Before I getting to the intricacies of the ritual, it is important for me to put the breaks on for a second and explain the word “God”. For many people “God” is a dirty word which has been used to tell them what to do, who to be and, worse still, what to believe. Many people want to throw out God altogether, but naturally it’s important not to throw out the baby with the bath water.
A lot of Ceremonial Magic grew up in a very Christian background where “God” specifically meant the god of Abraham, who was incarnated as Jesus and existed also as God the Father and the Holy Spirit. Alternatively, it is worth noting that much of magic draws on pre-Christian belief systems where “God” isn’t that specific! Hermetic Magic as practised in the Golden Dawn draws on Neoplatonism, Pythagoreanism and other stuff. Although Hermetics has its own God a universal mind dreaming of us as outlined in the Corpus Hermeticum, to arrive at most modern Hermetic orders you need to travel through a thread of Rosicrucianism.
In Rosicrucian belief, God is imagined from a very Christian perspective, drawing heavily from the Bible and cultural misinterpretation of its texts. Often, the Bible appeared to say one thing, and the leaders of the time decided to interpret it differently. There are some Rosicrucians, such as Isaac Newton who struggled to see “God” as the Christian Trinity and who diverged slightly from the Christian teachings of the time, but most Rosicrucians were stuck in that belief.
In Neoplatonism on the other hand, major writers such as Porphyry and Poltinus drew their ideas of God from a much more philosophical point of view. Their ideas of god was the result of a number of debates and theories concerning what God was like. Their writings indicated a belief that pagan deities existed in the realm of intellect, and as such, could be experienced by the minds of men. They also believed that a unified principle existed, which one could call “God”.
The Neoplatonic Unified Principle would encompass me, you and everything. It’s like the substance of which everything is constructed. As Science progresses, it becomes more and more clear that this is energy in various forms. In the Pythagorean and Neoplatonist view, a stone is “God”, a book is “God”, and so is the devil, but this view of God also transcends above these physical things, through the world of logic and mind into a reality that existed beyond thought. If God were to transcend rational thought and could only be experienced, not known, no Bible could be written about its teachings because they could not be known as they would transcend the intellect like “God” himself.
I plead with you, do not decide what you believe in before you practice! I know a lot of people who are uncomfortable around the major monotheistic religions, which do not match their moral identity, so anything similar to them is already wrong before it has even been philosophically explored. God is unknown to us, and deciding that we know what it is, before we’ve even experienced it would be an arrogance unworthy of the practice of magic. Many who have written about god before us, as a sad, worldly agenda, so it is imperative that we must recognise that not everything which is said about god must necessarily be true, but we should also not assume that we know better than everyone who came before us. Read what people had to say about god, but as Circe often tells me, “Don’t anticipate! Be ready to be surprised.”
Be prepared to be wrong about god! As I am. I have kind of come to the conclusion that the view that god is all things as one is as much about an angle as it is truth. Like from a certain perspective that cannot see the differences between anything in our universe (say from the angle that is between yin and yang and beyond duality) it might seem that all things truly are one, but it is only from a perspective that invalidate the separations that we hold so dear in our day to day life.
What is the nature of God? The unknown. It is the fate of all things, it is the universe from a perspective where there seems no separation of things, it is the seeming lack of Will that seems to result in the flow of the universe from beginning to end, it is the force that keeps all physical things in existence and not vanishing. It is both good and evil. It is whatever did not need to make us, but did. It is us, our friends, our enemies, our possessions and the things unowned. Finally, it is what has already seen the future happen and what can’t wait to re-experience our past.