The Way of Discernment

When the monks of the Egyptian desert were asked which virtue most surely keeps a seeker from falling, they did not answer love, or humility, or fasting. They answered discernment. A traveler who carried their conversations to the West records that the elders once sat up a whole night with the great Antony debating the question, and that Antony settled it: discernment is the mother, the guardian, and the governor of all the other virtues, because without it a person may fast and pray and keep vigil with great zeal and still walk straight off a cliff. The same traveler tells of an old monk, fifty years in the desert and stricter than any of his brothers, who was persuaded by a visitor in shining form, whom he took for an angel, to throw himself down a well to prove his faith. They pulled him out half dead. He died three days later, still certain he had obeyed heaven.

The elders had seen enough of zeal. What they feared was zeal without eyes.

Why This Room

For some years a particular kind of letter has been coming to the fellowship. A student writes that she came to the Essenes by way of the tarot, or the Kabbalah of the modern schools, or a Masonic lodge, or a teacher of ceremonial magic, or the stars. She has studied for years inside one school, and then she has hit a wall. A ritual she was taught led somewhere she had not meant to go. The tables of correspondences she memorized do not match the ancient text they were said to come from. Something seems to have followed her home from a session with a practitioner. Or she is a Christian who has been told by her church that her whole inner life is of the devil, and she would like to know whether it is.

Hesper Lind, who answers the letters, asked the keepers to build a room for them. This is that room. Much of what is in it was taught to us by a friend of the fellowship who has spent a lifetime in those other worlds: a Christian who has read the cards since youth and keeps the line this room describes, a Mason of long standing who knows the lodge from the inside, and a student of the Book of Formation who reads it in the critical edition that gathers every surviving manuscript. The pages that follow call this teacher simply our friend. We have checked what we were told, and we have written it in our own voice, as we do everything.

Two Questions

Almost every page in this room comes back to two questions. The fellowship did not invent them. They run through scripture and through every serious tradition we know.

Who is answering? When you pray, read, cast a lot, look at the sky, or sit in silence, to whom are you turning, and on whose terms? Scripture forbids certain practices, and the pages of this room look at those verses closely. What they forbid, again and again, is not an object: not a deck of cards, not a bowl of water, not a map of the stars. It is a relationship. It is going somewhere other than to God for what only God can give, and demanding an answer instead of asking for one.
Can you show me the page? When a teacher says a thing is ancient, where is the text? A great deal of what is taught in the modern schools as the secret wisdom of Egypt, or of the Kabbalists, or of a hidden brotherhood, turns out on inspection to be a story about a source rather than a source. The story may be beautiful. The student deserves to know which of the two she is being handed.

These are the questions the fellowship asks of itself. The page on The Modern Essene Gospels puts the second to the books from which some of our own teachings come, and answers it plainly. The page on Asking and Commanding puts the first to every spiritual practice, including ours.

Why an Essene Fellowship Speaks of These Things

A student may fairly ask what tarot cards and Masonic pillars have to do with the holy ones of the desert. More than one might think, and for three reasons.

First, the modern schools claimed the Essenes. From the eighteenth century on, lodges and esoteric societies looking for ancestors named the Essenes as an early link in a chain of secret wisdom, and some still do. The article How a Tradition Grows digs through those claims layer by layer. A student who meets the Essenes inside one of those schools needs to know where the school itself came from.

Second, the modern schools are built from the books the Essenes loved. The Book of Enoch, with its Watchers who taught the reading of the stars and its holy angel who taught the true courses of the sun and moon. The temple of Solomon, with its two bronze pillars and its veil. The names of the angels, which the historian says every Essene swore at his entry to keep. The caves by the Dead Sea even held a horoscope, written backward in a jumble of alphabets. When a modern teacher builds on these things, an Essene student has a particular duty to know what they actually say.

Third, the Essenes were a people of discernment before they were anything else. The Community Rule charges the instructor of the community to teach the children of light the natures of the two spirits, and to weigh every member according to his spirit. A candidate was examined and examined again for two full years before he touched the common drink, and every member was examined anew each year. The desert community did not trust zeal. It tested it.

What We Hold and What We Do Not

We hold that the line scripture draws runs between asking and commanding, and between reading what has been revealed and prying out what has not, and not between one object and another. We hold that the history of the modern schools can be traced, and that every date on these pages can be checked by anyone with a library card. We hold that many good and serious people have walked those roads, some of them our own students, and that a capable person can do brilliant work inside a flawed map.

We do not practice cartomancy, astrology, or ceremonial magic, and we teach none of them. We do not hold the cards, the horoscope, or the Kabbalistic tree of ten spheres to be part of the Essene way; where a page describes them, it describes them as history, or as a student's question answered as honestly as we can. We do not claim that any modern order descends from the Essenes, or that the Essenes kept the secrets those orders said they kept. We do not ask anyone to leave a tradition in order to read these pages, and we think no less of those who stay.

The Pages of This Room

Asking and Commanding: The one line that traditions agreeing on almost nothing else have all drawn: between petitioning the unseen world and compelling it. The Watchers who were not sent, the archangel who would not rebuke in his own name, and the dross that grows on those who force.
The Lot and the Diviner: Scripture forbids divination and commands the casting of lots, sometimes in the same breath. The difference between them, the lots of the desert community and the stones on the high priest's breast, and the question every reader of cards should be asked.
The Heavens and the Watchers: Why the Book of Enoch condemns the angels who taught the signs of the stars and honors the angel who taught their courses. The Essene calendar, the horoscopes of the caves, the wise men from the east, and the difference between reading a clock and bowing to it.
The Tree and Its Branches: A map of where the modern mystery schools come from: six old roots, a translation in Florence, two great branches, and the orders of the last two centuries. Know the tree before you choose a branch.
The Cards and the Letters: The true history of the tarot: a card game of the Italian courts, an Egyptian fantasy at a Paris dinner table, a seminarian who counted cards against letters, and the century that taught readers there were no hard cards.
The Secret Chiefs: The London order of 1888, its cipher manuscripts, its German adept no one could find, and the seven letters it moved. What its own founders wrote when the order broke apart, and why the fellowship claims no hidden masters.
Two Pillars in the Porch: Is the most famous deck of cards a Masonic code? The pillars, the veil, and the pomegranates of the first book of Kings, and why the institution that hands on a symbol is not its source.
Paths, Not Steps: The popular teaching that the trumps are twenty-two steps of a single journey, and the older picture of a network of paths that each soul walks in its own way and in both directions.
Keeping the Door: For the student who fears that something has followed her home. The practical before the spiritual, the house swept and empty, the songs of the sage, and the simple disciplines that keep a door.

Two pages elsewhere belong with this room: The Book of Formation, on the short and ancient text that nearly every modern school claims and very few have read, and the article The Company He Kept, for the Christian mystic who has been told her inner life does not belong in the church.