These days, good books on magic are much more readily available than they once were. Students of magic have any number of readable, well-organized introductory guides they can buy and study. The prospect of spending ten or twelve years of daily study and practice, slogging through The Golden Dawn page by page, may seem as outdated as writing on clay tablets. Still, for those who have already learned the basics of the magical art, putting in the time that’s needed to master a tradition of magic from top to bottom—from the simplest introductory lessons and exercises straight through to the summits of its philosophy and practice—opens doors that nothing else can.
The Golden Dawn, in turn, is among the very best resources for systematic study and practice along these lines, because it’s not simply the record of one person’s experience and practice. The rituals, essays, and instructional papers that make up The Golden Dawn were written by many people over the course of nearly half a century, and thus embody the experience of an entire magical order and of the traditions from which that order was born. Even those students of magic whose primary work lies elsewhere have much to learn from a careful study of the teachings of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. For those who feel themselves called to the Golden Dawn tradition, on the other hand, it contains enough in the way of magical teachings and techniques to keep the aspiring mage busy for a lifetime.
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Francis Israel Regardie was born in London’s West End slum district in 1907, the child of an impoverished Jewish family, and emigrated to the United States with his parents at the age of fourteen. In his teen years, he enrolled in the Societas Rosicruciana in America (SRIA), one of the many Rosicrucian orders active in America at that time, and reached the rank of Zelator. In 1927, he encountered the writings of Aleister Crowley; he was deeply impressed and wrote to Crowley, met him in Paris a short time later, and found himself hired as the Great Beast’s secretary.
That position lasted until 1931, when Crowley ran out of money. In the meantime, Regardie devoted much of his time to studying magic and occult philosophy, and he published his first two books in the year following his parting with Crowley—A Garden of Pomegranates, a short but useful summary of Cabalistic teaching, and the far more substantial The Tree of Life, which still ranks as one of the best summaries of the basic philosophy and approach of Golden Dawn magic ever penned.
These books won him entrance to the British magical community, and he was initiated into the Hermes Temple of the Stella Matutina, one of the fragments left over from the explosive disintegration of the original Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in 1900–1903. There he rose quickly through the grades of initiation, and he received most of the instructional materials included in this book. He was appalled, however, by what he saw as the ignorance and incompetence of the leading members of Hermes Temple, and he learned, to his dismay, that many of the teaching documents of the original Golden Dawn had been withdrawn from circulation or even destroyed. These unwelcome discoveries convinced him that something drastic had to be done if the teachings of the Golden Dawn were to be saved from extinction. This inspired him to begin collecting as many Golden Dawn documents as he could find, making use of his contacts throughout the British occult scene to fill out the set of rituals and papers he had received as a Hermes Temple initiate.
In 1935, Regardie took all of the Golden Dawn documents in his collection and began the immense task of assembling them into a single book. His efforts to place the project with his British publisher went nowhere—there have been rumors ever since that one or another influential British occultist applied pressure to sink the project—and so he returned to the United States and found an American occult publisher, Aries Press in Chicago, willing to take on the gargantuan project. The Golden Dawn duly appeared in four volumes between 1937 and 1940.
Regardie went on to have a long and distinguished career as an author of occult nonfiction, a therapist in the alternative health care field, and a guide and inspiration to many younger American occultists. Many of his books remain valuable guides to students of magic today. The Golden Dawn, though, remains his most durable legacy, and it will likely remain so for centuries to come. Few authors, in and out of the occult field, have the opportunity to create a work that will be passed down through the ages; The Golden Dawn is such a work.
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The way Regardie arranged the four original volumes of The Golden Dawn may seem puzzling at first, but it comes out of the task he set himself—that of preserving the teachings of an order whose custodians seemed content to let it die in total obscurity. It’s one thing to receive occult teachings and disciplines in a magical lodge that can illustrate them symbolically in ritual, and impress the subtle dimension of those teachings into the new initiate’s mind and spirit, before handing over the knowledge lectures that give the symbols, the practices, and the patterns of subtle energy their resting place in ordinary knowledge. It’s quite another to study those same teachings and disciplines alone, without the benefit of ceremonial initiation, and these two paths define very different ways in which the tradition can best be approached.
This is why, for example, the knowledge lectures of the grades are all given in Volume One, prior to any of the rituals. Encountering the rituals for the first time as a written text, without any grasp of the meaning of the symbolism deployed in them, invites frustration and discouragement. Start instead with the knowledge lectures, study them carefully, take up the basic exercises given in the first knowledge lecture and practice them daily, and by the time you reach the texts of the degree rituals, you’ll be able to figure out what’s going on. In the same way, once the knowledge lectures and degree rituals have been studied, the magical disciplines in Volume Three and the advanced techniques in Volume Four can readily be mastered.
Those readers who are approaching this book as a resource for magical training, outside the purview of a functioning Golden Dawn temple, thus need only proceed through the teachings in the order in which they appear in this book. Start with Regardie’s introduction, which provides a thorough overview of the Order’s teachings and ceremonies, along with a great deal of valuable practical advice on how to approach the Golden Dawn system without the assistance of a temple or the mentorship of adepts.
With that overview in place, proceed to the first knowledge lecture, and learn what it has to teach; not in a casual manner, but thoroughly, because you will be using every detail constantly in your later work. Learn the astrological symbols and the Hebrew letters so that you not only can read them at a glance but can draw them accurately at will and can write the names of the Sephiroth in Hebrew letters without having to look up the spelling.
Special attention should be directed to the two practical techniques given to the Neophyte in the first knowledge lecture—the Lesser Ritual of the Pentagram and the Golden Dawn method of meditation. Students very often slight these two fundamental practices, passing from the Lesser Ritual of the Pentagram to more complicated ceremonies as soon as possible, and ignoring the meditations entirely. That way lies failure, for like any other building, the temple of initiation can never be stronger than its foundation.
The Lesser Ritual of the Pentagram, as given on page 56, practiced twice daily as described in the knowledge lecture—invoking in the morning, banishing in the evening—provides essential training in core skills of magical practice and establishes the elemental symbols and forces in the mind and subtle body of the student. Over time, it also teaches direct perception of the movement of magical energies: a crucial skill, and one too often neglected in magical training nowadays. Practicing day after day, the student becomes aware of the changes that follow when force is invoked or banished, and this awareness broadens to a powerful sense of magical energies at work.
The Golden Dawn method of meditation is equally important to students who are pursuing the work on their own. The method given in the First Meditation on page 55 may seem embarrassingly simple, but like so much of the fundamental work of the order
, it has depths that do not show themselves at a casual glance. The key to those depths, as with the comparable depths of the Lesser Ritual of the Pentagram, is daily practice.
Discursive meditation, to give the method its proper name, is in fact one of the lost keys of Western occultism. Many of the emblems, images, and enigmatic texts of occult tradition are meant to be “unpacked” through daily meditation. The aspiring student of the Golden Dawn tradition is well advised to start with the initial topic of meditation given in the first knowledge lecture, and then go on to meditate on the symbols of astrology, the names of the ten Sephiroth, the words and images of the Lesser Ritual of the Pentagram, and the two pillars of the temple. Upon reaching the second knowledge lecture, after the assigned meditation, the symbols and teachings of the Zelator grade become themes for meditation, and so on.
This is an important part of the work for those who have the opportunity to pursue their studies as a member of a Golden Dawn temple, but it’s far more important for those who are doing the work on their own. Systematic meditation on the symbols and teachings of each grade has the same magical effect as passing through a ceremonial initiation into that grade; either way, the symbols, concepts, and energies of the grade are awakened in what the Golden Dawn teachings call the sphere of sensation—the aura of subtle energies that surrounds the individual—and allow the initiate to come into contact with the magical powers of the cosmos.
The Lesser Ritual of the Pentagram and daily meditation on the knowledge lectures, followed by the ritual of each grade, provide the solitary student with the foundation of practical work for the Outer Order grades. Once the first two volumes of this book have been worked through in this way, the student is well prepared to go on to the two volumes following, and take up the work of ritual magic, skrying in the spirit vision, divination, and the rest of the extraordinary panoply of occult technique provided in the Golden Dawn papers collected here.
This work is essential to those who seek to practice Golden Dawn magic themselves, but it is even more so to those who aspire to teach and initiate others. Golden Dawn temples have been founded using only the material in The Golden Dawn as a basis for working, but in my experience, at least, the founders of successful temples studied and practiced the Golden Dawn teachings thoroughly themselves before trying to share the tradition with anyone else. Just as an unlit match will not light a candle, an initiation ritual performed by officers who have not themselves contacted and integrated the magical energies of the grade being conferred is nothing more than amateur theatrics. Only those who invest the time and effort to learn the teachings, meditate on the symbols, practice the rituals, and awaken the energies of the tradition are in any position to pass on the tradition to others.
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The Golden Dawn, as noted above, originally appeared in four hardbound volumes. The first four Llewellyn editions were straightforward reprints of the original version, in double or a single volume, with a few minor additions to the text. This had the benefit of fidelity to the original work; still, first the edition had its share of errors and misprints, many illustrations were left out to save money, and the graphics that did find their way into print were crudely drawn and not always useful. These were duly reproduced in the editions that followed.
The sixth edition, which appeared in 1989, was a far more ambitious project. The text was scanned and reset, not merely reprinted, and some of the errata in the original edition were finally caught and fixed; a table of contents, a table of diagrams, and a very thorough index compiled by David Godwin were added for the convenience of students; a substantial body of additional forewords, afterwords, explanations, and introductions to the ritual work were written by some of the most active and respected Golden Dawn initiates of that era; and changes were made here and there to correspond to the practice of current Golden Dawn temples.
These real accomplishments, though, were balanced by serious flaws. The illustrations, with all their shortcomings, were carried over unchanged from earlier editions; the missing images were not inserted; and the process of scanning and resetting the text, though it caught some old errors, managed to add new ones. The additional material added to the text, while it was erudite and in places very helpful, tended to confuse specific interpretations of the Golden Dawn tradition with the tradition itself, and made the resulting volume less useful to the many students who approached the work in different ways. Meanwhile, down on the material plane, the sheer volume of text, combined with the publisher’s decision to produce the book in paperback format, required such small type, dense printing, and compressed layout that the sixth edition earned the less-than-affectionate nickname of “the black brick.”
When Llewellyn Publications asked me to take on the project of preparing a seventh edition, we agreed from the beginning that the best strategy was to go back to basics. There are many ways to fill in the general outline of work sketched out by the Golden Dawn papers and Regardie’s editorial notes; rather than inserting one of these approaches—mine or anyone else’s—into The Golden Dawn, it seemed best to let the text speak for itself and to encourage Golden Dawn temples and teachers to do as some have already done and prepare commentaries setting out their specific interpretations of teaching and practice.
More generally, as I researched the various options, it became clear to me that The Golden Dawn deserved to be treated as any other classic work is treated when a new edition is prepared nowadays. As far as possible, along these lines, I have tried to free it from editors’ and printers’ errors, to correct those obvious mistakes that needed to be fixed, to adjust the text to current standards of capitalization and punctuation, and to supply it with the missing illustrations and with more accurate and attractive graphics throughout, so that the original work can communicate itself more completely to its readers. I have also added footnotes where this seemed helpful.
One result of the editorial decisions just indicated may briefly startle readers familiar with older editions of The Golden Dawn. The original Golden Dawn papers were written in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but their authors wanted to make them look much older, and they deliberately used archaic style, grammar, and capitalization to get that effect. The style and grammar have been left unchanged, but modern editions of nineteenth-century books normally prune the exuberant capitalization of that period. Consider the following typical passage, from The Garden of Eden Before the Fall (page 84):
Thus the Rivers form a Cross and on it THE GREAT ADAM, the SON who is to rule the Nations, was extended from TIPHARETH and his arms stretch out to GEBURAH AND GEDULAH, and in MALKUTH is EVE, supporting with her hands the TWO PILLARS.
By bringing the capitalization up to date—
Thus the rivers form a cross and on it the great Adam, the son who is to rule the nations, was extended from Tiphareth, and his arms stretch out to Geburah and Gedulah, and in Malkuth is Eve, supporting with her hands the two pillars.
—nothing is lost, and a great deal of readability is gained.
From the very earliest days of the project, it was clear to me that the task of preparing a corrected edition of The Golden Dawn required more than a single pair of eyes and hands, and I sent out a general letter to the Golden Dawn community asking for assistance. The results went far beyond anything I expected, both in terms of the number of people who responded and the level of assistance they were willing to offer. The response was so great that I was not able to make use of all the help that was offered, especially once it became clear that the best approach to this project would be an improved edition of Regardie’s work rather than a completely new presentation of the original source material he used. I remain grateful to all the many people who sent encouragement and suggestions. Any remaining errors and inadequacies in this new edition, of course, are mine.
I would like to thank the following members of the Golden Dawn community for their contributions to this new edition: Nicholas Chapel, Dirk Cloete, Alfred DeStefano, Nick Far
rell, Adam Forrest, David Griffin, Earl King Jr., Darcy Kuntz, Walter Lavash, Aaron Leitch, Harry Lerwill, Liza Lewelyn, Sean O’Daniels, Samuel Scarborough, Mark Stavish, Patrick Terrell, Clare Vaughn, Peregrin Wildoak, and Nagasiva Yronwode. Particular thanks are due to two contributors from the Golden Dawn community: Uri Raz took on the immense task of compiling a list of typographical and printing errors in the sixth edition, and completed it with aplomb, and James Clark tackled the equally huge project of creating a completely new and corrected set of illustrations for the new edition, and carried it off with equal success.
At Llewellyn Publications, associate publisher Bill Krause offered me this project and was always available for e-mail discussions; senior acquisitions editor Elysia Gallo shepherded it along the journey from first discussions to final edits, and editor Stephanie Finne made the last stages of that journey a good deal easier than I had expected. My thanks go with all.
Finally, a word of acknowledgment is owed to those without whom this project would never have been possible in the first place. To William Wynn Westcott and Samuel Liddell Mathers, who founded the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn; to the adepti and initiates of the original order and its successor groups, who contributed so much to the tradition; to Israel Regardie, who gathered up the results and made sure they would not be lost to the future; to Carl Llewellyn Weschke, who republished The Golden Dawn and kept it in print despite the ups and downs of popular taste; and to all the readers and students of the Golden Dawn, past, present, and future, this new edition is dedicated. May it bring Light in Extension to students of the Mysteries for generations to come.
—John Michael Greer
Introduction to the First Edition by Israel Regardie
It was in the year 1890 that Dr. Franz Hartmann, in an endeavour to provide a simple outline of the vicissitudes of what came to be known as the Rosicrucian Order, wrote a book entitled In the Pronaos of the Temple. The central figure of this history was a monk, Fr. R.C.—described in the earliest Rosicrucian manifesto the Fama Fraternitatis as the “pious, spiritual, and highly-illuminated Father … It is said that he was a German nobleman who had been educated in a convent, and that long before the time of the Reformation he had made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land in company with another brother of this convent, and that while at Damascus they had been initiated by some learned Arabs into the mysteries of the secret science. After remaining three years at Damascus, they went to Fez, in Africa, and there they obtained still more knowledge of magic, and of the relations existing between the macrocosm and microcosm. After having also traveled in Spain, he returned to Germany, where he founded a kind of convent called Sanctus Spiritus, and remained there writing his secret science and continuing his studies. He then accepted as his assistants, at first, three, and afterwards, four more monks from the same convent in which he had been educated, and thus founded the first society of the Rosicrucians. They then laid down the results of their science in books, which are said to be still in existence, and in the hands of some Rosicrucians. It is then said that 120 years after his death, the entrance to his tomb was discovered. A staircase led into a subterranean vault, at the door of which was written, Post annos CXX patebo. There was a light burning in the vault, which, however, became extinct as soon as it was approached. The vault had seven sides and seven angles, each side being five feet wide and eight feet high. The upper part represented the firmament, the floor, the earth, and they were laid out in triangles, while each side was divided into ten squares. In the middle was an altar, bearing a brass plate, upon which were engraved the letters, A.C.R.C., and the words Hoc Universi Compendium vivus mihi Sepulchrum feci. In the midst were four figures surrounded by the words, Nequaquam Vacuum. Legis Jugum. Libertas Evangelii. Dei Gloria Intacta. Below the altar was found the body of Rosenkreutz, intact, and without any signs of putrefaction. In his hand was a book of parchment, with golden letters marked on the cover with a T, and at the end was written, Ex Deo nascimur. In Jesus morimur. Per Spiritum Sanctum reviviscimus.”
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