Sol Ascendans – The Website of Alex Sumner

Way back in the dim distant past (i.e. the 1990s), I would scour my local library for absolutely any books they had on the occult at all. Amongst the inevitable dross I did find some gems, which however disappeared from the library altogether after I had returned them: subsequent borrowers not being as honest as me, I would imagine.

One book, however, which I found which was more valuable than anything else was a slim volume entitled Elizabethan Magic by Robert Turner. This was the first time I had found anyone who had written about the Enochian system in detail. I wanted to find out more about this abstruse magical system: so that when I came across Regardie’s Black Brick, and discovered by skim-reading it that the Golden Dawn itself incorporated Enochian magic into its teachings, I decided to invest in it – both in terms of time and effort – and hitch my wagon to the GD from that point forward. Yet I have to admit that this book by Turner definitely influenced my choice of direction.

I subsequently learned the full story: that Turner and a chap called Dave Edwards had, in the 1960s, founded a magical order they called The Order of the Cubic Stone, which had a public face in the form of its journal The Monolith – scans of some copies of which appeared floating around the internet. The story of the Order it described was that two young occultists contacted a Spirit Guide which told them to form an order like the Golden Dawn, but with the errors in the Enochian system corrected by reference back to the original Dee manuscripts.

Looking at Regardie’s black brick it is easy to see what this Spirit Guide meant. The four Enochian tablets published in Regardie’s set of tomes often had multiple letters in various squares: whilst large parts of the total material given by the angels to Dee is just plain missing: for example, the Holy Table, the Sigillum Dei Aemeth, the Tabula Bonorum Angelorum, as well as a full explanation of the 30 Aethyrs and 91 governors of the various parts of the Earth.

We now know that the Enochian material used by the original GD was a lot better quality than that published by Regardie: for example, it used the proper lettering of the four watchtowers, derived from the reformed table of Raphael. Moreover, I myself found evidence that at least by 1916, Adepts in Amoun Temple of the Stella Matutina, the GD spin-off, were at least aware of the other parts of the Enochian system, e.g. the Sigillum Dei Aemeth. It would appear that the material which came into Regardie’s possession and which he subsequently published had been corrupted from the original in relation to the Enochian system – as indeed to the rituals generally.

However, the scholarly resources we have now would not have been available to Turner and Edwards back in the 1960s, which means that their efforts to “correct” the Enochian system were all the more pioneering.

Now it so happens that modern GD orders do not rely on the material published by Regardie as is, but have actually made an effort to go back to the original material, and have even incorporated those parts of the Enochian system missing from the black brick. This makes me suspect that The Order of the Cubic Stone inspired modern GD orders – not necessarily because they used the OCS’ material, but because the OCS’ integrity and fidelity to its sources goaded them into upping their game.

As to what has become of the OCS, both Turner and Edwards have passed on, as indeed has Turner’s wife Patricia who was herself a leading member and organisational force in the Order. Nevertheless I believe there are OCS members about somewhere – one of them made himself known to me at the recent Welsh Occult Conference – they are, amongst other things, working to ensure that their publications are still available for modern occultists.