Top 10 signs that your Magical Order is dead

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.      

Teaching or ritual systems are not evolving

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

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.

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.      

 No one writes any new teaching or brings about any more research

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.

Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn workshops

 American readers of this blog might want to know that one of the senior adepts of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, Carrie Mikell & Aaron Leitch are running their ceremonial magic workshops in ceremonial magic starting from March 3.

Aaron Leitch

You can find out more here. Aaron knows his stuff and is an expert on ceremonial magic and Enochian, having published some important books on the subject and if you want to learn more about practical Golden Dawn magic, then this is a good one to learn all about it.
There are lots of different teachers within the Golden Dawn community who are offering courses either online or offline.  They are well worth looking at if you cannot join a full temple.  Each teacher emphasizes their own practical work and you can learn more from these sorts of workshops than from pages of writing. It is worth jumping into a car and booking a hotel  in a strange part of the world to visit.  I did  a lot of that when I lived in the UK and do run workshops both online and off myself now.

Apprenticed to Magic

At the end of the 20th century the system of magical training started to break down.  There once was a time that you would be taught by one person who would show you their magical system, which was often worked out over years by experience.  To some measure that changed with the adoption of the Order system.  You would join a group like the Order of the Golden Dawn and that would train you.  What really happened was nothing of the sort.   An order, like the Golden Dawn, would perform some of the magical work on the students sphere of sensation, but actual training was carried out by adepts who knew what they were doing.

But sir, you might know the secrets of the universe,
but you failed to point your Hebrew correctly

 In Whare Ra for example a candidate would be initiated and after a period of assessment they were taken under the wing of an adept who would train them.  Often this was using the Golden Dawn system, but sometimes it was not.  Some of these adepts saw the Golden Dawn as the starting point and would take their students through the same disciplines they had learnt.  In other words the training of a student was an apprenticeship under an adept, the Order provided a backdrop for them to meet and trained them in a common symbolic language.  The thing that was being watched for was not how clever the person was, but what sort of questions they asked.

Now not only ignorance of the Golden Dawn system is common, there more students out there and too few adepts providing them with that specialist type of training. To fill the gap are books, and those who set up groups and orders.  I have moaned before how it is too easy to get into an esoteric group these days and how the competition between the different orders is silly.

But it has created a situation where people think that, for argument’s sake, the Golden Dawn provides the person with training.  All a candidate has to do is complete a system of exams, go through a certain number of rituals and they will be finished.  

The Invisible College needs to go mobile

But the same thing applies to correspondence courses.  The Magical Order of the Aurora Aurea has a correspondence course and one of the strangest questions I get is “how long does it last for?”  In other words when does it finish and you get the certificate that you have been trained.  Many are surprised when I say that I have written 17 lessons and so far can’t see how it is going to end.  My point is that the training does not stop; there is an infinite things to learn and only one short lifetime.

In my generation, magical training changed.  Orders became less formal and the central training method became that of the workshop.    It has to be said that these were a special sort of workshop.  The trainer was an experienced magician, who never read from a script and would include a large amount of practical work.  This work was pioneered by Marian Green whose workshops gave students their first crack at what would pass for experience. 

Workshops also provided a small income for the teachers too, although some kept workshop costs down by selling their books at them.   

In many ways this approach was killed off by those who would charge a fortune for sub-par workshops.  Also the cost of getting some teachers into some parts of the globe meant that prices either became too high, or workshop organisers (or the teachers themselves) were exploited.

But Sir, I have read that it is OK to
have a ritual between Set and the Flower Fairies

The increasing prices also made students wary.  There was a feeling that spirituality should be given as a service, ignoring the fact that the high costs in terms of time of providing teaching was prohibitive.  No doubt there were some, with very little to say, who were milking the system.

Now we have a situation which is developing where people are not getting properly trained.  Many teachers out there are presenting “one size fits all” training packages for students that cover the usual rubbish – make a few elemental tools, ask the student to do the lesser banishing ritual of the pentagram (sic) and the middle pillar until they are blue in the face.     At the other end of the scale you get kids playing with Solomonic or Goetic magic, often mixed with systems that do not go together.   They also get incredibly childish when you point out things like “this system does not go with that one.” 

The assumption is now that any idiot can be a magician if they apply to the right Order and the right workshop.  There is little respect for any teachers and students feel free to play out their parental projections upon them without consequence.   You have untrained people telling trained people that they are “wrong” and argue about how many angels are on the head of a pin while not actually doing any practical work.

I used to think that the relaxing of systems at the end of the 20^th century and the access to more information thanks to the Internet was a good thing.    I liked the ideas of the autocratic orders which were the bane of my existence had faded.  Now I am not so certain.   In trying to be all things to all people, which is the role of a modern esoteric teacher, I have let students get away with murder.  By not putting my foot down and insisting that something needed to be done in a particular way, there are very few students who have developed in a way that is useful.   I am not saying that it is necessary to be an autocratic arsehole (although it is fair to say that I learnt more under such types) but neither is it possible for a student to learn magic if they are too closed, and trying to run things according to their own egos. 

One think I have noticed is that the Golden Dawn ritual, if performed correctly, does a Stirling job of kicking modern students out of its system.   As the Magical Order of the Aurora Aurea came closer to its “contacts” the energy has become less patent with those who are not going to make it.  As a result the period after a 0=0 has been a rough time for MOAA members as the 42 assessors grab students by their pentagram necklaces and give them a good kicking until they sort their lives out.  If they survive, then other experiences are delivered.

But as far as training is concerned, I am thinking that it is better to go back to the old ways, of master and student.  I am beginning to think that new technology can be used for teachers to contact students and create the sort of master apprentice structure which has been lost.  This is the first century were a teacher can be in contact with a student every day or so and, if done correctly, could result in better trained students worldwide.

Time will tell if the Apprenticeship system ends up
being yet another Mickey Mouse training system

This would involve the teacher being connected to the student every one or two days.  Techniques would be given and the teacher and student would interact on the results.  Books would be suggested (after all there is no need to re-invent the wheel) but mostly training would be tailored for each student as much as possible. However the student would not be god.  They would really have to work.  In two days, the teacher will be asking how they are getting on and reviewing work and suggesting new patterns from it.  The teacher could throw out the student who does not work (some would go quite quickly).  Technology could be used to arrange online workshops on specialist subject etc.

The other side of this is that money will have to change hands.  This sort of training would not be for occult tourists and one thing that discourages that sort of behaviour from the student is the fact that they have invested money in it.  It means that the student has to think hard about signing up for it.  It also means that practically the teacher has a good reason for showing up.  Because of the time it takes to train people, there would be a limited number of people who could be trained at a time.  Some training could be skipped by those who know the basics.

I am keen to look at this because it solves some of the frustrations that I have had with training people over the years.  If I go ahead with it, then I will be vetting the students who take part in it very carefully as I would not want to waste their time or mine.  It would not be connected to MOAA, but no doubt would be linked to it.