Nick Farrell on Skylight Press

Nick Farrell is an esoteric author and journalist who has dedicated his life to the Western Mystery Tradition. Joining the Builders of the Adytum in New Zealand at age 17, he started to read everything he could find on the Golden Dawn and Magic. He moved to Hawkes Bay where he was trained by some of the elderly high-grade members of Whare Ra, which was the last Golden Dawn temple to close its doors, before moving to England in 1989. There he joined Dolores Ashcroft-Nowicki’s Servants of the Light School where he worked with David Goddard and later followed him into his Pharos organisation.

In 1997, Farrell left Pharos and joined Chic and Tabatha Cicero’s Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and formed a branch of their Order in the UK. Around that time he wrote his first book Making Talismans, a work that sought to present a complete magical system in order to bring about inner and outer change. Farrell consulted shamanism, paganism, the Esoteric Order of the Golden Dawn and Dion Fortune to ascertain what talismans are and how they work. Some time later he moved to Sofia and wrote Magical Pathworking, The Druidic Order of Pendragon (with Colin Robertson), which revealed the rituals and secrets of a Druid order active in Derbyshire from the mid-nineteenth century until the 1940s. This was followed by Gathering the Magic, a practical guide to sustaining successful esoteric groups in an Aquarian age fraught with an array of new challenges. Turning his hand to fiction, Farrell wrote an esoteric novel called When a Tree Falls, a sort of Dantean ontological quest where the protagonist confronts a myriad of alternate realities. This was followed by Egyptian Shaman, described by fellow esoteric author Lupa as “an innovative, realistic approach to shamanic practice.” In the book Farrell presents a system that integrates various facets of Egyptian mysticism, both ancient and revived.

In 2009 he moved to Rome where he established a new international Golden Dawn Order, called the Magical Order of Aurora Aurea, which is dedicated to fusing a practical modern magical current to the Golden Dawn system.  He also wrote two histories of the Golden Dawn, the first of which being King over the Water, a contentious work that explores the Cipher documents and other founding materials, as well as the contributions of William Wynn Westcott and Samuel Mathers. In an enthusiastic review Peregrin Wildoak states the following – “Mr Farrell has produced something unique here: a brilliant mixture of solid reporting of historical information combined with an experienced magician’s insights and publication of original documents.”  This 
was followed by a second work on the subject called Mathers’ Last Secret, which has since been amended to Mathers’ Last Secret Revised. Continuing the thread from his first book Farrell studies the various facets of Mathers’ Magical direction and comes to some compelling conclusions, the sort of which that will place his book up there with Pat Zalewski’s Golden Dawn Rituals and Commentaries and Israel Regardie’s The Golden Dawn.

As well as compiling an impressive booklist, Nick Farrell is active in many other areas.  He provided the research for the HorusHathor, a Golden Dawn Tarot deck painted by Harry and Nicola Wendrich. He is also a respected journalist that has worked in various hotbeds around the world, as his website attests: “My journalism career has meant that I have seen some interesting sights, been shot at, had death threats gone to parts of the world I would never have seen. It is also a good earthing for all the imagination stuff that occultism tends to throw up.” He is the author of many engaging essays on a wide array of subjects and also maintains a provocative blog as “the thoughts, rants and ramblings of Golden Dawn magician and writer.” Skylight Press is thrilled to publish Nick Farrell’s upcoming book, Magical Imagination: The Keys to Magic, and become a part of his wonderful work. He continues to live and work in the great historical city of Rome with his wife Paola.

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