THE Rockwax Foundation

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

One abiding idea in esoteric tradition is that initiates can draw on secret or hidden sources of power, making them more powerful than ordinary people. Sometimes these sources of power are ancient and atavistic, sometimes they are from unknown realms, and sometimes they are drawn directly from spirits.

It’s an appealing idea, but it warrants some investigation. Sometimes it can be romantic and fanciful. Whilst there are branches of magic concerned with drawing power from demonic entities, this is, at least in some of the more developed traditions, less about making pacts with demons than about bringing them under a higher spiritual authority. In the Book of Abramelin, for example, after establishing knowledge and conversation with the Holy Guardian Angel, the magician is instructed to summon and bring various unredeemed spirits to heel. The text is quite explicit that these unredeemed spirits are to serve under divine authority, rather than being treated as authorities or sources of power in themselves. Except in the grimmest of grimoires, you don’t just form pacts with them. That would be like taking out a payday loan with a dodgy company, and it would come back to bite you very quickly. Although I have been in a room with Goetic magicians who say they have done this, their accounts sound too cosy, too much like encounters with friendly familiar spirits, to me, to link what they are doing with the older grimoire accounts. Whatever they are in touch with, it doesn’t really seem like the same thing.

As I understand it, all power ultimately comes from the Nothingness at the centre of the Crown of Unity, and this is where we all draw our spiritual sustenance. An influential Kabbalistic book, “Sha’arei Orah” (“Gates of Light”), written by Joseph Gikatilla in the late 13th century, describes the Spheres of the Tree of Life as palaces filled with treasures, freely accessible to those with good intentions who know where to look. It explains that the Divine is open to everyone and that ever-flowing blessings and favour fall like manna for the righteous. But just as we need to plug our electrical devices into sockets where the power has been stepped down through substations, rather than plugging straight into the National Grid, we also need to draw our spiritual sustenance through vessels, recognising they are tributaries from the original source of Power. We can, for practical purposes, make use of naturally occurring but invisible forces and the beings associated with them.

By way of an analogy, if a law-abiding citizen living in Britain wanted help after being the victim of a crime, they wouldn’t usually ask the King directly. They would ask the police, who represent the authority of the Crown. In the same way, in most magical traditions, some of the technical knowledge concerns understanding how the hierarchical system operates and knowing at what level and with which entities to interact to get things done.

And, of course, in different traditions, the hierarchy tends to mirror the worldly hierarchy of the society from which the magical tradition arises. If you have to bribe officials in the material world, you might need to do the same on the inner planes. So there is also a requirement not to become corrupted by dealing with power and its agents.

The seventh of the “Ten Commandments”, as given in the Book of Exodus, chapter 20, prohibits adultery. In Kabbalah, this commandment is usually associated with the seventh Sephirah on the Tree of Life, Netzach, meaning Victory.

Whilst adultery is typically understood as having sex with someone other than the person you are married to, the principle could be extended to betraying any kind of committed relationship, including deep friendships, or any kind of committed monogamous or ethical non-monogamous sexual relationship. Relationships are our lifeline. When we distort the flow of connection with other people, we distort our participation in life itself.

In this sense, it may be useful to think of adultery as adulteration: polluting or distorting the waters of life. The Sphere of Victory is linked in humans to our emotions, feelings, and desires. When they flow healthily, they sustain our commitment to relationships and nourish our bonds with others. When they become polluted or adulterated, they turn corrosive, poisoning the waters of life and destroying our relationships.

At a deeper level, Victory is linked to the experience of everlastingness and endurance. When we connect with this Sphere, we encounter a current that is always flowing. It may flow in different directions, but it remains constant in essence. It endures longer than any passing impulse of desire or fear. It is the great ocean of Life that connects us to every other living creature.

There is also a highly developed set of theories within the Western Esoteric Tradition about how thought forms are generated and acquire a kind of independent existence on the inner planes. They acquire a lasting resonance that can affect the environment of the people who create them, wittingly or unwittingly.

These thought forms can range from simple shapes to complex entities. Because we have a limitless capacity to conjure images, thought and emotion act upon subtle matter, shaping forms animated by elemental essence. These semi-conscious beings are associated with the qualities of the four classical elements of Fire, Water, Air, and Earth. They could be thought of like hermit crabs inhabiting empty shells. The thought form provides the structure, and the elemental essence inhabits it.

From this perspective, our desires and preoccupations are not inconsequential. They make thought forms, which can persist and become revivified by their host, thereby affecting the astral environment and, subsequently, events in the physical world. This is like the Kabbalistic idea that our thoughts create hosts of good and bad angels.

There are also, in the Tradition, entities that operate parasitically or deceptively, usually by offering access, at a cost, to what is already freely available from a purer source, in order to draw energy through themselves and thereby sustain their own existence, unless they too are caught up in a similar chain of corruption. Such practice is both polluted and polluting, like drinking from puddles when a fountain of pure spring water is freely available.

There is a saying that if a service is free, you are the product. This is as true in magic as in the marketplace.

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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Duncan Fleming 1/8/2026

I don’t charge for teaching Kabbalah, and I never have. This is partly because I wasn’t charged for being taught myself. It is a bit like an intergenerational model of care, where you receive something from one generation and, in time, pass it on to the next. This approach lends itself very well to one-to-one teaching, which works rather like an apprenticeship. You work closely with someone for a few years, showing them everything you can about the Tradition, and then they either go on to practise and teach it successfully themselves, or they bail out.

I started teaching in the late 1990s, and over the years this apprenticeship model has remained the foundation of my practice. It is a traditional model, with an individual teacher and pupil. Sometimes a small cohort approaches for teaching at the same time. If the timing is right, I can teach them some basic theory and practice together and hold small group discussions up to a point. But people learn at different paces. They have their own quirks and special interests, and the one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t really work beyond the absolute basics.

The tradition I teach uses a graded system, with formal examinations and aptitude tests along the way. This teaching is iterative and needs to build on what has come before, so I need to know that students have a firm footing and can do the basics well before I teach them anything more specific and pokey. Having a higher grade doesn’t mean you have any moral superiority. It is more like learning a martial art or a musical instrument.

As well as passing on the theory and techniques of practical Kabbalah and ritual magic, including making and consecrating tools and devising magical operations, teaching is about helping people develop a working relationship with the Spheres of the Tree of Life.

The most important thing people need to learn right at the beginning is how to open up and close down properly. By opening up, I mean entering a vastly expanded, semiotically aroused state of consciousness. Closing down means returning safely to everyday consciousness, with your feet firmly back on the ground. When I’m passing on techniques with practical intensity, I am concerned about aftercare and any subsequent repercussions. Yes, people have to learn from their own mistakes, but some of this stuff can be like dynamite.

The teaching is not just cerebral theory, or even just theory combined with technique. There is also an emotional, moral, and spiritual aspect to it. When we learn to work with and relate to the Spheres of the Tree of Life, we contact and energise those Spheres within ourselves. We then need to balance and integrate them into our being more deeply than before. Otherwise, we can end up lopsided and distorted, and even more inert, idle, dishonest, selfish, and arrogant than we were before we began.

Teaching Kabbalah is not psychotherapy. I’ve worked as a psychotherapist, and it’s quite different. It can, however, be an intimate relationship. There is no expectation that a student will bare their soul to you and tell you all their hopes and dreams, but at some point, if they are doing the work with any conviction, things get a bit real. There is a requirement to be more honest about motivations, rather like peeling away the layers of an onion.

For this reason, the Tradition I teach requires extensive interpersonal contact between teacher and student. That contact is difficult to maintain in a group setting, as the teacher’s attention is divided and each student brings different needs, capacities, and areas of difficulty. Some basic teaching can be done collectively, but the deeper work usually requires a more individual relationship.

After the very first stages, I think my relationship with a student is more like that of a sponsor in a mutual aid group. Instead of presenting myself as some kind of all-wise hierophant, I can be honest that I am just a person who has been as broken and confused as anyone else by life’s challenges. I have found a spiritual tradition that has been very helpful to me, so I will show anyone who is genuinely interested how it works and help them build the spiritual contacts and personal framework they need to sort out their own mess.

So why not charge? It would seem reasonable to take a fee for teaching. If I did, I might be able to devote more time to it. But charging is not in keeping with the spirit of the Tradition in which I was raised. It simply goes against the grain.

That said, I have no objection to charging for items that genuinely cost money to produce, such as books or music. Printing books, recording albums, manufacturing them, and getting them into people’s hands all involve real costs. Teaching, as I understand it, is a different kind of relationship.

There are other good reasons for me not to charge. When we take money, people quite reasonably expect a product in return. That might be a defined package of teaching, such as a certificate of attendance, or a series of achievement badges, as in the Scouts or Guides. I am keen to emphasise from the outset that there are no prizes. The Crown is hollow. Attainment is an illusion, and the only reward for hard work is more of the same. I don’t want to enter into a transaction with students. I just want to help them and teach them.

Any projection of the teacher archetype onto me might help in the very early stages, when someone is building enthusiasm and perhaps seeking approval or secret knowledge, but it needs to fall away quickly as we move into the intermediate stages. In my experience, the stronger the projection of the teacher archetype onto a living teacher, the greater the disappointment and resentment when the student realises what they have been doing. As in a Drama Triangle, the rescuer can seem to turn into the persecutor overnight, while the student becomes the victim. When this happens, the student may simply move on, join another group, and seek another teacher, but there is no opportunity to go further until this projection is overcome.

I also don’t run workshops or weekend experiences. This is not intended as a critique of those who do, as these can be excellent ways for people interested in occult matters to sample different traditions. It is easy to cock a snook at the spiritual marketplace. Of course, there are grifters, as well as eternal joiners who flit from one thing to another without ever getting to grips with the basic ontological and spiritual conundrums of their lives. That doesn’t mean everyone who offers or attends a workshop falls into either category.

I have also made a commitment to teach in the most inclusive way I can, which means not allowing fees to become a barrier for those who cannot afford them. Of course, it is possible to charge and then say that the fee will be waived or reduced if someone cannot afford it. But there is often stigma attached to that, and it can be very difficult to ask for a fee waiver or reduction when you are hard up. I certainly would not have been able to pay for teaching when I started.

Still, there are some inevitable expenses. Practical equipment costs money. It is not extortionate, but certain materials may cost a few quid. Unless activities are confined to spare rooms in people’s houses, there will also be costs such as venue hire and travel. These can be handled in the same way as in any small group, with people chipping in what they can, without anyone having to pay subs.

We started the Rockwax Foundation as a registered charity in 2011 to provide a public face for the teaching offered by me and two other experienced teachers who work closely together within the same Tradition. Charitable status helps with practical matters, such as receiving donations. It also provides a relatively respectable public face and a website. The website has brought in a trickle of enquiries from potential students over the years, serving much the same purpose as a postcard in an occult bookshop did before the internet.

I suspect this is both the strength and the precariousness of this particular way of teaching. There is no great funnel effect, with a large cohort taught through a weekend workshop or correspondence course, followed by more specialist teaching for those who show greater dedication and interest. The numbers are always esoteric, in the sense that they are for the few. But that’s all right. I only have so many spare hours.

I also don’t really want to play shopkeeper or sell teaching. Life is complicated enough. I am happy earning money in more straightforward and reliable ways. I don’t need another part-time job.

The real cost of teaching, of course, is people’s time and dedication. Nobody has to put in the time required for the practical work, meditation, and everything else. But if they don’t, there’s little point in me continuing to teach them, as my time is too valuable to waste on people who are not dedicated. In that sense, there is a cost, but it must be paid willingly. It cannot be paid in advance, only in the present moment, through an ongoing commitment to the Work.

I nearly didn’t write this because I know quite a few serious and responsible teachers who work in a very different way, and I don’t mean to disparage or criticise them. This is not an argument that nobody should charge for spiritual teaching. It is an explanation of why, for me, teaching must always be free and freely given.

For more information on the Rockwax Foundation teaching charity, visit www.rockwax.org.uk.