A Qabalistic Exercise, an Eastern Comparison

The Middle Pillar takes its structure from the Golden Dawn's reading of the Qabalistic Tree of Life, specifically the central column of its ten emanations, or sephirot, which the order's late nineteenth century founders mapped onto the standing human body from crown to feet. Its wide modern circulation owes a great deal to Israel Regardie, a former secretary to Aleister Crowley who published much of the Golden Dawn's previously guarded internal material in the twentieth century, making an exercise once confined to initiates of a small order available to any interested reader.

Because the practice involves visualizing points of light at fixed locations along the body's vertical axis and circulating energy between them, it is frequently compared to, and has arguably been reshaped by contact with, the chakra systems of Indian yoga, which occultists of the same period were also encountering through early translations of tantric texts. The comparison is a real historical influence rather than a coincidence: Golden Dawn descended orders were active at a time when Theosophical and other imported accounts of yogic subtle anatomy were circulating in the same occult milieu, and the two systems have never been cleanly separable in twentieth century Western esotericism since, despite resting on distinct textual traditions with different numbers of centers and different underlying cosmologies.