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THE TREE OF LIFE 161
sat shining and starlike, mute as statues, more colossal than
Egyptian images of their gods, and at the end of the hall was a
higher tllrorle on which sat one grcater than the rest. A light like
the sun glowed behind him. Below on the floor of the hall lay a
dark figure as if in trance, and two of the Divine Icings made
motions with their hands about it over head and body. I saw
where their hands waved how sparkles of fire like the flashing of
jewels broke out. There rose out of that dark body a figure as
tall, as glorious, as shining as those seated on the thrones. As lle
woke to the hall he became aware of his divine kin, and he lifted
up his hands in greeting.
He had returned from his pilgrimage
through darkness, but now an initiate, a master of the heavenly
guild. While he gazed on them the tall golden figures from their
thrones leaped up, they, too, with hands uplifted in greeting, and
they passed from me and faded swiftly in the great glory behind
the throne."l
In addition, the Qabalistic Tree of Life should be made the object
of nluch research and experiment on that plane. The Slcryer should
practise rising from one Sephirah to another, analysing the nature
of that sphere carefully ; climbing all the branches of this Tree
which grows out of the glowing heavens above descending in glory
to the many-coloured earth beneath. All the Paths radiating from
and joining together the Ten Sephiros should be carefully explored
and registered in the scientific diary. It is thus that self-knowledge
is attained, inasmuch as the Tree is a symbolic map not only of
man's own inner constitution but of the structure and forces of
the entire universe in every one of its multitudinous phases.
" Tlle Universe," wrote Crowley, " is a projection of ourselves ;
an image as unreal as that of our faces in a mirror, yet, like that
face, the necessary form of expression thereof, not to be altered
save as we alter ourselves. . . . In that Light, therefore, all that we
do is to discover ourselves by means of a sequence of liieroglyphics
and the changes which we apparently operate are in an objective
sense illusions. . . . It enables us to see ourselves, and therefore to
aid us to initiate ourselves by showing us what we are doing."
By studying this synlbolic map in the astral, through the means
of the Body of Light, the Magician will come to be acquainted with
every aspect of his own consciousness and the universe itself. Tl~e
. -
visions which he perceives, evoked by the use of sigils, are so many
The Cnlrdle of Visiotl. By A. E.