By Dion Fortune - Mystical Qabalah (New e.) (5/15/01) Unknown Binding

I can totally understand why Israel Regardie gave this book such high acclaim!I was actually going to deduct at least one star for the huge number of errors made. It's as if a manuscript was taken, placed into a machine to format it into a publishable version, but in the process some words got changed, periods were deleted, some paragraphs were not indented, the number 5 got inserted where an S should have been, etc. Normally, this would have really bothered me and taken away from the reading experience. Yet, for some reason, in this book, I found myself enjoying these errors! Its as if they activated my subconscious, pulled me in more potently to fill in the right words!In the last couple of months, I've found myself fascinated by how the tree of life maps out the psychological forces within us. As I read, I often thought about Ken Wilber's developmental models and what Freud and Carl Jung had to contribute.This book, more than any other that I have read, beautifully and clearly depicted what each sephiroth upon the tree represents. I appreciate the fact that Dion Fortune had a deep background in human psychology and was familiar with the driving force of eastern thought.I've spend years studying eastern ideology, Zen Buddhism, Vedanta, Hinduism. I've read several versions of the Bhagavad Gita, The Ashtavakra Gita, The Wisdom of the Vedas, The Upanishads, --which all point to the Absolute Reality. Our Ultimate Identity. Yet something always seemed to be missing, something always felt left out. I always got the sense that such works were telling me to shed the self and its movements in duality, because ultimately it is just an illusion.Dion, in contrast, acknowledges the truth of our Ultimate Identity but expresses how important it is to dive fully into the manifest realm. In eastern thought there is a saying that "emptiness is form and form is emptiness," yet they seem to undervalue the form aspect. Dion tells us that form manifests for an important reason. It isn't meant to be shunned or discarded. That the path to form leads us to the same Ultimate Destination--the realization of our Ultimate Identity as Kether.Anyway, I really loved Dion Fortune's writing style. She had a gift for explaining complex patterns of movement, in a simple and clear manner. I will even say that her writing was somewhat poetic. Most powerfully, I could tell that she was writing from a place of "direct" experience. That in her meditations she had not just seen these forces in motion, but had become them. She did a HUGE service to humanity in writing this book. It moved me so much that I purchased more of her books and intend to eventually own and digest everything she wrote.Therefore I just couldn't deduct a single star, even with the wealth of mistakes throughout the book. I even bought both versions, the Kindle version and the paperback. Both versions contain misspelling and punctuation errors.

Very enjoyable. Appreciate that the author took the the time to write her thoughts and values through this presentation. This, very well should be a first read for anyone attempting to consider studying this type of material.

I won't get into the debates between Kabbalah, Cabalah, and Qabalah, it gets messy and it's safe to say that everyone has their own reasons for arguing that theirs is the best.What I love about this book is it actually has an in-depth description of the sephira and their meanings. For a while I was finding a wealth of knowledge about their names, the histories of different strains and schools, the letters for the paths, but never really found anything that was closer to an operating manual for the concepts than this. That said I understand that Gareth Knight's 'A Practical Guide to Qabalistic Symbolism' is similar to this but expanded and with detail on the twenty-two paths (something that DF wasn't allowed to publish in her lifetime) and from the appendix that he added in this book I'm very interested in gettting a copy of that as well. I also downloaded the Kindle version of DF's Cosmic Doctrine which I've heard to be incredibly intense - should be an adventure!On a side note I have read around and heard there are some blinds in here - perhaps, but at the same time I was more worried about the larger concepts and what exactly Kether, Chokmah, Binah, Chesed, Geburah, Tiphareth, Netzach, Hod, Yesod, and Malkuth really mean or what their functions are in relationship to their neighboring sephira. If you're looking for that kind of information I'd have to argue in favor of this book being as good a starting point as many people claim.

This work is of course a classic in the Western esoteric tradition; so, as far as content goes, I'm satisfied with my purchase. A word must be said, however, about the actual publishing process in regards to this particular edition -- if only to caution other prospective buyers.This printing of Dion Fortune's seminal work has obviously been produced by scanning an earlier version, using OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software. OCR is a fine technology, but has evidently not yet been perfected -- with the result that what was originally typeset as e.g. the word "remarkable" may be scanned and identified by the software as "remarkabl&". --Clearly this is nonsense, but unfortunately a great deal of this kind of gibberish has made its way into the copy that I received.In fact the Amazon edition is regrettably quite riddled with errors of this type -- several per page, by my reading. Even worse, absolutely no attempt has been made to reconcile the pagination of the reprint vs. the original edition; the editors have simply omitted page numbers entirely! This not only makes the Table of Contents useless (as it refers to the pagination of the original edition), but it also tends to make any note-taking or referencing an exercise in frustration. I was eventually forced to accept that in order to make this even a moderately useful volume, I would need to write the page numbers in manually, and then go back and correct the Table of Contents to my handwritten pagination.Finally, there are multiple points at which the paragraph formatting is corrupted as well, such that line breaks may appear for no reason in the middle of any given paragraph -- even in mid-sentence! This is merely an esthetic point, of course, but it does I think reveal that little or no actual proofreading was endeavored in the production of this edition. If Amazon's subcontractors can't provide better quality control than this, I would respectfully submit that a new RFP might be in order. Even in our digital age, there is more to the art of making decent books than simply running off a few hundred pages of OCR-ed text and then binding them with a slick cover! For my part, I will make do with this edition, even in its relatively deplorable typographical state. I was already somewhat familiar with the content anyway, having owned an earlier edition that was regrettably nicked while I was at University; so I find I'm generally able to reconstruct the garbled text, or otherwise work around the egregious proofreading errors. However, I certainly wouldn't recommend this to others for purchase, nor would I buy a similar edition from Amazon again.

I am adding restored picture of Dion Fortune( Violet Firth). Beautifully written book, very helpful.

This is a review of this specific print edition not the subject matter in general.I purchased this to replace an old paperback copy that is showing wear and tear. I wish I hadn't. The layout and typeface is disorganised, it is riddled with spelling mistakes and in places text is overlaid on text so it is illegible. There are random parenthesis with gibberish in them. It looks like somebdy has taken the original and put it through a poor OCR system and just hit 'print' without proof reading any of it.I will be tracking down an earlier version on a second hand book site, avoid this one....

Having read this book before in my teenage years and being thoroughly impressed with Dion Fortune's lucid exposition of a rather complex cosmology / psychology I was absolutely appalled at what a disservice was done to this wonderful text by such sloppy editing (if there was any editorial process happening at all) in this edition. All I can say is shame, shame, shame. Perhaps the copyright could be given to Dion Fortune's own Society of the Inner Light. I am sure that they would do the text justice and truly honor the spirit of their founder by handling her most famous text in the respectful manner that it truly deserves.

This ebook is littered with punctuation and spelling mistakes making it difficult to interpret exactly what the author is saying.Buy another version as this one does a disservice to this excellent book

In-depth and very worthy study of the subject. Gives a wonderful insight to this vast subject and should be in all occultist's library's.

I still can't get my head around it; and I thoughtI could trust her as a writer as I have other books. I would be glad of any suggestions on a book for understanding Qabalah.