Back when I was working through the exercises in Israel Regardie’s Golden Dawn I didn’t have a group to work with. I’d always wanted to experience the actual initiations as well, so when a chance came by to join a Golden Dawn group I jumped at it.

The Open Source Order of the Golden Dawn is a game changer. Open source ritual, what a great idea! In the early 2000′s Michael Osiris Snuffin pulled together a group of people in Seattle to work the Neophyte ritual. In just a few years Temple of Light and Darkness had bylaws and a functioning ritual system.

Osiris redacted the rituals (open source, remember?) We picked roles and pulled together to rehearse. The Neophyte ritual took some time to get down, but after that it didn’t take many rehearsals to block. We did the initiations in bootstrap fashion, rotating roles, including the candidate role. It took about a year per degree to get us all through the initiations. As I write the group is preparing to move from Portal, where we have paused, to the Vault itself.

Performing the initiations has let me experience the energy of the system as well as benefitting from its knowledge. This is one of the wellsprings of the Western magical tradition. I’m especially pleased to associate with the women of TLD and OSOGD who have been supportive of my feminist ceremonial presentations. I’m grateful to all the people who put together the OSOGD for opening that door.

It must have been clear we were in from the sticks. It wasn’t just the way were dressed, farm hands in jeans and bulky jackets. It was the way Alex and I wandered through the occult bookshop, exclaiming at the book titles, stocking up on packages of incense charcoal.

Then we found it: The Golden Dawn, Israel Regardie’s massive tome, Llewellyn’s fourth edition and printing. We were so excited. The man who sold it to us smiled and said, “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do!”

The table of contents promised Book 1 would begin with knowledge lectures and meditations. Book 1 began on page 96. There was no index. As we worked with the material sticky notes sprouted at the top of many pages.

Alex and I were on a three-year magical retreat living and working in an apple orchard in the Okanogan Valley in Washington state. Magic was our whole lives. We studied the knowledge lectures and did the rituals. I learned the Ritual of the Pentagram and the Hebrew alphabet for the first time. I practiced breathing meditations while thinning apples in the orchard.

When we got to the initiations, Regardie had a little note that said something like, if there’s no group near you, visualize the initiations. We thought we were pretty bright, so we gave it a serious try, using dice and little counters to represent the officers. Without having seen an initiation we just couldn’t figure it out.

It wasn’t the easiest self-study system. When we had worked through that big book we graduated to the Aurum Solis Magical Philosophy series, which was easier to learn outside a magical group.

I don’t know what that long-ago bookstore owner would have done, but having that book granted us access to the magician’s body of knowledge and cemented our committment to the Western Ceremonial path.