YESOD 1 : Imaginary Cakes
In Hebrew, Yesod means Foundation.
It occupies the base position of The Tree of Life diagram (the ‘lowest’ sephira Malkuth, The Sphere of Earth, which dangles ‘below’ Yesod like a pendant, is regarded by some scholars as having at some time been combined with Yesod as one sphere, before the apocalyptic ‘32nd path’ divided and separated them) and is also The Foundation upon which the higher sephira are arranged in their cheerleader pyramid.
Like the physical moon in our terrestrial sky, the archetypal Moon of Yesod is closely linked to Malkuth – the two sephira are deeply connected.
The energies of the entire Tree of Life are distilled down through Yesod, siphoned via the straw of the 32nd path, into our imaginations and thereafter into materiality, where thoughts can be fashioned into solid objects.
Without Yesod, we would not be able to imagine the higher reaches of the Tree. We would not be able to imagine Freedom, or Human Rights, or reality TV.
Therefore, Yesod can be understood, at the simplest level, as the Imaginative Faculty, which places it at the Foundation of magic itself. Lacking the imagination to conceive of better possibilities, we would have no desire to change the material conditions in Malkuth, and no need for ‘spells’ to help us do so.
The Imaginative Faculty, more importantly, is where Magic is born in the sense that our imaginations allow us to add endless, elaborate layers of meaning and significance onto the purely mechanistic, deterministic processes of the material universe, transforming what we are reliably informed is a mindless, motiveless churn of particles into the fabulous theatre of our dreams, the glittering stage whereon we strut our stuff and compose our stories.
Imagination enchants Matter. Imagination brings the Dead to Life. Imagination is the Mother of Empathy.
As mentioned above, certain apocalyptic interpretations of Qabalah suggest that Yesod and Malkuth were fused together to begin with, until the sundering of reality and illusion took place that saw Malkuth slip ‘down’ into materiality while Yesod remained as a kind of upper story for waking consciousness (I’ve talked about the metaphorical event often described as the Apocalypse or Descent of the 32nd path (known as the Aeon or Judgment in the Tarot) which is the path that connects the two spheres on the diagram, whereby the two spheres are re-united).
Astronomers currently surmise that the moon was created when a gigantic chunk of space debris smacked into the earth and hurled a huge mass of material into space. Although no longer part of Earth, as Yesod is no longer part of Malkuth, the moon is still linked via gravity and rotation to the planet of its origin. One or two successful moon visits notwithstanding, we generally cannot touch the moon, but we can see it, we can feel its influence waxing and waning in our blood, our tides, our waters.
So too with Yesod – the imagination is insubstantial, intangible but is the source of all our solid buildings, roads and bridges, books and babies. Ideas born in Yesod become substantial and real when they are condensed into Malkuth’s materiality.
Like the moon, Yesod can be seen but not touched or held, yet its influence is everywhere about us, undeniable.
The work in Yesod, then, is all about developing and mastering the imaginative facility. The mental equivalent of training the main metaphorical muscle groups we’ll be using in magic.
Yesod is often called the ‘astral plane – by closing our eyes and activating our imaginations, we can travel instantly to Paris or Machu Picchu or the lunar surface. We can visualize streets and places and people. We can talk to the dead and visit distant planets – and the more we work this muscle, the more we nourish it with real information in the form of maps and descriptions, the more real, rich and detailed our voyages may seem.
Some claim that our astral vision can be honed to such a degree that we may travel to distant locations in our minds and bring back accurate information from faraway times and places (we’ll practise Astral Travel and test its limitations, in week 3).
The imaginative space inside our tiny bone skulls is vast enough to contain cities, planets, galaxies, universes, gods, devils, heavens and hells. Inside, we are all immense beyond limit. There’s a lot to explore.
The danger of Yesod, as mentioned above, lies in the potential for delusion – mistaking flights of fancy and daydreams for Malkuthian solid reality – many aspiring magicians falter here on the lower rungs believing they’ve become magi after a few vivid hallucinations, or seeming ‘contacts’ with disembodied intelligences. Many mediums and channelers stop here in their magical progress. You’ll have met others on this level, who dress like they’re Dungeons & Dragons characters and work hard to cultivate a spooky, theatrical, witchy aura that’s less Golden Dawn and more Hot Topic.
Dreamy and Romantic, creative consciousness in Yesod can also succumb to delirium, intoxication, delusion and madness, where we confuse what we believe with what is real.
Discrimination, in the form of the Sword of Reason is, as always, our best guide.
Our magical patron, in his Hermes guise is the God who can, of course, travel freely between ‘heaven’ and ‘Earth’ just as we intend to do.
YESOD: PART 1
Imagine making a cake. Use lunar, female, motifs and images. The cake is also a spell so encode into it your INTENT.
DAY 1
Make the cake in your imagination.
Read up on the ‘memory palace’ concept, which arose during the Renaissance and Enlightenment periods – here we’ll make a small memory palace in the form of a mental recreation of your kitchen.
The tendency of the imagination is to speed up the tedious repetitive processes required for material achievement – you will naturally imagine a much faster egg-whisking time for instance, editing out the number of beats and visualising only the basic pattern a few times so your mind can get instantly to the result.
It’s very hard to get a 1 to 1 ratio but try your best to match your imaginary cake making to real time – while paying attention to exactly how much faster you tend to do the work in your imagination compared to reality.
I’d also imagine the cake would be small enough that thinking through every last speck of icing sugar won’t take weeks – and small enough EAT afterwards without being sick.
Lay out ingredients and try to keep them in mind by continually hitting refresh on your construct. Are the walls still intact? Is the kettle still boiling?
Bake the cake in real time, in your imagination.
Let it cool.
Come back when it is ready. You have now baked an archetypal ultimate cake. It will taste as sublime as you wish it to.
Eat the cake, slowly, savouring each imaginary crumb. Evaluate moisture, sweetness, satisfaction.
Make notes on the taste, feel, smell, and look of the cake.
DAY 2
Repeat the procedure this time recreating the cake in Malkuth – with real ingredients and real kitchen tools.
Once again, eat the cake.
How different is the experience? Is the real cake as good as the imaginary one or vice versa? Or just different?
DAY 3
Simply REMEMBER the cake, superimposing your experiences of the last couple of days.
Remember it intact, remade fresh in a single instant by your imagination. Visualise it in all its glory.
Remember the taste. Or taste the memory.
How does the memory of the cake compare to the reality and the fantasy?
Here we are familiarising ourselves with the differences between Fantasy, Reality and Memory.
Arden, 6.2.20:
Hi Grant!
Thank you again for the curriculum, with all the time at home it's been possible for me to create more of the atmosphere I've wanted for the deep dive into the material. It has been nice in these past few months to feel fully present in my space and to use the quiet for more magickal study.
I completed the cake-baking this past weekend (I even found a gluten-free vegan recipe to complement my new anti-inflammatory diet). I timed how long the cake-imagining exercise on the first day took me, and found I was only off on the real exercise by about two minutes - the largest delay being my lack of properly anticipating how difficult it would be to find certain baking items in my cabinet. Noticing the gaps in my imaginative process (the washing of all the measuring spoons after using them, for example, was a convenient bit to leave out) was enlightening, even when I tried to intend to account for them as best as possible.
I also reviewed the Penczak and completed the chapter on Yesod, though I've set aside the rest of the tome to accompany further instruction for the time being.
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