E. A. Koetting and Baron DePrince - The Spider and The Green Butterfly

E.A. Koetting/Baron DePrince
turn against him, would sedate him with whispers of his
false majesty, and would slowly destroy him, first
spiritually and eventually physically.
The Tree -
When Vodoun and Hermeticism met one another, a
great many realizations were brought about concerning the
Loa, the spirits, and the powers of the Vodoun Current.
One of the greatest of these is the Tree of Life and its
Vodoun attributions.
The Tree of Life is known to Kabbalists to be the
hierarchal collective of Divine emanations, separate from
one another yet linked together, like separate branches of
the same tree. Each of the spheres, the Sephirotic
emanations, set in place in spiritual reality, gave formation
to physical counterparts, which are the major spherical
bodies of our solar system. Each spiritual sphere contains
the fullness of an aspect of the Eternal, and through various
methods of Pathworking, the western Magician will travel
to these spheres, will invoke and evoke from them, will
gradually gain their brilliance and power, and will
eventually hold their power in himself.
The Tree of Life, however, has a back side, a dark
side, a secret and unseen side, in which all things are
reversed, all virtues are bane, and all emanations reverse
into an inwards pull. It is from the back side of the Tree
that the secrets of the blackest Magick are discovered, and
from whence the most evil spirits travel through the
crossroads into this world.
The Vodoun Master has walked the 32 steps of the
cross, has traveled to the highest spheres of the Tree, has
found the back door to the other side of the Tree, and has
The Spider and the Green Butterfly
climbed back down it, back to Malkuth, back to his body,
imbued with all of the powers of good and evil,
malevolence and light.
A few visionary authors and researchers, having
traveled to Haiti and studied with Houngans and Bocors
there, have attempted to dissect the Vodoun understanding
of the Tree, attributing different Loa to the spheres and
even creating Tarot decks outlining the entire
Kabalistic/Vodoun system. While many of them are
definitely on the right path, and have discovered quite a
few truths, the actual attributions are kept secret by the
inner cults of Vodoun. These were revealed to me as I
began to walk the 32 steps of the cross, and despite my
many proposals and insistent requests to include these in
this text, such an excursus was denied, the secret needing to
be kept, only to be revealed to the Initiate who is walking
the 32 steps.
The evil Loa take the opposite journey of the
Houngan, climbing the backside of the Tree and coming
into this world through the back doors that have been
opened by Met Kalfu or His disciples.
When I began to work specifically with the Petro
Loa, I noticed that rather than manifesting in the room as a
blanket of power, a presence that would congeal into a
single space, they instead would just as strongly materialize
behind me. In the same moment that I would become
aware of their presence, I would feel them "latch on" to my
back, climbing up my spine until they reached the base of
my skull. It was at this point that I would communicate
with them, although they would remain there until the ritual
was complete. It is impossible to put into words the
frustration this would bring - to have an entity manifest at
my call, but to not be able to communicate with them faceto-face.
While I do not necessarily insist on a full physical
materialization when dealing with any spirit, the above
scenario would leave me feeling as if I was having a