One only has to read the history of the Golden Dawn to realize how relevant this book is for todays working groups. This much-needed book will help the reader gain insight into the care and proper feeding of an esoteric group. Like most organizations, there can be much shenanigans when it comes to group dynamics. Mr. Farrell's book cuts through the bull and shares with the reader his years of magical group experience and good sense. "Gathering the magic", will equip the reader with the necessary knowledge to run an esoteric group as best it can. I found this book to be an excellent book on leadership and have applied the principles to other working organizations outside of the esoteric, quite successfully! If you are one of those people, who is motivated to start their own esoteric group, this book comes highly recommended as an excellent point to start.

I chose this book because I seemed to be an absolute failure at holding together any group; much less an esoteric one and I found it to be very helpful in many ways. And yet, it was not exactly what I was hoping for.

I believe this is largely because the author is coming from a European paradigm and his experience was with Occult groups, not covens, circles and groves, which is what I am generally dealing with. There is quite a difference in dynamic between European and American Egos and Magickal Neophytes and Fluffy Bunnies, if you know what I mean. For example, when he suggested all members pay dues monthly, whether or not they attend the meetings, my first thought was "Oh yea, like that's going to happen" and when he suggested members be given a correspondence course and written tests to make sure they fit with the dynamic of the group, thought, "Now there's a good way to make sure no one joins my group." And yet, by the time I was done with the book, I knew he was right, and that it could be done. The examples and scenarios he provided were very simple and easy to follow.
This book is an extremely easy read all around, even if you're not interested in forming a group but just want to read about esoteric group dynamics in general. The author writes with great candor without throwing around a lot of jargon. It's like discussing things over coffee. The boring, procedural parts are softened with anecdotes about the author's experiences and those of people he knows to illustrate the importance of this or that concept and examples are presented for the extremely slow among us, like me. It is an entertaining and enlightening book if nothing else.

One concept he explained that I found very interesting was the idea of a group Eregore. That is, the independent personality of the group, quite separate from its individual members. With this concept firmly in mind, one can understand some of the weirdness that goes on in esoteric groups and the underlying tensions that nobody seems to be responsible for.

All in all I found Gathering the Magic to be an extremely useful book. Granted, a lot of the concepts need adaptation to the American Neo-Pagan viewpoint but the differences are really minor. People are still people not matter where they are. And I don't agree with some of what he has to say about magic, but that's pretty common. The useful insights as to group structure, dealing with conflicts, etc. are very valuable and, perhaps most valuable of all, I now have a better understanding of where I have personally screwed up in the past.