Paul Foster Case

Paul Foster Case

Paul Foster Case (born October 3, 1884 in Fairport , New York , † March 2, 1954 in Mexico ) was an American occultist and Rosicrucian .

Life

Paul Foster Case was born the son of a town librarian and deacon of a local parish church. At the age of five he received piano and organ lessons from his mother and became the organist of the parish church. He also began to be interested in occultism in his childhood and had experiences in lucid dreams . In 1900 there was a meeting between Case and Claude Bragdon , who asked Case about the origin of playing cards. As a result, Case came across the tarot in his father's library , which from then on would fascinate him all his life.

Case began to be interested in yoga between 1905 and 1908.

In 1916, Case published what is now considered to be a fundamental series of articles entitled the secret doctrine of the Tarot .

In 1918 he met Michael Whitty , editor of Azoth magazine , and in the same year became treasurer of the Thoth-Hermes-Lodge of the Rosecrucian Order of Alpha et Omega , a group that emerged after the collapse of the original Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn formed around Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers .

Whitty died in 1920, which Case attributed to what he believed to be an unhealthy occupation with Enochian magic . Paul Foster Case moved to Los Angeles and began building his own order, the Builders of the Adytum (BOTA), and finally bidding farewell to a career as a musician. Over the next three decades, he devised a complete curriculum and correspondence system that encompassed everything that belongs to the Western Hermetic tradition, including tarot , Kabbalah and alchemy .

In 1937 Case described what he believed the BOTA system should be in Wheel of Life magazine . The BOTA system, Case said, is the direct successor of the Golden Dawn, but it has been cleansed of the dangerous and dubious elements of magic that the Golden Dawn inherited from John Dee and Edward Kelley .

On March 2, 1954, Paul Foster Case died while on vacation with his wife in Mexico.

literature

• Paul Foster Case: Keys to the Eternal Wisdom of the Tarot . Urania, Neuhausen 1992, ISBN 3-908644-87-9 (Pomaska-Brand, Schalksmühle 2006, ISBN 3-935937-41-5 ).
• Paul Foster Case: The Rosicrucian Allegory. The True and Invisible Order of the Rose Cross . Volume 1. Pomaska-Brand, Schalksmühle 2001, ISBN 3-935937-00-8 .
• Paul Foster Case: The Ten Rosicrucian Degrees. The True and Invisible Order of the Rosicrucian , Volume 2. Pomaska-Brand, Schalksmühle 2003, ISBN 3-935937-12-1 .

Web links

• Self-presentation of the builders of the Adytum (BOTA)