Reflections on the Threefold Path

In the Order’s system of symbolism and ceremonial, the Trinity holds a special significance. Beyond its exoteric theological associations, the trinitarian current encodes the universal mystery of the Spirit’s descent into manifestation and the Soul’s arduous return, back to the One.

Shin—the three-flamed Hebrew letter of Fire—expresses the Spirit’s triple emanation as it pours outward from unity. Christian mysticism renders this abstraction concrete at Golgotha where three women keep vigil beneath the Cross of the Logos. Their number recapitulates Shin’s prongs, while their femininity supplies the receptive prima materia through which the fiery emanation can anchor itself in matter. Each woman thus embodies a facet of the Shekinah—the Divine Feminine scattered throughout the Universe.

These women also form the reflected image of the Supernal Triad—Kether, Chokmah, and Binah—now grounded at the foot of Tiphareth’s great sacrificial Cross. Their presence on the hill of Golgotha (the “place of the skull”) does not merely mark the crucifixion of the Logos; they herald the ascent of the Soul of Nature through the return journey of the initiate.

They are also the three central paths of the Tree of Life—running from (1) Malkuth to Yesod, (2) Yesod to Tiphareth, and (3) Tiphareth to Kether—and represent a sequential development: These are not static points, but stages in the dynamic equilibration of opposites in the descent of Spirit and the ascent of Matter, just as the ‘=‘ sign the Order uses between the circle and the square of each grade implies dynamic movement in both directions.

The Zohar shows us that the descent is masculine, characterised by imposition, will, and the act of emanation. The ascent is feminine, receptive, magnetic, and characterised by invocation. In the full circuit of the initiatory spiral, these polarities interpenetrate, the masculine finding its fulfillment only in the embrace of the feminine’s return.

This path of return, undertaken by every initiate worthy of the title, is not simply a reversal of descent but an initiation of the descent itself—a conscious echo that gathers and redeems the scattered sparks of the original emanation, and drawing down the Spirit thus in to it—transformed, sanctified by suffering, and illumined by gnosis.

Thus we come to the ritual symbols: the threefold rope bound about the Candidate and the three circumambulations performed in the Temple. These are not arbitrary gestures. The triple binding signifies the containment of primal force—Spirit bound in form, awaiting liberation. Each circumambulation is a deliberate journey—embodied by the mystery of the Cross (the Axis Mundi), and the descent of Shin in the form of the White Triangle upon the black Double Cubical Altar.

Every revolution is both an ascent and a descent, a binary drawing the Candidate closer to the realisation that the Trinity is not three but One in dynamic expression—through the two is concealed the one, revealed by the three. 

In this lies a great Hermetic mystery.

Kasmillos.