THE SABIAN ASSEMBLY

How frail they are: such towers as men do build,
     As though the soul of all were rock and brick
     Inert at every mason's hand! We pick
A keystone for the structure we have willed
To be. We cut and chisel hearts, full-thrilled
     To watch our mounting edifice. But quick
     As dizzy heights are gained by human trick
The Babel voices rise: and work is stilled!

How stout they are: the towers by spirit raised,
     Where every stone is conscious of its place!
The outer world may not stand by, amazed:
     The work goes on with spirit's leisured pace.
Each workman rules himself, by self is praised.
     His stuff of soul illumes the building's fate.

Nothing is as fascinating as self, unless it is the world in which self lives. It is for that reason that the first impulse of man is the investigation of these two realities. When he is alert and eager of mind and body, this investigation can be a wonderful adventure. It is because of this impulse, of course, that the human race makes progress, and that man in general becomes more than the animal he remains in his physical origins.

The Sabian Assembly is dedicated to the adventure of an increasing mastery of self and the world. Its goal is to help the individual climb to the top of even the most difficult mountain of understanding. Developing an exciting challenge for the mind, so the adventure will be fully appreciated, the Assembly concerns itself with various step-by-step ways to make the ascent to ultimate realization both facile in the accomplishment and progressively rewarding at every point of progress.

To keep its functions focused in immediate self-unfoldment of aspiring individuality in everyday living, the Assembly avoids formal organization and static framework in every way possible. There is no headquarters or salaried staff. Virtually all essential services are performed by volunteers.

What holds the Assembly together is the desire on the part of all its members to share as widely as possible in the responsibilities as well as in the rewards of participation in the activities. The primary dedication is to a respect for personality on the one hand, and to a faith in the essential dignity and integrity of mankind collectively on the other. A full account of the origin of the group together with detailed explanation of its materials and methods may be found in The Sabian Manual, a 309 page volume supplied to each affiliate but available by purchase to anybody wishing to investigate the Sabian conceptions and procedures without affiliation.

The Solar Path of Initiation

The principal characteristic of the individual's refinement of his potentials under Sabian direction is the demand for a rigorously precise use of the words of particular significance in the presentation of arcane principles. Because many newcomers in the fellowship find their conformity to this demand a major stumbling block, The Sabian Manual gives early attention to the matter. A few of the special terms even require preliminary explanation in this brochure. For example, the word initiation refers to the expanded awareness or broadened realization that must be gained by every man who seeks to achieve any true measure of control over his own destiny. The word Solar when capitalized identifies the consistent reference of everything to the core of selfhood, as the only possible basis for any exercise of such a control.

The Solar path of initiation, as re-established for modern needs in the Sabian Assembly and made available for all who are willing to meet the conditions, offers at once a test of the self's stamina and integrity and the possibility of bringing the self to the full of its powers. The person who enters on this path becomes an aspirant, and accepts at the start that it is possible for him to accomplish this complete self-fulfillment in life. He is asked to view his frustrations as a postponement or stimulus and not as defeat. He is challenged to exercise his more latent capacities and to develop his neglected potentials. At the beginning he may have difficulty with the prospect of considerable ritual or patterning in his ongoing. However, he will learn that rhythm is the actual cosmic base of everything, and that to be more than a pawn of circumstances he must establish and maintain a fundamental dedication of act and attitude that is particularly himself.

The Solar self-refinement has its least technical dramatization in the Sabian rituals where the rewards are stated in simpler form as health or the non-diffusion of selfhood, prosperity or the universality of possible self-adjustment, happiness or an expanding freedom from fear or prejudice, and understanding or an avoidance of the provincialism that must be eliminated most importantly. But even in this simplicity these rewards of the initiation cannot be regarded properly as a gift from higher power, since in that case they would make man a mendicant, or as the result of some kind of occult magic, since such a manipulation of the supernatural would do nothing to develop man in the basic dignity of his being.

Genuine Solar initiation requires continual self-respecting effort as the aspirant expends himself in the business of being himself very consistently and to the limit of his capacity.

The Sabian Conception of Ideas

Since the Sabian Assembly administers a Solar initiation, it must do so essentially as a Solar group. This means that it has no particular concern with the aspirant's religious interests or intellectual allegiances. What alone is of importance is his soundness of self-anchorage at the core of selfhood. In consequence what is involved primarily is his consciousness, or his practical utilization of his ideas as effective symbols of his own experience on the one hand and as the tools of mind or functions of thinking that on the other hand make a vicarious experience possible. Sabian attention centers on human experience in its completely individual potential as directly and continuously as possible, and the Assembly therefore refuses to become a religion or even a religious movement. It offers no competition to the established faiths or intellectual schools of thought of mankind but instead encourages its members to develop or continue a whole-hearted and understanding outreach to some ideal of world-wide or age-old compass for the sake of the advantage in selfless and yet personal orientation of widening scope. It recognizes the right of any member to establish his own devotional life in the Sabian rituals if he wishes to do so, but demands that he do not obtrude his views upon his fellows.

To encourage a continuous realization of the fundamental role of ideas as tools of mind, and of personal points of view as an ordering of thought at some particular moment, the Sabian materials are identified as a presentation of a philosophy of concepts. The word concept is then defined as idea-at-work. All this is to help the aspirant remember that he is training his powers of knowing, and only most incidentally is adding to his store of knowledge.

The principal purpose of the Solar self-refinement is to keep the aspirant's consciousness ever fluid, and his nascent eagerness completely unimpaired. To be avoided is any undisciplined emotionalism or lust for transient excitement, and quite as much a threat to the ultimate fulfillment is any unseemly pride of heritage or intellect. An individual's background, whatever it may be, is an asset to the extent he makes use of it in more than some limited setting. Irrespective of what a person may have made of himself, for better or worse, there is a place for him in the Sabian vision provided only that he associates with his fellows in the enthusiastic warmth born of a mutual respect for personality and human society in general.

The Presentation of Options

The occult validations under which the initiatory program is carried out, together with the detailed procedures, are explained in great detail in The Sabian Manual as already noted. Characterizing the Solar method in this application is a broad pattern of options. Beyond the preliminary two-year refinement of basic aspiration, that establishes the new-comer's effective rapport with the special genius of the group, there is no further step that any member of the Assembly is ever called upon to take. Thus the special activities concerned with spiritual healing on the one side, or the development of divinatory skills on the other, may be elected but they never are required or even recommended specifically.

In Solar initiation under Sabian auspices there are progressive stages of responsibility beyond the initial two years of neophyte or preparatory orientation. These in order are a five-year acolyte period of drill, and then a three-year legate status that may be followed by a lay-brother functioning of which no tangible measure or recognition is possible in everyday terms. The approach to each of these must be by voluntary decision as the eligibility develops.

There are other obvious options in connection with the various degrees of group participation such as take tangible form perhaps in handling the materials, or in research and editorial or teaching contribution. There always is the opportunity to volunteer for the more spiritual and transcendental sustainment of the group work as a whole, or for a ritualistic part of the healing ministry. A more recently developed option is participation in a Sabian chapter. Providing an active camaraderie or very practical togetherness with enlarged dimensions, chapters are largely self-directed in their pursuit of specific Sabian activities.

The aspirant may decide to place himself in the optionally available astrological classification when joining the Assembly or later, and leave it at any time before he completes the full possible course of horoscopic investigation. This option means primarily the receipt of additional sets of lessons for consideration.

The Framework of Instruction

The Sabian Assembly, while functioning essentially as a school of thought in the historical sense, is in no respect an educational institution of the sort recognized by law and hence chartered by the state. It gives its members no diplomas or certificates, and permits no reference to itself as authority for the practice of the esoteric arts or pursuance of any professional ministration. Indeed, it provides no indication of the aspirant's progress on the path of initiation but rather affirms that any proof of accomplishment in self-refinement under Solar definition must be in the given individual's competence, or his ability to live among his fellows in such fashion as to call forth spontaneous recognition from them in the terms of their values and what they can recognize as their better selves in his person or his works.

Membership in the Assembly does not require an acceptance of occult phenomena in the usual form of explanation, since in the Sabian presentation there also are adequate nonoccult interpretations that meet every exaction of the current rationalistic and nontheological canons of reason. Hence the question whether the arcane tradition has literal or historical accuracy is quite unimportant in any overall view, since its employment is as an organon or a mechanism of mind ordering. It must be remembered that men in many respects may learn as much from fiction as fact, exactly as the muscles of the body may develop as effectively in play as in work. There is high esoteric authority in the Sabian background at all times, but this is a ritualistic matter. On the Solar path the aspirant must be equipped to be as much at home in the secular culture around him as in the mystical otherworldliness that for him superficially at least may have the appearance of a greater spirituality. None the less and by the same token he must realize that the rather cavalier rejection of all superphysical experience at the hands of a prevailing secularism is an unjustified bigotry.

The Sabian Administration

The activities of the Sabian Assembly are coordinated by the Administrator, whose task is to maintain the group functioning through which the ideal of an uncompromisingly Solar unity-in-diversity will be able to survive. What is envisioned is a system of interlocking electives exercised by individuals of parallel aspiration, such as essentially and as a whole is self-administering because individually it is self-policing.

The properties of the Sabian Assembly consist of little more than the lessons and other instruction prepared by the founding chancellor, Marc Edmund Jones. Born October 1, 1888 his career included work in the early film industry, service as a Protestant clergyman, completion of his Ph.D. degree in philosophy, and long years in freelance writing and publishing. Dr. Jones died March 5, 1980. The analyses, letters, typescript reports and the like are reproduced and distributed by volunteer workers in the framework of the Sabian Publishing Society, a nonprofit foundation incorporated in Stanwood, Washington. Its trustees, all of whom must be under Sabian discipline, are pledged to the task of keeping these materials available for members of the Assembly and the public generally.

Membership In the Assembly

Membership in the Assembly is open to any individual of fifteen years of age or older who is and remains of good report in his community. His acceptance must be irrespective of sex, race, religion, economic status, education, political affiliation or any distinction such as tends to establish immutably separate groups in the human family. The initial basis for becoming a member is an agreement to 1) give regular and specified attention to Sabian materials or to other materials in Sabian perspective, although this need not be an excessive demand on time and strength under conditions of special stress, and 2) make a regular contribution of at least a token nature in or in advance of and for each calendar month. The applicant for membership must sign a pledge in a tentative acceptance of this obligation. If the definiteness of self-committal goes against the grain of his temperament, as it may well do in current times, he must remember that this is a symbolical gesture to serve him as a focal point in his thinking and nothing else. As an obligation to himself, it dissolves if ever his present purpose should happen to fade away.

The text of this pledge is given on the page opposite, and its provisions are explained very fully in the Sabian Manual. In preliminary fashion it may be noted that the initial four paragraphs, A to D, state the operation of the arcane principles involved. Paragraph 1 is the basic promise, and this is drawn in such a manner that it never is possible for the aspirant to pass judgment on himself and to conclude that he has failed in pursuing his intent on the one hand or has achieved the full of his potentials on the other. Paragraph 2 is the earnest only, and such regular reporting is no longer required in the new age, as explained in the 1976 revision of The Sabian Manual.

The Procedure in Affiliation

Inquiry concerning membership in the Sabian Assembly may be sent to the Administrator. The two blank forms to be signed as a first step in affiliation will be sent on request. One is the neophyte pledge and the other a statement of the monthly contributions the newcomer proposes to make. Concerning the contribution, it is the member's privilege to increase or decrease this without explanation whenever he wishes. Copies of The Sabian Manual and The Sabian Book (of Blue Letters) are supplied on receipt of the two signed forms and the payment of an admission fee that covers the cost of the initial materials and of processing the record. The fee is $30.00 unless the aspirant desires astrological classification, in which case it is increased to $35.00. Applicants who already possess The Sabian Manual pay reduced fees of $20.00 and $25.00 respectively. New students are expected to contribute at least $10.00 monthly, or $12.00 if in astrological discipline, to help meet Sabian objectives. Established members, however, are encouraged to give according to means even if only a token.

THE SABIAN LESSON SETS

These lessons normally run to about twelve hundred words each. The principal part of this material has been arranged in two revolving cycles of weekly issue, with the philosophy series repeating in twenty-one years and the Bible series in a little over nineteen.

NOTE: The analysis of Daniel is titled Chaldean Initiation; of Job, Art of Wisdom; and of The Song of Songs, Tools of Inspiration. Chaldean Initiation is not comprised in the weekly cycles. The twelve astrology sets provide early statements on techniques that have been refined and more fully developed in the printed textbooks; Modern Philosophers has been superseded by the lesson set Modern Thought supplemented by First Principles and Renaissance of Thought; and Conceptual Training by the six sets on Plotinus. The full-scale textbook on Fundamentals of Number Significance has minor anticipation in Pythagorean Astrology. The 1925 Key Truths of Occult Philosophy is available in mimeographed reproduction.

With the following exceptions the price of each lesson set is $20.00. The three Matthew sets and three Deuteronomy sets as well as Key Truths of Occult Philosophy and Chaldean Initiation are each $30.00. The Codex Occultus is $38.00. The five sets of acolyte discipline are available only as a unit for $400.00. The lesson sets may be bound in paper covers or left unbound. Please specify your preference when ordering. Sabian students may purchase sets for their own use at a 25% discount.

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