The Kabbalah, Magick, and Thelema is the second volume of writings by Phyllis Seckler to be published by the Temple of the Silver Star. Like the previous volume, The Thoth Tarot, Astrology, & Other Selected Writings, the work is edited and introduced by three of Seckler’s former students: Rorac Johnson, Gregory Peters, and David Shoemaker. The present volume also includes a short Foreword by another erstwhile student of Seckler’s, Lon Milo DuQuette, in which he reflects fondly on his teacher, and recounts with humor the trepidation that he felt prior to his first meeting with the seemingly mysterious Soror Meral. In common with her own distant mentor, Aleister Crowley, Soror Meral found short, pithy essays, written in the form of letters, to be an excellent and powerful teaching method. The main body of The Kabbalah, Magick, and Thelema comprises a series of these letters, which explore a wide range of topics from Kabbalah and the practice of ritual magick, through philosophical speculations, to commentary on the state of Thelemic culture at the time. Originally published in Seckler’s journal In the Continuum, they are here presented for the first time in book form, accompanied by redrawn and corrected diagrams. They give strong testament to her passionate determination to preserve and spread the ideas of Aleister Crowley and the principles of Thelema.The final section of the book contains a number of important letters between Seckler and other significant figures in the history of post-Crowleyan Thelema, including Karl Germer, Israel Regardie, Grady McMurtry, Gerald Yorke, and Marcelo Motta. These letters, which cover matters as diverse as the leadership succession of O.T.O. and the thefts of Karl Germer’s library, are published here for the first time. They are accompanied by a number of related photographs, the majority of which have not been previously published.
