‘Tell me one last thing,’ said Harry. ‘Is this real? Or has this been happening inside my head?’
Dumbledore beamed at him, and his voice sounded loud and strong in Harry’s ears even though the bright mist was descending again, obscuring his figure.
‘Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?’
~JK Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
The Dweller of the Threshold or Guardian at the Threshold is well known among those who walk one of the many threads of the Esoteric way. As we shall see in this exploration of perceptions of the Dweller from different esoteric practitioners over the last century and half, the Dweller is a kind of multidimensional Spirit made up of the results of our own choices, our worst nightmares, our traumas and, perhaps at the same time, can also be a spirit or spirits that carry the ability to assail a person who is unprepared or unconscious of what he or she is doing on the path of life or the path of initiation. The Dweller is met at the threshold, the Crossroads, most especially when one is soon to transition into higher knowledge or into an entirely new way of life. Its purpose is to test the traveller to discern whether she is ready or not to pass into another level of knowledge and healing work. Although the Dweller is fierce and may take the form of whatever the traveller most fears, its ultimate purpose is protective and instructive: going beyond the threshold before one is ready may result in soul loss or insanity as one’s psyche is not fully prepared to receive the power that the Dweller also gives. In the worst case, if one is not fully prepared to receive what the Dweller has to give yet manages to cross the threshold anyway, such a person may be responsible for further traumatising other people. As we all experience the realm of spirit differently, the Dweller will be individualised to one’s own perception but as with all spiritual work, this does not make it any less real.
What is the Dweller?: Bulwer Lytton, Theosophy, Rudolf Steiner
In 1842 Edward Bulwer Lytton wrote of the Dweller of the Threshold in his Victorian historical novel Zanoni. Although credited by most esoteric practitioners as the one who brought this figure into modern consciousness, Bulwer-Lytton’s Dweller was known long before he figured it in his work. Andras Nagy, creator of the Ancient Wisdom Publications website writes that the Dweller “is a manifested, menacing entity, a sum of all Darkness in a person, accumulated throughout all the lifetimes he or she had lived. The Dweller gets manifested at the time of Initiation when the participant or neophyte is ready to cross the threshold from the mundane world to the Higher Esoteric Arts. The Dweller would do anything to hinder the persons’ crossing, from guile to temptations. The Biblical reference of this phenomenon is the temptation of Jesus by the devil.”
In 1888 William Q. Judge wrote an article for the Theosophical magazine Path, entitled Dweller of the Threshold in which he asked the important question, “WHAT is the Dweller?” He answers that “the Dweller is the combined evil influence that is the result of the wicked thoughts and acts of the age in which any one may live, and it assumes to each student a definite shape at each appearance, being always either of one sort or changing each time. So that with one it may be as Bulwer Lytton pictured it, or with another only a dread horror, or even of any other sort of shape. It is specialized for each student and given its form by the tendencies and natural physical and psychical combinations that belong to his family and nation.” Judge also writes that the further we progress along the path, the more powerfully we stir the Dweller until “the awful Thing has revealed itself; and when that happens, it is not a superstition nor is it disbelieved. It can then never be gotten rid of, but will stay as a constant menace until it is triumphed over and left behind.” From the perspective of meeting the Dweller while one is engaged in deep personal inner healing work, the Dweller can be conceived as the shadow of archetypal psychology who sits waiting for one to reach it. It is an inevitable meeting for anyone engaged in any form of intense psycho-spiritual work, be it of the psychoanalytic grain or a tradition with a more overtly spiritual core, such as shamanism, for the shadow calls to be integrated into the psyche or soul. Retrieving one’s shadow can be a profound experience of soul retrieval. When the practitioner is able to retrieve and fully integrate this soul aspect she is then one step further along the way to truly being able to help others and allow her healing work for them to truly anchor and be a catalyst for change in their lives.
In 1947 Rudolf Steiner, a former Theosophist and founder of Anthroposophy, wrote a book entitled, in English, Knowledge of Higher Worlds in which he dedicated a chapter to the Guardian at the Threshold and another chapter to what he called the greater Guardian at the Threshold. The lesser Guardian, the first one we meet upon our path (in Steiner’s understanding anyway) and which is dealt with in this article, can be properly aligned with the Dweller on the Threshold. As we shall see, according to Steiner it is a manifestation that confronts the student when she achieves access through her spiritual training to a certain threshold of inner work, and in most cases this threshold is a form of profound initiation or transformative life change. Rest assured, no matter what path has chosen us, we will in all cases meet a version of the Dweller if our path is true and our work of the deepest quality.
In Knowledge of Higher Worlds, the Guardian describes itself in the following way and gives the prescription for working with it. Steiner’s transmission here is worth reading slowly and contemplatively for it is a very potent and condensed form of knowledge-medicine:
I am that very being who shaped my body out of thy good and evil achievements. My spectral form is woven out of thine own life’s record. Till now thou hast borne me invisibly within thee, and it was well that this was so; for the wisdom of thy destiny, though concealed from thee, could thus work within thee, so that the hideous stains on my form should be blotted out. Now that I have come forth from within thee, that concealed wisdom, too, has departed from thee. It will pay no further heed to thee; it will leave the work in thy hands alone. I must become a perfect and glorious being, or fall a prey to corruption; and should this occur, I would drag thee also down with me into a dark and corrupt world. If thou wouldst avoid this, then thine own wisdom must become great enough to undertake the task of that other, concealed wisdom, which has departed from thee. As a form visible to thyself I will never for an instant leave thy side, once thou hast crossed my Threshold. And in future, whenever thou dost act or think wrongly thou wilt straightway perceive thy guilt as a hideous, demoniacal distortion of my form. Only when thou hast made good all thy bygone wrongs and hast so purified thyself that all further evil is, for thee, a thing impossible, only then will my being have become transformed into radiant beauty. Then, too, shall I again become united with thee for the welfare of thy future activity.
Yet my Threshold is fashioned out of all the timidity that remains in thee, out of all the dread of the strength needed to take full responsibility for all thy thoughts and actions. As long as there remains in thee a trace of fear of becoming thyself the guide of thine own destiny, just so long will this Threshold lack what still remains to be built into it. And as long as a single stone is found missing, just so long must thou remain standing as though transfixed; or else stumble. Seek not, then, to cross this Threshold until thou dost feel thyself entirely free from fear and ready for the highest responsibility.
In 1977 Hugh Shearman wrote an article for The Theosophist entitled ‘The Dweller on the Threshold’. In the article he conceives of the Dweller not only as a psychological truth but also as a universal law of human experience, i.e. whenever we desire to make a change in our lives, from pledging ourselves to an esoteric school and its teachings to trying to become pregnant, stop drinking coffee or feeding our addictions, we may meet our Dweller at the Threshold. Shearman reminds us that in fairy tales and folklore, the greatest treasure is always guarded by a formidable creature — a dragon, a giant, a hag and in this reminds us that like the main character in the fairy tales, we often have no idea what we are up against when we set out upon a journey. By choosing a different path — and, let’s face it, every journey or choice outside the fixation of habit is a different path — we automatically even if unconsciously begin to stir our own Dwellers. As Shearman tells us, for those who would attempt to cross the threshold, “The dweller that they evoke by trying to cross this threshold is made up of all the elements in their own personalities or characters which are incompatible with their new enterprise or aspiration. If, for example, they have set themselves the goal of becoming peaceful, then every element of conflict and turbulence that is in them is liable to emerge. And often they will not see that this is indeed an element in their own natures. They will look out through that turbulence in themselves and claim that it is really in other people.” Shearman’s warning also speaks to the power behind petitionary prayer: “Be careful what you pray for because you just might get it.” We cannot know what is before us when we take a step toward changing our selves and therefore our lives but we do instinctively know that change itself is what will come and what we are asking of ourselves. The Dweller can help us perceive what it is that needs changing in ourselves or others and may often provide the prescription for how to achieve it.
Shearman advises those who choose ‘the road not taken’ to ally themselves with awareness of this process when the testings show themselves, when the Dweller manifests, and to be honest and humble in meeting it, knowing that this ‘dark night of the soul’ is part of the process of initiation and therefore purification (and really, life itself is the initiation). The warning seems to be that if we choose to begin to awaken to our own choices we are asked to have some consciousness of the great changes they will bring, and as we face the Dweller with eyes wide open we are called to realise that the challenges we face were inherent in the chosen path.
In 2005, Gareth Knight also wrote an article entitled ‘Dweller on the Threshold’. In this article he writes that in her book Isis Unveiled Madame Blavatsky “refers to the Dweller on the Threshold in the plural, as beings, some of them vicious, who surround us and move in the astral waves like fish in the water. Such astral currents can be controlled only by an adept, pure in mind and spirit, who knows how to direct this blind force.” Inasmuch as Steiner’s version of the Dweller on the Threshold recognises that the Dweller(s) is our own creation (in concert with modern psychology), Blavatsky also reminds us that we are not the centre of the cosmos as we might still like to think but that there are many forces in the cosmos which are definitely NOT of our own creation but can certainly assail those who are unprepared to deal with them, who are unconscious of them or remain without some kind of prepatory psycho-spiritual work — a form of initiation into the world of Spirit, therapy or bodywork. She reminds us, quoting directly from Zanoni in fact, “Amid the dwellers on the threshold is one, too, surpassing in malignity and hatred all her tribe; one whose eyes have paralysed the bravest, and whose power increases over the spirit precisely in proportion to its fear.” Gareth Knight reminds us too that these spirits are of nature, nature spirits, “creatures of ethereal matter, irresponsible, neither good nor bad….” One can argue that we are all ’spirits of nature’ but Knight’s point, along with Blavatsky’s, is that sometimes the Dweller we face at the threshold may not be our own. In shamanic thought, these forms can be intrusions we acquire from atmospheres we inhabit, people we meet, places we travel through. They can become mixed in with our fears and worst nightmares and become part of our own Dwellers; getting rid of them requires the help of a trained shamanic practitioner as well as a good deal of self and body knowledge to know when something is not right with us. Even so, as one of my teachers once explained to me, everything is energy (and hence, everything is spirit). When we are ready to cross the threshold, meet the Dweller, struggle with it and obtain the power and knowledge it wishes to give us, fears and intrusions return to their existence as pure energy now freed up and able to serve us in our healing work. Energy becomes available for the desired change to occur. In shamanic epistemology, this energy may take the form of a powerful animal ally or a spirit of the natural world. As Steiner’s Guardian says, ‘I will become united with thee for future activity.’
Knight also tells us that in Chapter 21 of her book The Mystical Qabalah Dion Fortune describes the Dweller as “a horror which confronts every adventurer into the Unseen, although her ensuing analysis of it makes clear that much depends upon our own psychological and philosophical preparation for it. That is to say, our realisation of just exactly what we are doing or seeking to achieve when we seek initiation.” Reminding us again that when the seeker meets the Dweller he or she stands at a crossroads, Dion Fortune recognises that three choices are presented: “One way is to continue to wander in the illusory world of superstition and psychic self deception; the second is to abandon the inner quest and return to more materialist speculations (which include various forms of psychology, whatever the transcendental veneer of some of them); whilst the third way leads to the opening up of higher consciousness in the objective realms of the Unseen”.
I believe that meeting the Dweller on the Threshold is an appointment we all have to meet as we walk the esoteric path. The time is booked into the diary. However, stepping back from this Threshold Guardian and knowing one is not ready is a great gift in itself and there is no shame in this. The appointment will come at its appointed moment. It is important to remember that we ‘cannot push the river.’
I Know You. I Know Your Name.
The Dweller on the Threshold may also be met when we attempt to heal ourselves of the force of trauma in our lives because embedded within the fascia of our traumas are our very worst fears.
For those who have been traumatised by war, famine, genocide, a traumatic and punishing upbringing, or a form of sexual abuse or rape, life may unfold what are simply one series of traumas after another. Even after many years of attempting to heal, the trauma rises up at the many chances we give ourselves to transcend it, to break through it, to leave it behind, and then, at the deciding moment, we come to the Dweller and cannot wrestle with it, cannot break through but fall back again. To say the least, this is a frustrating and sometimes heartbreaking process. We are reminded of Judge’s words above when he writes that the thing “will stay as a constant menace until it is triumphed over and left behind.” And, as Steiner reminds us, we must contend with the Dweller, who is our own creation, until we can transform its darkness into a scintillating light that still retains the wisdom of what was learned in the threshold darkness.
In her book The Masters of Lucid Dreaming, Olga Kharitidi writes of what healers in Samarkand call the ’spirits of trauma’ who can become for a person who has been traumatised another aspect or thread of the Dweller on the Threshold. A character in the book from Samarkand called Vladimir describes the spirits of trauma as ‘live representations’ that live in us. In other words, one’s trauma becomes a possessing spirit that haunts us. Its food is our unconscious choices that we make from our trauma, often when we choose to hurt ourselves or others, recreating the original trauma. Vladimir says, “Whenever something hurts you and you don’t accept it fully as a complete part of your history, you create a gap in your memory; a gap which, when the hurt is strong or repeated many times, becomes occupied by a spirit of trauma” (43).
Vladimir gives three reasons why it is crucial and everyone’s birthright to ‘win in their battle with the spirits of trauma.’ Firstly, healing trauma brings ‘profound healing, reverses unhappiness, and treats disease.’ Secondly, unhealed trauma affects generations before us and after us. And thirdly, unhealed trauma in life will and must be faced by all of us after death in whatever macabre version of hell we can imagine. Vladimir tells his audience, “One thing you need to believe is that, with death, the experiences of time changes radically. To enter death is, in a way, to enter time itself, and there you’d better be ready. There are many accounts of light and bliss, but this is only a beginning. What comes afterward is also described, but it is just not as well publicised. Angry, malicious spirits come next; they come to suck your blood and torture you by all possible means, but they are your own spirits of trauma. They will torture you until you untie the knots in your memory and become free.” The only way to conquer them is to know them, to know their names and through that we are called to know our own stories, consciously enter into the traumatic gaps in our memories in an effort to heal and untie the knots in our memory (45-47).
As Vladimir points out, we are not only healing ourselves by becoming free of our spirits of trauma. By meeting our own Dwellers consciously we heal generations behind us and protect generations before us. We also have the potential to heal the unhealed collective trauma that accumulates in our world and causes us harm in other ways. William Q. Judge understood this when he wrote “the Dweller is the combined evil influence that is the result of the wicked thoughts and acts of the age in which any one may live”. We can perhaps begin to imagine how initiation rituals in the ancient world, which survive now somewhat intact in indigenous cultures, are absolutely crucial because initiation allows us to make our acquaintance with our own Dwellers and thereby be given the ability to release and exorcise our spirits of trauma. As Vladimir says, ‘In traditional cultures, rituals of transition are very important. Before going to another of life’s stages, a person must go through a deep initiation ritual, one that basically cuts off all traumatic knots from the past and clears a path for the future. Modern civilization, as you call it, has lost all its psychological rituals. It doesn’t have the means to clear its members of traumatic memories. Therefore, at some point, these accumulate on the collective level and become very dangerous” (51). It is not much of a leap of the imagination to credit unhealed woundings on a massive level to continued war across the planet, people’s need for Prozac to stupefy themselves into abnormal perceptions of ‘normality’, children with guns engaging in mass murder and so on. Unhealed trauma on a massive level can only lead to violence or death, and it perpetuates itself.
Are you ready?
Both Shearman and Steiner would agree that the test at this threshold is to be able to accept with honesty and humility that every experience one has had has been the result of one’s own choices. To blame others, even perpetrators, for anything, is futile. From this moment forward, one must take responsibility for everything — where one goes, what one eats, one’s inner and outer balance, the people one hangs out with, thoughts and fantasies, the choices toward or away from balanced self-care, the choice toward or away from doing our psycho-spiritual work — everything. From this point forward one must remember that all past circumstances are the results of one’s choices and the outcomes they bring — therefore so are all the choices going forward. As the Guardian warns, one must accept full responsibility at the threshold of the higher work which awaits if one succeeds in crossing it. This knowing can be a bitter pill when we really feel the truth of it. Yet it is crucial to remember that every guardian carries a gift. It is given to each of us to know this gift for ourselves because in this way we heal, in this way we learn, in this way we can begin to help others.
The ultimate reward for successfully meeting the Dweller at the Threshold and obtaining the power and knowledge is has to give, is healing, health and wholeness and the increased potential to be able to help others in whatever way has been given to us to do so.
So, as you perhaps stand at your own threshold facing your own Dweller, you may be asked questions, questions my teachers have asked me: Who are you? Why are you here? What is your sacred dream? Are you ready? Because if you are not ready, it’s already too late. It is time to begin and the only time is now.
