In an article I wrote for “The Light Extended” in 2021, I outed myself as the Cancellarius of a Golden Dawn temple.[1] One of my main points consisted of describing the lengths to which I went to find monthly activities for our temple whilst we were on lockdown: by raiding such works as “Garden of Pomegranates,” “Ritual Use of Magical Tools,” “Circles of Power,” and even my own ingenium, to provide new rituals for us to use.
However, in that respect I merely continued the kind of thing I had done before lockdown, and which I did after we had resumed meeting in person. The fact is that our temple meets monthly, but we don’t always have new initiations or grade advancements every month. Hence, what to do in the meantime? Usually this would amount to a teaching session; or some other ritual; or better still, some other ritual which had a teaching element to it. We had long ago rejected the idea of trying to get a new initiate at every meeting no matter what the cost: we had no fears of elitism, as it turned out it only took a very low bar to get rid of 99% of all time-wasters.
“What I could really do with,” I thought to myself, “was some book of rituals which we could put on in our temple – so that I did not have to keep searching for something to do every month. If only such a handy resource existed!”
And then, Chic and Tabatha Cicero came out with this book. This hefty tome comprises over forty rituals, around three-quarters of which are original and previously unpublished, whilst the rest are based closely on rituals from Regardie’s The Golden Dawn but edited and annotated to make them more easily readable. There are rituals here for both the Outer and Inner Order. The Inner Order rituals include a number of compositions based upon the Z2 Magic Of Light Formulae, as well intriguing ways to put the Vault of the Adepti to good use.
The Outer Order Rituals, however, are most unusual: after an opening and closing of the Neophyte Hall, the officers are employed in a manner not following the traditional structure of the Neophyte ceremony. Hence, we get rituals of healing, of celebrating both solstices, and of Samhain, as well as charging talismans, invoking supernatural beings, and contemplating Qabalistic teaching through the power of ritual drama. The overall theme appears to be that of involving the officers and members of the Temple who would otherwise have sat on the sidelines in a way that would not happen in a normal Neophyte ceremony.
In short I am glad I got this: I foresee that I will be making use of this for some time in the future.
[1] Sumner, A, 2021, “Self Isolation in the Golden Dawn Tradition,” The Light Extended, a journal of the Golden Dawn, volume 3, Kerubim Press, Dublin, Ireland.
Sol Ascendans - The Website of Alex Sumner 