A magical group is something that has a life of its own, it
is not simply the quality of the teachings but also the drive of the members that
are currently in place. Builders of the
Adytum for example started out as a vibrant group with two very good spiritual
teachers – the last died in the 1960s.
It could have continued were it not for the actions of Will Chesterman,
who with the best motivations, froze the Order so it focused on a worship of
founder Paul Case and his successor Anne Davies. In Chesterman’s view, the teaching of BOTA
stopped with Davies death and all that needed to be done was preservation. In some ways he might have been right, BOTA
did survive, but it also imploded after his death. Chesterman’s problem was that BOTA stopped
making adepts, as those who showed any talent were usually at odds with
him. As a result another wave of
non-entities climbed up the ladder of BOTA with no knowledge of magic but with
a desire for political power. They
kicked out Chesterman’s wife Joyce from the temple she and her husband had put their
life savings into and took control for themselves. They also deleted all reference to Chesterman from their website. The European BOTA schismed off and did its
own thing.
This list which follows gives you signs that your group is
no longer functioning as it should and has probably lost its spiritual connection. It is not about BOTA, although there are some
elements of what I learnt from that group in my list. No doubt there are others. My theory is that the spiritual connection
within each group looks at an order and decides that it is finished. It walks away but it takes a while for the
group to die.
1.
The group fails to produce adepts.
Systems of teaching which have worked in
the past no longer create the right circumstances to build a magician. The
systems have become either obsolete with age, or no longer reflect the society
that created them. Adepts are always
those who are at the cutting edge of development. They might use “older systems” but their
approach will always be state of the art.
If a system does not encourage the development of adepts then the
spiritual connection will wither. It is
important to point out that in any given magical order the percentage of adepts
will always be small. For every 100 that
go through a school the number of people who make it their life will be about
one or two per cent. But if you can’t
spot one or two people who know what they are doing in a group any contact is
unlikely to be interested.
2.
It is common to think that there is a
perfect form of teaching, or that the founders of a system really understood
it. If this were the case the original Golden
Dawn would have been better than the later versions such as the Whare Ra and
AO. The original Golden Dawn was much
closer to modern co-masonry. It was
adapted by the founders to add in more magical elements and the results were
spectacular. The final break-up of the Golden
Dawn was inevitable not because it failed, but because adepts were taking it
into different directions. The fact that such teaching evolves bothers those
who want the reassurance of a fundamentalist approach. Fundamentalist systems
can be learned and be “correct” yet things that develop cannot be. Fundamentalism, for all its cries of “purity
of the system” are doomed. The goal of
magic is to evolve, fundamentalism locks everything into a past that never was.
3.
Teaching is considered “too powerful” and moved
to the Higher Orders.
This happened in both Whare Ra, AO and Inner Light.
Some material which had been given out to lower order members was
suddenly bumped up to the adept grades.
This was partly because the elderly chiefs did not know how to teach the
material and were fed up with answering tricky questions about it. The
converse of this is when Inner Order teaching leak downwards because people do
not realise how powerful it is. The
latter is rarer but there are cases of GD documents which have been given out
to the riff-raff because Chiefs thought it was unimportant, or believed that it
should really be taught at that level.
4.
An order makes its founders into Gods or
Goddesses
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| One of the most over worshipped founders of any magic order next to Christianity. |
If you are incompetent as a leader, you
bolster the reputations of the chiefs and founders of the order. In doing so the order creates a mythical
legacy which its chiefs inherit by virtue of holding the job themselves. It also means that you can get rid of
tricky members by claiming that they do not honour the teachings of the founders
enough and their removal or punishment is justified. In fact no teacher ever wrote anything perfect and some of the so called Gods and Goddesses of the old orders were deficit in a lot of areas. Anne Davies had a habit of making up tall stories which were believed by many, Paul Foster Case did not really want to run a Magical Order and prefered running a Positive Thought correspondence course that was Tarot based. No one has ever questioned Mather's ritual genius either.
There is
a culture of yes-people around the leadership.
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| Too many Yes men is bad for for a group... particularly haircuts |
It is ok to disagree with the leader, just
so long as you accept you are getting something out of the order. Hating the leader is probably a sign of your
own particular issues. However if a
leadership builds up a culture of yes-people about them, elevates people who
are not worthy to give them seniority then the order is on the way out. What happens is that the leader might be an
adept, but if they are not there, these non-people will take over, usually
after a particularly messy battle for dominance. If the order is based on grade rather than
magical ability, the chief is devaluing
the level of the group to preserve their own position. Another thing to watch are promotions on the
basis of “services rendered” to the chief.
This can be sexual, free professional advice, anything really. Each grade must be demonstrated on the basis
of magical ability and nothing else.
6.
There are issues about the succession to the
current leadership.
It is the duty of every chief to have a
clear successor, who is usually an adept who can continue the work of the
order. This is particularly important to
long established Orders. If the work is
focused on the chief, which sometimes happens, then the order closes. However if the group is to continue the
successor is obvious and publically recognised to make sure that any transition
is smooth. An order is on its way out
when it cannot manage this or encourages senior people to fight for the top
job. Succession is always based on the
person’s magical ability and their contact with the same spirit behind the
order. Politics cannot enter into it.
7. The teaching group stops initiating or bringing
in new worthy people.
Orders like those of the Golden Dawn exist
to train people. Sometimes it is
necessary for the group mind not to take people. However some groups end up never taking new
people at all. This is what happened at
Whare Ra and was one of the given reasons for the group to fold. The Bristol Temple was theoretically running
until the 1970s but had not initiated anyone since the 1960s. Magically that was the day it died. An order is like a light house on the
astral. If it is not attracting people
to it then there is something wrong. It
means its spiritual energy is not enough.
If the only people that can be attracted to a group who are really only
there for social reasons or other pointless reasons then that is also a sign.
Another sign is the membership becomes too old and is unable to attract young
blood.
8.
It is the duty of a chief of the order to
encourage people to write and produce new teaching and research for
experimentation. A student might be able
to survive on the view point of one person, but an order needs the ideas of
many to keep it vibrant. Each student
has a duty to make the system their own and to share their ideas with
others. The chief’s job is to make sure
that people do not stray too far off the path or go insane.
9.
The group becomes more interested in the mundane.
When a group becomes more established it
can sometimes end up owning property.
Some have even ended up paying their teachers’ salaries. But what also happens is that the group
becomes more interested in the material side of running the order than they do
the actual work itself. Once a group
spends more time working out which plumber to sub-contract out too than the
ritual they need to perform next, it is time to quit. Gossip is always part of an esoteric group,
it seems to come with the territory. But
after a while it starts to become the only reason why some people are showing
up. One group I know was obsessed with
its own made up history and spent a lot of time and energy finding historical
proof that it had a long lineage dating back to the Middle Ages. This is also when politics in an Order become more important than anything else.
People
forget how to do the magic.
Over the years a body of knowledge about how a ritual, or
initiation works is built up. If for
some reason the group starts to forget that it is on its way out. A sign comes about when someone says “lets
not bother with doing the godforms” or “let’s not invoke this godform, I can
never pronounce it.” Another sign is when a ritual is performed perfectly and
fails to get the slightest inkling of power.
It is like you can clap and hear an echo. Sometimes a group can pull itself back from
this particular point, but more often they do not. What happens soon after is that any sense of
contact with the Inner melts.
