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CONTENTS
Page Introduction PART ONE: PAPERS BY S. L. MACGREGOR MATHERS
Chapter 1. The Kabbalah 2. The Symbolism of the 4 Ancients 3. The Qliphoth of the Qabalah 4. The Azoth Lecture 5. Twelve Signs and Twelve Tribes 6. Address on the Pillars 7. The Tarot 8. On the Tarot Trumps 9. Note . . . Upon the Rosicrucian Ritual of the Relation between Chess and Tarot
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15 19 23 30 40 47 51 79 84
PART TWO: PAPERS BY J. W. BRODIE-INNES Some Psychic Memories 89 Some Celtic Memories 101 Some Notes on the First Knowledge Lecture 115 The Tarot Cards 119 An Egyptian Ritual Against Apophi and Its Relation to Modern Witchcraft 129 15. Witchcraft 140 16. Witchcraft Rituals 149
10. 11. 12. 13. 14.
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17. 18. 19. 20.
THE SORCERERAND HIS APPRENTICE
The Hermetic System The Scienceof Numbers - Kabalistic and Hermetic Occult Symbologyin Relation to Occult Science The Esoteric Teaching on the Origin and Significance of the Zodiac 21. The Tatwas (1) The Tatwas in Relation to the Human Organism (2) Polarity of Tatwic Currents (3) Some Aspects of the Tatwas in Relation to Daily Life (4) The Tatwas on Four Planes
159 165 173 180 191 200 207 214
INTRODUCTION
When, in 1896, the Adepti Minores of the Golden Dawn's Inner Order began to rebel against the authority of their chief, he sent them a long, rambling manifesto to justify his autocratic rule.ln the course ofthis document he claimed that, in order to establish the Vault of the Second Order, 'It was found absolutely and imperatively necessary that there should be some eminent Member especially chosen to act as the link between the Secret Chiefs and the more external forms of the Order. It was requisite that such Member should be me, who, while having the. necessary .and peculiar educational basis of critical and profound Occult Archaeological Knowledge should at the same time not only be ready and willing to devote himself in every sense to a blind and unreasoning obedience to those Secret Chiefs ... I, MacGregor Mathers, 'S Rioghail Mo Dhream 5° = 6°, Deo Duce Comite Ferro 7° = 4°, was the Frater selected for this Work: whom you know as the Chief Adept of the Second Order under the title of Deo Duce Comite Ferro which I had taken upon me. I Clear evidence, apparently, that Mathers was mentally unbalanced, and yet underneath this paranoid exterior what manner of man was he? Too little is known of his early life, and his biographers have been .too partisan for anything but phantom flesh to be placed over the bare bones of his life. It is most unlikely that a final answer will ever be given.
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THE SORCERER AND HIS APPRENTICE
He was born Samuel Liddell Mathers at Hackney, in East London, in 1854 and was educated at Bedford Grammar School.2 During the 1870s he lived with his mother at Bournemouth, where his everyday life as a clerk was soon interspersed with dreams of military glory in the First Hampshire Infantry Volunteers (although he was never an officer, despite being photographed in a Lieutenant's uniform), and with the ceremonial glory of Freemasonry through his initiation in the Hengist Lodge in 1877. At this time he began to reveal his aristocratic origins (or, from another point of view, to display his delusions of grandeur); on his Master Mason's Certificate of 1878 he is styled Comte de Glenstrae, a title allegedly awarded to an ancestor by Louis XV, and by 1882, when he joined the Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia, he had added MacGregor to his name. Mathers was led into the S.R.I.A. by Frederick Holland, who had already encouraged him to take up occult studies but who derided his pretensions to a highland ancestry, and was, no doubt, highly amused by Mathers' use of the motto of the Clan MacGregor, 'S Rioghail Mo Dhream (Royal is my Tribe), on his election to the Zelator grade." But fo