Nick Farrell is a prolific esoteric author and journalist who has dedicated his life to the Western Mystery Tradition. He joined the Builders of the Adytum in New Zealand at age 17 and then started to read everything he could find on the Golden Dawn and Magic, eventually moving to Hawkes Bay where he was trained by some of the elderly high-grade members of Whare Ra. He has since 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. Among other works, he has written Magical Imagination: The Keys to Magic (also Skylight Press), King over the Water, Mathers’ Last Secret and Mathers’ Last Secret Revised. In this all-new reissue of Beyond the Sun: The History, Teachings and Rituals of the Last Golden Dawn Order, Farrell returns to the source.
Beyond the Sun is both a fascinating history of the last Golden Dawn order as well as an exploration of its various pathways, teachings and rituals. Farrell, in close proximity to the various remnants of the order, illuminates both its formation and survival with various offshoots. The book contains the formerly unpublished ‘Inner Order’ teachings of the missing order of the Golden Dawn, which came to be known Whare Ra. Whare Ra managed to keep secret and above all keep running long after the other Golden Dawn magical orders had given up the ghost. Closing in the late 1970s, the Order was founded by Dr Robert Felkin 100 years ago. From its base in New Zealand, Whare Ra became a secret forefront of occult teaching.
After relaying its history, Farrell then presents the Second Order Rituals of the Order including the 6=5 and 7=4 in their complete and unedited state as well as the 6=5 training papers and lectures. Each ritual is then accompanied by various commentaries of their practitioners, including the 6=5 experiences of the poet WB Yeats and other adepts who went through the various initiations. It also contains numerous magical exercises inspired by the Whare Ra material.
Peregrin Wildoak, author of By Names and Images: Bringing the Golden Dawn to Life (Skylight Press), pens a provocative new foreword and has this to say:
“This is a dangerous book: possibly the most dangerous Nick Farrell has ever written. This is quite a statement considering Nick has previously tackled such daring topics as the creation of talismans, journeys to inner planes, advanced magical practices, shamanism, and perhaps most perilous of all, forming magical groups with real human beings whose foibles are only marginally less challenging than confronting a demon before breakfast…”
“The renaissance of the Golden Dawn since the early 1980s – however we view this phenomenon – has reached a point where many temples and groups are requiring and looking for ceremonial motifs and processes ‘beyond the Sun’. This book is, in part, a way of providing some solid and sensible approaches to this task, through methods and ideas formulated and honed down by the longest lasting Golden Dawn temple in the world.”
Beyond the Sun was originally published by Aurora Aurea via Lulu books in 2013. The first edition was limited to 100 copies and published on the anniversary of Robert Felkin’s death. Skylight Press is thrilled to reissue the book with additional material and diagrams as well as a new foreword. The book can be purchased from our website as well as Amazon and Amazon UK and various other online vendors.
Through the Skylight 