LETTER TO THE EDITOR OF THE OCCULT REVIEW

Published in the Occult Review

London, England / New York, New York, U.S.A.

February 19264

(pages 189-191)

“ONE ANOTHER”

To the Editor of the Occult Review.

Dear Sir,—The issue of the Occult Review which contains a review of my book The Anatomy of the Body of God, has just come to my attention. I wish to thank you and Mr. Meredith Starr for the first paragraph of the review: the remainder is so evidently distorted and unfair that I can only attribute it to “Another” who practically admits his shame by hiding behind Mr. Starr. Since the remainder of the article is, to say the least of it, misleading, I trust that you will allow me this opportunity of in some measure correcting the wrong impression which may have been given to your readers.

In paragraph two “Another” undertakes to explain the true Qabalah and Qabalistic Tree in a dozen lines. In this short space he succeeds in telling us that by his system of endeavor to transcend thought, one finds oneself thinking one has done so because one perceived the abyss below by a kind of spurious reasoning. He teaches us the “moral” lesson that we should first hold to “actual good,” then try to step towards “actual evils” and thus discover that we are in a state of change which is an “actual zero.” In both these instances he has taken a step away from the Reality he set out to contact by transcending thought.

He then remarks that this is intellectual and not material: it is a process, not a thing. I can only reply that it appears to be a very regrettable sort of intellectual process.

One aspect of the Qabalah, as I understand it, is that we may be enabled to classify all our ideas of the universe in terms of thirty-two, and then gradually, by our Qabalistic process of abstraction, reduce these still further until Unity (or Zero) is reached. There is little justification for making quite such a simple postulation of the universe as Plus, Minus and Zero, and hoping (or pretending) that we can just step from Plus to Minus and attain to the ultimate mystery of Zero. And even if this were possible, what have we learned about the Formative Principle of the Universe which the earliest extant treatise on the Qabalah—The Sepher Yetzirah, or “Book of Formation” endeavoured to explain?

To say that my book has little connection with the true Qabalah, being only a materialistic interpretation of a purely formal element, is far from true. It would have been slightly nearer the truth to say it was a purely formal interpretation of the material element—or of the ultimate substratum of pure passive potentiality, from which the four elements arose. This “void” which is hardly real is that into which “Another” has stepped, and because of its “lack of form” he imagines that thought has been transcended. Not alone the whole elemental world, but also the mineral, vegetable, animal, human and celestial kingdoms, lie between this ultimate substratum of the void, and the Reality “Another” hopes to find at the top of his little mental ladder. The whole macrocosm lies between, and only by obtaining some sort of definite idea of the process whereby the Plenum fills the Void, can we hope to transcend thought rather than merely sink below reason.

The Sepher Yetzirah discloses some sort of philosophical conception of the Formative Process (or Yetziratic plane). My book carries this forward logically to a point not attained in the old treatise. It shows, as in the Sepher Yetzirah, that the conception of the Tree of Life is not a simple ladder whereby we may climb in one direction, but that there should be progress in all directions from a centre to the circumference, and a proper reaction of the circumference upon the Centre. It clearly points out that although the Formal is so fully dealt with—since the treatise is devoted to the Formative Plane—the transcendence of Spirit must not for a moment be lost sight of. For the first time the dead and static symbol of the Tree has been shown to be dynamic and living even in its material and formal aspects, and this without any loss of the ideal conception, but rather an enlargement and multiplication of it.

To point out that a consistent geometrical world-view has been one of the puzzles since before the time of Plato, is not reverting to the past, since a reasonable solution is now given for the first time. When “Another” has brought even some semblance of Order out of his chaos, it will be time enough to consider whether Order mummifies the spirit, or whether—although an “ideal limitation”—it is not the only “ladder” to true freedom.

Yours very sincerely,

FRATER ACHAD [Charles Stansfeld Jones]

P.O. Box 141, Chicago, ILL.