Customer Reviews

The Golden Dawn Court Cards (Golden Dawn Studies No 5)

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This is a small book - just 36 small pages, but is worth it's weight in gold to me.

The cards are line drawings, and are not very artistic (e.g. in the Knight of Cups the waves show through the horse's back feet), but along with the appendice very enlightening.

I guess Westcott wasnt as good an artist as Pamela Smith or Lady Harris (or wasnt trying hard), so the drawings are not good art per se.

Comparing the pictures with the court cards from Wang's Golden Dawn Tarot Deck shows that Wang's minimalistic pictures are faithful to the source - the original drawings dont have a lot of details, though they're a bit more detailed Wang's.

The appendie contain such information as tables of colours correspondences to astrology signs, planets, notes, tree of lifes, etc and some explanations of symbols that appear in the cards.

This is not an instruction book - it's just card drawings and tables manuscripts, but the information is not widely available elsewhere.

Firstly, I have to declare an interest. I provided the original manuscripts sources to Darcy Kuntz and wrote the introduction. The most significant value, in my view, apaart from the interest inherent in Westcott's Keys, lies in the Elemental Sigils which are published nowhere else and are of major importance in the GD higher Grade material. These Sigils were further deployed within several unpublished papers by Mathers and in Westcott's immensely complex version of the Enochian Tablets which are now becoming more widely known.