John Michael Greer - Circles of Power: An Introduction to Hermetic Magic

I suspect most writers have mixed feelings when they look back over books from the early stages of their writing career. Certainly this has been true for me, and never more so than with the book you now hold in your hands. I wrote it in 1996, a year that was at once the beginning of my career as a published author and the peak of my involvement in the Golden Dawn tradition of ceremonial magic. At the time I had been practicing Golden Dawn magic for twenty years in all, and the process of writing my first published book on the traditionPaths of Wisdom, a study of the magical Cabalasparked a cascade of insights into the practical work of Golden Dawn magic. What started as a chapter on advanced ritual work in Paths of Wisdom exploded into a book of its own. I wrote it in a white heat of inspiration, fueled by the intensive ritual work needed to test each of the ceremonies in the book, and sent it to its first publisher convinced that I had produced the definitive guide to Golden Dawn magic.

The next year or two provided an excellent lesson in the difficulties encountered on the way from inspiration to realization. The book's first publisher managed to turn much of the Hebrew in the book into gibberishit didn't help that nobody in the editorial department could pick their way through the Hebrew alphabet, even with a chart of the letters on their desk, or even knew that Hebrew reads from right to left. Still, most of the problems with the original edition came from my side. With the serene confidence of the half-educated, I thought I understood much more than I actually did, and several of the things I thought were the book's best features became sources of extreme embarrassment as my grasp of magical philosophy and practice deepened. In particular, I had saddled the book with an arbitrary division of the Golden Dawn system of initiation into three degrees, and though the rituals assigned to the First Degree worked wellnot surprisingly, as they came straight out of the Golden Dawn papersthose I constructed for the Second and Third Degree turned out to be poorly conceived and ineffective. Sweeping generalizations in the discussion of the Middle Pillar exercises and elsewhere also provided a useful lesson in humility.

Despite all these drawbacks and very modest sales, though, Circles of Power found an audience that welcomed it as few of my other books have been welcomed. I have received more letters and emails from readers of other books I wrote on occultism, but never so many from the people I most hoped to reach, the serious students of practical magic for whom books such as these are tools for the Great Work. Long after Circles of Power vanished from bookstore shelves and lingered only in the backlist of its first publisher, enthusiastic students of Hermetic ceremonial magic contacted me to tell me that it had become a valuable resource in their own magical training. Ultimately that was why, when I had the opportunity to have Circles of Power released in a new edition, I jumped at the chance.

The process of preparing the manuscript for the new edition gave me the opportunity to correct a great many errors. Readers familiar with the original edition will notice a number of changes, some subtle, others less so. The Hebrew lettering has been corrected, discussions of magical theory have been modified in the light of subsequent experience, and the system of three degrees has been edited out and a few of the rituals modified accordingly. Nearly everything else has been left as it was. If some passages still show the overconfidence of the insufficiently experienced, I can only hope that my readers will accept the book for what it isthe journeyman-work of a mage in training, which has been useful to other students of the Great Art of magic.

John Michael Greer, 2017