By Devi Singh

The first time I set eyes on the Tree of Life was well before I became initiated as a magician on the Western Esoteric Path. Even then I was immediately struck by its shape, by the familiarity of its dimensions; the lines representing the twenty-two paths, the spheres representing the divine emanations, its poetic symmetry. I did not understand what I was seeing at first, but it was clear to me that it was deeply complex. Beyond that, its meaning was a beautiful mystery. Still, there was something familiar about it. I knew its shape. But how, and from where? Or, rather, when?

As a magician, one of the tenets I live by is to connect esoteric theory with my lived experience. I especially love tracing back through time to my experiences as a child, identifying all of the ways magic appeared and applying what I know now as a learned magician to these experiences to give me a greater insight. My childhood was not without its hardships, but it was also a time filled with wonder and magic and I find it continually serves me today to revisit the unique way in which children experience the world. To peer back through time with a magician’s gaze.

As a child, one of my favourite games and one I happened to excel at was hopscotch. My mother first taught me how to play. It was one of her favourite games too as a child growing up in Fiji. Her home was farmland in the middle of the jungle. The only way to get there was by walking a few miles along a dirt trail. She was surrounded by soft earth and copious plantation. For her, playing hopscotch was a treat. She and her friends would take to the schoolyard with chalk borrowed from one of the teachers and delight in drawing on the concrete and bouncing stones.

As soon as I learned to play, I would enjoy drawing the ten squares on my own concrete driveway with different coloured chalk. The next best part was finding the right stone to use as a playing piece. This was my soldier. Looking back, I realise how excellent the game was at fostering my balance and coordination. Skills that would come in handy later. Not unlike how the Tree of Life can help us navigate life. Each of the ten spheres on the Tree of Life resembles one of the squares in the game of hopscotch and in hopscotch, as on the Tree of Life, one ascends from realm, or square, to realm. In fact, the Magpie Hopscotch literally speaks of ascending from the earthly realms to the heavenly.

I can’t help but wonder, is this how the Tree of Life is passed down to children? Is this how it was encoded into my own life? So that when I saw it again as an adult I would be compelled to want to know more, so that when I stepped onto the magical path, it could reintroduce itself to me like an old friend? I believe it was this familiarity that opened the door and removed any resistance I may have had to something that at first seemed alien and ungraspable. It gave me a personal and experiential understanding of its mystery. I like to think that even before I became formally acquainted with it, the Tree of Life was already working its magic in my life.

In the most basic understanding, the Tree of Life is a symbolic representation of how the universe came into being. From Ain, Ain Soph, Ain Soph Aur, to Kether, and down through to Malkuth. It is a beautiful symbol that holds incredibly powerful energy and defines our relationship with the universe and its relationship to us. Dion Fortune explained it best when she said that it represents the microcosm of human consciousness, the macrocosm of universal creation, and the path of transformation and evolution. It is an attempt to symbolise every force and factor in the ‘manifested’ universe and the soul of man; to relate them to each other and reveal them spread out on a map as a practical guide.(1)

For those familiar with the Kabbalah of Jewish mysticism, the Tree of Life is essentially its central organising principle. Its ten spheres, or Sephira, and its twenty-two pathways each hold specific energies. They are in fact states of being and not destinations. Each Sephira has a particular experience or a way of working with it, a place to go for magical journeys.(2) Working on the Tree of Life is a magical journey that allows us to enter into and understand our relationship with the divine. Again, Fortune said it best, “the aspirant who uses the Tree as his meditation symbol establishes a point by point union between his soul and the world-soul.”(3)

Practically speaking, for a magician, the Tree of Life gives us a system or structure to guide us along on our divine path to self-realisation. The concept of correspondences is especially significant. Each of the Sephira on the Tree has its own correspondences to gods, goddesses, crystals, incense, planets, Tarot and so much more. In understanding and working with these correspondences, the magician can harness the power of symbols and archetypes. Fortune suggests that the initiate uses the Tree of Life as an algebra, whereby the magician calculates the secrets of unknown potencies.(4) To say it another way, the magician uses symbols and archetypes to define both a known and unknown quantity in one’s life/character/state of being, and then seeks to understand the unknown quantity via its relationship to the known.

Relating this back to hopscotch, working on the Tree of Life would be like a child standing on one of the squares, stone in hand, ready to proceed. She knows where she is, but her eye is set on the unknown – the next square along her journey. She must take stock of her present situation (i.e find her balance) and from where she is, from what she can see, extrapolate how best to make that next precarious landing.

So, for example, if you have identified your current state as being in the domain of Hod, the domain of human intellect (positive expression: intellectual acuity, easy flow of ideas, accurate self analyses, good organisational skills and execution; ease with verbal and written expression of ideas; shadow side: overly rigid thought structures, abandonment of feelings in service to cold logic, clinging to habits or structures in our daily lives without flexibility), you can work with the correspondences associated with Hod (i.e. Mercury, Thoth, water, fire opal) to bring in more of its positive domain into your life to achieve mastery. Or, if you wish to increase the emotional focus in your life, you can look ahead to the next sphere, Netzach, the sphere of emotion, to determine which elements you need to cultivate in order to progress.

Indeed, the Tree of Life is indispensable to a magician because it forms the basic building blocks of ceremonial magic. However, it is most valuable in how it can be employed in the psychological transformation of a magician. As Phil Mistlberger states, it is impossible for an initiate to progress on the magical path without performing deep inner work (without coming to terms with the ego), as psychological blockages are often the main impediment to spiritual growth.(5)

“All wisdom traditions, be they of the East or West, supply techniques of transformation that in the end amount to forms of self-observation. However, the complex (and arguably, in some ways degraded) times we currently inhabit demand new approaches, one that includes addressing issues that relate to the psychological state of a seeker of spiritual wisdom.”(6)

Mistlberger purports that the Tree of Life is in fact one of the most powerful ways to design and approach self-transformation. It provides an extremely well-defined path with clear guideposts along the way.

It should be noted that the Tree of Life was a fundamental tenet of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. According to David Shoemaker, the Tree of Life came into play as a degree system for magicians. Each degree was based on one of the Sephiroth of the Tree of Life. For the initiate, the experience of going through the rituals and the teachings of a specific grade was designed to stimulate the conscious and unconscious mind and to impress upon it the nature of the paths and Sepiroth, so that an internal map of these regions was created. For Golden Dawn magicians, the Tree of Life was a powerful way of receiving instruction in the Kabbalah, training in the basic correspondences, learning the Hebrew alphabet, and learning the astrological correspondences. All of these learnings were encoded and unravelled sequentially and progressively across these degrees of the order.(7)

Ultimately, as magicians, the direction we have to undertake to evolve ourselves mirrors the path of the evolution of creation as described by the Tree of Life. There is great insight to be gained by knowing that any given moment in life can be seen from the point of view of a particular Sephira. By contemplating the nature of that particular Sephira, lessons and guidance can be gleaned. Similarly, working with the shadow sides of the Sephira is greatly beneficial because it can instruct us in what to look for when we identify a problem pattern. Once you find it on the tree and associate it with a particular Sephiroth, then you can attempt to ‘transmute’ it into the positive expression of the same energy. As David Shoemaker puts it, “At any given moment, given any sort of conflict, or confusion or stuck place, we can gain enlightened understanding from each of the Sephiroth. A check in on our life – are we balanced, are we over-emphasized in one aspect…” (DS)

It does not escape me that the game of hopscotch was passed down to me by my mother, and to her by her mother, both of whom knew nothing of the Tree of Life. In fact, the initiation into childhood games is one of the ways cultures have learned to pass along the teachings of our wisdom traditions. Perhaps, in passing down the simple game of hopscotch, I was given not only a link to my ancestral past, but a glimpse of a way forward. For me, personally, one of the great missions of my life is to heal the intergeneration trauma of my lineage; the pain and trauma of being indentured labourers, being forced into marriage, forced into sexual slavery, stripped of the freedom of one’s own will. For hundreds of years, being able to ‘create change according to one’s own will’ has been an elusive concept for the women of my lineage. As a woman of the modern era, empowered as a magician, that changes with me.

The Tree of Life in its very basic form is a symbol. It is a drawing that holds within it the very essence of the universe, but, like all symbols, it can’t come alive until you breathe life into it. I would like to leave you with this final image. A young girl, no more than seven or eight years old, stands at the bottom of a set of hopscotch squares. In her hand is her trusted stone, the one she found by the river with her father. She throws the stone onto the first square, which she then hops onto with one foot. She does this again and again. On the occasion her aim is untrue or her balance fails, she resets the game. Eventually, she reaches the end, the last square, number ten. The girl turns triumphantly and takes the return trip back to the beginning. And when she reaches her destination she is no longer a young girl, she is a self-realised woman who sees the world anew.

It seems appropriate here to share a passage from a poem that has guided me since my youth. I find the words particularly applicable to a magician’s journey on the Tree of Life, should they decide to take that first step…or hop.

“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.”

—T.S. Eliot, from “Little Gidding,” Four Quartets (1943)

(1) Fortune, Dion, The Mystical Qabalah (Weiser Books, 2000), p. 13
(2) Wells, David, Qabalah (Hay House, 2017) p. xiv
(3) Fortune, Dion, The Mystical Qabalah (Weiser Books, 2000), p. 17
(4) Fortune, Dion, The Mystical Qabalah (Weiser Books, 2000), p. 15
(5) Mistlberger, P.T., The Inner Light (Axis Mundi Books, 2014)
(6) Mistlberger, P.T., The Inner Light (Axis Mundi Books, 2014), p. 18
(7) Shoemaker, David, Living Thelema (Anima Solis Books, 2013)