Roots of Threefold Return?
One of the hotly debated topics in Wiccan magical and ethical belief is the "threefold return." Its like Karma meets the butterfly effect: That which you send out is returned to you threefold. There are some who take this at face value, believing that all actions have repurcussions and that through taking actions they ripple out and effect things and the aftershock comes back to you magnified. And on the other hand, some believe that this is a complete load of bunk, because there's no rational basis in physics, natural phenomena or anything for that matter that operates in such a way, and as such a belief in threefold return is unsupported.
Over the course of the last month I've been reading Eliphas Levi's "Transcendental Magic." The book is a treatise on Qabalah as the basis for all magical philosophy, and how the principles of Qabalah are visible in the medieval grimoire tradition, the emerald tablet of Hermes, the tarot, etc. etc. In chapter three on Binah I ran into this particular comment.
Every utterance possesses three senses, every act has a triple range, every form a triple idea, for the Absolute corresponds from wold to world by its forms. Every determination of human will modifies Nature, concerns philosophy and is written in heaven. There are consequently two fatalities, one resulting from the Uncreated Will in harmony with it's proper wisdom, the other from created wills in accordance with the necessity of secondary causes in their correspondence with the First Cause. There is hence nothing indifferent in life, and our seeming most simple resolutions do often determine an incalculable series of benefits or evils, above all in the affinities of our DIAPHANE with the Great Magical Agent, as we shall explain elsewhere.
I'm not even going to try and analyze this, because I can't in any legitimate amount of time. But as Levi has written here there is an obvious implication of at the very least threefold effect from every action. It could be argued, if a singular action affects three realms with equal strength on all three, then the equal and opposite reaction would be to reflect back from those three realms to the source of the effect, in essence a threefold return. It makes little to no sense physically, but you can at least kind of see where this is going.
Well, Let's just leave the rest of the physics argument aside for now and suffice it to say that Levi has some kind of implication of a threefold area of effect (to borrow a phrase from D&D). Now what does this have to do with Wicca? Historical magical lineage, and the source material from which Gardner and others drew. Levi's research into Qabalah and medieval magical texts was the primary inspiration behind the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn as well as the bulk of the magical research of Aleister Crowley. It's fairly well known that Gardner was passingly familiar with Aleister Crowley and that the work of Gardner draws heavily from the ceremonial magical tradition. For instance, the Wiccan Rede is almost completely identical to Crowley's "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law." from the Book of the Law.
Given the connections, and given the Wiccan adaptations from masonry, Golden Dawn, Thelema, the Grimoire tradition and numerous other things, I would have no problem in believing that Levi's assertion in threefold effect was probably a likely source for Gardner to base the ethical assumption in threefold return. Not to mention that I think this is the only place where I've ever read anything that comes close to espousing some kind of threefold effect.
I've got to read further into this book and re-read much of Chapter three to see if I fully understand the actual point here, and not the historical repercussions alone. :)
Over the course of the last month I've been reading Eliphas Levi's "Transcendental Magic." The book is a treatise on Qabalah as the basis for all magical philosophy, and how the principles of Qabalah are visible in the medieval grimoire tradition, the emerald tablet of Hermes, the tarot, etc. etc. In chapter three on Binah I ran into this particular comment.
Every utterance possesses three senses, every act has a triple range, every form a triple idea, for the Absolute corresponds from wold to world by its forms. Every determination of human will modifies Nature, concerns philosophy and is written in heaven. There are consequently two fatalities, one resulting from the Uncreated Will in harmony with it's proper wisdom, the other from created wills in accordance with the necessity of secondary causes in their correspondence with the First Cause. There is hence nothing indifferent in life, and our seeming most simple resolutions do often determine an incalculable series of benefits or evils, above all in the affinities of our DIAPHANE with the Great Magical Agent, as we shall explain elsewhere.
I'm not even going to try and analyze this, because I can't in any legitimate amount of time. But as Levi has written here there is an obvious implication of at the very least threefold effect from every action. It could be argued, if a singular action affects three realms with equal strength on all three, then the equal and opposite reaction would be to reflect back from those three realms to the source of the effect, in essence a threefold return. It makes little to no sense physically, but you can at least kind of see where this is going.
Well, Let's just leave the rest of the physics argument aside for now and suffice it to say that Levi has some kind of implication of a threefold area of effect (to borrow a phrase from D&D). Now what does this have to do with Wicca? Historical magical lineage, and the source material from which Gardner and others drew. Levi's research into Qabalah and medieval magical texts was the primary inspiration behind the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn as well as the bulk of the magical research of Aleister Crowley. It's fairly well known that Gardner was passingly familiar with Aleister Crowley and that the work of Gardner draws heavily from the ceremonial magical tradition. For instance, the Wiccan Rede is almost completely identical to Crowley's "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law." from the Book of the Law.
Given the connections, and given the Wiccan adaptations from masonry, Golden Dawn, Thelema, the Grimoire tradition and numerous other things, I would have no problem in believing that Levi's assertion in threefold effect was probably a likely source for Gardner to base the ethical assumption in threefold return. Not to mention that I think this is the only place where I've ever read anything that comes close to espousing some kind of threefold effect.
I've got to read further into this book and re-read much of Chapter three to see if I fully understand the actual point here, and not the historical repercussions alone. :)