How We Rebuilt the School and the Help We Had

An honest account of the year just past — the original programme it all grew from, the Arcana courses drawn out of it, the four new doorways, and the part that artificial intelligence played in the work.

For a while, Helios was quieter than it should have been. The teaching was sound and the lineage intact, but the school as a thing you could actually walk into — a clear set of doors, a path whose shape you could see — had drifted out of focus. This past year, a small group of us set out to rebuild it properly. What follows is an account of how we did that, because we would rather you heard it from us than guessed at it.

What we started with

We did not begin from nothing. At the heart of Helios is the original First Degree — a three-year intensive programme I wrote between 2009 and 2012, built entirely on the Qabalah, NLP and the Tarot. It ran for years, and the people who came through it gave us something you cannot buy: honest feedback, cohort after cohort, on what truly landed and what did not. Almost everything we teach today grew out of that programme, and out of what those students taught us about it.

There was a great deal of other material besides, gathered in the way these things do — some of it finished, much of it raw. Egyptian Arcana is a good example. In its first life it was not a course at all but a series of live online classes, recorded as they happened: real teaching, but captured rather than designed, with all the digressions and unevenness of anything taught in the moment. The substance was there. The form was not.

The work of the year

So the work was, in large part, a work of structure. Out of that original programme and the material around it — refined by all the feedback the years had gathered — we drew the five Arcana courses: Hermetic, Tarot, Inner, Egyptian, and the more advanced Quantum, each rebuilt into a structured, self-paced course with a clear beginning, middle and end.

Alongside them we wrote something new: a twelve-month First Degree, Keepers of the Flame, carrying a student through twelve modules and a full cohort year, from foundations to the threshold of initiation — in a matter of months. Anyone who has built a serious course of study will know that is not the usual pace.

And we made four short doorways, seven days each, one into every strand of the school. First Light for the Egyptian Mysteries, The Living Card for the Tarot, The Hermetic Key for the Hermetic path, The Clear Mirror for the inner work. We have been asked “where do I begin?” more often than any other question, and these are our first honest answer — a small but real piece of the work, for about the price of a hardback.

It was, by any measure, an enormous amount of work.

Who “we” means

I have written “we” throughout, and I should say plainly who that is — because this was the work of four people, not one.

Lynn Robinson co-authored the new First Degree with me, and brought a deep grounding in NLP and a great deal of steady, patient support to the whole undertaking. Uwe Kreis gave a constant stream of ideas and suggestions, and the kind of moral support that keeps a long and demanding project moving when energy runs low. Ed Vale offered support and ideas throughout, has written for this Journal, and is now co-authoring the Second Degree with me. Whatever I have called mine in this account is, in truth, ours.

A detour through Dubai

There is a part of this story that began somewhere I did not expect. In early 2023, a former Helios student asked me to join a startup in Dubai, building a phone app that would teach philosophy, Jungian psychology, NLP, ancient history and metaphysics in fifteen minutes a day — the whole of it managed by AI, with a virtual guru named Enki at its centre. It is worth remembering that in March 2023 this was very much the bleeding edge; the tools were changing under our feet from one week to the next.

I wrote the three-year curriculum for that school and began designing its daily lessons. It was hard going — technology that shifted constantly, and the thin capital that startups live on — but I finished the curriculum, and in the summer of 2024 I left to pursue new work with AI back home in the UK.

I do not regret a day of it. What I learned there — about what these tools can and cannot do, and how to keep a human hand firmly on the wheel — is exactly what has shaped the way we use AI in building the new Helios.

The help we had

We did it far faster than four people could otherwise have done, and I want to be plain about how.

We built all of this with the help of artificial intelligence: an AI assistant — Claude — for the structuring, drafting and organising, and AI video for parts of the production. Some of the welcome and teaching videos use a presenter built from my own likeness and voice, made with my consent and noted clearly wherever it appears.

I want to be exact about what that did and did not mean. The AI did not supply the teaching. It has no lineage, no initiation, and no inner life to draw on. The wisdom, the discernment about what belongs in a First Degree and what does not, the shape of a pathworking, the ethics of the work — all of that is ours, and rests on more than thirty years of practice. What the tools did was help us take what we already knew and give it a better structure, more quickly: to organise, to draft scaffolding we then rewrote in our own words, to show us what we had left out, to turn a sprawl of material into something a student can actually walk through.

It is our content and our design. The tools helped us shape and build it. By our own reckoning, they cut the time it took to create the learning by around sixty per cent.

On slowness

There is a fair question here, and I would rather raise it than have it raised for me. We have written before about why the work is slow, and why faster is never the same as a shortcut. Is it not a contradiction, then, to talk of doing all this in months?

I do not think it is, because two quite different kinds of time are involved. The student’s inner work is slow, and must be. Nothing about that has changed, and we would not change it if we could; the soul matures at its own pace, and no tool will hurry it. What became faster was only the building of the container — the writing, structuring and production that go on behind the scenes long before a student ever arrives. Speeding that up did not cheapen the teaching. If anything, it freed our attention to spend where it belongs: on the teaching itself, and on the people doing the work.

Why we are telling you

Some of you will be uneasy at the thought of artificial intelligence anywhere near sacred work. We understand that, and we take it seriously. Our commitment is a simple one: the teaching at Helios is human, held in a living lineage, and the tools serve the teachers — never the other way round. We would far rather tell you plainly how the work was made than let it be quietly assumed.

The doors are open now, and there are more of them than there have ever been. Begin wherever you feel called — at a doorway, in a course, or simply by reading on.

Andy

with Lynn Robinson, Uwe Kreis and Ed Vale