BELLA DONNA digital art by Lydia Anneli Bleth - Selbstporträts - Kriegerin

 

~ Jeff Foster / Ancient Order Of The Hermetics

 

*Understanding someone’s trauma does NOT excuse their behaviour.*

Pain may explain why someone harms others. It does NOT erase the harm they do.

That may sound obvious. In some spiritual circles, it is a strangely radical thing to say.

We speak about empathy and compassion. We speak about seeing the wounded child inside the one who lashes out. We speak about ancestral trauma, unmet needs, the goodness hidden beneath addiction, cruelty, even violence.

“They are pure consciousness, just like all of us.”

Of course. The capacity to see the wounded child in someone and have compassion for them is beautiful. It is part of love.

But there is a real danger here.

*Too easily, empathy slides into excusing harm.*

We say, “That’s not who they really are.” We focus so much on the inner pain of the one causing harm that we overlook the pain of the one harmed.

The victim’s anger becomes “judgement” or “projection” or even “negativity.” Their pain becomes “just a story.” They are pushed toward forgiveness before they have even been heard. Sometimes we are told there are no victims or perpetrators at all, only concepts in the mind.

This is not harmless. It causes real damage.

When we centre the feelings of the person who caused harm and sideline the one who was harmed, two dangerous things happen:

First, the victim begins to doubt their own reality. If their anger is dismissed and their pain reframed as imagination, they start to mistrust their own instincts. They lose confidence in their nervous system, in their basic sense that something was not okay. This kind of spiritual gaslighting deepens trauma and erodes truth.

Second, it creates cover for further harm. When a community rushes to empathise with the abuser and pressures the victim to forgive for spiritual reasons, the message is clear: There will be no real accountability. Your behaviour will be explained away.

That is how abusive patterns continue for generations.

There is also a deeper danger: It teaches people that compassion means tolerating mistreatment. That “spiritual maturity” means overriding your anger and staying soft and open while others cross and violate your boundaries. Over time, that erodes dignity and self respect and enables abusive dynamics.

(I have met so many self-described “empaths” who are in relationships with abusers, addicts, narcissists. They pride themselves on seeing the wounded child. They call it “compassion”. But they are tolerating harm. And I know this from the inside - I used to be one of those people.)

Compassion for the one who harms must NEVER erase the voice of the one who has been harmed.

We can hold two truths at once. We can see the wounded child in someone and still say clearly that their behaviour is not okay. We can honour complexity and still name abuse. We can feel empathy and still have boundaries.

*We can have empathy for someone and still demand accountability from them.*

Compassion without discernment becomes enabling. Spirituality without moral clarity becomes spineless.

If our spirituality enables abuse and cannot protect the vulnerable, it is not spirituality. It is fear dressed up as love.

Compassion matters. Accountability matters just as much, if not more.

Keep your heart open. But keep your damn backbone too!

 

 

~ James William Kaler / Ancient Order Of The Hermetics

THE SACRED KNOWLEDGE OF WOMAN — AN ANCIENT TRUTH

Across civilizations separated by oceans and millennia, one truth appears again and again:
Woman was never meant to be diminished. She was meant to be consulted.

The ancient world did not see woman as lesser—but as other, and sacred in that otherness.

In the Corpus Hermeticum, creation itself is described as dual in manifestation, unified in essence. The feminine principle is not passive—it is receptive intelligence, the womb of insight through which divine order enters matter. Without it, nothing is born, understood, or made whole.

In Tao Te Ching, the Tao is repeatedly likened to the Mother of the World—dark, deep, yielding, and inexhaustible. The Sage is instructed not to dominate this force, but to align with it. To oppose the feminine current is to move against the Way itself.

The Rig Veda speaks of Shakti—the animating power behind all gods and forces. Even the highest masculine deities are inert without her. Power without wisdom is chaos; wisdom without receptivity cannot descend. Woman embodies the bridge.

In Timaeus, Plato describes the receptacle—the unseen matrix that allows form to emerge. This is not weakness. This is cosmic intelligence, the silent field in which order becomes real.

Everywhere the pattern repeats.

Man acts.
Woman knows.

Not because she is emotional—but because she perceives relational truth.
Not because she is mystical—but because her awareness is non-linear.

Ancient cultures understood this clearly:

A man who shames a woman severs himself from wisdom.

A man who refuses her counsel blinds himself voluntarily.

A man who does not speak openly with her remains fragmented.

Woman accesses a system of knowing that few men cultivate—not through logic alone, but through integration. She reads what is between things. She senses coherence before it is articulated. This is why kings once consulted priestesses. This is why oracles were female. This is why the mother was revered as teacher, seer, and anchor of the household soul.

To treat woman well was never about politeness.
It was about alignment with cosmic order.

When men honored women, societies stabilized.
When men dismissed women, civilizations collapsed inward—long before enemies arrived at the gates.

This wisdom is not new.
It has been remembered, forgotten, and remembered again—etched into stone, hymn, symbol, and silence.

The ancients did not ask men to kneel before women.
They asked them to listen.

And listening, they knew, is the highest form of strength.

 

~ James William Kaler / Ancient Order Of The Hermetics

“The search for truth is life;
the realization of truth is illumination;
the practice of truth is virtue.”
— Manly P. Hall

Hermetic wisdom does not flatter the ego. It demands movement.

The search for truth is life.
To search is to be alive. Not to parrot beliefs, not to cling to inherited ideas, not to defend identities—but to question, to observe, to test, to descend into uncertainty willingly. A person who has stopped seeking has chosen comfort over vitality. In Hermetics, life itself is the friction between ignorance and understanding. If you are not seeking, you are stagnating—no matter how spiritual you claim to be.

The realization of truth is illumination.
Illumination is not information. It is not reading another book or winning another argument. It is the moment when truth clicks internally—when something moves from theory into direct knowing. This kind of light cannot be borrowed. It arrives through inner alignment, through silence, through the courage to face uncomfortable insights about oneself. Illumination doesn’t inflate the ego; it humbles it.

The practice of truth is virtue.
Here is where most fall away. Knowing truth means nothing if it is not lived. Hermetics is not an aesthetic, a costume, or a collection of clever quotes. Virtue is truth in action: how you speak when no one is watching, how you treat others when triggered, how you govern your appetites, your reactions, your power. Practice is proof. Without it, realization decays into spiritual vanity.

Hermetics is a living discipline:

Seek relentlessly.

Realize honestly.

Practice ruthlessly.

Anything less is philosophy without embodiment.

Truth is not here to make you comfortable.
It is here to make you real.

Those who understand—understand.
Those who don’t—will be offended.

And that, too, is part of the work.

 

 Das Leben hat mich ausgekotzt ins Niemandsland,

das Land, das das Leben selbst meidet.

Ich bin die Verbannte, die von weit her gekommen ist,

durch weiten Raum und lange Zeit.

Verwundet in vielen Gefechten habe ich dennoch überlebt.

In der Isolation der Verbannung finde ich eine stille Heimat.

Im letzten Haus am Rande des Niemandslands warte ich und schärfe ich meine Klinge...

 

Life vomited me up into no man's land,
the land that shuns life itself.
I am the exile who came from afar,
through vast space and long time.
Wounded in many battles, I nevertheless survived.
In the isolation of exile, I find a quiet home.
In the last house on the edge of no man's land, I wait and sharpen my blade...

Text: Lydia Anneli Bleth, Mai 2015

 

 

 

~ Ava Leopoldo  / Ancient Order Of The Hermetics

When you have a higher Consciousness and you are Evolving,

you will no longer hold on to things that do not serve you. What the masses value will no longer have value for you. Your original instructions from the source are now easy accessible from your heart, and the relentless conditioning that you have been exposed to on a daily basis, will now disappear within you.

You will now start to notice your spiritual gifts, and you will start using them to be in great service for other life. You start to notice the people you were with before your spiritual awakening, and now you have nothing in common with and you slowly become estranged from them. You will now see the blessings in nature and the little things that you never noticed before, and they bring you harmony and peace.

You will start to dislike anything that supports separation, and you start to see and feel the divine oneness of the soul, because you now have a very powerful connection to the source of all souls. You become more sensitive to negativity and you would rather be alone than to be exposed to that by others. Love becomes the most valuable commodity in your life. Ekosi.   

 

~The Roots of Yggdrasil / Ancient Order Of The Hermetics

Blood does not forget, because memory lives in it long after names have faded and long after stories have thinned into fragments told beside the fire. It carries what was endured and what was broken and what was rebuilt and it carries it quietly beneath the surface of your own life, shaping instinct and resilience and the way you rise after hardship long before you ever chose a path of your own.

You are not separate from those who came before you. You are their continuation, the living proof that they endured long enough for you to stand where you stand now and every step you take adds weight to that echo. Every habit strengthens or weakens what will be carried forward and every choice becomes part of a line that began long before your first breath.

You do not walk alone. Your footsteps fall into a path already laid by hands that worked and hearts that broke and people who refused to disappear. Honor is not something you inherit simply because you were born into a name. It is something you reinforce or erode with the way you live each day and the question is never whether you will be remembered. The question is what your blood will remember through you.

You are the living echo of endurance, failure, survival, resolve, a continuation of everything that refused to break before you. What you excuse becomes permission while what you uphold becomes instruction. The way you live adds strength to the line behind you while giving shape to the line ahead, leaving an imprint that reaches far beyond your own life.

Even in the modern world, where people imagine themselves self‑made and separate from the past, the truth remains unchanged. You carry the patterns of those who came before you in the way you react under pressure and in the habits you fall back on when you are tired and in the quiet instincts that rise before thought.

Strengthen the patterns you want passed forward.

Break the ones that have harmed generations before you.

Build habits that your children or your community can stand on.

Treat your daily choices as part of a lineage, not isolated moments.

Remember that your example becomes someone else’s foundation.

Legacy is not a distant idea. It is the accumulation of your repeated actions and it becomes the starting point for those who follow. You are shaping the future every time you choose discipline over ease or clarity before avoidance or truth over comfort. You are not only living your own life. You are setting the tone for the lives that will come after you.

Make your footsteps worth remembering, not for praise and not for pride but so the memory carried forward is one of strength rather than apology. Blood remembers and it remembers through you, so walk in a way that deserves to be carried.

"Blood remembers. So walk in a way worth remembering."

 

 ~ James William Kaler / Ancient Order Of The Hermetics
What Is the Purpose of Life?
— from a Hermetic and Gnostic lens
If the meaning of life is to remember, then the purpose of life is to become.
From the Hermetic and Gnostic view, life is not an accident, nor a moral test, nor a waiting room for some external salvation. Life is an initiation in motion. You are here because something within you volunteered to descend into density in order to refine itself through experience.
Hermetics teaches that consciousness evolves through polarity, rhythm, and cause and effect. Nothing is random. Every challenge, attraction, loss, and delay is part of a precise inner curriculum designed to awaken mastery. The purpose of life is not comfort — it is competence of being. To gain command over mind, emotion, instinct, and will.
This is why the ancients spoke of The Great Work.
The Great Work is the alchemical task of turning the unrefined self into the integrated self. Lead into gold. Instinct into intelligence. Reaction into response. Fragmentation into unity. You are not here to destroy the ego, but to place it under conscious rule.
From a Gnostic perspective, the purpose becomes even more exacting.
The material world is a realm of imitation and distortion. Not evil — but incomplete. It exists to test whether the divine spark within you can wake up while surrounded by forgetfulness. The purpose of life is to awaken inside the illusion without being absorbed by it.
You are here to see clearly where others sleep.
To remember truth where others repeat narratives.
To choose awareness where others choose comfort.
Gnosis is not belief. It is embodied knowing. When you know, you change. When you see, you cannot unsee. The purpose of life is to reach a level of awareness where deception no longer governs your choices — internally or externally.
The Ancients understood that awakening carries responsibility.
Once you see, you are no longer here just for yourself. The awakened individual becomes a stabilizing presence in a chaotic world. Not a savior. Not a preacher. But a living reference point of clarity, restraint, and discernment.
This is why Hermetic texts emphasize silence, balance, and proportion.
This is why Gnostic texts warn that many are called, but few are ready.
The purpose of life is:
• To refine consciousness through experience
• To master the inner world before attempting to influence the outer
• To integrate shadow, not deny it
• To embody truth, not perform it
• To free the divine spark through awareness and discipline
• To become a conscious participant in creation rather than a pawn of it
You are not here to save the world.
You are here to stop unconsciously feeding what enslaves it.
When enough individuals complete this inner work, the outer world reorganizes naturally. Not through force. Through resonance.
The purpose of life is not to escape matter, but to redeem perception within it.
To walk the world awake.
To carry light without announcing it.
To finish the work you began before you forgot.
And if this feels heavy — good.
The purpose of life was never meant to be light.
It was meant to be true.