"From time to time, everyone has moments of clarity in which they’re able to connect the pieces of the larger pattern and, if only for a moment, understand. For one brief, shining moment, their minds are open to all that the universe has to offer and are ready to reach out and touch the Great Mystery…

… and then the phone rings, the baby cries, the neighbor comes knocking, someone honks her horn and waves of everyday problems roll in unbidden and wash away the nascent glimmering of understanding.

From a mage’s perspective, none of this is particularly noteworthy. These are the usual and predictable pulsations of a Sleeping mind, and while they rarely have any effect on the world, they represent the potential for Awakening that lies in all people. When a mage does sit up and take notice is when a Sleeper has a moment of understanding that lasts for more than a few moments. A Sleeper, by himself, might have epiphanies, intimations that magic is possible. Such times are a brief escape from the Quiescence. They may last a day, a week or even a month, and these are cases for which mages look because a mystical experience can elevate the Sleeper’s epiphany to an Awakening. Why some experiences stir some individuals’ souls and not others is one of the great mysteries.

Awakening is a very personal experience. Just as snowflakes and fingerprints, no two Awakenings are alike. Unfortunately, Awakenings are not typically pleasant experiences.It’s like realizing all at once that everything you thought you knew is wrong. A mage may feel as though he’s been plucked from the shallow end of the pool and dropped into the open ocean, but before the mage can accept his new world, he must dispense with his old one, and that act often feels like a violent betrayal of his former self. This conflict helps to shape a potential mage’s soul for Awakening, and an element of mental maturity is needed for the conflict to have meaning (although sometimes teenagers can emerge from such a crucible Awakened where older men and women fail). In reality, far more people almost Awaken than actually do Awaken because the fear of leaving the world they knew causes many to retreat into black-and-white fundamentalism as they seek out any available anchor to cling to in a sea of shifting realities. A rare few souls, dispensing with everything they once were, including their ethics, morals and sense of self, exist who embrace the chaos of Awakening with too much zeal.

Not surprisingly, then, Awakening is the sort of thing that people initially ignore and deny. As their moment of understanding grows imminent, they often fight it tooth and nail right up to the terrifying, fateful moment when they give up and give in to enlightenment. The more stubborn an individual, the harder he’s likely to fight his own understanding, and the more suffering and trauma his growing awareness causes, but the more powerful a mage he’ll be once he’s fully Awakened."

A soul, once stirred, is either sent in a dream or ecstatic vision onto strange astral pathways or plunged into a “mystery play,” a hallucinatory experience whereby the common, mundane phenomena of the world are transformed into highly symbolic and meaningful ciphers. A person experiencing an Awakening is called a seeker. Many seekers think they’re going crazy and in a sense they are. The insane sometimes perceive meaning in random events, but the mage sees how no event is truly random in a vast Tapestry woven by consciousness.

During a mystery play, the seeker experiences the real world as if it were a dream. People and places appear strange and can even take on semblances and roles alien to them, such as when a truck-stop waitress, bearing the ambrosia of the gods (in reality, a $1.00 slice of apple pie), appears to be a shining maiden dressed in gossamer robes or when the truck stop itself appears to be a filthy den of trolls, strewn with the bones of their kills.

For the seeker, this dream world is real; the ambrosial pie is truly divine and the trolls truly nasty. But only she experiences this “truth.” To everyone else around, including any other Awakened mages, it’s just a normal truck stop with a dumpy, middle-aged waitress and a stale, two-day old slice of pie. To their eyes, the world is mundane. To the eyes of the seeker, it is alive with enchantment and pregnant with possibility. Every action and every thing communicate the deepest truths about the universe and the seeker’s relation to it. The seeker has only to play along to find the key to Awakening.

Anyone who doesn’t realize that the seeker is experiencing an Awakening might think him crazy. When he begins addressing a homeless beggar as the King of the Elves, the seeker’s friends think he’s surely lost his mind. The seeker himself is usually unaware that he is undergoing a conversation with his soul. The Awakening’s reality is indistinguishable from normal waking reality.

Those people who for various reasons refuse to see the world as full of enchantment might instead find it in their dreams. People often deny the call, but if the call is urgent enough, it cannot be avoided forever. In dream, deep meditation or the reverie of an ecstatic experience, the mage’s consciousness is propelled across the Astral Threshold and into the vast infinities of his own soul. Although he does not yet know it, the path he follows leads to one of the five Watchtowers. Whether or not he reaches that tower before he is drawn back into bodily awareness is the challenge.

Inside the soul, the normal rules of reality do not apply. The environment could appear to be a featureless plain, a dense jungle, a shining cathedral or the depths of intergalactic space, and the environment may change instantly. The same is true of the figures that populate this space; people, animals, plants, spirits, and objects may appear as they are normally seen or transformed into something else. While such appearances and transformations may seem nonsensical, they are nonetheless bound to a kind of dream logic designed to offer the seeker a chance to raise his awareness.

The ultimate end of both a mystery play and an astral journey is to deliver the soul to a Watchtower for initiation. The Awakening is sometimes named “the Call.” The Watchtower does the calling. The soul, hearing its name whispered from the Supernal World across the infinity of the Abyss, either responds and enters the trance of Awakening or refuses the call and remains in Sleep.

In a mystery play, the Watchtower can be nearly anything in reality: a skyscraper, a phone booth or a grove in the woods. The Watchtower’s true form is evident to the seeker but to no one else. It is the archetypal Castle Perilous, the tower of testing, before which the seeker might be found wanting. If he passes the tests — by proving his perseverance throughout the Awakening — he is admitted into the tower, where he sees a multitude of names carved onto its walls. With a knowing beyond reason, he recognizes the empty space reserved for his name and begins to write, carve or will his name onto the surface. Even the illiterate know how to do this, for the pro-cess of writing is an archetypal image, not a literal act of writing. It is the Awakened one’s first spell, which is the declaration of his true self and his right to stand in the Supernal World.

By virtue of this name and its expression within the Watchtower, the Awakened soul gains sympathy with the Supernal Realm in which his name is written. This process is archetypal and can take many forms. In a mystery play, the seeker might write his name into the ledger at a bank although the clerks there might believe that he is merely signing up for a safe-deposit box and are unaware that he now claims a much greater treasure than all the assets within the bank. Once he has established his name in the heavens, the seeker returns to bodily awareness in the “real” world, no longer a Sleeper. He is now a mage."

Regardless of the form a Mage's Awakening takes, it will shape them for the rest of their life. Importantly, the Watchtower where he inscribes his name forges his link to the Supernal Realms and determines his Path...