Lux Esoterica (Nifiluz)

The Rose Cross Lamen — the central symbol of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, combining the 22 petals of the rose (corresponding to the Hebrew alphabet and Tarot trumps) with the cross of the four elements. It was worn by initiates of the Inner Order during ritual work. In the autumn of 1887, a London coroner named William Wynn Westcott came into possession of a set of manuscripts written in a strange cipher. Whether he discovered them in a box of old books, received them from a Rosicrucian contact, or — as some historians argue — created them himself, the story he told was more compelling than the truth: the Cipher Manuscripts contained the outlines of a complete system of initiation, written in a code based on a simple substitution cipher, and they included the address of a German Rosicrucian adept named Anna Sprengel who could authorize the establishment of an English temple. Within months, Westcott had recruited his Masonic and occultist colleague Samuel Liddell MacGre...

Aleister Crowley (1875-1947), c. 1910-1913 -- poet, mountaineer, chess champion, occultist, and founder of Thelema, whose influence on twentieth-century esotericism, art, and popular culture remains unmatched He called himself the Great Beast 666. The tabloids of his era called him "the wickedest man in the world." His students called him the Master Therion. He called himself a poet, a mountaineer, a magician, a prophet. None of these descriptions is wrong. None is complete. Aleister Crowley (1875-1947) is the most controversial figure in the history of Western esotericism -- which is, given the competition, saying something. He was a genuine polymath: published poet, skilled chess player, accomplished mountaineer (he led early expeditions to K2 and Kanchenjunga), and an occultist whose systematic reconstruction of the Western magical tradition shaped virtually everything that followed him, including modern Wicca, chaos magic, and vast swaths of popular music and visua...

On March 1, 1888, three Freemasons — William Wynn Westcott , William Robert Woodman , and Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers — founded a magical order in London that would prove to be the most consequential single institution in the history of Western esotericism. The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn lasted in its original form barely fifteen years before imploding in scandal and factional warfare. Yet the system it developed — a complete synthesis of Kabbalah, astrology, Tarot, alchemy, geomancy, ceremonial magic, Enochian magic, Egyptian religion, and Christian mysticism — became the framework on which virtually all subsequent Western magical practice has been built. Its members included a Nobel Prize-winning poet. A pioneering feminist novelist. A revolutionary occultist who shook the 20th century. A detective fiction writer. Several actors, artists, and intellectuals. And through the publication of its secrets by one disenchanted initiate, it gave the general public access to a ...

Before the Tarot, before the I Ching was known outside China, before astrology developed its current elaborate system — human beings looked down at the earth beneath their feet and read it. They watched the patterns in thrown sand, in the marks left by sticks in soil, in the distribution of pebbles — and from these patterns, they sought wisdom about the questions that have always driven oracular practice: What is happening beneath the surface? What is coming? What should I do? Geomancy (from the Greek geo , earth, and manteia , divination) is the art of divination through the interpretation of patterns formed on or in the earth — or, more broadly, through the interpretation of specific dot and line patterns generated through various random processes. It is one of the oldest and most cross-culturally widespread of all divination systems, practiced across medieval Europe, the Islamic world, Sub-Saharan Africa, and pre-modern China in forms that share remarkable structural similarities ...