I received a copy of Israel Regardie's magnum opus last week. I have the revised copy from Falcon Press.

So far I am into Part 2 Divination so I have not read the entire brick of a book as of yet. I have to admit that just the feel of the book in my lap is a pleasure in itself as it is a fairly large volume. Opened up its about 2 feet by a foot and a half so it has the feel of reading one of those huge musty old tomes from days of yore. You can feel yourself bonding with some sage in an alchemy lab. The book itself is bound in what seems to be red leather or pleather which is still nice. In other words this isn't your paperback necronomicon from your high school days. Ok.. enough about that.

I'm finding Regardies conversational tone very easy to follow. He doesn't just jump right in to complicated subjects but starts from a basic newbie standpoint. He even answers questions like "why is the hebrew alphabet so special in magick?" and even backs it up or I should say follows it up with funny stories about the alphabet from his own Jewish heriatage.

I also like how he is not discounting any other magickal system. He hasn't said "this is how the golden down did it and thats all there is so nanny nanny boo boo." He pulls information from many different sources and condenses them down into a very easy to read format. He even includes some papers that Golden Dawn members wrote that were not included in the original knowledge lectures. In some cases he even states that the original knowledge lectures were innadequate. This surprised me as I guess I was expecting him to be lockstep with Mathers and the rest. He does not leave one hanging either. When he states that the information is innadequate for the student to learn the subject discussed he gives the titles of several books where the student can learn enough to be an expert. For example when discussing tarot he states that Crowleys Thoth deck is a good deck to use and cites "The Book of Thoth" as a great reference book as well as many others. He lists several volumes concerning astrology and geomancy whereby the student could become expert in both of those subjects. I was happy about this because although I found geomancy interesting, I was also finding it the most confusing.

All this and I'm only into section 2 of the book with over 95% of the book to go. So far I think that he has recommended 10-15 other authors with even more books and papers which gives me alot of future work to do. I might add to this review as I get further into it so stay tuned.

Oh... I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in learning the Golden Dawn system of magic.

Arc

This post has been edited by Arcangle90: Apr 16 2006, 07:24 AM