More questions I’m afraid…
It is funny how coincidences work. The night after a conversation with a few colleagues at work concerning matters recondite, I find myself testing a new home video program by randomly clicking video files. Suddenly I am beholding Robbie Coltrane in Cracker talking about the exact topic we were discussing.
As part of a lovely exchange with a local priest, the antihero Fitz is lampooning traditional Catholic doctrine concerning priesthood. Put simply, once a person is a priest they are ordained by God to administer the sacraments. The capacity to stand in persona Christi however has nothing at all to do with the qualities of the priest. They could be nice or nasty, wonderful or a wanker. They could commit enraged rape and murder on Saturday night but when they preside over the Mass the wafer will still become the body of Christ. This is because God will not punish the Sunday faithful (by keeping the wafer as bread) on account of the sins of their priest. Nice.
With doctrines like this it is easy to see why secularists roll their eyes at us sacramentalists. However, the alternative view opens a large can of worms. If a priest by his or her actions can lose their qualifications to administer the sacraments, what is the cut off point? Can they be openly racist? If not, is a little soft racism ok? Can they have a quick look at porn on Saturday night and still be fine for Sunday morning but not pick up a drunk sex partner at a club? Are the verboten qualities universal and trans-cultural or temporal and specific. For example, I am sure any list of such things a century ago would have included homosexual sex whereas today it would only be on some lists.
The only way we can make sense of such questions is by viewing the administration of the Sacraments as an ability not an ordained qualification, which is a big no-no for the Church as it leads to a creeping sense of magic. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. In the ability model it is the consciousness, skills, contacts and subtle body makeup and structures that allow a priest to consecrate in persona Christi. These can be affirmed or developed at ordination but they most certainly can also be hindered or lessened due to unhealthy spirituality, abuse, damaging hallucinogenic drug use etc. I doubt there would be many magicians who would say that from a magical perspective a priest could indulge in a druggie sex-rape orgy on Saturday night and conduct a consecration without problems on Sunday morning.
Still what about less gross distortions of the spirit? My original Imperator was from England and voted for Thatcher! (a fact I discovered after initiation) 
I am sure the inner work he conducted at my initiation was not marred by his conservative politics. Well, pretty sure.
The Golden Dawn
Seriously however, the officers in the Golden Dawn, particularly the Hierophant, do a lot of tinkering and manipulating of the subtle bodies of the candidates during initiation. Is their magical ability to do this lessened, distorted or hampered by personal actions and choices? Would they be able to get high, take home an anonymous drunk sex-partner from a club, roger them rigid on a Saturday night and still be able to perform a neophyte initiation OK on Sunday?
During the neophyte initiation there is a particularly potent component when the Hierophant moves as the Elder Horus to stand and stamp atop the Evil Triad of the candidate, hindering the evil force. This is a crucial and pivotal part of the initiation and the new mode of spiritual awareness being instilled into the candidate. If it is not done properly things can go awry. I have seen firsthand the sad result for a group of Gnostic magicians of a Hierophant who did not do any inner work at this point and it is not pretty.
Equally though, can a Hierophant do this inner work effectively if they have not in some measure, controlled and put down their own personal evil triad? Will the presence of the godform and the Order’s egregore be enough? Personally, I think not.
This of course ties in with the oft quoted idea of Carl Jung’s*, that we can only help someone to the extent we ourselves have plumbed and healed the depths of the issues they are now facing. This principle is one of the reasons why only those of the Inner Order in the GD were given the role of initiators. Theoretically this means the our initiators are exemplars of the way forward, at least to some extent, even if not perfect. I think this is all well and good. However, the action of some Order’s senior members show the extent of the persistence of the notion that the simple act of Installation as Hierophant is sufficient, no matter what personal actions the Hierophant takes – kinda like the rapist priest mentioned above. What do you think? Thanks
* I have no idea if he really said this.
"We are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. And whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. For some strange reason I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. And you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the way God’s universe is made; this is the way it is structured." ~
“A religion without a goddess is halfway to atheism” ~
How does my spiritual practice and daily life serve the earth?
How does my spiritual practice and daily life affect the poorest third of humanity?
How will my spiritual practice and daily life affect the generations to come in the future?
"It is through your body that you realize you are a spark of divinity."
“For most of us, however, we only think seriously of food or sex or money when it becomes a problem, which is to say when we feel we are not getting our share. When we find ourselves in that situation then I regret to say that meditational visualisations are really not the best way to remedy the lack. … We are here in a physical condition in a physical world and while in that state we have to abide by the laws appropriate to it.”
"The biblical texts have been strained out through a Greek/Latin mindset, which is very surface and static. I sometimes think it would have actually have been better if Western culture had based so called "Western religion" on Greek philosophy, rather than middle-eastern, because then at least you'd have all one thing. It would be eternally consistent. But what we have now is sort of half of each. And you're left with a basically schizophrenic tradition." 
"Can a horse tell you what it means to be human? How can a horse get beyond the boundaries of being a horse and say what it means to be human? Why do we think a human being can say what it means to be God? And yet we’ve done that; we’ve done that and we said that we’ve got it so right that if you don’t believe it we’ll burn you at the stake. That’s a very strange idea." ~
