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Book of Ceremonial Magic: Introduction

THE mystic tradition in Christian Times is preserved, apart from all questions and traces of Instituted Mysteries, in the literature of Christian Mystical Theology; it is a large and exceedingly scattered literature; some of its most important texts are available in no modern language; they stand very seriously in need of codification, and--if I may be so frank--even of re-expression. But if, for other reasons, they are in their entirety a study which must be left to the expert, there is no person now living in Europe who has not close at his hands the specific, simple, isolated texts--much too numerous to name--which are sufficient to give some general idea of the scope and aims of the tradition. If I were asked to define the literature shortly and comprehensively as a whole, I should call it the texts of the way, the truth and the life in respect of the mystic term. It is not only full but exhaustive as to the way--which is that of the inward world, recollection, meditation, contemplation, the renunciation of all that is lower in the quest of all that is higher--but perhaps the most catholic word of all would be centralisation. It is very full also on the fundamental truth, out of which it arises, that a way does exist and that the way is open. The truth is formulated in all simplicity by the Epistle to the Hebrews--that God is and that He recompenses those who seek Him out. I have cited this testimony on several occasions in the same connection, and I do so here and now without a word of apology and with no sense of repetition, since it can never be a matter of redundancy to remember after what manner the Divine ways are justified to humanity, when humanity is seeking the Divine. The literature,

The Cloud of Unknowing "a beginning in the substantial creation." It will be seen that I set aside implicitly the suggestion that the passage is a simple reference to the soul in physical birth. I do not think that the mystic whose chief flowers are of all things exotic would offer a distinction like this as a qualification of the soul's eternity by integration in the Godhead, or, more correctly, by substantial unity. That which I take, therefore, to have been present to the writer's mind was the implicit pre-existence of all souls in the Divine Being for ever, and secondly their explication--as if the living thought became the living word; but there are no commensurate analogies. In this manner there arose "the substantial

The Cloud and its connections and identities in the great literature, is "the high wisdom of the Godhead ... descending into man's soul ... and uniting it to God Himself." The path is a path of undoing, though it is at this point that so many mystics stand in fear of the irresistible consequences which follow from their own teachings: it is the returning of the substantial creation into nothing; it is an entrance into the darkness; an act of unknowing wherein the soul is wholly stripped and unclothed of all sensible realisation of itself, that it may be reclothed in the realisation of God.

It may well seem that in this House Mystic of ineffable typology all the old order has passed away. The secret of attainment does not lie in meditation or in thinking, in the realisation of Divine qualities, in the invocation of saints or angels; it is a work between the naked soul and God in His uttermost essence, in an essence so uttermost that "it profiteth little, or nothing at all, to think upon the loving kindness of God, or upon the holy angels and saints, or else upon the glory and joys of heaven." That, and all that, is fair work and square work, good and true work, but it is not materials for building the Most Secret, Most Holy Temple, into which God and the soul go in and one only comes out. Yet is the old doctrine the true doctrine still; there is nothing abrogated and there is nothing reduced. In all but the deepest paths, it is meet and right and salutary to seek the interceding angels and the communion of saints, to dwell upon the Passion of Christ, and so forth. The old histories also are truly understood in the old way; the Passion was no shadowy pageant; Christ died and rose in the body; in the body He ascended into Heaven, and no less and no differently in that body He sitteth at the right hand of the Father Almighty.

Hereof is the mystic tradition in Christian Time; it has been perpetuated in an unbroken line from the beginnings of the new dispensation until this now. It is of course in itself the most secret, exotic and incomprehensible of all languages, though at the same time it is the most open, universal and simple. The understanding of it is a question of experience, and the experience is attained in sanctity, though--as I have said, but also elsewhere--the intellectual light concerning it belongs rather to the dedication out of which sanctity may at length issue than to the state of saintship itself. The technicalities of the occult sciences may seem hard to the beginner, and they are actually hard like the wilderness, because they are barren wastes, but they are in words of one syllable if compared with the little catechisms of eternal life, which are exclusive to the children of God.