James Lees

New Equinox

The worrying fact of a genuine Qaballa in English was first put to the occult reading public in 1979, in the Editorial of the final issue of Ray Sherwin's periodical The New Equinox. The "order & value of the English Alphabet," predicted in Liber AL vel Legis, had been obtained in the English Midlands by a magickian named James Lees in November 1976, and with the members of his occult group he had researched, experimented, and proved the new system to the point where the first conclusions and propositions could be shared. Lees took over the publication of The New Equinox with the subtitle "British Journal of Magick" and published several articles about the English Qaballa in 1980-81, in five issues. In the 1980's occultism was a basis for an undercover kind of lifestyle without fashionable accessories, a far cry from the present climate of academic indulgence and establishment-led tolerance, and only just emerging from the shadow cast by the Golden Dawn and the "Great Revival" to formulate new answers to the old questions. English Qaballa has not only withstood the tests of Time, but expanded from the first hypotheses into a complete coherent and harmonious initiatory system of alpha-numeric symbol correspondences, a viable alternative to the non-English systems which have dominated occult publication for decades. The reproduction of its advent and early development should therefore be of interest to a new generation of enquiring minds as well as to those who may be renewing an old familiarity.