From the Golden Dawn to Regardie

The exercise grew out of the teachings of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, but its familiar form was systematised and popularised in the twentieth century by Israel Regardie, whose book The Middle Pillar presented it as a practical technique for spiritual and psychological development. Regardie, who had trained both in the magical tradition and in psychotherapy, explicitly framed the exercise as a means of integrating the personality and balancing the psyche, drawing a parallel between the awakening of the sefirotic centres and the aims of depth psychology.

The practice invites obvious comparison with the arousing of the chakras in Indian yoga, and modern practitioners and writers have often drawn the analogy; the two systems share the idea of a central channel and a graded series of subtle centres awakened by breath, sound and visualisation. But the Middle Pillar's centres are the sefirot of the Qabalah, its words of power are Hebrew divine names, and its framework is the Hermetic Tree of Life, so that despite the structural resemblance it is a distinctively Western esoteric practice with its own symbolic vocabulary. Like the banishing ritual with which it is often paired, it functions for its practitioners as much as a meditative and self-integrative discipline as a magical one.