The Three Working Tools of the Kabbalist: Lon Milo DuQuette Previews His EFC 2026 Keynote

Troy: Hello, brother. Brother Lon Milo DuQuette.

Lon: Oh, Brother Troy, the devil man.

Troy: Yes. Thank you. Thank you for using my Gary and Dino applied epithet. I've been chatting, I don't know if you know that, when I visited you at your home in Costa Mesa with my friend Bram, we had been in Burbank summoning one of the Goetic spirits for the Gary and Dino Show. Those were the two guys that worked for Tom Leykis on his radio program in LA for so many years. I've talked to Gary and Dino recently. I'll probably edit this, but I'm talking about interviewing them, as my heroes.

Lon: Oh, right. And is my namesake planning to come on the podcast?

Troy: Oh, very good. Yeah, I'm excited about that. I don't know when I'm getting back to Southern California, or California at all. I'd like to be there next spring for the reappearance of Lamed Ben Clifford, who, rumour has it, is going to come out of his retirement cloister.

Lon: Where do unorthodox rabbis go when they go to hide? They go to another dimension. So you can't really say he's dead, but you can't really say that... Well, let's just say he will appear. Or he's at least agreed to appear. At least he's told me that in fitful, anxiety-ridden nightmares lately.

Troy: So is that something about a man who jumps the path? The Kwisatz Haderach. Where he's in two places at once, or in no places at any time.

Lon: He could be at any time. And two times in one place.

Troy: It's a joy and a pleasure to see you, brother. I've been working like crazy over here to get the Esotericism in Freemasonry Conference put together, such as it does. And you have agreed to come in person, and we're over the moon excited that you're coming.

Lon: Well, thank you for all your help in getting there.

Troy: It'll be super great to have you there. Do you want to talk a little bit about what your presentation is going to look like? The book's been out a while. We already interviewed you here about the book specifically. You want to talk a little bit more about your presentation and how that's going to go down here in a few weeks?

The Three Working Tools

Lon: Well, in Freemasonry, we have our working tools. And our working tools are one of those aspects of the craft, one of the symbols. Literally working tools, and what we build with those tools. Everything from our character and our strength of character and things like that, on one level. But they also have great cosmic and spiritual dimensions to them. And we get a little hint at what those might be in our degree lectures or initiation lectures and such. But it's just kind of enough to give us a taste for further investigation, if we would want to.

I mean, something as simple as the compasses. Dealing with arcs and circumferences and centres. It really leads you down a path if you start to logically dissect the wondrous significance. I can't say meaning, because when you define a symbol, it stops being a symbol. Because a symbol is an open-ended thing. Potentially it means everything.

But anyway, when you look at something as familiar to us as certain lectures that are given us right during the initiation ceremony itself, just taking that as a hint of how you could explore more of that eventually takes you down lines that go deeper into the mysteries. Just one thing, Pythagoras, for one. But more specifically, what we kind of know today, or refer to today, as Hermetic Kabbalah.

My talk in Seattle is going to be the three working tools of the Kabbalah. And I'm not going to presume to dissect the square and the compasses and the tools of a Mason, the balances and the plumb line and all of that stuff. Not directly, because they, in a sense, are broad symbols for these Kabbalistic working tools. And there's three of them that I'm going to talk about, and I'm going to treat them as working tools, to literally build our own great spiritual temple where the Kabbalah is concerned.

Those three working tools are: the divine name, which is called the Tetragrammaton. It's a four-letter Hebrew word using three letters. Kind of a wonderful mystery right there. And then the familiar diagram called the Tree of Life. We could do everything with the Tree of Life, including projecting it on the floor of our lodge room. But the Tree of Life and the Tetragrammaton, those two working together, even lead us to the third working tool of the Kabbalist, and that is the cube of space.

Even just a superficial understanding or meditation on those three working tools, in a sense, readjusts ourselves. I call it Kabbalistic study. I say it's like a cosmic lube job. It's like we've got really all of the equipment, the spiritual equipment, to use these tools properly for our own awakening, our own enlightenment, the building of our own temples. But our machinery isn't lubricated enough. And just like an apprentice is given tools to work with, at first he drops them on his foot and cuts himself with them. He has to work with them for a while to get to know them. And the same thing with these three working tools.

And of course, my talk is accompanied by my own primitive, almost stick-man animations, and primitive PowerPoint gags and such. And if I'm allowed to get through the whole thing, at the very least the brothers will feel lubricated.

Troy: I'm going to put that as a subtitle on the ticket. "You will be lubricated."

Is This What Lodge Should Be Teaching?

Troy: Okay, so here's some canned questions that I got for you. You're going to be speaking to a room full of Freemasons, and you're going to be using language that Freemasons might recognize. Is this what you're bringing? Is this stuff that the lodge should be teaching them already, or is this really remarkable niche stuff that you're going to be talking about?

Lon: Well, is that both? No, in my opinion, yes. This would be a wonderful thing for lodge to share. As a matter of fact, my Scottish Rite bodies in Long Beach, when I was living down there, I gave the pre-degree classes. Certain degrees, Kabbalah's mentioned right and left. Before those degrees, they have a classroom lecture, and I've done the Kabbalah classroom lectures, and I delivered them the same way I deliver everything: with crude drawings, with awe and reverence, and no crude or vulgar jokes at all. Not even one. And they liked it enough for me to come back for every reunion. That was nice. And that was in the olden days, before the pandemic. I guess I joined in 1999. So that's been a long time ago.

Anyway, so yes, I think it would be appropriate. But you and I both know that every year the character of a Blue Lodge changes with the mastership. And Grand Lodges, the character and the focus of things change with the installation of a new Grand Master of a jurisdiction. And sometimes there is still resistance to more esoteric... their focus is not as esoteric as you and I would like it to be.

Troy: Yes. And they'll come out and say, there's no esotericism. There's zero.

Lon: Oh yeah, I've heard that.

Troy: There's none in Freemasonry. We quietly ignore it and move on.

Lon: I'm a big tent.

Troy: Well, that's what I keep saying to people. It's a big tent. And just because that's not your Freemasonry. I had somebody online trying to point out, I was giving a review of Wäges' Élus Coëns book and talking about it being Freemasonry, and the guy was like, "Oh, there's no theurgy in Freemasonry." It's like, well, not in the craft lodge, no. But you can't have it both ways. You can't have every concordant body and every attached jewel of all these concordant bodies and associate orders call themselves Freemasonry, and say they're Freemasonry only for Freemasons, and then say, well, none of that...

I had quite a ranking member in this jurisdiction, famously, when the Science card came up in his tarot reading, I'm like, "Well, a Freemason recognized me." He's like, "That's not Freemasonry." It's like, right, it's not in the three craft degrees, but you can't claim all of this stuff, from every esoteric everything, to be Freemasonry. It'd be part of these concordant bodies. They're famous for that. It's just, let's take all this stuff and then say nobody else could do it, because we own all this and it's ours. But none of that's Freemasonry. I don't know, that's just my particular hobby horse. Let's not digress too far.

Lon: No. You know, they say Masonry makes a good man better. And I think that's absolutely true. And it is a big tent. And even if the man isn't as good as we would like him to be, I think he would be worse if he were not a Freemason.

Troy: So the magic works whether you want it to or not.

Lon: Yeah, I think it makes you better no matter what.

Troy: I would agree with that. And again, I didn't expect to love it like I did, and I do.

The Perfect Ashlar Has to Work

Troy: I'm not unfamiliar with your approach to tarot. I've been studying it with you at various points and reading your books. Oh, it's more than 20 years. It's closing in on 25 years, I would expect. And I quite enjoy this approach with The Tarot Architect, taking it and explaining it a little ways different. Do you want to take a stab at how this approach differs from the approach you've been teaching for years, this new approach called The Tarot Architect, approaching it through the Masonic perspective?

Lon: Well, if you've never thought about this before, then I'm going to hang up my headphones and be done for the day. No, it's not different. It's an elaboration. It's an exegesis on... I just wanted to use that word all day.

Troy: Was that your ten-dollar word of the day? Ding ding ding ding.

Lon: But it just became absolutely obvious that from the very, very beginning, when we talk about the rough ashlar and the perfect ashlar, both of them are stones. But one of them's got a lot of rough edges knocked off, and it's hewed and it's trued to, we could even say, mathematical perfection. And that stone is a building block, an essential part of the great temple of our universe. And we could stick our necks out and say, and that universe is our soul.

It's one block, one brick, in the universal temple. And in order for it to be a worthy brick, playing its part well, it has to be a perfect working miniature model of the whole thing. And I mean the whole thing. And you can say Great Architect of the Universe, you could say the supreme singularity. But it's not going to be a worthy brick, it's not going to do its job, the job that it really, really is here to be and to do, unless it is perfectly trued, squared, proportioned. And the idea of understanding what the dimensions of the blueprint are, so we can be that perfect reflection, that perfect brick, is so easily, almost painlessly, outlined in this basic Kabbalistic understanding of those three working tools.

And so I decided to look at it from the Mason's point of view. What we can say is a perfect ashlar, but it's got to do more than look like it's perfect. It's got to be able to do what it's supposed to do in the universe. Just like you and me wouldn't even be here talking to each other, breathing air in, we wouldn't even be here as a monad of existence, if there wasn't something that we must do that only we can do. We wouldn't be here unless we were, potentially, that important brick. As a matter of fact, we already are that important brick, but we're just asleep to the fact that we are that. We're not awake enough.

And the process of truing that stone, with an understanding of how we're a representation of great cosmic principles, just understanding a little bit, wrapping our brains around these concepts just a little bit, is already attuning us.

The Giant Tuning Fork

Lon: If I would take this from the point of view of a musician instead of a Mason, I would say that existence itself, the Great Architect of the Universe, I would see as a giant tuning fork. You know what a tuning fork is, like when you tune a piano. You hit it and it vibrates, and it vibrates at a certain note, a frequency of vibration. Now, what's holding the entire universe together, including transdimensional things, is like a giant tuning fork vibration. It's holding everything together.

Our job to true that stone is to make ourselves a perfect miniature version of that tuning fork, proportioned in exactly the same way. As if the great big vibration, the giant tuning fork, is a B flat. All we have to do is make ourselves a little B flat. A perfect B flat tuning fork. And we don't have to do anything. If we're perfect, we vibrate in sympathy with that B flat. So we've got a huge machine, and we're going.

And so, in a sense, the Temple of Solomon is the perfect example. We don't have to believe that it happened historically or anything else. The idea is Solomon was asked to make a house that was a perfect miniature working model of the big tuning fork. Am I making sense?

Troy: I got you.

Lon: And so how do you put God into a house? You make the house a perfect miniature working model of God, and the sympathetic vibration happens automatically. That's how you bring the vibratory essence of the singularity into a house, into a chamber, into a box.

And so the tarot cards are, in a sense, the flashcards of the Kabbalah. Particularly the cosmos as described just in the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet and the four suits. The four suits are like Yod, Heh, Vav, Heh. Then all of their little miniature Yod Heh Vav Hehs in each suit. It's easier just to take these, almost like playing cards, and lay them out and say, oh, see here, see here, see here. And these four live inside there, and these nine live inside these three. It's a whole lot easier just to use the tarot as the flashcards of the Kabbalah.

And the whole idea is to just get us vibrating, to tune up, to lubricate ourselves.

Troy: You will be lubricated.

Lon: You will be lubricated. And oiled up. Because we already have our tuning forks, but they're all dirty and rusted and caked in stuff. We need the great giant WD-40, and that's probably a galactic...

Troy: Galactic WD-40. Yes, yes, my brother. As a party trick at events like this, I will often bring my large-format Thoth deck and lay it out on a table as the Tree of Life. And I've got numbers of pictures of when I've done this. And lots of guys are like, "Whoa, I've never seen..." It's just like, really? You've never seen this? Come on. But to me, I've been steeped in this stuff for 20 years and I just really enjoy doing it. Should guys bring their tarot decks?

Lon: Oh, that would be great if they did. And any tarot deck that they like, as long as it's a normal 78-card deck.

Troy: And should they bring various Lon Milo DuQuette books that they've bought, so you could depreciate them by signing them?

Lon: Oh, yes, they can bring their rare unsigned editions along with them. And if they don't have enough of them, they can buy a few more, and bring those along too.

Eight Dollars a Speaker

Troy: In a recent podcast, I can't remember which, I brought up the scene in White Christmas where Danny Kaye is bragging about his co-star, and he says, "Well, in New York you'd pay six-sixty or eight-eighty to see somebody with Captain Wallace's skill." What would you say, brother, as we're winding up here, to somebody who's on the fence about buying a ticket? Tickets are only fifty bucks.

Lon: Oh my gosh.

Troy: I know, right? And it includes lunch. The fried chicken for lunch would be ten bucks. So that means that they're paying eight dollars for you, Doug Russell, Dago Rodriguez, Ike Baker, and who did I miss? Oh, damn. No, that was all of you. Eight dollars apiece to see you guys. Which is the price that Danny Kaye exclaims you could see Bing Crosby for in New York in the fifties. Now that I've totally ruined it with an example that predates anybody's memory, what would you say to push people off the fence to buy a ticket? And again, the old sawhorse of "you don't have to come, just buy a ticket and frame it and put it on the wall," I've already used that one. What would you say to push a brother off the fence, or even a non-brother? We've got people coming as invited guests. To buy a ticket and then perhaps, on the nineteenth of September, show up in Ballard, Washington and enjoy some fraternal tarot shenanigans.

Lon: Well, I would say, how much would you pay for a... Don't answer now.

Troy: Now you're invoking Ron Popeil here. There's more.

Lon: Now wait, there's more. Yes, there's more. I would say I'm 78 years old. How many other opportunities will you get to be able to tell your grandchildren, "I was with King Harry at the battle of..." "He who lives through this day alive will nightly feast his neighbours on Saint Crispin's Day."

Troy: This is Shakespeare. Now you're invoking Shakespeare.

Lon: And roll up your sleeves and show your scars, and say, "These scars I had with Lon and devil man Troy."

Troy: Troy the devil man. That's right. There won't be any scarification, I don't think. Hopefully not. I know we're going to go to a bar after, but it's usually pretty good-natured folks in that neighbourhood of Seattle. We shouldn't get into any fisticuffs at the pub.

Lon: I don't drink anymore.

Troy: Me neither, and neither does Ike Baker. So we will be having the sober table in the corner.

Lon: But I do overeat.

Troy: Well, that we can help you with. Seattle has excellent dining options. You will be presenting, I believe, in the morning, so your fried chicken lunch will be the beginning of your downward slope that day. It's a local place, Cookie's fried chicken. I can tell you last year it was amazing. Worth the price of admission just for the lunch.

Lon: Well, good. I'm looking forward to it.

Books Coming: Young Aleister Crowley, The Chicken Qabalah, Homemade Magick

Troy: What else you got coming up that you want to promote? Anything happening this fall other than this particular appearance?

Lon: Oh, I've got books coming out. Back in June, on June 6th of '26, my novel, the novel I wrote with Jim Brickowski, the filmmaker, Young Aleister Crowley, that's just come out recently, and we're working hard not only promoting that but trying to pull together maybe some film interest in the thing. But it's really fun, and I'm really getting a kick out of it, because all my books are usually sold in a pretty narrow market of esoteric books.

Troy: No kidding.

Lon: But Young Aleister Crowley purposefully was written for a much broader audience who might not be as deeply interested in the technical thing. And it is doing very well in the teen and young adult metaphysical and spiritual fiction, fantasy fiction.

Troy: And you can get it on audio edition, which I got. The audio edition is so good. I'm on my third time through, I think. The performer is fantastic. It's like listening to an old radio show. Almost like a radio play. That's what we discussed the last time we talked about this.

Lon: It's still the number one new release. It came out in June. It's still the number one new release in the teen and young adult fantasy market.

Troy: That's crazy. That's excellent. That's when the esotericism got to me, when I was a young teenager and playing too much Dungeons and Dragons and listening to too much heavy metal music.

Lon: Well, I didn't try to make it lightweight. As a matter of fact, many of the historical characters and events, Crowley really did. And the characters interacted the way they did. And some of them are just obviously wild. But I think Crowley would have liked it. I just think Crowley would have liked it. And I'm happy that it's been received as well as it is.

The Chicken Qabalah is coming out in a brand new edition, I think the first week in December. An expanded and updated version.

Troy: Or is this the expurgated version?

Lon: No, no, it didn't make it shorter. As a matter of fact, there's wonderful new material. New rabbi material surfaces, since he disappeared back in the eighties or whatever it was. His landlady's son came up with one of his deathbed lectures. And it's in there. And the Jehovah talisman. Nobody knows, but he had a whole class on making a Jehovah talisman. Jehovah in your shoe kind of thing. So there's good stuff. And it's now 25 years old. Can you believe it?

Troy: Yes, I can believe it.

Lon: And Weiser has kindly made it one of the Weiser Classics series, along with The Magick of Aleister Crowley.

Troy: Look at you. You're like a living legend. A legend in your own time.

Lon: In my own mind. Well, that too. But anyway, so that's coming up. In October, the brand new expanded edition of Homemade Magick is coming out on Red Feather, Schiffer.

Troy: You're doing that again?

Lon: Yes. Llewellyn let that go out of print. And Llewellyn also let Accidental Christ go out of print, and Red Feather, Schiffer, is picking that up too, and it's been redone too. That will be, I think, spring of 2027. But I think we'll see the new Homemade Magick, which is one of my favourite books, because it's sort of like My Life with the Spirits part two.

Troy: And does that have the formula for how not to burn down your backyard with a flaming bowl of alcohol? Didn't Connie write that chapter?

Lon: Well, I was making a black wax Round Table of Nalvage, the Enochian Round Table of Nalvage. And the wax spilled onto the oven floor and then set on the pilot light. And it became an eternal flame. It's funny now, but I'm sure at the time, not amusing. I'm not allowed near this oven anymore. And it was okay, because the landlord bulldozed the house a few weeks later.

Troy: Oh, man. What did he have to say about that? Impressed or unimpressed?

Lon: He got a kick out of that. You know, I wrote a group chant for the Round Table of Nalvage, with two voices. And if you do that chant for about five minutes, you get so stoned that the idea of talking with Nalvage doesn't seem far-fetched at all.

Joshua Tree, and Fifteen Days to Seattle

Troy: Brother, I promised you we'd wrap up quick. Do you want to drop one more time a hint about your spring event? I imagine there's still tickets available for next spring at Joshua Tree.

Lon: Oh, God, yes, please. You don't have to go, but buy a ticket. Buy two. They're small. Oh, it'll be fun to go, because Joshua Tree, just all by itself, is a life-changing religious experience. All you have to do is just Google Magical Retreats, and if you want, you can put Joshua Tree or Lon Milo DuQuette, and you'll go right to it, and read all about it. And if you read about it, you'll want to go. It's three days in the most magical place on earth that I've ever been.

Troy: Very cool. Well, brother, thank you for doing this. To remind everybody that you're coming to EFC 2026, where we will have a whole stack of your books at the book table, and we won't make you read them, won't make the person who buys them read them. We'd suggest that you get them signed in person. I don't know how I'm going to get my new Chicken Qabalah defaced like all of my other ones that are out in the world, with your personalizing on the beginning. But I will at some point get down to see you and get you to personalize that.

Lon: I'd be happy to do that.

Troy: Much love and light to you and Connie and all our other brethren down in Sacramento.

Lon: Well, thank you very much, and looking forward to seeing you in just a couple of weeks, right?

Troy: Yes. It's like fifteen days and hours from this very moment.

Lon: I've already lined up my ride to the airport, and Constance is helping me iron a few clothes. She's coming to handle you personally. She will not cross the border for anything less.

Troy: And she means it, because she hasn't been to the last couple of these. We miss her terribly, but she's coming.

Lon: Just to hold your hand the whole time.

Troy: Well, thank you very much. I know I'll be taken care of.

Lon: So yes, you'll have your very own body man. Who's not a man. It's a woman. I'm a lucky guy. Again, thanks so much. We'll talk again soon.

Troy: All right.