THE OCCULT REVIEW

London, England

December 1922

(pages 393-394)

Q.B.L., OR THE BRIDE'S RECEPTION.

A Treatise on the Nature and Use of the Tree of Life.

By Frater Achad.

Chicago: Collegium ad Spiritum Sanctum, P.O. Box 141.

Price $10.00.

One is immediately struck by the more than ordinary lucidity and sense of construction displayed in this work. In the Tree of Life and its Correspondences, we are told, we shall find “a convenient means of classification, a sort of filing cabinet, together with much valuable material ready to file, and room for all that we may collect in our further researches. In this filing cabinet we shall find a means of getting rid of a great many ideas which have been valueless on account of their unbalanced nature, and this not by means of suppression—which forms complexes—but by careful arrangement, thus setting our minds in order; and by balancing these ideas against their opposites, leaving the mind in a state which transcends both aspects, thus gradually regaining our lost equilibrium, which is the basis of the work. . . . The intention of this essay is to supply a basis whereby all serious students of the occult and mystic lore may learn to obtain equilibrium on all planes.”

We are furthermore told that “to appreciate this essay . . . one should have a pack of Tarot cards. Miss Colman Smith's pack, published by Rider & Son, of London, being the easiest procurable, the matter is discussed as though this were in the possession of the reader.”

There is no escaping the depth and wisdom of the quabalistically concealed meanings, and of these Frater Achad [Charles Stansfeld Jones] gives many illuminating examples. It is, however, in the appendix to Chapters 3 and 4 that the most interesting discovery is made. We are asked how it was that the serpent who founded the paths by ascending the Tree could possibly have started at the top, and we are shown what would happen if we started onn our upward journey by the Eleventh Path leading from Malkuth to Yesod and attributed to the Tarot Trump O—the Fool—i.e., following of course, exactly the reverse order of the Paths as they were numbered in the old way, but keeping exactly to the order of the Letters from Aleph to Tau.

As to elaborate further would take up too much space, we can only advise those who are able to do so to study Frater Achad’s essay. Their industry will be well repaid.

E. F. W.