Nick Farrell's Blog

Pre-orders now open

2012-01-25T19:22:00.002+01:00

Check out the latest press release from Kerubim Press. Golden Dawn and Enochian - what more could you want?

Pre-order Now!

Limited Hardback Editions available for pre-order.

The Kerubim Press launch titles, King Over The Water by Nick Farrell and Enochian Magic In Theory by Dean F. Wilson, are now available for pre-order. Both books are set for a late February launch, which is only weeks away, and there are only 100 copies of the Limited Hardback Edition of each title. All 100 copies will be signed and numbered by the author, and each copy will come with a Kerubim Press bookmark that is sure to be the envy of whatever it is you're currently using as a bookmark. If that wasn't enough, the Limited Hardback Editions also feature a different cover design compared to their paperback cousins, making them a true collector's item.

Paperback editions will be available from online retailers like Amazon in late February. Ebook versions will also be available within the coming months.

KING OVER THE WATER

King Over The Water is Nick Farrell's controversial prequel-come-sequel to Mathers' Last Secret, the exposé on Samuel Mathers from Golden Dawn fame. This book is set to rock the magical work just as much as its predecessor, with a thorough look at the ousted King of the Golden Dawn and how things went in his post-rebellion group, the Alpha et Omega. There are also a number of previously unpublished original GD and AO documents, such as the original Z documents and the Book of the Tomb, the secret and much coveted text that was required for making a Vault of the Adepts.

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ENOCHIAN MAGIC IN THEORY

Enochian Magic In Theory is Dean F. Wilson's long-awaited tome on the theoretical elements of the powerful Enochian system of magic. The book provides an indepth look at the history of the system and answers many of the questions about the puzzles left behind by Dee and Kelley. Using a unique mix of scholarly critique and personal insight, Wilson provides a thorough understanding of a system that has beguiled many. As a magician who has worked extensively with Enochian magic for many years, Wilson prepares the foundations required for using the system - the necessary steps before delving into the practical guidelines of Enochian Magic In Practice, the sequel expected later this year.

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Remember that there are only 100 copies of these Limited Hardback Editions. Make sure to pre-order your copy today to avoid disappointing both yourself and your bookshelf.

Mass initiations

2012-01-02T16:47:00.001+01:00

I had someone ask me if I thought whyit was impossible to initiate a group of people roped together. After all some Golden Dawn groups initiate people in this way, as domasonic orders, and Mathers explained to his AO members how it couldbe done.

If the ritual has NO MAGIC at all it isquite simple to do as many as you like, but magically it isimpossible for most magicians short of a secret chief to do properly. Even if you take the most basic instructions in the Z documents anddo not embellish them with half the godforms it takes an extremelycompetent magician to initiate more than one person at a time. I donot believe that there is a single person living who can concentratethat well and besides the Golden Dawn Z structure prevents ithappening.

Feel the intimacy of this mass ritual.

I know Mathers said it was possiblefor the AO but at that point he saw the order as something to makemoney from and largely abandoned the magical Z documents. Howeverin his earlier work he described things like the astral body of thecandidate being split from the candidate and being placed between thepillars... try and do that with half a dozen people. Then try to seetheir sphere of sensation interact with various godforms at differenttimes while holding your wand the right way up and not going wibble.

I used to think that roping togetherwas possible for the last part of the elemental grade rituals. Thiswas because I thought that the magic was somewhat limited and itappeared to be just reading out long teaching. Of course since thenI have found that there is a lot more work to do in the finalsections of those rituals which I had not been told about before andthese are just as complicated as the other sections.

So if it is magically impossible toinitiate that many people why do groups do it? Because they need toget the maximum number of bums on seats for their groups. They donot care about the quality of the magic, they want the quantity ofpeople. This might be, if they collect dues, to make money forthemselves, but it could also be for the ego value of having a largetemple. Either way it is not a group that anyone serious aboutmagic should be interested in joining.

One side issue to this is how manyinitiations can someone carry out properly? Over the years as thetechnical requirements for an initiation have gone up, I am findingthat I can initiate fewer into the 0=0 and 3=8 and 4=7. I tend tomanage three ok in a day but I will need a large glass of wine before I can speak coherently... Doing a fourth still works but I amcertainly flagging. I have been doing these for a while now and I am sure there are people out there who can do one or more more than me. However the bloke that can do six in a day is lying to himself and the people who he is initiating.

The reason is not just the stress ofthe rehearsal, or the visualising, it is managing to hold theconnection open for that many people. It is also the knowledge alsothat for the next week I will be as sick as a dog however buzzy Ifeel on the day. I am sure that there are better magicians out therewho can do better, but I would be careful of any group that suggeststhat you can be initiated with a crowd of people, or even that theHeirophant can manage to initiate more than four people a day andthat the fifth person will get the same level of attention as thefirst.

Bringing someone into the mysteries isa sacred task. It cannot be done as if you were operating aproduction line with everyone getting the same experience. As eachcandidate approaches a godform, it will react differently to thembased on their experience. You can see this as the officer's voiceschange in ritual as the godform energy changes. That is impossibleif large numbers, either roped together, or not, are involved.

My advice is that you do not join any group which suggests that something is possible. You will come to regret it later.

Source of the Universe Tarot Card?

2011-12-12T21:23:00.002+01:00

Mike Magee found the follow image from a 17th Century English book... If you ever thought that Levi or the Golden Dawn invented the image you can be rest assured that it is older than the GD but at least still British.

1=10 and changing the Golden Dawn System

2011-12-10T12:27:00.001+01:00

For a while I have been concerned thatwhen it came to the Golden Dawn's 1=10 grade, the ritual effect wasnot on a par with the other grade rituals. As I said on PatZalewski's yahoo group, when I went through it there was an empty feeling. The first part of the ritual was the best with the final unblockingof the candidate so that their sphere of sensation could continue upthe tree was impressive, but this was nothing like the heavenly canoerides of the higher grades.

I am not talking about intellectualinformation here. Sure there are spades of intellectual informationin the 1=10 which can get the candidate thinking for centuries. But if you want to present intellectual information you give to someone in a book you do not make them sit through a ritual. Rituals are where magic happens, lectures are where you give someone brain food.

Then there was the problem of the aftereffects of the 1=10. They were almost universally bad. The 1=10 issupposed to have an effect on the 12^th, first and secondhouses. This would be a balancing and therefore if a person had aweakness in that area then it could hurt a bit. Equally it couldhave been positive. With one exception the 1=10 had a negative effecton people's finances or created a depressing effect on the candidate. This would be fine if the candidate had to realise somethingearthy, but the fact is the negative effect stopped when thecandidate entered the 2=9 so something wrong which was beingcorrected by that ritual.

Being a traditionalist and not wanting to change anything if it can be avoided, I decided to look at the ritual in some detail to see what the problem was. Over the weekend I did two 1=10s andspent some time watching the way the energy flows in the ritualworked. The first problem was in the first half where the ritualtilted towards the Northern element with little to check it. Thesecond part was that there was not enough “divine input”hardwired into the the rite which would have provided the candidatewith enough steam to ascend the tree.

The problem is no where as acute as itwas when I was using Regardie's 1=10 for initiations. Using PatZalewski's Rituals and Commentaries book we were installing theArchangel Metatron within the candidate at one point which must havehelped from the days when I was just using Regardie but there wasstill something lacking. Likewise there was a lack of the earthelement within the ritual. We had also added Hathor to control theforces (at various points she appeared to dance on the altar similarto the Universe tarot card) in the centre of the temple.

I found the answer, but I was curiousto see if anyone else had spotted it or had noticed any of the sameeffects. I found the answer in a document written by Mathers butunseen by many until Pat published it a few years ago in his SecretTeachings of the Golden Dawn. This was effectively a Z document forthe 1=10. I will get to it in a minute.

Anyway the response on the web groupwas interesting to say the least. Some said they had noticed thesame thing and had even changed the ritual to make things workbetter. Others insisted that the ritual was perfect as it was and Iwas completely wrong. One suggested that it was earth so it wassupposed to be dull, another suggested that intellectual teachingshad their place within the system. Perigrin said that crossing thethreshold in the temple was an extremely powerful part of the rite.(I could not see how, looking at the ritual dynamic how that could bepossible). Generally though the feeling was that the intellectualaspects of presenting the three diagrams were “where the 1=10 waswhere it was at”. Yet magically (other than impressing thediagrams into the sphere of sensation of the candidate) the impactwas limited.

Simply the group split between thosewho felt you could not change anything and those who felt you neededto tinker with things. However, those who felt you could changenothing had to argue their position from the perspective that it wasperfect in the first place and those who wanted changes often wantedto shift it towards their own bias. Now as usual the answer lay inbetween (ironic for a 1=10 debate) Only one person thought to suggestthat I look at Mathers' ritual explanation.

Mathers suggested that in the firstpart of the ritual there was a triangle of invisible godforms formedin the temple. In the East there was the godform of Adonai Ha Artez(although he did not say it would be under the control of the EasternTablet and its Elemental King) In the South there was the femaleform Malkah (the bride) and she was under the control of the King ofthe Southern Tablet. The North was under the control of the Godformof the King of the Tablet.

Although Mathers did not explain theidea much this triangle of force would balance the ritual completely. Firstly the polarity between Malkah and the Elemental King of theNorth would create the immeasurable region and this could becontrolled by Hathor to allow the candidate to enter. Crossing thiswould give the candidate a burst of energy as they stood between thetwo polarities of Malkah and the Elemental King.

Malkah's energy would be controlled bythe Elemental king of Fire which would make her power more fiery andwarm up the darker side of the elemental King and the tablet. Thiswould be something that would be controlled by Hathor who, as the Godof Love and Beauty would counter effects of depression. The colderaspects of Earth would be warmed. This is emphasised by the factthat the triangle which the earth is connect to the three godforms isa fire triangle. The Apex of the Triangle is Air which is theopposite to Earth. This brings spirit into the ritual through theAir element. To balance this Hathor would have to rise above thealtar (like in key 21) to form a pyramid (of fire). But it creates athree dimensional triangle of the art wherein the Heirophant canbring Metatron inside the candidate to provide them with thespiritual power to continue up the tree. Notice how much fire is inthis part of the ritual? Hathor is likewise a fiery aspect. Allthis serves to balance the Earthy energy invoked by just opening theEarth tablet.

So why didn't Mathers balance the Earthenergy with its opposite of Air? The effect would be to cancel outthe Earth energy. In his other papers Mathers says that Air andEarth, on its own creates some weight, makes things difficult to see,untangible and provides little motion. Not a great thing for futurework. Fire and Earth, on the other hand creates great dryness andslight obscurity, perfect for future effort. Air would increase thepower of the Fire to create great heat, intense lightness, and motionwhich would be balanced from getting out of hand by the Earth. Either way the combination would help the candidate move on withsome clarity.

So why no water? Water, according toMathers would only provide some slight effect on the fire but speedit up too much, but it would have the effect of making the earth toocold, too heavy, dense and solid.

So what was going wrong with theRegardie version? The candidate comes into the temple and gets hitby pure Earth which was cold, dry and heavy and solid. His firstencounter is with Samael who stands by the Water side of the altarand represented by an officer connected to Water. He fails, and goesto Metatron who is on the Southern side but is not supported by afiery polarity of Malkah and the Elemental King of Fire. The Airelement makes little, or no energetic appearance in the ritual, thusthe candidate is hit by an unbalanced Earth Element with no controlor balance and becomes unbalanced in the Earth element for their timein that grade. If the person is already unbalanced then they willsuffer badly. Since most people are unbalanced when it comes totheir finances they get hit there. If not they get hit by the heavySaturnian nature of the Earth and this leads to depression. There isnothing positive to be found in unbalanced Earth. It is all prettygrim. It also ends when the person gets into the 2=9 when theyfinally get the balance of the Air (the 2=9 has a strong foundationand balancing aspect).

What is tragic is that the paper thatMathers gave his hint was given out at the highest grade of the 5=6in the early Golden Dawn, but not seen until the 6=5 in the StellaMatutina. Few copies have turned up and few knew about them until Patpublished his book.

It is not clear if this will solve allthe issues of the 1=10. I am not sure if the more passive invisiblestations of Malkah/ Fire are strong enough to polarise a fully opentablet in the North and the candidate would be unaware of either ofthem. I would suggest some direct exposure to those forces might beneeded (perhaps allegorically telling the candidate of theirexistence). However Mather's changes would go a long way tobalancing the problems I have this this ritual.

Egyptian Shaman is finally out

2011-11-08T20:29:00.001+01:00

The spiritual traditions of Ancient Egypt are well documented and are at the forefront of the Western Mystery and Magical Tradition. But they are a gloss over a more primal “shamanic” tradition which gets to the essence of Nature and its relationship with humanity, life and death.

This book is a practical manual for those who wish to explore that primal spirituality using Egyptian symbolism. As Egypt was one of the village cultures, so Egyptian shamanism was one of the first to operate in an urban environment, making its techniques suitable for modern times.

Egyptian Shaman paints the picture of what it was like to be a village priest in Ancient Egypt before describing the practical techniques which would have been employed during those times. These techniques, which have never been revealed before, have been adapted for modern minds with
the intention of making this a practical spiritual path.

The book controversially contains a chapter on exorcism and dealing with the dead, which many have claimed are subjects which should not be published. It shows how later Egyptian texts, such as the Book of the Dead, were Shamanic guide books to the Underworld.This is a book containing the keys to transmute,not only the self, but the whole planet.

It has yet to appear on the American Amazon but can be found here http://www.mandrake.uk.net/nickfarrell.htm

Revised edition of Mathers Last Secret is out

2011-10-27T17:32:00.000+02:00

The new edition of Mathers' Last Secret is now out. The new edition started out as an attempt to correct some of the typos which found their way into the first edition. However it started to grow making the book a lot bigger. This version is more of a scholars edition with improved footnotes and some of the more obscure material made clearer. Some of my commentary has been clarified.

Mathers' Last Secret is important to those who are not members of the AO because it contains the only complete version of the Golden Dawn rituals available. So far most of what has been printed have either been the cut down Stella Matutina rites which were printed by Israel Regardie or the later Whare Ra rituals. This book is the only one to contain the real Golden Dawn Portal ritual. So far the only Portal ritual to be published has been that of the Stella Matutina. Indeed seems that for many years the AO continued to use the Golden Dawn rituals, with some tweaks to the 0=0 rite.

As such it contains instructions, diagrams and even Tarot cards which will be vital for those who are trying to use the Golden Dawn System of Magic.

The first book was controversial because it lifted the lid on the AO as run by Mathers. For many years people, usually claiming to be the incarnation of Mathers have used the name of the AO to sell their system as different from other members of the Golden Dawn community. They have been able to do this because few had access to original AO material. Little of it survived and much of that was in the United States. That was until a cache of documents appeared in an unlikely place and permission was given for publication.

Mathers' Last Secret proved that not only was the AO exactly like the Golden Dawn of 1894 it had reverted back to its Masonic roots and played down the magical techniques which made the order famous.

The revised edition of Mathers' Last Secret is a tribute to the Golden Dawn community. There are those who would have you believe that the Golden Dawn community is at each others' throats, this book is a tribute to the way the real Golden Dawn community works together. Many Golden Dawn leaders and members from different Orders and temples helped me out on this project, some asking to remain anonymous. As a result I had access to information which I did not have and was able to make this edition more useful for those who want to study the Golden Dawn tradition.

There are still a few copies of the old edition in the market. If you want to buy the new edition you should use this link and make sure that the cover has “revised” written on it.

Alchemy and the Chemical Change

2011-10-04T13:38:00.000+02:00

We arrived in Hong Kong in search of the secret of turning lead into gold. We purchased an old scroll from an Old Sage in Fai Hai and were making our way to the dock when were way laid by the evil Fu Man Chu and his associates.
“Give me the scroll of the Golden Flower of the Dogs' Bollocks* for long have I sought the secrets of Alchemy and the ancient sages have not given them unto me,” said Fu Man Chu.
“And if we don't?” I replied, clutching the scroll to my chest.
“Then you will suffer the curse of 1000 deaths without medical insurance,” he said.
My associate Little Tim yelled “Run” and we fled to the docks, closely pursued by Fu Man Chu and his men.
We arrived in the Hong Kong docks and found thousands of junks waiting for the morning tide.
“Quick,” I shouted. “Board that Junk.”
“But which one,” asked Little Tim.
“It does not matter," I replied. "When it comes to Alchemy you can get away with any old Junk.”

* The phrase loses a bit in the translation.

Over the weekend we had a number of initiations and I was playing with the chemicals in the chemical change to make sure the proportions were right and we didnt end up with mud instead of something red.
Our temple uses Mohrs' salt which is a double salt of ammonium sulphate and ferrous sulphate. It's blue green colour turns red when it is exposed to Sodium salicylate. Both in solution are clear. In the old golden dawn the mix was a little different but the idea was the same. Iron indicator and Iron which turns red. Strangely Mathers' AO attributed the Iron mixture to Venus and the indicator to Mars. In the coming revision to Mathers' Last Word, I suggest it should be the other way around.
Anyway, during the ritual the candidate is told that the experiment conducted in front of the is to show what happens if they break their oath. This has lead some to think that it is where the oath is hardwired into the candidate's sphere of sensation. But there are couple of things wrong with this idea. The most obvious is that the chemical change happens after the candidate's elements are bought back together by the Kerux (since this was probably not a mini-ritual carried out by the early GD or the AO it might have been less important).

However as I was playing with the elements I noticed that he Mohr's Salt gave a greenish tinge to the water. Worried that there might be something else in the water that it might be reacting to I looked it up. Achemists would have called Mohr's Salt Green Vitriol. Which is represented by the symbol of the Green Lion. It often means the vegetable life force.
Then it occurred to me that by adding the Sodium Salicylate I was turning the Green Lion Red. Thus, under the cover of the threat of an oath violation, you were taking the lower aspects of the candidate and causing them to develop.
Now the reason I preface this with the silly story is that the Golden Dawn did not use Mohr's salt or Sodium Salicylate. Mohr's salt had only recently been discovered and certainly it would not have been available to alchemists. In short although the discovering is interesting and can be explained using Alchemical terms, it does not mean that the GD wanted this chemical change to evolve the candidate's vegetative self. Yet, it would be equally possible for someone to cloud this part of the ritual with alchemical symbolism to have it make sense. As I say above... you can get away with any old junk when it comes to Alchemy. It might be leading to new insights, but it equally it might not.

Announcing Kerubim Press

2011-09-22T10:17:00.000+02:00

DUBLIN, IRELAND – Kerubim Press, independent publisher of occult books, officially announces its existence today, giving the esoteric community a valuable array of texts on topics ranging from ceremonial magic to paganism.

Kerubim Press authors deliver thoroughly researched topics presented in an accessible, yet scholarly format and/or easy to follow guidelines for practical magical work.

Books are published in both a limited hardcover edition of 100 signed and numbered copies, standard paperbacks for a more affordable budget, and multiple ebook formats for the revolutionary digital book age, which Kerubim Press plans to be major mover in.

The first two books in Kerubim Press' lineup are Nick Farrell's King Over The Water and Dean F. Wilson's Enochian Magic In Theory, both scheduled for release in February 2012. Pre-orders for the special limited edition of each will be available before release. Pricing has yet to be decided.

(Temporary artwork)

Over the years many myths have built up about one of the founders of the Golden Dawn, Samuel L. MacGregor Mathers. Many of these have been created by those who wish to damn the Golden Dawn and its system of magic or by those who want to naively believe a bogus magical story about the Order and its founders.

In King Over The Water, Golden Dawn magician Nick Farrell paints a picture of the founders of the Golden Dawn becoming out of their depth as the Order began to create magicians. Rather than painting Mathers as an eccentric genius, Farrell sees him as an autocratic fantasist. He sees Mathers struggling to keep up as his students rapidly became better than him at the system he created, and shows how he was unable to raise his game to help the Order develop further.

In what will be a portrait of the problems that could befall any esoteric leader, Farrell (author of Gathering The Magic, a textbook on magical group dynamics) reveals how Mathers' later rituals were an attempt to remove the magic from the system he created so that he could milk it for money.

Included will be previously unpublished papers from Mathers' own version of the Golden Dawn, the Alpha et Omega, including the unexpurgated version of the Tarot manuscript, the full version of the Book of the Tomb (a key document for creating a Vault of the Adepts), the original method for the consecration of the sword, and much more.

King Over The Water is the prequel to Farrell's groundbreaking exposé on the Alpha et Omega, Mathers' Last Secret (2011, Rosicrucian Order of the Golden Dawn), and provides another look into the mind of a magician that helped develop the magic we use today.

(Temporary artwork)

The first of Dean F. Wilson’s eagerly awaited Enochian Magic series, detailing John Dee and Edward Kelley’s magical system in extraordinary detail, from the Heptarchic system to Enochian proper.

Wilson provides a unique mix of thorough research with his own experience and understanding from using the system for many years, resulting in a book that is both scholarly and insightful.

He explores the history behind the famous magician and seer, shows how the system was delivered, explains why it is such a powerful magical tool, and answers many of the questions that people have asked about the nature of the angelic beings.

Gain an indepth knowledge of Enochian magic. Learn how to derive the names of angels from the various tablets. Discover the purpose of the tools. Ponder the mysteries of the more obscure parts of the system, with Wilson’s suggestions for what they might mean.

This tome provides a comprehensive overview of the Enochian system for both scholars and magicians, with excerpts from Dee's diaries and insights from a number of Enochian magicians over the last century.

Enochian Magic In Theory is the first of a two part series on Dee's angelic system, with Enochian Magic In Practice providing the practical instructions for how to put the magic into use. The latter is scheduled for a late 2012 release.

Like the Kerubim of Ezekiel, Kerubim Press aims to look in all directions to provide one of the most comprehensive selections of occult books on the market, while remaining committed to quality in everything it publishes.

Spread the word about Kerubim Press by telling your friends and colleagues.

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Alchemy and Golden Dawn Ritual

2011-09-14T12:58:00.000+02:00

Alchemical ideas are starting to be battered around the blogsphere again. As usual this is thanks to the output of Pat Zalewski. It seems that Pat only has to cough an idea these days and people will flood the internet saying they thought of it first and Zalewski got it wrong.

Part of the problem, and it is not a problem for Pat, is that Alchemy means different things to different people. The symbolism is so obtuse that some, like the psychologist Carl Jung decided that it was all archetypal processes of transmutation and not meant to be taken literally. Others, like Israel Regardie, nearly killed themselves trying to create the Philosophers' Stone in a test tube. My own experience of physical alchemy has been what I have seen others achieve. I was around at the Zalewski house in the 1980s when I saw a created plant stone in action. I have also seen a person who managed a peacock's tail transformation during some metal alchemical work. At the time I thought it was fairly interesting, but did not seem to create much in the way of spiritual transformation. The Peacock's Tail for example was a multicoloured oxide coat which I had seen when I used to make toy soldiers (I think it was to do with the oils). Equally I do not believe those who claim they have turned base metal into gold, simply on the principle that it is clearly a sales ploy. I find it incredibly unlikely that, given the personality transformation required to archive the Stone, that anyone who claims to have done so must be practically of saint-like status. Most of the people I have met who claimed follow Alchemy as a spiritual path have been arrogant wankers with glass egos and a love of belittling other people's efforts to re-enforce their flaccid egos. Mind you the same can be said of ritual magicians.

As a metaphor, alchemy is an important way of understanding magical processes. It is a set of symbols which can be used as an allegorical language to understand some of the more subtle ideas in magic.

The Golden Dawn was a little soft on the use of Alchemy. It is fairly clear from some papers, that Mathers had a passing interest in the subject. Certainly alchemical ideas flow into the rituals. Even without going into details it is possible to see an alchemical idea being expressed in the transmutation by the Kerux.

It is the idea that the Golden Dawn rituals can be interpreted alchemically that Pat Zalewski has latched onto in his book. The idea is simple but can be taken to depths which could end up with you trying something out in a test tube.

You start with the candidate being the base matter. Each grade is an alchemical process which leads to the refinement of the personality. To Pat, the entire outer order is part of the blackening process with different phases of whitening and yellowing.

These are all alchemical terms and when others use them they are inclined to make your head spin. But by rooting them into the Golden Dawn ritual it is easy for anyone who follows this tradition to understand.

For those who are using the Golden Dawn system, this book unlocks a layer of understanding that they would otherwise not have got, even if they were experienced alchemists. Alchemists tend to live in their own world and are not used to applying their system to something as involved as the Golden Dawn. They will spend days writing long smug a treatise which says that the Golden Dawn Alchemy shown in the Z documents is “wrong” and not understand that it is wired into the 0=0.

Zalewski covers this point smoothly and tells it like it is. It is also a very different book from what he has written previously. His previous contributions to the Golden Dawn tradition were written many years ago. This one was written this year. It shows a considerable maturing both in writing style and thought. Gone are the days of quoting his teacher Jack Taylor. In Alchemy and Golden Dawn Ritual, Pat is standing on his own with his own ideas and it is an approach he can fell justifiably proud. It is a little book of 128 pages but it points you in the right direction for how you need to see the rituals to get them to work correctly.

One of the downsides to this approach is that you can say any old rubbish with an alchemical gloss and get away with it. It is possible to sniff that “of course you were not using the 12 step method or the method insisted on by Father Bacon for storing cheese”. However Pat's approach does not have that problem. Instead of obscuring, the approach clarifies.

Anyway, it is a book well worth buying http://www.amazon.com/Alchemy-Golden-Dawn-Ritual/dp/0982352182/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1315997849&sr=8-1 .

Johnson's Solids and Enochian Aethyrs

2011-09-06T18:26:00.000+02:00

I got passed a paper from the Hermetic Order of the Nascent Dawn which had some interesting ideas relating the to the Governor of the Aethyrs. It was given on to me in the assumption that I would put it here.

The idea is that there are 92 governors of the Aethyrs who rule over different parts of the world. The rule of the First Aethyr is Occodon and he rules Egypt.

The number also pops in a list of Geometric Solids. These are called Johnson's Solids after Dr Norman Johnson who wrote his 1966 worked out that there were only 92 convex non-uniform polyhedra which could have regular faces.

What is interesting is that he arranged a list of them in order If you look at the first one (which is the simplist) you get a four sided pyramid. Remember Occodon and the fact he looks after Egypt?

What HOND is arguing is that there is a reason why the list of geometric shapes appears in this order and that we can find out a bit about the energy of each Governor by looking at the Johnson Solid connected to it.

It gets into adding up numbers as each of them a calculator. Each face is made up of a number both inside and outside. I would guess that each solid is made up of a shape which can be interpreted cabblastically.

Magically you could construct a talisman built out of each shape with your name on the outside... your mystery name on the inside and surround yourself with all the angels and divine names that each shape creates. They would be like my four worlds talismans only replicated many times and into a three dimensional solid.

Since each Governer represents an area of the earth you could use their shape to help you in magic to help that particular country.

I have no strong views on this and am suggesting it in case anyone has an “aha moment” and it provides them with an answer they needed. I have not seen any Metabiaugmented dodecahedrons structures in Rome (I think I would have noticed). But Angels do tend to throw up geometric shapes a lot so there might be something in it.

The nature of the 6=5 and 7=4 Grades in the Golden Dawn

2011-08-27T15:35:00.000+02:00

The Golden Dawn is a system of spiritual evolution. People often forget this and assume that it is all about magical techniques and intellectual information.

As far as history goes this state of affairs has been encouraged. Papers on the various Golden Dawn components were written, promoted and demoted in the grade structure often giving the illusion that “more powerful techniques” were given in future grades.

However more powerful techniques seemed to have dried up by the 5=6 grade and no one appeared to be able to provide a system for the 6=5 and 7=4 grades. Felkin came the closest with two very impressive rituals but the actual grade material that went with it was, in theory, a little sparse.

This has lead people to attempt to create new 6=5 and 7=4 grades which are providing “new information” and “powerful techniques”. However more techniques and more intellectual information is not what the 6=5 and 7=4 grades are all about.

The 5=6 grade is called Adeptus Minor. In that grade you are given many practical techniques and magical processes. These are incredibly involved and cover all the major branches of the Western Mystery Tradition. By the time that a person has completed this training they should be a competent magician within the Golden Dawn tradition. They should be experienced in Inner States and practical magical methods. They should equally be able to take magical systems and convert them to the Golden Dawn system. I will give you an example of how you can take something that is outside the Golden Dawn system and make something that fits and appears to give you more information.

Agrippa sigils using planetary squares

One of the incredibly basic forms of magic used by the Golden Dawn was the art of drawing sigils and seals on Planetary squares. The squares produced by Agrippa were basic. Below is a simple Saturn square. (I worked this out in the 1990s before I was a member of the Golden Dawn and had to redraw the diagrams from an old dot matrix printer)

However if you “enhance” the square using Golden Dawn information, it appears much different and adds considerable teaching to the nature of the square.

From this we can see that the square is centred on the Tarot card The Emperor so we know that Saturn energy sets things in Order. Paul Case would say that the top lines were the initiating energies, the second line where the catalysts and the third line were the results.

More interesting stuff comes when we start to use the planetary square to create a sigil of a spirit or angel. Here we have created the sigil of Zazel by connecting all the letters of the name onto the square. (The lamed is missing but is converted to Gimmel be found by using the Al Beker chart).

What we can learn from this is that Zazel is heavily committed towards communication and Gemini, which is something we would not expect from a Spirit of Saturn. Indeed with the Fool we would think that the spirit is pure air. The only thing that seems to root him to anything would be having his feet in the waters of Luna and the High Priestess. Using the Golden Dawn Talismatic associations we could visualise a crowned being with a thin intelligent face, light hair (you could argue a case for a dual headed Janus). Winged with a swastika lamen, holding a sword standing on waves of water. (note that if you are using the square you do not look up the talismatic image for Lamed, you look up Gimel). There is a lot more information which can be gleened from this method, you could take it even further by adding the colour scheme from the vault and really sex it up. What would you get? Four points for Gryffindor for coming up with it. What have we really learnt here? We have simply fine tuned something which already existed and it may or may not be more effective. But is this sort of thinking advanced? The answer is no. It is pure and simple intellectualising which may or may not take us somewhere.

The 6=5

The Golden Dawn was apparently very slap dash when it came to the 6=5 and 7=4. Mathers wrote two rituals which were quite simply rubbish and boosed a couple of 5=6 papers to higher grades in the hope that people would leave him alone. Felkin did better with two rather good rituals but weak teaching. Paul Case did not believe it was possible for an order to train people at 6=5 and stopped his chapter at 5=6 (he did issue 6=5 and 7=4 grades. Will Chesterman had a 7=4 grade on his Premonstrator certificate,which was signed by Anne Davies hanging on the wall of the temple at Naenae).

Whare Ra taught that the 6=5 was more of a mystical grade than the 5=6 and the work of the grade was to use the lessons of the 5=6 to find your own spiritual path.

Certainly the approach to this grade was much more transpersonal than the 5=6. In addition to goetic work and some other experimental systems, the focus of the grade appears to be using greater magic for the good of humanity. Through this service, the Greater Adept learnt the humility and sacrifice to pass on to the next grade. In many ways the 6=5 is about the surrender of the personality completely to archive the will of the One Thing. Thus you know that training system has to be geared towards teaching that, rather than more ways that the personality can be agrandised.

The 7=4

This grade was even more mystical. Instead of working magic, 7=4 was the magic, or at least working to become it. Given this slips down to what your definition of magic is, it is probably best explained by using mine as an example. Magic is the art and science of becoming a co-creator with God. Instead of using that science, you are a living example of it in action. This can be said to be the goal of the grade as the jump between this state and the 6=5 is high. No longer are you a person working magic for the good of humanity, you are the magic working within humanity.

Both these grades depend on the knowledge of the 5=6, but they are not looking for more information. Instead they are looking to apply information gained effectively. So an order teaching new information at the 6=5 and 7=4 grades is barking up the wrong tree. Any new information automatically categorises itself at the 5=6. If it is a system, new or not, it is by its very nature 5=6.

This is not to say that there is no scope for teaching at the 6=5 and 7=4, however it has to be a different order of training than we have seen before and not just systems, and intellectual chewing gum. The 6=5 is easier in that its goal slightly more familiar – use magic at bigger targets. The training must be how you manage this. Equally the ability to use the system as part of a spiritual quest is not something that the Golden Dawn system has done particularly well up to this point. The 7=4 is the last stab that the Golden Dawn system has of training anyone anything and this is one region which requires serious research from the next generation of Golden Dawn orders. Mathers, Westcott, Felkin and Case failed to manage it. While we work to create more intellectual systems to fill that gap, so will we. While we teach that all we need is a new system incorporating Alchemy, sex magic, or Macramè, we fall further from what these higher grades mean.

Mathers' Secret Hair colour revealed.

2011-08-08T15:17:00.001+02:00

I stumbled upon the attached picture when I was searching around recently, It shows Mathers taken in 1911 by the Daily Mirror. It is an interesting picture as it shows that Mathers' hair had gone white and he appeared to be dying it to keep himself looking as if he had succeeded making the philosopher's stone.

In 1911 he gave an interview to the Daily Mirror and apparently forgot to touch up his roots. As a result he has ended up looking remarkably like the Bride of Frankenstien. We wonder if his Secret Chiefs approved.

Given the fact that Mathers was supposed to be dapper he looks a bit dishevelled, like someone who has spent the night drinking a little too much potion of eternal youth.

Mina would later complain that he was “drinking a little too much” – a problem that got worse after he returned from the UK. It might explain why he was unable to bring in much new information for the AO, although Mina later told Yeats that despite him being sick for three months during the First World War he was fit right up to the day he died.

Rome's Pantheon may have been built as a massive sundial

2011-08-01T08:02:00.000+02:00

One day I will write in a little more detail about this really magical place. This appeared in the Daily Telegraph this morning.

It is one of the best preserved buildings from the Roman world, a 2,000-year-old testament to the immense power and wealth of the empire.

But mystery has always surrounded what lies behind the unusual design of the Pantheon, a giant temple in the heart of Rome that was built by the Emperor Hadrian.

Now experts have come up with an intriguing theory – that the temple acted as a colossal sun dial, with a beam of light illuminating its enormous entrance at the precise moment that the emperor entered the building.

Constructed on Hadrian's orders and completed in AD128, the Pantheon's hemispherical dome is punctured by a 30ft-wide circular hole known as the 'oculus'.

It provides the interior of the building with its only source of natural light and allows in rain and – on rare occasions – snow.

Giulio Magli, a historian of ancient architecture from Milan Polytechnic,Italy, and Robert Hannah, a classics scholar from the University of Otago in New Zealand, have discovered that at precisely midday during the March equinox, a circular shaft of light shines through the oculus and illuminates the Pantheon's imposing entrance.

They have been working on the theory since 2009 but recently brought together all their latest research in a paper published in a scholarly journal, Numen.

The precise calculations made in the positioning and construction of the Pantheon mean that the size and shape of the beam perfectly matches, down to the last inch, a semicircular stone arch above the doorway.

A similar effect is seen on April 21, which the Romans celebrated as the founding date of their city, when at midday the sun beam strikes a metal grille above the doorway, flooding the colonnaded courtyard outside with light.

The dramatic displays would have been seen by the Romans as elevating an emperor into the realm of the gods – a cosmological affirmation of his divine power as he entered the building, which was used as an audience hall as well as a place of worship.

He was in effect being "invited" by the sun to enter the Pantheon, which as its name suggests was dedicated to the most important deities of the Roman world.

"The emperor would have been illuminated as if by film studio lights," said Professor Magli. "The Romans believed the relationship between the emperor and the heavens was at its closest during the equinoxes.

It would have been a glorification of the power of the emperor, and of Rome itself." The sun had a special significance for the Romans, as it did for the ancient Egyptians. The god Apollo was associated with the sun, and the emperor Nero was depicted as the Greek sun god Helios in a giant statue called the Colossus, which gave its name to the Colosseum.

One of antiquity's most remarkable examples of engineering, the Pantheon's fine state of preservation is thanks to the fact that it was converted into a church in the seventh century, when it was presented to the Pope by the Byzantine Emperor Phocas.

It retains its original bronze doors and marble columns, some of which were quarried in the Egyptian desert and transported by the ship down the Nile and across the Mediterranean to Rome at huge expense.

The building now contains the tombs of Victor Emmanuel II, the first king of united Italy, and the Renaissance artist Raphael.

Inner and Outer

2011-07-20T10:28:00.000+02:00

Since the Second World War, thanks to the efforts of Dion Fortune and her followers, magic has moved from doing things on the material level (while hopefully looking above) to working on the Inner Levels. This has been more noticeable in the UK, where Fortune's off-shoots have ruled the roost. As Marian Green once said “we are making beautiful temples and then going into them and shutting our eyes”.

Having trained in the Dion Fortune tradition, I can see its advantages and flaws. On the plus side it encourages the development inner vision to see what is really going on. However it lacks a lot of the personal development work which is required from, say, the Outer Order of the Golden Dawn. While it is true that these Inner Landscapes do encourage the knowledge of one's self, in practice this does not happen. People are too often taught that what they are seeing is “real” when a lot of the time it is subjective.

True, inner work ultimately leads to an objective reality, but within such groups the subjective reality often takes people on flights of sub-luna fantasy which is never checked. Visions which should be treated for psychological examination by the person, to discover more about themselves, end up as fantasy stories becoming touted as scientific or historical fact. Inner Plane contacts become psychological mothers and fathers demand an “unreserved dedication” to convert their students to nothing more than slaves in return for emotional support.

The Golden Dawn tradition has the opposite problem. It's flaw is that people too often see the material reality as all there is. They see the roles of the officers, the grades etc as important. It becomes a matter of doing the ritual and the tests rather than any inner development. Where Inner work is required, such as the use of the Z documents, it is glossed over, ignored, or performed so literally that it is largely pointless. Inner Plane contacts, Secret Chiefs, if accepted at all, become so twisted so that they become mortal and only talk to the head of an order to boost his manna.

An ideal system exists by merging both and finding a balance between the two ways. In the Golden Dawn this means training people to see the outer and Inner linked. However as the system is created this requires some adaptation. Although what is called pathworking is known within Golden Dawn groups, it is considered Second Order stuff which is not seen for nearly four or five years. It requires some of the training which the Dion Fortune system would be familiar with. While many would see this as oath-breaking, it is no more dramatic than allowing outer order students to do the middle pillar. The bonus is that they will see what is happening in a ritual, and be allowed to take part in the magic on the yetziratic level, which will make the whole thing more interesting for them.

For the Inner Light tradition, there needs to be better written and clearly defined patterns of ritual. People need to open their eyes and “see” inner realities mapped onto physical space. This will reduce the problems of disconnection from reality, which that tradition has suffered from.

Both traditions need to learn from each other.

What Regardie didn't know about the Golden Dawn

2011-07-12T09:50:00.000+02:00

This article was originally published in Hermetic Virtues. That magazine is a must have for any serious student of occultism and particularly the Golden Dawn. All the proceeds go to a good cause too http://www.hermeticvirtues.org/.

Israel Regardie is the main reason that the Golden Dawn magical system is popular. It was his Golden Dawn book, published just before the Second World War, which is considered the bible of the modern Golden Dawn movement. There are those who insist that the vision of the Golden Dawn, presented in the 6^th Llewellyn edition is the real Golden Dawn and anyone else who does not use it is somehow “unorthodox”.

This is deeply ironic, given what those who knew the man have told me. Regardie was not a person who wanted to be made into a God or to be accorded a Papal status within the tradition. He was a person who lived the system, but also knew he was not the only one. True, he published the Golden Dawn book, but there were holes in his knowledge which, because of his unintended status within the tradition, have become crucial gaps.

Israel Regardie's first brush with the Golden Dawn was through Alister Crowley. He would later say that he learnt no magic from Crowley during the brief period that he was his secretary. However there is an understanding of magical principles in his early works, such as the Tree of Pomegranates, which do not come fully formed in the mind of someone in their early 20s.

Regardie attracted the attention of Dion Fortune who had made contact with the Stella Matutina temple in Bristol. She had become a friend of Hope Hughes and had completed the Golden Dawn studies that she had started in Berridge's London temple of the Alpha et Omega.

The Hermes Temple in Bristol was theoretically under the control of the Felkins who were running their “Whare Ra” temple in New Zealand. However the control between New Zealand and Bristol was non-existent and just before Regardie was initiated the English temple had decided to undergo an experiment.

The feeling was that the Golden Dawn rituals were too long and almost a third of the elemental grade rituals were spent presenting diagrams to the candidate. The temple decided to take a hatchet to the elemental grade rituals and remove most of the diagrams and present these to the candidate as part of their course packets. It is incredibly unlikely that if the Felkin's had known of this plan they would have ever approved of it. The New Zealand temple was at that time using the last incarnation of the Golden Dawn rituals and a 6=5 and 7=4 rite written by Dr Felkin. Whare Ra, under Mrs Felkin, had placed layer upon layer of magical meaning onto the ritual. While it was possible to change some aspects of the speeches under such a structure, they would have considered it dangerous to remove components to the extent that Bristol had done so.

It was also quite unlikely that the “inepti” of the Bristol Temple, as Regardie was fond of calling them, would have understood the magical implications of what they were doing, or even researched it.

Regardie was disappointed with the Golden Dawn. He saw a bunch of elderly inepti sitting on a ton of valuable magical information that no one was doing anything with. He felt that the Golden Dawn, as he saw it, was dead and the valuable information stored within its teachings needed to be shown to the world before they were lost.

History has proved him right, but really publication of the Golden Dawn did little to further the system for nearly 30 years. The Golden Dawn book did not sell well and was difficult to find. The people who bought it were often members of temples who wanted printed replacements for the hand written manuscripts and clearer diagrams than they could manage. It is myth that the AO temples closed when the book was published because Regardie had revealed their secrets. The AO at the time was using a completely different ritual set for its 0=0 ritual and its elemental grade rituals would have been more involved than anything in the “Golden Dawn”. Whare Ra was doing extremely well and was not going to suffer any real problems until the 1960s. The Bristol temple appears to have been going until the 1960s and its adepts were still meeting occasionally for rituals until the 1970s.

Part of the reason for this was that Regardie had published the hacked rituals and teachings of the Bristol temple. As far as the existing temples were concerned they still had secrets and that the rituals as published were lacking the inner mechanics to make them work properly. It is telling that immediately after the publication of the book, Bristol went back to the original Stella Matutina rituals.

In the late 1970's, the last surviving Golden Dawn Temple, Whare Ra closed its doors and burnt most of its material. The direct lineage of the Golden Dawn was truly ended. While the rest of the world was unaware of the death of Whare Ra, something significant did happen around the same time. Chic Cicero and other Regardie friends decided to restart the order. To do this they depended on Regardie's book and memories from the man himself and this is where the holes started to become obvious.

When it came down to it, people were expecting an awful lot from Regardie. According to Bristol records he only ever attended Bristol seven times during a two and a half year period. To expect someone in their eighties after a full life to remember details of a ritual that took place 40 years earlier was a bit unfair. It is clear that he relied on his book, like many other people would do as they followed the Ciceros in the resurgence of the “Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn” that followed.

This lead to one of the first mistakes that has flowed into the new Golden Dawn – that of the Kerux's staff.

If you read any book that was published after Regardie, or join most Golden Dawn orders you will encounter a caduceus wand with two serpents being carried by the Kerux. During the 2=9 grade you will be presented with a disk that will show two versions of this. The first is a staff with the three mother letters upon it and the second is the caduceus. If you look at the Z documents there is some confusing references to the Kerux's staff which could be read as being either the single staff and or the caduceus. When the modern Golden Dawn sprang up, it used the caduceus, presumably based on Regardie's memory or interpretation of his own book.

However he was wrong. The Stella Matutina and the Golden Dawn before it, always used the staff with three colours on it. Red at the top, yellow in the middle and blue at the bottom. Whare Ra adepts told this to both me and Pat Zalewski. Some believed that the blue end was pointed although I was not told this. If you think that this only applied to Whare Ra, you might like to look at the drawings in the WB Yeat's collection of the 0=0 ritual in which you can see clearly that the Kerux's staff is also a stick. There are some very good reasons for this.

When the candidate enters the hall they are barred using the water part of the staff. This symbolises many things but perhaps the most significant is death. To enter the sacred temple of the mysteries you have to die and be born of water. Later when the candidate approaches the Heirus they are barred with the fire portion of the staff. This consecrates the candidate so that they are born of the Holy Spirit (fire). Finally as they approach the Hierophant they are barred with the yellow segment, that of Air which is the middle pillar, the ruach, and balance through the agency of Thoth. There is much more in these simple barrings but this is designed to give you an idea. However if you try to do this with a caduceus it is physically impossible. The Kerux can only, carefully, bar the candidate with the yellow part of the wand which means all these magical subtleties are lost. If attempts do do anything different are made then the Kerux will break one of the serpents on the wand. If the wand is made of metal, like that in one temple I have worked with, then you could injury the candidate.

The next issue that was forgotten, possibly because Regardie did not know, was the use of Godforms in the elemental grades. There are many different ideas about which Godforms should be used. Dion Fortune said that the use of Godforms in an initiation rite were the keys to the ritual. If these are forgotten then the rite loses its power completely. The use of the Godforms within the elemental grades of the Golden Dawn has been forgotten. Although the ritual does indicate some of the godforms that can be used, for example the 3=8 uses the Samothracian godforms, the invisible stations and “inner temples” have not been found. While it is possible that in the early Golden Dawn they did not exist, they appear to have done so in both the AO and the Stella Matutina. Felkin had developed his own set of godforms, but what these are have not been revealed, although I believe that one former chief instructed one person in what they were before his death. In the absence of information from Regardie, or other sources, modern GD groups have come up with their own solutions to this problem. The worst, and most common, is not to have any godforms within the elemental grades at all and thus render the elemental grades into masonic parodies. This is favoured by those who see the rituals as psychological rather than religious and the grades as “status” rather than tools for transformation.

The next process is to use the godforms from the 0=0 but “add” the godforms of the ritual as they are mentioned. This is better than nothing. However it faces the problem that the elemental grade rituals are not carried out within the temple of Maat. Not only is the inner structure “different” the officers take different godforms, some of which would be alien to the image of the Hall of Judgement.

The next most common technique is to replace the godforms of the chiefs with those of the Enochian chess pieces. This seems logical but has several problems. Firstly it elevates Enochian chess to an incredibly high level of importance within the GD, which I am not convinced it ever had. Secondly it only deals with the invisible stations of the chiefs who are a small part of the ritual. This means those who use this system have to incorporate other methods to generate Godforms for different parts of the rituals. Lastly it brings in the use of Godforms whose existence and symbolism was moot, or minor.

The final method has been to go through the ritual and come up with a different method of godforms. How different groups do this is unimportant. What solution they come up with tells much about the flavour that the group is trying to develop. But it does tend to kill off those kids who claim 7=4 and start a temple with “Golden Dawn” in one hand and “Secrets of a Golden Dawn Temple” in another. You need to know a fair bit about the system to work out the impact that each Godform is going to have on the candidate at that point in the ritual and that really requires someone who has worked the system for a while.

Perhaps the most important magical tool that Regardie did not know about was the use of diagrams. As I said above this as because he was initiated using a slashed ritual. True, he was presented with some diagrams in the initiations and others appeared in his course packet. But this re-enforced that they were for intellectual stimulation only.

If you believe this, then it is clear why they were removed from the ritual. For a start they make some of the rituals a lot longer. When we installed these within the Magical Order of the Aurora Aurea we found that the 4=7, in particular, was a lot longer. Superficially, the candidate is led to one of the diagrams by an officer who appears to read out what was on it. It seems largely pointless. This belief seems to have carried on with some modern Golden Dawn orders who simply slap photocopies of the diagrams on the floor if the temple and casually mention them (many of the candidates are not even aware that they are there). The one exception to this appears to be the elemental tablets which are accorded a high status as magical tools.

However in Whare Ra each diagram was seen like a magical wand and an important part of the ritual. A 6=5 adept Percy Wilkinson once told me that the officer had to use the diagram to stimulate the candidate's Ruach. For years I wondered what he meant and experimented with sending a ray through the diagram into the candidate's heart centre. As the idea of the sphere of sensation has greatly influenced my magical practice I do the following. The candidate is shown the diagram, the godform of the officer is extended over the candidate and an image of the diagram is projected onto their sphere of sensation. Depending on the diagram this creates an effect.

This leads me onto the next point. If the diagrams are magical wands then what are they supposed to do. For a long time I assumed that they were providing a set of symbols for the candidate to understand unconsciously. Now I think that the result is much more direct and that the diagram is actually shaping the candidate's sphere of sensation to bring about change. What is happening then is the elemental grade rituals are a form of psychic surgery where the diagrams shape the candidate's sphere in their own image.

When you look at the diagrams it seems strange that some of the information is repeated in various grades. For some reason, geomantic figures are shown in all the grades, lineal figures are also shown in different variations, as are tarot cards. We are also shown several different versions of Qlippoth diagrams which feel out of place in an initiation of light.

It seemed to me that the presentation of the geomantic figures tended to enable the energy of the initiation to be earthed so that there would be a physical result from the initiation. The geometric shapes of the lineal figures would cause the candidate's sphere of sensation to correctly align at a Briatic level. The Qlippothic diagrams which are actually presented with “evil names” spoken out loud are designed so that the sphere of sensation can identify the negative aspects of the grade and control them.

There are many diagrams with trees on them in which planetary symbols are overlayed upon them. The effect of these is to open the sphere of sensation to the implications of planetary force on the personal tree of life.

There are some traditional Golden Dawn diagrams where the magic wand effect must be limited. One “diagram” is basically a shopping list off tarot attributions which would have had limited symbolic effect. There are others which have since gone missing and we have to build them based on their description. In a couple of cases this has proved difficult but must have been resolved by groups that use the full rituals.

There were some other things that were cut from the elemental grade rituals. These included the Hierophant outlining the knowledge that the candidate would have to learn in the grade. This appears to have been cut because it was no longer relevant as the tests covered new and different things. However there was a function of this point of the ritual in that it set the candidate's sphere of sensation so that it would be adjusted to receive the information in the future. It could have been adapted but when it was used it wasn't and Bristol cut the lines completely.

There were other things that happened within the elemental grade rituals which Regardie did not know about. These included the separation of the candidate into various “bodies” and the reconstitution after either purification and consecration, or teaching by the various godforms. The extent to which this happened appears never to have been written down and was passed on from Hierophant to Hierophant. Each officer would develop their own system over time with different degrees of success. Jack Taylor in Whare Ra was a case in point. So was Maiya Tranchell-Hayes who taught some of the techniques to Dion Fortune. Pat Zalewski has done some terrific work explaining what happened in Whare Ra. Tony Fuller was also taught by Frank Salt some of his methods. How far these views were “official” would be never know. Some of the older Whare Ra people never knew them however they seem to have been methods that made the grade rituals magical.

All this, with the lack of godforms, leads us to a clear idea why Regardie thought that the elemental grades were useless. In the early 1980s, when he visited Pat Zalewski, he believed that the whole lot could be replaced by his “Opening by the Watchtowers Ritual.” Bristol had managed to remove most of the magical elements and Regardie assumed that was because the grade rituals were not up to scratch. Had he undergone an elemental grade rite in Whare Ra, or even the SM in London a few years earlier he might have felt differently. Certainly doing the elemental grade rituals without Godforms a psychic person would not have been able to feel any atmosphere or power within the temple. Without the magical use of diagrams they could not have created enough changes in the person's sphere of sensation to bring about change in their environment. It appears that Regardie received some of this oral instruction from somewhere, but certainly not all of it.

What is interesting is some of the modern groups have become aware of the limitations of Regardie and have been looking closely at some of the collected manuscripts searching for clues. I am not certain that this is the answer although it can be helpful. The answer really relies on using the whole ritual and then working with it trying out different techniques to make it all work magically. The answer comes with time and practice and the sure knowledge that things get better with experience. It is only in magical practice that the holes within the Golden Dawn system appear and demand to be filled. It is only amongst those who believe that Regardie is the beginning and end of the Golden Dawn system of magic who will fall into these gaps and take their groups with them.

Missing from the 4=7

Hiereus :

On this Tablet, (indicating it) are shown the Paths when arranged with Daath added to, the Sephirotic Tree. It differs from the other and more usual attributions. Furthermore it is not so correct, as Daath is not properly speaking, a Sephirah.

On this Tablet, (indicating it) is shown the arrangement of the Sephiroth in the Four Worlds, each Sephirah with its own 10 Sephiroth inscribed inside, so that the total number is 400, the number of Tau the last letter of the alphabet.

(Hiereus resumes his place. Hegemon leads Practicus to Tablet in South)

Hegemon:

This is the symbolism of the Altar of Burnt Offering which King Solomon built. It was formed of a four-fold cube, 20 cubits square and 10 feet high, 10 are the principal parts which you here see classified above, as under the Sephiroth, and forming thus the Triangle of Fire above it.

(Hegemon leads Practicus to Tablet in North)

This is the symbolism of the Brazen Sea, which King Solomon made. It was 10 cubits diameter answering to the Sephiroth; the height was 5 cubits multiplied by the Ternary. Beneath the rim were 300 knobs, the number of the Holy Letter Shin and of the name Ruach Elohim and it stood upon the 12 oxen, answering to the 12 Stars of the Crown of Aima, the Great Mother. It is the synthesis of Binah, containing the Waters of Creation.

(Places Candidate in West facing Hierophant and returns to his own place.)

Missing from the 1=10

Hierophant:

Frater < >, before you can be eligible for advancement, to the next grade of 2 = 9, you will be required to pass an examination on the following subjects:

1.Names and symbols of the 3 Principles.

2.Metals attributed to the 7 Planets.

3.The meaning of the special Alchemical terms: Sun, Moon, King, etc.

4.Names and meanings of the 12 Astrological Houses.

5.Names and meanings of the Planetary Aspects.

6.Names and meanings of the Querent and Quesited.

7.The 4 great classes of Astrology.

8.The arrangement of the Tree of Life.

9.The names of the 4 Orders of he Elements.

10.The 3 Pillars of the Tree of Life.

11.The names and forms of the Kerubim

12.Meanings of the Laver, Altar, and Qlippoth.

13.The Names of the 10 Houses of Assiah.

14.Names of the 4 Worlds of the Qabalists.

15.Names of the 22 Trumps and 4 Suits.

Unpublished Golden Dawn manuscript released

2011-07-01T08:28:00.001+02:00

A special Ritual Edition of Hermetic Virtues is out and it includes quite a few interesting rituals including an article of mine publishing the original Golden Dawn sword consecration rite (which has not seen the light of day before) and my suggestions about how it could be improved using the Z formula.

There are some good articles including:

+ Outer Order Ritual of the Seven-Branched Candlestick by Sandra Tabatha Cicero

+ The Magician by Harry Wendrich

+ Lycanthropy in the Golden Dawn Tradition by John Michael Greer

+ The Golden Dawn Bornless Invocation by Aaron Leitch

+ Opening the Temple in Malkuth First Part - Opening Malkuth by Jayne Gibson

+ Practice Ritual for opening the Elemental Grades in the Outer by Frater A.M.

+ The unpublished original GD method of consecrating a sword by Nick Farrell

+ Scrying Mirror Consecration Ritual by Samuel Scarborough

+ The Three Courts of the Seven Sisters; into the Vault of Enoch by Frater L

+ Ritual of Tiqqun by Dean Wilson

You can buy it here . It is a not for profit magazine put together by volunteers for a good cause.

The Path of Peh

2011-06-29T16:54:00.000+02:00

Cabbalists have long warned of the dangers of lateral paths, those of the 27th, 19th and 14th , on the Tree of Life. Spiritually people are jumping between extremes, something which is never good for someone trying to progress.

This problem is represented by one of the most misunderstood tarot cards in the deck, the Tower. In cabbalah this card is represented by the Hebrew letter Peh, and its lessons are one of the hardest that a person has to face.

This card appears to be one of doom with destruction of structure emphatically expressed. On the face of it we are saying who ever walks this path is about to lose everything they have thought was true.

The card, and the path's meaning comes from the cabbalistic book, The Zohar which talks about the Kings of Edom who ruled over matter before creation. These are the Lords of Chaos or unbalanced force. They were overthrown by God to create balance. The card also is connected to the Tower of Babel where humanity tried to create a Tower to reach to God. God not only overthrew the Tower but condemned mankind to speak in lots of different languages. God's reasoning was that if everyone spoke different languages they would never get their act together to build such a tall Tower ever again.

When a person walks this path they are unbalanced and thinks they know how their universe is meant to be.

In the Golden Dawn Ritual Tarot, the Tower is made up of the Hebrew letters and this gives a clue as to how our universe is built. We build our universe with words (Peh in Hebrew means Mouth); we describe it and talk about what we want and believe.

Up until now that is all very well. We build our universes according to what our family, friends and circumstances dictate. Most of the time these decisions are based on the comfort of our lower selves. There is nothing wrong with this, it is entirely how everyone lives their life.

But what we don't understand is that our Higher Selves very often have plans for us that are completely out of step with that. Our ever more complicated universes are built brick by brick, word by word until they mock what our Higher Self wants for us.

We are so certain that we are right and that we have been doing the right thing all the time. We use the Hodian powers to justify our material and intellectual existance. But it is a prison for our true self. Our towers always isolate us from what we are truely meant to be and our own powers. Illness, misery and isolation are all symptoms of those who are about to walk the Tower path.

Yet your lower self is almost certain to deny this. You are a King, or Queen, of this Kingdom. It is yours and you know every inch of it. You have invested time, money and effort into it. It might be cold, useless and broken, but it is yours.

When you first step onto this path you are asking your Higher Self to take over the design of your life. This sends a current of energy from your Higher Self that connects into the universe you have built. Everyone knows that there is always something wrong with their lives but they manage to hold everything together. When we experience the Tower this current from the Higher Self finds your weak spot and it is blown. If the rest of your universe can hold together you might be alright, but generally what happens is that everything goes like a House of Cards.

How does this manefest? Usually in the form of a realisation that you might have not got it right. But this is not the sort of realisation that you can say opps silly me. This is a gut wrenching deep realisation that will cause your universe and its reason for being to collapse as your Higher Self calls you to your power and destiny.

The singer Peter Gabriel wrote of this in a song called "In Your Eyes:"

"All my instincts, they return
and the grand facade, so soon will burn
without a noise, without my pride
I reach out from the inside."

Sharpened by the realisation of your Higher Self the instincts that were heading you towards your real life in childhood, before Schools, teachers and parents got in the way, return to you. This creates something similar to a mid-life crisis. You start to question what is real and what your true motivations are for everything. This can be incredibily depressing or liberating, depending on how much you hold on to your old Tower.

But it is important to realise that you, the seeker, are seeing your universe destroyed and it is terrible. But you are also building a new one. The destruction and creation is part of the duality of a laterial path, both are hand-in-hand with each other. The old Tower has to be swept away but a new universe which is going to be more 'you' is going to be put in its place.

Remember that the letter Peh is the mouth? What comes from the mouth is the Word. John's Gospel says that "In the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was toward God." Our Higher Self is the Word and the Word which was With God is now reverberated to the lower levels and formed a vehicle for itself which we call the personality so that it can be uttered in the densest levels of matter. This suggests then that the Word is heard again. You are reminded of your destiny and need to reform your personality so that it is a better lamp for the Word.

All those images that you create are bought to life on this path and traveling it is where you get your magical power from. But before that, this path excites those images that you have currently built up. These are mostly images of separation, negativity and fear and things that keep you small. Normally it would be very hard for you to break free from this habitual thinking, so the Universe steps in and creates the change for you. You would think you would be grateful, and after the dust has settled you probably will be, but the pain of the process makes you spit and hate the universe more than ever.

Is it possible to avoid the pain of the Tower? It depends on the level of attachment you might have to your current universe and willing you are to let it all go. Chances are that any new universe that is created will have components that are similar to the new one, if you look at the Tarot Key the Sun, the wall that is in the background is a new Tower but built in accordance to the divine pattern out of the rubble of the old Universe. However you cannot be certain what will stay and what will go. It is best to just see what happens.

The Tower card says that the change we experience comes from our Higher Self, or God giving a proper image of our true life pattern. So one way we can avoid too much pain is by looking at our material and emotional universe and working out what it is that is standing in the way of an occult life. What is weak in us that could shatter under the pressure of the Tower? What is it that you base your life on and is this sustainable in the light of infinite truth. Using Christian symbolism, can you stand before your creator and be 'proud' about how you have constructed life. What is it that you can honestly say you are cocking up and need to change. It is almost certain that the Martian forces of the Tower will be targeting those to bring you down.

The other issue you might like to think about is where you have your security. In an ideal divine universe your security should be based on the Universe or your Higher Self. Other dependencies whether they be people, habits, or environments, or even the power of your own ego, could be under pressure or actually be swept away at this time.

In your meditations you should be saying to yourself, "I let go of the control of my universe and place it under the charge of my Higher Self. What will come, will come, what I will lose I do not need."

This will help you deal with some of what you will face. However not all of it. You have to remember where you are headed and that is Netzach, which is the sphere of Love. If ever there was a psychological minefield where bogus perceptions of reality need to be swept away it is over love and what it means. To even get half way to understanding what Love is you have to sweep aside a Tower which has its foundations deep within your pysche. Most people's perception of love comes from the relationships and lessons of their family. As most families are to a greater or lesser extent dysfunctional, so to are the inadequate perceptions of what love which people build their lives on. The sort of love, of which Netzach is a representation, is the real thing. While it is divine, it appears in fragments in human expression. This is why as an Initiate experiences the energies of Netzach it often throws light onto their weak relationships and creates a focus for the Tower. We can help resolve this by working out what love really is and trying to manifest the real version in our life. However anyone who has read the Greek myths will know that Cupid is often a trickster and when he is evoked we can be taken into many strange places. However, when understood, it is Eros that all divine universes are built upon and it is impossible to progress without really understanding it. Thus it is that the Tower often sweeps aside our false perceptions of Love and helps us to build a concept which is better suited for our spiritual journey.

Another aspect of this path is a call towards Unity. One of the visions of Netzach is that of the seven lamps. What is being suggested until Tiphareth all things are One Thing, but at this sphere this 'white light' splits into the seven chromatic colours. In other words One becomes Many. Coming down the path, from Netzach to Hod, the Tower builds a structure based on this split universe, moving to ever more complexity. However coming up the path, as you are about to do, it destroys the many fold structure to create ever more simpler forms. While this 'seven fold structure' is not yet the unity of Tiphareth, the process "does the head in" of an Initiate, particularly as they are used to seeing their universe as being made up of many bits. To fix the pain that goes with this it is best to organise life into simpler constructions which are focused on seeing everything as an expression of the One Thing. This is difficult to do, but the work you do will assist anything that your Higher Self might be trying to teach you.

Earlier I mentioned that the trick of dealing with a lateral path is through balance. As the Tower collapses there will be a rush of emotion as power which has been locked up into its construction is freed. This emotional power, which is a hallmark of Netzach needs rationalisation by Hod otherwise you will end up in an explosive martian cocktail of anger and retribution. Your intellect should kick in and tell you, "This is part of my Tower experience. I will feel this energy, but I will not act on it."

Practical work

During this period you should be examining your personality and questioning your weak points so that you can make yourself into a lamp for the Word of your Higher Self. All aspects of the way you do things should be questioned and re-examined. Pay particular attention to those things that you are sure you are doing correctly, generally these are the areas that you are failing in most. Think back to what you wanted to me as a child. Have you met those goals or did they get lost along the way. Look at your relationships, are they helping or hindering you? Can they be improved? The answers to these questions are not to be decided by the standards of Malkuth. They have to be in accordance to your Higher Self. Look at the things that you have done to isolate yourself from the rest of the universe, where you have made things into a mockery of the divine Unity. Then spend quiet moments listening for your Higher Self to speak to you and when the flash of realisation comes, you will be ready.

Rosicrucian Tradition of the Golden Dawn: Revealing the Alchemy and the Theurgy of the RR et AC

2011-06-27T19:57:00.006+02:00

For the last couple of weeks I have been going through Samuel Robinson's book Rosicrucian Tradition of the Golden Dawn: Revealing the Alchemy and the Theurgy of the RR et AC. It is a bit of a tome, but there is a lot in it.

After a long training by Pat Zalweski, Robinson moved to Europe where he made links with many different Rosicrucian Orders and formed his own Hermetic Order of the Nascent Dawn. This is a Golden Dawn Group but appears to have lineages with other German Rosicrucian groups. The book shows a lot of his thinking about the Second Order work of the Golden Dawn.

It is possible to see a lot of Robinson's roots coming out in the book and I have to say there are flashes of genius in it as it takes the reader into places that they never thought the Golden Dawn could go. That is not to say I agree with all of it, but it does give some very good ideas for anyone who is using the Second Order magical system of the Golden Dawn.

Robinson has a crack at dealing with the sphere of sensation, the practical use of the Z documents, the Holy Guardian Angel, the Angel of the Golden Dawn. There is so much in his approach you have to feel that he is on to something.

He has also published a cipher manuscript for a Third Order which is based on the Crowning of the Pharaoh Ritual from Ancient Egypt. This is an interesting idea which slots in to the system in the same way that the Judgement Hall of Maat is used in the outer order. I am a long way from thinking about Third Order stuff so it is not particularly useful to me, but I have to admit that it makes sense and slots in nicely to the SM flavour of the GD.

That is not to say it is an easy book, or a book for beginners. You have to be Second Order to actually understand what he is talking about. It does provide advanced students with some good ideas about who to take the system forward in a practical way. I would say that if you are experienced working with in the Golden Dawn system, there is a lot here which will fire your imagination and help you unlock some aspects of the Golden Dawn which have not been publicly talked about.

Where Robinson differs from many in the GD tradition is his insistence that things take a Theurgical approach. This is a much more religious approach to ritual that many in the Golden Dawn would not understand. There is a tendency within the tradition to pay lip service to divine names and shout them out in rituals without ever having any experience with them. It is possible to be an Atheist in some Golden Dawn groups, where as, if you if you used Robinson's approach to binding demons with that attitude you would either get nothing, or be reduced to a pair of smoking golden slippers.

Theurgy techniques make ritual a more spiritual practice. It is less about what you can get and more about your relationship with what you invoke. I don't agree that the GD system entirely Theurgical, but I do think that Robinson has a point in that it has gone too far in the other direction where religious experiences are not important. I put this down to the masonic approach to magic, but it could be equally due to a post-modern belief that you do not really need God.

Rosicrucian Tradition of the Golden Dawn has the considerable weakness that it needed an editor before publication, which it clearly did not have. It is often more than the fact that the spelling is off, but sometimes the wrong word has been used and it gets confusing. You are left reading a sentence for some minutes before working out what Robinson is getting at. This is not problem for me, but I know some people who make typos the defining statement about whether or not a book is worthy or not.

It is available on Lulu here.

Occult couples

2011-06-12T20:00:00.000+02:00

“Fear is failure, so be thou without fear, for he that trembles and the fire and the flood hath no part of God”

Most occultists believe that they live without fear. They claim that within its teaching, they find that their fears, particularly of death, are washed away. While this might be true, one of the biggest problems we find within the Golden Dawn community stems from fear – the fear of being alone.

The study of magic is such a minority activity and is divided still further into different strains of teaching. Even within a single group, magicians vary in what they believe so that the chances of you finding someone who thinks like you is remote.

Ultimately the magician has to go it alone. This is the message of the Tarot card the Hermit.

But humans do not do well when they are alone. Humans are social creatures who need to function with others to thrive. There are all sorts of illnesses that come from being alone. Being alone is simply un-natural. Every biological system within our body requires us to find a mate and raise children.

But this causes another problem, how to you fulfill your biological and emotional needs for people when your universe is so different from anyone else.

The Tuhoe Tohunga, Hohepa Kereopa said that everyone has a separate universe and relationships between men and women are dependent on the similarity of those universes.

When I look at the relations I have had, the ones that have been successful have been so when people have been thinking along similar lines to me. Relationships with muggles have only worked while there was enough in the relationship which was not occultism that could hold everything together.

Anna Branch, who was an American magician, once told her husband that he should not ever make her choose between occultism and him. I guess occultism was the real her and the rest was just what they had in common. That was enough to hold them together unless he tried to intervene in her “real life”. Fortunately, Branch said, “he died” so it never came to that.

As magic grew increasingly important to me, it became more difficult to have partnerships with muggles. Even if they were sympathetic to the magic ideas, the concept of having your partner locked in a room banging on a computer knocking out books which were designed only to be read by a few thousand and understood by six did not make sense. Winging your way around the world to initiate people and not having a holiday at the same time seemed senseless.

The obvious idea is to have a relationship with another magical person. However this causes problems too. Not only are the right people rare, just because you have that certain chemistry in the ritual and can talk about magic does not mean it is the sort of relationship that can help you function on the mundane world.

Often because of the relief of being in a relationship where magic can actually be talked about creates such a relief that it takes a while for you to realise that the person you are with is not one you would normally want to go out with. You allow your standards to slip, or end up in an abusive relationship, just because this person has similar spiritual experiences to you.

I know of one person who thought she could deal with this problem by having two men. One for her mundane life and another for her magical one. Unfortunately most people want exclusivity in their partners, she thought she could have the same level of love from the magical partner by not sleeping with him while demanding his undying “spiritual love”. Needless to say it did not end well.

It is a problem which resolves itself in one way or the other. Either you deal with the crushing loneliness by compartmentalising your life so you can find a balance. Or you try and being entirely magical or entirely “normal”. The unbalanced way will ultimately be unsatisfying in my experience.

If you are really lucky you find a partner who is magical AND your material universe works. Life becomes a meandering path in which the darkness that overwhelms one, can be repelled by two working in harmony; each upholding each other’s strengths and balancing each other’s weaknesses. This is rare and even harder work. You not only become responsible for your life on a material level, but your job becomes to assist each other's spiritual walk.

But it does mean that Goals which were impossible for one, become obtainable for two. The shared universes weave themselves into a life destiny which alone they could not obtain.

While this sounds great, sometimes relationship problems become spiritual ones and it becomes difficult to separate the two. Many couples strive to understand one another, but an occultist knows that another person is as complex and hard to understand as God.

Such couples exist to do the work. What is interesting about these relationships is that it is rare that they have children. The work becomes their child.

Dion Fortune once said that for people to become true magicians they have to have passed through the path of hearth fire.This mirrors the old Cabbalistic idea which implied that you are supposed to have had a few kids and proven yourself able to be a parent before you pressed ahead with spiritual work. While this sounds great, in principle, if Fortune had followed her own advice she would never have been a great magician. Her relationships were all dire and it means that she never followed that path at all.

Any spiritual path, be it hearth fire or Solomonic magic, is optional to the magician. What is important is to find your way through it. What ever you choose, it becomes a life path decision. Sometimes finding that balance is part of your spiritual destiny. Certainly the cure for being alone is to find someone to share your life with. However make sure it is the right person. Don't jump simply because someone appears to share your world view, they have to fit everything. All your universes have to match. On the whole, it is worth the wait.

Temples of Humanity

2011-06-02T16:18:00.002+02:00

Below is an unpublished Whare Ra document. It is has close similarities to a paper written by Dion Fortune and is related to what I call the Inner Temple method. Fortune said that she acquired the Inner Temple method from the AO Chief Maiya Tranchell-Hayes where it was a Second Order AO proceedure. Since this paper was written after the split and is an ST document, it indicates that the idea had a common source and that both sides of the divide used Astral Temples for ritual and teaching. You can see hints of it in the Flying Rolls and the Z-documents.

The idea of using the astral counterparts of important landmarks was very important to Dion Fortune's work. She used the astral aspects of Glastonbury Tor, but she had the additional advantage of living there.

We are lucky to have a similar site in Rome where the astral reality and the physical overlap.

As this paper points out, these are powerful sites to work for humanity rather than individuals. Rituals which take place at these levels can help humanity a lot.

To seek out these places, even using this paper as a guide, is a lot of work. Even then they are “protected” by their own guardians. If you do find your way into one, it pays to be very, very polite. If you find entrance is easy then you are in the wrong place.

The Temples of the Earth (M.C.)

There are certain areas on the earth's surface which are surcharged with ritual force. These we call "Temples", for on them,or most of them, men have erected buildings set aside for Spiritual Teaching.

It seems probable that in the first place such areas were marked by some natural phenomenon, such as flames or hot springs in some cases. At all events they have formed sanctuaries for the wild creatures in time of stress

Having once been recognised and dedicated by man, they continue to be used by whatever form of religion prevails at any given time. As for instance the site of St. Paul and Westminster Abbey , which are known to have been Temples of the Sun and Moon, in pre-christian days. There are at least 12 such sites and there may be many more. It seems likely that our own Temple at Whare Ra is such a spot.

These areas have, from time immemorial, been associated with the Astrological Signs and Planets. We know of one on the bank of the Euphrates, which is dedicated to the Sun.

One on the Ruenzori Mountains (between Lakes Albert and Victoria), which is associated with the Moon. One in Central Europe, which is linked with Venus. And another in North Italy linked with Mercury.

There are some others in China and elsewhere.

Mesopotamia (Sun) Northern Persia (Mars) North Asia (Saturn)

Mountains between China and Tibet (Jupiter).

To contact any of these, it Is necessary to be quite clear which you desire to visit, and how you would reach it if you were travelling there by ordinary methods.

In these days we can go almost anywhere by air, therefore you van imagine yourself entering an aeroplane .

First protect yourself by the Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram.

Then enter your plane and behave exactly as though you were going an actual physical journey. Follow mentally the route you have already plotted out. Descend at a convenient distance from the selected site and then endeavour to see with the interior eyes, what is before you.

It may be added that all these sites are distinguished by the presence of mountains, water (either river lake or springs). Pure invigorating air and abundant light .

So far Where Re has lacked the near presence of water. The Order should aim at boring for there is as there is at least one underground stream and there may be two .

One of the easiest Temples to reach is the Sun Temple on the Euphrates. It is simple to follow the course of the river until you are on top of a hill in a loop of the river. After a short canal cuts it off from the surrounding ground and it is therefore approached by crossing a bridge either North or South of the building and climbing steps. On the South side steps begin on the far side of the stream and thus form a bridge in themselves.

On the Northern side the bridge crosses the stream first and the steps are broken into three sets of twelve seven and three,, each marked by a square landing and supports. The lowest of these is a pair of obelisks, the second two palms, the third two lion headed sphinxes.

The southern approach is unbroken and has a hundred steps with a balustrade on each side. At the top either side there are great doors opening down the middle and giving entrance to a large square portico: on the inner side of which hang heavy embroidered curtains.

The aspirant must be ready with all his Order Signs, Grips and Passwords. If he is a Mason he had better be ready with these also.

Remember that you must always enter such a place with the saluting sign and the sign of Silence. Stand still and await further guidance and instruction; use your eyes and intelligence, make a careful note of whatever you see or hear.

So that you can write out a short, clear account when you return.

Remember that these Temples are not simply astral, you should receive spiritual vibrations from them : and the Teaching should not be merely personal.

These places are cosmic and are concerned with world affairs, not petty personal contacts. Most of them seem to use some form of ceremonial: and you may be called upon to take part in this , but if so it is for definite reason and purpose.

Tohunga: Hohepa Keropa

2011-06-01T14:56:00.001+02:00

There are few moments where I have picked up a book and found things that "spoke to me" and this one is one of the rare ones which should be on every Golden Dawn magician's reading list.
Written by Paul Moon it is based on interviews he carried out with a Maori magician, or Tohunga.
Kereopa was a Tohunga amongst the Tohuoe tribe. I went up there once to do a feature and I can safely say it was one of the rawest moments I had with Maori spirituality. I never met Kereopa and it is on my list of things I can kick myself about. His blunt approach to people was legendary and he felt compelled to say stuff which was politically stupid but turned out to be incredibly accurate. He saw it as a Magician's job to shake people up a bit.

The book is well written. It is possible to hear the man's voice and what he has to say is well reasoned and clear to anyone involved in any magical tradition. If you were to replace the world Tohunga with magician you would get a very good message on a lot of the sorts of subjects which are essentially screwing up the Golden Dawn.
The Tohunga tradition is fading a bit because of white suppression and there are few good ones left. But rather than reconstruct a lost system, Kereopa sees change as part of any living tradition. He did not mind the fact that it was losing information when he died. He felt that teaching would come to future Tohunga anyway. They would work it out for their age and teach it.

"Each person who takes a leaf of Knowledge opens themselves to receive more knowledge, and so the thing that keeps the [magicians] going in the end is the knowledge that survives, even if it is not past in the way it used to be. I don't have any fears that there will not be a single person to carry on what I have learnt, because everyone who is interested will discover all they need to discover."

In otherwords the modern Golden Dawn is different from anything that existed before 1978, it has been built by those who have discovered new things about it. It does not matter that it is not the same as Mathers or Westcott people will find the knowledge in the spirit which is behind it.

I think this process was going on even when the old Golden Dawn was going. It is just that some, like the Maori, harken back to a golden age which never was.

To quote the book again:

Traditional knowledge tends to accrue gradually and unevenly in communities. The challenges of a new or changing physical environment, economic developments, perceptions of spirituality, spurts of population growth, grinding political advances and the unremitting pursuit of of every kinds of perceived progress, all merge into a chaotic concoction which propels the emergence of a corpus of knowledge that is unique to that community.

In other words each Golden Dawn group is going to be different, and each temple will be slightly different from the main group. There can never be ONE Golden Dawn and certainly no one RIGHT Golden Dawn.

There is a lot in this book about personal development too and it did fill a few holes my own spiritual thinking. Like I said you can tell a useful book because you say "oh right" or "aha" a lot or put it down while you think through the implications.

The Third Order of Whare Ra

2011-05-25T22:01:00.001+02:00

THERE have been moments lately which I have had to scratch my head and wonder what is going on with the Golden Dawn.

If you were a collector of paper, signatures and the like, you can fill reams of internet bandwidth with endless speculation about what the Golden Dawn was like. Moreover, these revisionists can forge that history so whatever fantasy they have about themselves is re-enforced.

You can link the Golden Dawn tradition with anything you like if you have enough time and pieces of paper. You can pretend that the right people were Gods and the people who don't fit your theory were secret garden gnome worshippers.

One of the weak points for those who want to make themselves important in the Golden Dawn story is the existence of Whare Ra. This Golden Dawn temple shut its doors in the late 1970s having succeeded for some 60 years. The problem with Whare Ra is some of its members are still alive and when a lot more of them were still living. Theytrained people. It is these people who have provided most of the practical and historical work to those working the Golden Dawn tradition.

While some of the minor things in Whare Ra were slightly different from 60 years earlier, we know what they did and wherethey did it. To an esoteric archaeologist, it is like stumbling across a society that had been cut off from the rest of the world and still worshiped Anubis and can tell you exactly what mix of incenses you use on which day.

This is bad news for many of the theories of the paper collectors.

Lately, someone has come up with a bizarre theory that the Third Order of Whare Ra was Steiner's Rosicrucians. This is based on the fact that Felkin was quite interested in Steiner and used a few of his techniques.

Again nice theory, and probably you can find a few pieces of paper that might back it up. However, tell that to the people who actually were in Whare Ra, and they would laugh at you. The people who met the Whare Ra types were never told to read Steiner nor have any of his ideas ended up in many of the Whare Ra papers. Alice Bailey and theosophy were stronger forces at various times in Whare Ra's history.

Neither Tony Fuller, Pat Zalewski, nor any of the others who have trained under Whare Ra people have seen a Steiner influence and although Percy Wilkinson had an extensive library, there is hardly any Steiner there. Steiner might have been an influence on Felkin and Meakin at various stages of their lives but that fell by the wayside when he came to Hawkes Bay. The only think that is left are a few exercises called the Processes, which were sporadically used.

A mysterious un-named person popped up and said that they had lived in Havelock North, and the place had a strong Steiner influence. This meant that Whare Ra must have also been influenced by the Steiner ideas. However, that argument is a bit like saying that because the Magical Order of the Aurora Aurea is based in Rome,therefore we must have the Vatican as our Third Order. Other Magic Orders in Havelock North are not influenced by “the Steinies” as they are dubbed in Havelock, neither was Whare Ra. One of the reason for this is that the Steinies started to appear in Havelock in the 1930s and the school did not establish itself until the 1970s.

However, the thing is that you end up having to argue with people who are quite determined that their theories are right. I had one person lecturing me the other day about what was taught in a certain Chivalric Order of which I was a member and telling me I must have got my magical knowledge from that rather than the GD. In another case, someone gave a detailed description of what Percy Wilkinson must have known or be like.

I have grown tired of it really. It is like someone coming to you to try and prove your mother never existed and showing you a theory which appears logical. Chic Cicero has the same problem with people's interpretations of history where he was actually there, but he is a little more patent than me.

Now these same types will claim I am doing the same thing with my interpretation of Mathers in my book Mather's Last Word. I might be doing the same thing to Mathers that I am accusing others of. That would appear logical. I don't think Mathers was a magical god, and I 'll be happy to show you papers that back up my theory.

But, what is being actually being disputed in Whare Ra is a history which I am a part of. It is a history I saw. The bits of the history I didn't see, I have spoken to those who were there.

I am not going to argue about what I saw with people who were not and desperately want to be recognised for their point of view. Neither am I going to argue with habitual drug users who think they can turn lead into Gold, have a fantasy about Arabs paying for Hebrew wands, or with single men who are so desperate for a shag they make it a mystery in the sad hope that one day they will get laid.

Sure, you can attack the theories in my books, (although one so called scholarly critique was packed full of so much magical ignorance, and logical holes, I could not even begin to reply to it). However, when it is about something I saw, or experienced, I have decided that you can stick your theories up your arse, and I will ignore you.

I will add to that what a real Whare Ra adept once told me “Modern Golden Dawn groups do not understand what the Third Order is, and what its currency is”... such crap pseudo-historical arguments just prove her point.

The dangers of Flashing in the Golden Dawn vault

2011-04-10T15:26:00.000+02:00

As part of my work on building the Vault on the computer I have looked at a large number of posts online about the how the GD did it.

One of the things that strikes me as odd is how some of the various vault artists have said that they have tried to get squares to flash.

The central document for the creation of the Vault was “The Book of the Tomb” which was written by Westcott. It talks about two methods of creating a vault which are diametrically opposed. According to Westcott you have a base wall of set colours and on each of them you mix the colour of the planet.

The base wall is made up of flashing colours and so are the colours of the planetary walls. This method is called juxtaposition. It is the hardest to do because it requires you to mix colours exactly otherwise things go brown or black. Having made the walls on the computer I have found that the sweet spot for this mix is 20 percent the colour of the activating wall.

Here is the Mercury wall which is made using the back wall and a yellow activating backwall (at 20 percent) and a purple sigil colour.

The first thing you will notice is that the only colours that flash are those of Mercury which were already Yellow and Purple. If you think about it, it is completely logical. If you mix two colours together you will lose the ability for anything to flash. The magic then is not in the colours but the mixing of them. This art of mixing colours was and still is one of the lesser known aspects of alchemy. If you want to know more you should read the Alchemy of Paint by Spike Bucklow.

There is a lot that meditation on how the different walls change the base colour can reveal

However the Book of the Tomb suggests a cheats way. This was the method that was used by the Amon Ra temple in Edinburgh. This involves mixing the backwall as before and then painting the sigil of the backwall relative to the new colour.

With the same mercury wall you end up with something like this:

The logic here is based on a much familiar GD premise. That is that the flashing colour will activate the colour on the panel and bring its energy into the temple. Westcott said that this idea was acceptable however it is my contention that he missed the boat on this one (perhaps Amon Ra made it wrong, showed it to him and he didn’t have the heart to correct them).

My first teacher was initiated into a SM offshoot in the 1970s and he moaned that the vault (which was done the Amon Ra way) made you feel sick after a few minutes and you could not look at the walls after a while. He would have had a point, not only are all the sigils shouting at you they are also broadcasting all their energy at a higher pitch than the traditional wall.

However they are also missing the subtly of the first wall. As you saw some parts of the wall flash... these are the pure aspects of it. This sends the magical message that those energies of the wall are still there. However the mixing shows us how these energies work to effect the various parts of the Kabbalah, the other planets etc. Say for example we were travelling in Yesod. The purples suddenly give way to a more yellow purple we know that we are exploring the territory more intellectually. Likewise if we find something needs to be managed in a chosen sphere we can transform the colours of that environment to tune them to what we want.

I am deliberately scratching the surface of what the vault colours can do, but it is just to give you an idea.

To make matters more interesting there have been other GD vaults. The Whare Ra vault for example has some completely different squares to the book of the Tomb. This involves changing some of the base squares. For example the Water Kerub is flipped so that instead of being blue with a flashing orange background it becomes Orange with a flashing blue background.

All these give the vault a different energy and the answers to different questions. However they are much deeper questions which are not solved by having an entirely flashing vault.

Please note that I aware of the blind (or typo) in these vault drawings. You do not get any points for telling anyone what it is.

Jeff and the Archetypal Occult Order

2011-03-31T22:37:00.002+02:00

This never made it into When a Tree Falls. It did not really work with the plot...

According to Plato's School:

In the time of the dreaming the One God, who was known as Jeff (for Nigel would be stupid name for a major deity), had an idea. According to Plato, normally Jeff's Ideas were to create tables, the duck-billed platypus, caves, or Belgium, but this time it was more important.

I created the universe as a perfect mirror of who I am, so that I can understand myself better, he reasoned. Therefore I shall create, within humanity, a method so people can be like me. The more people are like me, then the more they will understand and the more I shall understand.

And so it was, in the dreaming, that the path of Magic was born. And humans picked up this idea and became Mighty. But a small human with magic was a terrible thing. The Magic would take the small human inside and make it think it was a God and say “look, here are the powers to prove it”.

Jeff was perplexed for he had cocked up and he had not really learnt much at all.

This magical stuff is good, but it is not for everyone and it needs order so the right people are trained. And so Jeff created the Idea of an Order which was based on himself as the Chief and Adam and Eve. They had got so good at this Magic stuff that Adam had become adept at the active principle of the universe and Eve and adept of the passive. So it was that the Order began and ended with the Chief of all Adepts and then there were the second and third adepts.

And together they created rules and divisions so that humanity learnt magic in stages. There was the magic of hearthfire, where people learnt to control their own personalities. And these people became adepts of Matter. Masters of their bodies, homes and in some cases whole empires.

But those who succeeded were offered the chance to became magicians where they learnt to use magic. And finally there were those who after testing became the Magic and took up their place alongside Adam and Eve.

In each age of humanity, the Order flourished in different forms and on different levels. On earth these formed Mystery Schools, which rose and fell, and sometimes small magical groups meeting in secret.

They might not have always met the Idea and mirrored the True and Invisible Order completely, but the needs of each age were met.

But the world started to change. People began to forget the power of the Story and replaced ideas with scientific method. In the 17^th century, Johann Valentin Andreae realised that this was happening and wrote what he knew about the Order in the form of a story, so that the information may not be lost.

And the scientists of the age saw the story of the Rosicrucians as a call to science, others a new religion, still others hoped to make money off it.

But the story survived and those who understood it started to make contact with the real Order and they created groups even within others.

And over hundreds of years it came to be that out of a hundred groups, one would be chosen to connect to the real Order. The closest a human group came to reflecting Jeff's idea the more likely they were to be accepted. On earth they could appear alike, but on the deeper levels they would reveal their True connections.

The hands of the three chiefs gave lineage both to individuals and groups, but the lineage was to the Idea rather than the form. The hands of Jeff could be on one small lodge meeting in an upper room as part of a huge group.

Yet there were those who considered the form of the story and did not think that the Idea created a deeper reality. So they looked for the Order on Earth when it was in heaven. In absence of lineage they created their own idols out of paper signed by dead humans. But the hand of Jeff did not live in paper but in the work. And those who looked at the Idea literally were lost. They looked for human masters to serve and when they could not find worthy candidates they dreamed that they were talking to Secret Chiefs.

But still the True Order continued training, testing and making its connections. Those who heard its voice knew that they were not speaking to invisible creatures, but a hidden reality.

Sometimes they even told stories of these voices, so that their followers could understand the idea. And some of their students got it, and others took them literally.

Humanity really is a funny thing, thought Jeff.

Bill of Rights for esoteric groups

2011-03-27T20:36:00.000+02:00

Nick Farrell's ideas for the melting pot

1. A teacher is also a student, and the teacher and the student are members of an Order.

The Bill of Rights applies to all those who have signed it and also indicates their attitude to individuals, Orders and Groups who have not.

For the Student:

has the right and duty to ask questions and receive an answer which they can understand.
has the right to be respected.
is allowed to develop their individuality and not have that dictated to them by the Order or the teacher.
should not be exploited for any spiritual or material gain.
should not be prejudiced against on the basis of the sex, religion, race, sexual preference or political views.
should not be engaged in attacking, defaming, slandering another member of another spiritual group. Debates about teaching are acceptable but these must not become personal.
No student should be forced to do anything that is against their own moral code or the laws of the land.
A student will do all they can to support the order.
A student will always act in a fraternal way and assist their brothers and sisters to develop on the path of return.
No student will attempt to control another or use magic to harm another.
A student the right to leave a group if they wish without having to receive pressure to stay.
A student will work the system they have been given under instruction.

A teacher has

The right to be respected.
The right to refuse membership or grades to those who do not meet the order's requirements.
The right to have their version of the system followed.
The right to call for assistance and not have to do everything themselves.
The right to say that they do not know an answer to a question, but will find out.
The right to be mortal.
to follow their spiritual path and not stop for the sake of the Order

An order

Recognises the right of another Order to exist even if its views are the antithesis of its own.
Does attempt to get another Order to do its bidding or claim “seniority” over it.
Does not take legal action against another.
Does not recognise the grades of another or attempt to steal members from another group. (People may leave to join another, but they must not be actively head-hunted recognising grades is a way to make it easier to jump ship).
Does not market or advertise itself as being superior to another Order.
Does not publicly defame or humiliate another group or an individual knowing them to be a member of that group.
Is not a business designed to gain any economic power but is a spiritual organisation designed for the improvement of its members.
Does not attempt magical attacks on another group or individual.
Attempt to keep channels of communication open with other Orders.
Do not attempt to interfere with the internal workings of other Orders or create schisms in other groups.
If disputes arise between members of groups then this must be dealt with between group leaders perhaps under the assistance of a neutral third party.

10 Signs that an occult leader has lost the plot

2011-03-16T08:09:00.002+01:00

Leaders of esoteric groups are in a difficult position trying to balance their own spiritual path with helping others. Sometimes it all proves too much and they go off the rails. However there are 10 basic signs that things are about to go pear shaped which followers should react to.


Mathers never went off the rails. No way!				.

They start thinking that they, and their group are actually important. Perhaps the most famous esoteric order in the world – the Golden Dawn – had a fewer than 130 members in its history. Whare Ra had much more than that, but significantly not much more. One of the largest Golden Dawn groups in the World is run by Chic Cicero. It has some 20 temples with, on average, 15 members each. All this adds up to being absolutely tiny in the scale of things. Even Wicca (which is huge) has group leaders which can only really claim control of about 24 people at most. In the scale of world such leaders claiming they, or their orders, are important, are worth listening to are fairly pathetic.
They start claiming that they are the re-incarnation of a famous occultist. This means psychologically they know that their personality is not up to scratch and they have to borrow someone else's. What is interesting is that often by nicking the personality of another they end up exhibiting some of that person's faults and life story. A similar problem to this one is that they start claiming grades which put them above the riff-raff still further. Often this is done under the authority of secret chiefs (who are never around to sign a certificate or answer questions from other people). However it is harder to argue against a person who claims that they are a 10=1 because their Secret Chief gave them the grade in honour of their magical ability.
They take a lot of drugs or start drinking. This is a common problem it means that the person is seeking to escape the real world and live in one where they are seen as important.
They decide to pack in their day job and live off their students or their Order. This indicates that they are losing touch with material reality.
They start claiming authority from Secret Chiefs or Invisible beings. The only authority comes from God. All else is advice. Secret Chiefs, or contacts, do not tell people what to do. They provide information and guidance in terms of spiritual principles. Some chiefs claim that difficult or unpopular decisions come at the demand of Secret Chiefs or contact. They can say “It is not me that is refusing you this grade it is “Anubis””. The answer to that is “if Anubis told you to jump off the great pyramid would you do it?” The point here is that Secret Chiefs and Contacts are supposed to help you individualise and that sort of relationship is one of dependence.
They ask you to give you all their money or want to shag you or your partner to assist your spiritual path. Sometimes they will even change their order structure to make sure they get a shag. One OTO group had a habit of promoting young attractive women faster so that they could be used for sex magic by the chiefs sooner.
They start to become incredibly paranoid. This is a symptom of number one. As they start to inflate their importance they start to think that everyone is out to get them. Paranoia is a sign of a weak personality which is often over inflated. One person once accused me of doing black magic against them... this surprised me as I had never actually thought about them. In my universe they were not that important to be bothered with let alone do magic about. One thing that they will do is scan essays, articles and Internet posts desperate for proof that others are talking about them. They will see attacks that are not there and misquote and bend sentences so that they constitute an attack.
They feel the need to attack other orders, personalities and systems. It is a sign that they have nothing, that they will label and attack other groups. In occultism, those who can, do. Those who can't, attack others that can. Such types will not just attack those who are better magicians, but they will attack any group which they see as a threat. If they are dependent on the money from their Order, or the status it provides for their broken personalities, then they will often attack groups that are more commercially successful.
They lose any sense of humour.
They believe their own bullshit. Lots of occult leaders create stories about themselves or their orders. Paul Foster Case and Anne Davies were great at this. Davies once said that Master R manifested a statue of the Madonna on her bookshelf to cheer her up! However such stories were always presented for the incredulous and it is unlikely that anyone ever believed them. However it is a sign that a leader really has lost the plot when they start to believe such stories, even in the face of evidence (such as they were in the wrong town when the story is alleged to have taken place).

If your esoteric group leader starts manifesting any of these symptoms you have to take them to one side and find out what is wrong. Most likely they will throw you out, but if they fail to listen you should leave. Trust in the universe that you will find new teachers. It is not that they are bad, it is just that they are going through some shit and need to sort it out. If they are not going to sort it out, you need to leave before things turn very ugly. Remember that they are only manifesting these problems because they are a bit broken. The reason they react badly is because they know you are right.

Whare Ra and me

2011-03-15T20:01:00.002+01:00

There has been a couple of posts on the world wide wibble which seems to imply that I had no connection with the Adepts of Whare Ra. This is a little surprising as no one has ever questioned me on this before. Tony Fuller, Pat Zalweski and Mike Burden should be able to back the story up as all of them were there for different parts of the story.

I started out in Builders of the Adytum in New Zealand. At that point it was being run by Will Chesterman. In the middle of the 1980s, Chesterman made it fairly clear that I was going nowhere in BOTA because I was a journalist and he was worried that I would write all their secrets in a book (That book has never been written). I moved to Napier and met up with Mike Burden through a BOTA study group. Mike had recently become involved with a Whare Ra side order and was being trained in astrology by Percy Wilkinson who was then the highest ranking person in the Order... the top post had not been filled for many years. Percy was a 6=5 in Whare Ra when it closed and was seen as the Order's astrology expert. Mike introduced me to Pat Zalewski and took me along to Percy's house where the game of finding out things would begin.

At the time I was not particularly interested in joining the Golden Dawn but Percy and I used to talk about magic. Well, I used to ask carefully framed questions and get carefully framed answers back.

Sometimes people used to appear (Barbara was one) for the chats and such was the secrecy it was only by guess work that I worked out that they were in Whare Ra at one point.
After a while Percy suggested I join OTR and I have to say it was the most magical initiation I have ever had. I think that it was from that initiation I consider my magical path really began.

When the blindfold came off there were lots of elderly adepts in the room who I later discovered were Whare Ra.

Some techniques that I was interested in I did get a lot of information about. Sadly I am kicking myself that I didn’t ask more about the inner techniques that the GD used. There were questions that were answered that I only really understood when I became involved with the Golden Dawn. The magical processes that were being used in OTR were a variant of what was being used in Whare Ra. That is not to say they were the same, but the effects were what was supposed to happen in an initiation. Percy gave me a lot of helpful tips and techniques which proved vital when the Nottingham temple of the GD started.

I went to the UK with the aim of finding more about Magic and it was there that I worked exclusively with the Inner Light tradition. It was about that time that Pat's books came out and I got the link between what was happening in the GD and what I was doing with the British groups I was connected to.


The sign off dates for the consecration		of Percy's tools

However after five or six years I returned and conducted a workshop at Whare Ra side order for the surviving Whare Ra members. Percy had died by then and had handed his tools and book collection onto Mike. Mike got all Percy's astrology, Enochian, side order and other papers. Some ended up with others. While I have copies of that material it is fair to say I have not published any of it.

Anyway although I thought my workshop would be like teaching your grandmother how to suck eggs, but I got on very well with Barbara Nairn who thought that it was good to hear practical magic being talked about again. I picked up a lot from her... she was an incredibly regal woman who had considerable power even though she was ill.

Other Whare Ra members would fill me in on the gossip of the Order and it was from them that I got some of the stories of the old days which have found their way into Gathering the Magic and various blogs.

Needless to say the phrase getting “blood out of a stone” was an apt way to describe getting Whare Ra specific information other than stories. I saw a clipping of an obituary I had written when the former Mayor of Havelock North had died sitting on Percy's desk once. I asked him if he knew him... in a disinterested journalist sort of way... it was a dead mayor obit and I had not been that interested in writing it. Percy laughed and said “You know he was the head of Whare Ra don't you?” What was even funnier was some of the people I quoted in the article were also Whare Ra but I had not known it. Such was the secrecy of the group. However I did meet a lot of them.

There are a couple of them still around although they are very elderly. When Paola and I went to Hawkes Bay we met up with Mike and the members of the Table Round again. We were married on TeMata Peak which is the place where Whare Ra met and the side order still meets.

One of our Wedding presents was Percy's 5=6 Nemis. Mike, who was the best man at the little ceremony, felt Percy would have wanted us to have it. Certainly it felt incredibly symbolic when he gave it to us.

In hindsight I have been incredibly lucky with the people I have met and the teachers I have had. When I wrote the Mathers Last Secret Book I dedicated it to Percy, who I felt was the unsung Magus of Whare Ra. I don't claim any lineage from these Golden Dawn people, but they taught me some valuable things and that is what teachers do.

List of things that are unimportant to the Golden Dawn Tradition

2011-03-14T14:49:00.003+01:00

As an extension to my “List of things you thought were true about the Golden Dawn but weren't”, below is a list of things that huge chunks of Internet bandwidth are wasted on.
These give outsiders and insiders the impression that they are important. Yet the Golden Dawn Tradition can safely do without them.

Lineage

The myth: That it is incredibly important to have a connection with the original Golden Dawn. It is vital that your group claims some lineage.
The reality: If Lineage had any magical use the GD would be dead in the water as there would not be a Golden Dawn order in existence that could claim it. For Lineage to take place you would require written permission from the Chiefs of the last surviving Orders given to a fully initiated person of at least Tham.

Felkin: No lineage for you, you
you naughty rebel,

Magically there is no advantage in having your chief received a piece of paper signed by another chief. What matters is the ability of your temple and its officers to initiate. Felkin had no warrant to set up the SM from Mathers or Westcott, but his temple between the 1920s and 1960's was staggering. Later the temple gradually lost this ability. Lineage with Whare in the 1970s was only marginally more useful than lineage to the Westlife fan club.
It is a moot point whether the original Golden Dawn was anything more than a co-masonic group with very little magic on offer. Linking to this might not be as interesting as you think.
In my view it is more important who taught you and what you learnt. This is a sort of spiritual lineage. If your teacher was a barking mad person who knew nothing about magic and insisted you wear a kettle on your head, then your spiritual lineage is less important than if you were taught by Jesus.

Secret Chiefs

Myth: The Chief Adept of every Order talks to secret chiefs and this gives them special powers to teach and initiate.

Reality: Secret Chiefs creates an air of mystery around the Chief Adept and raises them to almost Pope-like status. There are two flavours of Secret Chief: those who are real people and those who are 'contacts'. Contacts are the most common these days however you still find Secret Chiefs popping out of the woodwork. Mathers was so desperate to meet them that he considered Mrs Horos a secret chief until she turned out to be a con-woman.
There is something that happens when you take some responsibility for a group but anthropomorphising this is not helpful. As Chic Cicero once told me that you do not need to search for Secret Chiefs, if you are doing the work they come looking for you.
You certainly do not need to believe in them, or accord yourself status thanks to your connection to them. It is a bit like accord yourself status when you turn on the light switch because you have bought light to dark places.
Secret Chiefs, or contacts, are similar to Platonic Ideas, which the leadership has to bring through into what ever flavour school they are doing. In fact they never need to be mentioned at all. Some Chiefs would think that these would be their own ideas, and no one else in the world could tell them otherwise.

Westcott forged the Sprengel letters

Myth: It is very important that Westcott did not forge the Sprengel documents because it weakens the Golden Dawn if it had no connection to continental magic groups.

Reality: When you are doing your lesser ritual of the pentagram you are unlikely to think about Sr Sprengel or whether or not Westcott had the right to set up the Golden Dawn. You get initiated, you have your magical experiences, you train in it as your path.
The fact that the Golden Dawn system worked is proof of Sprengel's existence was unimportant because the most important changes were done without her. .
Sprengel disappeared long before the Golden Dawn became magical and Mathers wrote the 5=6 material. She also did not help correcting the rituals or writing the lessons. All she did was give permission for the GD to run and it is a moot point as to whether that was required.

The origin of the Cipher documents is vital

Myth: If they were written by one prominent magician or another is vital to the Golden Dawn.

Cipher Manuscripts: Never seen
and forgotten.

Reality: The Cipher Manuscripts are not particularly important to the over all development of the Golden Dawn. They provided a structure for Mathers and Westcott to build the outer order. They required a lot of fleshing out to be usable. Most members of the Golden Dawn never saw them. While I think they were written by McKenzie, there is little to suggest that it would have made any difference to GD history if they were written by Butler Lytton or Enid Blyton.

Reincarnation

Myth: It was important that you believed in re-incarnation to carry out your GD work.
Reality: Some people did and some didn't. Dion Fortune's student William Butler said that it was important to accept re-incarnation as a working theory. For years I did this. Now I don't. As a theory it did not work and lead to silliness. My magical ability did not change a bit and it saved me having to worry about the fate of Atlantis.

Christianity

Myth: The Golden Dawn was a Christian Order.
Reality: Although there were moves to Christianise the later Golden Dawn groups the template of the Outer Order is not specific. The second order is Christian but in an incredibly wide sense. Jesus is not really seen as the Nazarene, but more of a force of divine forgiveness within the universe. This has meant that it can be seen as Christian, pagan or neutral according to the group minds of users.

Grades

Myth: As you go up the ladder of grades you become a better magician thanks to the doors that are opened by the initiation rituals. It is therefore more important to have a chief who is the highest grade possible (7=4 and above).

The grades of the Order
Status who needs it?

Reality: Grades are important to provide structure to the work. But there is no magical status in them.
The grade rituals do have an effect but only at a level that the person is able to receive it at the time. The rituals provide doorways and there is no guarantee that anyone will walk through them.
There is no consistency about what a grade means between different Golden Dawn Orders as grades are given to students for different reasons. Some orders insist that a person receive a grade for sitting a test, others prefer that a person shows signs of magical ability or alchemical changes in their personality. Other people get grades by shagging their initiator, or paying large sums of money. One group can make you spend 15 years to get to NAM while another will stick you through the grades in a weekend.
Real status is your experience and your ability to let the magic change you. If you are 10=1 and spend your days trying to cheat your fellow man, and try to tear down the work of others then you are not even a 0=0.

Intellect

Myth: The Golden Dawn is an intellectual order and everything has to be seen and understood by the mind.
Reality: No one intellectually understands the Golden Dawn system. It is a spiritual- magic process. Intellect is useful, you can intellectualise experience and write long tomes about it, but at the end of the day it is what you do and your connection to the One Thing that matters.

The name Golden Dawn is important

Myth: The name the Golden Dawn defines the tradition and is important for any Golden Dawn group to have
Reality: In the history of the Golden Dawn, the Order used that name the least (just ten years). It was also called the Alpha et Omega, The Stella Matutina and Smaragdum Thalasses much longer than it was ever called Golden Dawn. No one ever suggested that the name of the order ever changed the work of the order.
Changing the name was a good way of avoiding it becoming public or associated with scandal. It also was a good method of dividing the group mind if your group splintered away from another group.

Nick Farrell unfair to cyclists

2011-03-05T16:14:00.000+01:00

It has been bought to my attention that there are those who feel that my book “Mathers' Last Secret” is unfair to cyclists. The common thread in the complaint is that I fail to understand the esoteric importance of cycling to the western mystery tradition. By making comparisons between a working magical lodge (good) and cycling (bad) I have understated the importance of cycling generally.

A meeting of Waite's Holy Order

It is well known that it is vital that people are aware that Mathers and Westcott cycled and that to truly understand the Golden Dawn we have to understand cycling. Apparently it is vital that the male bike is used as the ladies bike is apparently irregular and devoid of any mystery what-so-ever. Westcott and Mathers may have formed the Golden Dawn so that ladies could ride male bikes, but this was not mentioned in the cipher documents.

For many centuries male cyclists have directly influenced the Western Mystery Tradition. Anyone who takes part in cycling will find it deeply moving, while those who take part in a Magical ritual will be unable to walk home and will find their lives deeply altered.

Now I want to make this clear. I have no problem with cycling and feel it has a place. Indeed for many years I was in an esoteric cycling group which met at Great Queen Street. However I do not think that cycling is anything in comparison to the magical experiences that I have had. It is not as if I have not seen other cycling groups, but they do seem similar. I always feel that in comparison to a 0=0 or 5=6 initiation, tearing around the block on a ten-speed is simply not comparing like with like. There have been times that I have wondered how the magical tradition of the Golden Dawn emerged from cycling at all as it appears to be two different things.

Critics say that cycling is a vital part of magic. If I had studied continental cycling, or even Scottish cycling (which has 33 degrees depending on what tartan you are wearing) apparently I would be aware how important it all was.

I am not certain however that this is the case. A magical ritual to me is a layered experience. According to the AO and SM you would visualise a temple, packed with appropriate godforms you would then see energy flowing throughout the ritual and symbolic information psychically. With cycling you just sit and peddle on one level.

It is fairly clear to me that Mathers and Westcott believed that cycling was the way forward, (certainly around the block) and they took this into the AO. Waite also tried to enforce cycling in his Isis Urania temple. This later evolved so that his Holy Order even developed more cycling degrees and bicycle clips.

However the likes of Brodie Innes and Felkin considered cycling unnecessarily to spiritual growth and insisted that people learn magic instead. It is from these people that the Western Magical Tradition began and in my view the modern Golden Dawn came from.

Needless to say I have felt no need to adopt cycling within the Magical Order of the Aurora Aurea. Neither do we consider it important that people are able to ride a bike without stablisers as I have seen some GD groups insist. That is not to say cycling has its place, but it is probably a distraction to real magical work.

Revolution in an Esoteric Order

2011-02-28T14:24:00.001+01:00

YOU GO AWAY for a few weeks and it seems that everything changes. There are revolts in Egypt and Libya and now my inbox is full of news that Robert Zink has been “expelled from his own order”, along with comments from Robert that esoteric orders are not a democracy and you cannot expel a chief.

Unfortunately for those who have rebelled, Robert is right, unlike Egypt or Libya you cannot simply rebel. When someone forms a school or an order it is an extension of their teaching system. To learn, students have to sign up for it, for better or for worse. The administration of an order can be democratised to a point, similar to the Round Table of Arthur's Knights or the Senate in Imperial Rome. But ultimately the teaching of the order rests on one person's vision and they are the only one which can implement that vision.

However this is not the same thing, as Robert has been claiming, “that there is only one adept” and all must obey. Instead it is more that a leader has created a one universe that all in that universe must work within otherwise they are not doing it “right”.

The question which Robert's rebels have had to face is “what do you do if you disagree with the chief and his universe?” There is only one honourable and respected path here. You quit.

You take those who believe in your ideas and set up an alternative school based around your own concepts. You send back all the course material you have received and write your own. In short you become the Chief with a new school and tradition.

What I will say next will not impress the rebels and will probably break many inter order protocols but will stand as a bit of a warning. For your revolt to succeed and your temples to continue you must form your own order based around the new ideas you have. You must jettison those elements within your Order which made it Robert Zink's vision of the Golden Dawn. Otherwise you will be condemned to repeat all the mistakes of the EOGD and end up much like the pigs in Animal Farm.

Before anyone evokes the revolt of the adepts in the original Golden Dawn as a precedent, lets be clear that they were all aware that the moment the revolt took place that they had to set up new Orders. Mathers set up his AO, the rebels set up Morgan Roth (after calling themselves the Hermetic Society). The later split into the Stella Matutina and the Holy Order as another rift developed between the Masons and the Magicians.

Firstly the rebels have attacked Robert Zink and made him the scapegoat for all their problems. This was an error. It raises darker questions. Many of them have built their esoteric careers thanks to Robert. They took grades from him and if he was doing wrong, you were willing allies to the Golden Dawn image he created. Comments about Robert's methods have existed for more than a decade and most of them were his loyal lieutenants. No one outside the order believes for a moment that he acted on his own without their knowledge, help and blessing. If the list of sins against Robert is as detailed as they say, he certainly was not sending out emails, setting up websites, attacking other orders by himself. It seems unlikely that in a hierarchical organisation any of you could have risen to the top by disagreeing with the Chief Adept, so implication in his “crimes” is almost certain.

There are many who left the Esoteric Order who never met Robert Zink who never the less suffered at the hands of the chiefs of his temples. If Robert was behaving badly, his temple chiefs must have, at the very least, been towing the line and obeying orders.

Looking at the list of those who have rebelled, I noticed that three of them have not only kept the grades that they received at Robert's hands but have rushed to take upon themselves his titles. I also noticed that there was the assurance that the temple was going to continue to run “Power Weekends” which are Robert's idea and framed in his “sales speak” language. In short they appear to be keeping the Esoteric Order running in the same manner as it always has. So what was the point of a revolt?

It appears, to the outsider, be a simple power grab from within the order against the leadership, rather than a Geboric attempt to remove an errant leader. If this perception is wrong, then it is unfortunate, especially as there equally appears to be among the rebels those who believed they were doing the right thing in removing a person they thought was doing the wrong things.

The problem is that Robert has been doing these things for a very long time and it seems strange that there seems to be an epiphany that has suddenly become moralistic and clearly unable to see their involvement.

The only way anyone can do the “right thing” is to set up a new order with a completely different egregore. This would give everyone a break from the past and allow a new order to grow from the ashes of the old.

Do not think that I am siding with Robert in all this. I think the way he has handled the revolt is equally incorrect. Once a revolt happens on this magnitude the Chief has to hand on the order to a chosen successor or set up his Order, under a new name. Robert should understand that the current situation is an indication that what ever started the Esoteric Order wants a change of focus and the status quo is no longer viable. You cannot say, like I notice Gaddafi is also trying, that there is no revolt and you have lost no territory. If the list is as long as it appears Robert has lost almost all of his temples. However if you have three or four people loyal you can always start again.

Robert needs to take those who remain loyal to him and use them as the nucleus for a new group which follows his direction. He will now be free to run his courses or another order in the way he likes. Unlike the rebels, he does not have to rewrite too much of his material, unless he wants to take advantage of the break to make things work better according to his vision.

The Esoteric Order of the Golden Dawn as we know it is over. If everyone, rebels or Robert, try to maintain the status quo its death will get messy. There will be legal arguments and copyright feuds, and both sides will attack until they are exhausted. The lessons of the EOGD need to be learned by both sides and the methods not done the same way. Otherwise history will just repeat itself and there will be more revolts from those who believe that it is possible to ascend in an occult order by bumping off the chief. This is a bad thing for any occult order. It is clear that what ever was being done in the Esoteric Order was not right for the GD egregore and reform was needed.

I wish both sides in this success and that their groups will grow and develop the Golden Dawn tradition. But there is a lot of work on both sides to create new groups from the Esoteric Order and at the moment both sides think they can rule using the old ways. But occult groups do not work like that and it is time for something new.

Magical day

2011-02-19T23:03:00.000+01:00

Paola and I were married on top of TeMata Peak in New Zealand. It is a magical place where the Whare Ra temple was built, and was a sacred mountain to the Maori and where the earth appears to meet the sky. Will write some more when I have time and am not on a netbook!

Amazon.com takes orders for Mathers' Last Secret

2011-02-03T12:30:00.000+01:00

If you want early orders of Mathers' Last Secret, Amazon has copies for sale. We do not expect them to have them very long :-) Have a look here

Mathers' Last Secret is Out!

2011-02-01T14:01:00.000+01:00

THIS WEEK my book Mathers' Last Secret hit the pre-order in Amazon and is likely to stir some controversy. For the first time, I reveal the real rituals of the Alpha et Omega along with the notes that a Hierophant followed.  The rituals have not been seen before.  They are from an extremely early AO period.  They belong to the Berridge Temple and were written soon after the revolt.

Most of the AO material, that has come to us,  is much later. It is often written by Mathers' successors, and so this book gives the chance for those to see what the Great Man himself thought about the Golden Dawn system.    The rituals were found in a cache which was preserved in a Witch Museum and belonged to  VH Fr Nisi.  Included in the cache were several diagrams, which had been drawn by Edward Berridge and included lettering, which had been missing from published works and other groups.

This is the second book in a trilogy of material I am writing on Mathers' AO.  The first " King over the Water" looked at the history of the Early AO and the Nisi material.  It was co-written with Melissa Seims and has been given to Thoth Publications.  "Mathers Last Secret" looks at the rituals from a magical perspective and the third “Mathers' Torch” will examine the work of Mathers' successors.  By a quirk of the publishing world, it looks like the sequel is out before the first one.

I have said that this book will upset people.  This is partly because the rituals, like the rarely seen versions of the early Golden Dawn rites reveal something about Mathers and Westcott that many will not like.  The founders of the Golden Dawn were not particularly good Golden Dawn magicans by later standards and that the system that we know and love comes to us from a system evolving into something better.

There has been a tendency to make Mathers, in particular, into a god of magic and the only sole source of a magical trend within the GD.  In these rituals, we see that he allows short cuts, which disobey the Z documents and, in terms of magic, would make an initiation null and void.   To any later user of the system, the only conclusion is that Mathers did not understand the technique that he had bought through.

Other people who will be offended by this book are those Chiefs who claim they are the reincarnation of Mathers and are performing the "only true and correct" AO rituals.  These people will have some explaining to do to their members when Mathers' Last Secrets reveal that they are actually using the cut down Regardie rituals and techniques.

Finally there will be a small number of people who claim to be the Guardians of the AO material.  These are people who have collected photocopied documents and sat upon them distributing them piecemeal in return for status among fledgling GD groups.  They will be disturbed that most of the material they are sitting on is post Mathers and does not reveal his will about the way that the GD should have proceeded.

The publication will probably revive the old argument against oath breaking and secrecy.   Firstly, I should make it clear that I have never made an oath to any AO group.  If I had, it would not have been the same oath that is contained in this book.  Secondly, this material is publically available if you know where to look.  Although NISI has never been seen, other AO materials are being distributed among the GD community.  No doubt this distribution is carried out in return for favours, is being done by those who will claim I am breaking some oath in publishing this book.   I have no doubt that it will be these that will have their followers write scathing reviews about the accuracy of the text (NISI had a large number of typos)

I would say that all this is a smokescreen for the real Elephantin the room. That is that the Golden Dawn under Mathers and Westcott was not the Magical Order that the Golden Dawn tradition has become and was not the Golden Age of magic.  Those who have built their Orders on this premise will have problems explaining this to their memberships and will turn to attack the messenger.

It does not have to be this way.  The AO rituals are just as valid as those of the Stella Matutina. While Mather's guidelines would need to be junked, if you merge the rituals with the Z documents, perhaps add the realisations made by Whare Ra, or Pat Zalewski, you would have a very interesting magical system.

Mathers Last Secret allows AO groups to be formed along more accurate lines and flower into a better system.  This protects students from the guesses of their teachers and frees them from the Secret Masters of photocopies.

Even if readers do not accept my magical interpretations of Mathers' antics, they will at least have accurate copies of the rituals and notes to make their own conclusions.  They will also have material and approaches that have not been published before.

The book has been printed and Amazon should be taking orders in a few days. You can apply to be notified when they have it.

Thoughts on charging for correspondence courses

2011-01-16T15:52:00.000+01:00

For a year now the Magical Order of the Aurora Aurea has run a correspondence course. It uses the Golden Dawn system to provide people with a system of training and mentorship. As a system it works and those who have worked hard at it have got a lot out of it.
The only problem is that the drop out rate between the first and second course is phenomenal as is the range of “dog ate my homework” excuses. I wrote the first few courses to weed out those who will not survive. It forces people to wrestle with their lower self and get a bit of discipline by learning the basics of meditation. All vital stuff in training and has to be done. The work picks up after about five or six months. But the idea is more that if you are forced to write a daily diary that will be mentored you start working and from that you get the insights into the system. It was the same sort of system used by the outer order of Inner Light and is still being used in the Servants of the Light. It worked for me too.

The course is cheap. We were not in it for the money, the order just wanted to help people who could not make contact with a group start working on the magical path. Currently we charge 10 euro for the first lesson and five euro for each one afterwards. This is what I think is the problem. People join with the expectation that it is cheap so they do not place any value on it. They join without engaging brain as to whether or not they can really do the magical path.

I am toying with the idea of raising the price for the first course from 10 to either 50 or 100 euro with the idea of people giving it some value. The course will remain at 5 euro for after that. Obviously if we raised the fees the amount of people joining would plummet, but those who did pay up would be serious about it.

One of the things that really gets on my nerves is that many people have not even bothered to tell us that they want to quit. This meant that one of our supervisors had ten or so students but was not doing anything, where as another had five students and was run off her feet. We did a purge of these members recently and the correspondence school lost another 70 per cent.

The reason I am posting this here is to ask what the view of the community would be to increasing the fees like this and for this reason. Like I said the course was not about the money (the Order itself is not collecting dues at the moment). However I am beginning to feel that if we are to be taken seriously we might have to charge a bit more for the first lesson to make people stop and think about what they are getting into. By keeping it cheap afterwards we are still sticking to our volunteer ethos without having to waste so much time with people who stumble across the order on the Internet and think that joining is a good idea. I am fairly open minded about this so I am interested to hear people's point of view. Discuss.

John Dee Work

2010-11-15T09:14:00.003+01:00

I realise I have not been posting for a while, I have been writing like a mad thing and sorting out the portal Material for the Magical Order of the Aurora Aurea. Portal has required a lot of work. Not only are the published versions of the ritual hacked about (and in my opinion unworkable) the course material for this important grade is tiny. Much of the work appears to be writing an essay on your experiences in the Outer Order.

Frankly this is a missed opportunity as I think that the portal should be a nine month pressure cooker with the student looking for connections with their Higher Self in preparation for the 5=6 grade. When the ritual is restored the Portal is a shadow working for the 5=6 and indeed provides the candidate with important technical information.
I have also been working with Paola to start on Enochian again after a long absence. The first thing to go has been the GD pronunciation system. Thanks to the work done by Aaron with his Angelic Language book, she has gone through and replaced the pronunciation of the words. These are actually a lot easier to vibrate and have a lot more grunt. Paola is better at this stuff than I am. I don't think that this is an area that the GD came up with anything useful and the Dee system is a lot more natural.

I have also dusted off my Wnochian table and started to work with it using a supreme pentagram environment (I do not like Regardie's Watchtower Ritual). My seal is a bit knackered and needs replacing, I also need more red silk to cover the table and the floor. The ensigns of creation are paper (they will be tin soon) and I will make four lesser seals of truth but Paper will do under the four wheels of the cubic altar.
All up, it is a good effect. If you call angels on the quarters the crystal acts as a balance (much like a rose in the rose cross) and it does not need to be even used to scry. The tablet of equilibrium is placed on the seal of truth and then the cloth over the top with the gold ring and the crystal.
Anyway this is just an update.

Pat Zalewski's Antidote to Golden Dawn Bullshit

2010-08-17T17:24:00.000+02:00

FOR MANY years now it has been possible to set up a Golden Dawn group based on Israel Regardie's book perhaps supplanted with a few “unpublished manuscripts” picked up elsewhere. If a subject was too high-level you could shove it into the higher grades where few would ever see it.

You could argue that your's was the one real Golden Dawn. Most of these groups run rituals like Masonic orders. Indeed they tend to attract masons who always seem to be on the look out for something new to join. Rituals are read from the Black Book 6th Edition Regardie and the value of the ritual, and the skill of the Hierophant is decided on the basis of how well it was “performed” and the psychological effect on the candidate. There is a very good argument to suggest that the Early Golden Dawn was exactly like this. A sort of hermetic co-masonry where women were admitted.

But for those of use who are interested in magic that is not what the Golden Dawn is all about. Many of us take our Golden Dawn from its more magical off-shoots such as the Stella Matutina and the AO. But how the fact is that the Magic stuff is only hinted at in the papers that have been left behind. I do not believe that anyone could create a truly Magical Order from nothing other than Regardie, however well developed the Golden Dawn Tradition is.

Pat Zalewski was lucky. He met with a bloke who left the last surviving Golden Dawn group in the 1960s before it went down hill and shut down in the 1970s. His mentor was a bloke called Jack Taylor who was raised to the grade of 7=4 by none other than Mrs Felkin. Jack was able to give Pat a crash course in the practical aspects of the Golden Dawn as it was experienced by him.

Pat has written many Golden Dawn books but this one Golden Dawn Rituals and Commentaries is truly the only attempt I have seen to place all of the magic back into the Golden Dawn tradition.

It takes you through the magic used within the Golden Dawn rituals and provides you with a Hierophant's handbook. It uses the complete rituals, provides all the diagrams that were cut from the Regardie version.

Of course there will be those who wish he did not publish this book. For a start it is clear that the Hierophant needs a level of magical expertise and concentration that many don't have. An order needs a degree of practical knowledge that cannot be found by having all the robes right and being able to shout the loudest. A book like this shows how a Order should be and the level of magical sophistication and skill required. It shows the glaring holes that exist in the magical ability of the “play orders” out there.

The question has been raised about how much of the magical information given here is from Pat, or Jack and how much of it was real Golden Dawn. Such questions are usually asked by those who believe that what Mathers or Westcott was doing was the true “fundamentalist” way of the Golden Dawn. These are the types who believe that magical techniques are carved in stone and handed down by god along side demands to stop looking at your neighbour's arse.

The book clearly identifies what is Pat's ideas, and what is Jack's and what comes from elsewhere. I know that most of the ideas contained in this book were also agreed with by some of the Whare Ra adepts I met. Others were not. Jack was a Magus, he was not a fundamentalist follower of any born again Golden Dawn cult. I was equally lucky to see many of the ideas used in this book put into action by those in Whare Ra and feel their effects.

Pat does bring in new ideas. Some I agree with and others I don't. But I have also put them into practice and a lot of what is written in this book not only works, I would actually say that you are wasting your time in the Golden Dawn system if you were not applying them.

Another question is whether this information should be left tucked away from people to see. The point is that it was nearly lost because people followed the traditional way about shutting up over important stuff. Information like this is what makes a spiritual tradition. It is the ritual in action rather the ritual in form. The ritual provides the ingredients, people still need to know how to make the cake. In the Golden Dawn's case magic has been allowed to slip out of the system and needs to be shoved back in.

What I find interesting is that many Hierophant's in the modern Golden Dawn will not be able to run a temple ritual according to Pat's methods. They might pretend they can, but I don't know many who can effectively do what is written here.

But equally I can find few modern Golden Dawn people who can argue with the reasoning. You have to talk from experience to know if something works or doesn't.

Golden Dawn Rituals and Commentaries is really the sort of book every would be Hierophant should write at some time in their life. You have to show people who follow you, what you did, and what you added to the tradition. However it is also the book that every Golden Dawn magician should have and use it as the touch stone for their own magical work. They might disagree with something in it, but they can say “Pat says this, but...” and such a thing furthers the tradition.

Equally, however they will find many challenges to the way they work the system. In short Golden Dawn Rituals and Commentaries tells people to cut the bullshit and do some proper work and sets up a the magical yardstick.

Anyway this is a book you need. It is very very big and heavy andI am not even going to begin to pick it out here... there is not enough space on the world wide wibble. However it is well worth the price.

Book review: The Golden Dawn The Unpublished Lectures of the Hermetic Order of the AO

2010-08-10T17:03:00.001+02:00

On the subject of printing secrets, we have this little controversial book which was released a couple of weeks or so ago. The book covers a few of the papers which were stored in the Slater Collection which are later AO.
The information created a controversy when someone who is sitting on a pile of photocopies from the Slater Collection insisted that one of the articles were “forged” and the book was a “fraud” because he didn't have it in his collection. In fact, all 12 papers are real and from the Slater collection and the writer deserves an apology, at least on that score.
For these 12 papers the book the 122 page book is worth the price. But the real problem is that the book shows little effort in presentation.

To produce a book like this you have to do more than simply print the papers. You have to explain the material and place it into context. The author has done little other than defend his actions in publishing "secret material". You really don't know what you are looking at or why, everything has just been chucked together without a theme or a thread linking them.
The diagrams have mostly not been redrawn and have been scanned in. This is actually quite useful because you can work them out for yourself rather than risk something important being missed.
The typeface is ugly and where Greek is used it is not translated. I would have not used the Greek and written the translation out.
According to AO expert Tony Fuller, who actually owns many of the documents printed here, there are a few mistakes and missing information. Judging by the way it is all laid out I would be inclined to believe that is possible.
The enochian papers use enochian lettering, which is unusual. This becomes significant when you consider that it was this material that was injected back into Whare Ra and the other Golden Dawn Groups in the 1920's. However none of the Whare Ra Enochian papers I have, use the Enochian lettering.
There is an interesting paper on the LVX formula which hints at more than it is telling and a 6=5 paper on the Seven Branched candlestick which is useful but you have to wonder why it would be given such a high grade.
Anyone interested in the Golden Dawn tradition should buy this book, but they will be left with a slight feeling that they have been cheated. It could have been, and should have been a lot better. As far as secrets go, it proves my point completely. You can have a 6=5 paper in your hand and I doubt many would even realise its value.

On Secrecy

2010-07-25T14:02:00.000+02:00

There has been a fairly interesting debate which has been going on on this blog and elsewhere about secrecy within modern Golden Dawn groups. Please note that I am not saying what oath we take in the Magical Order of the Aurora Aurea. It is similar but not the original. It does have a clause on revealing teachings but it is not the same as the Golden Dawn or SM. The oath of all these groups was different anyway. I think that oaths should reflect the times and not simply parrot phrases that have no meaning. However since all the oaths are similar lets have a look at it and the secrecy thing.

The Oath

Harpakrat

The traditional oath was a surprisingly dull thing if you read it out loud and includes many clauses that are almost legalistic in their phraseology.

Firstly the candidate swears to keep secret the Order, its name, the names of its members and the proceedings that take place at its meetings from non-initiates and those who don’t have the current password.
At this point we come to something which belongs to a bygone age.

Why keep secret the name of the Order?

Most Orders have a website with their name all over it. During the recent Golden Dawn wars people were fighting over the name of the Order in court. The name has become a trademark in other words something which is used to make money through marketing. The Name of almost every order is now public domain. It might not have been when the Order was founded, but now keeping the name of your order secret is largely meaningless and indeed for outfits that see themselves as commercial schools, undesirable.

This is not something that is a problem in a consumer culture like our own, however the idea that the name would be made public terrified Mathers. After the name was used in the Horos court case he tried to his order's name secret by renaming it the AO. Even today modern orders have no problem calling themselves the AO on their websites. It is just a sign of the times. BOTA which is a lineal descendant of the AO is very public about its name and Golden Dawn lineage.

Why keep the names of members secret?

The names of the members need to be secret because it is still and always will be a matter of privacy.

People think you are nuts if you belong to an occult order and sometimes this still can be a matter of blackmail, particularly if a member is working in the teaching profession. In court case I heard of, a masonic group was at odds with former members over some land. The former members threatened that if the case against the continued they would go to the local papers with a list of members (some of whom were pillars of the local community).

Some members of my order have been members of other Golden Dawn groups. For a variety of political reasons it is best that these groups do not know that they have ended up in MOAA. Then we come to another silly promise oath....

The retrospective oath

The candidate swears to keep quiet about information they may have gained concerning the order before they took the oath. There is only one situation where I think this is important. If you know the names of members before you join you should continue to keep secret about it. Otherwise it is a clause that is out of date.

Copyright clauses

The oath features copyright clauses… all material has to have the GD label on it. This is to keep the teaching regular throughout the order. Second you are not allowed to copy the material. However some of this material is copyrighted and others are not. The older stuff has long passed out of copyright and is legally public domain.

In MOAA though more than three quarters of the material is copyrighted. It was written in the last decade. This stuff is secret because it defines our group as different from others. While it is still not possible to really work magic with this material, it is still important to be kept secret.

Swearing not to be passive

This is one of my favourites. You should not allow yourself to be placed in such a state of passivity that any initiated person or power may cause you to lose control of my words and actions.

At the time I thought this meant that I would not allow myself to be hypnotised or take part in pathworkings. Indeed some people think this clause of the oath was designed to prevent a hypnotist getting the passwords out of a GD adept while under their control. But they were wrong and that is not what the oath is saying.

Hypnosis does not cause you to lose control of yourself, however passivity does. Passivity is when you turn your will over to that of another. You do it in co-dependant or other abusive relationships, you can also make yourself totally passive to a bully at work. Whenever you surrender what you want to another’s will you lose that vital connection with your higher self and in serious cases the damage can be permanent. Your personality is the chariot you are seeking to perfect in this work you must never hand over the reigns to another in any form.

In this we answer the question... should I obey demands that I conform to the will of another chief who interprets the his tradition in a different way from me? Should I write what they want me to write, in a style they wants to. Should I censor my views to appease that particular Chief or declare that black is white because that chief is uncomfortable with the way I put things? The answer is that to do so is that I am being passive, I am allowing an “uninitiated person” (at least in my tradition) take control of my thoughts and worlds. I must follow way that is set down for me by my traditions and believes. I can be sympathetic, but I must act my self and do things the way I do them.

Keep on studying

The next clause is that you promise to keep on studying. You don’t stop just because you are busy. This is important because in the outer order you are trying to build up the habits that will carry you on the path of return for the rest of this incarnation (and who knows beyond). This oath with me always appears as a sort of feeling guilty that I am not doing enough work! It dogs me like a pack of wolves at times. Finally there is the clause against evil magic which is self explanatory.

So when does being secret become poo?

Most people when they talk about people breaking their oath refer to the publication of materials. They rarely look at the other aspects of the oath and assume that it is all about secrecy. The Oath is about that, but it is much more. It is saying how you will live your life. If you were to sum it up, you would say “I am going to keep my magical life a secret. I will protect other people from being exposed and will help other magical people who I will work with. I will work hard and not allow someone else to take control of me.”

The debate about keeping stuff secret seems to fall into two camps. One one hand you have those who feel that everything should be kept secret even if it is well known or been published, or is only “secret” because someone has not published it yet yet, any anyone could do so at any moment. On the other hand you have those who thing that everything must be kept totally open and there is no point keeping any secrets and any oaths you make should be as general as possible.

That is a jolly nice cigar you have there Mr Freud.

In 1919, in his article "The Uncanny" , Freud thought a lot about secrets. Generally he thought they were unhealthy obsessions in the neuro-psychoses of defence mechanisms of a person. As you would expect with Freud it mostly came down to poo and sex. Parents lied to a child about where they came from and the child had to think about it for themselves. The child became aware that there was a secret and determined to find it out. This starts the child's thinking processes. So in otherwords the positive side of a secret is that it HAS to be found out. The other thing that Freud suggests is that you have to look at OTHER things that are secret. These include sex and poo. Now it is really easy to laugh at Freud, particularly if you are magician who likes to waive their wand around too much in public, but he has a point.

Secrecy is about power.

If you have a secret you have power over those who don't know it. Ultimately people should find out the secret because it is part of their evolution to gain knowledge. But hanging on to the wrong knowledge is eventually emotionally and physically constipating.

I have experienced extreme secrecy in three Magical Groups and I can safely say that all those groups were stunted. The secrecy was used by the chiefs to cover up for the fact that they were fundamentally insecure about what they did know. In the case of Whare Ra for example the chiefs took parts of the teaching which had been in one grade and moved it to a higher one. The reason was that it made that information less accessible to students who might ask them questions about it/ If you shove the difficult, or more interesting teaching in the second or third order, the chance that you will ever get asked about it is that much more remote. If you took outer order teaching which would be seen by 99 per cent of students and shove it in the second order it will only been seen by two percent. If there is NAM teaching and you shift it to the 6=5 it is very unlikely that anyone will see it.

My teacher David Goddard referred to this as drawbridge syndrome and said it happened when a group was dying. The knowledge which should be moving freely in a good group is constipated in a far off grade where the chiefs usually sit on their cushions.

Too much Secrecy can be self defeating

The next problem about a secret is that it can be lost if the person who knows it dies without telling anyone. The only reason we know what was done in the Golden Dawn at all is because people broke their oaths. If you read Dion Fortune and this is confirmed by my meetings with Whare Ra people you can't help but admire their defence of the oath and the teaching they have. But they were also filled with the knowledge that if they didn’t pass on their information it would die with them. So they “got around their oath” by answering what you asked. This meant that you had to frame the question really specifically or you didn’t get what you wanted.

Once I pointed out to one of them who was giving me the run around that the 5=6 oath said that if you meet someone who professes to be a Rosicrucian you must test them and that they are honour bound to find a successor. The idea of a “successor”, even if not treated literally implies that you pass the information on.” They laughed and told me what I wanted.

To avoid this happening within MOAA I am making the copyrighted material public if the order collapses.

A secret made for its own sake is toxic.

It gives a false power to those who should not have it. For example one person who worked in the same tradition as I did spent a lot of time collecting documents, mostly photocopies. If you approached him about them he would say that he would not give them to you because that would break his oath. However used the photocopies to get recognition from other orders about how high level he was. In a debate on something important he could trump it because he had a document that covered the subject. It was not knowledge or experience just a good filing system. He ended up suckering one group into being made a chief without having to to a stroke of meditation in his life. Last I heard he died without actually ever even turning up at a meeting.

Written knowledge is not magic

In the Golden Dawn there is two types of knowledge. The first is the written knowledge which appears in papers. Most of these have been published. If you were to take the published material and try to use it to become a magician you would fail. In fact I doubt there is a single magical order anywhere that can rely on written material to produce adepts.

Secondly there was oral instruction and experience. Like the words say this explains the teaching and places it into a context. If you were to record this teaching it would fill many tapes and pages and pages of transcripts. Even then you would miss important points.

I learnt magic sitting and listening to my teacher. I have read his writings but I learnt a lot more from listening to him than I did from the countless books I read. It was from these talks I got the Golden thread which enables me to connect teachings and understand what they tried to do. To me that is magic. If you wrote notes about the same thing it would be knowledge. The differences is between Hod and the conjunction of Chokmah and Binah. What is interesting is that this teacher was not a member of the Golden Dawn, if he had been the very act of the way he was teaching would have been considered “against the oath” certainly of Whare Ra. I know this because when I last went to New Zealand I ran a workshop in Hawkes Bay and several of the old group of Whare Ra members turned up. At that point I was not in the GD and just talked about what I called the British Western Mystery tradition. I was told later they had not heard that stuff since Whare Ra closed and realised how much they had missed being taught it. But the secrecy even worked against that and athough they were all high level Whare Ra people, they had to find their own source of teaching because of their interpretation of the oath of secrecy.

Can the old written material be covered by the oath of secrecy?

There is no point considering the Regardie material part of the oath because everyone can pick up a book and read it. Material which is sitting in a library or collection is equally considered in the public domain. Any one visiting Dublin can sit down and read all Yeat's Golden Dawn material effectively having access to the same collection as a 7=4 in the SM. Equally the Slater collection gives someone the same status as a 7=4 in AO.

It is my belief that none of the original Golden Dawn, AO, Whare Ra, SM documents can be considered part of the oath of secrecy. They are owned by the tradition and are the bear minimum standard that all orders who choice to follow that tradition need. If I had my way ALL this material would be published on a single website and orders could use the material in their own way.

What is the point of swearing to protect such material from others

when you have no power to do so?

You can argue that it is symbolic, but it is a poor symbol if it is. You could symbolically swear to protect Martin Luther King from assassination. It might be symbolic but it does.... um.... sod all really.

Martin Luther King demonstrates the 1=10 salute in public

Then there is the suggestion that there is power which can be gained from knowing if a group is using some Golden Dawn documents and not others. However the value of this knowledge is small.

Just because you you are chief of a modern order does not mean that you are the chief of an original group. You have no power to moderate other groups who might believe they are following the same tradition.

Oaths to protect material which do not help people master magic,

or help in the daily running of the group are pointless.

You can say that unpublished original GD material can help people master magic. The short answer is that they can't.

A while back I published the most complete version of the Book of the Tomb as an ebook . I did this because two modern orders were engaged in a pissing contest about which had the “real vault”. By publication of the document the real formula for the construction of the vault was revealed. A potential Golden Dawn flame war was abandoned as both groups could consider their vaults in the light of the real core documents.

Since the several smaller groups have built their vaults using the Book of the Tomb. Some of them look very nice. However then came the crucial point of the story.

One of the people who built his vault asked me how to use it. I told him I could not help and he would have to work it out for himself. As it turned out his group DID sit down and work out a system which I am sure is working for them. The point is that the moment they stepped off the core document then they entered into the bounds of what I consider “secret” .

Oaths to protect core information censor every Golden Dawn magician from writing any books that further the tradition .

What Golden Dawn books did Westcott, Felkin, Mathers or Brodie-Innes write? Even Dion Fortune admitted she could only publish her Mystical Cabbalah book because Crowley had already published the crucial material in 777. The following Golden Dawn members have written specifically Golden Dawn books which by the standards of the secrecy oath should never have seen the light of day. If you consider these books of value, you have to admire the fact that such books fly in the face of secrecy tradition.

Alistair Crowley, R Waite Israel Regardie, Dion Fortune, Nick Farrell, Pat and Krys Zalweski, Chic and Tabatha Cicero, David Griffin, Robert Wang, Francis King, Paul Foster Case, Aaron Lietch, Darcy Kuntz, Donald Tyson, Perigrin Wildoak, Donald Kraig, Gerald Suster,

This list is not exhaustive but gives you an idea. The point is that all these books have furthered the tradition but would not have been possible of publication of the core traditional documents was impossible and could not be discussed. No one from Whare Ra dared to write anything.

Other things which need to be kept secret

Some things are unique to each order and have to be kept secret at all costs. These are the images of inner plane temples, god-forms and images which are used in the subtle forms of magic. Some groups do not bother with these and personally I don't see how. However that which is built by thought must not be talked about because it can be destroyed by thought too.

The Golden Dawn is changing

This is where running a re-enactment group ends up.

While there are those who want the Golden Dawn to be a re-enactment society. My experience with re-enactment groups leads me to believe that they are not appropriate model for a magical group. The older material should be seen as foundation stones upon which the new order is built. Since all GD orders have the same foundation stones then that stuff should be held in common. If you obsess too much about the foundations then you never get the roof built.

Correct position for the 'L' in the Golden Dawn LVX formula

2010-07-18T19:56:00.001+02:00

There has been much debate on the correct position of the arms for the LVX formula of late. Regardie had a perfect 'L' as, it appeared did the original Golden Dawn.

However there is another suggestion that the right hand was held as if lobbing a spear while the left was down while off centre. This is similar to the position which is shown of the Magician in the BOTA tarot deck (and for that matter the one that Harry is painting at the moment).

All good stuff which seems to indicate that the GD got more detailed as it got older.
However one should perhaps look at the inspiration for the sign of Isis mourning. Attached is a picture from Wikipedia showing a rare image of Mourning Isis from the Louvre. It is a pretty good bet that it might have been the inspiration for Mathers in Paris. You can see a marked similarity between this image, and another of Homer Simpson. If this is correct we should say L, 'Doh', the sign of morning Isis while hitting the top of our crown chakras.
It is just as well Mathers did not go to a Germany Museum and see this statue of Mourning Isis.

Otherwise we would be sayiing "L, pardon, the sign of Burping Isis" (although she could be equally checking if her breath was fresh by breathing into it. What would have happened next? V, phooey, the smell of the Armpits of Horus, X, ow, the sign of Osiris with heartburn. We could be wrong but we think that this is actually Nephysis and not Isis at at all (the throne on her head gives it away). So we are stuck with 'L, doh, the sign of morning Homer" after all. Just as Mather's intended.

The Muse of History

2010-07-18T11:01:00.005+02:00

I have absolutely no problem with other GD groups. The Magical Order of the Aurora Aurea is quite close to other some other GD groups and regularly share information. Generally until someone has a pop at me I am usually fairly open and trusting (sometimes to a fault).

The issue of historical research can be thorny. A researcher's job is not to act as the propagandist for their own order. They have to be open minded as to what might have happened even when this will lead them away from an official line that their temple chiefs would be happy with.
If the line of reasoning of their temple chief is “Mathers was a god and I am the incarnation of Mathers” a researcher would be in the uncomfortable position of having to point out that Mathers was a drooling looney, if it was true.

Then there is the problem about who “owns” the material. Some groups, as part of their articles of faith, claim that they own the Golden Dawn material and therefore unpublished material is protected either by their oath or moral copyright.

Recently one dusted off the argument that I was an “oath breaker” or some such stuff because I released the 1910 AO's Book of the Tomb which a group which claims lineage from that order said it “owned”.

The question is, does a researcher ignore the protests or strange rulings from other Orders in the quest for “unity”? The issue of secrecy is one that I have thought about a lot as a writer/historian. I see it this way.

Anything that comes out of a modern Order must have a new approach to the material or else it is not a true manifestation of the Golden Dawn. The documents that come out of the GD involve the barest of bones of the system which still need to be interpreted and put into action by the chiefs of the new Orders. New material and new approaches are by nature secret.
If another Chief wants to share them with me, or me with another that is good and interesting. However if I were to publish material which was written by, say Chic Cicero, to explain the Book of the Tomb that would be wrong. Nor would it be right to publish material that has been consistently used by an other group.
For example the Order of the Table Round material, though historically interesting, should not be published because it is being used (anyway the current ritual is still under copyright). It is not wrong to publish the AO rituals from 1910 but it would be wrong to publish the 2010 rituals of a group which claimed to be the AO.

As a researcher it is wrong for me to deny other Chiefs the right to look at the original material and develop their own systems based on that interpretation. Therefore anything I find, that I publish, assists all Golden Dawn orders.

Their chiefs can choice to accept, reject or develop the material themselves. If they adapt the material and provide new approaches to their systems, in the same way that they did with the Regardie book, then the researcher's work is done.

Finally there is the matter of the researcher who “listens to their own chief” as a source. For argument’s sake, if I find a paper that says that Westcott molested small boys yet I ignore this paper, or write it in such a way that the information is obscured, because my Chief tells me it is a bad idea, or was not true, then I lose the right to be a historical researcher. Likewise if another researcher proves that my Chief's historical perspective is wrong, it is not my duty to prove the Chief right. It is my duty to look at the evidence and change views accordingly.

This is tricky when a researcher's role in an order is tolerated by the Chief while they are supporting the Order's official line. This is one of the reason that the best GD researchers have been those, such as Gilbert and Howe, who have been outside the order and are not worried about upsetting anyone.

BOTA insisted that Whare Ra had predicted that a red haired woman would come from overseas as “a messiah”. It is likely that prophecy was made up by members of BOTA in New Zealand who were fans of Anne Davies, who had red hair, in a bid to attract members of Whare Ra to their group.

I tried to track down if there was any truth to the prophecy being made and the only ones who had heard of it at Whare Ra were those who were also members of BOTA. While Mrs Felkin had made a prophecy about a New Zealand messiah, there was no mention of red hair, nor that the messiah was a woman.

Turning Anne Davies into a messiah was a tall order anyway. When she tried to speak to Whare Ra members in Hawkes Bay, Percy Wilkinson had to leave the room because he was laughing too much at her.

A BOTA historian would have had to admit that the prophecy was PR spin. It would be their job to say that the story was made up and not to report it as fact, or say “at the time there were rumours of a prophecy”.

Lastly a researcher knows that there are no absolutes. You can have all the paper in the world to back up your point and still be completely wrong. This is a problem for those who want a more fundamentalist religious approach to the GD.
They quote the Z documents instead of the bible, but they are more or less the same thing. There is a basic insecurity which wants them to see that their view is “written down” by an “authority” which instead of god was Mathers or Westcott. However the GD always was a system evolution with each generation taking it in a different way.

There never was a “right” or “wrong” Golden Dawn. Each order evolved toward the directions of its chiefs. This is normal. Dion Fortune's Society of Inner Light evolved from Christianity, to Paganism, back to Christianity, then to sexual polarity magic, then Scientology(!) then back to Christianity. Whare Ra went though stages of Christianity, Steinerism, Alice Bailey, Christianity and finally fundamentalist Christianity. Charting these developments is the job of the researcher. However saying “The Golden Dawn was this...” is impossible to say.

History in the making

2010-07-16T21:16:00.001+02:00

Israel Regardie tended to slag off Crowley. After all, the Great Beast wrote a really nasty letter about him which, among other things, said he was a compulsive masturbator so he had a right to be miffed. However, according to Chic Cicero if a younger occultist attacked number 666, Regardie would wade into him and defend Crowley to the hilt. He said that he knew Crowley, it was his right.

I did not really understand that, until someone in an argument had a pop at someone in Whare Ra who was one of the teachers of Pat Zalewski, Jack Taylor but also had a go at the person who was my initiator, a 6=5 called Percy Wilkinson. The person in question was looking that this person from the perspective of history of the Golden Dawn. I didn't know Jack and what I have picked up about him was second hand, but I did know Percy.

Percy was the simply the best initiator I have ever seen. I have tried over the last 14 years to mirror his success and only gained a shadow of it. He was a 6=5 at Whare Ra and managed to do things in that initiation that I would not expecting and would never do so again.

But my reality, based on personal knowledge and experience, had challenged some history that someone was trying to create. This person believes that Mathers and the early Golden Dawn was the bee's knees and Whare Ra was not how it was done in the GD and therefore suspect.

Such an attitude is to be expected. I am a journalist, I have sat in as history of one sort of another unfolded. I have also been around long enough to see what historians have made of the circumstances I have sat through. The experience of reality was nothing in comparison to the story that unfolded.

But when it is as personal as my occult experiences it seems different. When you see your history, merged into the limited understanding of occult historians or even just “stories” you wonder what are the “real people”. Behind the various myths that are described for them. Can documentation mirror the reality of what it was like to be a member of the Golden Dawn or Whare Ra?

I have a clear view on the teachers I have had and the people within various groups I have worked with. I was also present during key pivotal moments in several groups. But the strange thing is that I know that when these same events are described they will be hammered into what ever pet theory that people have at the time.

This person's pet theory was that Whare Ra which was the most successful Golden Dawn temple ever was “less important” to the Golden Dawn tradition. How thinks were done at Whare Ra was interesting but a footnote to what was done elsewhere.

It was made on the basis of papers... the sort of things that historians consider primary sources.

However Percy, Barbara and all the people I have worked with do not figure in these papers. They are just records of various z documents etc.

With my historian hat on, I can say I am not impressed with the Mathers and Westcott. But based on this incident I can also say I have not got a clue about who they really were. When I wrote King over the Water with Melissa Seim I tried to make them a little more human and understand where they were coming from. My experience in Masonry helped. But really I have no real idea what it was like to live in the Victorian period or what it is like to have everyone you loved kill themselves, such as Westcott, or have an attractive wife who is scared of sex, like Mathers.

All I can do is look at their letters and try and interpret things. To do this it is important to remove what ever bias I have against them. The modern Golden Dawn holds up either Westcott or Mathers as Gods. I came to the conclusion that neither were particularly important to the story. The real “character” and “Genius” of the Golden Dawn was the Order itself. It has evolved into the different Orders you see today.

It is easy to say the Golden Dawn or the AO was better than Whare Ra. But the fact is that no one knows what the AO or the Golden Dawn were like. I picked up what Whare Ra was like by talking to people who are now dead who were there. The stories were far different from the papers. For example you can find a Whare Ra document that says masks could be used for the grade ceremonies. Yet Percy told me they were not used in his life time and he had never seen them. Jack Taylor told Pat the same thing. Since Whare Ra was more Christian than the early Golden Dawn I would think it was possible that the removed them. However there is no real record of the other orders using them either. The point here is that the papers might tell you one thing. The reality will tell you another. When it comes to the Golden Dawn all we have is papers and when it comes to Whare Ra we still have some living memories to play with as recounted to Pat, Chris, Me, Tony Fuller and Mike Burden.

So I will give you a memory... this is first hand... it comes from a person being initiated by Percy Wilkinson who was using the Z formula. You can use it to measure the standard of your own Golden Dawn group and then tell me that Whare Ra adepts did not know what they were doing.

I had been stuck in the chapel for three quarters of an hour. I was bored. I had meditated on the egregore and done all I really could think of doing. I had heard the cars of others arrive at the temple and them getting ready. But I was awake as much as normal.

I could hear the ritual starting up. The “knocks” and then suddenly something physical happened. My consciousness moved so that it was not quite my body, like I was watching the story and being a part of it. I relaxed but at the same time could not move. I was feeling a bit stretched.

There was a knock on the chapel door and a person led me downstairs. He put me in the robe and asked me how I felt. I opened my mouth to speak but no words came out. I tried but couldn't. “Yeah, that is normal I was told.”

He put a black bag over my head... but my consciousness was split I was both looking outside of the bag and inside it. I could not walk properly.

The doors of the temple swung open, but I saw them clearly. There was a blazing light inside the temple and I could see it clearly. I walked forward and suddenly I was barred. What was strange about this was I could not see the “people” just the godforms. As the barring happened my heart centre opened and I could feel it. I felt that part of me was in a different part of the temple watching me being initiated but I was aware of a presence behind me whispering stuff which I understood but didn't. Another part of me was inside the black bag and yet another part was hovering above watching the swirling patterns that the ritual was forming below me....”

That should give you a rough idea. I have never experienced it before or since. There was something similar which happened during my 5=6 but nothing like Percy's initiation which I have been striving to recreate ever since. Sometimes with some success, other times not.

Although I had other initiations before and since, that one is where I feel my serious magic began. It was by this one that the others were measured, and by those that I think about whether or not other groups “have it” or not.

Although it is fun to get caught up in the history, or the correct way to hold a wand, at the end of the day it is the magic that interests me. In that regard I am sure that based on the magic of Percy, Whare Ra “had it.”

I was lucky, however when it comes down to history, it is hard to explain real magic to anyone.

* The Photo of the back end of Whare Ra was borrowed from Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:08_Looking_NW_at_Sth_wall_of_Whare_Ra.jpg.

Things you thought were true about the GD but probably weren't.

2010-07-13T07:24:00.005+02:00

This article is a bit of fun and the list is not exhaustive. If anyone can think of others put them in the comments box

It is not called the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn

The "Golden Dawn" was never called the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (HOGD). That was invented by Regardie for his book. The First Order was called the Golden Dawn in the Outer (GDO) although on some letterheads it was called the Esoteric Order of the Golden Dawn. Hermetic Order does appear on some letter heads and course material but it was not the name of the Order. I pointed this out in my book Making Talismans and one Order immediately changed its name. Mathers wanted to call the AO the Golden Dawn but decided that the name was profaned by the Horos court case. In the AO 0=0 he said that the Order was sometimes known as the Golden Dawn but that name has been profaned and we no longer use it. He looked forward to the day that it was possible to drop the AO name and become Golden Dawn in the Outer again. We guess once the name has been forgotten and no longer associated with sex scandals, cults, swindlers, law suits and serial liars.... good luck with that.

The Kerux has a Caduceus Wand

This is based on a misreading of Regardie's Golden Dawn during the 1970's by one of his students in the early days of the re-formation of the order. It has ended up in several books and repeated by several orders who claim they had nothing to do with Regardie. The Kerux carried a stick with three colours on it. You need it to be stick because you are barred during the ritual by each of the three colours. If the Kerux staff has a black and white snake on it you will have someone's eye out.

Neophytes are taught the lesser banishing ritual of the pentagram as their primary magical tool

In fact they are taught the invoking pentagram. The banishing pentagram is just a footnote in the original knowledge paper. Modern Golden Dawn orders hardly ever do the invoking pentagram and say that it is safety to banish first, even when they are doing an invoking ritual.

It is not clear when the banishing replaced the invoking. The last Golden Dawn temple Whare Ra would perform a banishing before doing a working in space which had not been used for one before. It seems likely that that the banishing obsession comes from Wicca. Magically the invoking provides just as much protection as the banishing. When you invoke you call upon the divine names and angels for protection, when you banish you are asking those names and angels to remove something for you.

The Lesser Ritual of the Pentagram is elemental

The LRP has never been considered elemental by the Golden Dawn. Those who have read Regardie know that the you are drawing the invoking and banishing earth pentagram, but this was not a fact known to a Neophyte, nor indeed any of the outer order. When the information was first taught, the GD didn't have a second order so the Supreme Ritual of the Pentagram system had not been developed. It was always designed to be a positive force (invoking) or a negative force (banishing). This is more news to groups outside the Golden Dawn who use it to "open and close" ritual space.

The Tablet of the element is a like a talisman and the pentagrams should be drawn on them.

Whare Ra teachers were quite clear on this. The tablets were doorways and you drew your pentagrams through and behind them. In fact I was told that if you tried to invoke onto the tablet you got a belt of elemental force which was unbalanced.

The Golden Dawn ritual is colourful

Other than a few diagrams there was very little colour in the GD. The tablets were either black and white, or white and red lettering. The tarot cards were black and white most of the officers were black and white. This made the appearance of the vault even more memorable. The second order is full colour.

The elemental grade rituals do not use Godforms

While the 0=0 ritual had the Z documents which described the use of Godforms the elemental grades had little or nothing, at least written down in Regardie. This has lead some to believe that either the godforms are not used in the grades above 0=0 or that they were the same as the 0=0.

The 0=0 is based on the Temple of Maat and is therefore pretty specific. The use of those Godforms would not work in the others. It would be a bit like staging Hamlet using the same set and character's from Antony and Cleopatra. Also some godforms are named.

There is no doubt that Mathers intended that there were godforms for the elemental grades. He even wrote a paper on the ones for the 1=10. The others are sort of mentioned by name in the rituals.

What seems to have happened is that the AO and SM and Whare Ra developed their own set of Godforms. These have been lost. Dion Fortune said that the godforms are the missing keys to understanding any ritual. It is fairly clear that each order must develop its own system of Godforms for the outer order.

The Golden Dawn used masks

This is based on a piece of the ritual which says “The priest who wears the mask of....” It has also appeared in a few of the 1980's coffee table books about magic where the fact that the GD used it was a throwback to the magic of Ancient Greece. While masks are a good idea in the two rituals where they can be used, they are a pain in the arse. It requires you to limit your visibility. It is hard to wear a nemyis. If you have the masks on sticks you need more hands than Kali to read a script and hold your elemental weapons and often shove candles or water into a candidate's heart centre. Whare Ra did not use them and there is no indication that anyone else did either.

Wynn Westcott and Sam Mathers were initiates of the Golden Dawn

In fact neither of them is recorded having any form of initiation within the Golden Dawn system. The closest either of them came was to take up the cross of suffering during Corpus Christie. Apparently Mathers did it first and was too scared to do it again, Westcott did it next and he faced the same problem (I can't think why, it is not so bad once you are up). They off-loaded the job on minions there after. While they may have initiated people into the system they never experienced it for themselves. This makes the second generation of Golden Dawn people more significant than the founders who never experienced it.

Westcott had to quit the GD because Mathers hid some second order papers with Wyn's name and address on them in a taxi.

Westcott did quit (temporarily) because of personal problems (something to do with not working with women for a while). However he did say that someone had been contacting his work and was out to get him but never said what the problem was.

Just before he quit he was “promoted” with a key title by Mathers. This strange and unnecessary if Mathers was going to frame him. The story was coined by Crowley many years after the fact and was probably made up. The quote was that he was “paid to sit on stiffs not raise them” is pure Crowley.

Crowley might have received it from Mathers (who made it up) but it was not true. It is incredibly unlikely that Mathers would have profaned his own material by giving it to the great unwashed. When he joined Mathers's AO, Westcott had his name and address put on the AO labels so that if someone died the material would be returned to him. Hardly wise if his employers had made him choose between his job as a coroner and the Golden Dawn. Anyway at the time Westcott was the head of Soc Ros. Given that masons populated all levels of the establishment it is unlikely that any of them would have objected to a group that met in Mark Mason's Hall.

Mathers was a virgin

Mina Mathers was terrified of sex. Even by standards of Victorian society she was completely frigid. When she discovered that sex was how she was born she could not look at her “parents the same way ever again”.

Consequently she made a bit thing about telling everyone that both her and Sam “kept themselves pure”. The downside was Sam never got the memo. While in Paris, he was poking the maid. It is not being judgemental to say this, the set up was just as hypocritical as the rest of Victorian/ Edwardian society. Sex with one's wife was supposed to be a chaste experience while your average male was supposed to be out whoring.

Sam's working relationship with the staff was discovered when a member from London visited Paris and apparently the house was in an uproar because Sam had been caught out. The incident was circulated with some amusement among London members and ended up recorded in the Waite papers. As far as I am aware no one ever asked Sam "are you a virgin?... if it is not a personal question" and no one would dare to ask Mina.

Israel Regardie was an expert on the Golden Dawn rituals

Regardie said that he only attended seven rituals within the Bristol Temple. It is fairly likely that he was not even initiated into the 0=0, but that the Bristol temple accepted his initiation into an American order which had a warrant from Westcott and was using the 0=0 ritual copied from Crowley's Equinox. Most of the information Regardie learnt from Bristol was through letters and while it was clear he worked very hard on the material he did not get much ritual experience in the system. He never did an officer's role in Bristol. Anyone who has worked the system will tell you that the system is lived in practice. Regardie carried out three 0-0 initiations in the late 1970s as Hierophant. That was the only temple experience he had.

Bristol was using cut down rituals at the time and, according to Regardie, their ritual skills were not up to much. He did not think much of the Golden Dawn rituals and for most of his life advocated doing the 0=0 and then making the student do Watchtower rituals before the Portal and then the 5=6. Many have assumed that Regardie got most of his Golden Dawn expertise from Crowley. Regardie said that the Great Beast never taught him any magic.

Israel Regardie was a 7=4

Regardie only gained a 5=6 when he left the Bristol Temple. Before his death, when he visited Pat Zalewski in New Zealand, Pat awarded him a 6=5 in recognition of his service to the Order. Over his remaining years Pat used to promote and demote Regardie to 7=4 as a joke between them. When Regardie died they gave him an honorary 7=4 and this was published in the Falcon Press Edition. Regardie was not ever a 7=4 in the Bristol Temple.

The Golden Dawn and AO carried out initiation rituals above 5=6

In Whare Ra there were 6=5 and 7=4 initiations. These were rare and even rarer were the 8=3 and 9=2. However at least they existed. Although Mathers appears to have written a 6=5 and 7=4 ritual for his AO there is no proof that it was ever used. Before Sam's death, admission to the 6=5 (at least) was by cheque. The earliest AO ritual mentions 6=5 and 7=4 in the 0=0 but the set of material stops at the 5=6. Although there were temple chiefs that held the 7=4 rank, there were no reports of an initiation ceremony being involved. Indeed some AO members travelled to New Zealand to have an initiation into the 6=5 and 7=4.

In the Golden Dawn and the rebel temples there were no 6=5 or 7=4 rituals. People held these titles but they appeared to have been awarded without an initiation. This is similar to the 5=6 grade which was also “awarded” before the inner order was created.

The Golden Dawn had a tarot deck for divination

Despite the fact that its system has influenced Tarot for nearly a century, the Golden Dawn didn't have a deck of its own. The Trumps for the initiation were drawn in Black and White and adepts were expected to colour them in when they had been given the colouring instructions. But this is only half the Major Arcana.

For divination most used the Marseilles deck for divination until the Waite deck appeared on the scene. Felkin was aware of the problem and asked Westcott to design him a deck. This was done in black and white and was supposed to be coloured. The prototype was on little yellow cards and adepts were expected to draw their own from that template. This appears to have happened in the SM and Whare Ra but not in the AO. When Builders of the Adytum set up in New Zealand Whare Ra members were allowed to join at their existing grades. Since BOTA had a good colourable tarot deck many of them used that. A complete deck suitable for divination didn't appear until the 1980s with the Regardie/ Wang deck. A complete deck for use for everything did not happen until Tabatha Cicero's deck.

Westcott Forged the Cipher Manuscripts

This old chestnut comes up when people have only read people who have glanced at the Magicians of the Golden Dawn. Westcott never forged the Cipher documents although he did translate them. These documents provided the outline for the order with the grades from 0=0 to 4=7. The cipher outline was enough for Mathers to knock together a passable ritual. These ciphers were not forged and have been fairly accurately sourced to a leading mason called McKenzie.

What Westcott has alleged to have forged were the letters between Fräulein Sprengel's and himself which gave him permission to establish the Order based on the Cipher manuscripts and the right to initiate. He was also charged with forging her signature on the Warrant of the Isis-Urania Temple. The evidence from Howe is not bad and enables him to dismiss the entire Golden Dawn tradition as based on forgery.

Of course, to modern non-masonic minds this is total rubbish. An order stands or falls on the ability of its teachers and teachings. It is hard to find a single Magical Order anywhere which was formed in a “correct way”.

However to the masonic mind you need permission from someone above you in the food chain to give you the right to initiate. Howe does have a point that Sprengel was “too convenient” for Westcott.

However Howe is not conclusive in his evidence that Westcott did invent Sprengel. He points to the fact that the letters included phrases and writing which indicated that they were written by an English person who knew German. What is strange then, if it were a forgery, that Westcott made such a pig's ear of it. Surely someone with his connections could have found a better forger? From most sane people's perspective the Cipher documents alone provide enough of a template for the order to be formed correctly. Springel was a minor part of the story. The concept that it needed lineage belongs to a hide bound tradition that should have died out about the same time when the GD admitted women into its ranks.

Fräulein Sprengel's first name was Anna

This is a myth which comes from Dr Felkin's enthusiastic and at times hair brained researches into GD history before the First World War. In all the letters and documents connected with Sprengel she has no first name. Felkin however found the name Anna when he was convinced he found the Secret Order behind the GD. Although his discoveries, along with the real vault of CRC did not pan out to much, the name Anna was forever associated with Fräulein Sprengel. . Amusingly it has even been assumed that Westcott invented the name “Anna” from Anna Kingsford who ran the western hermetic branch of the Theosophical Society. In fact she never was an Anna in the first place.

The publication of Regardie's book caused the GD to close down

The Golden Dawn book hit the shops in 1939 Bristol carried on until the death of the last Adept in the 1970s, although they stopped initiating long before that. Whare Ra closed in 1978. Only the AO's London Temple closed soon after the Second World War and that was less to do with Regardie's book and more to do with falling membership. People are not often aware that although the GD book was important it was a complete flop and suffered from a minimal distribution. It was not until the book was bought by Llewellyn in the 1960s and the occult boom happened that it started to get the attention it deserved.

It would have been great to be in the Golden Dawn or Whare Ra

The original Golden Dawn was nothing more than a Masonic side order that admitted women, radical for its time but nothing to see here move on please. It became more interesting when Mathers provided the Z documents and made the rituals magical. Then the second generation of people who benefited from the system came into their own as Magicians. These were the Florence Farrs, the WB Yeats, Edward Berridge, Crowley and Brodie Innes. However even that dated.

My experience with Whare Ra was that the Golden Dawn was not enough for them. They took the system as far as it could go and then started to branch out into other areas. The temple set up was incredibly secretive and people carried this obsession to their grave. If two Whare Ra people met each other in the street they would ignore each other. If one dared to greet another they would lift their nose up and walk away.

Dr Felkin was famous in Havelock North because of his masonic and medical connections and his strange house. When I first moved to Havelock North I wrote the obituary for the last chief of Whare Ra. I didn't know that of course. I covered his death as if it was the Mayor of Havelock North (which he was). In the process of researching the article I rang through whose who of Whare Ra people to ask them about the guy. No one thought to mention his connection with Whare Ra.
Later when I started finding out about Whare Ra people I rang all these people again. I discovered if you asked a direct question you could “sometimes” get an answer.

While there is no doubt that it would have been interesting to know what they knew about the Golden Dawn there was a reason that the order closed. It had lost touch with the world around it and the sort of approach to magic that was developing. It survived as long as it did in New Zealand because the country was a backwater away from the rest of the world. Even New Zealand had to change and despite a conservative backlash in the late 1970s and Early 80s it changed radically. Edwardian Orders do not work that well in that environment.

I find it interesting that as Whare Ra was closing Regardie was helping Chic Cicero and Adam Forrest form the HOGD. With the books that Chic produced based around Regardie's the Order managed to survive 21^st century. Some of the important material from Whare Ra has been saved and this is now coming back into the modern Order. People like Pat Zalewski and Perigrin Wildoak are making new information available. This is keeping the GD refreshed and relevant.

It is fair to say that many modern people who apply to join the Aurora Aurea would not have been accepted in any Golden Dawn Order in any period. Modern students expect everything to be done for them, preferably for free, and if they don't get cosmic consciousness by next Tuesday they will slag you off on the internet. The idea behind the Golden Dawn is that you work and many modern magicians can't do that.

It was impossible for a GD temple to ban women

Although a 5=6 adept swore to keep the balance of sexes in a Golden Dawn temple, masonic sexism still was a powerful force within the early order. One technique that the misogynists used was to set up temples that had people "pre-trained" effectively this meant only master masons were admitted. There were a couple of goes at setting this up the most successful was the Bradford Temple. "You know we never thought that by making a requirement that members being master masons we were keeping women out... never mind.... oath... yes but we have made a requirement that we are all master masons and "The Ladies" don't have trouser legs to roll up and it does not do to bare their breasts" Fortunately this attitude was rare. The Golden Dawn still remained a game changer in this regard.

Bram Stoker a member of the Golden Dawn

No he wasn't. He might have known Pam Coleman Smith but she was not a member of the Golden Dawn either. So people wanting a place where they can be vampires will probably not find their home in the Golden Dawn. Besides Dawn is not a good place for a Vampire to be... you tend to be all smoking shoes and dust clouds.

Azrael - Whom God Helps

2010-07-11T15:21:00.002+02:00

The idea of death is a key part of organised religion. This has mostly been because the fear of death has been a method of control for society. Many occult and religious systems try to place the idea of balance outside the material world of the living. Thus they make the immediate afterlife a place of balance and judgement. It meant that you didnt start looking for “evil people” to get their comeuppance in this life and no matter how terrible your life had been if you had followed the religious line you would be “safe”. However such simplistic approaches to life and death have never really worked. The biggest problem with them has been that they promise eternity. Either eternal bliss or eternal damnation. You might think that Pope John Paul II was a pretty nice bloke, but get saddled with him for eternity the novelty will wear off. Eat enough chocolate and it becomes hellish, imagine what an afterlife of perfection and rest would be like.
Then there is the idea of what makes up an evil person. Most people who are dubbed evil are unlikely to see themselves as such. Monsters like Hitler and Stalin believed that they were acting for the common good.

The eternity time scale is also incredibly unfair. Modern humanity has “three score years and ten” on this planet but the decisions that they make in this tiny period of history is supposed to set them up for eternity.

But the biggest problem for an occultist is “who does the judging?” Obviously religion says “god does it” however if the universe is made up of One Thing, and we are all expressions of it then it is really God judging itself. If you do a crime to yourself, assuming that such a thing is possible, do you condemn yourself for eternity or do you think to yourself “well I will not do that again”. If you do something good for yourself do you continue patting yourself on the back forever?
It is more likely that what happens after death is something we do not know and thus becomes the greatest mystery of all. The Ancient Egyptian religion came up with a very interesting roadmap of what it expected in the afterlife. It even shoved a Lonely Planet guide to the afterlife in people's coffins on the assumptions that they could read it and know which ferryboat to catch if they wanted to get to Amenti.
But these are all fixed systems, created by humanity. Sometimes they ignore the fact that God is One Thing, other times they assume that humanity, or matter is so evil, that it must be escaped.

In my novel Tree Falls, I describe death as being a spark of life beginning a new adventure sailing off into the darkness. It was not bad but I am sure other people would come up with something better. The point is that we need a guide to the afterlife. For those of an Egyptian bent, the God Anubis is a good guide. However for those more interested in Judeo-Christian traditions the best guide is Azrael.
Azrael is the Angel of Death and his name and legend comes to us from the Arab Hebrews who remained in the Holy-land after the Roman genocides.
In one of his forms, he has four faces and four thousand wings, and his whole body consists of eyes and tongues, the number of which corresponds to the number of people inhabiting the Earth.
However in another form “he” is a “she” who is seen as a beautiful compassionate woman dressed in black. It is this more benign form, which is connected to the sphere Binah, the great mother, which we will be using. If you think about it, death is a birth into something new. You are leaving behind the womb of materiality into a new existence.
The way to communicate to her is to enter in your imagination to a triangular temple. The walls and ceiling are made of lead. On the ceiling in polished letters is the name Elohim.

In the centre is an altar upon which burn three candles. Visualise this as clearly as you can and say* :

Listen, all creeping things -
the bell of transience.
In the name Elohim I call upon the Angel of Death
Come forth into thy temple Azrael
Leaves have their time to fall,
And flowers to wither at the north-wind's breath,
And stars to set; but all,
Thou hast all seasons for thine own, O Death!
Is childhood ever long enough, or a happy time, or even
a beautiful summer day? All of these carry the seeds of
the same fierce mystery that we call death.
Through winter-time we call on spring,
And through the spring on summer call,
And when the abounding hedges ring
Declare that winter's best of all:
And after that there's nothing good
Because the spring time has not come--
Not know that what disturbs our blood
Is but its longing for the tomb.

Come forth my Azarel
Open thy mysteries of Death
Show me the secrets of the doors of horn and ivory
Teach me the reality behind the story.

If you want a more cheerful one you can say:

Come forth Azarel
Into thy secret and sacred temple
Show me the secrets of the doors of horn and ivory
Open thy mysteries of Death
Teach me the reality behind the story.
Show me the path from manifestation to the unmanifest
Transform me from the scorpion to the eagle and the phoenix
Write my name in the book of life so that I shall be one of the twice born.
Guide me on the great adventure away from pain to joy
From sadness to happiness
From the fragmented reality to the One Truth
The light behind all colours
You who are the transformer
Transform me with thy mysteries.

Allow a few minutes and then see Azarel appear to you. Since you are not ready to die yet, she will appear as a teacher. She will certainly not appear as something you should be frightened of.
Ask her your questions and see what she says. Remember that some of the answers will be clouded by your fears and preconceptions so they will need to be meditated upon.
When you have finished asking your questions. Thank Azarel and ask her to depart and then do a banishing ritual of the pentagram.

* This invocation was knocked together from several famous poems by different authors with bits added by me. It should give you the right feeling to call Azrael .

Thinking about Gods

2010-07-07T19:10:00.000+02:00

Gods are very important in the pagan religion but their role in Magic is a little less clear. My personal belief is that their is only One Thing that takes on lots of different roles. Paganism and modern paganism in particular with its Goddess obsession does as much to move me as the Christian idea of a male God. However the question then comes to the idea of worship. How do you worship One Thing? The sort answer is that you don't. It is as vain as worshiping yourself. You are part of the One Thing so you are just saying to another part of yourself how brilliant you really are. This is silly.
But I use Godforms a lot and so the question is what sort of relationship should you have with them?

Terry Prachett said in one of his books Lords and Ladies:

"Once you start paddlin' with the occult you start believing in spirits, and when you start believing in spirits you start believing in demons, and then before you know where you are you're believing in gods. And then you're in trouble."
"But all them things exist," said Nanny Ogg.
"That's no call to go around believing in them. It only encourages 'em."

If you replace the idea of believing in them with worshipping them you get where I am coming from here. I don't believe in worshipping gods any more than I might worship an aeroplane which takes me on holiday. Gods are masks, bits of the One Thing, which I use to get me from one state to another. A god or a bus it is the same thing. Now I can worship the One Thing through one of those fragments but it ends up being the same as worshipping the coffee table.
The Bible is full of references to “not worshipping idols” and what I think is meant here is don't worship fragments. Both you and Gods are fragments you are both equal so kneeling before them is not a good idea unless you BOTH are kneeling before the One Thing.
Gods are creations of the created tools to understanding... you don't want to go around worshipping them it only feeds their huge collective egos :-) .
The universe is made up of stories. When you use a godform you are choosing to look at he universe through one lens and through “one story”. There are many stories but you benefit from understanding the world through many different ones (it is when people think their story is the only one that people start getting burnt at the stake). In Aurora Aurea when we adopt a god form we are putting on a mask to understand a story or an aspect of the one thing which is above all stories.
Magicians are not priests. We do not have the job of bringing one story to others to believe in. We are looking for the story that suits us and living it.
So I see the Godforms as realised aspects of myself with the power to do more than me because they have a bit more history. But I don't think I would ever go around worshiping them.
BY the way the beautiful Green Man picture on the left is one of Paola's.

Paola and I got engaged

2010-07-04T13:14:00.001+02:00

We will get married in Feb when we go on holiday to New Zealand

David Williams

2010-06-04T22:40:00.002+02:00

David Williamson died on Corpus Christi after a long illness that destroyed him.
David was a doctor where he spend his life working with the dead and performing the function of a coroner's doctor.
This lead him to a relationship with a god form called Anubis. The Opener was an archetype which had a huge influence in his life. He was introduced to magic through Masonry and then joined the Servants of the Light school of magic where he became a supervisor and rose through the ranks quickly. It was there that he meet Krys and the patterns of his life were changed completely.
I was deeply honoured when he and Krys joined the Horus Hathor temple of the Golden Dawn and they were a great asset to me. Both of them could see whether or not magic was taking place in the temple and practically assist with the inner perceptions of the temple working.
David's dedication to magic forced him into a change which estranged him from his family. His daughters, who he deeply loved, rejected him when he left their mother. This deeply affected him and led him in a downward spiral into illness from which he never recovered.
David was a man who was incredibly significant to the magical path. He was intelligent, and inspired in his magical work and there are a large number of students who owe him much for his insight.
With such potential, particularly working with Krys, one can only wonder what he would have achieved for the Order.
His invocations to Anubis in both in the Magical Order of the Aurora Aurea and in its correspondence course, get to the heart of this godform and have bought his understanding to our order.
Personally I will miss him, and I will miss what he provided to me over the last six years that I have known him. It is rare that people dedicate themselves to this work. He had a saying which he provided as an eulogy to his fellow Golden Dawn Frater Brian Thompson when he died over a year ago.

"May he appear before the throne
of Osiris, as a traveller, justified"

As a traveller David has finished his journey too early.

Paola and my own thoughts are with Krys at this time.

"I am the Divine Magician who guides David through the celestial halls,
I part the Veil of the hidden world and clear his vision.
I initiate David into my Secret Mysteries,
I cast for David the Holy Circle of Starry Light.
I enfold thee in my Ka and rejoice in your embrace.
The Ancient Ceremonies are performed,
the chants echo across the temporal halls.
David's Temple is rebuilt, your faith renewed.
We are One, David and Me
twin beams of light entwined,
the Soul-Temple glows as a Golden Dawn,
the Ancient Twilight glows across Space and Time.
We are an Indestructible Star, David and Me
a Power of Heaven.
I indwell in David's Soul-Temple.
And make him complete."

Plato and bright ideas

2010-05-06T15:47:00.001+02:00

I wrote this story today which is fairly interesting. The idea is that a symbol of enlightenment can help you have breakthroughs. It is almost a scientific confirmation of Plato

Golden Dawn Temple Deck Update

2010-04-14T15:50:00.000+02:00

Harry and Nicola have done a video showing the images of the forthcoming Golden Dawn Temple Deck. It is looking really good! The bonus is that the YouTube flick comes with a soundtrack from Harry and Nico's album.

The Three Chiefs of the Golden Dawn

2010-04-11T15:45:00.001+02:00

hy the Past Hierophant needs to get the boot

The top table of chiefs are composed of the Imperator, the Cancellarius and Praemonstrator. The Hierophant is also supposed to sit between them and behind him sits the Past-Heirophant.
Throughout the history of the Golden Dawn little work has been done about the magical function of these officers. Instead the titles are seen as mostly administrative. The person who fancies themselves in charge of the group takes the role of Imperator because it means “the person who rules” and it gets to stick them on a throne above all the others dressed in bright red and holding a jolly big sword.

However this ego stroke shows the ignorance of the system and the belief that it was an Imperator that ran the Order. In the original GD these officers were not seen and their function was not discussed by the great unwashed. The Hierophant's throne was between a half open curtain and that was all that could be seen of these officers. If there was any dance of the ego it was conducted behind closed doors or curtains.
There were three important officers on the top table and one, the Heirophant which moved between the three.

The three represented the three pillars on the tree of life, the alchemical principles, Fire, Air and Water and the gods Nepthys, Thoth and Isis. The Hierophant (and the candidate) represented Osiris, Salt and Malkuth, and Earth.
But what does all this mean?
There are three great currents which come into the 0=0 ceremony from the withdrawn orders which are personified by the three chiefs. For the sake of identification I will call these the Nephsys, Thoth and Isis current. Their function is to rebuild and empower Osiris.
Nephsys is water and Mercury. Her function is to alchemically separate (ie desolve) the candidate during the various processes of the 0=0. She is the force of putrefaction which takes place after death. She is also the purifier. Isis is fire and sulfur and the consecrating force which alchemically binds the candidate. Thoth is the quintessence the force which unites the forces of Sulphur and Mercury and thus resurrects Osiris.
These three rays take up a third of the temple each. Every time a candidate or an officer (with their godform) enter into those temple sectors they are working with and interacting with those rays. Thus when the candidate enters the temple in the West the first thing that happens to them is that they are broken down by the Nepthys force so that they can be rebound by the Isis force and raised up under the Thoth ray. The work of the 0=0 therefore can be said to be using the “Solve et Coagula” maxim of the alchemist.
This means then that the circumambulations where the candidate crosses the three lines of force mirror the alchemical processes of dissolve and bind. These transmutions are carried out by Maat and Anubis as they lead the candidate around the temple. They are also a factor at the various points where the candidate is stopped.
Also it is interesting to note that when Sulphur is mixed with Mercury and baked it creates a vermilion powder which was the basis for red paint. It makes sense of why the Hierophant wears red and how the action of the Imperator and the Praemonstrator bound by the power of the Cancellerious manufacture within the order the “created fire and the uncreated (or hidden) fire” which powers the Hierophant.
The Hierophant then takes his power from these three rays which are manifested throughout the grade rises of the outer order. He is the salt, or material result of their action and hopes to pass on these powers to the candidate.
To me this answers the question as to whether the Hierophant should sit in front of the officers or in a line with them. He should be on an apex of triangle which the base line is the Imperator, the Cancellarius and the Praemonstrator. He should be seated in front of the Cancellarius who provides him with the middle pillar of air and the powers of the quintessence which he is expected to manifest into the the temple of Maat.
The question about all this is what has all this work got do with the post of “past-heirophant”?. In Whare Ra this job was basically to assist the Hierophant in bringing in all the energy into the temple and to effectively sit in his chair as Osiris when the Hierophant was running around being Aroueris. He is Aroueris when the Hierophant is sitting down. The question is, is this role really required as it breaks a lot of very important symbols on the top table. You lose the idea of the tree of life, you lose the trinity, because four officers do not mean the same thing as three.
The role, while an interesting idea, is not mirrored with other officers. Just because the Heirus stands up there is not a past Heirus to fills the passive role while the officer is active on the floor.
Since none of the chiefs roles are contained in the Cipher manuscripts it means that they are the invention of Mathers and Westcott. While the idea of three chiefs shows some alchemical genius, the use of four does not. In fact it shows the influence of freemasonry. In freemasonry once someone has passed through the chair they are given a past master title. They are supposed to assist the current master in their role. Sound familiar? However it is just another officer and a sop to the lost status which is afforded to the new master of the lodge.
Magically it does little which is not done elsewhere and actually messes with the tree of life and alchemical symbolism which is much more important. When I started to question the role of the past Hierophant I noticed that with the officer sitting on his desk there are actually 11 officers. Praemonstrator, Cancellarius, Imperator, Hierophant, Past Hierophant, Hegemon, Hierus, Dadouchos, Stolistes, Kerux and Sentinel. While this is a little superstitious, it is not a desirable number of officers to have, since it represents the qlippoth, whereas ten indicates the sephiroth. Given this, I think it is probably better that the past Hierophant is handed his P45 and pink slip and told that in a magical order we don't really need to create senior jobs to avoid upsetting people who can't be Hierophant any more.

Diagrams in the Golden Dawn

2010-04-09T10:28:00.000+02:00

For many years I have been working in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn where few of the diagrams of the Golden Dawn where used in the initiation rituals. This is because the HOGD and many modern Golden Dawn orders were based on the rituals printed by Israel Regardie just before the Second World War in his Golden Dawn book.
The Bristol temple was going through a phase of removing parts of the ritual it did not understand or felt were cumbersome and the versions of the rituals that Regardie experienced were these cut down rite. The candidate still saw the diagrams, they were given to him or her during their course work and that was felt to be enough.
When deciding on the rituals of the Magical Order of Aurora Aurea I felt that we should return to the Whare Ra rituals. Whare Ra was the last surviving order of the Golden Dawn, closing its doors in the late 1970s. I worked with some of the people in that temple after it closed and know the magical depths they managed to find within the Golden Dawn system.
Going through the old rituals, I was surprised at quite how many of the diagrams there were which have to be presented to the candidate. Some were obvious, some I had seen and some were a complete mystery. Some diagrams even appeared to be repeated or the information duplicated across several grades. In each case the diagram was explained by the officer, often extending the length of the ritual considerably.
Part of me started to agree with Bristol and think they should be edited out. After all how can a candidate who has undergone an initiation that means anything actually stand, let alone comprehend the subtleties of a dozen diagrams.
I had been following a few threads on the various diagrams and decided that what ever happened they were important for a reason unknown and the Magical Order of the Aurora would use them in its initiations.
One thing we did do was to use the godforms associated with the diagrams to over shadow the candidate during the speeches and to link the diagram to the candidate's sphere of sensation. I thought that this would be fairly tame and a sensible magical use of the them.
However during psychic observations of the use of the diagrams in the initiations we started to notice that they were doing something more than we thought. Firstly the godforms appeared to be teaching the candidate something in connection with the tablet while the speeches were taking place. Secondly the godforms appeared to use the tablets magically to change the candidate's sphere of sensation. In several cases we heard a clicking sound when some people were exposed to the tablets as their sphere of sensation was re-orientated.
This was interesting so I returned to the rituals to note where some of the confusing diagrams apppeared. Perhaps the strangest was the Geomantic Diagrams which were scattered throughout the GD rituals. However if these diagrams were part of a huge psychic operation which is taking place on the candidate's sphere of sensation over several rituals their function becomes more than simply providing intellectual information. Geomancy works with the Earth spirits so in the initiation it is sealing and earthing the different components of the psychic operation. This is particularly so in the 4=7 when the candidate is shown something which tells them how to build an Earth talisman. Pat Zalewski was the first to spot the fact that when Mathers converted the the Cipher manuscripts so that the geomantic symbols used in the talisman were Rubeus and Puer. It made sense in some respects in that the path where the candidate is exposed to this particular talisman is on a Luna path and Mathers wanted to hint at the feiry Mars aspect of the Moon. The fact that he changed it is crucial because it says he recognised that the presentation of the diagram would have a magical effect. Unfortunately he was being a little too clever by half. The author of the Cipher documents said that the talisman should be Rubeus and Admissio. The fusion of these two geomantic symbols would be to negate the destructive aspects of Rubeus and allow the positive flow of love. This path after all is a move towards Netzach and very appropriate to the idea of the Moon under the influence of Mercy.
So it appears to be fairly clear that an operation is taking place here and not simply the masonic presentation of intellectual knowledge.
Take another example. Several times the candidate is shown various versions of the geometric shapes, in different guises. The information could be worked out the first time you see the diagram so why do you get a reprise for the second and third times. My suggestion would be that this is giving the sphere of sensation instructions in an energy form that it can use them to communicate but also crystallising parts of the sphere of sensation so that they fit to those shapes.
All this is fairly good magic covered under a dry intellectual shield. If the diagrams, such as tarot, have the effect of shaping the sphere of sensation then it becomes crucial that they are used and presented to the candidate.
But the diagrams also have another function in the temple. When they are not being showed to the candidate they act as invisible stations for power. This makes their placement important as it is possible to see lines of force between them. Remember that in an initiation the temple represents the candidate's sphere of sensation so these focal points become crucial.
With these diagrams being restored to the position of magical weapons their power becomes obvious. However this does raise some pretty obvious questions. The first is why did the Bristol temple think that ditching the diagrams was a good idea?
It is quite likely that in various times in its history the Golden Dawn has degenerated. The magical meaning behind the rites has been lost. While Felkin's Whare Ra remained on the ball there was no-one to check what the “provinces” were doing. There is an inherent trend within the Golden Dawn to kill off its magic side, or at very least, not study it. When this happens an order goes through the rituals and the motions of a working order without it being one. Diagrams, which superficially appeal to the Intellect are easily dismissed for what they appear to be, rather than what they really are.

Blog back from dead

2010-03-11T08:58:00.000+01:00

After a bit of work I managed to get this blog back from the dead. My old website was cut off and when it was restored the blog would not work. I have attached it to this address now and it seems to be fine, although you might want to update your links etc.

My website address

2010-03-05T14:48:00.001+01:00

My website has moved to www.nickfarrell.eu. Can you update all your links?

The Magical Order Of Aurora Aurea

2010-02-25T20:42:00.001+01:00

After laying low on the subject for a few months, I just thought I would tell everyone about the Golden Dawn Order that has been formed after I left the HOGD.
The Website for the Order can be found here www.auroraaurea.com. The Magical Order of the Aurora Aurea will be a world-wide Golden Dawn group whose main focus is taking a magical approach to the system. There are a few minor changes, but the frame work and initiations are traditional (Whare Ra) GD. The Order structure is slightly different and there is a ritual public face, called an Anticum. There is also a separate correspondence course for those who are not close to a full temple (although we are hoping that the course will draw people together to form Aurora Aurea temples).
The training material includes the traditional Golden Dawn material along with new teachings that work within the same system. The Order is much more hands on and practical than the pile of papers, traditional knowledge paper plus examination system of the Golden Dawn. It requires daily work and will have a full grade system at least until 7=4.
We are based in Europe with temples in Italy, Slovinia, Dublin and Wales.
The Correspondence course is a rewrite of the HCOMA course which was closed down by the former Director of Studies last year. If anyone was on that course and would like to continue then they are welcome to join at their previous level. It is a supervised course but offers no recognised grade other than the spiritual work that the student manages to achieve on their own.
It has been fun starting an Order from scratch, although my head hurts now that I have been writing the course material. I have nearly finished the 3=8 material! Currently members are flat out translating the material into different languages too.
Anyway have a look at the website and if you have any questions get in touch.

Nick Farrell