The Tree of Life: An Illustrated Study in Magic

Rating:
Summary: Regardie's book is invalueable to the student of the occult.
Review: Regardie's Tree of Life is invalueable to the student of both Qabalah and magic, introducing us to the methods employed by Aleister Crowley, the Golden Dawn and the Goetia. Regardie has extensively studied rituals of the Ancient Egyptians and Greeks and outlines simple formulas for performing the most complex rituals founded upon ancient knowledge. Also outlines the Augoeides working.

Rating:
Summary: One of the Best ...
Review: Thank God this book is still available in its unedited/modified edition, besides the Cicero's!

Read and learn. Also, get, and practice, Regardie's 'Art of True Healing,' still available in a useful, functional edition, but little modified by Mark Allen. Well worth your bother!

You won't regret it, answer-seekers ... !

Rating:
Summary: Great book but...
Review: The book itself would be great and would easily deserve 5 stars (it is Regardie's Magnum Opus) if it was not stained by its footnotes and illustrations (both by the Cicero's). Poor Regardie! He does deserves better than that. To anyone reading this I can only recommand the following : buy an old edition of this book. ( I personnally have a copy edited By S. Weiser in 1969). This way you'll get the best of magick and escape the worse... This is what I did and I did well!

Rating:
Summary: Worth it's space on your Reference Shelf
Review: This is not a book to read -- it's a book to contemplate. It's a reference book, one that will soon be bristling with post-it notes.

This edition is particularly valuable because it's printed in nice large print on very good paper, with sturdy (though paperback) binding. The printing is crisp, so the illustrations, woodcuts, line-drawings, and sigils and Magical Seals, are sharp enough to read so you can copy them in every detail.

The numerous color plates are on heavy foolscap, bright, shiny and true-color.

As for the content -- The Tree of Life is to Magick as the Periodic Table is to Chemistry.

Where did I get that idea? Well, I'm a chemist & sf/f writer who got so "into" Tarot I wrote a book called "The Biblical Tarot: Never Cross a Palm With Silver" which you can buy on amazon.com, and have more to write in that series. Over the 25 years prior to writing that book, I taught Tarot.

And I discovered that I could lecture for three hours and at the end ask the students to define "Tree of Life" and they had no clue. So I hit on this way of explaining it -- by relating the function of the Tree of Life in the study of Torah and Magick to the function of the Periodic Table in the study of Science.

Chemistry being a branch of alchemy (as science is a branch of Magick) people can usually see immediately that the Periodic Table (that underlies all science) must be a branch or subset of something larger that tabulates the components of Magick. That something larger is the Tree of Life -- the Bible itself.

The link between Tarot and the Bible is the Tree of Life. "Etz Haim" is an appelation of the Torah which is the first Five Books of Moses. In other words, the Bible is the Tree of Life to us, and as a tree's sap nourishes the leaves, so the Tree of Life brings us (the leaves) the pure Energy of the Eternal.

If you're just starting to learn Cabbalah and want to start with Regardie, there are several things to take into account before you decide to buy this book or before you read it first.

Regardie was a member of the Golden Dawn -- a Secret Magickal society in England around the turn of the 20th Century. Dion Fortune and Alistair Crowley were also members -- they all knew each other. Regardie admired Crowley.

Crowley betrayed his oath and broke the Group Mind of that Secret Society. Then Crowley taught Magick in a way that would tend to unleash the power and Will of any hapless initiate -- without the safeguards many practitioners deem necessary. Then he died a very sick and ugly death -- many say because of his practices. Hence he has become connected with Black Magick which always destroys the practitioner -- and I personally do not recommend any beginner get anywhere near any of Crowley's books, or his Tarot Deck, or any of his desciples.

And Regardie is connected to Crowley.

That said, this book is still a piece of scholarship that belongs on the reference shelf of a wide variety of professionals, not just those interested in Magick.

It is a writer's handbook (I also teach writing online) of Magick and the alleged connections with "Egypt" -- some of which are valid and actually refer to the real historical Biblical Egypt (at least as the British conceptualized it around 1900 or so. In the early 20th Century, much of what we think of as archeology was done by wealthy amateurs not by scholars. So they missed a few points here and there).

Regardie's book is a reference for the Magickal concept of how the Universe is structured. People writing stories set in Medieval times need this book -- it's a whole different mindset than we are used to. If you want your fictional characters to seem real, they need to think like Regardie, not like you and me. (If a character thinks like a real Medieval person, no 21st century reader would understand him.)

The book contains extensive discourses on Theurgy and Abremalin the Mage, and a wide range of topics -- and it even touches briefly on the Tree of Life used as a Pagan focus for ceremonial and meditation.

There are diagrams of the Tree Glyph in color and some line diagrams that show the relationships among the parts of the Tree.

In other words, this book -- like much Golden Dawn literature -- ranges far and wide among the most pagan and most monotheistic of Earth's religious traditions, as if there were in fact no difference among them.

This may reveal to you an eclectic and higher Truth -- or it may only seem philosophically confused beyond redemption. But taken within the Golden Dawn's historical and social context, it makes perfect sense.

There at the turn of the century when the wealthy of England were holding Seances led by famous Mediums, it was socially unacceptable but yet absolutely necessary to explore The Unseen. In that England, the Church of England held sway absolutely.

Therefore, these well educated and well to do people banded together to try to break the chokehold on their subconscious minds that Christianity had gotten. They became convinced they were not Christians.

Yet, if you are not Christian, you can read what they have written and see how very, very Christian their brand of Paganism was. Their denial of Christianity was strident and very strained, and nowhere is that more evident than in Dion Fortune's (wonderful and highly recommended) books and in Regardie's writings -- "The Tree of Life, An Illustrated Study in Magic" being a good case in point.

Altogether this is an edition well worth it's cover price if you are at the right point in your studies or need a reference for the anti-Christian or for the mindset of the Pagan just being converted to Christianity.

If you're looking for a place to start studying the real Tree of Life and Cabbalah, you might do better to visit the School of Philosophy in the WorldCrafters Guild at simegen.com and explore some of those links first.

Rating:
Summary: Perfect Compilation of Magical Theory and Practice
Review: This is the first book by Regardie I have read, but not my first book on magic by any means (I have read works by Crowley, Agrippa, Barret etc). Despite its 500 pages, it was a matter of days before I had finished it, I just couldn't put it down!

The premise of the book is a study of magic as a technical system, stripped of cultural baggage, but that is where it fails slightly. For all the claims that they were free of religion, the Golden Dawn bunch really did seem obsessed with a form of monotheism, and one based in the Jewish faith. It's almost as if they want to keep that tie with traditional teachings, just in case! They obsess with Egypt as the cradle of religion, which it was in the sense that it spawned the Coptic church (from whence came the edited down version of the bible as we know it) & later on embraced Islamic tradition, but before all of that Egyption religion was not monotheistic in the sense that this book revels in.

However, if one ignores that & the rather absurd idea that we are the ultimate beings, whose next step is to become God, then it is possible to find a whole range of useful material. This book includes a discussion of the nature of the astral light, the qabalah (very briefly, but concisely), the symbolism & procurement of tools & the mechanics of ritual.

Of course, most of what can be found in this book can also be found in the likes of Crowley, but this has the added boon that Regardie doesn't spend half of the time pulling your leg with stories of baby sacrifice and that the material that is presented isn't obscured by dubious prose (a la Magick in Theory & Practice).

After reading this I am quite tempted to read his Garden of Pomegranates to see what he makes of the Qabalah. In short I would say that this book is worth getting for a study of how the Golden Dawn & many ritual magicians view magic (but of course in their eyes there is no other type of magic!), and also for some of the technical aspects of practice. Despite it being far from a stripped down version of magic, with quite an unacknowledged basis on Judaic teachings, the amount of information contained in it is nealry unparalelled. Worth the cover price ten times over (how very malkuth of me!).

Rating:
Summary: Invaluable, but not what it aims to be.
Review: This is the first book by Regardie I have read, but not my first book on magic by any means (I have read works by Crowley, Agrippa, Barret etc). Despite its 500 pages, it was a matter of days before I had finished it, I just couldn't put it down!

The premise of the book is a study of magic as a technical system, stripped of cultural baggage, but that is where it fails slightly. For all the claims that they were free of religion, the Golden Dawn bunch really did seem obsessed with a form of monotheism, and one based in the Jewish faith. It's almost as if they want to keep that tie with traditional teachings, just in case! They obsess with Egypt as the cradle of religion, which it was in the sense that it spawned the Coptic church (from whence came the edited down version of the bible as we know it) & later on embraced Islamic tradition, but before all of that Egyption religion was not monotheistic in the sense that this book revels in.

However, if one ignores that & the rather absurd idea that we are the ultimate beings, whose next step is to become God, then it is possible to find a whole range of useful material. This book includes a discussion of the nature of the astral light, the qabalah (very briefly, but concisely), the symbolism & procurement of tools & the mechanics of ritual.

Of course, most of what can be found in this book can also be found in the likes of Crowley, but this has the added boon that Regardie doesn't spend half of the time pulling your leg with stories of baby sacrifice and that the material that is presented isn't obscured by dubious prose (a la Magick in Theory & Practice).

After reading this I am quite tempted to read his Garden of Pomegranates to see what he makes of the Qabalah. In short I would say that this book is worth getting for a study of how the Golden Dawn & many ritual magicians view magic (but of course in their eyes there is no other type of magic!), and also for some of the technical aspects of practice. Despite it being far from a stripped down version of magic, with quite an unacknowledged basis on Judaic teachings, the amount of information contained in it is nealry unparalelled. Worth the cover price ten times over (how very malkuth of me!).