Writing in his blog, a chief of a modern AO Order, David Griffin
claimed that there were Golden Dawn Orders that had told there
members that they were forbidden to attend his Golden Dawn conference
later this year. My first thought was “what autocratic Order would
be dumb enough to do such a thing?” Then I realised that it was
actually possible.
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| Chic and Tabatha Workshop in the 1990s. I was in David Goddard's Pharos Group at the time and had hair. |
I left New Zealand to attend occult
conferences and workshops. Throughout the 1990s I dont think there
was a single one that I could have gone to that I did not. Some of
them were run by people who were involved with the Order that I was
with at the time – Servants of the Light, others were names of
people's whose books I had read. I learnt an awful lot in that time
and saw many different approaches to magic. I was also able to form
impressions of different Orders and systems.
One of the workshops I actually ran was
for Chic and Tabitha Cicero, which was how I actually met them.
When forming my own group it never
occurred to me that people would not do the same things. There is a
difference between learning from other groups and joining them. Some
groups work better with the Golden Dawn tradition than others. The
Magical Order of the Aurora Aurea follows The HOGD and Regardie as
seeing membership Crowley's OTO as incompatible with membership with
out order. But we do not ban people from attending public workshops
or Gnostic Masses. The same thing applies to dual membership of
other Golden Dawn groups.
But it would be against everything I
stand for to forbid an individual from gaining additional knowledge
in any way they can. It is also a sign of insecurity when a group
leader forbids anyone anything. If you have confidence in yourself,
and your own system you do not need to ban anyone from anything. In
fact more often people will go away to these conferences, and come
back with stories about how one famous Golden Dawn teacher stuck the
pillars in front of the altar in the 0=0 or could not tell the
difference between the banner of the east and west.
That being the case there was a
mentality in some groups that they were the font of all knowledge and
that other Order material was suspect. BOTA, when I was involved
with it in the 1980s in New Zealand, had this approach (I am told
that this was unique to Will Chesterman). The claim is that it is
damaging to the group mind to allow foreign teachings to influence
the mind of a student. While this might be true if your Order was
perfect and had everything, you are taking away from your student the
ability to think, to reason, and to become individualised. If you
have read my book Gathering the Magic, you will see that I think that
individualisation is the the goal of the outer order. A good order
does not act like an autocratic parent, threatening its students with
its own insecurities, it lets them learn.
How many people can take the Golden
Dawn knowledge papers, as they are written, and form them into
something coherent? The point about the Golden Dawn system is that
it is a chalice of symbolism in which an adept pours their magic.
Telling a student what they can and can't do might make for a nice
shiny chalice but it stops the flow of magic.
I circulated the details of David's
conference amongst my members and left it up to them if they
attended, which is what I think all Golden Dawn teachers should do. Those that do not should really think about what kind of students they are hoping to create.
