The Third Order of Whare Ra

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

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

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.