Israel Regardie: The Man Who Published the Golden Dawn's Secrets
Crowley's former secretary swore an oath of secrecy, left the order within a year and printed everything. What is documented about Israel Regardie, and what is only told.
Contents
Israel Regardie (1907-1985), once Aleister Crowley's secretary, joined a Golden Dawn successor order, left it within about a year, and published its rituals in four volumes (1937-1940). That set is why the Golden Dawn system is public today.
Israel Regardie was born Francis Israel Regudy in London on 17 November 1907 and died in Sedona, Arizona, on 10 March 1985.
His family emigrated to Washington, D.C., in August 1921.
He worked as Aleister Crowley's secretary from October 1928, first in Paris.
A Garden of Pomegranates and The Tree of Life were both published in 1932.
He joined the Stella Matutina, a Golden Dawn successor order, at the Hermes Temple in Bristol and left by the end of 1934.
In 1910 the Court of Appeal discharged Mathers' injunction against Crowley's Equinox, noting the material had already appeared in September 1909.
The Golden Dawn appeared in four volumes from the Aries Press, Chicago, between 1937 and 1940.
Crowley called Regardie's publication 'pure theft', although he had printed Golden Dawn ritual material himself.
He graduated from the Chiropractic College of New York City in 1941 and practiced in Los Angeles from 1947.
The Middle Pillar (1938) presents a Golden Dawn exercise in psychological terms.
The Complete Golden Dawn System of Magic appeared in 1984.
His stated motive was to save a dying tradition from unfit leaders; this rests on his own account as reported by his biographers.
An honorary grade conferred on him in New Zealand in 1983 is recorded by Thelemapedia; independent documentation is thin.
The Middle Pillar and the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram are practised daily by many ceremonial magicians in the form he published.
That the Middle Pillar has any medical or therapeutic effect.
That Crowley's Aiwass was a part of Crowley's psyche, as Regardie argued in The Eye in the Triangle; it is an interpretation.
That Regardie's volumes reproduce the original 1888 rituals; they give the Stella Matutina versions of the 1930s.
VERIFIED = verifiable in scientific or official sources · TRADITIONAL = historically or culturally recorded · LIVED PRACTICE = widely practiced, experiential knowledge · NOT PROVEN = spiritual interpretation, not scientifically established.
Almost every Golden Dawn ritual performed today, in a lodge in Los Angeles or a spare room in Leeds, reached its performer through one man who had sworn never to reveal it. Israel Regardie broke that oath in print between 1937 and 1940. He was called a traitor for it, and the man who called him a thief had lost the same argument in court himself. This is the documented record, sorted from what is only told.
What this article covers
- From Mile End Road to Crowley's desk
- Inside the Stella Matutina, and out again
- The secret that was already out: a London courtroom in 1910
- Four volumes from Chicago
- The chiropractor who read magic as psychology
- Where the sources disagree
- Sedona, 1985, and the afterlife of the books
The short answer
Israel Regardie (17 November 1907 – 10 March 1985) was a British-born American occultist, author and, for most of his working life, a chiropractor and psychotherapist in Los Angeles. He served as Aleister Crowley's secretary from 1928, was initiated into the Stella Matutina — a successor order of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn — in the early 1930s, and left it within about a year. He then published the order's rituals and teaching papers in four volumes through the Aries Press of Chicago. That set, reissued many times since, is the reason the Golden Dawn system is a public tradition rather than a closed one.
Two things are routinely left out of that summary. The first is that the "secret" had already been fought over in an English court in 1910, and the judges were not impressed by the secrecy. The second is that Regardie spent the second half of his life arguing that the whole apparatus was best understood as psychology — which is why his best-known practice, the Middle Pillar, reads more like a relaxation manual than a grimoire.
From Mile End Road to Crowley's desk
He was born Francis Israel Regudy on Mile End Road in London's East End, to Orthodox Jewish parents who had emigrated from Zhitomir in the Russian Empire. The family name became "Regardie" through a clerical error when his elder brother enlisted in the British Army, and the family kept it. In August 1921 they emigrated again, to Washington, D.C. Those details come from the two standard biographical sources — Gerald Suster's Crowley's Apprentice (1989) and Richard Kaczynski's Crowley biography Perdurabo — which agree on them.
As a teenager in Washington he left Orthodox practice behind and read his way through Theosophy, the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita and Buddhist texts, and then yoga, which led him to Crowley's Book Four. He wrote to the author. In October 1928, not yet twenty-one, he arrived in Paris as Crowley's personal secretary. The arrangement survived an expulsion from France in 1929, a stretch in Brussels and a period at Knockholt in Kent, and ended when Crowley could no longer pay him.
The apprenticeship produced his first two books, both published in 1932: A Garden of Pomegranates, an outline of the Qabalah dedicated to Crowley, and The Tree of Life: A Study in Magic. Dion Fortune — herself trained in a Golden Dawn successor order, and the founder of the Society of the Inner Light — called the second one the best book on magic she had read. That endorsement opened the next door.
Inside the Stella Matutina, and out again
By the 1930s the original Golden Dawn had long since split. After the crisis of 1900 the London adepts broke with Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers; one faction under Dr. Robert Felkin became the Stella Matutina, with temples in London, Bristol and — from 1912 — Havelock North in New Zealand. Regardie was admitted to the Hermes Temple in Bristol, with Crowley's blessing, and took the motto Ad Majorem Adonai Gloriam.
He rose quickly into the inner order, the Adeptus Minor grade, and was disappointed almost as quickly. His biographers describe a leadership he found self-important, obsessed with titles and, in his judgement, beyond reform. By the end of 1934 he was out. The dates and the exact grade differ between sources; the table further down lays the differences out rather than choosing one.
What he took away was not regalia but paper: the knowledge papers and ritual texts that an adept of that grade was expected to copy by hand. He had already written one short book about his experience, My Rosicrucian Adventure, completed in February 1935 and published in 1936. It told readers the order existed and what it taught. The next project told them everything else.
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See the deckThe secret that was already out: a London courtroom in 1910
Regardie is usually described as the man who broke the Golden Dawn's silence. He was not the first to try, and the first attempt ended in open court. In September 1909 the second number of Crowley's journal The Equinox began a serial called "The Temple of Solomon the King," describing the order's ceremonies, with a notice that it would continue in March 1910. Mathers — by then styling himself Comte MacGregor, the order's "earthly chief" — obtained an interim injunction from Mr. Justice Bucknill to stop the third number. Crowley appealed.
A contemporary newspaper report of the hearing, reprinted by Holythorn Press, is worth reading in full, because the three Lords Justices treated the idea of a legally protected occult secret with open amusement. Mathers' counsel argued that publication would be irreparable because "the cat will be out of the bag." Lord Justice Vaughan Williams answered: "But so much of the cat came out of the bag in September." Lord Justice Farwell added: "And I think it is a dead cat." Lord Justice Moulton observed that anyone who knew such societies knew "that the ritual of most of them has been published." The injunction was discharged and the appeal allowed with costs.
Two points in the report carry straight into Regardie's story. Crowley's counsel argued that any obligation of secrecy ran to a voluntary association, not to Mathers personally, and so was not his to enforce. The court never ruled on whether the oath could be enforced: it discharged the injunction because Mathers had waited until the issue was printed and because, after September, publication could do him no further harm. When Regardie published in 1937 he was breaking a promise, and his critics were entitled to say so. But the only time a Golden Dawn chief had asked an English court to stop such a publication, he had lost.
Four volumes from Chicago
Regardie returned to the United States in 1937 and placed the material with the Aries Press in Chicago. The Golden Dawn appeared in four volumes between 1937 and 1940. It contained the grade rituals of the outer order, the Adeptus Minor ritual, the knowledge lectures, and the Tarot, geomantic and elemental material that the order taught in stages. What readers got was the Stella Matutina's version of the system — the papers as they stood in the 1930s, after three decades of revision by successor orders — not a copy of the 1888 originals.
His stated reason, as his biographers report it, was preservation: the orders were dwindling, the leaders were in his view unfit to carry the tradition, and if nothing was printed the system would die with its last adepts. The Encyclopedia of Occultism and Parapsychology summarizes his conviction that the heritage of magic was the spiritual birthright of every man and woman, not the property of a lodge.
The response was hostile. Occultists vilified him; Kaczynski records that some placed curses on him. Crowley, who had by then fallen out with him bitterly, called the publication "pure theft" — the same Crowley who had printed Golden Dawn ceremony in The Equinox and defended the right to do so before the Court of Appeal. The volumes sold slowly at first. Over the following decades they became the reference that nearly every later Golden Dawn group — and a large share of modern ceremonial magic in general — was built on.
The chiropractor who read magic as psychology
The second half of Regardie's life looks, at first glance, like a different person's. He trained in psychotherapy, graduated from the Chiropractic College of New York City in 1941, served in the U.S. Army during the Second World War, and in 1947 moved to Los Angeles, where he practiced as a chiropractor and Reichian therapist and taught at the Los Angeles College of Chiropractic. He published articles in Psychiatric Quarterly and the American Journal of Psychotherapy.
The two halves are the same argument. Already in The Middle Pillar (1938) and The Philosopher's Stone (1938) he read Golden Dawn practice through Jung, and later through Wilhelm Reich. The Middle Pillar exercise — visualizing spheres of light along the central column of the Tree of Life while vibrating divine names, coordinated with the breath — is presented in his hands as a technique for attention, relaxation and integration of the personality. In The Eye in the Triangle (1970), his book on Crowley, he argued that Aiwass, the voice Crowley said dictated The Book of the Law, was best read as a facet of Crowley's own psyche.
That is an interpretation, not a finding, and it should be read as one. Some of what he built on — Reich's orgone theory in particular — has no standing in medicine today. The exercise itself asks for nothing more than attention and breath. It is best treated as meditation practice, not as treatment for anything.
Where the sources disagree
Biographies of Regardie rest heavily on Suster, who knew him, and on Regardie's own recollections. Where the reference works diverge, we give the range rather than a single figure.
| Point | What the sources say |
|---|---|
| Entry into the Stella Matutina | 1933 (Hermes Temple, Bristol, per the Stella Matutina history and a Golden Dawn order biography) or 1934 (Suster, Encyclopedia of Occultism) |
| Grade reached | Zelator Adeptus Minor (Suster) or Theoricus Adeptus Minor (a Golden Dawn order biography) |
| Publication of The Golden Dawn | 1937–1940 in most references and library records; some accounts give 1938–1940 |
| End of the Crowley secretaryship | Given variously as 1929 or the early 1930s; the move from Paris to Brussels and Kent in 1929 is agreed |
None of these touches the central facts: he was an initiate, he left, and he published. They are listed because an article about someone who made secret documents public should be candid about which of its own claims rest on a single witness.
Sedona, 1985, and the afterlife of the books
Regardie retired in 1981 and moved to Sedona, Arizona. He died there on 10 March 1985, of a heart attack, at dinner with friends at a restaurant — a detail recorded in both Suster's biography and the order biographies. By then the Golden Dawn had come back to him. The Complete Golden Dawn System of Magic, more than a thousand pages, appeared in 1984. According to Thelemapedia, a group in Wellington, New Zealand — the country where the Stella Matutina's Whare Ra temple had worked until 1978 — conferred an honorary grade on him in 1983, the man the orders had once treated as a traitor.
The American side of the story is the one that made him permanent. Llewellyn Publications in Minnesota has kept The Golden Dawn in print for decades, since the late 1980s in an edition revised and annotated by Chic Cicero and Sandra Tabatha Cicero. Christopher Hyatt, to whom Regardie left his papers, set up the Israel Regardie Foundation. The Tarot attributions, the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram and the Middle Pillar that circulate in American occult bookshops trace back in large part to those four Chicago volumes. For the order itself, see our overview of the Golden Dawn's history, grades and real legacy; for the man he served, Aleister Crowley and Thelema.
What we are not claiming
We are not claiming that Regardie was a traitor, and we are not claiming he was a savior of the tradition; both are judgements about motive and consequence that belong to practitioners. We make no claim that the Middle Pillar or any other practice described here has a physical, medical or psychological effect beyond what the practitioner experiences, and nothing here is medical or legal advice. Details of his private life that appear in some biographies are left out on purpose: they have nothing to do with what he published.
What the record supports is simpler. A young man who had been Crowley's secretary joined a secret order, found it wanting, and printed its papers. The papers turned out to matter more than the orders that guarded them.
Frequently asked questions
Who was Israel Regardie?
A British-born American occultist (1907–1985), Aleister Crowley's secretary from 1928, briefly an initiate of the Stella Matutina, and later a chiropractor and psychotherapist in Los Angeles. He is best known for publishing the Golden Dawn's rituals and teachings in four volumes between 1937 and 1940.
Why did Regardie publish the Golden Dawn rituals?
According to his biographers, because he believed the successor orders were in decline and badly led, and that the system would be lost if it was not printed. He regarded the material as a spiritual inheritance that belonged to everyone.
Was Regardie the first to publish Golden Dawn rituals?
No. Aleister Crowley printed Golden Dawn ceremonial material in The Equinox from September 1909. Mathers sought an injunction; in 1910 the Court of Appeal discharged it, one judge remarking that the cat had already come out of the bag.
What is the Middle Pillar exercise?
A Golden Dawn-derived practice Regardie published in 1938: visualizing spheres of light along the central column of the Tree of Life, vibrating divine names and coordinating it with the breath. He described it in psychological terms; it is best understood as meditation, not therapy.
Which edition of The Golden Dawn should I read?
The one most widely available is Llewellyn's, revised and annotated by Chic and Sandra Tabatha Cicero. It keeps Regardie's text and adds corrections and notes. The 1937–1940 Aries Press set is a collector's item.
Where and when did Israel Regardie die?
In Sedona, Arizona, on 10 March 1985, of a heart attack while at dinner with friends. He had retired there in 1981.
Sources
Gerald Suster, Crowley's Apprentice: The Life and Ideas of Israel Regardie (Samuel Weiser, 1989) · Richard Kaczynski, Perdurabo: The Life of Aleister Crowley, 2nd ed. (North Atlantic Books, 2010) · Gareth Knight, Dion Fortune and the Inner Light (Thoth, 2000) · "Regardie, (Francis) Israel (1907–1985)," Encyclopedia of Occultism and Parapsychology, via Encyclopedia.com · "Publishing the Secrets of the Rosicrucian Order," newspaper report of MacGregor v. Crowley, Court of Appeal, March 1910, reprinted by Holythorn Press · The Equinox I/2 (September 1909) and I/3 (March 1910) · Israel Regardie, The Golden Dawn, 4 vols. (Aries Press, Chicago, 1937–1940); The Middle Pillar (1938); The Eye in the Triangle (1970); The Complete Golden Dawn System of Magic (1984) · Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, "A Biography of Israel Regardie" · Thelemapedia, "Israel Regardie" · Reference histories of the Stella Matutina (Hermes Temple, Bristol; Whare Ra, Havelock North).
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