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Publications
Book Reviews Review by M.D. MacGregor Rogers
The Golden Dawn Journal is presented as an ongoing series of book-length anthologies on diverse topics of interest to the praciticing ceremonial magician. The first volume concentrates on divination, and projected themes appear to include everything from Alchemy to the Z documents. As a material artifact, it is a little disappointing. The softbound book uses flimsy paper and coverstock. The cover bears an attractive design with a very conservative graphic, designed (I suppose) to attract us stodgy ceremonialist types. The editors preface the text with a fine essay on the general nature of divination and its role in ceremonial practice. I found myself getting annoyed that so many of the individual contributors then began their pieces with a reworking of the same generalities. There is a wide mix of articles, though there is a predictable bias towards the Tarot among the available techniques. Any practicing magician is likely to find at least a couple of the 15 essays valuable. The volume concludes with a "Forum" section, which appears to have been an interesting backfire. The concept was to get a variety of positions from the contributors in response to a single question on the topic. Instead, the query "Can a divination always be trusted?" elicited a high degree of consensus, broken mostly by semantic variations. That's not too surprising, since it's one of the few questions that I have not heard ever-contentious magicians disputing. All told, the Golden Dawn Journal is an ambitious project with mixed results and great promise. I will be reading the next volume. |
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