In this age of Internet flame wars and perpetual games of spiritual one-upmanship, have you ever wondered: What would Christian Rosenkreutz do? When I think of what it means to be a Rosicrucian, one phrase springs instantly to my mind. “To profess nothing, but to cure the sick, and that Read more…
A few years back, Saturday Night Live did a skit called “The Trivial Psychic” wherein Christopher Walken revived the same character he played in the movie The Dead Zone. But in addition to being a reluctant psychic, he got visions of things that were small and unimportant: he couldn’t tell Read more…
It is useful to remember that most books, even sacred books, contain errors. As magicians we are taught to examine everything with a discriminating eye. So we should not be surprised to find mistakes that have crept into treasured magical grimoires — mistakes that have also found their way into Read more…
“Seven is the height above, seven is the depth beneath.” Apocalyptic movies starring Christopher Walken notwithstanding, the number seven is very important in esoteric lore. Hippocrates tells us: “The number seven, because of its occult virtues, tends to bring all things into being. It is the dispenser of life and the source Read more…
What is it about the practice of magic that makes fundamentalists condemn it so? Beyond the obvious fact that humans often denounce what they do not understand, there is also the undisputed fact that magical practice flies directly in the face of the fundamentalist’s agenda: to proselytize, to convert, to Read more…
The Divine Pymander of Hermes Mercurius Trismegistus in XVII Books was published in 1650 by John Everard. Translated from Marsilios Ficino’s Latin translation of 1471, Everard’s work represents the first English translation of the Corpus Hermeticum (the “Hermetic body of writings”), the foundational documents of the Hermetic tradition. The Pymander (Ποιμάνδρης) is one of the chapters in the Corpus Read more…
The Outer Order of the Golden Dawn has been described as “Osirian” in essence because the Egyptian God Osiris, embodied by the initiating Hierophant, plays a central, critical role in the magical work of the Neophyte Hall and the spiritual alchemy of the Outer Order in general. The equilibrated aspect Read more…
At the 1997 Golden Dawn Conference in London, a unique and enigmatic set of Enochian Tablets were displayed to the public for the first time. These tablets, once owned by Dr. William Wynn Westcott, were discovered a few years back in the archives of the SRIA, but there was no Read more…