In Modern Magick I described why I thought the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was important. Imagine a simple hourglass: The sand in the top half represents the  forms of occultism known in the West during the middle to late 19th century, ranging from ceremonial magick to Paganism. They were filled with differences and yet some occultists conceived that there was a hidden, underlying, unitary basis. At the central point, all of those systems merged into a complex but coherent system. That system spread out, as represented by the sand in the bottom half of the hourglass, influencing directly and indirectly virtually all forms of occultism and spirituality in the West as they exist

One of the most difficult aspects of magick is understanding that it is a science and an art. Since there is a scientific aspect to it there must be some presuppositions about magick that have acquired the quality of being rules or laws. In my Modern Sex Magick I describe what I contend are nine basic theorems of magick. These general rules are not sexually related. In my book I gave a list of other theorems specifically related to sex magick. What do you think of these? THEOREM ONE: All actions have magickal reactions. This means that everything you do, whether you are conscious of it or not, has a magickal reaction. Many people fail with magick because they do a brief ritual to

In major Western Ceremonial Magick traditions, the altar is described as being a "double cube." That is, it had two equal-sized cubes on top of each other. So if your altar was to be 36" tall, each side would be 18". That's the way I made my first altar. I painted it completely white (representing the spiritual light) and then decoupaged a large pentagram to the top. On one side I decoupaged a poster of the Tree of Life. I used this for many years before giving it to a temple I had been working with. My current ceremonial magick altar is also a double cube, however it is painted black. This is to symbolize the concept that our physical universe, where I do magickal work, is spiritually

Many months ago I turned in a manuscript to Llewellyn for consideration. I had been working on this manuscript for many years, and I had followed the formatting rules I had thought were appropriate for the submission. I thought wrong. I also received a large number of suggestions from my acquisition editor. I spent a lot of time considering what I would do. I came to realize that as an author, it's important to understand that what you create is a product, not a baby. In my opinion the goal of the author in writing a book (excluding those that are simply written for a profit) is to be able to share your ideas and concepts with as many readers as possible. The challenge to this