The Secrets, Printed

The Golden Dawn is the four-volume work in which Israel Regardie published, between 1937 and 1940, the previously secret rituals, knowledge lectures and practical instructions of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the grade ceremonies, the Kabbalistic and tarot teaching, geomancy, and the methods of skrying and ritual magic of the most influential magical order of the modern West.

Regardie, who had been Crowley's secretary and later an initiate of a Golden Dawn successor order, justified the disclosure on the ground that the order had already broken apart and its material was decaying in private hands, and that it was better preserved and made available than lost; the decision was, and remains, controversial among those who hold that oath-bound material should not be printed. Whatever the ethics, the effect was decisive: it put the complete working system of the Golden Dawn into public circulation, and virtually all subsequent Western ceremonial magic descends from, or reacts to, this publication. Aleister Crowley had set the precedent two decades earlier by publishing order documents in his journal The Equinox.