Regardie publishes the GD system

The Golden Dawn survived because a young man broke his oath.

Israel Regardie was born in London in 1907 to Jewish immigrants and grew up in Washington. At twenty he read Crowley, wrote to him, and in 1928 became his secretary in Paris, where he stayed four years and learned a good deal, including how not to run one's life. He wrote his first two books in 1932, A Garden of Pomegranates on the Kabbalah and The Tree of Life on magic, and on the strength of them was admitted in 1933 to the Stella Matutina, the largest surviving offshoot of the original Golden Dawn, at its Hermes Temple in Bristol. He went through the grades in a year and came out convinced the order was dying: the teaching was intact but the temples were small, elderly and losing the documents.

So between 1937 and 1940 he published the whole thing. The Golden Dawn appeared in four volumes from a small press in Chicago: the grade rituals from Neophyte to Adeptus Minor, the knowledge lectures, the Tarot and Enochian papers, the Middle Pillar, the Pentagram and Hexagram rituals, the correspondence tables. Crowley had printed much of the outer order material in The Equinox in 1909 and 1910, but Regardie's edition was complete, ordered and usable, and it has never been out of print. He said later that he did it because secrecy was killing the tradition and that a system worth having should be available to anyone who could use it. The Stella Matutina expelled him. Its remaining temples were gone within a generation.

The consequence is that almost everything on this map after 1940 is downstream of one book. Gerald Gardner had it when he assembled Wicca in the 1950s, and the pentagram rituals, the elemental quarters and the grade structure went in. Every twentieth-century Tarot book, from Case's BOTA to Crowley's Thoth to the flood after 1970, took its attributions from the tables Regardie printed, and Llewellyn, which took over the book in 1969, built a publishing empire on it. When the Golden Dawn was refounded in the 1980s, by Chic and Tabatha Cicero among others, it was refounded from Regardie's edition, and Regardie himself, by then a chiropractor and Reichian therapist in California, consecrated the first vault.

That is the point to hold. The Golden Dawn most people meet is not the London order of 1888 but Regardie's 1937 text of it, and the text fixed the system exactly as Mathers left it, seven planetary attributions and all. What had been a secret error became a public standard, reprinted with each new edition and copied into every book that used the tables. Regardie gave the tradition its life and its afterlife in the same act, and the map since then is mostly the story of people reading him.