Israel Regardie - The Complete Golden Dawn System of Magic.pdf

THE COMPLETE GOLDEN DAWN SYSTEM OF MAGIC
Lux of a new order, moving over the formless waters. That Word of the Mystery
of Illumination, designed ultimately to disperse the Mystery of Darkness is the message to
an unborn soul, and thereto the influx of Light makes known that in order to attain
perfection the soul must assume flesh. What is signified therefore is a remote prenatal
experience, but we have no mystical symbolism to speak to us of that which went before it.
We only know that the soul had already come forth from God, and in respect of the
Divine Unity was therefore in a state of detachment, or that it was necessary for its
progress to become attached in a state of environment, yet so only, that it might
ultimately set aside all accidents and return as we have seen into Unity. The Second Grade
of the Outer Order, which is termed that of Zelator, is concerned with a spiritual
condition apart from and preceding experience, wherein the soul is formulating the
condition of the work by the quest of its proper agents, or, to put it in more simple
language, the soul is in search of its parents. In the Grade of Theoricus we are reminded of
the Hermetic philosophy which was accustomed to instruct its disciples that it was useless to
go in search of the practice till they had worked out a clear theory. The soul, after a
manner, is formulating the theory of the work outside the prime condition conceived in the
Second Degree. It has so far worked well that the quest is ended; it has found its parents and
the process of generation is inaugurated. By an act of its own will the soul has consented to
immersion in the material, and has passed into the deep sleep of gestation. In the Grade of
Practicus there is presented symbolically that unseen process by which the physical body is
designed and the building of the house begins.
The next Grade refers to the building of the house in beauty to become the Temple of
the Living Soul. Though it is termed and that fitly the Degree of Philosophus, its entire
process is of an automatic kind, for the great experiment is continued in virtue of those forces
which have been previously set in motion.
The soul has renounced the remembrance of its former knowledge, nor has it gained
the wisdom of the world, but that notwithstanding, it has deserved to be classed as one who
is friendly thereto, and has acted in consonance with its ends. We come now to that Grade
which is without any number in our system. In its more remote interpretation it signifies the
event of birth into natural life, for the attainment of which the soul has set aside all
whatsoever that remained of its first prerogatives and has at the same time drunk of the
chalice of forgetfulness. By his entrance therein, the newly-born man has ceased to
remember the past, and before him spreads the unknown future, even as those who in the
Order of the Golden Dawn enter at a given season within the experience of the Portal as
recipients who at least by the hypothesis, are unaware whether there is anything beyond it,
while a certain imputed forgetfulness, or setting aside, is symbolically assured by the
change in the name of the Member who has passed within the First Circle of the Fraternity
by the ostensible renunciation of his earthly titles. Of that Portal the Philosophus on his
admission becomes a Lord indeed, and of the Paths that lead thereto, but the Vault is in the
bosom of the Mystery, and of our Mystic Founder who, being dead, yet speaketh, he has
136