. I have probably been purged from the rolls since then, but for a while at least I was member of the American Successor to the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor. There material is actually quite interesting, but their Tarot system does not align well with others that I learned about and I eventually settled on the Golden Dawn version. I still have my old black and white Brotherhood of Light tarot deck. It is not pretty, but eventually the they did issue a colored one that was actually very nicely done. One of the things that distracted me from them was Mouni Sadhu's book on the Tarot to which I will be returning shortly. ZYD

I'm sorry to be so long getting back to this, but as I thought about how to proceed I realized that I should be ready with citations and other things to flesh this out, which required going through my computers to find the necessary resources, and then I needed to decide on the best place to start and finally decided on the following post I made on the subject of the Microcosm/Macrocosm relation since it is one of the fundamental reasons for my decision to favor the ritual techniques of the the Golden Dawn over those of Bardon: In the West it became fundamental to Metaphysics and Ontology, but originated as an Epistimological theory: Like is only known by like in Empedocles because it solves a lot of problems created both by Parmenides on the one hand and the early Greek Atomists on the other. This doctrine was worked out by Plato in a very profound way and continued to influence Western Philosophy up to Hegel. It existed in China as can be seen in this quote from the Confucian, Mencius: and was also used in Daoism. In Plato, as becomes very clear in Plotinus, all things, including our own divine being as already there within us, it allows this type of knowledge of God: as is found in the Corpus Hermeticum. The text which I emphasized above, "If, then, thou dost not make thyself like unto God, thou canst not know Him. For like is knowable to like", emphasizes the epistemological origin of this practice and it is only the Microcosm/Macrocosm analogy that makes it possible. This is a very Western approach approach to God as the fullness of Creation and the unifying One at its root, though the approach to the One as the one itself is also part of Western Philosophy especially in Plotinus. I will add that the Paracelsus quote that starts the above was also important to me because in my teens I was concerned with questions of epistemology and in thinking about it had thoughts like those those have become know as "Meno's paradox", though at the time I had no idea who Meno was and as I have noted elsewhere on Dao Bums because of I started reading Plato with the Republic I was not going to learn about for more than a decade. The Paracelsus quote above was to provide a good framework for my own thinking which had already inclined me to "Innatism", as an answer to the problems I was examining. More soon, ZYD

Yes, I would be happy to enlarge on these comments and in the process make clear why I chose the Golden Dawn techniques over those of Bardon and others, such as Crowley. The first stop on that will be a discussion of a real hermetic author, Mouni Sadhu and how I learned from him what real Golden Dawn magic is about and how the founders and early adepts of the Golden Dawn thought about and practiced it. ZYD

I had seen a topic on Rasmus' teaching a month or so ago and looked at it, and based on what I could determine from the descriptions it looks like it moved in the direction I was moving before I actually had the Golden Dawn material, which I bought in early October of 1970. The Golden Dawn material is like a treasure casket of mysteries that as you search deeper into it, the more valuable things you discover, it makes anything that Bardon has to say seem trivial by comparison, however you do have to work at it to get to that level of understanding. It also prepared me to understand the Daoist Ritual Tan ( 坛 ) as represented in works such as those of Saso, and that was very important to me also. There is more to the formal structure of such systems than meets the eye at first acquaintance, and it is very well worth knowing. ZYD