Vincent Bridges ©2011
Preface to The Ophanic Revelation.
It was the winter of 1979 and I was making my way to California to study “magick” when I made a detour through Sedona Arizona to meet the man almost single-handedly responsible for saving the very approach to magick I was about to study. I didn’t have an introduction, just an overheard address to go on, and no good idea behind why I should, but there I was trudging into the gloom of what promised to be a very cold night. I found the address, rang the buzzer and waited.
A charming gnome of a man opened the door, invited me in, fed me, plied me with brandy and let me sleep on his sofa. His kindness to a young stranger with far more ego than wisdom was amazing and sincere. The reason I invented for my visit, the origins of the Tarot Trumps, on which I had many strongly held and shallowly thought out beliefs, we dispatched almost immediately. The conversation then ranged from the Kabalah and Agrippa to Wilhelm Reich, Tesla and Stanislaw Groff. As the conversation wound down, his gnome eyes glinted and he leaned in to make his point. “The Tarot is fine, good practical Qabalah, (he managed to pronounce the “q”) but if you’re looking for a real mystery, real “magick,” go for the Enochian material.”
I knew roughly what he meant. I had read the books he had written and edited concerning the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and Aleister Crowley, but Enochian had never appealed to me in the way all that vibrating in Hebrew did. It seemed too strange, too alien somehow.
“Yes,” he said, ” alien. I’ve often thought that if someone were to really study the Enochian material, deeply all the way back to Dee and Kelley, with a modern eye, then we might just be able to prove some variety of– I don’t know– intelligence beyond the human…”
Perhaps it was a trigger, or just the stimulus of a challenge from someone I admired, but the comment stuck with me. I paid attention to the “Enochian material” in the training and initiations I received, read what was available and came, eventually, to the conclusion that the whole of my magical training had been aimed toward an understanding of the alien-esque Enochian. Along the way, I moved back to North Carolina, settled in the witch haunted Uwharries, and seriously turned my attention to making sense of my magical experiences and training. After seven years, I had a leaner, stripped down, version of the Order’s system, which I called, almost as a joke, the Fifth Way.
A decade after that wintry hike, I was back in Sedona. This time I was with a hundred or so earnest New Agers. The Fifth Way had merged briefly with the Melchizedians and we were on a mission “to anchor the Blue Light around the planet,” starting with the red rocks of the Sedona desert. We spent the week out on the vortex spots, working on our own internal processes and aiming toward the big event of bringing in and grounding that mysterious Blue Light thing.
This particular week in November of 1989 happened to be a pivotal moment in history, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Velvet Revolution in soviet controlled central Europe. It was a strange feeling to spend the day meditating and come back to the motel and watch the events in Europe unfold live on TV. By Saturday, the day of the big event, I had decided to do something different; I was going to climb up on Bell Rock and do the entire sequence of the Enochian Calls or Keys.
The Calls are at the core of the material the angels dictated to Dr. John Dee and Sir Edward Kelley, the perhaps misnamed Enochian system. They contained most of the translated angelic language, which Dee and Kelley never called Enochian, but were convinced that Enoch spoke. The Calls are also Keys in the sense that they open or unlock powerful structural components of the universe. The first two activate a kind of control panel, using the central cross that binds the elemental quadrants of the Great Table together, the next four the elemental angles, and the last twelve the remaining sub-angles of the elemental quadrants of the Table. In addition, there is a last Call or Key that unlocks the thirty aethyrs or spirit levels.
So I found a good spot high up on Bell Rock and settled in to carefully do all 48 Calls. It was quite an experience, and when I finished I found that I was surround by a group of Japanese tourists who had been taking my picture. They bowed and left and I slowly climbed down to where the group planned to collect for the evening’s big event. I settled on a limb of the ancient juniper tree at the rendezvous and waited.
About an hour before show time, our leader arrived in a state of complete emotional collapse. His wife had announced that she was leaving him after discovering that they were in fact both having an affair with the same man. He turned the big event over to me, saving he was too devastated to do the ritual. It was up to me to bring in, and anchor, the mysterious Blue Light of the Melchizedek movement.
I agreed, and although the resulting ritual had its moments of comedy, it was in my opinion very successful. Something energetic and dynamic on a very large and intense scale was connected into the earth through the large red bell-shaped rock in Sedona that week, as the Cold War ended, the Iron Curtain fell and the Velvet Revolution swept the new Czech Republic. It’s a long way from Sedona to Prague, but the arc of this story connects them directly.
In the next few years I traveled widely in Egypt, India, Nepal, Tibet and England, following many of the peripheral threads of the larger pattern through what seemed at times an endless tapestry of cosmic strangeness. Sufi saints on the Nile, Shiva devotees in Kathmandu and Rishikesh swamis by the Ganges, Nyngma-pa caves, yak skin boats in the Yarlung Valley and 8th century immortal masters born from a lotus, flowed together and blended into a new perspective. We returned to Egypt in 1995, this time with a group of Fifth Way Adepts and by that fall I was in England talking about an early version of the galactic alignment and its connection to raising the Djed at a conference near Oxford. I took the opportunity to spend a few days in London at the British Museum getting microfiche copies of every scrap of Dee’s manuscripts I could find.
During one long afternoon of waiting around the office of the manuscript collection, the librarian took pity on me and opened the case containing Dr. Dee’s scrying crystals. She allowed me to hold the small smoky quartz orb that was apparently given to Dee directly by the angels. It was this crystal ball in which Edward Kelley saw the angels dictating their language and magick seals from large tables filled with letters. I was casually holding it in my hand, trying not to hold it to my third eye, making an effort to be cool and nonchalant while absorbing as much of whatever energy it contained as I could. Eventually my files arrived, and the crystal went back in the case, and I stumbled back to my Montague Street B&B and fell into a deep sleep.
A few months later, back in North Carolina, a conversation with my friend and colleague Dan Winter sparked a sudden new rush of insight. By that summer we had planned an expedition, back to Sedona of course, in which we would put together the entire Enochian system, from the Holy Table to the Seal of Nalvage, and then activate all 48 +1 of the Calls or Keys and see if we got a response. We chose Bell Rock, where seven years before I had done the Calls and anchored that Blue Light, and, thanks to an apparently accidental meeting with Nick Fiorenza, we had our structure properly aligned along the galactic center/edge axis.
I vibrated all the names on the Holy Table, Lamen and Ring, the Seal of Ameth, the Tablet of Union, the Elemental Tablets and then activated it all with the Calls. As I continued on into the Call of the Aethyrs, which repeats 30 times with just a minor change, I noticed several profound shifts occurring around me. I had been vibrating the angelic language for several hours at that point and so was very sensitive to the energy rushes and trills it gave off. But those were nothing compared to the thickness and intensity of the Aethyric Calls as each layer of the spirit zones were unlocked and opened, like a series of gates approaching infinity. As I finished the Call of Silence, I became aware of a great rushing, non-physical wind and looked up to see a large number of tornadoes, made of light and filled with eyes, shimmering and dancing around the perimeter of Bell Rock.
After what seemed like forever, but was actually just an hour or so, the tornadoes departed. One of us, who kept looking outward at the tornadoes, had sunburn on her face, even though it was a quiet night with no wind. All of us were exhausted by the experience, and yet strangely energized and mentally wound up at the same time. The next day we had a lecture at a local new age center and I remember trying to explain how angels were not beatific companions but enormous plasma beings the size of nebulae. I don’t think I was able to convey the full extent of the experience, but it must have been an impressive attempt.
Fast-forward thirteen years to 2009. Dan Winter and I are scheduled to head up a six-day workshop on Alchemy in Prague, the first time we’ve worked together in over a decade. Dan, with help from the insights gained in our angelic working, has become an international new age headliner, touring the globe giving lectures on his unique brand of mystical science. I’ve become an expert on the mysterious French Alchemist Fulcanelli and almost by accident an authority on the life of Nostradamus. But by a curious mixture of coincidence and karma, Dan and I wind up in Prague, where, 420 years before, Dee and Kelley received their final angelic communication, achieved, by some accounts, the transmutation of lead into gold and preached the approaching apocalypse to the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II.
The conference was great, our collaboration extremely fruitful, and somewhere along the way I fell under the spell of Prague and the circle of my Enochian obsession was complete. I can explain it no better than that; being on the spot brought the whole of my understanding and work into a sharp, laser-like focus. We closed the conference with a brief bit of Enochiana, the first two Calls in a simple magical setting accompanied by harp music. It was amazingly powerful, and in the days that followed a new idea took root and began to grow.
What if this strange series of conversations and informational downloads were designed to come on line, so to speak, at this point? What if the entire corpus of Dee and Kelley’s work could only be understood, or used, not 400 years ago when it was received, but now, at this precise moment in time? And if we accepted that premise, then what exactly was it meant to do?
I had postulated that the system functioned as kind of non-physical computer or communication device, and that certainly seemed to be the case in the Sedona working. The Ophanim appeared and what communication there was, beyond the very experience of their appearance, focused on creating and projecting the Tree of Life on the celestial sphere and aligning the Cube of Space properly in space. Even the cosmic Djed raising in September 2002 had been part of the larger vision from the “angels” in Sedona. Working from these clues, I had already determined that the basic structure of the Great Table was aligned to precessional motion, and could used as a way of marking the galactic alignment, Fulcanelli’s season of catastrophe and the end point of the Mayan calendar, and my new insight showed that this was no accident.
And so, the book you are about to read came into being. Based on work that went back to the early days of the Fifth Way Mystery School, the notes and written preparation for the Sedona working, as well as my articles on the structure of DNA, divination and language, we also tried to break new ground, in terms of telling a bit of the real history of the system and its reception, and with my wife Darlene’s new work on the letter forms themselves and their connection to the physics of vortices and the phonemes of DNA, the goal was to make this book a sort of beginer’s handbook of the larger project for which the system seems to be designed.
That larger project appears to be nothing less than saving the planet from destruction, or at least saving some our DNA from catastrophic mutations by interacting directly with the “language,” the grammar and syntax, of DNA. The impression I had in Prague in April of 2009 was that if a certain number of people could be exposed to the Ophanic influence, be jolted by the energy of the Calls, and then followed their intuition into a further exploration of the system, we might, by 2012, be ready to consciously evoke the Princes or Governors of the Aethyrs, those 91 little vortex swirls assigned to the surface of earth, and somehow mitigate or diffuse the effects of the up-coming disaster.
Perhaps the best example of this basic premise can be found on the ground in southern Bohemia, in the region around Trebon, where Kelley performed at least one alchemical transmutation and where some of the most powerful angelic communications occurred. At the same time these events were taking place at the old castle at Majdalena, a whole movement of what can only be called full-scale geomantic terra-forming sprang up in the Trebon region. One of Dee and Rosenburg’s alchemical conspirators, and Kelley’s drinking and distilling friend, Jakub Krčín, launched a program of landscape transformation that is unparalleled in European history. What once were dark peat bogs, swamps, sand dunes and pine forests became a lush and beautiful environment of canals, lakes, small ponds and fisheries, with abundant space for wildlife and forests.
Krcin and his successors did their work so well that even today, four hundred years later, the region is the only artificially created bio-zone recognized by UNESCO as a protected biosphere reservation. The exact connection between Krcin and Dee and Kelley has yet to be examined, but it is not inconceivable that Krcin was influenced by Dee’s concept of angelic intelligence and its connection to the land.
But even if the influence is entirely indirect and somewhat coincidental, the connection of time and place remains. Something happened to the landscape of Trebon, and perhaps our best answer is to say that the events so charged the environment, with a residue of sentient angelic plasma, that change toward a stable biosphere was inevitable.
And that, simply put, is the reason why we should be interested in these four hundred year-old conversations with higher intelligence.