Seeing with Different Eyes: Essays in Astrology and Divination Edited by Patrick Curry and Angela Voss Cambridge Scholars PublishingSeeing with Different Eyes: Essays in Astrology and Divination, Edited by Patrick Curry and Angela Voss This book first published 2007 by Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 15 Angerton Gardens, Newcastle, NES 2JA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data ‘A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2007 by Patrick Curry and Angela Voss and contributors All sights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or ‘otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10); 1-84718-361-1, ISBN (13): 9781847183613TABLE OF CONTENTS Preface and Acknowledgments .. Introduction NCIENT EYES Parti: Chapter One... A World full of Signs: Understanding Divination in Ancient Stoicism Peter T. Struck 7 Chapter Two... Chaldean Divination and the Ascent to Heaven Algis Uzdavinys Chapter Three... Oracles, Dreams and Astrology in amblichus’ De mysteriis Crystal Addey 5D Chapter Four.... Living Light: An Exploration of Divine Embodiment Gregory Shaw PART II: RELIGIOUS EYES Chapter Five... 91 Theurgy in Theravadan Buddhism Garry Phillipson Chapter Six... 129 “Nor by dreams, nor by Urim, nor by prophets”: The Story of the Woman at the Well in I Samuel Ann Jeffersvi Table of Contents Part III: MUSICAL EYES 143 Chapter Seven. “The Power of a Melancholy Humour Angela Voss Chapter Eight... 173 Four Faces of Apollo: Divination, Music, Cosmology ‘And Healing in Ben Jonson's Masque of Augurs (1622) Anthony W. Johnson Part IV: ASTROLOGICAL EYES 209 Chapter Nine... A Phenomenological Approach to “Astrology: Thinking of Astrology at the end of Metaphysics Marilynn Lawrence Chapter Ten... The Unique Case of Interpretation: Explorations in the Epistemology of Astrology Geoffrey Cornelius Part V: CULTURAL EYES Chapter Eleven . The Chance Game of Divining? The Case of the Enochian Chess of the Golden Dawn and its use in Divination Johann Friedrich Wolfgang Hasler Chapter Twelve .. 7 Mind, Body and Cosmos in Mayan Divination Dennis Tedlock 311 Chapter Thirteen... Sacred ‘Connections ‘between Self, Other ‘and the Worl The Emergence of Integrative Medicine Barbara Tedlock 2329 334PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The essays in this collection originated at a conference held at the University of Kent, Canterbury, in April 2006, entitled “Seeing with Different Eyes: a Conference on Astrology and Divination”. This was the second event of its kind at Kent, and this is the second publication to emerge from the teaching and research initiative on divination located in the School of European Culture and Languages (religious studies section).’ The MA programme in the Cultural Study of Cosmology and Divination, sponsored by the Sophia Trust, is currently in its second year and is attracting international attention from students and researchers involved in the academic study of the theories and practices of divination and the cosmologies within which these practices arise. The focus at Kent is on the epistemology and hermeneutics of divination and symbolic interpretation as a field of enquiry in its own right, and it is unique in regarding divinatory consciousness as a ubiquitous human phenomenon worthy of investigation on its own terms. Divination studies have tended to become subsumed into other disciplines such as anthropology, classics or history of ideas, but in locating divination (and particularly the study of astrology) within religious studies, we are acknowledging its roots in a sacred cosmos whose order is perceived not solely through speculation but also, if not primarily, through participation in ritual activity. Divination is understood as a fundamentally “religious” experience, however broadly the word is conceived, and however valiantly science, behavioural psychology or the social sciences may seek to prove or disprove its “truth” through their own frames of reference. Our approach is truly interdisciplinary, as the papers in this volume demonstrate, but it is not reductionist. Divination is addressed here through the lenses of ancient philosophy, religious practice, the arts, astrology and specific cultural forms and contexts, all of which emphasise a dynamic interplay between the human rational faculty and the religious imagination, the interpreter and the symbol, the abstract concept and living experience. We do not seek to explain divination, or to relegate it to the product of a “primitive” mentality, but to understand its many manifestations as a rich testimony to the power and creativity of the human soul as it seeks to make sense of the unseen forces that surround it, and act accordingly.viii Preface and Acknowledgments We would like to thank all the staff and students in the MA programmes in the Study of Mysticism and Religious Experience and the Cultural Study of Cosmology and Divination at Kent for their enthusiasm and intellectual encouragement. Particular thanks go to Dr Jeremy Carrette and Dr Karl Leydecker for their confidence in and support of divination studies within SECL, and to Dr Peter Moore and Dr Leon Schlamm for fostering the seed of cosmology and divination within the study of Mysticism until it was old enough to fend for itself, We are also grateful to the Sophia Trust, without whose funding this initiative would not have been possible, and to the Urania Trust, for ongoing financial support. Finally, we would like to acknowledge Dr Alie Bird for her painstaking proof-reading and indexing, and thank her for her dedication and commitment to this project. ' The first publication being The Imaginal Cosmos: Astrology, Divination and the Sacred, Angela Voss and Jean Hinson Lall, eds., (Canterbury: University of Kent, 2007),CHAPTER ELEVEN DIVINATORY FOUR-HANDED CHESS: THE CASE OF THE ENOCHIAN CHESS OF THE GOLDEN DAWN AND ITS USE IN DIVINATION JOHANN FRIEDRICH WOLFGANG HASLER Enochian Chess, originally named “Rosicrucian Chess”, is a board game for four players comparable in some aspects to traditional chess, but adapted from the Indian four-handed Chaturanga. Apart from acting as a form of erudite entertainment for knowledgeable Hermeticists, it can also be used for informal, ludic group meditation and contemplation of the various elemental, geomantic, astrological and tarot symbolism its boards and pieces represent. It also has—as its name implies—important connections to the Enochian system of magic originally channelled by the Elizabethan Magus John Dee and his seer the alchemist Edward [Talbot] Kelley in the 1580s, and later modified and “Hermeticised” by Samuel Lindell MacGregor Mathers and William Wynn Westcott of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, at the end of the 19th century. Yet during its use in the curriculum of the Adeptus Minor of the Golden Dawn magical system it moved beyond its obvious possibilities as an aid to study, contemplation and meditation of Hermetic symbolism, and developed a different system of play that involved using it as a divination tool. Being a divination system in which four magical adepts actively participate, and later interpret in tandem each individual move (scrupulously recorded during game-play), it constitutes a unique case in Western divinatory practices. This paper will report on this lesser-known system of Hermetic divination, giving a quick overview of its history, symbolic attributions and operation, as well as discussing its peculiar casting and interpretation methods. The title of this paper might come as a surprise to many, since chess is not usually considered a game of chance, but rather one of intellectual prowess, strategy, well thought-out, premeditated moves and quick intellectual reactions. And since all forms of divination entail a certain258 Chapter Eleven degree of chance in the original configuration of the casting or spread that will be later interpreted, the use of chess in a divination context might seem contradictory to the very nature of both divination and of chess. Yet, as the Enochian chess revivalist and scholar Steve Nichols notes, “all recreational board-games such as Chess and card-games...seem to be survivals of magical practices amongst our ancestors”.! From this perspective then, chess as a divinatory game which combines strategy—in the form of complex decision-making based upon strict rules—with chance—through the use of dice—is not such a far-fetched idea, and actually several games of this type still exist (such as backgammon or snakes and ladders, to name only the most popular), though their use in divination has been lost. Enochian chess was originally called “Rosicrucian Chess” by its reputed inventor, William Wynn Westcott,” who, along with Woodman and MacGregor Mathers, was one of the three original founding adepts of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in 1888. I refer to Westcott as the reputed originator of Enochian Chess as it is now known, because it cannot be stated definitely that there was any form of Enochian Chess before his work on the matter in the early 1890s.‘ Yet it is a provoking thought that Richard Deacon quotes Robert Hooke (1635-1703) reporting in his book An Ingenious Cryptographical System that Dee had invented a game which: enabled a person to send out a secret message in what purported to be a confrontation between himself and spiritual creatures, or, when necessary, by the moving of objects resembling pieces of a game of chess so that each move gave an item of information. This is an intriguing clue into the prehistory of Enochian chess (that is, before its “re-invention” by the Golden Dawn at the end of the nineteenth century), which I have been unfortunately unable to follow-up, and which is not mentioned in any documents, lectures or instruction papers of the Golden Dawn which I have come across. Furthermore, it is only mentioned by one of the modern authors who have worked intensely ‘on Enochian chess in the last thirty years,’ and for the purposes of contemporary Enochian chess it seems to be an ignored or overlooked source, which is not the case with Westcott’s material on the game, now considered as the standard starting point for Enochian chess. ‘This game, when used for meditation or occult study, was played in a way we might more easily associate with mundane, non-magical chess But when used for divination, dice were cast to determine which of the pieces were to be moved, and the players assumed a role similar to that of‘The Chance Game of Divining? The Case of the Enochian Chess 259 of the Golden Dawn and its use in Divination the tarot reader while spreading the cards on the reading cloth or table: namely that of non-intervening, agents in the development of a spread or configuration dictated by fate. I. History of Enochian or “Rosicruician” Chess 1.1. Enochian Chess as a Golden Dawn Creature Even though the Enochian system of magic® was channelled and initially systematized by the Elizabethan alchemist Edward [Talbot] Kelley and the magus/scientist John Dee between the years 1582-1589,? it was not until three hundred years later—when Samuel Lindell MacGregor Mathers was revising and further “Hermeticising” the system in the wake of the creation of the influential Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn—that a way of applying part of the Enochian system (as the Golden Dawn approached it) to a board game was devised. Tt must be clarified that Enochian or Rosicrucian Chess did not form part of any of the workings or magical theorisations of Dee and Kelley or the original Enochian systems they channelled and systematised in the latter part of the sixteenth century; actually, their original system of magic was later modified in many important and substantial ways by the founding Golden Dawn adepts during the last decade of the nineteenth century, as several authors have pointed out.!° Enochian magic is indeed the product of two heavily Hermeticised minds of the golden era of Occult Philosophy (a physical alchemist and a magus), but it stands in a peculiar way outside the “mainstream” of Hermeticism, almost as a “para- Hermetic” system: the original Enochian magic does apply the planetary heptad in one of its sub-systems (the Heptarchia Mystica), but it relies on a new, channelled sacred language instead of the traditional Hermetic Latin, Hebrew or Greek for all of its workings. "The most famous component of the later, more developed Enochian system (as opposed to the Heptarchia, which is earlier, cruder, and which exhibits linguistic inconsistencies when compared with the latter Enochian language) is the system of four Watchtowers, which were received by Kelley in a vision at Cracow during several weeks in 1584.'* The complex sub-system of the watchtowers and all the names, symbols and magic calls” associated with them js all that survived into the Golden Dawn interpretation of the Enochian system," and except for a very few purists who try to practise Dee’s original version, forms the basis of all of the Enochian magic that is practised today."°260 Chapter Eleven. The only way in which Enochian chess is directly related to Dee’s original Enochian system is that the boards have been derived from the elemental watchtowers and their correspondences and attributions have been kept."° The pieces, the rules for moving them, and the divinatory purpose of the game itself is completely alien to Dee’s Enochian workings, as his system of magic is mainly designed for evocation and direct communication with angels rather than for divination or meditation. 1.2, Enochian Chess as derived from the Indian four-player chess “chaturanga” Christine Zalewski, who was the Golden Dawn adept responsible for the reconstruction of the rules of Enochian Chess in the 1980s—almost a hundred years after it was invented by Wynn Westcott—is of the opinion that beyond any doubt, “Westcott based the Enochian chess game on the Indian game, Chaturanga”.'” According to Adam McLean, Westcott would have become very familiar with this game through the influential book History of Chess by the orientalist Duncan Forbes (1798-1868), first published in 1860, which it is probable he knew. Chaturanga is a four-player board game quite similar to modern chess, in which each of the players is assigned a corner of the board. Another important difference between chaturanga and modem chess is that the former incorporates the use of dice. Its name derives from the Sanskrit words chatur, which means “four”, and ranga, which is “member”, “limb”, “detachment” or simply “part”."* The term was used by epic poets of India to refer to parts or detachments of an army.'? Chaturanga therefore can be translated either as “four armies”, “four parts” or “quadripartite”. The first historian of chess who suggested that chaturanga was of Indian origin was Sir William Jones (1746-1794), who in 1790 wrote about “the Indian game of chess”.' Forbes, whose work Wynn Westcott in all probability knew, supported this idea. He is also of the opinion that the game already existed five thousand years ago,” and later “found its way into Persia around 550 CE during the reign of Naushirawan and it is here that it underwent a drastic change into a game that was eventually called Shatranji”.’ His theory also states that it was later, in Persia and before the year 1,000, that the use of dice was abandoned and the number of players was reduced to two, both teams facing each other instead of being placed at the corners of the board, as is still done in Rosicrucian or Enochian chess and in the original chaturanga, from which the former derives.*‘The Chance Game of Divining? The Case of the Enochian Chess 261 of the Golden Dawn and its use in Divination Several later orientalists dispute Forbes’s theories though, suggesting that the game originated in China and was later exported westward to India, where it became known to Europeans.”* Most recent research seems to confirm that chess went through a process of complexification rather than simplification as Forbes suggests, and that four-player games are posterior to two-player versions. But since it was the work of Forbes which was known to Wynn Westcott, the most recent and current theories on the origin of chaturanga are irrelevant in tracing the origins of Enochian or Rosicrucian chess, as this is effectively a game invented by a single man, and therefore the sources of inspiration available to this man at the time of the creation of the game are more important for our purpose (regardless of how historically inaccurate they may be) than the most recent findings on the subject, which were unknown to him at the time when he created Rosicrucian chess. The legend about the origin of chaturanga—which must have been very interesting to Wynn Westcott—tells us it was developed by Sita, a concubine to King Ravana of Ceylon (Sri-Lanka) as a sort of battle- modelling or war simulation game that would acknowledge the imponderable effects of chance in a real battle as well as the classical considerations of tactical force, strength and position. In essence this is not very different to what happens in several forms of divination, in which the number of parts or pieces and their most common effects are known beforehand, and it is their order, arrangement, position and appearance in the reading (or lack thereof) which is determined by chance, the interpretation of the divination being a delicate balancing of all of these factors in order to extract signification from the spread or result under consideration.”* 1.3. The adventures of Enochian Chess in the Golden Dawn and its offshoot orders The history of Enochian chess within the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and its several offshoot orders is as confusing and full of lacunae and uncertainties as that of chaturanga. When the state of dissension, friction and sectarianism between the different former members of the original Golden Dawn and the followers of the respective offshoot orders they created had reached crisis points by the 1930s, Israel Regardie, former private secretary of Aleister Crowley and a member of the order of the Stella Matutina in Bristol, took the crucial decision of publishing all of the written material of the Order, which was until then considered highly262 Chapter Eleven private, and protected by an oath of secrecy swom by all of its members, as still happens in some of the several contemporary incamations of the Golden Dawn tradition.”’ This decision was motivated by what seemed to be a very real danger of all of the documents of the tradition being lost due to the troubles going on between and within the different temples and orders, which basically followed the same basic tenets, with comparatively minor differences in interpretation, outlook or focus.* The until-then highly private documents were published by Regardie in four volumes under the simple title The Golden Dawn in 1937. Needless to say, this flagrant breaking of his oath of secrecy brought him an enormous amount of antipathy and criticism from the occult world in general and the magical establishment in particular.” But for historians of the occult movements, and of the Golden Dawn, this publication offers one of the most reliable source materials for the study of the teachings of the order as they stood in the first quarter of the twentieth century. It seems that the original idea of Wynn Westcott—if not of all three of the founders of the Order—was to include Enochian chess in the curriculum of Enochiana, or matters related to Enochian magic, as modified and taught by the Golden Dawn. In the grade requirements for the Practicus Adeptus Minor—the third part of the 5=6 grade—one can read: [Requirement number] 14. The thorough elementary knowledge of the Formulas of the Awakening of the Abodes, by means of the Play or Raying of the Checkers of the Lesser Angles of the Enochian tables.” Yet, according to Ellic Howe, the Practicus Adeptus Minor grade of the inner or Second Order of the Golden Dawn was never implemented." In his compilation of the Golden Dawn grade material, Regardie places the Enochian chess papers, if only through insinuation, at the first level of the 5=6 grade, the so-called sub-grade of Zelator Adeptus Minor. This material was only delivered to those students who had completed the elemental cycle or Outer Order studies, of a minimum duration of two years, and were at the first step of magical adepthood, the 5=6 degree of Adeptus Minor. This first step, even though usually numbered as the fifth grade in the sixth sphere of the cabalistic Tree of Life (from where the nomenclature 5=6 derives), was effectively the seventh step in the Golden Dawn grade structure, after the grades of Neophyte, Zelator, Theoricus, Practicus, Philosophus, and the Portal grade.* (See figure 11-1.) In the Stella Matutina (one of the first Golden Dawn offshoot orders which appeared after the troubles that befell the order due to the acceptance and advancement of the infamous Aleister Crowley in its