Imagination · “Feel It Real”
Inner Temple & Astral Doorway
Build, through a fixed symbolic ‘doorway’ (e.g. a tattva or Tarot Trump), one stable inner location — a temple, stone circle, or sacred place — that can be entered the same way each time, returned to for inner work, and used as a secure base from which to pathwork.
Inner temple / astral doorway: Fix one doorway (a tattva or Tarot Trump) and always use it. Relax, step through, and build one location — temple, stone circle, sacred place — in vivid detail. Use it: rest, meet a guide, set intention, or pathwork out and back. Return through the same door and close it. Revisit regularly to stabilise it; record each visit and ground. Same door, rebuilt each time, held by your own mind.
What it is
Alongside the one-off journey, Ashcroft-Nowicki teaches the construction of a stable inner location — a temple, a stone circle, a sacred place — that you build once in vivid detail and thereafter return to the same way every time.
The threshold is a fixed doorway: in Inner Landscapes every guided journey uses a Major Arcana Trump (from the Servants of the Light Tarot) as its door and is “all linked by the central location of a stone circle which is reached by pathworking”; in The Ritual Magic Workbook the student spends months “constructing and consecrating a temple” and “exploring the Inner World.” The point is permanence: where a pathworking is a journey through, the inner temple is a place you keep.
It becomes a tranquil, secure retreat and the stable base from which further pathworking sets out — an inner room that, by repetition, grows more solid and easier to reach with each visit.
The Method
A faithful working method drawn from her published instruction:
- Choose the doorway. Fix one symbolic threshold you will always use — a tattva (a coloured elemental symbol) or a Tarot Trump standing as a door. The same door, every time, is what makes the return reliable.
- Relax and still the mind. Settle the body, quiet the breath, and bring attention inward until the inner imagery is clear and receptive.
- Pass through the door. See the doorway vividly, open it, and step through the threshold — the deliberate move from outer to inner awareness.
- Build the location, detail by detail. On the far side, construct the place: floor, walls or stones, light, an altar or centre, the quality of the air. Build it slowly and with as many senses as possible. On the first visits you are making it; later visits you simply arrive.
- Do the inner work. Once the place is established, use it — rest in it as a retreat, meet a guide or inner figure, set an intention, or use it as the launch point for a pathworking journey out and back.
- Return through the same door. Leave by the threshold you entered, closing it behind you. The fixed exit seals the working.
- Rebuild and record. Return regularly; each visit reconstructs the same location, which steadily stabilises it. Record each visit in a journal, and ground afterwards. (Sourcing note: a faithful synthesis of Ashcroft-Nowicki’s teaching of a kept inner location entered by a fixed Tarot/tattva doorway — the stone-circle hub of Inner Landscapes and the consecrated inner temple of The Ritual Magic Workbook. The same-door, rebuild-each-time, return-and-record structure is her standard method.)
Source & Lineage
The kept inner location and its Tarot doorways are developed in Inner Landscapes (1989) — journeys linked by a central stone circle reached by pathworking — and the consecrated inner temple is the year-long spine of The Ritual Magic Workbook (1986); both rest on the pathworking theory of The Shining Paths and Highways of the Mind.
The doorway-as-threshold derives from the Golden Dawn’s tattva/skrying method and the SOL lineage of W.E. Butler and Dion Fortune. It is the stable-base complement to her own scripted journey.
Common refinements
Changing the doorway. The same threshold every time is what makes the location stable and quick to reach; varying it weakens the link.
- Rushing the build. Construct the place slowly and concretely on early visits; a vaguely sketched location won’t hold.
- Never revisiting. Stability comes from repetition — visit regularly, not once.
- No clear exit. Always leave by the same door and close it; don’t drift out or leave the working open.
- Forcing vividness. Let detail accumulate over visits; work with felt sense where the visual is faint.
- Skipping the journal. Recording each visit anchors the location and tracks how it develops.