Israel Regardie

Regardie served as Crowley's secretary from 1928, fell out with him, was initiated into the Stella Matutina, a Golden Dawn successor, and then, between 1937 and 1940, published its rituals, grade papers and knowledge lectures in four volumes.

This was a straightforward breach of his oath of secrecy and was received as such; he was denounced, and the order effectively did not survive it. His defence was that the surviving temples were moribund and the material would be lost with them, and that a system this good had no business dying of secrecy. He was largely right on the facts. Every Golden Dawn revival of the last eighty years descends from what he printed, and the modern availability of a complete Western ceremonial curriculum is his doing.

The other half of his life's argument was that ceremonial magic and psychotherapy are doing the same work. He trained as a chiropractor, practised as a Reichian therapist, and insisted that nobody should attempt the higher grades without analysis first, that the rituals are instruments of psychological integration and are dangerous to an unintegrated personality. Whether that reading is a rescue of magic or a dissolution of it is still argued, but it is the frame through which most twentieth-century practitioners received the tradition.

Regardie's second career explains what he did with his first. After the break with Crowley and the publication of the Golden Dawn papers, he trained as a chiropractor and lay psychotherapist in America, absorbed Freud and Jung, and above all encountered the work of Wilhelm Reich, undergoing Reichian therapy and incorporating its attention to breath, posture and muscular armouring into everything he later taught.

From that vantage he reread magic as a psychophysical discipline: ritual as a technology for reorganising the practitioner, the Middle Pillar exercise as circulation of energy through an actual body, attainment as integration rather than escape. His One Year Manual condenses the conviction into a daily curriculum. He practised in Los Angeles for decades, and his insistence that students of magic should first undergo psychotherapy, repeated in book after book, came from clinical experience of what unintegrated practitioners did to themselves. The same period made him Crowley's posthumous editor and advocate: The Eye in the Triangle is part biography and part settling of accounts, and his editions returned long unavailable texts to print. He lived to see the revival he had made possible, corresponded generously with a generation of younger occultists, and died in 1985. The oath he broke in 1937 had an unstated corollary he honoured all his life: that a tradition survives by being taught, and is only safe to teach whole.