The Secret City: London's Hidden History of Magic, Mystery, and the Occult.

  Buy Now (Click Link) After the collapse of the Golden Dawn, Aleister Crowley, disillusioned and seeking a new source of magical authority, embarked on a series of travels that would take him across the world. He climbed mountains in Mexico and the Himalayas, he studied yoga and Buddhism in the East, and he continued his experiments in ceremonial magic. However, it was in Cairo, in 1904, that he received the revelation that would change the course of his life and the history of Western occultism: a short, cryptic, and terrifyingly powerful text known as Liber AL vel Legis , or The Book of the Law . The Cairo Working: A Honeymoon and a Magical Operation Crowley was in Cairo on his honeymoon with his new wife, Rose. Rose, who had no previous experience with magic, began to enter into a series of strange trances. She told Crowley that a messenger of the Egyptian god Horus was trying to contact him. Crowley, initially sceptical, tested her by taking her to the Boulak Museum and asking...

  Buy Now (Click Link) The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, for all its brilliance and influence, was a fragile and volatile organisation. Its members were brilliant, ambitious, and often deeply eccentric individuals, and its hierarchical structure was a breeding ground for jealousy, power struggles, and schism. In 1900, less than twelve years after its founding, the order would be torn apart by a magical civil war, a bitter and often bizarre conflict that would pit the order’s London adepts, led by the poet W.B. Yeats, against its flamboyant and rebellious leader, Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, and his fearsome new champion, the young Aleister Crowley. Crowley Vs Yeats The Seeds of Rebellion: Mathers’ Autocracy The conflict had been brewing for years. Mathers, who had become the sole leader of the order after the death of Woodman and the resignation of Westcott, had moved to Paris and was ruling the order from afar. His leadership style became increasingly autocratic and erra...

  Buy Now (Book Link) While the spiritualist movement was bringing the seance to the masses, a different and far more sophisticated magical revival was taking place in the hidden temples of late Victorian London. This was the world of high ceremonial magic, a world of complex rituals, of secret initiations, and of a new and powerful synthesis of Western esoteric traditions. At the heart of this revival was a single, extraordinary organisation: the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. The Golden Dawn, founded in 1888, was arguably the most influential magical society of the modern era. It was a magical university, a school of the occult sciences that sought to systematically train its members in the theory and practice of ceremonial magic. In its short but brilliant existence, the Golden Dawn would lay the foundations for much of modern Western occultism, and its influence can still be felt in the magical practices of today. The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn The Founders: A Trio o...