Readers, please enjoy this guest blog post by Donald Tyson, author of a vast number of books, including The Serpent of Wisdom, The Demonology of King James I, and Necronomicon.   Schools of magic begin with the inspired leadership of one human being. That person is always guided by spirits, who are the true teachers of the school. We see this again and again throughout the history of Western occultism. A school rises under the leadership of an individual who psychically receives esoteric revelations. It prospers for a number of years, then usually dies when the individual who led it comes to the end of life. Sometimes, however, there is a transfer of authority to another person,

In Part 1 of this series, I described why the Middle Pillar Ritual matters. The basic concept is that it's a "step up" from the traditional bedrock magickal skills of the LBRP. But what, specifically, does this mean? When you look at the LBRP, there are two important energetic concepts: raising/generating energy and directing it outside of yourself to empower the visualized pentagrams. I've had people report amazing phenomena just from this work alone. With the Middle Pillar, we turn that energy "in." As you note, I put the word "in" within quotation marks. This is because most people, when considering bringing something (such as magickal energy) into ourselves, generally think that