The Alchemy of Bollocks --Turning Pop Culture into something useful

Attached is an old article I wrote for the Horus Hathor Temple in Nottingham when I ran it.  I found it on my computer this morning so I thought I would put it here. 

In the UK there is a term which means something is completely untrue, or a waste of time.  It is called 'bollocks' and it is considered a rude word which you are not supposed to use in polite company.  It is the complete opposite of the phrase the 'dog's bollocks' which is said to mean something very good – particularly for the dog.

Popular culture is built on bollocks. It sucks you into a morass of TV chatshows, Jerry Springer and reality game shows. It is bollocks that television presenters can do up your home or that you will be better if you look like they say you should.  It is bollocks that you should take drugs to make you 'normal' or that is wrong to be depressed occasionally. It is bollocks that your flight is somehow safer because you took your belt off and let someone sniff your trainers. Soap operas are temples of bollocks that we sacrifice our brain, time and souls at its virtual altars. 

Popular culture demands not only that we build our lives on bollocks.  We are encouraged to look away from things that are sensible and well thought out in search of bollocks answers to everything. 

Occultists consider themselves outside the mainstream.  They are supposed to look at the unseen world and find a measure of reality that is unseen by other people.  But despite this, popular culture seeps into their reality too.  Despite our attempts to be outside the system we cannot escape it.

This has lead many modern magicians to say “if you can't beat them join them” Is it possible to turn the symbols of popular culture into something we can use.

The logic is that if modern popular symbols are archetypes it should be possible to use them to key into the same forces that were opened by older symbols. 

However this is not as easy as it appears.  Older symbols are often hard-wired into the consciousness of humanity.  They are based on beliefs held by our ancestors for thousands if not millions of years.  This gives the symbols a depth which more recent symbols cannot quite match.

For a long time I followed the view that a symbol was a symbol.  It did not matter which one you used so long as it meant something to you.   In the spirit of experiment to prove this I did two rituals. The objective was to remove negativity in a particular area.  In the first rite I used pop culture symbols of Star Trek New Generation.  It was a great laugh,  I got to play Picard.  The negativity was visualised as a Borg cube which was destroying the area.  The ritual was effective.  Energy from the phaser banks was seen belting out of the East of the temple by more than one of the temple psychics. In short it did what was expected and was a lot of fun. 

The control ritual was one using heavy cabbalistic symbolism, neo-platonic symbolism with a bit of alchemy thrown in.  It was less of a ritual and more of a pathworking, but it also was designed to send a burst of spiritual energy outwards to smash up a negative thought form.  It did this to the same technical standard as the other ritual. One could say well that was proof that pop culture symbols worked just as well as the traditional ones.  But it didn't.

When the ritual officers asked which they thought was the most effective they all felt it was the classical ritual.  The felt that the symbols gave them more to grab hold of.  While the Star Trek rite amused them and intellectually they could understand the logic of the symbols it failed to move them emotionally  like the cabbalistic version.  So my experiment failed, it seemed that it was not entirely possible to root a magical system in popular culture symbols.  They were simply not deep enough to carry it off.

Does this write off then the use of popular culture symbols within magic?  Not at all.  But it is not simply a matter of replacing your rituals with popular symbols you have to alchemically wire it into the collective unconscious yourself.  In short, you have to turn bollocks into gold.

This has been done before, and will probably be done again in the future, with the myth of Atlantis. Popular culture has muttered that Atlantis was a real place for centuries, but in the 19^th century the literal idea of this place really took off, with the works of the Theosophical Society.  One of the people heavily influenced by this teaching was Dion Fortune who became convinced that she was an Atlantian adept in a past life. She worked with the symbol of Atlantis and made it into a system.

This lead to a funny incident in the 1980s there was a very famous collective of magicians that used to meet around a residential centre called Hawkwood.

They had heard a legend that when Atlantis had sunk, the Solar Logos, which in Dion Fortune's system ruled the solar system, had decided that it did not want some of the Atlantian adepts to re-incarnate because they were too evil.  It stuck their souls on a comet with an incredibly wide orbit around the solar system, to gnash their teeth  until the solar system was ready for them.

It is not clear where the legend started from.  It has all the hallmarks of a channelling session, but it could have come from Dion Fortune's own Inner Light.  However the story got several of these famous magicians thinking.  It seemed to them after a few thousand years the Atlantians should have sorted themselves out and should be ready for an incarnation or two.   They meditated, and prayed, about the idea and got a good feeling about it.  Those who channelled the Secret Adepts of Power also got the nod from their contacts for the project.

So they met at Hawkwood with a plan to do a huge ritual to save the Atlantian evil adepts.  The ritual was set up, everyone was robed, but all was not well with the bloke in charge of the ritual.  He was starting to have a few doubts.  What if the Solar Logos was not happy with the idea of pulling these people back into incarnation?  What if he was releasing a plague of terrible evil on the world?  The rite opened and in the West the priestess made her contacts and poured power into the thought forms that were supposed to draw the errant Atlantians back onto the planet.  There was a pressure building.  The Mighty Magus of Power had broken out into a sweat.  Suddenly he knew he wanted to do this ritual about as much as he wanted someone to jab red hot needles in his eyes.   He decided that the Inner did not want the ritual to happen and used an emergency ritual shut down technique that delivered his fellow magicians to earth with a bump.

The Priestess, speaking words of her contact, said: “Priest you have failed” and stormed out of the temple room only to faint when she got into an outside corridor.  Many of the other officers felt physically sick and the ritual when down in legend as one of the ones which went bang.

But no one seemed to have paused before the ritual took place and thought; evil Atlantian magicians on comets that is complete bollocks that is! Nor did they consider what would have happened if the ritual had been completed. 

The idea of the souls of these adepts being stuck on a comet by the God of this solar system did not seem funny or odd to them.  Even if accept this bollocks they even had to accept other things that they did not believe.  They would have to believe that the soul could be attached to a physical reality. Further that the Solar Logos, or Sun, might consider some humans too evil to allow them to re-incarnate.  This would mean that the Solor Logos woke up one morning and decided to abandon the law of karma for these evil sods.  Adherents of this flavour of occultism are great fans of karma.

Yet they disabled all of these 'common sense' structures to accept a pop-culture myth and then allowed it to effect them so deeply that one of them passed out when it 'failed'.  Why?  Well it was all about faith. It was  serious magic to them.  What normally would have been popular culture symbols had been rooted into their belief structure so deeply that they were wired to the archetypes.  They were able to take the symbols and use them in a way that I was not able to hit with my Star Trek ritual.

This 'faith' built out ideas in other areas. I know of four people who claim to be the priestess who guided the ships from the sinking Atlantis to the shores of Britain.  The first was Dion Fortune who invented that version of the myth.  Others have been those who often are not aware that Dion claimed that role for herself and think they must have done it because they are such shit hot psychics.  However the Atlantis myth also developed into a system of magic based around geometric shapes.  Each shape was held to have a magical virtue and officers in a rite were told to hold lines in this pattern.  The idea was to make the shape light up on the astral.  Now this idea is really superior because it shows that the bollocks has been refined into pure intellectual magical gold.  It is producing something incredibly useful that could be adapted outside of that particular system.  The probably owed a lot to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, but that is not so important to the people who are using this system.

Popular culture can also motivate esoteric people to do workings that they normally would not consider.  As the world readied for the First Gulf War there were a number of magical groups that responded by doing rites for victory.  Some responded by digging up copies of Dion Fortune's Magic Battle of Britain book which described the setting up of wards around Britain during World War Two.  What was interesting about these groups was that they had apparently ignored the fact that the Dion Fortune defence rituals were designed to protect Britain from invasion from the Nazis.  There was no way that the Iraqi army was ever going to fight its way through Europe to besiege Britain. But what they were doing was responding to a stirring in the popular culture that felt that Britain was being attacked.  This was, of course, bollocks but it added power to the working that perhaps logic alone would not have provided.

So how is it possible to redeem a popular culture symbol so that it can be used to the same magical level.  The Atlantian working was based on faith.  The people practising were certain that it must be true and therefore made it happen.  The Gulf War working was based faith based on war propaganda and mass hysteria.  These are things that are very difficult to mimic in the regular working of a magician.

Using neo-platonic thought,  the reason for this is a symbol is not a single object but a gateway to many other objects that link to single divine idea. Look at it this way. One day a creator God, let us call him Jeff, decides to create beer.  He does not visualise a pint of something wet, hoppy, refreshing, lager or dark beer.  He thinks about everything that beer is and conceives it as a symbol.  A primal symbol of all beerness.  This image flows towards manifestation and gives birth to other symbols that make for different types of beer and flavour until there are legions of different types for creation to use.

Popular culture symbols are a bottom up creation.  They make links based on other symbols.  Picard is is not wired into the Universal archetype for leadership, he is  a symbol of other captains who show these qualities.  The Borg are not the archetype of a mechanistic collective, they are based on human societies where these ideas have gone wrong.  

But a divine idea which attracts more ideas to it over time. 

Popular culture symbols might track a way to becoming archetypes over time, but the very nature of popular culture is that it is ephemeral and will pass into history.

But the magician will not let that stop them.  Equipped with a knowledge of how these things work, it is possible to connect popular culture symbols to more primal ones.  It will take some doing and will probably only be personal to you, but it will make symbols from popular culture carry the same weight as those older and more traditional ones.

Firstly you have to do some internal wiring and this requires some meditation.  Take the symbol that you wish to redeem and stare at it for some time.  Allow it to create some 'ideas' in your mind.  So if we use Buffy, we allow the idea of being a chosen one roll around in our mind.  We think of a few of the adventures she has had etc.  Then try to think what she is a symbol of.  Compare  and reject those other heroes who do not fit the  qualities you find interesting about her.  So Alexander the Great for example was a 'Chosen One' but he led armies fighting humans and while Buffy only had a small gang fighting evil.  It does not quite work.  If you think that it is vital for the archetypal 'Buffy' to be a female hero then you will have to find a heroine who fits.  Remember, you do not have to use humans, myths and legends, gods and goddesses will all work.

Once you have selected a 'hero' then you start to look at the qualities that hero has which makes them represent what you want to use. 

Say we decided that Buffy, with her super powers and tendency to rush into dark places to fight evil, has enough links to be similar to the symbol of Hercules.  What is it that Hercules has that connects us to the ideas of heroism? We might generate a list – bravery, leadership, not fleeing in the face of monsters, or being eaten by them and, above all, a strong sense of humanity.

Now, in our mediation, it gets a bit tricky.  We have to take these qualities and ascend upwards with them.  The process makes them more abstract.  Generally I see the symbols as becoming geometric shapes but they radiate feeling.  Allow the shape to move upwards and follow it in your mind's eye toward a single point of light.  That light has symbolically to be damn big.  It represents the singularity of the creator... in my case Jeff.  In that light you should see the shape changing before settling on a single shape.  You might want to note that shape, before allowing it to come back.  Watch it change, moving from primal shape, to new forms, separating out into different beings, heroes, linking to Hercules and finally, like the bottom of a family tree, Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

What you have done is link Buffy magically to something more primal and when you use her you will find that she is 'connected' to all the symbols that you meditated on.

It might be interesting to see if some of these symbols start to evolve in the direction that you meditated on.  You might pick up a Buffy comic and see a story line which reflects your meditation.  In magical terms it would be a good 'check on earth' that the links have been properly made as others who work with the Buffy image will have started to pick up on the same connections.  Again that would be a matter for experiment, but from your perspective when you tap into that image you will be free from a lot of the bollocks that surrounds popular culture icons and rooted into a divine reality.  Because you have seen those links between Buffy and 'Jeff' you can believe in them and because you have felt the depth of the links between her and him you benefit from the depth of the symbol.

This technique can be applied to any popular culture symbol, from Star Trek to and Andy Warhol tin of soup. But as an experiment I suggest you do a ritual using the pop culture symbols and then try and linking an iconic set before trying something else. Take the whole cast of Buffy, or the Bridge of the Enterprise, the Jerry Springer show, a range of cars, anything. Then use them as magical symbols to see if you can improve them by linking them to the Divine.  It does make watching the shows, or car spotting a completely out of this world experience.

Nick Farrell

Sofia

25/01/08

Inner and outer

I wrote this essay years ago for the Horus Hathor Temple of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn  but I think it still stands - at least on a basic level.  People often forget that there is an inner aspect to ritual. 

Many people think if you do the GD ritual as if it were a perfectly performed play it is enough to archive spectacular magical effects.  Such people advocate turning the GD into a sort of Masonic order.  But with respect to those who do attempt to do Masonic rituals in an esoteric way, the GD is a MAGICAL order were the mere performance of a rite will simply produce a minor effect where there is an overt dependence on the superficial symbols of the rite.  If it were all about play acting we would be better off taking part in the Importance of Being Earnest with the local am-dram club.

You will have heard me talking about the ritual taking place in the Judgement Hall of Maat, none of this is mentioned in ‘the script’ it is  part of the astral or inner workings of the ritual.  Too many details about this I cant go into, but these involve the manipulation of different Egyptian godforms in a sort of twilight between the material and the spiritual realms.  The Hierophant builds up these godforms and causing them to vibrate at a particularly frequency by using calling their names in an ancient language.  This work I find makes it easier for me to see them clairvoyantly during the main working.  These godforms are ‘Golden Dawnised’ images of the Ancient Egyptian God in particular colours that are designed to enhance their power in the working.

Esoteric teaching says that there are three basic levels to the universe.  The first is the material, the next is the astral level which is at right angles to this one and is the realm of imagination and dreams.  Finally there is the divine level which is where the realm of the gods and goddesses or just God depending on your tradition.

Magical power comes from the divine level and therefore to call power into your rites you need to build an astral bridge between the group on the material and the divine.

What the hierophant does along with anyone else who is sitting on the top table in the East is visualising a halfway house on the astral in their imagination.  This temple is populated with Egyptian gods and goddesses and these act as channels for divine power. This halfway house is then placed over the top of the physical temple.

Some of the Gods are placed over the officers, other are just left passive conduits of power.

In the GD this godform work was considered top secret and would only be know to the highest grades in the group. The layout of the Inner Temple and the various depictions of the Gods and Goddesses used were kept in a single coloured scroll or book in some temples and which only those who did the visualising saw.  

Usually when a temple closed this scroll or book was the first to be destroyed to prevent anyone getting access to the group’s egregore.  For this reason anyone can perform rites that have been published, no one can claim to link to the original group. They build new godforms but they will never have access to the original egregore because these will never be the same or visualised in the same way.

The godforms provide the halfway force between the Earth and the spiritual forces you wish to attract, but the godforms we have formed does not yet actually draw much force to it.   The Heirophant has built a circuit and are is yet to power it up.  To do so the Heirophant ascends spiritually to the highest level they can and draws down spiritual energy into the thought-forms created.

At the point in the ritual where the Heirophant says: “By names and images are all things awakened and reawakened” you will notice that he does the sign of the enterer but does not do the sign of silence until a few seconds afterwards.  It is during this point that he or she is powering up the circuit.

The Magic of the Angels

I have been out of things for a while I concentrated on my latest book The  Shem Grimoire.  The book is exactly what it says on the tin.  It is a collection of my Kabbalistic notes and essays on invoking the 72 Shem Angels.   It is a process that I started to investigate several years ago and built up momentum until it started teaching me more about Tarot and the angels.

This book was compiled from my notes and diaries and so is not exactly orthodox.  It uses the Golden Dawn system of magic in its highest aspects and includes papers on consecrating tools for this particular work.

What I found interesting was that besides requiring me to tinker with the Tarot system, the Shem Angels suggested that they were the key to not only understanding your chart but how to work with it to be who you are supposed to be.

The Shem system I worked on says that the 12 areas of your life are controlled by 12 Shem guardians.  Understanding those areas of your life involves talking to them. In addition, while your life is under the authority of the seven main planetary spirits these are specialised according to the deans of your chart and have unique angels appointed to them.

This could mean some big changes for personal rituals as it is possible to get into the details of why some rituals work and some don’t  and to talk to the beings that are making sure that it does (or doesn’t).

This book has burnt me out and I am not going to do any more for a while.  There is a lot in it and it is a really serious book.  It is 333 pages and on a larger format than I normally use.  I think on that basis it is the largest book I have ever written It is packed full of diagrams, sigils and woodcuts.  This is mostly because I always wanted to create a magic book (of the sort you see on Buffy).

I have released it as a limited edition hardback and there will only be 200 made.  Many people have said that they want it and I have sent out a couple of copies for reviews.  It will be my last one for a while, I also have been thinking if this will be my last “practical” Golden Dawn book as I am more and more moving from that system.

You can buy the book here http://www.lulu.com/shop/nick-farrell/the-shem-grimoire/hardcover/product-21451554.html

Magical Egregore 101

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.

The Golden Dawn is not a bunch of Nazis

There is a move afoot within the Golden Dawn community to liberate the name Golden Dawn from a deluded bunch of Greek Nazis who, in the popular mind, have taken it over.

In actual fact this confusion has come from the fact that the Western Press have translated the name of the Nazi political party Chrysi Avgi.   The reason is probably that Fox broadcasters can’t pronounce Greek. 

The group, which is xenophobic, homophobic, and misogynistic has a few things going for it.  It moves into deprived towns in Greece and offers food and community services to Greek nationals who otherwise would starve.  This is the same tactic used by the Muslim Brotherhood.  When Greek’s economy picks up, the group will fade away, fortunately its leader Nikolaos Michaloliakos  is about as charismatic as a road accident.

However the group has been linked to what the Greek Orthodox Church calls a “rise in paganism” Seraphim, the bishop of Piraeus, spoke publicly of the paganistic dimension of the Greek Golden Dawn.

This would be news to Chrysi Avgi as it is very proud of its Greek Orthodox links, something the church should be ashamed of.

But the danger is that the view might be accepted by the Western Press and the Nazi Golden Dawn might forever be linked to that of the magical one.

Already a Google search for the name Golden Dawn is more likely to result in political finds rather than occult ones. It is only a matter of time before right-wing nutjobs start applying to orthodox golden dawn groups looking for a spiritual dimension for their backward politics.

Irish Blueshirts supported by Yeats

It is not as if the Golden Dawn does not have a few neo-nazi skeletons in its closet.  n the 1930s Yeats lent his support to the openly fascist Irish Blueshirt movement, led by Eoin O'Duffy, a former IRA Chief of Staff who had become Police Chief of the Irish Free State. The Blueshirts aped Mussolini's Blackshirts and Hitler's Brownshirts, down to the same uniforms, the same stiff-armed salute and the same greeting: 'Hail O'Duffy!' Yeats wrote three marching songs for the movement which sent a 700-strong contingent to fight for Franco's Fascist uprising against the Spanish republic in the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39.

The much-admired Maud Gonne was a big fan of Hitler and the Nazis, and her daughter Iseult even hid a German parachutist in her home during the second world war.

As I revealed in my book King over the Water, Samuel Mathers’ closest friends included members of the French Synarch movement and it was likely that the “politics” he was involved with was of that movement. The Synarchs came close to power under the Vichy government in Paris.  I personally think that it was these Right Wing links which caused the end of the first Golden Dawn.  Yeats had left the Golden Dawn by that point in his career.

The far-right is attracted to the perceived elitism of occultism as well as the secrecy and dressing up.  Because of their conservatism, masonic groups often have to watch out for Neo-nazis trying to use them as recruiting grounds. 

Mussolini’s favourite occultist, Julius Evola

Normally such types quote Plato’s Republic as occult justification for their politics. Plato called for a government run by an elite team of philosophers who did not work for money but ran the country on philosophical principles. As I wrote here Mussolini’s favourite occultist, Julius Evola took this idea a stage further.  One of the things I find alarming about this period in occult history is Evola is being dusted off and being presented as an occult genius.  It is something I put down the Right seizing an economic opportunity to peddle its nazi manifesto to the esoteric world again.

But lets be clear about this.

The ideas of the Far Right (and left for that matter) are alien to occultism, mysticism and magic. If you find any of these ideas attractive, you cannot be a viable member of the Golden Dawn.  You might learn a few techniques, but you are forever locked out from discovering the real secrets.

 Why is this?

The Central doctrine behind real occultism is that the universe is an expression of the One Thing.  Therefore none of the beliefs of the Far Right tally with that.

The Golden Dawn system of magic is never about extremes, it is always to do with balance.  The extreme politics of the Far Right and Left are Qlippothic within Golden Dawn philosophy.

 One race cannot be superior to another, one religion cannot be better than another, each human has its function within creation.  You cannot use violence against another person because they reflect an aspect of the Divine and you are doing it to yourself.   Nor can you blame them for your problems.  If immigrants really are taking jobs, a more human approach is to make sure that their country of origin is a better place to live.  People rarely leave their country for the fun of it.  If your country is fucked, then do something about it don't blame your local Jew or African.

Therefore I am joining Don Kraig in his call for Golden Dawnleaders to denounce the Neo-Nazi movement in Europe and call on the press to stop making links between Chrysi Avgi and the Golden Dawn.