Temple of High Magic

As you know in March Ina will come to Romania to have a workshop on high magic. She wrote an excellent book The Temple of High Magic - Hermetic Initiation in the Western Mystery Tradition.

Since the first pages of this book we are impressed by the foreword by Gareth Knight leading authority in the Western tradition and esoteric sciences.
The book is full of information, methods and techniques you can immediately put into practice so as to create a solid foundation and well structured personal and ceremonial magic practices Hermetic tradition.

The purpose of the book is primarily to help us to clarify some things, concepts, spiritual aspects of magic as the writer says:

"Spiritual magic is truly a lost tradition. I find it alarming that the best way to explain the spiritual magic is to use terminology of Eastern philosophy: the magic of the "western yoga" magical power as chi, the magic system as a whole in terms of Kundalini Yoga. The words that describe Western spiritual exercises were loaded with negative connotations. Magic is seen as something terrifying as a pseudo-religion. At the same time modern people who are interested in spirituality consider normal and natural to practice exercises from shamanic traditions around the world. When we tell people  that we in the West have our own shamanic traditions with unique exercises they are surprised. "

The simplicity of explanations and at the same the depth of message makes us understand and have a much more clear, concise idea about what high magic is and how we can use it for our spiritual development or to become ourselves.

I can say  that definately this book must be added to the list of books of every library involved in the study of Hermetic Western Magic.

The first part of the book puts light in a  very clear and concise way on terms and certain aspects of the Hermetic tradition and are put directly into the practice and methods to practice for application in social everyday life.

The magician costumes in the temple are explained as well as the temple structure itself and founding officials. The utensils used, location and reasons of their use. It describes the role of each officer in the temple, the four cardinal points, archangels and animals present in the holy temple. Explaining the Tree of Life, and the four sefirotic worlds. Each of these is enriched with practical things, special rituals and meditations. Besides that the Kabbalistic Cross, the Middle Pillar Ritual (Israel Regardie version) and the Pentagram ritual of purification are clearly explained with many details.

Surely I can say that this book will establish  structured and well defined magical practices according to the Hermetic tradition.