Since the Magical Order of the Aurora Aurea
decided to leave the Golden Dawn, there has been some somewhat strange comments
about egregores including one very confused comment from one clearly
uninformed “chief of an order.” Ironically
there was been one comment from a chap who has spent a long time claiming I was
not Golden Dawn for years, suddenly insisting I was because I did the same
rituals as him. It is nice to be wanted,
I guess!
Since I learnt about egoregore early on in my
training it never occurred to me that people did not really understand how they
worked, so I thought I better explain.
If anything it will make why we have walked away from the GD egregore clearer.
An egregore is a spirit, similar to the Roman
concept of a Lare in that it forms spontaneously and appears to have a
personality. It is formed when a group
is started and in psychological terms is called a “group mind.” In my book Gathering the Magic I said that
this egregore is made up of the sum
total of aspirations, beliefs of all group members past and present. In
psychological terms they refer to it as a ‘group mentality’ however they stop
short of describing it as an individual, although some like British
psychoanalyst Wilfred Ruprecht Bion from
the Tavistock Clinic who pioneered some work on the ‘group mentality’ have
found them themselves reluctantly labelling it as an entity.
Among his therapy group Bion found this
entity could behave like primitive human with the entire attendant drives. For
example, if the group was attacked they would all behave in a ‘flight or fight’
reaction against the external foe.
This is all standard stuff. It could be seen a rowing club or a drama
club. Bion noted that an egregore personified the ‘basic assumption of the group’,
which if the person fought against a ‘group undertow’ would drag them in
another direction. If they don’t go with
the flow then the group will enact a fight or flight reaction against
them. Again, this is something that an
unscrupulous leader will use. If a
second in command can present enough of a case to the group that the leader
should be removed, they will work quickly to expel him on the flimsiest of
evidence extremely quickly. This can
happen intentionally, but sometimes it happens that the second in command gets
swept along with the group mind if they find that their leader has been
misbehaving. In the Golden Dawn revolt
of 1901, Florence Farr and William Yeats, who until then had been identified as
friends of Samuel Mathers, found themselves with the rest of the mob holding the
pitchforks and torches.
 |
| The Golden Dawn suffers from some major parasites. |
Magical groups, because of their dependence
on imagination and astral images develop an unusual form of particularly
powerful egregore. It can actually assist them reach higher states and do more
than an individual could manage. A group egregore is powered up every time a
rite is performed and the longer and more often a group meets the more powerful
it becomes until it has the power to do lots of interesting things some good,
some bad.
On the plus side it means that all the magic you do, whether you are with the others or not, suddenly develops a special power. It is like you are tapping into a reservoir of energy that you never had as a solo magician. I had been carrying out a Golden Dawn ritual called the Ritual of the Pentagram to clear out any lower astral nasties from a room for years before joining a Golden Dawn group. But somehow, upon joining the old dusty rite developed a brand new sparkle; it was easier to visualise and the room felt completely different afterward.
On the negative side you can fall foul of a
group egregore if you don’t toe the group line on everything. You can wake up one morning with a different
view of the world, go to your group working as normal and find that you just do
not get on with any one any more. After a while it becomes clear that you are
not welcome and you have to leave.
There
after the people in the same group that you have known and loved will shun you
and speak your name in whispers. Nothing
particularly bad, although you might have the distinct opinion that if they had
the choice they would beat you with sticks and shove your head down a toilet.
This is because your sudden change of viewpoint goes against the mindset of the
egregore.
Each group has an egoregore and it is part of
a larger one for an Order. There is
often a larger one which represents the tradition (in our case the Rosicrucian
tradition). When a group is formed its
leaders and teachers attempt to form a link with first the tradition and then a
contact which agrees to work with them.
This link is then attached to the egoregore. In the Golden Dawn this egregore is powered
by the Second Order.
Over the years egregores will become
corrupted. Some of their members, or
chiefs might let the side down. Or a
politically motivated person might try to take over the group. They can also
attract astral parasites, which are the astral wildlife which feed off intense
generation of energy and emotion. The Golden Dawn had several methods to spring
clean every year (the equinox ritual and the use of the HRU and HUA).
While a group is active it is fairly easy to
see how it all works. The difficultly
comes when a group breaks up or becomes inactive as was the case with the
Golden Dawn. Generally an egregore
remains dormant on the astral and will become activated again when people start
to identify with it.
Despite what many might think, working with
another group’s egregore is easy. It is
a matter entirely of identification. If
you think your group is connected to the Golden Dawn, or Gerald Gardner or
Alistair Crowley it is. It might not be
rational, egregores are not intelligent.
If you say you are a Golden Dawn order you are – even if there is a lot
of evidence that you are actually a four kids with a copy of Regardie. This issue of identification is more
important than things like rituals.
Rituals might help you focus on an egregore but they are not needed for
the egregore. External identification is
also important. How outsiders see your
group will help define it because an egregore is built by thought, and thought
can change it. It is for this reason that the Golden Dawn oath prohibited the
disclosure of the name of the temple. It
is also the reason why, after the Horos Trial the Golden Dawn changed its
name. Suddenly its egregore could be
modified by the great unwashed.
 |
| Felkin pulled his Order out of the GD and the SM egregore |
When we started the Magical Order of the
Aurora Aurea we were firmly connected to the Golden Dawn egregore by our own
identification. It was because we saw
ourselves as working within the Golden Dawn tradition. This was particularly important when I was
the only member of the Second Order. But
what we found was that the egregore of the Golden Dawn was ultra-conservative. If we bought about a logical change, the
egregore kicked and screamed – after all it had more than 100 years defending
itself against too much change.
Identifying too much with the Golden Dawn egregore opened us up to all
the pathology of a 120 year old order which had not cleaned itself up enough.
However connection to the Golden Dawn
egregore was optional. There had been
several cases even within the GD history where leaders had NOT connected to the
GD egregore. Dr Felkin disconnected his
Stella Matutina from the GD egregore and later disconnected his Smaragdum
Thallasses from the SM. Paul Foster Case
pulled his order from the AO egregore and Waite did it several times.
The way they did it was by reconnecting their
new order to an impulse behind it. They
also proceeded to identify themselves with the new current rather than the old
one. This meant purging the old name
from the rituals and course material and (often) changing godforms, moving the
inner locations of the temples and of course using a different name.
The claim that the rituals are important to
the Golden Dawn egregore is pretty bogus.
The rituals were written by someone who was never in the order, after
being reworked by someone who was never initiated into it. They have been used by a wide range of
different orders who have clearly different egregores – BOTA, Stella Matutina,
Waite’s Holy Order, Whare Ra, HOGD, AO, and Hidden Light.
 |
| The Whare Ra vault based on different designs |
What this allowed was for changes to come in
which would not be contested by the egregore and means that you do not have to
deal with the sins of the past, or its old chiefs or the old parasites.
For us, this desire to change seemed to
arrive with the creation of our Second Order – which powers the first. Initiations started to take on a different
favour and power of their own. Much of
this came as an experience of the 5=6 and approach which was different from the
original order. This flowed into the
outer order where the Golden Dawn egregore came up to bite it. It is obviously better to spend a few months
rewiring that egregore into something new, than it is to keep fighting it.
As a side note I am also disappointed that
the GD safeguards to clean up its egregore clearly do not work. HRU and HUA appear to be too obscure (and
unknown) to help. It might be because we
have lot any teaching to do with these figures.
