Brief Note on Versions of the Middle Pillar Exercise
                              
                              
 A while back someone asked, more or less, about the Middle
Pillar exercise developed by Regardie and described in
various ways in various places.  Various computational
disasters later, I toss my bits of shell into the pot.

 The "classical" Middle Pillar exercise described in (for
example) _The Middle Pillar_ and _The Art of True Healing_
was worked up by Regardie from a Portal grade teaching paper
used in the Stella Matutina (one of the transformation
bodies, so to speak, of the Golden Dawn), drawing on various
remarks scattered throughout the GD material, with some
inspiration from the English version of Wilhelm's
translation of _The Secret of the Golden Flower_.

 The original Portal paper directs the student to first
build up the Middle Pillar of the Tree of Life in the aura,
and then add the sephiroth of the Pillars of Mercy and
Severity (as though one were standing between the pillars in
the temple, facing West).  Regardie, however, uses a
somewhat different scheme, derived from the Tarot documents
that describe the projection of the Tree of Life into a
sphere.

 This scheme gives four side pillars rather than two, with
Mercy and Severity alternating.  The Middle Pillar then runs
through the center of the Earth, with Kether associated with
the North and Malkuth with the South Poles.  The side-
pillars are essentially at the cross-quarters; the four
elemental Enochian Tablets are at their appropriate
quarters, filling the spaces between the pillars (as is
discussed in the "Book of the Concourse of the Forces," I
believe).  This means that, as I remember, if one is facing
East (toward Leo), a pillar of Severity will be to the left
in front and to the right in back, and a pillar of Mercy
will be to the right in front and to the left in back.

 Now, Regardie based the circulation patterns of his Middle
Pillar Exercise on two sources.  (1) the description of the
Neophyte grade Opening, as interpreted in various places in
the Z documents, and (2) the spherical Tree of Life.  The Z
documents specifically state that the four pillars of the
spherical Tree are formulated in the candidate's aura during
the Neophyte initiation, and Regardie takes these pillars to
be at the left and right, and to the front and back.  Thus,
one circulation activates the pillars to the side; another
circulation activates the pillars in front and in back; a
third circulation (the "Fountain") activates the Middle
Pillar, and a fourth (the spiral) enacts the "rising of the
Light" of the triple clockwise circumambulation during the
Neophyte opening.

 Regardie specifically states (in _The Complete Golden Dawn
System of Magic_) that he does not recommend the work of
building the side pillars in the aura (as the Stella
Matutina instructions had recommended) because (a) there
should be four rather than two side pillars, and (b) the
peripheral circulations achieve the same effect.

 Our correspondent asks about the location of the pillars
of Mercy and Severity, which is in fact another question:
which way should one be facing?  The scheme presented in the
Tarot and Enochian documents is clear enough:  the Pillars
and Tablets (and Paths, and the whole panoply of the Tarot)
occupy precise spaces in the sphere around the Earth, as in
the Sphere of Sensation of the practitioner.  But how should
one orient oneself?

 The answer, unfortunately, leads to another problem.
Another Portal document, "The Microcosm - Man" is very
precise, though not very helpful.  It states in no uncertain
terms that (a) each one of us is oriented within our Sphere
of Sensation *facing the sign that was rising at the time of
our birth*, and that (b) the Sphere does not rotate:  we
keep this individual orientation throughout our lives.

 This means that though the pillars are 90 degrees apart
for everyone, they --and the Tablets as well -- are located
in different directions in  each person's Sphere.

 This gives a practitioner a chance to make some decisions.
One might simply do the Middle Pillar Exercise and let the
circulations be seen as activating whatever is in their
paths.  One might, on the other hand, take the direction of
Cor Leonis as one's "East", and visualize everything in its
canonical place.  This means, however, that the peripheral
circulations go through the Tablets rather than the Pillars.
One might, on yet another hand, decide to interpret the
Elemental Tablets as Pillars, so that the peripheral
circulations would activate the Passives with one flow and
the Actives with the other (then one would have to consider
whether Actives were Severity and Passives Mercy, or vice
versa).  On a fourth hand, one might simply remove the later
overlay and go back to the earlier strata of the Golden Dawn
material.

 There are many other hands that one might grasp at in
one's desperation, and I do not have the stamina to try to
enumerate them all.  I only wanted to sketch out the
situation, and point out that there is in fact a problem
there, one which must be addressed by anyone who wants to
keep to the Golden Dawn tradition.

 LeGrand Cinq-Mars
 rjb@u.washington.edu