My first exposure to the Western esoteric tradition was in the mid-1970s, when as a high school student growing up in a suburb of Montreal, I was introduced by a friend of mine to the world of one of the most celebrated and notorious of the 20th century European magicians, Aleister Crowley. This initial contact was via his elaborate Tarot deck and its accompanying literature, called The Book of Thoth. The usage of the Egyptian deity Thoth, as well as Crowley’s revelatory experiences in Egypt in the early 20th century, dovetailed with my own interests in ancient Egypt. Not long after my introduction to Crowley and his work, I also found out about another celebrated Western magus, G.I. Gurdjieff. I ended up participating in a group in Montreal dedicated to the application of Gurdjieff’s teachings, which was led by Edward Fanaberia, a shiatsu teacher and former yogi who had once wandered Asia as a mystic, and who later trained directly under John G. Bennett, one of Gurdjieff’s primary direct disciples.
As it happened, in the early 1980s my path became sharply redirected toward the East, and I spent the better part of the next decade as a disciple of a controversial Indian guru. I also studied and practiced in the Tibetan and Zen Buddhist traditions, and spent time wandering Asia, periodically staying in Himalayan monasteries and Indian ashrams. The guru I’d been initiated to was Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (later to be known as Osho). Years later I assembled my views of these three influential teachers into a long book, published in 2010 by Axis Mundi Books as The Three Dangerous Magi: Osho, Gurdjieff, Crowley. I followed this book up with The Inner Light: Self-Realization via the Western Esoteric Tradition, published in 2014, a 600-page study of Western esoterica and related fields.
The Temple of Anubis first began meetings in 2002 in Vancouver. In March of 2007, while visiting my maternal ancestral homeland of England, I traveled with a friend through the southwest of the country, visiting Stonehenge, Avebury, and Glastonbury. One day, while standing atop the famed Glastonbury Tor (land of the mythical Arthurian tales) performing the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram, I experienced a subtle but reliable shift in consciousness that resulted in the general release of some negative mind-states I’d been caught up in for the previous six months or so. It was then that I became convinced of the psychological and spiritual power of ceremonial magic.
The usage of the symbol of Anubis, the Egyptian deity, had its roots in my long-standing interest in the esoteric traditions of ancient Egypt. This interest culminated for me on a practical level via my journey to Egypt in the spring of 1998. I’d gone there after exploring Israel and Jordan. While there I visited Giza, site of the Great Sphinx and the three main pyramids. I went inside the Great Pyramid and spent an hour or so inside the King’s Chamber, lying down in the sarcophagus and sitting in meditation in the chamber. While there, I underwent an initiatory experience. I later traveled south along the Nile and visited the temples of Karnak, Luxor, and the Valley of the Kings and Queens. I ended the journey by visiting St. Catherine’s in Sinai, the oldest Christian monastery on the planet.
The animal depicted by the mysterious Anubis symbol has been identified by anthropologists as an African golden wolf, also known as the Egyptian jackal. Anubis is a god of the dead, a psychopomp, a guide who ushers souls through the realms of the Other Side. Because death is the great teacher and tester, forcing us to grow in ways that a promised immortality never could, gods associated with death have always carried great power and meaning. Anubis’s black color is associated with embalming (the preservation of the body to enable the soul to complete its lessons), as well as the soil of the Nile (fertility, life, and the regeneration cycles central to rebirth motifs). In psychological alchemy, black (nigredo) is associated with the first general stage of awakening, in which difficult elements of the ego-personality are ‘burned off’ by the challenging circumstances of life that everyone deals with sooner or later, a ‘blackening’ or ‘cooking’ process that all initiates into the mysteries undergo in a more condensed, accelerated fashion.
The other ‘black god’ I have long felt a deep connection with is Mahakala, the Eastern deity sometimes known as ‘Black Coat’. Mahakala is most commonly associated with Tibetan Buddhism, where he functions as a teacher and guardian deity. In the Hindu tradition he’s recognized as a manifestation of Shiva, consort of the goddess Kali. His name translates as ‘Beyond Time’; his Tibetan name, Nagpo Chenpo, translates as the Great Black One. He is both a protector and a teacher, and is recognized, along with Kali, to embody supreme power, including the ability to dissolve space and time and entire universes, thus representing the indifference of Nature. The black color denotes, among other things, the absorption of all colors, as well as all names and forms. This pure formlessness is the closest analogue to pure consciousness or pure Spirit. The ironic connection between black, death, and infinite, formless light and life, represents a core understanding of the initiate.