Esoteric Text

The Golden Dawn

Ceremonial Texts

A four volume publication of the previously secret rituals, knowledge lectures, and practical instructions of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. It disclosed the grade ceremonies, Kabbalistic teachings, tarot, geomancy, and skrying methods of the most influential magical order of the modern West. Its release made a complete system of ceremonial magic publicly available.

Facts

Origins

Era of Composition

1937 to 1940 1

Language

English 1

Attributed Author / Compiler

Israel Regardie 1

Discipline

Ceremonial Magick 1

Discipline (class)the subject's own account

Ceremonial Magick 2

Tradition (class)the subject's own account

Ceremonial 2

Text

Literary Form

Liturgical / prayer 1

Attributions

Tradition

Ceremonial 1

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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.

The Rituals, Printed in Full

What Regardie published was the working material: the initiation ceremonies of the grades from Neophyte upward, the Knowledge Lectures the members had to learn for each, the rituals of the pentagram and the hexagram, the consecration of the implements, the system of skrying, the Enochian material, and the tables of correspondence underlying all of it.

The scale of the disclosure is what made it consequential. Before 1937 the Golden Dawn system existed in oath bound manuscripts held by a handful of people in fragmentary and mutually inconsistent copies; after 1940 it existed in four printed volumes that anybody could buy. Effectively every Western ceremonial order founded since works from this text or from something derived from it, and a great many practitioners who have never belonged to any order use its rituals.

Regardie's stated reason was preservation. The order had fractured, its surviving members were elderly, and he judged that the system would be lost. His critics judged that he had broken an oath, and both things are true.

The atlas records the publication as the decisive event in the transmission of Western ceremonial magic, and describes the practice rather than instructing in it.

Connections

Associated With

1937

Israel Regardie began publishing the rituals and knowledge lectures of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in 1937. The atlas dates the four volumes 1937 to 1940.

Source The Magicians of the Golden Dawn: A Documentary History of a Magical Order 1887-1923Ellic Howe

1940

Regardie's four volume publication of the Golden Dawn material was completed in 1940. The atlas dates the set 1937 to 1940.

Source The Magicians of the Golden Dawn: A Documentary History of a Magical Order 1887-1923Ellic Howe

Ceremonial Magick

Attests

Amber

Amber is the King scale colour of Cancer in the Golden Dawn's four Qabalistic colour scales. Where a modern astrological source gives a sign a colour, this lineage is very often the unnamed origin of it.