Mysticism is defined as an attempted subjective union with God or spiritually experiencing divine knowledge inaccessible to the intellect, usually attained through some sort of esoteric practice that involves bypassing the ego or a form of self surrender. Methods of entering into the necessary trance state include prolonged dancing to repetitive music, chanting a mantra or prayer, self flagulation, the use of psychotropic substances, various forms of breath work and meditation self hypnosis such as staring at a certain point or object through the use of a pendulum and by various activities that exhaust the body and tires the mind in an effort to bypass self awareness to reach into the deep subconscious or collective unconscious.

Reaching the deeper Self of course, one of the most powerful techniques traditionally used to achieve gnosis is through tantric sex. Gnosis is the Greek word for knowledge, the type that comes from within, such as intuition, which is accessed in ancient mystery schools through intense ecstatic arousal. In gnosticism, sophia is a feminine aspect of God which represents a divine internal wisdom available to the individual without the need of a middleman, such as a priest, rabbi, pope, or imam, whether attained through meditation, sexual practices, or the use of drugs.

Shamans, alchemists and kabbalists believed that it was necessary to enter into altered states of consciousness in order to perform what many consider magical arts, such as divination clairvoyance or obtaining direct divine knowledge. Much of what Western civilization considers distinct spiritual beliefs such as gnosticism, kabbalah philosophy, alchemy, tantra and other esoteric practices that fall under the umbrella of the occult can all be traced back to the ancient Aryan Magi, from where we get the modern term magician from. It's from this school of thought that European secret societies obtain their mystical traditions through organizations such as the Knights Templar, Rosicrucians, and Freemasons, which base their nomenclature on Judeo Christian and even Islamic literature. However, predates all Abrahamic faiths.

Known in the Bible as wise men, the Magi were technically a subclass of priests in the ancient Persian Empire but were not really part of the mainstream Zoroastrian religion, although they greatly influenced it, as well as all belief systems of the Orient, which is a term that simply means east. The Magi were astronomers, and it's from them that modern religions received their encoded layers of astro theology, meaning references to the zodiac, which is not only reflected in the twelve months of the calendar year, but the twelve ages of what Plato calls the Great Year, a 25 920 year cycle also known as the Procession of the Equinox. The knowledge of such a long cycle implies that there's been a tradition of keeping track of the movement of the stars that stretches back into the Pleistocene or Ice Age, when civilizations such as the fabled Atlantis allegedly existed. Whether this magical tradition really stretches that far back into prehistory is debatable. But what is clear is that its influence in medieval European history, particularly in regards to a one time Catholic priest named John D.

Born in 1527, John D was an English alchemist, astrologer, court philosopher and exceptional mathematician who entered Cambridge University when he was just 15 years old, where he excelled and became a junior faculty member before even taking his degree. After graduating, he went to Paris where he delivered a series of well received lectures on the Greek mathematician Euclid. After lecturing and studying on the European continent between 1547 and 1550, dee returned to England, became astrologer to Queen Mary Tudor and shortly thereafter was imprisoned for being a magician, but was released not too long after Dee met the future Queen Elizabeth. While she was being held under house arrest by Queen Mary, the two developed a friendship that lasted for the rest of their lives. As Queen, Elizabeth gave Dee money. More importantly, she protected him from those who accused him of witchcraft.

Besides practicing astrology and doing horoscopes in the court of Elizabeth I, whose favor he enjoyed he also gave her lessons in the mystical interpretation of his writings. Dee's house in Mort Lake near London was for many years a major center of science in England. Dee salvaged many rare and ancient scientific writings that had been scattered when Roman Catholic churches and monasteries were ransacked during the Reformation. And his own library of more than 4000 books may have been the largest of its kind in Europe at the time. To give you a feel for Dee's own work, I'll read you a short sentence from the Hieroglyphic Monad and I quote before we raise our eyes to heaven Kabbalistically illuminated by the contemplation of these mysteries we could perceive very exactly the constitution of our Monad as it is shown to us not only in the light, but also in life and nature. For it discloses explicitly by its inner movement the most secret mysteries of this physical analysis. End quote.

In D's most hermetic work, The Monas Hieroglyphica, which means one Hieroglyph or the Hieroglyphic Monad, published in 1564, d believed he had found a Hieroglyph, a hitherto hidden symbol which contained in its form the very unifying principle of reality which contains within it all the most elementary principles of the universe. It is to be contemplated upon and fixed in memory as an archetype applicable to all studies. Dee spent most of the time in his library where he explored the Talmudic Mysteries, the Rosicrucian theories and a host of other obscure and occult subjects such as Enochian magic. He claimed that by gazing into a crystal he could communicate with otherworldly spirits and even wrote about how, as he knelt in prayer late one autumn, he was visited by the angel Uriel. I will leave it to my viewers to decide if this was an actual experience or an interaction with his own subconscious mind or, as Jung would say, an archetype of the collective unconscious.

In any event, he claimed that the angel that appeared to him promised to be his friend and companion as long as he lived. Dee also associated with other occultists, for example, Edward Kelly, a lawyer who stood accused of necromancy, which is the practice of using dead bodies for divination. Dee and Kelly recorded hundreds of spirit conversations, including an alleged angelic language that they called Enochian, which are claimed to represent a pre hebraic language. That said, some researchers have suggested that Enochian was a code de used to transmit messages from overseas to Queen Elizabeth in his alleged capacity as a founding member of the English Secret Service. Others have claimed that this Enochian language, which is supposedly from the time before Noah and is used in Enochian magic, is part of the system of magic used by Alastair Crowley and the Golden Dawn, and of the necronomicon to contact intelligences from other dimensions or evoking quote the Old ones. As Dee went deeper into the occult, he turned his back on Queen Elizabeth and set off on a journey that took him beyond the boundaries of religion and morality. He risked everything in his quest, and his diaries record how, ultimately, he became the instrument of forces beyond his control.

The language Dee allegedly sought was said to contain the power by which nature was framed and the whole universe was constructed, the very mathematical framework of all the mysteries of creation, the alchemical key to unlocking the secrets of the universe letter by letter. After months of scrying and hundreds of hours of looking into the crystal ball, the angels revealed the alleged Enochian language, based on an alphabet of 22 letters, its own words, grammar and syntax, and resembled no known tongue, although some scholars have compared it to Hebrew. When the Pope heard that D was being granted audiences with Emperor Rudolph, he sent spies to investigate and concluded that Dee was a threat. The Pope then presented a document to the emperor accusing Dee of being a black magician while attempting to seize the heretical books of angelic conversations. Dee was eventually expelled from the Holy Roman Empire and ended up in southern Bohemia. They were given six days to get out of the empire and fled Prague in fear for their lives. With nowhere to go and no prospects of patronage, things were looking desperate when they received word that a nobleman from southern Bohemia requested their alchemical services. Even more surprising,