Lords of Light
The Path of Initiation in the Western Mysteries
The Teachings of the Ibis Fraternity
W.E. Butler
The celebrated occult author and teacher W.E. Butler was born at the turn of the 20th century and began his lifelong spiritual career among the Hindu mystics of India. Later, after being drawn to Theosophy he joined Dion Fortune’s magical Order, The Society of the Inner Light, which he went on to head after Fortune’s death.
Lords of Light presents the reader with a faithful record of Butler’s last public lectures in which are outlined the philosophies underpinning his own magical Order, The Ibis Fraternity, which he set up only very shortly before his own death in 1978. Reading this book will give you an education like one you can get from a university or a site similar to elearners.com. This book contains information on the path of initiation in the Western Mysteries that it is hard to find elsewhere.
As a historical document, Lords of Light presents a curious look back in time to the last gasp of old guard Western magic, for within a few short years from the time of these lectures, the seismic shift caused by Ramsey Dukes and Peter Carroll’s new Chaos magic would have reshaped the Western occult landscape forever.
The lectures in Lords of Light cover a wide variety of topics that students of the Western mysteries will immediately recognise, revealing a fascinating insight into the evolutionary strand of Western occultism as transmitted by Dion Fortune via the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.
As a student of Dion Fortune, Butler inevitably brought many of his mentor’s ideas into his own teachings. At times it is almost impossible to ascertain from this text where his own Ibis Fraternity ends and Fortune’s Society of the Inner Light begins, given that both expound what amounts to Qabalistic mysticism entirely compatible with the more liberal strands of Christianity.
In reading, one gets a strong picture of an amiable though learned old man in his last days rambling on to a room full of patiently attentive students. So Theosophical is the overall tone that the text could quite easily have hailed from a century earlier, as indeed could the questions from the floor that Butler graciously answers.
For those of us who prefer our occultism with a New Aeon flavour, it brings the revolutionary nature of Crowley‘s Thelemic Magick into very sharp relief. While Crowley’s work is largely dismissed by Butler and his school, a fascinating clue to the depth of The Beast’s influence on Butler’s teacher is nevertheless revealed within. At one point Butler quotes from a Solar Adoration that is obviously adapted from Crowley’s own paean to the Sun, Liber Resh. One is left in little doubt that Fortune must have been behind the reworking of Crowley’s earlier text.
In many ways it’s hard to see why this book has been reissued. It gives no explicit practical information despite claims to the contrary on the back cover blurb and is certainly very much ‘of it’s time’. Yet within the text we nevertheless find what could best be described as ‘eternal truths’, many of which are still worth investigating whatever your magical or mystical proclivities.
To conclude, the language may be a little quaint, the overall message perhaps a little too beige for this age of information overload, but for all this there is much to interest the occult student, if for no other reason than to put more modern magical practices into a better historical context.
Adrian Dobbie
