I started teaching in the late 1990s, and over the years this apprenticeship model has remained the foundation of my practice. It is a traditional model, with an individual teacher and pupil. Sometimes a small cohort approaches for teaching at the same time. If the timing is right, I can teach them some basic theory and practice together and hold small group discussions up to a point. But people learn at different paces. They have their own quirks and special interests, and the one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t really work beyond the absolute basics.

The tradition I teach uses a graded system, with formal examinations and aptitude tests along the way. This teaching is iterative and needs to build on what has come before, so I need to know that students have a firm footing and can do the basics well before I teach them anything more specific and pokey. Having a higher grade doesn’t mean you have any moral superiority. It is more like learning a martial art or a musical instrument.

As well as passing on the theory and techniques of practical Kabbalah and ritual magic, including making and consecrating tools and devising magical operations, teaching is about helping people develop a working relationship with the Spheres of the Tree of Life.

The most important thing people need to learn right at the beginning is how to open up and close down properly. By opening up, I mean entering a vastly expanded, semiotically aroused state of consciousness. Closing down means returning safely to everyday consciousness, with your feet firmly back on the ground. When I’m passing on techniques with practical intensity, I am concerned about aftercare and any subsequent repercussions. Yes, people have to learn from their own mistakes, but some of this stuff can be like dynamite.

The teaching is not just cerebral theory, or even just theory combined with technique. There is also an emotional, moral, and spiritual aspect to it. When we learn to work with and relate to the Spheres of the Tree of Life, we contact and energise those Spheres within ourselves. We then need to balance and integrate them into our being more deeply than before. Otherwise, we can end up lopsided and distorted, and even more inert, idle, dishonest, selfish, and arrogant than we were before we began.

Teaching Kabbalah is not psychotherapy. I’ve worked as a psychotherapist, and it’s quite different. It can, however, be an intimate relationship. There is no expectation that a student will bare their soul to you and tell you all their hopes and dreams, but at some point, if they are doing the work with any conviction, things get a bit real. There is a requirement to be more honest about motivations, rather like peeling away the layers of an onion.

For this reason, the Tradition I teach requires extensive interpersonal contact between teacher and student. That contact is difficult to maintain in a group setting, as the teacher’s attention is divided and each student brings different needs, capacities, and areas of difficulty. Some basic teaching can be done collectively, but the deeper work usually requires a more individual relationship.

After the very first stages, I think my relationship with a student is more like that of a sponsor in a mutual aid group. Instead of presenting myself as some kind of all-wise hierophant, I can be honest that I am just a person who has been as broken and confused as anyone else by life’s challenges. I have found a spiritual tradition that has been very helpful to me, so I will show anyone who is genuinely interested how it works and help them build the spiritual contacts and personal framework they need to sort out their own mess.

So why not charge? It would seem reasonable to take a fee for teaching. If I did, I might be able to devote more time to it. But charging is not in keeping with the spirit of the Tradition in which I was raised. It simply goes against the grain.

That said, I have no objection to charging for items that genuinely cost money to produce, such as books or music. Printing books, recording albums, manufacturing them, and getting them into people’s hands all involve real costs. Teaching, as I understand it, is a different kind of relationship.

There are other good reasons for me not to charge. When we take money, people quite reasonably expect a product in return. That might be a defined package of teaching, such as a certificate of attendance, or a series of achievement badges, as in the Scouts or Guides. I am keen to emphasise from the outset that there are no prizes. The Crown is hollow. Attainment is an illusion, and the only reward for hard work is more of the same. I don’t want to enter into a transaction with students. I just want to help them and teach them.

Any projection of the teacher archetype onto me might help in the very early stages, when someone is building enthusiasm and perhaps seeking approval or secret knowledge, but it needs to fall away quickly as we move into the intermediate stages. In my experience, the stronger the projection of the teacher archetype onto a living teacher, the greater the disappointment and resentment when the student realises what they have been doing. As in a Drama Triangle, the rescuer can seem to turn into the persecutor overnight, while the student becomes the victim. When this happens, the student may simply move on, join another group, and seek another teacher, but there is no opportunity to go further until this projection is overcome.

I also don’t run workshops or weekend experiences. This is not intended as a critique of those who do, as these can be excellent ways for people interested in occult matters to sample different traditions. It is easy to cock a snook at the spiritual marketplace. Of course, there are grifters, as well as eternal joiners who flit from one thing to another without ever getting to grips with the basic ontological and spiritual conundrums of their lives. That doesn’t mean everyone who offers or attends a workshop falls into either category.

I have also made a commitment to teach in the most inclusive way I can, which means not allowing fees to become a barrier for those who cannot afford them. Of course, it is possible to charge and then say that the fee will be waived or reduced if someone cannot afford it. But there is often stigma attached to that, and it can be very difficult to ask for a fee waiver or reduction when you are hard up. I certainly would not have been able to pay for teaching when I started.

Still, there are some inevitable expenses. Practical equipment costs money. It is not extortionate, but certain materials may cost a few quid. Unless activities are confined to spare rooms in people’s houses, there will also be costs such as venue hire and travel. These can be handled in the same way as in any small group, with people chipping in what they can, without anyone having to pay subs.

We started the Rockwax Foundation as a registered charity in 2011 to provide a public face for the teaching offered by me and two other experienced teachers who work closely together within the same Tradition. Charitable status helps with practical matters, such as receiving donations. It also provides a relatively respectable public face and a website. The website has brought in a trickle of enquiries from potential students over the years, serving much the same purpose as a postcard in an occult bookshop did before the internet.

I suspect this is both the strength and the precariousness of this particular way of teaching. There is no great funnel effect, with a large cohort taught through a weekend workshop or correspondence course, followed by more specialist teaching for those who show greater dedication and interest. The numbers are always esoteric, in the sense that they are for the few. But that’s all right. I only have so many spare hours.

I also don’t really want to play shopkeeper or sell teaching. Life is complicated enough. I am happy earning money in more straightforward and reliable ways. I don’t need another part-time job.

The real cost of teaching, of course, is people’s time and dedication. Nobody has to put in the time required for the practical work, meditation, and everything else. But if they don’t, there’s little point in me continuing to teach them, as my time is too valuable to waste on people who are not dedicated. In that sense, there is a cost, but it must be paid willingly. It cannot be paid in advance, only in the present moment, through an ongoing commitment to the Work.

I nearly didn’t write this because I know quite a few serious and responsible teachers who work in a very different way, and I don’t mean to disparage or criticise them. This is not an argument that nobody should charge for spiritual teaching. It is an explanation of why, for me, teaching must always be free and freely given.

For more information on the Rockwax Foundation teaching charity, visit www.rockwax.org.uk.

Part of the problem is that there isn't really one single Zohar. There is the very peculiar Aramaic text itself from the time it was written, the many layers of mystical speculation on its meaning, the commentaries surrounding it, the scholarly interpretations, and then the various attempts by translators to make something comprehensible out of a work that often seems determined to resist easy explanation. Every translation creates a different doorway into the same labyrinth.

My first encounter with the Zohar was in the early 1990s, when I was studying Philosophy and Theology and writing my dissertation on The Continuing Significance of Kabbalah. I wanted to properly understand what Kabbalah was and why it remained important beyond Orthodox Jewish communities, particularly within the Western esoteric tradition.

At that point, I knew little about the history of Kabbalah. I was approaching it with curiosity rather than expertise, reading anything I could get my hands on. The Zohar was evidently one of the central texts because so many later ideas about Kabbalah seemed to lead back to it. The problem was that, at the time, there was not all that much available in English.

I had a copy of S. L. MacGregor Mathers' The Kabbalah Unveiled, which contained translations of several important sections of the Zohar. It was helpful, but it was also several steps removed from the original, having been translated into English from a Latin version rather than directly from the Aramaic.

I also had Gershom Scholem's small anthology Zohar: The Book of Splendour, which offered selected passages and a glimpse into the wider world of the text. They were tantalising glimpses rather than a complete encounter. And perhaps that was appropriate. The Zohar is a text that seems to arrive in fragments. You don't so much master it as gradually become more familiar with its landscape. I should mention that throughout all this, Gershom Scholem's Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism was essential in helping me understand that the Zohar did not exist in isolation. It belonged to a historical world, with particular ideas, influences, and developments.

For my dissertation, I spent time in the private library of the painter Robert Lenkiewicz. He had built up an extraordinary collection of books on philosophy, religion, psychology, and the occult, including rare manuscripts and esoteric works. The first time I visited, he actually locked me in the library while I was working so that he could be sure I wasn't making off with any priceless manuscripts.

While I worked, Lenkiewicz would sometimes come in and tell me stories. At the time, I didn't always realise that these were not just anecdotes but attempts to communicate something about the subject itself. One story has stayed with me. He told me that, as a teenager, he had approached an old rabbi who was reputed to have great knowledge of Kabbalah. Lenkiewicz told me he had immediately launched into an impertinent question about the sephirah Din, or Gevurah. The rabbi responded by forcefully shouting, "No! No! No!" The young Lenkiewicz interpreted this as a refusal to engage with him because of his arrogance. Later, he came to realise the rabbi had deliberately demonstrated the very quality of Gevurah itself: boundaries, limitation, strength, and judgement. Whether the story happened exactly as told is beside the point. It captures something important about Kabbalah: that its ideas are not simply abstract concepts. They are ways of perceiving and engaging with reality.

Lenkiewicz's library was fantastic, but I also needed something substantial I could read at home. That came, via the magic of inter-library loan, through the five-volume translation by Harry Sperling and Maurice Simon. The Sperling and Simon edition was the first time I felt I was really entering the world of the Zohar. It was not the entire Zoharic corpus, but it was a substantial selection and, at the time, one of the most accessible ways into the work. The translation has a particular quality. It is, I think, quite beautiful and poetic, but it also smooths out some of the strangeness of the original. The Zohar can be, by turns, dense, awkward, repetitive, surprising, and downright bizarre. Sperling and Simon often transform that into something more flowing and literary. In some ways, this made the text easier to approach. In other ways, it concealed some of what makes the Zohar so fascinating. I would read passages and then sit with them for hours. A single page could send me down a rabbit hole of symbolism and speculation. I would try to work out what was happening, what the imagery meant, how the different divine attributes related to each other. It felt like trying to crack a nut with an impossibly hard shell.

Eventually, I bought my own copy of the Sperling and Simon Zohar set from Bob Gilbert's Wise Owl Bookshop in Bristol for around £50. That was a huge amount of money for me in the 90s, when I was living very frugally. Bob wanted me to know that this particular 5-volume copy had belonged to someone who "knew their stuff", because it contained pencil annotations throughout. Sadly, I eventually sold it when I was spectacularly skint, although I have subsequently replaced it with another edition.

Another crucial translation for me was Isaiah Tishby's three-volume The Wisdom of the Zohar. Rather than being a complete translation, Tishby's work is a thematic anthology of passages from the Zohar, accompanied by extensive explanatory notes. The danger with mystical texts is that it is very easy to treat them as collections of profound statements detached from their historical and cultural context, which is why commentary is helpful.

Then came the Daniel Matt Pritzker Edition. I had heard excellent things about it from someone who was collecting each volume as they appeared, but the books were expensive, and I couldn't justify buying them one by one. Only after the complete twelve-volume set was completed did I finally take the plunge. The later volumes were completed by other translators, with Daniel Matt as general editor, but the whole edition was an extraordinary achievement. I still couldn't quite justify the cost of the hardback set, which ran to several hundred pounds, so I read them all as eBooks instead. Perhaps one day, when I am in my dotage, I will finally acquire the physical set.

I spent around a year and a half reading through the entire translation carefully, making extensive notes as I went along. It was quite an undertaking. Some sections felt like crossing a desert. They were dense, repetitive, and stubbornly resistant to interpretation. Then, suddenly, there would be a moment of extraordinary brilliance: a shimmering jewel of thought, an unexpected connection, a flash of insight that made the whole journey worthwhile.

Matt's translation is astonishing because it allows the Zohar to be strange again. It captures something easy to lose: the Zohar is not a neat system of mystical doctrines. It is a living, imaginative, sometimes chaotic conversation. The sefirot of the Tree of Life are not a static diagram. They are supernal beings in relationship, constantly shifting and interacting. The divine world of the Zohar is dynamic, and the spheres dance with each other.

Of course, coming back to an old text over several decades also means becoming aware of the troubling aspects. The Zohar contains some breathtakingly offensive passages. I became increasingly aware of its misogynistic elements and of how culturally distant the world of medieval Kabbalists is from my own. According to the Zohar, women are more evil than men because the Serpent filled Eve with its slime. It's tempting either to dismiss old texts because they contain ideas we find unacceptable, or to romanticise them and pretend those problems are not there. Neither approach helps us understand them. The Zohar is a remarkable work of imagination and spiritual creativity, but it is also a product of a particular historical world, and both things can be true.

The strange thing about having come back to the Zohar in different translations over the years is that I don't feel I have finally understood it. If anything, I understand better why it refuses to be understood completely. I am enormously grateful to all the translators who have devoted years of scholarship to bringing this extraordinary body of work into English. Translating the Zohar is not simply a technical exercise. It requires patience, sensitivity, and a willingness to spend years wrestling with something that constantly slips away.

And…having said this, the Zohar is not actually my favourite traditional Kabbalistic work by a long stretch, but more on that another time.