The Western Gate

When I was young I began to draw, sketch and write over images of the Otz Chiim, the qabbalistic tree of life. I’d fill all sorts of ideas on it, some plagiarised from Crowley’s 777 book, and others from what ever arose in my mindset as I pondered the strange avenues of this manifested archetypal design.
When I discovered the above drawing recently I reasoned it must have been from one of those sessions.
I remember keeping, what I thought was this drawing, as it was the first time I used the signature seen on the very bottom right. Then I noticed I had written about my apprentice and birth of my daughter, so I placed it confusingly when I was about about 20/22 years of age. Then I noticed the tell tale, also bottom right, “30 cycles of being turn!” And also the mention of the eclipse on the 12th of October which would be 1996, Aleister Crowley’s birthday. I remember doing this drawing, taking many old sketches from years earlier, shoehorning them onto a new design, using the daft sketches and megalomaniac rhetoric in places. I remember sitting there at 30 years of age giggling over some of the things I had wrote, not once did I reason it was stupid or embarrassing.

As I look upon this sketch I remember my very younger self, almost with affection as a father to a son, with fondness and with love and I wonder what I would’ve said to myself of 40 years ago. If there is truth in the quantum theory, as it seems to suggest, the future influences the past.
I remember as I wrote all this down on that solar eclipse it would be the last time I used this particular image of the OtzChiim. It was eclipsed. 1966 became 1996. I stopped following and stood alone. I walked from then on, a strange path guided by whatever was the higher consciousness and not what I found or followed in books. I allowed creativity to arise rather than trying to force out an idea.
I still feel like a child in an adult world. I still hold all new findings with a naive wonderment I always did.

Master of none, Apprentice to many.