Complete Golden Dawn System of Magic [Hardcover]

Israel Regardie (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 1995

Regardie's classic, final testament to the Golden Dawn. Beautifully illustrated throughout, with many color plates. The Complete Golden Dawn System Of Magic is the easiest edition to study. An essential text in any library of magical works. The book that made it all happen! Wilson at his classic best.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Everything you'll need to know to pursue a serious study of magic is contained within these fascinating volumes. --Magya Tor, Magical Blend Magazine

No serious student of the Esoteric, Qabalistic mysteries should be without this important and valuable work. --Eliot Camaren, Clinton Chronicle

No serious student of the Esoteric, Qabalistic mysteries should be without this important and valuable work. --Eliot Camaren, Clinton Chronicle --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

About the Author

Israel Regardie (1907-1985) was considered by many to be the last living Adept of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. At an early age, Regardie worked as Aleister Crowley's personal secretary. In addition to his extensive writings, Regardie practiced as a chiropractor and as a neo-Reichian therapist. He taught psychiatry at the Los Angeles College of Chiropractic and contributed articles to many psychology magazines.

Christopher S. Hyatt, Ph.D., Adv. M.ED. was trained in psycho-physiology and clinical psychology. As a research scientist he has published numerous peer-reviewed articles in professional journals and was a Research Fellow at the University of Toronto and the University of Southern California. He fled the world of academia and state sponsored psychology to become an explorer of the human mind...creating such devices as the Radical Undoing series. He is now a world-famous author of a wide variety of books, audios, and videos on post-modern psychology, sex, tantra, kundalini and mysticism...and an advocate of brain exploration. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 1100 pages
• Publisher: New Falcon Pubns (February 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1561840378
• ISBN-13: 978-1561840373
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,686,289 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

62 of 67 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Light in Extension, August 3, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: The Complete Golden Dawn System of Magic (Hardcover)

If you want to complete the Great Work, then this volume is the only book you need. This version is much easier to use than the Llwellyn version, and for those of you who want to (dubiously) claim a grade beyond Adeptus Minor, this book contains a tugid, heavy-handed and pompous ritual for the Adeptus Major grade by A.E. Waite.

Thelemites might want to beware. This volume contains strong opinions about Crowley in both directions. For example, the editor calls Crowley's corpus "[material]" -- a word I've never seen in a footnote before now, and Regardie is forever ambiguous about his former master. At the end of the book there are a few essays by practicing Thelemites to balance the Crowley bashing at the beginning.

This book also contains:
1. Reproductions of the trumps from Regardie's Tarot.
2. The Introduction to the Qabalah Unveiled by S.M.R.D.
3. Regadie's previously unpublished Enochian Dictionary.
4. Historical and explanatory essays by modern Golden Dawn Adepts.
5. Nothing by the Ciceros, (a blessing perhaps?)
6. Eight pages of color plates including examples of Enochian Chessmen.
7. Large, easy-to-read, diagrams -- an aspect that suffers in the smaller Llewellyn paperback.
8. No Llewellyn adds for back endpapers.
9. An exmple of the ritual of the hexagram with the unicursal hexagram popularized and possibly invented by Crowley, although Regardie claims that the unicursal hexagram was in the order papers before Crowley's time.
10. Expanded coverage of geomancy.

I hope this helps you make an informed purchase.

E.U.L.

46 of 51 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars this MAY be the edition you want . . ., December 20, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: The Complete Golden Dawn System of Magic (Hardcover)

Thank God for Purists!

At one point I thought the Llewellyn edition of Regardie's classic had been distorted by 'contributors' (!) leaving the rest of us with no resort except the New Falcon edition of the Golden Dawn, in spite of its higher price.

However, I have since read that New Falcon themselves have been overly tampering with the original Golden Dawn material in this volume, besides adding their own essays and such. We are left with the task of comparing editions, as we venture to make use of the Golden Dawn material. Obviously, we need to compare these 'reissues' with those present before Regardie's death.

Yet this New Falcon edition of the Golden Dawn material also has additional material by Regardie, and additional reading recommendations, variant from the Llewellyn edition. These valuable recommendations will redefine the occult book market for you, and have you going after more of the books Regardie actually thought were important, instead of the misleading plethora of colorful, whacky, glitzy/flashy 'offshoot' books that litter the burgeoning occult market today.

New essays, not included in the Llewellyn edition, by Regardie and others, are featured. Especially valuable are those wherein Regardie touts the necessity of regular, balanced psychotherapy for anyone embarking on Golden Dawn paths, as a preventative of problems and device for gaining self-knowledge.

A useful list of psychology books, apparently approved of by Regardie, was featured in the first edition by New Falcon of the 'Comp Golden Dawn System,' before he died. I do not know if such a list has been maintained as it was, or has been tampered with, thus endangering the spirit and usefulness of Regardie's original advice/recommendations.

Such lists recall those contained in Regardie's much smaller 'Foundations of Practical Magic,' Aquarian Press, which came out some six years before he died. Now out of print, this smaller book featured reading recommendations sprinkled throughout the text, as well as two 10 or 12 item lists of recommended useful books (one list on qabalah, one list on meditation.)

The introductory material in Regardie's smaller book 'Ceremonial Magic,'Aquarian Press, also now unfortunately out of print, featured good advice on introductory material for would-be Golden Dawn practitioners. For example, I was not previously aware that Regardie thought so highly of W.E. Butler. Regardie recommends 'the several books of W. E. Butler, all on the same subject, which are excellent texts for the student to study for a long time.'

At any rate, consulting earlier editions of Regardie's editions of the original Golden Dawn material will transcend the need for the tampered rituals and knowledge lectures in more recent editions. It will also transcend the need for the hacked Golden Dawn material of dubious authenticity scattered all over the internet. These derivative pseudo-Golden Dawn phenomena, modified without Regardie's knowledgeable eye, have been deceiving sincere students and researchers left and right.

It would be nice if future editions of the Golden Dawn material, would preserve the original and useful material set forth in the edition before Regardie's death. Maintaining the integrity of that original volume published by New Falcon, circa 1984, they can then add, with enthusiasm, their '150 pages of new material,' and still not cheat the reader by messing about with the edition Regardie at least had a chance to see before it went to press, whilst he was still alive.

Frankly, I wish New Falcon would just leave their 1984 'Regardie - approved' volume alone, and reprint all their new essays they feel are so desirable, into some other seperate volume.

I think what we need is a new Regardie to come forward, and rescue the original material from so many tampering hands, no matter where such tamperers originate from.

. . .at any rate . .

Yet, still don't feel the need for this volume? Then get Regardie's 'The Art of True Healing' book (see reviews,) practice it for awhile, and note results(!!!) You will then surely want to get your hands on this New Falcon 'Complete Golden Dawn' volume, or the other Llewellyn Golden Dawn collection, and all the rest of the Regardie material, even the out-of-print stuff.

Which brings us to another question, there, New Falcon . . .!

15 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good for reference, January 9, 2001

By 

PT - See all my reviews

This review is from: Complete Golden Dawn System of Magic (Hardcover)

For those interested a lot of the rituals compiled in here are from the original HOGD temples and not the later "Stellar Matutina (sp?) rituals that are in the Llewellyn version of _Golden Dawn_... so that is an added bonus.

Also as numerous people have pointed out, the layout is often hard to get used to since it has 10 or so chapters and each chapter starts off at page 1. Francis King's ritual magic book is probably better for the size (and bang for the buck, as i have noticed that some people have jacked up the price of this book thinking that it is ultra rare or something), (I am refering to Francis king's book which contains most of the so called "flying rolls") but this contains some similiar works and shows a lot of the early influence of Theosophic concepts, which I found interesting.