The Astrology of the Jewish Kabbalah

Divination, Evocation and Vision are the preliminary techniques of Magic rituals in the kabbalah. There is considerable justification for their employment: when there is adequate understanding of their meaning and technical procedure. But these are preliminary methods only. They are but steps leading to the consummation of the supreme sacrament. The inevitable end of Magic is identical to that conceived of in Mysticism, union with God-head. Magic conceives of divinity as Spirit and Light and Love. It is an all-pervasive and omnipresent vital force, permeating all things, sustaining every life from the most minute electron to the largest nebula of mindstaggering dimensions.
It is this Life which is the level of the entirety of existence, and it is this primal awareness in which we live and move and have our being. In the course of manifestation, cosmic centres develop within its infinitude, centres of lofty intelligence and power, whereby the cosmic high tension may be modified and reduced to a lower key so as ultimately to produce an objective manifestation. These cosmic centres of life are what for the moment we may name the Gods (not spirits)--beings of enormous wisdom, power and spirituality in an ascending hierarchical scale between us and the unknown and unnamed God. The particular hierarchy that they form receives in Magic a clear classification in terms of the Qabalistic Tree of Life.
Sometimes to describe these concepts, there is the metaphor of a man striving to reach the roof top of a several storeyed building. Now Magic conceives of spiritual development in an analogous way. That is to say, it conceives a personal evolution as progressive and orderly. Divinity is the objective we seek to reach, the roof top. We, those of us cherishing the mystical ideal, are below on the ground. Not with one leap may we attain the summit.
By means of the magical technique we employ the invocation of the Gods, who answer metaphorically to the stairs or lift, and attempt union with their wider and vaster consciousness. Since they represent the several cosmic levels of energy and mind intervening between us and the supreme goal, as we unite ourselves in love and reverence and surrender to them, by so much the nearer do we approach to the ultimate source and root of all things.

Using the plan of the Tree of Life as his guide, the magician invokes the lower Gods or Archangels as they are named in another system, desirous of mingling his own life with, and surrendering his own being to, the greater and more extensive life of the God. Thus his spiritual perceptions become finer and more sensitive, and his consciousness becomes with time accustomed to the high tension of the divine force flowing through him. His interior evolution proceeding, he invokes the God of the Sephirah or plane immediately above. Following the same procedure, he attempts to assimilate his own essence, his own integrated consciousness, to that of the divinity he has invoked. And so on--until finally he stands upon the lofty Darien peak of spiritual realisation, united with the transcendental life of infinity, feeling with universal love and compassion, conscious of all life and
every thing as himself with supreme vision and power.