Here is the inside story of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, told in its entirety for the first time. Francis King describes the conflict between W. B. Yeats and Aleister Crowley, the often difficult relationship between Yeats and Kabbalist MacGregor Mathers, and Rudolph Steiner's attempt to take over English occultism. With consummate scholarship, King has created a definitive modern history of the Western esoteric tradition.

In early modern England, the practice of ritual or ceremonial magic - the attempted communication with angels and demons - both reinforced and subverted existing concepts of gender. The majority of male magicians acted from a position of control and command commensurate with their social position in a patriarchal society; other men, however, used the notion of magic to subvert gender ideals while still aiming to attain hegemony. Whilst women who claimed to perform magic were usually more submissive in their attempted dealings with the spirit world, some female practitioners employed magic to undermine the patriarchal culture and further their own agenda. Frances Timbers studies the practice of ritual magic in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries focusing especially on gender and sexual perspectives. Using the examples of well-known individuals who set themselves up as magicians (including John Dee, Simon Forman and William Lilly), as well as unpublished diaries and journals, literature and legal records, this book provides a unique analysis of early modern ceremonial magic from a gender perspective.

In the Western world, magic has often functioned as an umbrella term for various religious beliefs and ritual practices that seek to influence events by harnessing supernatural power. The definition of these myriad occult and esoteric traditions have, however, usually come from those that are opposed to its practice; notably authorities in religious, legal and intellectual spheres. This book seeks to provide a new perspective, directly from the practitioners of modern Western magic, by exploring how a distinctive mode of embodiment and consciousness can produce a transition from an ‘ordinary’ to a ‘magical’ worldview. Starting with an introduction to the study of magic in the Western academy, the book then presents the author’s own participant observation of five ethnographic case studies of modern Western magic. The focus of these ethnographic case studies is directed towards ideas and methods the informants employ to self-legitimise and self-represent as ‘magicians’. It concludes by discussing the phenomenological implications and issues around embodiment that are inherent to the contemporary practice of magic. This is a unique insight into the lived experience of practitioners of modern magic. As such, it will be of keen interest to scholars of the Occult and New Religious Movements, as well as Religious Studies academics examining issues around the embodiment and the anthropology of religion.

Reverence is a worldview: a way of approaching life with wonder, care, gratitude, and respect. Right now on earth, this lkind of attention is vital. The invitation to reverence, and all the suggestions in this book for anchoring meaning in daily life, is to walk in awareness, especially an awareness of our precious connections to each other and to the planet we are part of. Awareness makes us more conscious of our choices. This is the essence of spiritual ecology: the re-enchantment of our relationship to earth and each other as part of earth.Our awareness of all the things life brings: the tender, fierce, resilient, calm, despairing, joyous aspects of life? these are what we are here to experience. These are what incarnation is about. With reverence, we slow down and witness and feel and celebrate and make meaning, alone, and together with others. We make little spots of beauty. Pause before meals to drop into full appreciation. We say "thank you" to plants before harvesting them. We mark important moments in a new way. We rebind ourselves to the cycle of the day, the moon, the seasons. With attention, we might even more deeply connect to milestone events and life phases, such as coming of age or an empty nest or a reconciliation.Reverence offers ways to think about ritual and ceremony. The dozens of rituals, ceremonies and designed experiences feed the reader's own instinct and intuition about meaning-making, and inspire the reader to deeply drink in the beauty of life- in all of its daily joys, milestone celebrations and losses. Christine includes personal, partner and communal rituals for daily living, for thresholds, new beginnings, celebrations and losses.

Ritual Magic, by Donald Tyson, provides a historical, theoretical, and practical introduction to the astonishing world of magic--not mere myth and delusion nor tricks and illusion, but real magic. In Ritual Magic you will learn what is possible with magic. Can magic bring rains from a clear sky? Can it calm stormy seas? Can real magic change the outcome of great battles? Can you use magic to improve your life? The answers to these and many other questions will be found in Ritual Magic. Explore the roots of magic - its complete history Get answers to questions frequently asked by those approaching magic for the first time Discover how magic works Learn the similarities and differences among different magical paths, including Golden Dawn, Shamanism, Wicca, Thelema, Druidism, and more Receive complete instructions for rituals to awaken magical awareness and to accomplish a willed purpose Deepen your knowledge of ritual magic, with suggested programs of study and reading material Learn how and why magic can become an important part of your life Whatever you own particular occult interest, Ritual Magic will help you learn what it is about, where it comes from, and how to do it correctly. By using this book as a road map of Western occultism, you will discover the truth about magic and use it to improve your life.

This volume presents editions of two fascinating anonymous and untitled manuscripts of magic produced in Elizabethan England: the Antiphoner Notebook and the Boxgrove Manual. Frank Klaassen uses these texts, which he argues are representative of the overwhelming majority of magical practitioners, to explain how magic changed during this period and why these developments were crucial to the formation of modern magic. The Boxgrove Manual is a work of learned ritual magic that synthesizes material from Henry Cornelius Agrippa, the Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy, Heptameron, and various medieval conjuring works. The Antiphoner Notebook concerns the common magic of treasure hunting, healing, and protection, blending medieval conjuring and charm literature with materials drawn from Reginald Scot’s famous anti-magic work, Discoverie of Witchcraft. Klaassen painstakingly traces how the scribes who created these two manuscripts adapted and transformed their original sources. In so doing, he demonstrates the varied and subtle ways in which the Renaissance, the Reformation, new currents in science, the birth of printing, and vernacularization changed the practice of magic. Illuminating the processes by which two sixteenth-century English scribes went about making a book of magic, this volume provides insight into the wider intellectual culture surrounding the practice of magic in the early modern period.