Time to actually speak

It has been brought to my attention that there has been vocal opposition to the release of my new book King Over the Water in some quarters. Clearly without actually reading it, Sincerus Renatus (SR), who I have not spoken to since he started trying to write long rambling interpretations of Howe and the Sword of Wisdom to counter my first book Mathers' Last Secret, could not resist allowing it to get personal. In the end, when he started claiming I never met Whare Ra people and was never a member of OTR, I started to realise he was not interested in what really happened at any time in history (including events at which I was actually present) and only interested in creating a reality distortion field.

His chief David Griffin was a little clearer. He claimed that Mathers' Last Secret published HIS documents, even when the writer was actually dead before he was born. He has been writing a lot of blogs with the words FACT in capital letters which contain clauses that actually fail to live up to their billing.

Anyway, SR wrote yet another long post again this morning. Normally I would not bother replying, any more than I would to the drunk who shouts at people on the street corner. However, he made a few comments about Mathers' Last Secret, clearly terrified what King Over the Water will contain and desperate to stop people reading it so he can keep spinning his bogus history which makes him, his order and David Griffin appear important in the scheme of things. There is little doubt that daring to reply to them for the first time will be seen as proof that I am engaging in a “flame war,” because they are insecure where truth is concerned. Anyway, here are a few quotes and my replies to him.

(a) MacGregor Mathers took the initiation rituals of the Golden Dawn Tradition into a Masonic direction, stripping it off from all Magic, and that (b) he changed the same rituals into Magically barring the initiate from a full spiritual development. The attentive reader will of course notice that ‘a’ contradicts ‘b’.

It does not. Mathers takes out the Z documents, thus removing the magic, and then tweaks what is left so that it blocks the candidate from symbolically reaching a particular point where he can be challenged. It is like taking the car's engine out and then making sure that someone does not push it to a new location – and to top it all off he removes the steering wheel too. It is not a contradiction and the fact that SR doesn't get this indicates his incapacity to grasp the subtleties of the arguments of others. Maybe if SR was a historian or an anthropologist he would be able to write about Golden Dawn history :)

But even in this respect it fails tremendously, as entire portions of the rituals in the source text are missing and the transcriptions are filled with typos and errors.

A page of Nisi which SR apparently can't read

SR clearly lacks experience with reading Golden Dawn manuscripts. Nisi is pretty good in comparison with Crowley, Yeats, and some of the Whare Ra manuscripts. In King Over the Water I had to use some Slater manuscripts which were even worse. Slater's are the pile of documents that SR's order is based upon, so if he says Nisi was bad because of typos, etc he has to rule out his own material too.

I know this to be absolutely true as I myself own copies of the same source material as Mr. Farrell.

Actually SR is using Melissa Seims' photographs of the Nisi material, which he got in a document swap from someone else. I don't mind this, as I gave it to anyone who asked for it, but he should not mislead people into thinking he had the material before I did. Remember that he gained access to Nisi simply because I am not a bastard when it comes to making sure that Golden Dawn historical material is available to the world. To claim I was wrong for making this material generally available when he has clearly benefited from my making this material available for free is uncharitable at best, or is he saying simply that only he has the rights to AO material?

Mr. Farrell’s (the N.I.S.I. Collection)

SR should really be careful when he hits out at other people making “scholarly mistakes”. If he were so scholarly about his analysis of the Nisi collection he would have spotted who wrote the material. The Nisi collection was MY short name for it. “Nisi” was my shorthand for Nisi Dominus Frustra (Henry Kelf). It was never the N.I.S.I. Collection. There is much more to scholarship than imperiously correcting other people's spelling, including the writing of Kelf, who was a real AO member. The fact SR uses N.I.S.I consistently shows that he did not look at the original manuscript, nor read Mathers' Last Secret where it was clearly explained. One of the hallmarks of “scholarship” is to actually read and understand the material.

Publishing a revised edition not more than one year after the first is a bit unorthodox, to put it mildly.

Actually it is very common in the literary world now. It is possible thanks to new technology and means that people have access to the latest information, because books can be changed easily. Would SR rather people remain ignorant or not have access to the correct information? Historically books were updated when the first edition ran out and Mathers' Last Secret was updated as soon as we sold over a certain amount agreed with the publisher. As far as the revisions were concerned there were some minor typos and I took the opportunity to add some more footnotes and tweak some points that were not clear or that I did not have at the time.

I stand by my opinion that it is one of the worst “G.D. publications” that I have seen yet, if not the worst. As I have stated before it should never have been published.

Yes, it would be the worst book in the world for SR's order because it proved that what he has been selling people for years was just a reality distortion field. His order could no longer continue to pretend that the AO documents were different from the Golden Dawn. Apparently one of the “worst GD publications” has apparently forced it to make sweeping changes to the order that it would not have made otherwise. If Mathers' Last Secret was so unreliable (which it is not), then why make the changes? Maybe it was because it made SR's historical fantasy look bad. The fact that Mathers was using slightly tweaked Golden Dawn rituals with the magic taken out must have been a little embarrassing. It meant that while he was claiming that Mathers was the font of all magical knowledge he had associated himself with someone who was not particularly interested in teaching magic at all. My guess is that he is sitting with his fingers in his ears waiting for another explosion of reality coming out from King Over the Water.

Mr. Farrell and his publishers are good enough occultists to know that the best way to hurt a magical Order is to publish its rituals.

SR's knowledge of practical magic is underwhelming. Mathers was incredibly lazy and only tweaked the 0=0 rituals (yet he did not feel that their use by the rebels would cause him many problems). Elemental grade rituals have already been published, as has the revised 0=0. So if SR's reconstructed AO was going to be damaged it already had been done so by the British tabloid press, Regardie, Crowley, Torrens and Gilbert. Magic is not about the literal wording of rituals, (that is Masonry). It is about the inner content behind them. Someone could publish the rituals of the Magical Order of the Aurora Aurea and it would not harm the Order at all. That is because the godforms would be different as would the various events which happen at an inner level. The egregore and the spiritual connections are all different.

If SR's reconstructed AO uses the same inner structure as Mathers (the rebels didn’t) then it would be safe, because I have not published that material. If his Secret Chiefs have not told him about the Z documents, inner structures and their practical magical use in the 0=0 and beyond I suggest he asks them

When the Rosicrucian Order of the Alpha et Omega re-emerged in the early 1990’s, when the old Grand Temple of Ahatoor No. 7 was revived in 1992,

SR has changed his story. Originally his reconstructed AO order claimed "unbroken lineage" from Mathers and that all others were just, er, "reconstructions". It was even claimed that he had the minute book of the actual Paris temple as proof. In fact, they had a photocopy. If the temple was revived in 1992, as SR is now saying, it cannot have any lineage other than from his Secret Chiefs. Which is fine, so long as it does not use real history to justify its existence.

it’s no surprise then that he nurtures such views and desperately tries to overlay them upon the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and its successor the Rosicrucian Order of A∴O∴

I know there was a schism in SR's group about their uses so this is a little sensitive for him. David also had run ins with Dolores Ashcroft-Nowicki's (DAN) former student, so he would try to distance himself from this aspect of GD magic. However, DAN did not invent those methods (and indeed I don’t use her methods, favouring those taught to me by Whare Ra people).

SR is actually dismissing the inner teachings of a former AO leader Tranchell-Hayes (at one point he claimed lineage from her), which she learned from Brodie-Innes. But that is OK because he claims that the Secret Chiefs abandoned the AO before he took over. The same method was also used in Whare Ra, but he claims the Secret Chiefs were not behind the SM. Some of the channelling techniques that Fortune used were an adaptation of the methods used by Mathers and were used to communicate with LeT, but that is OK because he says that he met the Archangel face to face. I am interested to know SR's source that LeT is Lux ex Tenebris as the meaning of that name was a theory from Howe's book.... I can find no point where Mathers mentioned that was what those initials mean. It is interesting that his Secret Chief pops up with the same name as Howe's theory about what the name meant.

This is what makes people as Pat Zalewski and Nick Farrell scared as hell. That is what makes them so obsessed with the Rosicrucian Order of the Alpha et Omega, both past and present. In this they use the subtle and deceiving tactics of targeting the historical Order to hit the current Roscicrucian Order of Alpha et Omega®.

Actually, I have no particular interest in SR or his order (which, as he has publicly said, has little to do with Mathers' AO, but is rather a later reconstruction by his “Secret Chiefs”). He has absolutely nothing that I want or need. My path is that of practical magic and that is what I teach in MOAA. Generally I only pay attention to other groups and individuals that are working magic or are interested in sharing information and experiences within the Golden Dawn tradition. SR and his chiefs show a distinct lack of either. "I am going to tell you a secret".... really! That comedy hard sell didn't work for Zink, so why should it work for a serious magical group?

I am not interested in the fantasy of people who claim they can turn lead into gold, those who construct bogus histories, spout New Age rubbish, claim proprietary ownership on documents they don't own or say they have the secrets of the universe but when they are asked to provide proof they mysteriously clam up. I am also against the Golden Dawn being used for personal financial aggrandisement and hard sell techniques. A Golden Dawn order should not be a sole proprietorship controlled by a trademark. While I have no problem with people making money from occultism, I draw the line at running the Golden Dawn as a business. This is what I objected to with Zink's order.

At one time I made friendly approaches to SR and his order, but I was forced to pull back when David insisted that I had no contact with the people at Whare Ra. In one case he even claimed that I had never been a member of OTR, because he said so. It was clear that the price of being left alone by SR and David is to accept their reality distortion field without question.

Lately David has been insisting that the Magical Order of Aurora Aurea is based on Regardie's teaching and that we have nothing “new” to teach. Something the actual members of MOAA were surprised to hear :)

Spinning a reality distortion field around other people's work when you are ignorant of what they really do and then shouting the lie over and over has made SR, David and their Order the pariah of the Golden Dawn community. While so called “scholarship” promotes this distortion field no one with any sense can take any of them seriously.

I decided to break all contact with their group - and it has remained that way ever since. I have deleted a number of abusive posts from David from my blog. His response was to claim that his Secret Chiefs had thrown me out of the Golden Dawn and threatened me that if I did not do what he told me my own members would depose me as chief of MOAA!

The sequence is getting dull. If I write antyhing that breaks with the orthodoxy which SR or David is trying to peddle at this minute, I am apparently attacking their order. This might be true if I sat down and worked out “how can I piss off SR and David”, but really I usually don't have the time to waste thinking about them or their group

Neither am I “jealous” about how the “Secret Chiefs selected their order over mine”, as SR and David have publicly alleged. If they think that their Secret Chief has made a difference to their spiritual lives I am glad for them. Frankly I see little in the way of evidence. Personally I find the whole Secret Chief thing a personal attempt to satisfy a distant father figure in a personal life by rejoicing in finding a figure that actually gives the person some attention. In MOAA we are more interested in contacting our Higher Self and becoming individuals than looking for more humans to surrender our will to. But while SR claims to have invisible friends he has to accept that the rest of the community will take the piss, because it is silly to think that he can actually sell people that idea.

This propping up of a reality distortion field will mean that SR will write a long blog on his site which will actually say nothing. Then David will go onto his blog and insist that it proves everything and the fact that I do not reply means you and he are right. He will then write a couple of anonymous posts to back him up and delete posts from those who disagree with him.

In fact he has not discredited anything for me to reply to. He is just not actually saying anything.

I generally do not reply to SR because it gives his argument too much credit to waste my time replying when he is clearly not interested in learning or discovering any truth.

I have been around long enough to see David's lineage story change so many times that it has become a joke. No, they don't have lineage to the original Golden Dawn and every time he has used a historical source to claim it, it has been subsequently disproven. They seem to have realised this because the new story is that you have the lineage from unnamed Secret Chiefs. Well, it is historically unarguable, but needs to be taken on faith that it is true. Given the fact that they and their order have not been able to tell the truth so far about its lineage, SR will perhaps forgive the rest of the GD community if we don’t believe them time either.