"Magitians Discovered" and pre-Golden Dawn Magic

My Interest.
An excerpt from the introduction to Volume 1:

I was initially drawn to the material in the 1665 edition of the Discoverie through editing a work that itself drew on that edition for part of its text. This is the fourth part of astrologer Ebenezer Sibly’s “A New and Complete Illustration of the Celestial Science of Astrology”. Departing from the rest of the book, Sibly made the fourth part a self contained statement about his view of the spirit world and the occult. This fourth part was republished by myself in 2014 as “The Station of Man in the Universe, Ebenezer Sibly on the Spirit World and Magic” 24

My purpose in editing, and reprinting, the Sibly material was to present an account of the pre-Golden Dawn occult worldview as told by a magician himself. I also wanted to present an account of pre-Golden Dawn magic that was more concise than works such as Francis Barrett’s “The Magus”. Though I believe that it is effective, Golden Dawn style magic is removed from the mainstream of magical practice as it existed in Europe from the middle ages to the turn of the nineteenth century. That is quite a lot of time,and to be cut off from that period of practice cuts one off from the main trunk of the tree of the English language magical tradition.

However, I found that Sibly, in making his fourth part, had drawn on a similarly concise statement on the same topic, the 1665 Discoverie material. In fact, I found that some of the most enlightening sections of Sibly’s work had been taken from it. The anonymous Discoverie material, both the theoretical and the ritual material, functions itself as a self contained whole, and the certainly qualifies as an example of pre-Golden Dawn magic.

Created: 2016-04-05 02:10:45