Complete GD System of the Tarot?

Barleywine

I just rediscovered my formidable Falcon Press edition (1985 Second Printing) of Israel Regardie's "The Complete Golden Dawn System of Magic" waiting patiently on my bookshelf for me to finally return to my studies. Volume 9 of this work is titled "The Tarot, The Complete Golden Dawn System of the Tarot" with a sub-heading "This includes Documents N, O, P, Q, R and an Unlettered Theoricus Adeptus Minor Paper."

Can those of you more versed in the GD tradition tell me whether: 1) this in fact comprises the complete tarot material or whether anything has been held back in Regardie's presentation, and 2) this material owes a considerable debt to Eliphas Levi's work? I grazed in it some this morning to get reacquainted. Looks like it will be a valuable reference work to augment my Thoth material, as well as making for some fascinating study. I doubt if I will use the elaborate and exhaustive (daunting, even) reading "operations", though. It looks like it would take three hours to get through a single reading.
 

Aeon418

Barleywine said:
1) this in fact comprises the complete tarot material or whether anything has been held back in Regardie's presentation
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The "off the top of my head" answer is yes, that's all there is. But other people in various Golden Dawn spin off orders have written their own papers.
Barleywine said:
2) this material owes a considerable debt to Eliphas Levi's work?
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Of course. Levi and his ideas were a very big influence on the founders of the Golden Dawn. So naturally some of his theories on the Tarot are woven into the Golden Dawn's view of the Tarot.
 

Ross G Caldwell

Remember that the GD entirely changed Levi's Hebrew-letter attributions, with the exception of the last (Tau=World), to accord with the attributions given in the "Cipher Manuscript", folios 51-56 (and 32). I don't know if the "Complete Golden Dawn System" includes the Cipher Document - I only have a one-volume Llewellyn reprint of the 1937-40 edition.

Here is the Cipher Manuscript -
http://hermetic.com/gdlibrary/cipher/

So you might say that the spirit of GD mysticism of the Tarot owes a lot to the Continent, which itself was informed by Levi, but it was completely renovated by whoever wrote the Cipher Manuscript.
 

Barleywine

I paged through all ten volumes of the Regardie compilation but found nothing resembling the script or the translations that appear in the Cipher Manuscript folios. Possibly he rendered everything into a more accessible form and its in there, but I couldn't tell from a cursory review. I do appreciate being pointed to the Hermetic.com web site, since there appears to be a considerable trove of information there. After reading the very lucid historical discussion of the Cipher Manuscript on Wikipedia, I do recall previously reading about the document and its controversial history in various works on the Golden Dawn. I didn't try to seek it out since at the time (mid-1970s) it's doubtful there was much of an internet outside of the universities and there was certainly no robust public search engine available. (Translation: to my knowledge, Samuel Weiser didn't publish it so I didn't find it)

Thanks for the responses.
 
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