ABSTRACT
The trance meditation technique involves a transfer of consciousness to the visionary world of symbols through an act of willed imagination. The exercise described involves a magical world-view in which man is regarded as both the microcosm and the macrocosm. John Dee and Edward Kelley considered that the communications formed the basis of a new language—Enochian—and these magical conjurations were subsequently incorporated into magical practice by the Golden Dawn magicians who used them as focusing stimuli to precipitate trance visions. While the Tattva and Enochian systems of trance magic bring about highly specific visionary states a more complete transformational process is found in the use of the Major Tarot Arcana in conjunction with the Tree of Life. The supreme reality in modern shamanic magic is thus a state of consciousness which is not anthropomorphised, is neither male nor female, and cannot be contained by the symbolism of an image.
