The world of magic is one of high imagination. In this wide-ranging historical survey Gareth Knight shows how the higher imagination has been used as an aid to the evolution of consciousness, from the ancient Mystery Religions, through Alchemy, Renaissance Magic, the Rosicrucian Manifestos, Freemasonry and 19th century Magical Fraternities, up to the modern era.
Knight considers magic as a middle ground between science and religion, reconciling them in a technology of the imagination, which properly used, can bring about personal regeneration and spiritual fulfilment. He uses Coleridge’s theory of the imagination as a basis for the validity of magic as science and art in its own right. Many systems and structures have come down through the ages slightly shoddy, misrepresented, maligned, misaligned. With this book a deconstruction becomes a recycling of raw material for the purposes of re-ordering and re-configuring – a righted prism, a shored up temple, a foundational re-ballasting.
“It is obvious from the beginning that we have here a work revealing the author’s spiritual maturity, a work with a definite message and structure, rather than the piecemeal gathering of snippets of information which often is offered in books with this sort of title, by inferior authors with little occult understanding.” — The Hermetic Journal
Gareth Knight is one of the world’s foremost authorities on ritual magic, the Western Mystery Tradition and Qabalistic symbolism. He trained in Dion Fortune’s Society of the Inner Light, and has spent a lifetime rediscovering and teaching the principles of magic as a spiritual discipline and method of self-realisation. He has written around fifty books covering topics as diverse as Qabalah, history of magic, Arthurian legend, Rosicrucianism, Tarot, Faery, the Inklings (Tolkien, C.S.Lewis et al) and the Feminine Mysteries, as well as several practical books on ritual magic. The Gareth Knight Group, a magical fraternity which he founded in 1973, is now run by his daughter Rebsie. He has lectured worldwide and contributed extensively to Inner Light, the journal of the Society of the Inner Light, and Lyra, the Gareth Knight Group journal.
- ISBN: 978-1-908011-04-6
- 208 pages
- perfect-bound paperback: 229mm x 152mm
- black and white text, with diagrams
- published 31st March 2011