The ALL In All of the Creative Process

Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum, 1652.

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Molly Hankins October 23, 2025

Hermetic teachings tell us that to be in the creative process is to engage with the very same energy which creates and sustains all of life. THE ALL of consciousness, known as God or The Creator,  becomes all there is in the material realm by way of directing divine will is an idea described by The Kybalion, which contains a comprehensive breakdown of Hermetic principles, as a vibratory transmission. “It is taught that the process consists of the lowering of vibration until a very low degree of vibratory energy is reached, at which point the grossest possible form of matter is manifested. This process is called the stage of involution, in which THE ALL becomes ‘involved’ or ‘wrapped up’ in its creation,” The Kybalion explains. The artist who becomes so immersed in their creation that they come to live inside it is mirroring the very act of divine creation emanating from the original source of consciousness. 

Eventually this involutionary process begins to reverse into an evolutionary process subject to the Hermetic principle of Rhythm which states that, like our breath, all must go in and out of being. During the outpouring of creative energy, the principle of Vibration brings inspiration into matter until the cause of this outpouring finally ceases. Only then does the evolutionary process of individualization begin, which will extend mental energy back from the material world towards the divine, as described by the principle of Mentalism. 

To engage mentally is to offer divine attention, the Latin root of the word attention coming from the Latin attendere,  to reach towards or stretch out. Attention leads to creation, creation leads to individualization, and that extension of mental energy reaches out to reconnect and unify us with the original source of divine, primordial creativity - THE ALL. We can experience this passively via the principle of Vibration just by giving our attention to the creative work of another. Thiscan have measurable, physical impact on us; changing our brainwave state, stimulating the nervous system and triggering the release of hormones.

For Hermeticists, offering our attention to THE ALL in meditation is the portal to access the endless well of divine creative energy. When we close our eyes in meditation and pry our attention away from the grip of the material world, we return attention to THE ALL, the source of all creation. the font of divine inspiration, the all which contains THE ALL.. In drawing from this well, the artist becomes a pure channel for the will of THE ALL. Much of the work of Hermetic students involves removing the blockages of subconscious programming in order to become a pure channel, unimpeded by human limitation and societal conditioning.

The Kybalion asks, “Have the Venus of Medici, the Sistine Madonna, the Apollo Belvidere, spirits and reality of their own, or do they represent the spiritual and mental power of their creators?” Both are true, and for Hermeticists the paradox of that truth is an indicator of its divinity. Only when we recognize paradox are we mentally extending and thereby evolving ourselves beyond the duality of life in the material realm back towards a more holistic, divine understanding. Of course some of Shakespeare’s personality complex is contained in his characters, but so are truths so universal we recognize THE ALL coming through them, even hundreds of years after these works were written. 

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“Just as every portion of a hologram contains the image of the whole, every portion of the universe enfolds the whole.”

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“The ALL is in the earthworm, and yet the earthworm is far from being THE ALL,” The Kybalion states. “And still the wonder remains, that though the earthworm exists merely as a lowly thing, created and having its being solely within the mind of THE ALL - yet THE ALL is imminent in the earthworm, and in the particles that go to make up the earthworm. Can there be any greater mystery than this of ‘All in THE ALL; and THE ALL in all?” This explanation is both philosophically and technically grounded in the holographic model of reality, described by author Michael Talbot in his book The Holographic Universe. 

The holographic model suggests that every part of THE ALL, including the earthworm, contains all the information about the whole of THE ALL. In the same way a tiny piece of a holographic image contains the whole image but in lower resolution, so too is the ALL contained in every expression of life. Talbot explained that, “The idea that consciousness and life (and indeed all things) are ensembles enfolded throughout the universe has an equally dazzling flip side. Just as every portion of a hologram contains the image of the whole, every portion of the universe enfolds the whole. This means that if we knew how to access it we could find the Andromeda galaxy in the thumbnail of our left hand. We could also find Cleopatra meeting Caesar for the first time, for in principle the whole past and implications for the whole future are also enfolded in each small region of space and time. Every cell in our body enfolds the entire cosmos.” We see this when comparing the striking similarities between images of a neural network in the human brain to images of the interconnected webs of galaxies in outer space.

In keeping with the famous occult axiom, “As above so below, and as below so above,” we maximize our enjoyment of the human experience by engaging in the creative dance of involution and evolution. As we engage in involution, pouring energy into our creations, we’re performing the same creative process as THE ALL. To share our creations with others is to kick off the evolutionary aspect of Rhythm and Mentalism, inviting the mental aspect of the process that extends our consciousness back towards THE ALL to begin. The Kybalion encourages us not to get hung up on asking ourselves why THE ALL creates, because to speculate is useless from our limited human perspective, a low-resolution experience of divine consciousness. From this place we can’t conceive how THE ALL in high-resolution expresses itself creatively, much less why.

The Kybalion does make one concession for those seeking to understand why THE ALL creates, which is that there must be some satisfaction derived from the creative act. We access this divine satisfaction in the material world through giving our attention to creating and to experiencing the creations of others. As conscious fragments of THE ALL, perhaps our ability to participate in this process is why we were created. 

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Molly Hankins is an Initiate + Reality Hacker serving the Ministry of Quantum Existentialism and Builders of the Adytum.

Film

Mollie Engelhart

Film

The Language of the Body (1992)

Roper’s Gymnasium, 1831.

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One of the leading figures of the late 1970s and early 80s literary Punk movement, Kathy Acker was a radical in every sense. Her writing pioneered an experimental auto-fiction and incorporated cut-up techniques, developed some thirty years earlier by William Burroughs and Brion Gysin. Consistently, she wanted to push the boundaries of language and redefine the meaning of the novel. So too in this text, written towards the end of her life, Acker considers the inexpressibility of bodybuilding through traditional language. Drawing on thinkers like Elias Canetti, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger, the essay links the meditative rhythms of training to deeper existential questions: Can we know the body? What is the relationship between control, chaos, and meaning? And what can we learn about art and creation through pushing our bodies.

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Kathy Acker October 21, 2025

Preface Diary 

I have now been bodybuilding for ten years, seriously for almost five years. During the past few years, I have been trying to write about bodybuilding. Having failed time and time again, upon being offered the opportunity to write this essay, I made the following plan: I would attend the gym as usual. Immediately after each workout, I would describe all I had just experienced, thought and done. Such diary descriptions would provide the raw material. After each workout, I forgot: to write. Repeatedly. I...some part of me... the part of the ‘I’ who bodybuilds... was rejecting language, any verbal description of the processes of bodybuilding. I shall begin describing, writing about bodybuilding in the only way that I can: I shall begin by analyzing this rejection of ordinary or verbal language. What is the picture of the antagonism between bodybuilding and verbal language?

A Language Which is Speechless 

Imagine that you are in a foreign country. Since you are going to be in this place for some time, you are trying to learn the language. At the point of commencing to learn the new language, just before having started to understand anything, you begin forgetting your own. Within strangeness, you find yourself without a language. 

It is here, in this geography of no language, this negative space, that I can start to describe bodybuilding. For I am describing that which rejects language. 

Elias Canetti, who grew up within a multitude of spoken languages, began his autobiography by recounting a memory. In this, his earliest remembrance, the loss of language is threatened: “My earliest memory is dipped in red. I come out of a door on the arm of a maid, the door in front of me is red, and to the left a staircase goes down, equally red...” A smiling man walks up to the child; the child, upon request, sticks out his tongue whereupon the man flips open a jackknife and holds the sharp blade against the red tongue. 

“...He says: ‘Now we’ll cut off his tongue.“’ 

At the last moment, the man pulls the knife back. 

According to memory, this sequence happens every day. “That’s how the day starts,” Canetti adds, “and it happens very often.” ’ I am in the gym every three out of four days. What happens there? What does language in that place look like? According to cliche, athletes are stupid. Meaning: they are inarticulate. The spoken language of bodybuilders makes this cliche real. The verbal language in the gym is minimal and almost senseless, reduced to numbers and a few nouns. “Sets”, “squats”, “reps”,... The only verbs are “do” or “fail” adjectives and adverbs no longer exist; sentences, if they are at all, are simple. 

This spoken language is kin to the “language games” Wittgenstein proposes in his The Brown Book.  In a gym, verbal language or language whose purpose is meaning occurs, if at all, only at the edge of its becoming lost.

But when I am in the gym, my experience is that I am immersed in a complex and rich world. 

What actually takes place when I bodybuild? 

The crossing of the threshold from the world defined by verbal language into the gym in which the outside world is not allowed (and all of its languages) (in this sense, the gym is sacred) takes several minutes. What happens during these minutes is that I forget. Masse’s of swirling thought, verbalized insofar as I am conscious of them, disappear as mind or thought begins to focus. 

In order to analyze this focusing, I must first describe bodybuilding in terms of intentionality. 

Bodybuilding is a process, perhaps a sport, by which a person shapes her or his own body. This shaping is always related to the growth of muscular mass. 

During aerobic and circuit training, the heart and lungs are exercised. But muscles will grow only if they are, not exercised or moved, but actually broken down. The general law behind bodybuilding is that muscle, if broken down in a controlled fashion and then provided with the proper growth factors such as nutrients and rest, will grow back larger than before. 

Domenico de Rossi, Dancing Faun. c.1704

In order to break down specific areas of muscles, whatever areas one wants to enlarge, it is necessary to work these areas in isolation up to failure. 

Bodybuilding can be seen to be about nothing but failure. A bodybuilder is always working around failure. Either I work an isolated muscle mass, for instance one of the tricep heads, up to failure. In order to do this, I exert the muscle group almost until the point that it can no longer move. 

But if I work the same muscle group to the point that it can no longer move, I must move it through failure. I am then doing what are named “negative reps”, working the muscle group beyond its power to move. Here is the second method of working with failure. 

Whatever way I chose, I always want to work my muscle, muscular group, until it can no longer move: I want to fail. As soon as I can accomplish a certain task, so much weight for so many reps during a certain time span, I must always increase one aspect of this equation, weights reps or intensity, so that I can again come to failure. 

I want to break muscle so that it can grow back larger, but I do not want to destroy muscle so that growth is prevented. In order to avoid injury, I first warm up the muscular group, then carefully bring it up to failure. I do this by working the muscular group through a calculated number of sets during a calculated time span. If I tried immediately to bring a muscle group up to failure by lifting the heaviest weight I could handle, I might injure myself. 

I want to shock my body into growth; I do not want to hurt it. 

Therefore, in bodybuilding, failure is always connected to counting. I calculate which weight to use; I then count off how many times I lift that weight and the seconds between each lift. This is how I control the intensity of my workout. 

Intensity times movement of maximum weight equals muscular destruction (muscular growth). 

Is the equation between destruction and growth also a formula for art’ 

Bodybuilding is about failure because bodybuilding, body growth and shaping, occurs in the face of the material, of the body’s inexorable movement toward its final failure, toward death. 

To break down a muscle group, I want to make that group work up to, even beyond, capacity. To do this, it helps and even is necessary to visualize the part of the body that is involved. Mind or thought, then, while bodybuilding, is always focused on number or counting and often on precise visualizations. 

Certain bodybuilders have said that bodybuilding is a form of meditation. 

What do I do when I bodybuild? I visualize and I count. I estimate weight; I count sets; I count repetitions; I count seconds between repetitions; I count time, seconds or minutes, between sets: From the beginning to the end of each workout, in order to maintain intensity, I must continually count. 

For this reason, a bodybuilder’s language is reduced to a minimal, even a closed, set of nouns and to numerical repetition, to one of the simplest of language games. 

Let us name this language game, the language of the body.

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“In ordinary language, meaning is contextual. Whereas the cry of the beggar means nothing other than what it is; in the cry of the beggar, the impossible… occurs in that meaning and breath become one.”

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The Richness Of The Language Of The Body 

In order to examine such a language, a language game which resists ordinary language, through the lens of ordinary language or language whose tendency is to generate syntax or to make meanings proliferate, I must use an indirect route. 

In another of his books, Elias Canetti begins talking from and about that geography that is without verbal language: 

A marvellously luminous, viscid substance is left behind in me, defying words... 

A dream: a man who unlearns the world’s languages until nowhere on earth does he understand what people are saying.  

Being in Marrakesh is Canetti’s dream made actual. There are languages here, he says, but I understand none of them. The closer I am moving toward foreignness, into strangeness, toward understanding foreignness and strangeness, the more I am losing my own language. The small loss of language occurs when I journey to and into my own body. Is my body a foreign land to me? What is this picture of “my body” and “I”? For years, I said in the beginning of this essay, I have wanted to describe bodybuilding; whenever I tried to do so, ordinary language fled from me. r 

“Man,” Heidegger says, “is, the strangest.” Why! Because everywhere he or she belongs to being or to strangeness or chaos, and yet everywhere he or she attempts to carve a path through chaos: 

Everywhere man makes himself a path; he ventures into all realms of the essent, of the overpowering power, and in so doing he is flung out of all paths. ’ 

The physical or material, that which is, is constantly and unpredictably changing: it is chaotic. This chaos twines around death. For it is death that rejects all of our paths, all of our meanings. 

Whenever anyone bodybuilds, he or she is always trying to understand and control the physical in the face of this death. No wonder bodybuilding is centered around failure. 

The antithesis between meaning and essence has often been noted. Wittgenstein at the end of the Tractatus: 

The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is, and everything happens as it does happen - in it no values exist, and if they did, they’d have no value.

For all that happens and is the case is accidental.  

If ordinary language or meanings lie outside essence, what is the position of that language game which I have named the language of the body? For bodybuilding (a language of the body) rejects ordinary language and yet itself constitutes a language, a method for understanding and controlling the physical which in this case is also the self. 

I can now directly talk about bodybuilding. (As if speech is ever direct.) 

The language game named the language of the body is not arbitrary. When a bodybuilder is counting, he or she is counting his or her own breath. 

Canetti speaks of the beggars of Marrakesh who possess a similar and even simpler language game: they repeat the name of God. 

In ordinary language, meaning is contextual. Whereas the cry of the beggar means nothing other than what it is; in the cry of the beggar, the impossible (as the Wittgenstein of the Tructutus and Heidegger see it) occurs in that meaning and breath become one. 

Here is the language of the body; here, perhaps, is the reason why bodybuilders experience bodybuilding as a form of meditation. 

“I understood the seduction there is in a life that reduces everything to the simplest kind of repetition,” Canetti says. A life in which meaning and essence no longer oppose each other. A life of meditation. 

“I understood what those blind beggars really are: the saints of repetition…”

The Repetition Of The One: The Glimpse Into Chaos Or Essence

Robert Mapplethorpe, Lisa Lyons. 1980.

I am in the gym. I am beginning to work out. I either say the name “bench press”, then walk over to it, or simply walk over to it. Then, I might picture the number of my first weight; I probably, since I usually begin with the same warm-up weight, just place the appropriate weights on the bar. Lifting this bar off its rests, then down to my lower chest, I count “1”. I am visualizing this bar, making sure it touches my chest at the right spot, placing it back on its rests. “2”. I repeat the same exact motions. “3”... After twelve repetitions, I count off thirty seconds while increasing my weights. “1 “.. The identical process begins again only this time I finish at “10”... All these repetitions end only when I finish my work-out.

On counting: Each number equals one inhalation and one exhalation. If I stop my counting or in any other way lose focus, I risk dropping or otherwise mishandling a weight and so damaging my body.

In this world of the continual repetition of a minimal number of elements, in this aural labyrinth, it is easy to lose one’s way. When all is repetition rather than the production of meaning, every path resembles every other path. 

Every day, in the gym, I repeat the same controlled gestures with the same weights, the same reps,... The same breath patterns. But now and then, wandering within the labyrinths of my body, I come upon something. Something I can know because knowledge depends on difference. An unexpected event. For though I am only repeating certain gestures during certain time spans, my body, being material, is never the same; my body is controlled by change and by chance. 

For instance, yesterday, I worked chest. Usually I easily benchpress the bar plus sixty pounds for six reps. Yesterday, unexpectedly, I barely managed to lift this weight at the sixth rep. I looked for a reason. Sleep? Diet’ Both were usual. Emotional or work stress? No more ban usual. The weather? Not good enough. My unexpected failure at the sixth rep was allowing me to see, as if through a window, not to any outside, but inside my own body, to its workings. I was being permitted to glimpse the laws that control my body, those of change or chance, laws that are barely, if at all, knowable. 

By trying to control, to shape, my body through the calculated tools and methods of bodybuilding, and time and again, in following these methods, failing to do so, I am able to meet that which cannot be finally controlled and known: the body. 

In this meeting lies the fascination, if not the purpose, of bodybuilding. To come face to face with chaos, with my own failure or a form of death. 

Canetti describes the architecture of a typical house in the geographical labyrinth of Marrakesh. The house’s insides are cool, dark. Few, if any, windows lookout into the street. For the entire construction of this house, windows, etc., is directed inward, to the central courtyard where only openness to the sun exists. 

Such an architecture is a mirror of the body: When I reduce verbal language to minimal meaning, to repetition, I close the body’s outer windows. Meaning approaches breath as I bodybuild, as I begin to move through the body’s labyrinths, to meet, if only for a second, that which my consciousness ordinarily cannot see. Heidegger: “The. being-there of historical man means: to be posited as the breach into which the preponderant power of being bursts in its appearing, in order that this breach itself should shatter against being.” 

In our culture, we simultaneously fetishize and disdain the athlete, a worker in the body. For we still live under the sign of Descartes. This sign is also the sign of patriarchy. As long as we continue to regard the body, that which is subject to change, chance, and death, as disgusting and inimical, so long shall we continue to regard our own selves as dangerous others.

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Kathy Acker (1947–1997) was an American experimental novelist, poet, playwright, performance artist, and postmodernist writer, whose idiosyncratic style redefined contemporary writing and made her one of the most insightful and influential voices of her generation.

Film

Larry Levan Playlist

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Larry Levan was an influential American DJ who defined what modern dance clubs are today. He is most widely renowned for his long-time residency at Paradise Garage, also known as “Gay-Rage”, a former nightclub at 84 King Street in Manhattan, NY.

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Hannah Peel Playlist

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Mercury Prize, Ivor Novello and Emmy-nominated, RTS and Music Producers Guild winning composer, with a flow of solo albums and collaborative releases, Hannah Peel joins the dots between science, nature and the creative arts, through her explorative approach to electronic, classical and traditional music.

Tyler Cowen: On Choral Music - Deep Cuts and Listening

Film

Rivering (Museum of Suspense IV)

Charles François Daubigny, River Landscape with Moon. c. 1860, Leopold Museum, Vienna.

Ale Nodarse October 16, 2025

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“To study rivers is to adopt another life.”

A white orb glistens. A sky swells forth. Daubs of orange-pink glow incandescent before falling into a warm blue — falling further again into a muted violet. And the sky folds on itself, so that the rivershore appears as an isthmus, a dark ground set between the sky and the sky’s double. The painting, Charles François Daubigny’s River Landscape with Moon (c. 1856–66, Leopold Museum), is a lesson in reflection. 

Charles-François Daubigny, Night Journey. 1862.

The artwork is a study, among many, which Daubigny produced of the River Oise during the 1850s and 60s. As with most studies, it implies speed. The brush moves quickly, oil paint crossing atop the wooden panel as the horsehair bristles make themselves seen. Paint structures its own topography. In this case, the first ground layer of cream-colored oil remains visible beneath the secondary, darker tones. The effect (which a screen fails to capture) proves luminous. The light of the moon suffuses the landscape. It emerges as if from below, flickering through and under everything. 

Daubigny knew the river he painted well. He had chosen to live and to paint upon it by setting himself within a floating studio called Le Botin or “The Little Box.” While the works within the Museum of Suspense have dwelt on the suspended figure in painting, Daubigny placed the artist and studio quite literally adrift –– and made a series of etchings to “document” the novelty of such a transformation. In one, the Night Voyage, Daubigny views himself and his boat from above, his little box a luminous if isolated flicker. (In reality, Daubigny was often accompanied by family and by fellow painters. Monet, too, would set up a floating studio.) In another scene, The Boat Studio, the box is amplified (fig. 3). The view to the landscape at the picture’s center emerges as a painting in miniature, while finished artworks sit to the painter’s right. They are the products of the little box and the river upon which it floats. The undated River Landscape with Moon most likely numbers among these. 

Charles-François Daubigny, The Boat Studio. 1861.

On the etched “picture” closest to us, Daubigny adds a single word along the lower right corner -“Realism” (realisme), . This word was to insist on truth. This is how it was. It was also to insist on possibility: a subtle testimony to all that might emerge, beautiful and strange, when suspense took its place as a fixed condition rather than a momentary exception. The river suspended and estranged the painter, who willed the familiar unfamiliar and set it near at hand. 

Today, we are familiar both with the moon and with the blue orb viewed from its horizon. Ventures to outer space, both scientific and commercial,) continue to insist and to capitalize upon the power of such a vantage. While a view from the moon back to earth may no doubt be a life-changing thing, Daubigny’s study reminds us that, when it comes to wonder, the river may suffice. Something of the moon is already, really, there. And there is another life.

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¹ Jim Harrison, The Theory and Practice of Rivers (Livingston, 1989), 24.
²Bonnie Grad, “Le Voyage en Bateau: Daubigny’s Visual Diary of River Life,” The Print Collector’s Newsletter (1980): 123–27.
³See Edouard Manet’s painting of Monet Painting in His Studio Boat (1874; Neue Pinakothek, Munich). To an extent, Manet revealed the artist’s isolation and the distance between artist and subject, in Monet’s (and Daubigny’s) works, as exaggerated. See Harmon Siegel, Painting with Monet (Princeton University Press, 2024), 218–221. 

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Alejandro (Ale) Nodarse Jammal is an artist and art historian. They are a Ph.D. Candidate in History of Art & Architecture at Harvard University and are completing an MFA at Oxford’s Ruskin School of Art. They think often about art — its history and its practice — in relationship to observation, memory, language, and ethics.

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Tyler Cowen (Part 1)

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Iggy Pop Playlist

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Iggy Pop is an American singer, songwriter, musician, record producer, and actor. Since forming The Stooges in 1967, Iggy’s career has spanned decades and genres. Having paved the way for ‘70’s punk and ‘90’s grunge, he is often considered “The Godfather of Punk.”

Film

Egyptian Magic and The Seven Octaves of Vibration

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Molly Hankins October 9, 2025

The  ancient Egyptian deity known as Ptah embodies the concept of a primary creator as the source of all there is. When Hungarian author, mystic and yoga teacher Elisabeth Haich began remembering her past lives in Egypt as an initiate and priestess, she attributed her devotion directly to Ptah, who came to her in the Earthly form of Ptahhotep. In her 1994 book Initiation, Haich describes one of these past lives growing up as a daughter of the Pharaoh Atothis, and niece of a high priest in the mystery school of Ra, Ptahhotep. She sought initiation as a young girl, but her uncle Ptahhotep insisted she was not ready. After she asked him to be initiated for a third time, Ptahhotep had to give her permission because, according to rules governing initiates, asking three times for initiation is a sign that it’s a requirement for her soul. Knowing she lacked sufficient life experience in that incarnation to safely begin the process, Ptahhotep began teaching her the universal truths which she describes throughout Initiation.

The basis of these universal truths is the divine law of nature. Ptahhotep explains this using what he calls the seven octaves of vibration, through which life expresses itself in the material world. Like most spiritual belief systems, the ancient Egyptians believed the world of form was a small piece of the far greater expression of the spiritual world. “The fact that the creative force manifests itself on each and every level of innumerable possibilities means there are countless different wavelengths, wave forms and frequencies,” Haich tells us, recounting the words of Ptahhotep. “And as long as we are in the body, with its limited perceptive ability, we can perceive only a certain number of these wave forms because our organs of sense are limited. Whether some form of vibration appears to us as ‘immaterial energy’ or as solid ‘matter’ depends upon our own idea and the impression of something which is basically nothing but movement, vibration or frequency.” 

According to Haich, Ptahhotep claimed that shorter energy wave forms correspond with matter, while longer wave forms with ideas and the divine creative force. This is paradoxical because in the physical world of form, shorter wave lengths correspond with a higher rate of vibration, which is traditionally associated with divinity rather than physical matter. However, only when we really consider this paradox do we begin to close in on universal truth beyond the material world of duality we currently live in. If we imagine the occult axiom of, “As above so below and as below so above,” as being akin to a mirror, the reversal of how shorter and longer wavelengths express themselves in the material vs. the spiritual world begins to make more sense. The source of these vibrations, known as God or The Creator, are radiated into our world by our sun, and Ra is the sacred sun god of Egypt. Explaining these seven octaves of vibration, Ptahhotep shared how all divine energy radiates in all directions from a center, such as the sun, to take form in different wavelengths. 

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“In the material world, we are living amidst the vibrations that emanate from the spiritual into the physical, and developing our consciousness so as to be able to cause effect is at the heart of magical practice.”

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The chemical composition of matter determines the vibrations it can hold. In communicating this information, Ptahhotep was preparing Haich’s past life body to be able to hold the vibration of initiation. Receiving and integrating this knowledge begins the alchemical process of preparing any initiate for the “higher octaves of consciousness” that allow us to begin practicing magic, defined as being able to cause change according to will. Magic is far more efficient and effective when practitioners can hold and transmit a wider range of vibrational states. Everything radiates the vibration it embodies from its center, and that vibration corresponds to its state of consciousness. The first four octaves of vibration correspond with matter, vegetation, animal and human life, while the last three, accessible to humans who take responsibility for their vibrational state, correspond with personal intuition, embodiment of wisdom and universal love, and finally reunion with the mind of God. All seven of these states are available to us while we’re in our human form, according to Ptahhotep. 

“Matter, the very lowest degree of consciousness, manifests itself only through contraction, cooling off and hardening. The plant manifests itself on two levels, the material level and the level of force - vegetative force - that gives life to it,” he explained. “The animal manifests three forces, the material, the vegetative and the animal. It has a body, it seeks out its food, eats and digests and is conscious on the animal level: it has emotions, instincts, urges, feelings, sympathy, antipathy and desires. The animal is conscious in the third developmental stage, only one degree lower than man. The average man stands one octave of vibration higher, he is conscious on the mental level. He has intellect and the ability to think. But at the same time he manifests the three other levels,” writes Haich quoting Ptahhotep. 

At the fifth octave of consciousness development, man makes a great leap as he enters the plane of causality. In the material world, we are living amidst the vibrations that emanate from the spiritual into the physical, and developing our consciousness so as to be able to cause effect is at the heart of magical practice. The sixth octave is where God’s divine love radiates from, and as we begin to access it, we begin to integrate the wisdom of universal love and bring it into our daily lives. The seventh octave is described as the completely conscious God-man who becomes a center radiating purely divine, creative energy. Ptahhotep says, “All other forms of revelation manifest only in transformed vibrations, only part of God. A God-man is a person who manifests God - his own divine self - completely and perfectly through a perfect consciousness; one who experiences and radiates the divine creative forces in their primordial, untransformed vibrations and frequencies.” 

Only those who evolve their consciousness to the level of the seventh octave can make conscious use of these primordial, divine waves of energy. Developing our physical bodies and consciousness to be able to hold these higher octaves makes up much of any occult initiate’s work. Ptahhotep reminds us that while the bodies of different beings in the world of form may look the same, they differ chemically based on the level of consciousness development of the soul embodied within that form. When undertaking any occult work, particularly without the direction of a teacher or established magical order, it’s essential to remember that it takes time and diligence to evolve our consciousness to be able to hold the energies of higher octaves of being. Divine frequencies can shock and even harm our physical, mental and emotional bodies, so a slow and steady approach is always recommended.

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Molly Hankins is an Initiate + Reality Hacker serving the Ministry of Quantum Existentialism and Builders of the Adytum.

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M.I.A.