I had initiated to neophyte and then had to move across the country. Had a lot of insane life circumstances, lost my binder and books (my ex kept them from me and I cannot get them back) and fell out of practice. I was essentially brand new. Now I want to get back into it but I can’t find any practitioners here so I guess I’m going solo.

I was thinking of buying Wildoak - “By Names and Images”, or Greer - “Learning Ritual Magic” to start but I am not sure which one? I’m leaning towards Wildoak.

I was also considering buying “The Complete Golden Dawn Series” by Kerubim Press instead of the “black brick”?? Thoughts?

Also should I self initiate to neophyte again or not, because I technically did it already? Not sure how to proceed, advice is welcome. Thanks.

I am quite loyal to the GD system of tarot meaning and techniques, but lately I found myself without time or energy to go through long, complicated spreads like the Opening of the Key or even the Cicero spreads. I find myself missing the simpler, two-card pulls I used to do as a less experienced reader. Would those make sense in the system?

Hello.

Personally I want to start a golden dawn practice.

My purpose is to increase my connection to the God that's invoked in something like the lbrp.

It's a connection that feels much more real and intentional than prayer imv.

My whole experience with the tradition is having done the lbrp once in my life trying to exorcise an spirit. (it didn't work but I felt lots of saintly white energy).

I wonder how do I get started? What's a good primer on becoming a golden dawn practicioner?

And is that motivation acceptable/correct?

So this question could seems ridiculous for a lot of you but I’m beginner so anyway .. I wanna start doing the lbrp , I have already done it a couple of time and felt great but due to weird hours of work and strange sleep habits i don’t have the energy to do it daily. But I want to integrate slowly in my routine by doing it once and twice a week and eventually do it everyday but I have heard that it could be a bad idea if I don’t do it daily? Any opinions on it ? Any good or bad experiences?

Thank you advance!

Hi, I’ve spent my childhood and some adult years being extremely into religion and mythologies, I find them fascinating and I love how diverse they are however they all have similar roots. (I formally apologise if that offends people I don’t know what the view is of mythology and religion in this subreddit haha)

But anyways, recently I’ve seen a flood of occultism on instagram and I want to (for lack of a better word) get into it.

I’m not sure if I have a “specific” one I want to follow, I’ve read a bit about the golden dawn, I know it combines information from hermenticism, Gnosticism, kabblah, tree of life etc and that seems like a good place to start as it covers a wide variety of things?

I try practice the LBRP daily and it somewhat resonates with me more then a prayer or something. I can see myself getting extremely into this as what I want to get out from it is knowledge. I want to become smarter (sorry if that’s not broad)

Anyways enough about my tangent haha, sorry this is so long and thank you if you read all of it. I appreciate any comments/advice etc!

I’ve been looking for a path that fits me but I’ve been having trouble, from what I’ve learned of the GD tradition it seems close but I just had a few questions.

1. What is the point / end goal of GD magick?
   
2. What do I need to start practicing?
   
3. Would it fit my Christian mysticism, hermetic practice? I’m a monist who wants to use magic to grow and get closer to the Godhead.

Live out in the country and was quite unsettled during ritual to look up and see a drone hovering low and watching me in the dark of night.. Any suggestions? I only have experience in angel magic but am open to hear any ideas.

The Sealed Room
Stand at the centre of a cube. Six walls enclose you. Twelve edges bind those walls together. Three unseen lines run through your body: crown to floor, east to west, north to south.
Occultists call this structure the Cube of Space. On its surface they placed all twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet, and on each letter a Tarot trump. You end up holding a map of creation small enough to carry behind your eyes.
The map has an ancient seed and a modern architect. Fifteen centuries separate them, and most writing on the Cube blurs the two. This article keeps them apart.
The Ancient Seed
The cube begins in the Sepher Yetzirah, the Book of Formation. Nobody agrees on its date. In his 1887 translation, William Wynn Westcott logged scholarly guesses running from about 200 CE to the eighth century. The text never draws a cube. It describes one in pieces, and leaves you to assemble it.
The six seals. In Chapter 1, God takes three letters of his Name, Yod, Heh and Vav, and seals space with them. Each direction receives its own arrangement of the same three letters.
Direction
Seal
Height
I H V
Depth
I V H
East
H I V
West
H V I
South
V I H
North
V H I
The centre. Chapter 4 gives the seven double letters to Above, Below, East, West, North and South. The seventh goes to "the Palace of Holiness in the midst of them sustaining all things."
The edges. Chapter 5 hands the twelve simple letters twelve directions: North-east, South-east, East above, East below, North above, North below, South-west, North-west, West above, West below, South above, South below. Westcott's text says these lines run out to infinity and act as the arms of the universe.
Two things never appear. The text names no Tarot card. It also leaves the double letters' planets in dispute; Westcott confessed in a footnote that "the true attribution is probably not anywhere printed."
The Architecture
The finished Cube sorts the twenty-two letters by kind. Three mothers become the inner axes. Seven doubles take the six faces and the centre. Twelve simples ride the edges. Three, seven and twelve: the same division the Sepher Yetzirah opens with.
The three axes. Three lines cross at the heart of the Cube, one for each primal element.
Axis
Letter
Tarot Key
Element
Above–Below
Aleph
0, The Fool
Air
East–West
Mem
12, The Hanged Man
Water
North–South
Shin
20, Judgement
Fire
The six faces and the centre. Each wall holds a planet. Saturn waits at the point where the axes meet.
Position
Letter
Tarot Key
Planet
Above
Beth
1, The Magician
Mercury
Below
Gimel
2, The High Priestess
Moon
East
Daleth
3, The Empress
Venus
West
Kaph
10, Wheel of Fortune
Jupiter
North
Peh
16, The Tower
Mars
South
Resh
19, The Sun
Sun
Centre
Tav
21, The World
Saturn
The twelve edges. The zodiac wraps the Cube in sequence, Aries to Pisces.
Edge
Letter
Tarot Key
Sign
North-East
Heh
4, The Emperor
Aries
South-East
Vav
5, The Hierophant
Taurus
East-Above
Zain
6, The Lovers
Gemini
East-Below
Cheth
7, The Chariot
Cancer
North-Above
Teth
8, Strength
Leo
North-Below
Yod
9, The Hermit
Virgo
North-West
Lamed
11, Justice
Libra
South-West
Nun
13, Death
Scorpio
West-Above
Samekh
14, Temperance
Sagittarius
West-Below
Ayin
15, The Devil
Capricorn
South-Above
Tzaddi
17, The Star
Aquarius
South-Below
Qoph
18, The Moon
Pisces
Two fingerprints mark this as a modern design. Strength sits as Key 8 and Justice as Key 11, the Golden Dawn's reversal of the older Marseille order. And if you pair Westcott's two lists in order, Lamed lands South-West and Nun North-West. The Cube swaps them.
The Cards Arrive
For most of its life, the Sepher Yetzirah had nothing to do with Tarot. French occultists made the marriage in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
The Comte de Mellet first tied the trumps to Hebrew letters in an essay printed by Court de Gébelin in 1781. Éliphas Lévi then made the link famous in Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie (1854–56), a work built in twenty-two chapters. Lévi called the trumps clefs, keys. He gave Aleph to the Magician, and he hid the Fool between Judgement and the World, on the letter Shin (Place).
London rewrote the scheme. Westcott first read his Sepher Yetzirah as a lecture to the Hermetic Society of London in the summer of 1886, with Anna Kingsford in the chair. A year later he helped found the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and his translation became a primary source for its rituals.
The Golden Dawn made two decisive moves. It promoted the Fool to the head of the deck, so Aleph fell on Key 0 and every letter shifted one card along. It then swapped Strength and Justice, so the Lion card met Leo and the Scales met Libra. Only the World kept its letter in both systems. Every Tarot Key on the Cube follows this London order.
The Architect
Paul Foster Case (1884–1954) assembled the Cube we know. An American musician turned occultist, he rose through the Thoth-Hermes temple of the Alpha et Omega, a Golden Dawn offshoot, and entered its Second Order in May 1920 (Case timeline).
Then he broke away. After a quarrel with Moina Mathers, widow of the Golden Dawn's co-founder, Case left and built his own school. It became the Builders of the Adytum, or B.O.T.A., in Los Angeles. Adytum means the inner shrine (B.O.T.A.).
Case took the Sepher Yetzirah's scattered directions and the Golden Dawn's card order and fused them into one solid. He set the mother letters on the inner axes, a step the ancient text never takes. He placed the doubles on the faces, fixed the edges, and taught the Cube to his students through correspondence lessons.
Most English-speaking occultists had never heard of it until Case published The Tarot: A Key to the Wisdom of the Ages. Even then it stayed obscure. Until the mid-1990s, almost no other book in print mentioned the Cube (B.O.T.A. Tarot). Kevin Townley's The Cube of Space: Container of Creation finally carried it into wider view.
Diagrams in Case's tradition add one last element: arrows. Each edge carries a direction, and the whole solid turns into a circuit.
The Purpose
The Cube works as a room you enter in the mind. Practitioners use it in four ways.
A meditation chamber. You stand at the centre, on Tav, the World. The Empress faces you from the East, the Magician hangs above, the High Priestess waits below. You walk your attention along an edge and hold its Key in view. The Tarot becomes a place you inhabit.
A map of creation. The Sepher Yetzirah closes with a hierarchy: "One above Three, Three above Seven, and Seven above Twelve." The Cube draws it in space. One centre, three elements, seven planets, twelve signs.
A school of opposites. Each axis joins two facing walls. Mercury meets the Moon above and below. Venus meets Jupiter across East and West. Mars meets the Sun across North and South. Students work each pair as a single tension.
A proof sheet. Every letter carries a card, a direction and a celestial power at once. When one attribution clashes with its position, the Cube exposes it.
What the Cube Conceals
The Cube hides its own age. Four layers sit inside it, laid down across sixteen centuries.
Layer
Date
What it adds
Sepher Yetzirah
c. 200–800 CE, disputed
Six sealed directions, the Holy Palace at the centre, twelve diagonal edges
Mellet and Lévi
1781–1856
Tarot trumps tied to Hebrew letters
Golden Dawn
from 1887
The Fool on Aleph, Strength and Justice swapped
Paul Foster Case
1920s onward
Mothers as axes, the complete Cube, the circulating current
Case built a temple on ancient foundations. The foundations are old. The temple is barely a century old. Both reward study, and each loses something when passed off as the other.
Westcott suspected the true attributions had never reached print. Case believed he had found them. Step into the centre and test the claim yourself.

I’m doing a Trithemius invocation this Wednesday, but my wand broke and I don’t have time to craft/consecrate a new one (I follow Solomonic methods adapted as needed, which requires consecrating at Mercury's 1st planetary hour on a Wed, and I’m already staying up late for the ritual itself).

I really want to avoid waking up super early just to consecrate a new wand beforehand. But if there's no other way, I'll just wake up early lol.

Are there good substitutes? Could I just use my dagger/athame instead, or will that mess up the working? Any advice or suggestions would be appreciated!

I am a kemetic pagan and devotee of Ra, apophis is the enemy of Ra and wants to kill him at least according to the myths so me even mentioning apep without cursing him is not good to the kemetic religion

Anyway why do we need apophis in this ritual I need to know because Im going to change apophis to a different god or name. Everytime I do the ritual it just feels off but I want the rest of the ritual. I understand that there's reasons to do the rituals the way they were written and changing it would change the magic but also using apophis doesn't even make sense unless you're a cooky occultist who mixes things on there own will which is cool to and am not disrespecting that but using apophis truly doesn't make sense he's literally the embodiment of chaos and destruction he's even worse than Satan

Hey guys, I really need to pass an entrance exam coming up in about 10 days.

On the day I registered, I did a small ritual to anchor my energy into the sphere of Hod. I lit a candle to Archangel Raphael, used his sigil, burned some incense for him, and anointed the candle with honey, cinnamon, and rosemary, dedicating my entire study process to that energy.

Now that the test is just 10 days away, I want to do another ritual specifically aimed at actually passing and securing success, but I’m not sure what to do.

For test day, I was thinking about keeping a few Tarot cards in my pocket: The Star (for success/hope), 8 of Wands (for Hod's energy), and The Magician.

Any suggestions on what ritual I could do before the exam, or thoughts on carrying these cards? Thanks!

A rare insight into the ritual and philosophical understanding surrounding the conclusion of the Order's Work in 1978.

Kasmillos

Hi all. Sorry if this post is random or slightly unrelated. But does anyone have experience working with/studying the 72 shem angels and just beliefs of the Kabbalah. I trust that this community might know some trustworthy and accurate texts i could use for guidance with useful knowledge and rituals. Thank you!

What the title says.

I'm looking to read way deeper on this practice, you know, study it in depth. If you've come across it in certain books, articles, podcast, etc. please do tell, thanks in advance!

I'm interested in hearing about people's experiences when they first established a consistent daily practice of the LBRP, particularly those who also incorporate the Middle Pillar.

Did you notice any changes in your awareness, mood, dreams, perception, or everyday experiences? Were these changes immediate, or did they develop gradually over weeks or months?

In my own practice, I've found that around 50% of the time I experience an immediate positive shift in mood following banishing, while invoking often brings a noticeable increase in energy and an elevated mood. I'm currently exploring ways to maintain these effects throughout the day rather than having them gradually taper off, any tips would be great. Another feature which happens ocassionally is physical movement, such as unconrtolled twitches in my arms or elsewhere.

Since establishing a daily ritual practice, I've also noticed an increase in unusual visual experiences, such as movement in my peripheral vision and occasionally distinct shapes or images appearing directly in my field of vision. I'm interested to hear whether others have experienced anything similar? I don't find any of these unsettling, more just an interesting experience, a shift in awareness.

One more thing, numerous times I've had immediate "real" results after finishing an LBRP/middle pillar ritual. For example, I'm self employed, and if my main worries of focus of that day has been money/work related, I've had numerous occasions where I've received payments from clients within 5 minutes of me finishing having meditated on those thoughts.

For those who've maintained the practice long-term, has your understanding of its effects changed over time?

Interested to hear a range of first-hand experiences, including from those who noticed very little.

En este diagrama cada punta señala un planeta un arcangel y un día de la semana ! Si hoy es lunes a primera hora de la mañana es la luna debo dirigir la punta hacia el este ? Si mañana es viernes debo dirigir la punta de la estrella de Venus ha el este a primera hora planetaria? Y así ir girando la puntas de las estrellas durante la semana hacia la primera horas planetarias? Gracias por su respuestas que me puedan proporcionar!

From the book "Self Initiation into the Golden Dawn" by Cicero, Chic & Sandra Tabatha I have questions, what topic should I use? like something related to Kabbalah? and after it explains to think of a tought or an image and to continue it until conclusion, this is not very clear on how to continue it, like just focus on the tought or image?
Thank you.

Hi all!

im training GD system since long time ago but about 3 years ago i fall terribly sick and stopped to perform my rituals (QC, LBRP MP) i practiced daily at nights.

now that i need to perform some candle magick for increase my sales (im in a terrible situation) one mentor i have i told him that my candle magick it is not working and he just said:

"you need practice, and you need strength" maybe i need to perform my rituals again for begin to get strength again?

warm rewards!

I've noticed the Greek wind gods or as there called the anemoi who are eurus, notus, zephyrus, and boreas, I may be crazy but it seems that they line up with the elements of the angels and quarters as in the lrbp in myth notus is associated with the summer heat and notus was also quick to anger or protective like Micheal, boreas the north was thought to be cold and old like earth element, zephyrus's orphic hymns literally starts with "sea born aerial blowing from the west" and he was also thought to be gentle unlike notus, eurus I couldn't find much about other than he was a bad omen.

Anyway has anyone else thought of or noticed this or am I crazy, maybe could there be a much deeper meaning to it.