Israel Regardie

The teaching

Taught from his own books, above all The Tree of Life (1932), A Garden of Pomegranates (1932) and The Middle Pillar (1938).

Magic as a way of growth

Regardie teaches that magic, rightly understood, is a technique of spiritual growth and not a means of getting things. Its end is the union of human consciousness with the divine, which the tradition calls the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel and he also calls the higher self. Ritual serves that end by concentration: every sense is engaged, colour, sound, scent and gesture, the names of God are vibrated, the forms of the gods are assumed in the imagination, and the whole being is driven toward one idea until consciousness is lifted beyond its ordinary bounds.

The order's own course, which he printed whole, is taught on the orders art's branch The Golden Dawn: its grades on the Tree, its knowledge lectures, the ritual of the pentagram and the vault of the adepts. Here is what he made of it.

The Qabalah for beginners

A Garden of Pomegranates teaches the Qabalah as the order used it. The ten sephiroth are the stages by which the one life comes down into the world and by which the soul climbs back; the twenty-two paths between them are the twenty-two letters and the trumps of the tarot; and the divine names govern the Tree in each of four worlds, from the world of pure spirit to the world of action.

The soul has its own parts on the Tree. Its highest principles, the Yechidah, the Chiah and the Neshamah, belong to the three supernal sephiroth; the Ruach, the reasoning mind and will, is centred in Tiphareth; the Nephesh, the animal soul of instinct and feeling, in Yesod; and the body stands in Malkuth. The student's work is to bring the Ruach into the service of the Neshamah above it, and so to open the way to the highest.

Relaxation first

Every practice begins, in his teaching, with relaxation, because a tense body keeps the mind tense. The student lies down or sits, lets each part of the body go in turn from the feet upward, and lets the breath fall into an easy, even rhythm. In later years, after his training in the therapy of Wilhelm Reich, he held that the body stores old fear and grief as a rigid armour of muscle, which must loosen before energy can flow through the work.

The Middle Pillar

His best known exercise works along the middle pillar of the Tree as it is laid on the body. Standing or sitting relaxed, the student pictures a ball of brilliant white light just above the crown, the place of Kether, and vibrates the name Eheieh several times. A shaft of light comes down from it to the throat, where a second ball is formed for Daath and the name YHVH Elohim is vibrated; then to the heart, for Tiphareth, with YHVH Eloah ve-Daath; then to the genitals, for Yesod, with Shaddai El Chai; and then to the feet, for Malkuth, with Adonai ha-Aretz. The five centres stand on one shaft of light.

Then the light is circulated. It is drawn down the left side of the body and up the right, then down the front and up the back, and at last up the shaft from the feet to the crown, where it falls like a fountain all round the body as a shell of light, is gathered at the feet and drawn up again. The exercise ends with a few quiet breaths and a return to ordinary awareness.

He sets it beside the psychology of his day as a way to balance and quicken the whole person. The house adds the limits: the breath is easy and never held; sessions are short, a few minutes at first; anyone who feels dizziness, pressure in the head or a flood of feeling stops at once; and anyone with a history of psychosis or mania leaves it alone.

Magic and therapy

He held that magic and psychotherapy describe the same country. The gods, angels and elemental figures of the rites are, at one level, the forms the deep mind takes when it is called upon, and the goal of the work, the union of the conscious self with its source, is what Jung called the integration of the personality. For that reason he urged every would-be magician to undergo some psychotherapy first: magic strengthens whatever is in the psyche, its knots and fears included, and a student who brings unresolved conflicts into the circle finds them magnified there.

The art of true healing

In The Art of True Healing he turns the same exercise outward. Once the pillar is built and the light circulated, it may be directed in imagination to a part of one's own body that is weak, or held in thought around another person who has asked for help. He offers it as an aid beside medicine and not in its place; the house teaches it as his teaching and promises no cure.