"From one point of view the officers employed in these Rituals represent just such psychic projections. They represent, even as figures in dreams do, different aspects of man himself - personifications of abstract psychological principles inhering within the human spirit. Through the admittedly artificial or conventional means of a dramatic projection of these personified principles in a well-ordered ceremony a reaction is induced in consciousness. This reaction is calculated to arouse from their dormant condition those hitherto latent faculties represented objectively in the Temple of Initiation by the officers. Without the least conscious effort on the part of the aspirant, an involuntary current of sympathy is produced by this external delineation of spiritual paths which may be sufficient to accomplish the purpose of the initiation ceremony. The aesthetic appeal to the imagination - quite apart from what could be called the intrinsic magical virtue with which the G.D. documents Z.1 and Z.3 deal at some length - stirs to renewed activity the life of the inner domain. And the entire action of this type of dramatic ritual is that the soul may discover itself exalted to the heights, and during that mystical elevation receive the rushing forth of the Light."Israel Regardie, The Golden Dawn
Thursday 18 September 2008
Israel Regardie on the Initiation Ceremonies
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This paragraph is a good example of Regardie's "psychologizing". It's very much influenced by the decades during which Regardie wrote (1937-1985), but very foriegn to the spirit of the original, pre-1903, Golden Dawn
(in fact Regardie was born in 1907, four years after the original G.D. broke up).
Regardie made his living as a Reichian psychoanalyst, so psycho-dynamic interpretations came naturally to him. Not only are such ideas totally foreign to the Hermetic tradtiion, but to anyone who knows a tiny bit about modern psychology, Regardie's connection with lunatic-fringe figure Wilhelm Reich means that his judgement and his reliability as a witness are open to question.
Regardie was also heavily influenced by Crowley (as most here will know, he was Crowley's secretary at one time), and Crowley's ideas diverged greatly from the original G.D., with which Crowley actually had a very tenuous connection, as a junior member who was expelled. After Mathers himself was suspended from the G.D., he initiated Crowley into the Second Order in a highly irregular ceremony conducted in Paris. But soon enough Crowley would betray Mather's by publishing the G.D. rituals in his Equinox news letter, causing Mathers to sue him in the law courts. (Mathers was later forced to drop his suit because he couldn't come up with the legal fees.)
Crowley later made ideas drawn from the 18th century Hellfire Club (it's motto: "do what thou wilt") and Rabelais (the fictional Abbey of Thélème first occurs in Gargantua and Pantagruel) central to his thought. By the time Regardie knew Crowley, Crowley was deeply steeped in the sex magic of Theodore Reuss's O.T.O--an organization that had nothing whatsoever to do with the Golden Dawn.
Of such stuff is the Rabelais-Reuss-Crowley-Reich-Regardie tradition made. It's time that people interested in the occult stopped viewing the original, 1880-1903 G.D. though the distored lens of Regardie's anachronistic editorializing. A half-way decent edition of the G.D. papers, with some attention to scholarly and historical principles, is long overdue.
--M.
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