readings, one curriculum at its own scale — the
course the blog has been quoting in fragments since its first week, read
whole, and found to state the blog’s own claim about curricula in its
own words, to carry a stronger clinical procedure than the blog credited
it with, and to leave the check that decides everything to the
practitionerFourteenth of the readings, and the first whose unit
is a training rather than a book. Every reading before
this one held a single volume up to the series’ test. This one holds up
fourteen — five apprentice books, five initiate books, four adept books
— and the claim being tested is the blog’s most confident one about the
West. The western column put it in a
line: a curriculum is a safeguard. It was an inference
from extracts. The holy daimon had
already narrowed it (a book with no gate has nowhere to put a referral);
Egregores had already leaned on it; the frame series supplied the test
underneath it and the differential the
boundary it is measured against. Here the claim meets the curriculum’s
own account of what it does — and the curriculum says the same thing, in
a sentence the blog never quoted.
Status. This post reads one source: the Quareia curriculum of Josephine McCarthy, in the two course texts listed in 1 and the per-book texts beside them. Quotations are verbatim, checked character for character and cited in the notes by grade, book, module, lesson and the course text’s own page marker; the reading of them is an inference, offered as one. The curriculum’s cosmology is not endorsed — nothing here claims its inner realms, deities, contacts or adept magicians exist, and nothing claims they do not. No living author is diagnosed, no practitioner’s experience is validated or disqualified, and its terms are reported in its sense, not adopted.*
Quareia is a graded magical training by Josephine McCarthy, published free online by Quareia Publishing UK in fourteen volumes: Books One to Five carry the Apprentice section, Six to Ten the Initiate, Eleven to Fourteen the Adept.1 Each section is ten modules of eight lessons; the adept books carry the adept modules two to a volume.2 Every lesson opens with a welcome page stating the course’s purpose in a sentence repeated, unchanged, eighty-one times in the apprentice course text alone:
“The Quareia takes a magical apprentice from the beginning of magic to the level of adeptship and beyond. The course has no superfluous text; there is no dressing, no padding — everything is in its place and everything within the course has a good reason to be there.”3
A route from the beginning to adeptship and past it, with nothing in it that is not load-bearing — and the second sentence of the same page is the one the blog has leaned on since its first week:
“So remember - in order for this course to work, it is wise to work with the lessons in sequence. If you don’t, it won’t work.”3
Read in the place the text puts it, that is a causal claim about efficacy, not a protective claim about the student: the work depends on the order, and out of order it “won’t work”. Safety is not mentioned yet. It arrives, and it arrives in the curriculum’s own words — which is the finding this reading is built on.
Three borrowings make the reading necessary. The western column took the pace (“solid, safe and sane… in slow, careful steps”), the deferral of other-lives work (“the ego inflation and fantasy realm that a magician can so easily get stuck in”) and the clinical referral (“if you are still hearing them, go see a doctor”).4 Egregores used the third as the contrast that indicts another book, and the holy daimon used it again as the gap that book’s material invites. All three are accurate — worth saying, because the series’ usual finding is otherwise.
And the debt. The test applied here is not the blog’s invention. Does the frame supply a check that does not benefit from the answer comes from the frames series; the boundary the referral is measured against comes from the differential. This post’s own contribution is the comparison only.
Start with what the order is, because the blog’s word for it — a gate at each rung — underdescribes it. The order is a requirement to complete before advancing, stated as one — in the welcome page, and again where the stakes are highest. In the apprentice section’s practical destruction work, contacted ritual with inner contacts specified in the text, the lesson opens with a fence:
“Note: if you are not a Quareia student and have not done all of the lessons of the apprentice section so far, please do not do this work, for your own safety.”5
That is the blog’s claim in the curriculum’s own voice, with the words attached: not it will not work, but do not do this. It is the only place in the apprentice section where the sequence requirement gets a safety rationale rather than an efficacy one.
The order is also metered. The advisory opening each apprentice book is four numbered rules; two are about rate:
“1. Pace yourself. Some modules can be done together, some cannot… There is no clock ticking, and it is not a race.”6
The fourth makes the same demand of the student: “Do not skim through the lessons. You simply will not learn and you will not properly develop. Slow down, take your time.”6 That is a metered pace without a meter: a rate prescription whose purpose is comprehension, and whose only enforcement is the student’s work.
And the pace is content-gated, in a way the blog can check concretely. The flame meditation that later becomes “the Void” is not the first exercise of the first lesson. It is the third, held behind a capacity threshold stated in the same breath:
“Once you are accustomed to visualising in meditation and are able to sit for half an hour or more, then it is time to learn the meditation of the inner flame.”7
“This image will be slowly connected, through your training, to a state of mind and a state of power called the Void… it is the nothing from which all things flow.”7
So the blog’s line — Quareia will not give you the Void’s deeper uses until you have done the earlier work — is right in substance and loose in detail: what the text shows is a capacity threshold gating a technique, in the first week of the first module. The gate is not a person saying no. It is a condition printed on the page.
The order’s stated purpose includes protecting the work — a different thing from protecting the student. The apprentice mid-term summary explains the no-skimming rule from inside:
“If someone browses through the lessons, cherry-picks what work they want to do and ignores the rest, they will miss these subtle prompts and keys. This in turn protects the work, and protects the casual browser.”8
The consequence is stated as a rule of design rather than of supervision: “the ‘pickers and dippers’ will be filtered out by their own unwillingness to take the time to read, digest, and work.”8 The design protects the work and the browser; it names no supervisor, examiner or body. The mechanism is the text’s refusal to be skimmable, and the outcome it predicts is self-selection: the filter is the student’s own unwillingness. Nobody stands at the door. The door is heavy.
The ego-inflation deferral the blog quoted is where the blog said it was. Verified, apprentice Module 8, Lesson 6, on the northern root temples:
“But when it comes to accessing your other lives, it is best to wait until you are in the adept phase of your training. This is not because such work is dangerous, but because of the ego inflation and fantasy realm that a magician can so easily get stuck in. Many try to relive these other lives, preferring them to their present life: that is just immature escapism.”9
The reason is psychological, not metaphysical: not that the operation is unsafe but that the practitioner gets stuck in the fantasy of it — and preferring the other life to this one is not the kind of thing any mentor in the record adjudicates.
And the curriculum states its own protective mechanism, in one sentence, at the end of the grade. After telling the reader that initiation in a lodge cannot be self-administered, the apprentice section’s last lesson gives its own account of what Quareia’s version is protected by:
“And this is how Quareia protects itself. If someone who has not done the work reads this lesson and tries to do it, they will fail miserably, as the keys that unlock this gate were embedded in the magician throughout their apprentice training… This is why there is no need for secrecy: the Mysteries protect themselves. They blossom within the worker, and evade the curious.”10
That is the centre of this reading. The blog said a curriculum is a safeguard. The curriculum says this is how the curriculum protects itself, and names the mechanism: the keys are embedded in the worker by the doing, so the gate cannot be opened by someone who has not done it — not because a person refuses them, not because a rank is withheld, but because the thing is inert in the wrong hands. §3 asks what instruments it supplies for the cases where that is not enough. §4 asks what the claim cannot reach.
The text is more specific than the blog credited on one axis and less specific on the others. Take the clinical referral first — and here the passage the blog quotes is a differential, not an aside. It sits in apprentice Module 1, Lesson 5, “Inner Senses”, where, before anything positive is said about inner hearing, the text rules out what looks like it: tinnitus under the name musical hallucination, with its triggers (“brain tumours, epilepsy, migraines”) and its marker (remembered childhood music), and then:
“The other biological event that can be mistaken for inner hearing is symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia. In such cases there is often a whole array of mental health symptoms that help to rule out inner hearing.”11
Only then comes the discipline, stated as a sequence:
“As with all inner senses, you can immediately see the dangers of confusing inner senses with mental obsessions and illnesses, and as with all things magical, you must approach such things intelligently, carefully and with common sense. If you hear voices telling you to kill people, you have a problem. Clean yourself up magically, and if you are still hearing them, go see a doctor.”11
The blog’s reading of that — try the tradition’s remedy, and if it fails, leave the tradition — is correct at the level of the sentence. What the lesson adds is what the blog never had: a rule-out procedure first, so the referral is not a concession bolted onto a magical claim but the second half of a differential.
And it is not one sentence. It is a procedure, at four grades of the curriculum, with an order and a scope rule. Set out as the text has them.
Grade one — apprentice, inner senses (above): try the remedy first; if the symptom persists, a doctor.
Grade two — apprentice, on parasites. Inner infestation and mental illness “are often very similar, to the point that it can be difficult to tell the difference — and there is a difference”, and then the triage rule:
“Someone who is mentally ill and not infested needs to be treated medically. Someone who is infested needs magical treatment. Sometimes, both treatments are needed concurrently. But as apprentices, you are not yet adequately equipped to deal with such a situation.”12
Grade three — initiate, exorcism, where the curriculum’s own practitioners meet the case that looks like possession. This is the strongest instrument in the record: the misidentification is named as a presentation that “can even fool a doctor if they have little or no knowledge of the occult or religion”, and then the finding:
“But they are not; they are dealing with a very ill person. And it is really important to be able to make that distinction, because such a person is in need of immediate and highly specialised medical care.”13
And the magician’s role in that case is refused outright:
“The treatment of such illnesses is still in the early phase of understanding in medical terms, but the role of the exorcist has no place in that treatment, and can often make the situation worse.”13
Grade four — initiate, basic exorcism, the scope rule. Here the curriculum forbids the practitioner to make the assessment at all, and orders it outside:
“Unless you have worked in mental health or have a lot of experience in mental health, do not try to assess the person’s mental health. That is the work of an adept and a psychologist or psychiatrist. The presentation of mental illness and/or possession can be the same to an untrained eye, and is something that must be approached properly: first is a mental health assessment by a psychiatrist.… Should you come up against someone showing signs of full possession, you must walk away from that situation and advise them to get a mental health assessment before doing anything else: making a mistake can do the victim a great deal of long-term damage.”14
The same module adds an ordering rule and a prior-exhaustion rule:
“Of course all medical avenues must have also been explored.”15
“Though mental issues are to be left to a trained psychotherapist… But remember: your job is inner repair, not psychological repair. Otherwise you can end up doing more harm than good.”16
Read the four grades together: the curriculum distinguishes a category of problem the practice cannot address, assigns the assessment to a named profession, forbids the practitioner to make it, orders the professions medical-first, and instructs withdrawal and referral in the hardest case — a triage protocol, and the instrument the differential described from the clinic’s side.
The second axis is the “stop if” rule, and there are real ones — the clearest a health-status exclusion in the initiate exorcism module:
“Note 1: Do not do this work if you are pregnant, have small children at home, or are sick — even if it is only a minor illness. It can take a lot of vital energy to do this work, and if there is an weak spot in your health or in your immediate family it can create major problems.”15
A second excludes a household (“do not do this exercise if you have children in the house”);17 a third is the sequence fence quoted in §2;5 a fourth closes the door at the initiation: “If you wish to only have a mundane life, then stop working with the Quareia lessons right here.”10 And a doctrine of walking away from a job runs through the initiate section.18
And a health check before the grade boundary — administered by the student, on the student, by divination. The initiate section includes a lesson called “Magical Health Check”, whose instrument is three readings of the student’s own body, and whose governing sentence refuses the exclusion the name invites:
“There is no particular health status that one needs for adept work; rather you must ensure that your body, mind, and energy is the best that it can be for you as an individual.”19
Nothing in it is administered by another person: a check performed on the self, with a deck, by someone who has spent two grades learning to read the deck.
Now the third axis, and here the blog’s word does not survive contact. The word is gate. What the curriculum supplies at each grade boundary is a self-assessment, described in terms that forbid the reading the blog gave it:
“This is not a ‘pass or fail’ type of exam; it is a pause-and-reflect, a self-assessment. If you are being mentored then it will help your mentor understand what stage of development you are at, and where you need to be refocused in terms of revision and understanding.”20
“There is no fail or pass with this; everyone develops in their own way. Being able to self-assess honestly, without fear of failure, and without grandstanding or ego, is a good skill.”8
The checkpoints are therefore not gates in the sense the blog’s table means — they are reflections, with the student’s own orientation as their purpose. That does not make them inert: a reflection set at a specified point in a syllabus is a real structure. But the enforcement the blog claimed is not something these lessons do. §5 takes that up.
The checks that are outside the practitioner are three. The first is the clinician, in the four-grades form above. The second is a mentoring scheme, described as an application whose subject is the work itself:
“If you wish to be mentored through the Initiate and Adept training, these online and paper written notes will be a part of your application. Without them, you cannot be mentored.”6
Its terms are opt-in and gated: the notes are requested individually, so that no part of the work can be skipped as unassessed, and the channel does not open early. A third has an institutional shape in the healing module, where the course ships books to students who cannot afford them and guards the route with a real assessment of a real claim — “if you are not known to us through mentoring or previous correspondence then we will first put you through an assessment to ensure that you are, in fact, at this stage of initiate training.”21 That is how far the outside world reaches in: to decide whether to post a book.
The counterweight goes in the body, and here it is not a hedge. It is the shape of the object.
It is one author’s system. The volumes are by Josephine McCarthy, the copyright lines run from 1993 to 2016, and the acknowledgements name a team rather than a lineage: individuals thanked for making the course possible, and donors.1 There is no founding order, no succession and no second teacher of record. The curriculum’s authority is authorial, not conferred — which matters, because the blog’s own table wants a plural community row, and the honest entry for Quareia is a single living practitioner’s graded text, a small named team, and a mentoring scheme a student has to apply for.
It is taught by text, and its default mode is self-study. Nothing in the texts requires a teacher: the course is published free, the lessons address one reader, and the mid-term summary tells that reader what to do when there is nobody:
“So be aware that no one is holding your hand. No one is spoon-feeding you. You are expected to pick up every detail, to include the new elements for yourself, and adjust your work accordingly, then decide what is suitable for your own practice and what needs to be rethought as an individual.”8
The adept books state the same from the far end, in a lesson whose whole instrument is self-assessment:
“If you are working with a mentor then they can go through this with you and point out weak areas… If you are not being mentored and are studying the course alone then doing this self-assessment can be a very good exercise as an intermediate step between theoretical study and practical application.”22
Read as a matched pair, those are the curriculum naming its own two populations: one has a mentor, one does not, the lesson is written to work for both, and the second is the default. The mentoring is not supervision of the practice but review of the record.
Where the community check actually exists, and how narrow it is. There is one place in fourteen volumes where the curriculum designs an institution’s safeguards rather than a student’s practice, and it is not in the course: Appendix A of the adept Book Eleven, “The Work of the Hierophant” — a foreword, an introduction and twelve sections addressed to the person founding and leading a lodge. It holds the record’s only institutional language of protection, and it restrains the head of a group:
“Keepers of the implements can be assigned and they will be responsible for the upkeep and work of the implement. The use of a variety of Keepers shares out the power and responsibility around the founding members of the lodge which is another action towards safeguarding against power grabs and control issues with the Hierophant and subsequent leaders.”23
The appendix around it is candid about the office: “it is like being a parent to a lot of people”, and the “ego and greed” that end a leader’s hope of “anything of true lasting worth”. It also names the control problem in both directions — decisions taken by “people who may or may not understand the complexities”, and “the Hierophant having absolute control and then abusing it”.23
So the blog’s community row is not supplied by this curriculum to its own students. It is supplied, in an adept appendix, to someone about to run a lodge. For the solitary student working from the website, the checks in the record are the sequence and its capacity thresholds, the four-grade clinical protocol, the health-status exclusions, the self-assessments, and — if applied for — a mentor reading the journal. The curriculum does not claim more than that.
And the honest gap is where the blog must be careful. The blog’s model asks whether a frame supplies a check that does not benefit from the answer: a reader outside the person, who can return a verdict. This curriculum supplies one, with a clinical domain — a psychiatrist, a psychotherapist, a doctor, for the category of problem magic does not fix — and a second whose domain is the written record, if the student applies. For everything else — whether the work is being done, whether a vision is real, whether a key has been found — the only reader in the record is the practitioner, and the curriculum says so: when a mentoring adept reads the notes, “if you have found a key… they will instantly recognise it and will tell you”, while the difference between a real contact and the reader’s own imagination “can be very difficult to tell for an apprentice or an initiate”.8
Two corrections running in opposite directions, which is why both need writing.
First: the referral is stronger than the blog said, and should be carried as what it is. The western column called the doctor sentence “the single most striking passage in the Western material” and read it as the discipline in miniature. That reading holds — and it happened without the four-grade procedure, and without the ordering rule that makes a procedure of it. This curriculum does not merely permit a referral: in the exorcism module it forbids the practitioner to make the assessment, names the profession that must make it, insists the medical avenues have “all” been explored, orders the clinician before the magician wherever both are needed, and instructs withdrawal where the case is full possession. The differential argued that the check must be external to report what the practice cannot. The curriculum implements that, and the blog has been carrying one sentence of it. The machine has no reading and the holy daimon both contrasted this referral against books that lack one; the contrast stands, and it is sharper than it was drawn, because the object compared is a protocol and not a line.
Second: “no one gets there without the previous stage having been checked” is not what the curriculum enforces, and it is the blog’s sentence rather than the course’s. The western column’s §4 drew its conclusion in two halves: the syllabus means nobody arrives at the deep state on a whim, and nobody arrives without the previous stage having been checked. The first half is what the text supports, in the curriculum’s own words. The second is the blog’s inference, and the text does not support it in that form. At each rung the curriculum checks the student with a self-assessment that is explicitly not pass-or-fail, with the mentor as an optional reader of the record; and at the grade boundary it says, in terms, that the initiation it administers is between the practitioner and the inner world — “hence you cannot self-initiate into an organisation” — and that what protects it is not an examiner but the keys embedded by the work.10 So the correction is a subject change: what the curriculum guarantees is that the order is enforced and the content gated. The row should read: a syllabus with a metered order, capacity thresholds and a clinical protocol — and a check that is the practitioner’s own, plus a mentor where one has been applied for.
Third, a citation correction. The western column sourced “to stay solid, safe and sane… in slow, careful steps” to apprentice Module 4, Lesson 4 and used it as the curriculum’s metered pace. The address is right; the scope is wider than the use. Its subject is the realms, not the coursework.24 The curriculum’s instruction about the student’s pace is the advisory’s first rule, which the blog never quoted: “There is no clock ticking, and it is not a race.” Both are metered; only one is about the student’s schedule, and the blog used the other one for it.
And one scoping note the blog’s own discipline requires. The sentence the blog quotes is about inner hearing, and sits in a lesson that rules out tinnitus and paranoid schizophrenia first. That is not a narrowing of the finding; it is the finding seen properly: the referral exists here because a differential was built first.
The series reports the presence or absence of a safeguard, a metered pace and a clinical referral as search results, scoped to the text. Here the result differs from previous readings in one way that matters: the referral is abundant, and the blog’s own word for the other two is nearly absent.
The safeguard family occurs three times in the two course texts, and none of them safeguards the student’s mind. In the apprentice course text, twice: a magician’s “lifespan will be safeguarded” — an effect of skilled practice, in a lesson on demons;25 and a routing rule for the inner temples, “an additional safeguard to going into an inner temple via the library”, where the library’s contacts decide which temples a student reaches.26 In the initiate course text, once: “I will put certain safeguards into the action”, of a designed exercise in which a student creates a vessel and then has to remove what moves in — a safeguard in a rite, not a fence around a person.17 Across the four adept texts, three times more: a quotation of Elizabeth I’s Tilbury oration (the text quoting her), and the lodge appendix’s “safeguarding against power grabs”, which protects a group from its own leader;23 and an instruction for the practitioner’s own survival, “if you want to safeguard your own life should you be caught up in such a tide”.27 A search shows only what it indexes, so the claim is scoped: the vocabulary of institutional protection appears in this curriculum only where it is restraining a Hierophant. Everything the blog means by “safeguard” here is present under other names.
There is a metered pace, and it is stated as comprehension rather than caution. “Pace yourself” occurs three times in the course texts, each time for reasons of learning;6 the one occurrence joined by a safety rationale is not a pace instruction but the sequence fence — “for your own safety”.5 “supervisor” returns 0 hits in the course texts, and “prerequisit” 0.
The clinical vocabulary is the anomaly, and it is mixed. The counts are itemised in 28; the point here is what they are made of. “Doctor” is the commonest of the named referral terms, and nearly every instance is the text’s own narrative or a case account rather than an instruction to a reader. “Clinic” is a research programme, the word “subclinical”, and an acupuncture reference. And here is the negative finding inside the positive one: the single occurrence of “therapist” in the apprentice course text is not a referral at all. It is a personality description in the astrology lesson — “This is the therapist who is only interested in your troubles and never discloses anything about themselves, the martyr, the Human Resources manager…”.29 In the curriculum’s own first module, the only therapist is a quadrant of a chart.
And there is no exclusion statement anywhere. “not for everyone” 0; no list of conditions that disqualify a person. The health lesson refuses the move outright — “There is no particular health status that one needs for adept work” — and the sequence fence’s audience is defined by work already done. The filter, by the curriculum’s own account, is the student’s willingness.8 That is the shape of this protection, and it is the correction to the blog’s word gate: the syllabus orders the material, prints fences where the work is dangerous, and refuses to sort people.
A reading holds one source whole and asks what a blog that has quoted sources all along has to change. This one returns a confirmation with a subject change, a strengthened instrument, and a gap.
The confirmation is that the blog’s claim survives, and that the curriculum makes it itself. The western column inferred from extracts that a curriculum is a safeguard. Read whole, the curriculum says the same at the end of the apprentice grade — “this is how Quareia protects itself” — with the mechanism named: the keys are embedded in the worker by the doing, and nowhere else. The two agree about the shape of the protection and disagree about where it lives. The blog’s version puts a check at each rung; the course’s puts a requirement at each rung and a refusal to be skimmable in the text, and leaves the verdict with the practitioner. That is not a weaker claim. It is a different one, and it is more honest about its own limits than the blog was.
The strengthened instrument is the referral. This curriculum does not have only a doctor sentence. It has a rule about who may assess, one about what must be exhausted first, one about the order of care, an instruction to withdraw and refer in the worst case, and a health check performed by the practitioner on the practitioner at the grade boundary. The blog’s uses of the single sentence are not wrong; they are thin. The differential’s boundary — some problems the practice cannot see, and the practice’s duty is to know which — is implemented here as a procedure with a scope rule.
And the gap is the one the blog keeps returning to, arriving this time from inside a curriculum that admits it. Every check here that could return a verdict about the practice is the practitioner’s own, a documentation review by an applied-for mentor, or clinical. There is no second reader of the visions, the contacts, the keys. The container argued that the container is the instrument doing the auditing; the holy daimon found a book asking its reader to judge their own state with no other orientation. This curriculum does not ask that. It asks less, and says what it is asking: do the work in order, and the order will hold you up — and where the work runs into a category it cannot touch, it names the profession and sends the person there. The blog’s table should carry that, and should stop carrying the claim that a rung of this curriculum was checked by anyone but the person standing on it.
Marking: a reading. Documented — the curriculum’s identity, structure, publication terms and every passage in quotation marks, taken from the texts listed in 1, checked character for character and cited in the notes by grade, book, module, lesson and the course text’s own page marker. Address: the texts’ line-break hyphenation is joined and their line breaks are not preserved; curly quotes and apostrophes are rendered here as straight ASCII; the spaced en dash is rendered as an em dash; page-adjacent numerals and the source’s footnote markers are dropped from quotations; where the per-book texts differ in punctuation the course texts are quoted. Absences reported as search results, scoped to the two course texts: the “safeguard” family 2 and 1, none about a student’s mind; “supervisor” 0; “prerequisit” 0; “not for everyone” 0; and the clinical and pace counts itemised in §6, terms listed in 28. Inferred, as this post’s contribution: that the curriculum’s protective mechanism is content-embeddedness rather than supervision; that its grade checkpoints are self-assessments by its own description, and therefore not gates in the blog’s sense; and that the referral is a four-grade triage protocol rather than a single sentence. Not adjudicated and not adopted: the curriculum’s metaphysics, and the claim that the Mysteries protect themselves, which is reported as its own account of its mechanism and not assessed. Not diagnosed: Josephine McCarthy, the named team, any mentor, any student. Nothing here validates, disqualifies or restricts anyone’s practice.
3.
4 and is not in these texts.
11); the acquisition warning, cited to the Initiate Module 5, which is in these texts at Module V, “Deities and the Magician”, Lesson 6, page marker 779 (“Do not let the desire to own, to have, or to collect creep into your magical work. Not only can you end up with magical wars in your house between deities who do not like each other or do not match, but you can also end up with parasited vessels in your house.”); and the health-and-doctor guidance, cited to the Initiate Module 8, which is in these texts at Module VIII, Lesson 5, “Magical Impact, Attack, and Curses I”, page marker 128 of the Book Nine text (“Keep a close eye on your health and if you get a minor infection that you would not normally take medicine for, go see a doctor and get some. A magical attack can seriously amplify minor illnesses.”). The column’s own sentence about the curriculum, quoted in §5, is: “a graded system with a gate at each rung means nobody arrives at the deep state on a whim, and no one gets there without the previous stage having been checked.” Egregores credits the referral to this curriculum and draws the contrast with a book that supplies no route to a clinician; the holy daimon repeats that contrast and qualifies the “a curriculum is a safeguard” row. Those uses are not re-read here beyond the quotations they carry.
Josephine McCarthy, Quareia — the Apprentice, Initiate and Adept course texts, published free online by Quareia Publishing UK at https://www.quareia.com/. Read for this post from the two course texts and the per-book texts beside them: the Apprentice course text and the Initiate course text. The per-book texts are of the printed paperbacks — Book One (Quareia—The Apprentice, ISBN 978-0-9933480-0-6), the Initiate Book Ten (978-1-911134-03-9) and the Adept volumes Book Eleven (978-1-911134-11-4) and Book Fourteen (978-1-911134-17-6) among them — and they differ from the course texts in punctuation and layout: an example met while verifying is the mid-term summary’s “if you are seriously backed into a corner and I can see that you truly do need help, then I will converse with you”, which the Book Three text prints as “…truly do need help then I will converse with you”. Quotations here follow the course texts. Licensing: the copyright pages of the apprentice and initiate volumes carry “© Josephine McCarthy”, “All rights reserved”, and — where the texts include it — “Permission granted to reproduce for personal use only”; the course advises that the work be done in sequence. Every quotation is within the length a reading has used throughout this series, and the curriculum is published free at the address above so that a reader can check every one of them. Standing welcome page: the four-sentence welcome appears 81 times in the apprentice course text and 81 times in the initiate course text — see↩︎
The Apprentice section’s ten modules run from Module 1, “Core Skills”, to Module 10, “Understanding Destruction”, eight lessons each; the Initiate section’s ten run from Module I, “Core Initiate Skills”, to Module X, “Preparation for Adepthood”, eight lessons each; the adept volumes carry the adept modules two to a volume (Book Eleven: I, “Advanced Magical Patterns”, and II, “Magical Construction”; Book Twelve: III and IV; Book Thirteen: V and VI; Book Fourteen: VII, “Adept Exorcism”, and VIII, “Mediation of Power”). Each grade’s final module carries a ninth lesson: the apprentice section’s contents list “9 Apprentice Section Initiation Lesson”, and the initiate section’s list ends with “Initiatory Lesson: Born of the Stars”. The apprentice initiation lesson is headed “Initiate Lesson” in the course text while the running heads on its pages still read “Quareia - Module 10, Lesson 8”; the text calls it “the 81st lesson of the Apprentice training”. It is cited here as Module 10, Lesson 9 (its number in the Book Five contents), with the text’s header form noted.↩︎
The standing welcome page, printed at the head of every lesson: “The Quareia takes a magical apprentice from the beginning of magic to the level of adeptship and beyond. The course has no superfluous text; there is no dressing, no padding — everything is in its place and everything within the course has a good reason to be there.” and “So remember - in order for this course to work, it is wise to work with the lessons in sequence. If you don’t, it won’t work.” — followed by “Yours, Josephine McCarthy”. Verified byte-identical in all 81 occurrences in the apprentice course text (first at page marker 1) and in the initiate course text; the initiate course text sets the same two sentences with em dashes in place of the spaced en dash of the apprentice course text. The second sentence also appears, in a contracted form (“If you don’t, it will not work properly”), as the second sentence of the Course Advisory in every apprentice book ([^adv]).↩︎
The blog’s own earlier citations of this curriculum, verified against the texts for this post. The western column: “to stay solid, safe and sane… in slow, careful steps” (it cites apprentice Module 4, Lesson 4 — correct; see [^app41] for the sentence’s scope); the ego-inflation passage (it cites Module 8, Lesson 6 — correct; [^app86]); the inner-senses referral (Module 1, Lesson 5 — correct;↩︎
Apprentice, Module 10, “Understanding Destruction”, Lesson 7, “Practical Work I”, page marker 1541, opening the practical work: “Note: if you are not a Quareia student and have not done all of the lessons of the apprentice section so far, please do not do this work, for your own safety. It is contacted work and you will not have to contacts to achieve this work. You are more likely to put yourself in harms way.” The text’s “you will not have to contacts” is reported as the text prints it; it reads as a damaged line for “the contacts”, and is flagged rather than tidied. The Book Five text opens the same lesson with the fence marked “WARNING”.↩︎
Course Advisory, opening each of the apprentice books (Books One to Five), four numbered rules. The four rules are: “1. Pace yourself. Some modules can be done together, some cannot… There is no clock ticking, and it is not a race.”; “2. Keep paper and online notes… If you wish to be mentored through the Initiate and Adept training, these online and paper written notes will be a part of your application. Without them, you cannot be mentored.”; “3. Learn to be flexible and adaptable… if you get stuck, work it out for yourself!”; “4. Do not skim through the lessons. You simply will not learn and you will not properly develop. Slow down, take your time.” Read from the Book One text (page 3 of 174), where all four appear on one page, and verified in the Book Five text. The later books do not carry the four rules: from Book Six (Initiate) onwards the advisory page contains only the two sentences quoted in [^wel], so the mentoring route is described once, in the apprentice books, and is not restated for students who begin the initiate or adept volumes. The reminder “Pace yourself.” occurs once more, unnumbered, in apprentice Module 8, Lesson 3, before a six-lesson practical block:↩︎
Apprentice, Module 1 (“Core Skills”), Lesson 1, “Meditation Techniques”, page markers 1–7; the lesson’s three graded exercises and the flame/Void material are at 5–7. The capacity threshold sentence is at marker 6. The Void is named here for the first time in the curriculum (“a state of mind and a state of power called the Void… the nothing from which all things flow”, marker 6); its development as a defence (“that is the inner bullet-proof vest needed for inner work: absolute stillness in the ‘nothing’”) is at Module 1, Lesson 4, page marker 47 of the course text (12 is the printed book page). The blog’s separate account of the Void — from McCarthy’s “Working with the Void,” in the Quareia vision archive — is cited in↩︎
Apprentice, Module 6, Lesson 8, “Apprentice Midterm Summary” — the course’s own mid-point checkpoint, page markers 1011–1024. Quoted here from it: “Don’t skip through this lesson. Read it properly: certain keys are within the text that you will need.” (marker 1011); “This is partly why casually skipping through the lessons will not work… This in turn protects the work, and protects the casual browser.” (marker 1018); “Everything in this course, from the smallest thing to the biggest thing, rests on something else.” (1018); “those who pay attention to detail will build as solid magicians, and the ‘pickers and dippers’ will be filtered out by their own unwillingness to take the time to read, digest, and work.” (1018); “So be aware that no one is holding your hand. No one is spoon-feeding you.” (1018); the mentoring scheme’s terms and the individualisation of the request (“any part of your work can be requested for submission”, 1018); the emergency channel and the apprentice-grade bar (“However, there may be times when you are confronted by something that is truly out of your depth and you need advice for your own safety.… You will not get any mentoring until the initiate section: my contact is there only for real emergencies.”, 1022); the key-recognition passage (“When a mentoring adept looks through your notes, if you have found a key… they will instantly recognise it and will tell you.” / “If on the other hand it is something from your imagination, the mentor will tell you”, 1021–1022); the self-assessment (“There is no fail or pass with this; everyone develops in their own way. Being able to self-assess honestly, without fear of failure, and without grandstanding or ego, is a good skill.”, 1023); and the difficulty case (“waiting at the wall”, 1020–1021).↩︎
Apprentice, Module 8, “Inner Temples”, Lesson 6, “North”, page marker 1244, in the material on the northern root temples and the release of what is clung to: “As you learn to explore these temples in a deeper way, you will eventually learn how to access your own ‘jettisoned’ knowledge from your other lives… But when it comes to accessing your other lives, it is best to wait until you are in the adept phase of your training. This is not because such work is dangerous, but because of the ego inflation and fantasy realm that a magician can so easily get stuck in. Many try to relive these other lives, preferring them to their present life: that is just immature escapism. You treat other lives just as you treat childhood memories.” This is the passage the western column cited to Module 8, Lesson 6 — the address is correct.↩︎
Apprentice, Module 10, Lesson 9 — the section’s final lesson, headed “Initiate Lesson” in the course text ([^structure]) and “Apprentice Section Initiation Lesson” in the Book Five contents, page markers 1559–1567. Quoted from it: “This is the 81st lesson of the Apprentice training, the bridge that opens the way for deeper magical development as an Initiate.” (marker 1560); the contrast with lodge initiation (“In many magical lodges and schools, the initiation is a ceremonial ritual aspect of the lodge which formally recognises the stages of the magician’s development. It is witnessed by members of the lodge and allows the recipient to claim a degree of development with that specific lodge: hence you cannot self-initiate into an organisation.”, 1560); the protective claim quoted in §2 (“And this is how Quareia protects itself…”, 1561); “If you wish to only have a mundane life, then stop working with the Quareia lessons right here. Once the door is opened to the Mysteries, it cannot be closed…” (1561); the self-conducted ritual from “The Visionary Ritual of Crossing from Apprentice to Initiate” (1562–1566); and the closing block — “Task: Write a summary of your experience in your journal and type it up in more detail on your computer.” followed by “Congratulations on stepping from the work of the apprentice and the world of the mundane onto the path of the Initiate.” and “If you choose to walk away from that agreement, there is no punishment: you always have a choice.” (1567). The rite is to be done “before midnight on the night of the new moon following the events experienced in the Inner Library” (1560). The initiate grade ends on the same pattern: Module X’s appended “Initiatory Lesson: Born of the Stars”, a self-conducted vision, whose closing task reads “If you are being mentored then you can discuss these with your mentor.” (the initiate course text).↩︎
Apprentice, Module 1, Lesson 5, “Inner Senses”, page markers 67 and 69. The rule-out material (musical hallucination as a rare form of tinnitus, with “brain tumours, epilepsy, migraines” and OCD as triggers; “The other biological event that can be mistaken for inner hearing is symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia. In such cases there is often a whole array of mental health symptoms that help to rule out inner hearing”) is at marker 67. The referral passage is at marker 69, inside the section on inner hearing. A third clause precedes the referral and is part of the same discipline: the positive criterion is a subject “mentally stable, healthy, and most important of all, the event in question is a manifestation of an experience that the subject has always had” (marker 67).↩︎
Apprentice, Module 6, Lesson 4, “Parasites”, page marker 905: “One word of caution. The presentations of parasite infestation and mental illness are often very similar, to the point that it can be difficult to tell the difference — and there is a difference. Sometimes — many times — the two come together, and it is very important for a magician to be able to differentiate between which is which, and why. Someone who is mentally ill and not infested needs to be treated medically. Someone who is infested needs magical treatment. Sometimes, both treatments are needed concurrently. But as apprentices, you are not yet adequately equipped to deal with such a situation.” The lesson’s worked case (“Frank”) continues the same triage: the parasite was to be removed first, “then, after twenty four-hours, Frank would be assessed to see what was left behind, which would indicate how much medical treatment was needed”, and the outcome — the psychotic behaviour went with the parasite, and “He was taken to a doctor and prescribed medication which he took for three months” (markers 910–911).↩︎
Initiate, Module II, “Exorcism I: The Basics”, Lesson 1, “Assessing”, page markers 179–184. Quoted: “This is the most spectacular type of presentation, and the one most often mistaken for possession. It can even fool a doctor if they have little or no knowledge of the occult or religion.” (179); “But they are not; they are dealing with a very ill person. And it is really important to be able to make that distinction, because such a person is in need of immediate and highly specialised medical care.” (180); “The treatment of such illnesses is still in the early phase of understanding in medical terms, but the role of the exorcist has no place in that treatment, and can often make the situation worse.” (182); and, in the same lesson, the check the curriculum sets beside a performance of possession: where the presentation is “a very calculatedly created drama to gain attention”, it “can often be brought to a screeching halt by the suggestion of being sectioned or committed to a psychiatric unit and medicated” (page marker 181 of the initiate course text; the Book Six text is headed “Lesson 1. Assessing”).↩︎
Initiate, Module II, Lesson 5, “Basic Exorcism”, page markers 307–311. The passage quoted in §3 runs across the page break at marker 308; it was verified in two parts, on either side of the text’s page marker, and joined for quotation. The same lesson continues with the layer-by-layer method of approaching a house or person, and with the instruction to keep readings off-site where the case is major: “Do not do this in a house with major problems: wait until you are home and do it in your work space with all the directions going and your stole on. Be very careful: beings can mess with readings and can also connect to you through them.” (marker 309).↩︎
Initiate, Module II, Lesson 6, “Parasites and Clingers”, page marker 324, “Removal Techniques”, Notes 1 and 2. Quoted: “Note 1: Do not do this work if you are pregnant, have small children at home, or are sick — even if it is only a minor illness. It can take a lot of vital energy to do this work, and if there is an weak spot in your health or in your immediate family it can create major problems.”; and, immediately before it, “Usually it is a change in the host’s behaviour, along with a loss of physical or/and mental condition that brings the exorcist to the door. Of course all medical avenues must have also been explored.” The text’s “if there is an weak spot” is reported as the text prints it.↩︎
Initiate, Module VIII, Lesson 2, “Emergencies”, page marker 1173, in the material on violation: “While the body heals from the violation, the mind and spirit often does not. Though mental issues are to be left to a trained psychotherapist, the inner impact and violation can cause immense long-term suffering if the attack’s pattern is not taken out of the system. This is a difficult and sensitive issue, but most magicians will likely encounter it at some point. But remember: your job is inner repair, not psychological repair. Otherwise you can end up doing more harm than good.” (The text’s own footnote numeral sits between the last two sentences and is dropped here, as throughout.) The same lesson’s rule for a coma case is another instance of ordering the clinician first: “If it is a person and they are in hospital, check with the doctor first before administering a homeopathic dose.” (marker 93 of the Book Nine text).↩︎
Initiate, Module I, “Core Initiate Skills”, Lesson 8, “Vessels and Windows”, page markers 156 and 164. The child exclusion is at the head of the practical work: “Warning: do not do this exercise if you have children in the house — just read this part of the lesson and…”. The initiate course text’s occurrence of “safeguard” is at marker 164: “I want you to experience what it is like to have a feral being move into a vessel, and then you have to remove it. The way we will do this is not dangerous, as I will put certain safeguards into the action…”.↩︎
Initiate, Module II, Lessons 3 and 4, and Module VIII, Lesson 1. Quoted: “Do not fall into the trap of feeling you have to fix everything. If it needs a magician, get to work. If not, walk away. Those situations are about people wanting to divest themselves of responsibility” (module II, lesson 3, marker 257); “If they are unwilling to change, then walk away. Under such circumstances continuing would only endanger you and the people involved” (module II, lesson 4, marker 271); “In such cases, all you can do is walk away from the situation. If a person has been told what they need to do and why, and they choose not to do it, it is their choice.” (module II, lesson 4, marker 283); “You always need to know when to walk away from a job that you cannot be of any real help with.” (module VIII, lesson 1, marker 1160).↩︎
Initiate, Module VIII, Lesson 8, “Magical Health Check”, page markers 1289–1292: “As you are now edging towards the end of your initiate training and the beginning of your adept training, you will be starting the process of putting everything in order… People studying this course will be of many different age groups. Some will have physical issues or disabilities, and others will have energetic issues. There is no particular health status that one needs for adept work; rather you must ensure that your body, mind, and energy is the best that it can be for you as an individual.… You will need to approach this work seriously to ensure that your later adept work does not trigger potentially damaging health issues.” The instrument is three readings (marker 1290) and “Take any necessary actions (change of diet, for example) and note them down.” (1292). The lesson’s own caution about the readings is quoted in §3.↩︎
Initiate, Module VII, “The Realm of the Inner Desert”, Lesson 8, “Mid-course Exam”, page markers 1144–1145: “Before we shift gears and move on to more active, practical magic at adept level, it is time to assess how much you have taken in and understood, and how this understanding has changed your approach to magic. The best way to do this is for you to answer a series of questions to the best of your ability. This is not a ‘pass or fail’ type of exam; it is a pause-and-reflect, a self-assessment. If you are being mentored then it will help your mentor understand what stage of development you are at, and where you need to be refocused in terms of revision and understanding.” The lesson’s own framing at the head of Module VII makes the same point in advance (“At the end of this module there is an ‘exam’ lesson where you will be able to self-examine your progress”, Module VII, Lesson 1, marker 1020). Note that the text’s running heads on the exam lesson’s pages read “Module vii, Lesson 7” — a running-head slip in the book, since the lesson’s own opening block is headed “Lesson 8: Mid-course Exam” (the Book Nine text, page 73). The course’s later checkpoints repeat the form: Book Fourteen’s module VIII (“Mediation of Power”) lesson 3 is headed “Self-assessment”, and its own words are “This is not a pass or fail exam; this is for you to see and assess where you are in your training” (page marker 45).↩︎
Initiate, Module VIII, “Magical Healing”, Lesson 1, “Introduction”, page marker 1157, in the study books list: “If you cannot afford, or gain access to, my book on the subject matter, then contact the Quareia team through the website and we will get a copy to you. We are very aware that there are some people accessing this course from places around the world where book access or income may be severely limited. In such cases we utilise donations made to Quareia to ensure that a student has what they need to study. To prevent abuse of this system, if you are not known to us through mentoring or previous correspondence then we will first put you through an assessment to ensure that you are, in fact, at this stage of initiate training.”↩︎
Adept, Book Fourteen, module VIII (“Mediation of Power”), lesson 3 (“Self-assessment”), page markers 44–50: “If you are working with a mentor then they can go through this with you and point out weak areas or discuss your reasoning to see what insights emerge. If you are not being mentored and are studying the course alone then doing this self-assessment can be a very good exercise as an intermediate step between theoretical study and practical application.” The lesson’s framing sentence is quoted in [^ini78]. The module’s exercise is a set of written case scenarios to be worked and reasoned about, with the assessment to be made by the student.↩︎
Adept, Book Eleven, Appendix A, “The Work of the Hierophant” — “Foreword, by Alan Richardson”, an introduction, and twelve sections. The lodge-design material quoted in §4 is from A.5, “The Building and Maintenance of the Egregore” (the Keepers and “safeguarding against power grabs and control issues with the Hierophant and subsequent leaders”; also “The Keepers should be chosen by the entire group on the basis of their balance, maturity and stability.” and “In the unlikely event the egregore is breeched at sometime in the future, the outer containers can be cleansed and exorcised”) and A.12, “Longer term implications of being the Hierophant” (the burdens of the office; “it is like being a parent to a lot of people”; “The two parasite desserts of ego and greed…”; and the section “Control”, with the two failure modes and the recommendation of passive governance, “not assign anyone with lodge status other than ‘adepts’ and ‘initiates’”, and “Having hierarchies beyond what is totally necessary creates a disharmony and encourages distracting but meaningless goals.”). Section A.9, “The dynamics of work in a magical lodge”, opens from the other end: it is “very easy for a magical lodge to fall into the trap of becoming a training school and not much more. That is fine if that was the intention all along, but then it is a school and not a lodge.”, and where a training “cuts corners, skipping over the harder and less glamorous parts of training, then the foundations of the initiate will be weak — weak foundations make a dangerous tower.” The occurrence of “safeguard” in the same volume that is not about a lodge is inside the quoted Tilbury oration of Elizabeth I (“I have placed my chiefest strength and safeguard in the loyal hearts and good-will of my subjects”), in module IV.↩︎
Apprentice, Module 4, “Death and the Underworld”, Lesson 4, “The Underworld and the Abyss”, page marker 571, in the second vision of the lesson (“Accessing the root ancient temples”): “Over the span of the course, you will learn carefully how to access these different realms individually and eventually learn how to work with them together. But to stay solid, safe and sane, you need to learn, visit, and interact with these different aspects in slow, careful steps.” The subject of the sentence is the realms — the desert, the underworld, the upper worlds and their mirrorings — and the next sentence treats the current visit as one step in it. The blog’s use of the quotation, and its scope, are discussed in §5.↩︎
Apprentice, Module 6, “Different Types of Beings”, Lesson 3, “Demons”, page marker 890: “The smart ones learn how to survive, how to interact with all sorts of deities, and learn as adepts how to take their place in the vast community of natural forces. Their lifespan will be safeguarded (though not prolonged… remember Decima?) and they will have a much better chance of living their full potential lifespan”. This is one of the course texts’ three occurrences of the safeguard family; the apprentice text’s other is [^app82], the initiate text’s is [^ini18].↩︎
Apprentice, Module 8, “Inner Temples”, Lesson 2, “The Inner Library”, page marker 1199, on approaching the inner temples through the library: “There is an additional safeguard to going into an inner temple via the library that I will use in this module, and that is allowing the inner contacts of the library to decide what temples you have access to, and which ones you do not.” This is the apprentice course text’s second occurrence of the safeguard family; the first is [^app63].↩︎
Adept, Book Fourteen, module VII (“Adept Exorcism”), lesson 5 (“Objects and Resonance”), section 5.8, “Fate pattern resonance”, page marker 75 of the Book Fourteen text: “But if you want to safeguard your own life should you be caught up in such a tide, or that of someone close to you whom you know would shift how they operated if you made some suggestions, then there are some things you can do.”↩︎
The search terms behind §6, run case-insensitively with word boundaries against the two course texts: safeguard family (safeguarded, safeguard, safeguards — the wider family, not just the plural) 2 (apprentice, [^app63], [^app82]) and 1 (initiate, [^ini18]); supervisor 0 and 0; prerequisit* 0 and 0; pace yourself 1 and 2; not for everyone, not suitable for you, do not attempt 0 in both (outside the “please do not do this work” fence of [^app107]); doctor(s) 6 and 30; physician 0 and 1; therapist 1 and 0 (the apprentice hit is [^app18]); psychotherapist 0 and 1; psychiatry 0 and 1; psychiatrist 1 and 2; psychologist 1 and 3; mental health 4 and 17; clinic(al) 2 and 2; hospital present in both; danger(ous) 157 and 177; warn(ing|s|ed) 95 and 101; careful(ly) 92 and 211; mentor(ing|ed|s) 20 and 25; assessment 7 and 9; stop and 16 and 10. Counts are inflated in places by the texts’ own duplication of running heads and by ordinary English usage (a “danger” in a myth, a “careful” step in a ritual), and are reported as counts rather than as findings; the itemised referral instances are in §3 and the four-grade protocol is verified in [^app15],↩︎
Apprentice, Module 1, Lesson 8, “Astrology”, page markers 155–156, the lesson’s passage on chart shapes and quadrants: “This is the therapist who is only interested in your troubles and never discloses anything about themselves, the martyr, the Human Resources manager, the doting Mother or partner…” — cited in §6 as the apprentice course text’s single occurrence of “therapist”, verified against the text and against the Book One text (page 86 of 174).↩︎