You can count on the fingers of one hand the number of books that describe real Magical Orders with insight and clarity—and two of those were written nearly 80 years ago. You can count on the fingers of two hands the number of magicians around today who completely understand that real Orders are not judged by badges, certificates, glam robes, solemn rituals and impressive grades. This is all Hobby Magic, which is even more draining than Hobby Politics and just as self-serving.
I knew a magician once—now long since dead—whose naiveté pulled him into the more Disney-like aspects of Magical Orders. Let us call him Frater A. Physically he looked like the French magus Sar Peladan, and had all of that cranky individual’s concerns with sex, power, secrecy and control. Frater A however, had a tendency to alienate anyone who tried to get close to him by his unfailing ability to grab the wrong end of the magickal stick, no matter how it was handed to him. He was dogmatic, somewhat pompous, inflexible, yet very very good at working on psychic levels. If he ever did a Banishing, then ye gods that place got Banished! No-one ever doubted his sincerity, or his commitment, and his sheer bloody-minded determination to walk every inch of what he saw as his true Magickal Path. No-one could fail to admire him for that.
Yet the one area in which he showed an almost bashful innocence and bewildering stupidity was when he talked about his Order. He became like a little boy, and his face lit up like a lovesick teenager when he spoke about his Order. He wore its logo on his briefcase, and his personal notepaper. I’m sure I saw him wearing a t-shirt bearing its legend, and you could imagine that his duvet cover and pillowcases were similarly emblazoned.
When he spoke about the senior Adepts within said Order his voice went a bit hushed, with deep respect bordering on veneration. He had done some essays on abstruse aspects of the Colour Scales, from the Kabbalah, and ‘They’ had approved. When he said that, you could almost hear him capitalise the word ‘they’; it was almost as if something within him bowed. More, to his almost ineffable delight, ‘They’ had invited him to the main temple in a faraway land, to discuss certain things with him. I don’t think I’ve seen a man so excited, or in such awe about his potential progress within his beloved Order.
All he had to do now was raise the airfare, and find a place to stay when he was over there. Onward ever inward!
Of course, when he returned outwardly tanned but inwardly ashen, the denouement was as total as it had been predictable. He was honest enough to admit that the Order, when you finally got to the higher echelons, was nothing more than a money-making scam, and its Adepts rather dodgy businessmen who wouldn’t know their athames from their elbows. He stuck to working among British stone circles after that. At least you know where you stand with them.
Fifty years before this Dion Fortune had railed against this sort of thing. She had been especially scathing of ‘certain American organisations’ which she saw as being little more than moneymaking rackets, and she refused to call them Orders. It was also she who pointed out that many of the temples within the legendary Golden Dawn were like flat batteries, attended by greybearded ancients, and not connected to anything vital on inward levels.
At the other extreme was Frater 0, this being the name that the curmudgeonly mage William G. Gray took upon himself for his disastrous initiation into the Society of the Inner Light. Later, when he decided to express his own attitudes and experience with respect to such things as Orders and Inner Plane Adeptii, he wrote in the very first line of his Magical Journal: “The Mysteries are a Consciousness-Pattern workable on both sides of the Veil, so that participants from each state can meet and co-operate with each other.”
In other words, you have to be connected with something. It is not about poncing around in a circle and gathering plaudits along with initiatic grades. It is about learning to connect with energies and entities that exist within, and can be contacted in a mutually effective way. He went on to add:
Behind any type of Occult Group, a main objective is to get in touch with Beings and Intelligences of a different (and one hopes higher) order than our human selves. It makes little difference whether we call them the spirits of our ancestors, angels, demons, guides, or what. The underlying motive is similar whether Mrs Bloggs of Balham seeks her defunct Auntie Kate, or Frater Ipsissimus invokes the All-Highest Himself in the most splendid Lodge available. Each tries to reach beyond themselves towards what we call ‘Spirit’, and have personal contact with ‘spiritual’ beings in an intelligent way.
That’s what it’s all about, in essence, though very few self-styled magicians are plugged into anything more vital than their egos.
In short, this is one of the very few intelligent books written about genuine Magical Orders. In it, Josephine McCarthy gives us some startling, eye-opening and at times disturbing insights into how true Orders work, and how we might connect with them. This is the real thing. She shows how the individual can, with right attitude and application, make his or her own links with these inner surges of Otherworld consciousness, for lack of a better description. She shows what you might experience, how you might handle the contact and develop it, with the likely pitfalls that human vanity and ego can create — and also what you should avoid and run screaming away from!
Trust me, this will become a classic.