The first organisation to be called the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn opened in 1888 as an initiatory society dedicated to the study and practice of Ritual Magic, the Qabalah, Hermeticism, Astrology, Tarot and Alchemy. It was founded by people who wanted to have something like Theosophy, but rooted in the Western Mystery Tradition.
The original order ceased operating under that name in 1903, but continued in various forms until the late sixties or seventies.
However, in the late seventies / early eighties there was a move to revive the Golden Dawn, mainly thanks to the influence of Israel Regardie, and temples originating from that period still exist to this day.
(a2a) There are several strategies which I would use: I suggest you learn all of them so that you can choose which is most appropriate when the need arises. You can:
Form a protective barrier around yourself;
Bind the spirit within something which acts as a “spirit trap”;
Go “invisible” – so that they completely ignore you;
Command their respect by invoking a superior power which they recognise;
Call upon a Spirit guide to protect you and deal with them on your behalf;
Ask them to leave of their own accord;
Forcibly banish them if they don’t leave peacefully.
You could try to burn them, but if you did succeed, it would probably only prove that you’re not on the astral plane at all, but rather still inside your mind.
Always try to find out why the spirit is behaving the way it is, before you get heavy-handed. I did hear about one incident where some witches claimed they were attacked by an evil entity – except that it turned out they had trespassed on a sacred site, and the entity was a perfectly reasonable guardian spirit just doing its job. The correct approach would have been for the witches to withdraw from the confrontation themselves.
But by far the best advice I could give is to prepare for astral projection by practicing this lot whilst you are still in your physical body. All of these strategies have their analogue in ceremonial magic, for example by calling upon angels or upon your Holy Guardian Angel, or assuming god-forms, or using rituals such as the lesser banishing ritual of the pentagram, etc. Practice them now so that you can deploy them at will when you are out of the body.
And always set your intention for what you want to do with your astral projection, and keep this firmly in your mind, before you leave the body: this will make sure you don’t turn up somewhere random and get surprised by something unpleasant.
“Abramelin” was a Jewish magician, living in 14th century Egypt, who conferred the “Sacred Magic” on one “Abraham the Jew” who came from Worms in present day Germany. Abraham the Jew then wrote up the account of his journey as well as the description of the Sacred Magic, which became the grimoire now known as “The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage,” or “Book of Abramelin.”
That at least is the story: note however that neither Abraham the Jew’ nor Abramelin’s historicity have ever been proven independently, with some people believing them to be fictional characters.
I tend to assume that because the Sacred Magic works, it’s not actually necessary to know who Abramelin was, except that someone must have come up with the idea for it in the first place, so I call that mysterious person “Abramelin” all the same.
Olim, libri qui magicum contenuit in Latina scriptebantur, illa enim lingua scholasticorum trans Europam erat. Sic, multa ritualia antiqua in Latina ut historicum artificium sunt.
Non omnia carmina in Latina sunt: aliqua, praesertim cabalistica, Hebraeo veniunt; alia vero Enochiano. Est nulla ratio ritualibus magicis novis in Latina scribere: lingua uti potes quod tibi placet.
The first Pentacle of Mercury from the Key of Solomon: “It serveth to evoke the spirits under the firmament.”
Alex Sumner answered:
OK speaking as a ceremonial magician here… the rationale behind the Pentacles of Mercury or indeed any other planet, from the Key of Solomon, is that when you uncover them, you attract Spirits towards you, even causing them to manifest: and when you cover the Pentacles up, you send the spirits away.
My first thought on seeing this question was “Mercurial spirits might be cool to evoke every once in a while, but do I want to evoke them all the time? When it would be inconvenient for me? To the exclusion of other types of spirits?”
Let’s face it, taking this literally, you could not get naked without being interrupted by a Mercurial spirit. Taking shower or having sex would become a nightmare! Conversely, if you were at work, and you needed the assistance of a Mercurial spirit to help you make an important business decision, you would have to strip off in the middle of the office. If you were at school or college, and you wanted a Mercurial spirit to help you with whatever you were working on, you would have to get naked in the middle of the classroom or lecture hall.
More seriously, there is a school of thought that says that by getting a tattoo of a spirit, you get owned by that spirit, which is not the kind of pact you might be wanting to achieve – i.e. better to establish a healthy relationship with the spirit by evoking it in the proper manner.
So tattoos may be generally cool, but I’d personally think twice about getting one in the form a pentacle from the Key of Solomon.
OK there are two things you have to realise. Firstly, the idea that you must be gifted your first tarot deck is actually a superstition put about by charlatans who don’t want it widely known that if anybody can learn the tarot, they would be out of a job! It is “gatekeeping” at its worst. Do not let anyone shame you into not buying a new tarot deck, you are free to do so if you want.
However: the second thing to realise is that there is another option which you haven’t yet considered, i.e. that of getting your first tarot deck back. If it has truly become yours then this is what I (if I were in your position) would be first considering. My personal inclination would be to go to my favourite spirit of the Goetia, Andromalius, who is exceptionally good at recovering stolen items, although if you have any feelings left for the person who stole your tarot deck, you would have to word your petition to the spirit very carefully.
I am now an experienced Ceremonial Magician. However, when I was fourteen years old myself, I got turned on to the occult not through reading occult books per se, but through Call of Cthulhu role-playing game, and the fiction of H P Lovecraft.
This is not so crazy as it may sound, since because Call of Cthulhu is based in a fictionalised version of the real world, the creators actually included a lot of historical data of real-life occult organisations and personalities such as Aleister Crowley, Dion Fortune, Israel Regardie, the Golden Dawn, etc. Because this piqued my interest, I remembered them when I came to researching the occult seriously when I was older.
Indeed, several serious occultists I know claimed that they were first inspired to take up the dark arts after reading Dennis Wheatley novels. Dennis Wheatley actually met Aleister Crowley, although he was a bit of a hypocrite in that he told his readers not to get into the occult real-life, as it was a sure path to be enmeshed by the powers of darkness, etc.
So yeah, if you do your research, you will probably find that a lot of fiction is inspired by genuine occultism. A lot however is not. The one thing I would advise against doing is watching The Irregulars. This is probably one of the worst programmes out there when it comes to historical accuracy about occultism. Or about the Sherlock Holmes universe. Or indeed about life in Victorian England generally.
(NB: if you are on Netflix and you want to watch something decent about the occult, try The Midnight Gospel instead).
The Irregulars. Not as authentic as The Midnight Gospel
Ask yourself: why is there this herb or this crystal in the spell in the first place?
The person who originally came up with the spell didn’t put it there at random, they did so because they had a specific plan in mind – a specific reason. You work out what that reason was, and you may realise – there are other methods of achieving the same goal not necessarily using the original herbs or crystals, or indeed any at all.
So yes, if you can breakdown how and why spells are constructed you could do witchcraft without either herbs or crystals, even to the extent of learning to create your own spells. You might even realise that you know more than the person who originally wrote the spell!
Incidentally, I can offer my opinion about herbs and crystals which may help you. The main reason they are used in magic is because they have Astrological properties which coincide with the purpose of the spell. There is more than one way of invoking Astrological energies, this is the sort of thing which can be researched.
Or of course, you may get to the point where although you technically can work without herbs or crystals, you can make an executive decision that working with a herb or crystal is most convenient for you in a particular instance.
A Succubus. Note that in real-life, Succubi tend to appear without horns, wings, tails, and indeed clothes!
In a novel I wrote, The Magus, one of the characters has an authentic experience with a “Succubus.” Whilst trying to evoke a demon and get it to do its bidding, the demon tries to get out of the pact by distracting him with sex in the form of a beautiful woman. Whilst the experience is highly erotic, the man realises that if he is to succeed with his magic he needs to refuse sex with the Succubus and instead force it to agree to do his Will.
In other words, despite the fact that a Succubus might seem attractive to a lonely but horny teenager who is not getting enough in real life, such a demon only manifests when an evocation goes wrong. One cannot deliberately summon a Succubus, as that would entail deliberately failing at an Evocation – but if you set out with the intent to fail, it wouldn’t work to begin with.
“Magical thinking” may be out of place in the hard sciences, but Scientists tend to forget – not everything in this world is Scientific. The most obvious example of which is Art – by which I include literature, music, film & theatre, and just about everything we do for cultural and aesthetic reasons.
In order to appreciate a work of Science Fiction, one has to has to have a Magical Thinking mindset, not a Scientific one, because the plot necessarily requires a suspension of disbelief. The same could also be said for horror fiction, fantasy fiction, etc
It is also necessary to accept Magical Thinking in order to appreciate history itself, since as late as the middle of the twentieth century, the Arts were given greater emphasis in education than the Sciences. There was indeed a time when it was thought that you could get farther in life with a knowledge of the works of (e.g.) Shakespeare than of Isaac Newton. This is not necessarily the view of modern education, but if you didn’t actually realise this then you would fail to understand the decision making processes of the world’s most influential people of the comparatively recent past.
Finally of course, Magical Thinking is a requisite for understanding actual magic. 😉
Sol Ascendans - The Website of Alex Sumner 
Why do people use the Latin language in occult and in “spells”?
Non omnia carmina in Latina sunt: aliqua, praesertim cabalistica, Hebraeo veniunt; alia vero Enochiano. Est nulla ratio ritualibus magicis novis in Latina scribere: lingua uti potes quod tibi placet.
Alex’ answer to Why do people use the Latin language in occult and in “spells”?
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