A few years ago, society seemed to be changing rapidly. Various kinds of personal differences seemed to be losing their stigma. It was becoming more socially acceptable to be neurodivergent, trans, or to have other kinds of difference. It felt like people could finally be a little bit more comfortable in their own skin. Primary-school-age children were discovering the edges of their identity, putting the jigsaw of who they were together in a freer way than before. Yes, there was an aspect of privilege in terms of formal diagnosis, because the waiting lists were so long that it was often only people with spare money who could get the ball rolling. But to me, it all seemed like a step in the right direction.

On some level, I was aware this may have been a bubble. I’ve lived in Bristol for many years, which is certainly perceived by the right-wing press as a hotbed of wokery. My paid work also exposes me to polar extremes of opinion. On the one hand, there are people pushing for greater inclusivity; on the other, I’m very aware of the sheer amount of hate-fuelled vitriol. Because it can be hard to judge what ‘normal’ people think, I looked to YouGov polls and similar sources to create a simulacrum of a semi-objective barometer of ordinary, changing opinion.

The backlash against this increased inclusivity has been harsh. When large numbers of people, especially younger people, began sharing and revelling in their differences, it made more socially conservative people feel as though the fabric of civilisation was falling apart. They couldn’t tell the boys from the girls anymore. They were being told off for using the wrong words. They were being told that people were autistic or ADHD, etc., in ways that seemed hard for them to understand, because, back in their day, people who were maybe a little odd didn’t have a label. And so, a large swathe of society set about actively re-stigmatising difference again, to keep people in their lane, back in their box. Kindness was reframed as weakness. There was more ‘enemy at the gates’ rhetoric. ‘They’ were taking over. There were also superficially empathetic versions of this narrative: the poor, mixed-up kids who were being taken over, hoodwinked by social contagion. Swarms of migrants were invading, taking advantage of our good nature. At the heart of this was phobia. An exaggerated fear, out of all proportion to any real danger posed by any marginalised group.

There is no perfect looking glass. Viewing the world through any single lens will inevitably introduce some distortion. The Marxist view is one such lens. I’m not talking about the dialectical model of change associated with Marxism via the philosopher Hegel, but about the basic notion of opposition in class struggle.

I was brought up with this view. My dad and his brothers came from the tenement blocks of Glasgow’s Gorbals district. They had experienced a lot of poverty. Their heroes were trade union activists. As a child, I spent Saturdays collecting food donations for striking miners. There was a war between the rich and the poor. It is incredibly incisive and energising to see life as a Manichaean struggle between two opposing forces of good and evil: the powerful exploiting and oppressing the weak, and the fight against evil.

Similarly, one of the tenets of certain strands of second-wave feminism is that there are two classes of humans, separated by biological sex, and that, at the most fundamental level, men are advantaged because they have always, and continue to, deliberately and systematically oppress and exploit women. This has recently become a massive pinch point in the form of differing, seemingly irreconcilable views on sex and gender. In fact, my oldest friend ended our friendship because I didn’t share her increasingly hostile views towards trans people.

This exploitation view goes beyond any one society being sexist or misogynistic. It is seen as something basic and fundamental. Any other perspective that appears to obscure this view of women as a sex class being exploited by men is viewed with suspicion, because it may be an attempt to minimise this exploitation for the benefit of men, who inevitably want things to stay the same so they can continue to gain advantage from it. This extends to suspicion of what would seem quite an innocuous and uncontroversial idea: gender theory, the idea that gender roles, identities, and expectations are shaped not so much by biological sex as by society, culture, and personal experience.

It’s easy to see why, if you held these essentialist views, it would be a short step to viewing trans women with suspicion, because, from this perspective, biology is what matters and ‘biological’ males are intrinsically predatory. This is where all the absurd rhetoric about trans women invading women’s spaces comes from: in this view, a trans woman is a folk devil, a fairy-tale wolf dressing up as Grandmother to trick Little Red Riding Hood.

So, in the essentialist view, this exploitation of one sex class by another is because men are fundamentally, intrinsically, and irredeemably oppressive. They are chromosomally and biologically dangerous and violent.

Of course, in the most simplistic sense, this is kind of true. Most violence against women is perpetrated by men. We’ve all seen nature documentaries. Whilst these programmes tend to preserve and amplify society’s ideas, we can see sex-based differences in the roles male and female animals play and how they interact. There are exceptions, but in mammals in particular, males are usually bigger and stronger than females and tend to fight and fuck their way through life. They often seem less subtle, less nurturing, and rougher and more brutal than females of the same species.

The traditional symbolism of spiritual traditions also says a great deal about male and female. This is often less about biological differences and more about very ancient ideas about the nature of maleness and femaleness. Tradition can also uphold the belief that male and female are rigid, mutually exclusive categories, each with a distinct, non-overlapping set of attributes, aptitudes, abilities, and desires.

In Jungian terms, one central archetype is the Anima, the inner image of the feminine. It lives in the psyche’s symbolic realm and typically becomes active when a man struggles to express qualities he associates with femininity. Traits such as emotional sensitivity, aesthetic awareness, vulnerability, or intuitive openness may be suppressed because they conflict with internalised ideas about how men are supposed to behave. When this happens, he may project these disowned qualities onto any woman he becomes involved with, imagining her to embody emotional depth, grace, or nurturing warmth, regardless of who she actually is. The projection becomes a filter that shapes expectations more than a genuine relationship. This model is rooted in a heteronormative framework, though its underlying dynamics can appear in many relational configurations.

A similar dynamic can occur with the Animus, the masculine archetype. A woman may project this inner figure onto a man and expect him to be strong, decisive, rational, or protective in ways that mirror her own unclaimed capacities. Cultural norms influence this process. Women may be subtly discouraged from traits such as assertiveness or authoritative clarity, making it easier to project those qualities onto imagined male figures rather than recognise them within themselves.

Such projections are compounded by subtle yet deeply rooted forms of internalised misogyny and misandry, a mistrust of traits traditionally labelled as effeminate or masculine. Characteristics such as softness, expressiveness, and sensitivity may be seen not only as weak or effete but also as manipulative, contrived performances intended to appear non-threatening and sexually appealing to men in order to gain proxy power. In this distorted view, so-called feminine traits are regarded as both pitiable and dangerous, a deception masked as seduction. Likewise, men may be considered intrinsically and irredeemably cruel, callous, and predatory. These hidden mistrusts make the projected Anima and Animus not just idealised figures but vessels for contradictory, often hostile fantasies that encompass both adoration and contempt.

Importantly, Anima/Animus projection is not confined to stereotypical gender roles or conventional partnerships. It can be just as influential in relationships between people who see themselves as progressive or psychologically aware. Even when we believe we have outgrown traditional roles, we may still respond to unconscious archetypes of masculinity or femininity rather than to the actual people we love. This is fundamentally problematic. It is a selfish, largely unconscious process that clouds reality, distorts connection, and often causes confusion and disappointment. Until we recognise and withdraw these projections, the relationship cannot genuinely develop between two whole, present individuals.

Anyway, I am explicitly not trying to minimise the fact that men treat women badly or that there is structural, sex-based inequality. But rigid, negative projections about what men and women are like don’t solve anything. They just keep us stuck.

When thinking about the Western esoteric tradition and Hermetic Kabbalah, one often thinks of authoritative figures within a lineage, perhaps leaders or representatives of an initiatory school. These authorities produce various forms of writing, if they write anything at all. One form is a study or overview of their tradition, from an insider, sympathetic perspective, but one that places it in context. This might be a history or an academic translation of a classical text, with commentary or additional context. Another category of writing is the passing on of methods, techniques, or instructions for carrying out magical activities, whether rituals, meditation techniques, or what have you, that have a Kabbalistic basis. Umpteen books boil down traditional Golden Dawn-derived techniques, such as the Middle Pillar, pathworking, 777 correspondences, etc. Some of these are great, even when they are derivative. The last category, rarer, is books that offer intimate personal advice or reflections on Kabbalistic practice.

Yet another approach, almost a genre in itself, is common in classical Jewish Kabbalah but much less so in Hermetic Kabbalah: the radical exegesis of existing writing through juxtaposition, numerology, acronyms, etc. These techniques include Notarikon, Gematria, and Temurah, and they have a long history. In fact, the core texts of traditional Kabbalah, including the Zohar and the Sefer ha-Bahir, largely follow this formula: a discussion and reverse engineering of a piece of scripture or holy saying to draw out and reveal hidden meanings beyond the ordinary, at different levels corresponding to the Four Worlds of Emanation, Creation, Formation, and Action.

One very surprising and inspired exponent of this technique was the eccentric jazz musician Sun Ra. I was turned on to his music in my late teens and enjoyed, and still do, many albums recorded with his Solar Arkestra band, ranging from pure cacophony to experimental synthesiser music to big band, and all shades in between.

Many years later, I came across his writings in two books, Prophetika and The Wisdom of Sun Ra, as well as anecdotes about his interest in magic and Kabbalah in the biography Space Is the Place by John Szwed.

Sun Ra was born in 1914 in Birmingham, Alabama. He became part of the Chicago jazz scene. As a young man, he had a really, really odd experience. It sounds very much like an alien abduction story. Entities apparently took him to Saturn, or to a place he interpreted as Saturn. While there, he died to himself. He received an enormous amount of teaching, then spent the rest of his life expressing and teaching it through music, particularly very, very experimental jazz. So, you have someone who was not part of a traditional initiatory system, but simply had a calling to do the Work.

Using these esoteric techniques to draw out the secret meaning of scripture and traditional writings carries potential risks. A key part of developing one’s intuition is recognising signs in daily life and reading synchronicities. However, this can be overdone. If the symbolic side is overstimulated, it can lead to a kind of semiotic arousal, seeing patterns and meaning in everything. If this process accelerates too quickly without enough grounding and integration, it can split the soul’s upper and lower aspects, resulting in utter madness.

This interplay between inspiration and convention is essential. It is what shapes and sustains spirituality. But our spiritual traditions can become culturally conservative, overly reverent, and ossified like stone. To genuinely inspire, they rely on a raw, mystical connection and direct experience. Evidently, this rawness can also be disruptive, creating tension because inspired revelations may be borderline heretical, if not overtly revolutionary, or at least challenging. They might not fit in with established teaching and received wisdom about what holy writing is supposed to mean.

So proponents of these techniques walk a very fine line. Historically, many rules required deep knowledge of existing lore and law before people could learn the techniques that led to raw inspiration. They were radical, but not revolutionary.

None of these considerations bound Sun Ra; he operated completely outside any organised religion. He was a magpie drawing on all traditions. Yet he used the techniques of revelation. He was a Master of the Holy Name, not part of a teaching lineage, self-taught through pure inspiration. He was using the same techniques of experimental Jazz to deconstruct, explore and rebuild spiritual motifs in the same way as musical motifs.

He could have been a crackpot, and some people clearly thought he was, but what he came up with pointed toward a greater reality rather than getting lost in patterns and fragments. The space connections linked up in a way that made his life and other people’s lives more coherent, richer, and better. And, as I say, the quality comes out in the actual things said in the teaching. I’ve got a little quote from Sun Ra here:

“Your wisdom will be when you say, ‘I do not know.’ Your ignorance will be your salvation. When you admit that you do not know. We the brothers of the cosmos will come to your aid and I will say to you, ‘Come, my brother, you are dear to me. I will take you to new worlds. I will take you to outer unseen worlds greater in splendor than anything the earth possesses… I am nothing. My symbol is the name of nothing, and yet I speak as a living pattern for the spirit of the universe.”

Sun Ra didn’t have an extensive formal education, or part of an initiatory lineage (as far as we know) and yet the stuff pouring out of him was like Nag Hammadi scripture – on par with Thunder, Perfect Mind. Sun Ra is an inspiration – that’s all I have to say!

By Duncan Fleming

I recently wrote about the idea of the Hidden Masters, the flourishing of the Theosophical Society, and the many different places people can find spiritual authority. As well as receiving teaching from living, incarnated ‘masters’, there is the ancient tradition of entering a trance and acting as a ‘medium’ to channel the words of a non-physical entity.

So, fast-forwarding about 100 years, to the 1970s, it is interesting to look at what had happened to the New Age spiritual tradition. Again, it was set apart from mainstream religion and mainstream science. We are no longer in a time when it is commonplace to attend séances, but it is still not unusual for people to believe in ghosts, Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, UFOs, spontaneous human combustion and myriad weird shit. Think big coffee-table books of the unexplained. Under the hood, people still believed in lots of uncanny, spooky stuff. It is after the 1960s and the hippy movement. Many Eastern spiritual ideas are mainstream. It is normal for people to ask what star sign you are as a chat-up line. People talk about good and bad karma.

There is also an immense arrogance, a conceit among some people who believe their particular New Age spirituality is the pinnacle of human evolution. I came across this chart from the mid-1970s, which purports to show the self-actualised Californian, beneficiary of the teachings of enlightened channellers, on the way to becoming post-terrestrial. It is the self-perfection fantasy of the entitled, on the genetic runway to space and beyond, to become interstellar planetary beings.

The great conceit of that fantasy is that it rests on an extremely crude and oversimplified idea of evolution. Africa is the hunter-gatherer person. And then you’ve got another wave of evolution, Southeast Asia, the tool-making person, who, bless them, can make pots and spears and stuff. And then the caste person in India, and all those naive and rather stupid monotheistic feudal people, who might be in Europe. But then America, because America’s where it’s at, you’ve got the socialised people, and then you’ve got the self-indulgent person (so there’s a little bit of self-hatred, a touch of self-loathing). So, as in older thought, there’s an idea of cosmic evolution and a vast hierarchical system, but it is now overtly racist. Although the seeds of that existed in some of the dubious racial evolution theories of Theosophy.

It is certainly true that when people have genuine spiritual experiences, they feel part of a web of being that’s connected, purposeful, and has a sense of direction and growth. They feel they are going somewhere, that things will eventually get better, and that things are not arbitrary. But there is also a tendency to place whatever group one belongs to at the centre and the pinnacle of development. There may be a pole-star vision of where they will develop next, but they are at the vanguard of current human development.

Then, as now, there remained traditional initiatory systems and broadly pagan communities, alongside a much looser New Age community. People who don’t want to commit to initiatory systems, and who don’t want to recreate a rustic, nature-based lifestyle, and who are happier mooching about in a city apartment. But they’ve still got a Will to a System, a desire to make sense of the ineffable. And what do they look for beyond acid trips and sci-fi novels?

A notable example is the Seth Material. Jane Roberts and her husband, Robert Butts, began experimenting with ESP and Ouija boards in 1963. The material emerged from these early experiments, but it really blossomed publicly in the 1970s. Roberts was a pleasant and unassuming woman, and she found she naturally slipped into a deep trance and began speaking. She wasn’t someone who had particularly trained in this, or who was particularly witchy. It was those times, so she went with it. And her husband, being a very meticulous guy, dutifully transcribed everything that came from her mouth.

The material they were receiving was really interesting. It began with different characters coming and going, and then a character kept returning. The quality of the teaching that came through this character was far more purposeful, coherent, and multi-faceted than they were used to. This character was called Seth.

They published this material, and it became quite a phenomenon. There are many volumes of Seth material. They devoted the rest of their lives to conducting and transcribing these sessions. I think it is the most coherent and fully formed example of channelled works from that era.

What is interesting about the Seth Material is that, if we are to take Jane Roberts at her word, she did not possess an encyclopaedic knowledge of esoteric philosophy. Yet the material presents a fully formed cosmology and epistemology, and it is internally consistent.

The Seth Material is an example of hard idealism. Although it is internally consistent, it requires a substantial reimagining of the building blocks of reality to make sense of it. In this sense, it is not unusual, but it is quite pronounced. Many spiritual traditions treat consciousness as primary. Conscious awareness is seen as the space in which everything manifests. The world that seems to be ‘out there’ is understood to be an illusion: a trick of the mind. Time, space, and matter are regarded as transformations within consciousness. In this view, the statement ‘the universe is happening in me’ is taken literally, not just poetically.

This is, of course, opposed to models that treat consciousness as an epiphenomenon, a by-product of complex brains, in which ‘I am happening in the universe’ is taken literally. It is not a minor difference. These outlooks sit at opposite ends of a spectrum: one prioritising the mind, the other prioritising matter. They meet only if the framing is altered.

Seth was very clear about having had many human incarnations, having been a teacher, and having been physically incarnated at some point. This brings us back to the point that the only value in channelled or received works is the quality of the teaching someone receives, not the supposed authority of the source. Is it someone just writing thousands of pages of drivel about what life was like on Atlantis? (I’m looking at you, Charles Leadbeater.) Does it lead to any genuine developmental progress? And these personalities would also have to be reached and contacted. The amount of dedication required makes communicating such teachings an extremely demanding career, but it is one of the courses available.

Anyway, I don’t have a big point to make, except to say that 70s New Age spirituality was, at its worst, queasy and repellent, and at its best, quite fascinating and inspiring.

Some animals eat until they are full and then just stop. They don’t take more than they need. Maybe they evolved in an environment where there was always enough food, so it was advantageous to have an internal gauge of satiety to avoid taking in too much. Other animals keep eating and eating, as though they don’t know where their next meal is coming from. They eat more than they need to keep a reserve of energy in case food becomes scarce or sporadic.

Humans are somewhere in between, and we can vary widely along this scale. We can graze or binge, and many people do both.

Economies that rely on continuous growth and increasing consumption have long been criticised. Most of us understand that greed is NOT good and that too much can become too much. But our collective understanding of what is sufficient for us is less well established. Some environmental researchers have tried to identify a safe and healthy band of sufficiency between the minimum societies need to survive and flourish, and the point at which overconsumption becomes dysfunctional. It turns out that this is a really hard thing to figure out.

I was struck by something I read by in Black Paths and Green Cathedrals.

“define your own ‘enough’. Not society’s version, not what the adverts tell you, not the ‘success’ sold to you in magazines, but your personal, soul-deep enough.”

I think this gets to the heart of the problem. We have to figure out our own sense of sufficiency as an antidote to dangerous overconsumption. It doesn’t seem to be entirely innate, and it’s certainly not always instinctive for us to stop taking more than we need.

Addiction is a good example. Although it’s not easy and some people have to call on the help of a higher power, some forms of addiction can be completely turned off – like turning off the water in your house at the mains tap if there’s a leak. This is because you really don’t need certain addictive things in your life at all. They are not a wholesome aspect of human life. You don’t need to gamble, you don’t need to smoke crack. So it is possible to completely cut these things out of your life, and after an initial crisis, life can return to balance.

Of course, with certain substances like alcohol or benzos, it can be more complicated than that. If your body is very used to them, you may be physically dependent, and stopping abruptly can be very dangerous. Even then, it is possible to undertake a managed withdrawal, turning the mains tap off slowly rather than all at once, and eventually eliminating that substance from your life completely if needs be.

Sometimes it’s not as straightforward as switching off the mains, fixing the leak, then turning the supply back on. If you have been properly addicted to something, you may have permanently altered your nervous system to the extent that returning to safe use is difficult or impossible. At the very least, there may be a significant risk in trying to return to casual use. Some people have to go round the Wheel of Fortune many times before they accept this. The grooves and channels remain, and if you let the substance back in, things can unravel quite quickly. In those cases, complete abstinence may be the answer.

But other forms of addiction are not so simple. Eating is the obvious example, and sex probably belongs in the same category. These are natural drives and aspects of a healthy human life. You tend to make yourself unwell if you try to abstain completely, certainly in the case of food. As Dion Fortune observed, it is better to have a perverted will than a repressed will.

With this sort of addictive behaviour, the problem is not solved by elimination. The challenge is to stay within a zone of ‘sufficiency’ – recognising when enough is enough. We need to maintain awareness of our level of use within the cognitive loop and recognise our own green, amber, and red zones. Green is fine. Amber is a warning to be careful. Red is too much.

In the Sphere of Foundation, or Yesod, on the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, there is a traditional association with this idea of sufficiency. There is a sense that, behind the scenes, reality is weaving itself together in mysterious ways that provide us with what we need. There is an obligation to trust in the sufficiency and self-righting nature of existence, and to cultivate awareness of the deeper reality that underpins physical life.

Foundation is like the stream flowing from the river that nourishes the Garden of Eden. To experience Foundation fully, we must trust that we will receive what we need without grasping for it.

A lot of compulsive consumption stems from anxiety. We worry that we won’t be able to cope with situations, feelings, or even the present moment without the external thing. Another drink. Another purchase. Another helping. Another distraction. We become convinced that we need it. But of course we can cope.

Perhaps defining ‘enough’ is ultimately an act of trust. Trust that there will be enough. Trust that we are enough. And trust that we can let go of things that once seemed indispensable without losing ourselves in the process.

The late 19th century was a really wild time. Spiritualism had been on the rise since the 1850s. The edges of knowledge were shifting at remarkable speed. There were astonishing developments in science and a burgeoning industrial revolution, with amazing new technology. The first frontiers of psychology were being explored. It would have felt like a great time to be genuinely inquisitive and open-minded about the mysteries of existence – that there was still a great deal left to learn.

In this climate, it was completely mainstream to believe in, or at least to be open-minded and inquisitive about, ghosts, spirits, and psychic phenomena. There were sceptics, but exploring these things was not considered anti-scientific. There were many séances and mediums, and there was extensive investigation of the paranormal. It was just a part of Victorian culture.

The idea of hidden ‘Masters’ entered Western esotericism as a popular notion largely through the claims of Helena Blavatsky, one of the co-founders and the principal initiatrix of the Theosophical Society.

Spiritual authority has got to come from somewhere. It doesn’t just come out of a vacuum. In a society where it was normal for people to believe in spirits and angels, there was enormous variety in where leaders of religious and spiritual communities got their ideas from. So the idea of a network of living, hidden masters was not the most ‘out there’ notion by any stretch.

Blavatsky didn’t invent the idea of hidden masters out of nowhere, but she did make it much more of a coherent, synthesised idea. Eastern traditions already had long-established ideas about people thought to have reached an unusually high level of spiritual knowledge or power, often believed to live apart from ordinary society. The West also had notions of secret adepts and hidden brotherhoods, for example in the hermetic and Rosicrucian traditions, with figures like the Comte de Saint-Germain said to live for hundreds of years. There were also very old ideas that all religions contained fragments of one original, ancient and universal wisdom – sometimes attributed to Atlantis or other ancient civilisations.

But what was quite novel about Blavatsky was rolling all this together into one coherent system. That there was an invisible hierarchy of super-advanced humans working behind the scenes to advance civilisation along spiritual lines – these secret leaders as a system, a network.

So the idea of hidden masters was really amplified and clarified by the early Theosophical Society, as articulated by Blavatsky. They were not the only group to claim authority from living, highly adept individuals. The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, founded in 1888, had the idea of semi-mythical Secret Chiefs – not easily encountered, except by the visible heads of the order – and similarly, it was this prime access, this direct channel, that gave the outward leaders of the organisation their authority.

In the Theosophical Society, these Hidden Masters were called Mahatmas – and they were thought of as ‘masters’ in the same way that a teacher in a school would be. They were masters not because of hierarchy in itself, but because they could teach you about spiritual reality. And they were described as being joined together in an inner fraternity that was guiding human evolution throughout history. The world was thought of as being guided by an inner government, an order called the ‘Great White Brotherhood’ overseeing the long development of life and consciousness. ‘White’ was meant in the sense of spiritual light rather than racially White, and indeed the majority of the Masters were considered to be from India and Tibet, etc. (Although undeniably there were some questionable ideas of racial evolution too).

One was said to communicate with these masters only rarely through physical meetings. It wasn’t unheard of to meet them in person, but most of the time there would be psychic contact, via a trance state in which one would receive information from them. There was also more extraordinary contact via precipitated or materialised letters that would physically arrive, though they would arrive via a mysterious aethyric process, rather than being delivered by the equivalent of the Royal Mail. As you might expect, questions about the authenticity of these precipitated letters became highly controversial.

Everything about Helena Blavatsky was extraordinary. If we are to take her at her own word, before co-founding the Theosophical Society, she had led a very enigmatic life. She’d been like a bareback circus stunt horse rider. She had travelled the world and had been one of the few independent women to go to Tibet. She’d had a lot of adventures.

It was also not unusual in that heyday of spiritualism for people to make a precarious living by holding private séances for wealthy people. There would have been considerable pressure on those who performed to produce spectacular evidence. The redoubtable practitioner Daniel Dunglas Home would put on astonishing shows, where trumpets might materialise in the air and play music, or rise high into the air, carried aloft by invisible entities. Of course, cynics would say it was very good stage magic – but there was an expectation that a ‘powerful’ medium or clairvoyant would be able to materialise unusual phenomena, such as plumes of ectoplasm from the mouth or nose. So there would inevitably have been considerable pressure on Blavatsky to prove she was in touch with a powerful spiritual current and to produce some of these phenomena.

So those were the waters she was swimming in. It’s worth looking a little more into what she meant by a Mahatma or a hidden teacher. This is a quote from The Theosophist from 1884:

“A MAHATMA is a personage, who, by special training and education, has evolved those higher faculties and has attained that spiritual knowledge, which ordinary humanity will acquire after passing through numberless series of reincarnations during the process of cosmic evolution, provided, of course, that they do not go, in the meanwhile, against the purposes of Nature and thus bring on their own annihilation.”

Blavatsky said that from her childhood onwards, she was in contact with a tall Indian gentleman, Master Morya, who protected her. He saved her from a terrible horse riding accident as a teenager. She reported having a physical encounter with Master Morya when she would have been around 20 years old in London during the Great Exhibition of 1851, where he was visiting as part of the Nepal contingent. She approached him because she recognised him from her dreams, but he brushed her aside. However, he met her the next day in a London park, and he told her, for all her shortcomings, she was the best available person to bring his wisdom tradition to the West. So at this point she devoted her life to this mission. She was then put in touch with other Hidden Masters, who never gave their real names publicly.

Not all the hidden Masters supported the idea of starting the Theosophical Society – many of them thought it would fail because it was open to all, rather than selecting the elite. Indeed, the Masters would often berate Blavatsky and others. Koot Hoomi, a prolific communicator, criticised Blavatsky in a letter, saying that by attributing to them phenomena of the most childish nature, she had lowered them in the public estimation. Sinnett, another co-founder of the Theosophical Society, was very intrigued by the purported letters and began a correspondence via Blavatsky. All the letters from Koot Hoomi to Sinnett have been published and are in the British Museum, but Sinnett’s side of the correspondence is now lost. The letters themselves are, apparently, quite physically odd at a microscopic level.

Whilst the teaching of the Theosophical Society was enormously influential, it was still very controversial and divisive. The Society for Psychical Research at the time concluded that Blavatsky was a fraud, although their investigation would not be considered robust by modern standards.

Whether or not the hidden Masters are real, they functioned as a kind of mythic organising principle for the ideas of theosophy. And yet they were considered human – they had a normal(ish) lifespan and personality quirks – and were also thought of as rare blossoms on an evolutionary tree. But it was possible for any human being to do work on themselves and elevate themselves to that level.

Duncan Fleming

When I was young, I encountered the familiar image of the Tree of Life in my studies. I felt a sudden, intense sense of recognition, experienced strange tunnel vision, and fell in love with it at first sight. To better understand the Tree of Life, I wove a multicoloured tapestry that took months to complete, and it still hangs on my wall. With each stitch, I thought more about this tree and its ten Spheres. I still gaze at this image, and it always reveals more. A symbol is not just a sign that points to something else — it embodies and channels the reality it represents.

To begin making the tapestry, I set out the basic Tree of Life diagram on graph paper, with each square representing a single stitch. Although the design was, to an extent, pixelated, the organic fuzziness of the woollen yarn softened the edges, and some of the blockiness was overcome.

I used the colours commonly accepted as the main colours for the Spheres of the Tree of Life. Colours possess inherent qualities and occult correspondences. In the Tradition, each Sphere on the Tree of Life is associated with specific colours that, when used intentionally in ritual or meditation, powerfully evoke the qualities of that Sphere. Each of the Four Worlds: Emanation, Creation, Formation, and Action, has its own set of colour associations for the ten Spheres. However, in most practical work, the colours attributed to the World of Creation, the archetypal realm of ‘Briah’, are usually employed.

With ongoing use, these colour associations can come to feel instinctively obvious, to the point that it is easy to forget they are symbolic conventions rather than universal truths. It might seem natural that Loving-Kindness is blue and Strength is red, but colour perception is cultural. In some ancient texts, colours that we now clearly distinguish, such as blue and green, appear to have been grouped under a single term. This makes it difficult to retroactively apply our own categories to earlier or different times, as if they shared a universal meaning.

The only liberties I took with the ‘Briah’ colours were to replace Yellow with Gold, as I happened to find some pleasing golden wool, and to simplify the colours assigned to the Sphere of Malkuth, or Kingdom, at the base of the Tree of Life. These are usually given as four colours, representing the four elements. Citrine, a yellowish-green shade representing Air. Olive, a dark greenish-brown shade representing Water. Russet, a reddish-brown, rusty shade representing the element of Fire; and Black, representing the element of Earth. I simplified this to a single earthy Brown colour.

For the background, I chose shades of green in a simple repeating pattern that echoed the spheres and paths of the Tree of Life, while also recalling old tapestries, somehow geometric yet organic. I recall it took me a long time to get this right, and until I started to see the pattern emerge in real stitches, I was still unsure whether it would work.

I should add that I did this in my late teens, and making tapestries is not an activity typically associated with teenagers, certainly not male teenagers. But I was enjoying newfound sobriety, getting into ritual and meditation, and didn’t have much money at the time. My partner, who was generally accepting of my eccentricities, found it odd. Although it was, in some ways, a sustained meditation, I would listen to music or keep company while doing this – it was not a totally isolating activity. However, I couldn’t watch TV or films at the same time. I discovered I needed to pay close attention to hand-eye coordination and to what was essentially making a digital copy of a diagram of ‘bits’, but with organic stitches. I was performing the role of a colour printer, in slow motion.

I did, of course, also make a few mistakes along the way, which required tedious unpicking. The biggest mistake, which you can see if you look closely, is that I didn’t get enough wool in one go for the whole of the green background. And when I ran out and went to get some more, it was impossible to get exactly the right shade, just a very close match – so this is slightly visible.

I was heartened years later to learn of what may be an urban myth – according to folklore, traditional hand-quilters intentionally sewed a ‘humility block’ upside down or deliberately used a mismatched fabric colour to avoid showing pride in perfection. Similar legends exist in other crafts, such as the ‘spirit bead’ in some Native American beadwork or deliberate flaws in Persian rugs. This may be nonsense, but it is comforting – although, of course, my mistake was not deliberate.

Many years later, in fact when I reached the age of fifty, it felt like time to create another tapestry. Again, I spent a long time working on the design. I went through many variations. In the end, I made a very simple design, a yellow knotted Seal of Solomon inside a circle, with a violet iris-coloured eye in the centre. Again, for the background I used a similar organic green repeating geometric pattern. Initially, I wanted to have the four holy living creatures rendered around the circle, but every attempt I made to render them in simple stitches looked too simple and blocky – like 8-bit video game sprites – I really did try, though.

What struck me about doing a big tapestry for a second time was how long it takes. It was, after all, made with at least ten thousand individual stitches. When I did the first tapestry, I felt like I had all the time in the world – the only thing I had to do was turn in the occasional essay and attend lectures and seminars. At the age of fifty, I was right in the middle of life, with a demanding day job, a family, friends to see, things to do, places to be. It made me slow down and luxuriate in the process, rather than race to the finish. I am pleased with the final result. It hangs in the corridor of our house, so it’s the first thing people see when they visit. It is a kind of shield and a standard. Maybe I’ll make another one, the last tapestry, in another 30 years or so, if I am still alive and my fingers and brain work well enough

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