alchemy (64) Aleister Crowley (31) biography (80) ceremonial magic (129) Crowley (92) esoteric (95) Golden Dawn (453) Hermeticism (39) HOGD (39) Israel Regardie (42) Kabbalah (430) magic (337) magick (360) meditation (58) mysticism (58) non-fiction (123) occult (500) occultism (119) philosophy (36) psychology (49) Regardie (172) religion (46) ritual (44) ritual magic (42) spirituality (72) tarot (33) Thelema (118) to-read (132) Tree of Life (28) Western esotericism (39)

Common Knowledge

Canonical name: Israel Regardie
Legal name: Regudy, Francis Israel
Other names: Regudy, Israel
Frater A.M.A.G.
Birthdate: 1907-11-17
Date of death: 1985-03-10
Gender: male
Education: Chiropractic College in New York
Occupations: chiropractor
magician
occultist
writer
Organizations: Stella Matutina
Ordo Templi Orientis
U.S. Army
Awards and honors: IX Degree O.T.O.
7=4 Adeptus Major RR&AC
Relationships: Aleister Crowley (secretary to)
Short biography: Francis I. Regardie, born in London, England, November 17, 1907; died in Sedona, Arizona, March 10, 1985. Came to the United States in August 1921, educated in Washington D.C. and studied art in school in Washington and Philadelphia. Returned to Europe in 1928 at the invitation of Aleister Crowley to work as his secretary and study with him. Returned to London as secretary to Thomas Burke 1932-34, and during that time wrote A Garden of Pomegranates and The Tree of Life.

In 1934 he was invited to join the Order of the Golden Dawn, Stella Matutina Temple, during which time he wrote The Middle Pillar and The Art of True Healing, and did the basic work for The Philosopher's Stone.

Returning to the United States in 1937 he entered Chiropractic College in New York, Graduating in 1941, and published The Golden Dawn. Served in the U.S. Army 1942-1945, and then moved to Los Angeles where he opened a chiropractic practice and taught psychiatry. Upon retirement in 1981, he moved to Sedona.

During his lifetime, he studied psychoanalysis with Dr. E. Clegg and Dr. J. L. Bendit, and later studied psychotherapy under Dr. Nandor Fodor. His training encompassed Freudian, Jungian and Reichian methods.
Cause of death: heart attack
Nationality: UK (birth)
USA
Birthplace: London, Middlesex, England, UK
Places of residence: Sedona, Arizona, USA
Washington, D.C., USA
England, UK
Place of death: Sedona, Arizona, USA
Map Location: England, UK

Members

Reviews

Featured Recent Thumbs

All Ratings
4
½1
6
3
2
3
No Rating

All Languages
English32
Spanish10
Portuguese (Brazil)1

43 reviews

paradoxosalpha 1,437 reviews

The Wisdom of Israel Regardie Volume III by Israel Regardie

As with the previous two volumes of this posthumously-collected set of articles and essays, The Wisdom of Israel Regardie Volume III is a genuine mixture suffering from some sloppy editing. Lon Milo DuQuette's introduction consists of the same two pages that had previously appeared at the start of Volume I.

The body of the volume starts off with Regardie's reviews of books about the Golden Dawn by R. G. Torrens and Ellic Howe. Confusingly, the book in hand states that the reviews ran as a show more letter in a British periodical Agapé - The Occult Review in 1969, but one of the Torrens books reviewed is not supposed to have been published until 1972. Regardie is very harsh with Torrens, just a bit less so with Howe, and calls out Gerald Yorke sternly for his foreword to Howe's book. He also distinguishes between the original Golden Dawn and Crowley's A.'.A.'. without showing any real partiality to either, and credits Liber Legis with prophetic potential. It's definitely an entertaining read for those familiar with the material and contexts.

A set of Enochian papers are simply technical material for ceremonial magic, useful in combination with Crowley's Liber Chanokh. Regardie's "Discussion of the Z Documents" (reprinted from The Complete Golden Dawn System of Magic "Volume Six") ends incongruously with a multi-page quotation from The Hall of Mirrors by Victor Endersby, concerning the social and intellectual dimensions of occult organizing with respect to Blavatskian Theosophy. The editorial treatment of this quote (in both the original and this reprint) is clumsy, with no indentation or font change and only a single set of opening quotation marks for the first of many paragraphs. After the quote, there is no further remark from Regardie.

Also from the 1984 Complete Golden Dawn, Regardie's notes on "Self-Initiation" include discussion of Liber HHH but overlook Crowley's work on Liber DCLXXI for self-initiatory purposes. He criticizes A. E. Waite for adding Christian biblical material to the Golden Dawn rituals, and also expresses a strong preference for Crowley's "so-called Holy Books ... They convey more devotion and love to me than almost anything else" (84-5). Under this "Self-Initiation" heading are further included a disparate set of essays, notably the valuable short pieces on psycho-analytic theory for occult practitioners gathered as "The Proper Attitude toward Mind-Body" (85-93). He discusses the encroachment on magic of religious agendas, and in so doing, acknowledges Kingsford's influence on Mathers, in the process of exonerating Mathers of Christian piety (88).

The longest single piece in the book is a reprinting of the 1937 introduction from Regardie's original The Golden Dawn. This piece is largely yet another history and anatomy of the order, leavened with advertising citations of Regardie's other early works, and it is somewhat spoiled by evident editorial or typesetting errors, such as the peculiarities on page 155. It is paired--for contrast, one suspects--with the far more succinct 1984 introduction set at the top of "Volume One" of The Complete Golden Dawn System of Magic.

The various introductions to works by Crowley that Regardie posthumously edited are all gratifying enough, although they certainly go over some of the same ground repeatedly. Of special note is the introduction to the late work Magick Without Tears, where Regardie's praise substantially counters what many have taken from his Eye in the Triangle as dismissiveness to all of Crowley's labors after 1914--including, ironically, the mage's personal employment of and instruction to the young Israel Regardie. show less

Oct 17, 2024 (Edited)

paradoxosalpha 1,437 reviews

How to Make and Use Talismans by Israel Regardie

My copy of this slender book of occult instruction is a New Falcon Publications edition from 2018, more than thirty years after the author's death. It has positively execrable editing with typos and other errors on nearly every page, starting with the first sentence of the biographical introduction, which calls Regardie "one of the most distinguished and well-know (sic) occult writers of the twentieth century" (1). The basically helpful introduction was written by "M.A.C.," and nowhere in show more the physical book is there credit for the editing of this "2018 first edition." Amazon's listing however credits the editor as "Christopher A. Hyatt," who had been dead for a decade when it was published, but does appear to have edited a 1983 version. (A more recent edition available on Amazon from "Sterling Pub Co Inc" purports to have been published on December 31, 1899 -- nearly eight years before the author's birth!)

The body of the book is only seventy pages long, with large type and many diagrams, tables, and example illustrations. Regardie's approach is thoroughly informed by the ceremonial tradition descending through Cornelius Agrippa, Eliphas Levi, Francis Barrett, Macgregor Mathers, and Aleister Crowley. But he entertains eclecticism and counsels simplification of procedures. Regardie shows his Thelemic allegiance by preferring the use of a versicle from Liber Legis over a more traditional biblical alternative (51).

Based on the use of "the name Carr" as a principal example (22-25), the text seems to have been originally composed as personal instruction for Regardie's friend and benefactor Carr Collins, or perhaps for the esoteric study group that Collins organized in the Dallas area. It was likely written in the 1960s. As long as the reader is on guard against errors introduced by the sloppy editorial treatment, this book can be a valuable primer for occult practice. show less

Jun 24, 2025 (Edited)1 other review

paradoxosalpha 1,437 reviews

The Middle Pillar by Israel Regardie

I first read Israel Regardie's The Middle Pillar in my teens, and it was then one of my more useful sources as an autodidact in ceremonial magick. I have since had occasion to recommend it over the years, but have only recently returned to it for a full re-read. My more recent impressions have been decidedly mixed. I am here reviewing the "second edition, revised and enlarged" of 1970 with immediate reference to the 1986 fourth printing.

To reflect first in favor of the book, it supplies more show more detail on the subjective elements of magical practice than most primers are willing to afford, and for students without the benefit of personal instruction these details are precious. It is grounded in highly conventional techniques of Hermetic magic stemming from the Order of the Golden Dawn, and it communicates these intelligibly. The book is short and not over-ambitious, supplying sufficient materials for preliminary training and emphasizing the need to walk before running, while offering a larger context for motivation.

A keynote of the text is its advocacy for analytical psychology as an adjunct to magick. On the theoretical level, Regardie uses psychoanalytic jargon in an effort to clarify hermetic-kabalistic spiritual anatomy. In my own experience, this gambit was only slightly effective. As a teenage reader, it was largely a matter of ignotum per ignotius, and I doubt whether most readers today are any more familiar with psychoanalytic theories than I was as a teenager. Moreover, Regardie is entirely too willing to credit secular psychology as a novel scientific undertaking, evidently heedless of its religious functions and Kabalistic genealogy. (Those interested in the latter topic should read David Bakan's Sigmund Freud and the Jewish Mystical Tradition.)

While I will not join in Regardie's evangelistic enthusiasm for the institutions of modern psychotherapy--Freudian, Jungian, or Reichian--I think that the underlying sentiment is sound: Magick is not therapy. No one should take up these practices without some preliminary self-criticism and awareness of personal limitations. Profane defects should be remedied through profane means. "If thou thyself hast not a sure foundation, whereon wilt thou stand to direct the forces of Nature?" (Liber XXX)

There are a few terminological peculiarities in this book. When introducing the Four Worlds of the Kabbalah, Regardie gives their usual English names (Archetypal, Creative, Formative, Active), but he does not provide their Hebrew names and instead gives terms from "the Hindu system": TURYA, SUSHUPTI, SWAPNA, JAGRATA (65-7). Perhaps his aim here was to demonstrate cross-cultural validity of the metaphysical ideas, but he is not explicit about that, and succeeds only in muddying the waters with irrelevant jargon.

As in Regardie's other early published works on occultism, The Middle Pillar uses Sephardic transliterations from Hebrew rather than the Ashkenazic ones that are more common in modern Hermetic literature--a superficial issue that does not really impair the text. In fact Regardie dismisses the need for any working knowledge of Hebrew in these basic techniques (144-5). As a minor (?) technical point, he is inconsistent with respect to the pronunciation of Tetragrammaton as "Yod-heh-vav-heh" in the pentagram ritual (95) and "Ye-hoh-voh" in the Middle Pillar (115). No rationale for the difference is offered. (I cannot say I am a fan of either of those pronunciations.)

The sequence of practical instruction in The Middle Pillar is a little jumbled. After the preliminaries of the first two chapters, Chapter Three seems to be a fairly full accounting of the pentagram ritual. At the head of Chapter Four, readers are admonished to spend two or three months on twice-daily work with the pentagram ritual before advancing to the Middle Pillar technique. But it is only at the end of Chapter Four, after describing the Middle Pillar ritual, that Regardie addresses the issue of attention to breath and breathing (125-9). Surely, these directions could usefully have come at the top of Chapter Three. Even more strangely, Chapter Five is principally instruction in the technique of projective vibration to be used with god-names. In the vertebral curriculum of ceremonial magick as I have come to appreciate it (see Crowley's Liber O, for example), this latter technique is absolutely integral to the proper performance of the pentagram ritual. One might hope that readers would finish the whole fairly short book before undertaking the actual practices, but there is still no clear direction to apply the later details to the ritual outlined earlier in the book. In fact, there is a recurring emphasis on proceeding in the sequence in which the text introduces the practices.

What I found most off-putting on this read was Regardie's coyness regarding his sources. For example, he dedicates nearly an entire page to an extensive quote regarding the formulation of telesmatic images, which he attributes to "One very clever expositor" (102). As it turns out, the quoted text is from Dion Fortune's The Mystical Qabalah (Ch. IX, § 20), published in 1935, just one year before Regardie wrote The Middle Pillar (per the first edition's foreword). Why not give credit where credit is due?

More significant is his failure to acknowledge the Law of Thelema despite his patent debts to it. He expresses a sort of removed approval for "one system nowadays" which "conceives of the Great Work as the partaking of the recognition of the Crowned and Conquering Child Horus" (25). He places in hard quotation marks a phrase taken from Liber Legis II:6--"the flame which burns in the core of every man"--but cites no source for it (93). (The slight inaccuracy here suggests that he is quoting from memory.) Nor does he explain the source for his quotation of Liber Legis II:70 (150-1). Perhaps he thought the still-living Aleister Crowley was just too scary for his readers in 1936. He had relaxed by 1970 though, admitting in his introduction to the second edition that The Middle Pillar "is an attempt to simplify and combine the practices both of the Golden Dawn with the insights and later developments of Aleister Crowley" (vii). Later still, Regardie would come to write of the Middle Pillar technique itself,

"It seems to be, as far as I can discover, a specific development of the Stella Matutina, in which case Dr. R. Felkin was its originator. This might explain why there is no trace whatsoever of its usage in the technical writings of Aleister Crowley, who has certainly made good use of most of the Order techniques, and who would surely have used this had it been available." (The Complete Golden Dawn System of Magic, Vol. III, p. 51).

This admission of the relative novelty of the practice casts something of a shade over Regardie's earlier attributions of "negligence" and "failure" to magicians who had neither used it nor supplied it as an instruction to aspirants (110-1). As far as Crowley is concerned, I believe he did design a comparable technique into the Elevenfold Seal of Liber V.

Having acquainted myself with this book's weaknesses, I would no longer recommend it as a stand-alone primer on the basic material it describes, but I don't think it is quite obsolete. (Even in the foreword to the 1938 first edition, Regardie was already mildly deprecating it as "an expression of myself at that time" when he had written it two years earlier.) It marks a distinct phase in the popularization of magick, and it still supplies interesting discussion of its concepts and suitable encouragement to aspirants, all in a digestible package. show less

Dec 3, 20202 other reviews

paradoxosalpha 1,437 reviews

The Wisdom of Israel Regardie Volume I by Israel Regardie

This volume is the first of three that bibliographic records assure me to have been edited by "William S. Hyatt" --evidently the son of "Christopher Hyatt," which was a pen name--collecting shorter writings of the 20th-century occultist luminary Israel Regardie. Nowhere in the book is the editor named, and casual readers might be forgiven for mistaking Lon DuQuette as having editorial credit or blame, when he in fact contributed only a two-page introduction "Genius Can Be Infectious," show more delineating an occult catena from Aleister Crowley through Regardie to himself. There is a single footnote in the whole book signed Ed., which ridicules "Crowley-deifiers" and dismisses "much of what he (i.e. Crowley) wrote" as "pure crap."

The book is made up of "Selected Introductions, Prefaces and Forewords," and although there seem to be no especially rigorous criteria for distinguishing among these three types of discursive front-matter, they are used as the book's organizing structure: first introductions, then prefaces, then forewords. Each putative category contains a mix of longer and shorter pieces, some originally prefixed to Regardie's own books, some to those of others. (In the case of the prefaces, all are to books that Regardie had himself either written or edited.)

It would have been far more useful to simply arrange the pieces by the date of their original composition or initial publication, helping to demonstrate the evolution of the author's perspective. Thankfully, most do have such dates indicated, whether by editorial footnote or in the customary manner with the writer's location at the end. But the issue is confused by title headers that often indicate (typically posthumous) 21st-century New Falcon editions in which the texts have been previously reprinted.

An assortment of textual errors undermine confidence in the fidelity of the contents. There are stuttered phrases and sentences, even ones containing contradictions, such as when Westcott is said to have resigned his post as coroner to remain in the Golden Dawn, when the reverse was the case--as indicated in neighboring sentences with redundant diction (156). There is at least one missing header: no "Section I" appears before the "Section II" in Regardie's preface to Gems from the Equinox (180).

For some readers, Regardie will be chiefly considered as a pre-eminent authority on the history and system of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. The pieces here that are trained on that topic were unimpressive to me. In particular, I was struck by Regardie's absolute neglect of the Hermetic Society of Anna Kingsford as the seedbed of the order, without which it is difficult to imagine its emergence from the Societas Rosicruciana In Anglia. Perhaps Regardie had absorbed the unfavorable characterizations of Kingsford inconsistently expressed by Blavatsky and Crowley, so that he wanted to paper over her important contributions--which seem to have been no secret among the early initiates of the order that was founded swiftly after her death.

Aleister Crowley looms large in the book, featuring in nearly every piece, particularly those where Regardie introduces his own work. Only in the very early 1936 introduction to My Rosicrucian Adventure (here given in its repurposed form as an introduction to a 2013 edition of The Complete Golden Dawn System of Magic) is Regardie disparaging towards Crowley, while his later pieces recount his debts to the magus. In the Gems preface of 1970 he vainly thought to have finished with his obligation to Crowley "whatever it was" (194), but this was belied by his later work on the 1975 The Law is for All (121-42), to say nothing of the contents of the 1985 Final Thoughts and Views interview with Christopher S. Hyatt.

I found the project of this book gratifying and useful. I liked the idea of collecting these writings conveniently together, but the execution does seem to have been a little sloppy. The anonymous editorship and poor organization keep it from being a prize. Still, the contents easily held my interest, since Regardie was one of the first authorities I was able to consult on the topic of ceremonial magic, and this selection covering a wide assortment of times and topics supplies a considerable variety of his views. show less

Sep 12, 2024

See More Reviews