The Golden Dawn

by Israel Regardie

We adore Thee and we invoke Thee!

  Look with favor upon this Neophyte …

  And grant Thine aid unto the higher aspirations of his Soul.”

  This was merely one of the powerful, poetic invocations spoken in the Neophyte Ceremony, the first probationary initiation into the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, an influential esoteric society of the Victorian era. The purpose for which the Golden Dawn was founded was two-fold. First, through study, education, and organization, the order worked to ensure the survival of the Western Esoteric Tradition, and second, it endeavored to initiate, instruct, and support those individuals who found their calling in the mysticism and ritual, ceremonial magic of the West.

  Until the early decades of the twentieth century, little was understood about the mechanics and methods of ceremonial magic due to the secrecy that had veiled these practices. Unless someone was initiated into a magical organization or found a teacher willing to guide them, the chances for learning these procedures were slim to none. This changed when Israel Regardie published four volumes entitled The Golden Dawn, a collection of ceremonies and teachings from the famous magical order of the same name. The floodgates were opened and the magical world was forever transformed. One would be hard-pressed to find a modern-day magical group that has not borrowed heavily from this very book.

  No organization has had a greater impact on Western ceremonial magic than that of the Golden Dawn. Irish poet William Butler Yeats once credited his work in the order as inspiring his literary accomplishments: “If I had not made magic my constant study I could not have written a single word of my Blake book, nor would ‘The Countess Kathleen’ have ever come to exist. The mystical life is the center of all that I do and all that I think and all that I write.” Author and mystic Arthur Edward Waite was equally impressed with the order’s Adeptus Minor Ritual: “It could not be denied that the culminating Grade, as the system was then developed, had the root matter of a greater scheme than had ever dawned in the consciousness of any maker of Masonic degrees under any Grand Lodge or Chapter, Conclave or Preceptory, in the whole wide world.” Sentiments such as these were not uncommon among the initiates of the Golden Dawn.

  The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was founded in London in 1888 by a group of Qabalists, Rosicrucians, Freemasons, and Theosophists. But it was primarily the brainchild of Dr. William Wynn Westcott, a London coroner and prominent Freemason, who envisioned the concept of an esoteric Order open to both men and women.

  In 1886, Westcott acquired a manuscript written in cipher, which contained coded outlines for the ceremonies and teachings of a magical order. Included with the document was said to be a letter signed by one “Fraulein Sprengel,” a mysterious German adept of an occult order called Die Goldene Dammerung, or “Golden Dawn.” Westcott claimed that he got the papers from Rev. A.F.A. Woodford, but many now doubt this assertion.

  Preeminent Golden Dawn historian Robert A. Gilbert suspects that the Cipher Manuscript was written by Kenneth Mackenzie, author of The Royal Masonic Cyclopaedia and a leading member of the Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia. According to Gilbert the ritual outlines contained therein were created for a Golden Dawn prototype group known as the “Society of Eight” said to be provisionally formed in 1883 by Frederick Holland, another high-grade Mason. Holland’s order never fully manifested, and Westcott acquired the Cipher Manuscript after Mackenzie’s death in 1886. As it so happens, the magical motto of the mysterious Fraulein Sprengel, Sapiens Dominabitur Astris (“the wise person shall be ruled by the stars”), was identical to the motto used by Anna Kingsford of the Hermetic Society. Westcott had been a member of Kingsford’s Hermetic Society and it was Kingsford who probably served as the unsuspecting model for Westcott’s fictitious Fraulein. Regardless, it was the Golden Dawn, not the Society of Eight, which took root and blossomed.

  What was Westcott’s motivation for creating the false narrative? Very likely to attract leading Masons of the time who expected any worthwhile fraternal organization to have a respectable “pedigree.”

  Many such groups have a long tradition of tracing their hereditary roots back to the esoteric societies and mystery religions of earlier times—to the sixteenth century Rosicrucians, the medieval Knights Templar, the ancient Israelites, the Egyptians, the Babylonians, and even the inhabitants of Atlantis lost in the mists of time. While these various legends of ancient initiatory lineages and even “apostolic succession” can provide inspiration, allegorical information, and symbolic knowledge that is of great value to the Initiate, they almost always breakdown under the scrutiny of historical fact. The “myth of origin” for any esoteric group should be valued for nuggets of wisdom, ethical teachings, symbolic meanings, and the values it tries to inculcate within the group. Such legends are romantic and appealing to the magical imagination, but they should never be understood to be historically accurate. The same is true of the Golden Dawn. There is no “line of apostolic succession” that leads directly from Christian Rosencreutz to MacGregor Mathers. Wynn Westcott’s German Rosicrucian Adept, Fraulein Sprengel, was a necessary invention but a fiction nonetheless. Since the original Golden Dawn ceased to exist in 1903, splitting apart into three separate splinter groups, no one in this day and age can possibly claim institutional lineage to the original Order—much less back to the mythological character of Christian Rosencreutz.

  In any event, Westcott secured the aid of two other Masonic Rosicrucians, Dr. William Robert Woodman and Samuel Liddell “MacGregor” Mathers to help develop the rituals and curriculum for his new order, which materialized in February 1888 when the Isis-Urania Temple in London was inaugurated and the Golden Dawn was born.

  The Golden Dawn was never designed to be a religion or to usurp the domain of religion. The Order was conceived as a Hermetic Society of like-minded men and women who were dedicated to the philosophical, spiritual, and psychic evolution of humanity. Students were expected to learn the basics of occult science before proceeding to the next fundamental step—practical magic. Advanced members were expected to practice and become skilled in the high magical arts. It was this aspect of the order that set it apart from purely theoretical study groups of the period such as the Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia, from which the Golden Dawn borrowed much of its structure.

  The practical magic of the Golden Dawn covers many areas: banishings; invocations; purifications; talisman consecrations; divinations; meditations; evocations; spiritual development; skrying and visionary work; elemental, planetary, and zodiacal magic; Qabalistic magic; Enochian magic; assumption of godforms; manipulation of the Astral Light; and more. All of these methods were employed to give the Golden Dawn student a broad, working knowledge of the entire magical process. However, the ultimate objective of magic within the Order’s framework was inner alchemy—the continual purification of the student’s lower personality and the realization of an elevated state of consciousness wherein the magician’s psyche gradually enters into a union with the Higher Self and eventually with the Higher and Divine Genius. This is a process of high magic theurgy or “god-working.” Within the various spiritual traditions this primary goal has been described in many ways: the completion of the Great Work, the Magnum Opus, Enlightenment, Knowledge and Conversation with the Holy Guardian Angel, Samadhi, Illumination, Satori, and Self-Realization. In the Neophyte ceremony of the Golden Dawn it is called “the search for the Quintessence, the Stone of the Philosophers, True Wisdom, Perfect Happiness, the Summum Bonum.”

  A great deal of practical magic also takes place in the initiation ceremonies of the Order. Outwardly such ceremonies were “ritual dramas” wherein the officers reenact specific mythologies essential to the Western Esoteric Tradition. The “drama” of the Neophyte ceremony centers on the Egyptian story of the Weighing of the Soul in the Hall of Judgment. But other initiations and ritual advancements focus on the saga of the Hebrew Tabernacle in the Wilderness, the Babylonian/Hebrew story of Yahweh conquering the sea, and the Biblical account of the Fall of the Kin
gs of Edom. Still other rites emphasize the Kabiric Mysteries of Samothrace in ancient Greece, and in the Adeptus Minor grade, the allegory of Christian Rosencreutz.

  Inwardly, however, these ritual dramas are vitalized with active methods of high magic designed to effect a psycho-spiritual change in the awareness of the candidate. The officers who perform these ceremonies visualize and empower various symbols and correspondences, invoke the associated spiritual forces, manipulate the currents of the Astral Light, and use the faculties of willpower, visualization, and imagination to give the ceremony its magical potency.

  To this day the Golden Dawn system continues to be one of the best, most coherent systems of Western ritual magic ever conceived. The Order’s curriculum has also served as the foundation and springboard for various other magical groups and orders. Not surprisingly, we, like most modern magicians, owe a huge debt of gratitude to Regardie for publishing The Golden Dawn and making this valuable material accessible to all who wish to study and practice it.

  With the publication of The Golden Dawn, as well as an earlier book entitled The Tree of Life, Regardie made the Golden Dawn system of magic available to an eager audience of esoteric students and removed the excessive secrecy that veiled modern theurgy. A letter written to Regardie in 1959 by author Walter Ernest Butler stated what has become a familiar refrain of praise: “Your writings have been of such great help to me over the years … all I can say is that in many ways they altered my whole outlook.” William G. Grey, author of The Ladder of Lights echoed this sentiment a decade later in a similar letter: “You, of all people, wrote actually more into The Ladder of Lights than perhaps I did.” Francis King and Isabel Sutherland probably summed it up best in The Rebirth of Magic: “That the rebirth of occult magic has taken place in the way it has can be very largely attributed to the writings of one man, Dr. Francis Israel Regardie.” Before his death in 1985, “Francis” Israel Regardie was considered by many to be one of the primary custodians of the Golden Dawn tradition.

  Regardie’s entrance into the Stella Matutina, the most viable offshoot of the original Golden Dawn, took place in January of 1933. He made rapid progress through the grades but was terribly disappointed with the dilapidated state of affairs that he found there. Nevertheless, he was profoundly grateful for his experience with the Golden Dawn and a lengthy Freudian analysis—“for both of which I can say in all humility and simplicity—Thank God!” Convinced that the vital teachings of the Order were soon to be lost through neglect, and because he felt strongly that such teachings were “the heritage of every man and woman—their spiritual birthright,” Regardie published much of the rituals and teachings in the four volumes of The Golden Dawn from 1937 to 1940.

  We first became interested in magic back in the early 1970s. At that time, two books were our constant companions: Frances Barrett’s The Magus and Israel Regardie’s The Golden Dawn. Eventually we learned that Barrett had liberally “borrowed” large swaths of his book from Henry Cornelius Agrippa’s magnum opus Three Books of Occult Philosophy (1531), a text that had an enormous influence on the teachings of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. As a result, Barrett’s book began to diminish in importance to us, while Regardie’s book, fully titled The Golden Dawn: The Original Account of the Teachings, Rites, and Ceremonies of the Order of the Golden Dawn, became even more central to our studies. The richness of the Order’s teachings was evident on every page—here was a system of magic that was effective, efficient, harmonious, and elegant. Every piece of the system fit perfectly with every other piece, like a finely-woven tapestry. We knew we had found our true spiritual path.

  However, our search for the actual Golden Dawn led nowhere—the Order seemed to have been dormant for several decades. So we formed our own temple, Isis-Urania, in Columbus, Georgia, in 1977 using Regardie’s The Golden Dawn as our primary sourcebook. Within a couple of years we had initiated fourteen other members. Shortly afterward, we obtained Regardie’s mailing address and began corresponding with him in 1981.

  We first met “Francis” Israel Regardie and became his students in June 1982 when he came to our temple for a week of lectures and initiations. On the day of Corpus Christi (June 24, 1982), Regardie, acting as Chief Adept, consecrated our Vault of the Adepti, the complex ritual chamber required to perform Inner Order initiations. In the days that followed, Regardie performed two Adeptus Minor initiations. After that he assumed the office of Hierophant, consecrated our Neophyte Hall, and performed a Neophyte initiation. This was the one and only time that Regardie ever took on these offices and performed Golden Dawn initiation ceremonies.

  Our friendship and study sessions with Regardie resulted in many long phone conversations as well as several trips to Sedona, Arizona—including a final two-week visit in 1985 only ten days before Regardie’s death. Shortly thereafter, we performed the Requiem Ceremony from The Golden Dawn in his honor, in conjunction with the reading of one of his favorite pieces, “The Prayer of the Sylphs” from the Theoricus Ritual.

  But the important work that Regardie first began by preserving the rituals and teachings of the Golden Dawn for future generations continues to bear fruit today. His book The Golden Dawn remains as one of the greatest gifts ever given to today’s practicing magicians. Within the last few decades, an explosion of interest in the Golden Dawn has resulted in the formation of new Golden Dawn temples and orders—some promote the traditional teachings while others focus upon a mixture of Golden Dawn with other spiritual traditions. New and old avenues for magic and personal growth based on the Order’s teachings continue to be explored and expanded upon within the greater esoteric community. Regardie’s role in this current Golden Dawn renaissance cannot be underestimated. His books have become the instruction manuals for Golden Dawn magicians of the twenty-first century.

  However, students have not always found The Golden Dawn an easy read. Many have yearned for an updated version of Regardie’s text, but the task of revamping this complex classic has been a daunting one. This is precisely why Llewellyn’s seventh edition is such a godsend.

  This new edition of The Golden Dawn is the one that students have been waiting for—a clean edition with typos removed; translation errors fixed; consistent typography, spelling, and fonts; readable rituals with stage directions that make sense; fresh new illustrations; and a new index. John Michael Greer’s knowledge and expertise on this formidable project has proven to be indispensable in this regard. He is to be heartily congratulated for his work on this definitive text. We suspect that this edition will be the standard for decades to come.

  Swiss Psychologist Carl Jung tells us that “synchronicity is an ever present reality for those who have eyes to see.” The most important events in our lives have always been marked by a series of graceful synchronicities or “meaningful coincidences” that seem to defy mundane logic and define the essence of magic itself. Even an ostensibly simple act, like the timely purchase of a copy of Regardie’s The Golden Dawn, has had great meaning for us—it signaled the beginning of our life-long journey into the realm of magic. This book was the catalyst that set our spiritual lives on the path of their orbits. Readers of this new edition of The Golden Dawn may find that the same is true for them.

  —Chic Cicero and Sandra Tabatha Cicero

  Chief Adepts of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn

  Feast of St. Francis of Assisi, October 4, 2015

  Foreword to the Seventh Edition by John Michael Greer

  Every so often in the history of magic, a single book gathers up the occult teachings and practices of an entire era within its pages and becomes a core resource for generations of mages thereafter. On the Mysteries by Iamblichus of Chalcis, which gathered the heritage of classical Pagan magic and transmitted it to the future; Picatrix, which taught generations of medieval wizards the mysteries of Arabic astrological magic; and Three Books of Occult Philosophy by Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, which handed down the magic of the Renaissance to later times—these and books l
ike them have had a profound impact on magical theory and practice down through the centuries.

  The twentieth century also produced such a book, and it’s the one you now hold in your hands. Over the three quarters of a century since it first saw print, Israel Regardie’s The Golden Dawn has become far and away the most influential modern handbook of magical theory and practice. It is a treasure chest of arcane lore that has inspired countless students of magic and found an honored place as an essential textbook in scores of magical lodges and occult schools. It has been translated into many languages and copied (with or without acknowledgment) by hundreds of authors, and the fundamental concepts and practices of magic presented in its pages have been taken up by occult traditions all over the world.

  Like most modern students of magic, I can testify to the importance of The Golden Dawn from personal experience. When I began learning the magical art, back in the middle years of the 1970s, publicly available resources on the subject were scarce, and most books on occult subjects were long on pretentious verbiage and embarrassingly short on actual theory or practice. There were a few welcome exceptions—Francis King and Stephen Skinner’s Techniques of High Magic and Gareth Knight’s two little gems Occult Exercises and Practices and The Practice of Ritual Magic were among the most important in my early studies—but the most significant of all, the book that mattered most to me and many other students of my generation, was The Golden Dawn.

  It took me several years to save up the money to buy my first copy, and longer still to tackle the formidable prospect of working my way through it from cover to cover—from the first Knowledge Lecture in Volume One to the final intricacies of Enochian chess in the last pages of Volume Four. Like most other serious students of Golden Dawn magic, though, that’s what I finally did, and for well over a decade thereafter, The Golden Dawn was the constant companion of my magical training.