The Magician: His Training and Work

I love this book, and cannot but help reread it as Butler has introduced me to so many concepts in the worlds of ritual magic. It is more theory than practice, but the obligatory Lesser Banishing and short guide for astral travel are found therein as well as the use of the Flashing Colours. I found the information on developing the magical personality and Tattvic Tides particularly useful. I find his style quite personable and considerate. Contains also a good annotated bibliography.

Magick 101 in book form. This little tome is packed full of basic information on each area of Magickal study. It gives you an overview of all the fundamentals. It's a great starting off point for your Magickal studies. It's like the first day of class when the teacher hands out a syllabus. This is THE syllabus for western esoteric studies. By the time you finish the book you'll know where to go next in your Magickal quest. It's also a good book to give to interested friends and relatives if they want to understand, somewhat, what you are doing and why.

W.E Butler has written a sane, comprehensive and informative introduction to magic and managed to fit it all into a slim paperback. During his life, Mr Butler travelled and trained in India and was also a friend of Dion Fortune, who he greatly admired. He was involved with the Theosophical Society and their teachings as well as the Liberal Catholic Church. He co-wrote the Helios Correspondence Course with Gareth Knight which would later become the Servants of the Light Occult school. This work is now becoming increasingly more expensive and rare but well worth the effort one might put in to find it. The book has had several different editions printed including the Melvin Powers edition for sale here, initially quite inexpensive. There appear to be no new current editions available.

I agree with the previous review, I just wanted to add that I find the initial obscurity one of the great things about this book. It's written in earnest (no pun intended), and it deliberately sets out to avoid presenting the truths of magical thought 'on a plate', as so many of the more recent books on the subject attempt to do - with unfortunate results. The importance of independent thought and study is a maxim for anyone on the magical path - this book is full of useful information, and is likely to be one that the reader returns to periodically, to find that it sheds new light in unexpected areas. Highly recommended.

This book is one of the best I know in the subject. When I first bought it about five years ago I could recognize this fact clearly. Nonetheless, it is my opinion that this book is not for absolute begginers. When I read it for the first time I understood some things, but others escaped my comprehension. The third chapter, for example, on Qabbalah, is quite technical and philosophical, perhaps even too "stratospehrical" for readers without SOME (not neccesarily large) formation on Qabbalah. Re-reading it now, after five years of constant work and study on the subject, all these doubts have been solved... but not precisely through THIS book. There is a good section on de Middle Pillar exercise and the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram, and an excelentet chapter on talismans which includes the three different and interesting theories regarding the magical charge. On the whole, it is a very good book about magical theory, and in this it is accesible even to absolute new-commers to the subject, although technicalities make it a little dense even to the experienced reader. I would say that this book is a must for students of the occult and arm-chair and practical magicians alike, but I don't give it five stars because even for the sholarly occultist it is sometimes a little hard. Nonetheless, anyone pursuing magical studies seriously should have read this book at least once. I would include it, along with Regardie's, Fortune's and Kraig's books in the list of "10 books a magician should read"