Enshrining Regardie

Pat Zalewski, over on the Golden Dawn Group yahoo forum, is busy taking another tilt at convincing people that Regardie had a limited view of Golden Dawn.

I doubt that he is going to succeed in convincing anyone to change their mind.

Outside of a couple of people who have reason to see Regardie as a vemonous toad who broke all possibility of them being able to milk members for the privilege of seeing the Outer Order material (stuff that most of them would not have obtained if it wasn't for Regardie in the first place), most of us view Regardie as a beloved Frater of the Order who has became the unofficial Godfather of Golden Dawn.

And either you enshrine the man for saving the system, or you shrug your shoulders and get on with the Work.

Those people who enshrine Regardie hold his books up as the limit of what Golden Dawn and the RR et AC can be. For them, the rituals beyond Neophyte have no corresponding godforms despite indiciations that Adepts always perform the Work with the aid of godforms. For them, the last Grade of the system is ZAM (Zelator Adeptus Minor 5=6).

(There are also people who enshrine Mathers, Crowley, and the Secret Chiefs; all this enshrining limits what Golden Dawn can be.)

Those who just shrug their shoulders and move past the limits of what Regardie thought have learned already that his viewpoint was limited. It is a matter of experience. Those who are experienced know firsthand that there are things past the limits of the Regardie material.

In my own case, I got lucky. My first encounter with Golden Dawn was with a group of people who saw Regardie as a human being complete with flaws and warts. This group would have gotten along with Pat---scary thought as that is. I never even got a chance to enshrine Regardie.

As someone pointed out in an online class I attended today: Regardie only attended ritual seven times.

Read that again: seven times.

My cat has attended more rituals than Regardie did. My cat probably also has a better understanding of the rituals than Regardie, or Mathers for that matter, ever did.

It is one thing to read the works of Regrdie, but one should use a grain of salt when using them as Holy Writ; they are not a true indiciation of what Golden Dawn can be.

I wish Pat luck in his windmill tilting session. But I am not going to hold my breath that he is going to succeed in convincing a single person to change their mind.