List of things that are unimportant to the Golden Dawn Tradition

As an extension to my “List of things you thought were true about the Golden Dawn but weren't”, below is a list of things that huge chunks of Internet bandwidth are wasted on.
These give outsiders and insiders the impression that they are important. Yet the Golden Dawn Tradition can safely do without them.

Lineage

The myth: That it is incredibly important to have a connection with the original Golden Dawn. It is vital that your group claims some lineage.
The reality: If Lineage had any magical use the GD would be dead in the water as there would not be a Golden Dawn order in existence that could claim it. For Lineage to take place you would require written permission from the Chiefs of the last surviving Orders given to a fully initiated person of at least Tham.

Felkin:  No lineage for you, you
you naughty rebel,

Magically there is no advantage in having your chief received a piece of paper signed by another chief. What matters is the ability of your temple and its officers to initiate. Felkin had no warrant to set up the SM from Mathers or Westcott, but his temple between the 1920s and 1960's was staggering. Later the temple gradually lost this ability. Lineage with Whare in the 1970s was only marginally more useful than lineage to the Westlife fan club.
It is a moot point whether the original Golden Dawn was anything more than a co-masonic group with very little magic on offer. Linking to this might not be as interesting as you think.
In my view it is more important who taught you and what you learnt. This is a sort of spiritual lineage. If your teacher was a barking mad person who knew nothing about magic and insisted you wear a kettle on your head, then your spiritual lineage is less important than if you were taught by Jesus.

Secret Chiefs

Myth: The Chief Adept of every Order talks to secret chiefs and this gives them special powers to teach and initiate.

Reality: Secret Chiefs creates an air of mystery around the Chief Adept and raises them to almost Pope-like status. There are two flavours of Secret Chief: those who are real people and those who are 'contacts'. Contacts are the most common these days however you still find Secret Chiefs popping out of the woodwork. Mathers was so desperate to meet them that he considered Mrs Horos a secret chief until she turned out to be a con-woman.
There is something that happens when you take some responsibility for a group but anthropomorphising this is not helpful. As Chic Cicero once told me that you do not need to search for Secret Chiefs, if you are doing the work they come looking for you.
You certainly do not need to believe in them, or accord yourself status thanks to your connection to them. It is a bit like accord yourself status when you turn on the light switch because you have bought light to dark places.
Secret Chiefs, or contacts, are similar to Platonic Ideas, which the leadership has to bring through into what ever flavour school they are doing. In fact they never need to be mentioned at all. Some Chiefs would think that these would be their own ideas, and no one else in the world could tell them otherwise.

Westcott forged the Sprengel letters

Myth: It is very important that Westcott did not forge the Sprengel documents because it weakens the Golden Dawn if it had no connection to continental magic groups.

Reality: When you are doing your lesser ritual of the pentagram you are unlikely to think about Sr Sprengel or whether or not Westcott had the right to set up the Golden Dawn. You get initiated, you have your magical experiences, you train in it as your path.
The fact that the Golden Dawn system worked is proof of Sprengel's existence was unimportant because the most important changes were done without her. .
Sprengel disappeared long before the Golden Dawn became magical and Mathers wrote the 5=6 material. She also did not help correcting the rituals or writing the lessons. All she did was give permission for the GD to run and it is a moot point as to whether that was required.

The origin of the Cipher documents is vital

Myth: If they were written by one prominent magician or another is vital to the Golden Dawn.

Cipher Manuscripts:  Never seen
and forgotten.

Reality: The Cipher Manuscripts are not particularly important to the over all development of the Golden Dawn. They provided a structure for Mathers and Westcott to build the outer order. They required a lot of fleshing out to be usable. Most members of the Golden Dawn never saw them. While I think they were written by McKenzie, there is little to suggest that it would have made any difference to GD history if they were written by Butler Lytton or Enid Blyton.

Reincarnation

Myth: It was important that you believed in re-incarnation to carry out your GD work.
Reality: Some people did and some didn't. Dion Fortune's student William Butler said that it was important to accept re-incarnation as a working theory. For years I did this. Now I don't. As a theory it did not work and lead to silliness. My magical ability did not change a bit and it saved me having to worry about the fate of Atlantis.

Christianity

Myth: The Golden Dawn was a Christian Order.
Reality: Although there were moves to Christianise the later Golden Dawn groups the template of the Outer Order is not specific. The second order is Christian but in an incredibly wide sense. Jesus is not really seen as the Nazarene, but more of a force of divine forgiveness within the universe. This has meant that it can be seen as Christian, pagan or neutral according to the group minds of users.

Grades

Myth: As you go up the ladder of grades you become a better magician thanks to the doors that are opened by the initiation rituals. It is therefore more important to have a chief who is the highest grade possible (7=4 and above).

The grades of the Order
Status who needs it?

Reality: Grades are important to provide structure to the work. But there is no magical status in them.
The grade rituals do have an effect but only at a level that the person is able to receive it at the time. The rituals provide doorways and there is no guarantee that anyone will walk through them.
There is no consistency about what a grade means between different Golden Dawn Orders as grades are given to students for different reasons. Some orders insist that a person receive a grade for sitting a test, others prefer that a person shows signs of magical ability or alchemical changes in their personality. Other people get grades by shagging their initiator, or paying large sums of money. One group can make you spend 15 years to get to NAM while another will stick you through the grades in a weekend.
Real status is your experience and your ability to let the magic change you. If you are 10=1 and spend your days trying to cheat your fellow man, and try to tear down the work of others then you are not even a 0=0.

Intellect

Myth: The Golden Dawn is an intellectual order and everything has to be seen and understood by the mind.
Reality: No one intellectually understands the Golden Dawn system. It is a spiritual- magic process. Intellect is useful, you can intellectualise experience and write long tomes about it, but at the end of the day it is what you do and your connection to the One Thing that matters.

The name Golden Dawn is important

Myth: The name the Golden Dawn defines the tradition and is important for any Golden Dawn group to have
Reality: In the history of the Golden Dawn, the Order used that name the least (just ten years). It was also called the Alpha et Omega, The Stella Matutina and Smaragdum Thalasses much longer than it was ever called Golden Dawn. No one ever suggested that the name of the order ever changed the work of the order.
Changing the name was a good way of avoiding it becoming public or associated with scandal. It also was a good method of dividing the group mind if your group splintered away from another group.

Nick Farrell unfair to cyclists

It has been bought to my attention that there are those who feel that my book “Mathers' Last Secret” is unfair to cyclists. The common thread in the complaint is that I fail to understand the esoteric importance of cycling to the western mystery tradition. By making comparisons between a working magical lodge (good) and cycling (bad) I have understated the importance of cycling generally.

A meeting of Waite's Holy Order

It is well known that it is vital that people are aware that Mathers and Westcott cycled and that to truly understand the Golden Dawn we have to understand cycling. Apparently it is vital that the male bike is used as the ladies bike is apparently irregular and devoid of any mystery what-so-ever. Westcott and Mathers may have formed the Golden Dawn so that ladies could ride male bikes, but this was not mentioned in the cipher documents.

For many centuries male cyclists have directly influenced the Western Mystery Tradition. Anyone who takes part in cycling will find it deeply moving, while those who take part in a Magical ritual will be unable to walk home and will find their lives deeply altered.

Now I want to make this clear. I have no problem with cycling and feel it has a place. Indeed for many years I was in an esoteric cycling group which met at Great Queen Street. However I do not think that cycling is anything in comparison to the magical experiences that I have had. It is not as if I have not seen other cycling groups, but they do seem similar. I always feel that in comparison to a 0=0 or 5=6 initiation, tearing around the block on a ten-speed is simply not comparing like with like. There have been times that I have wondered how the magical tradition of the Golden Dawn emerged from cycling at all as it appears to be two different things.

Critics say that cycling is a vital part of magic. If I had studied continental cycling, or even Scottish cycling (which has 33 degrees depending on what tartan you are wearing) apparently I would be aware how important it all was.

I am not certain however that this is the case. A magical ritual to me is a layered experience. According to the AO and SM you would visualise a temple, packed with appropriate godforms you would then see energy flowing throughout the ritual and symbolic information psychically. With cycling you just sit and peddle on one level.

It is fairly clear to me that Mathers and Westcott believed that cycling was the way forward, (certainly around the block) and they took this into the AO. Waite also tried to enforce cycling in his Isis Urania temple. This later evolved so that his Holy Order even developed more cycling degrees and bicycle clips.

However the likes of Brodie Innes and Felkin considered cycling unnecessarily to spiritual growth and insisted that people learn magic instead. It is from these people that the Western Magical Tradition began and in my view the modern Golden Dawn came from.

Needless to say I have felt no need to adopt cycling within the Magical Order of the Aurora Aurea. Neither do we consider it important that people are able to ride a bike without stablisers as I have seen some GD groups insist. That is not to say cycling has its place, but it is probably a distraction to real magical work.

Revolution in an Esoteric Order

YOU GO AWAY for a few weeks and it seems that everything changes. There are revolts in Egypt and Libya and now my inbox is full of news that Robert Zink has been “expelled from his own order”, along with comments from Robert that esoteric orders are not a democracy and you cannot expel a chief.

Unfortunately for those who have rebelled, Robert is right, unlike Egypt or Libya you cannot simply rebel.  When someone forms a school or an order it is an extension of their teaching system. To learn, students have to sign up for it, for better or for worse. The administration of an order can be democratised to a point, similar to the Round Table of Arthur's Knights or the Senate in Imperial Rome. But ultimately the teaching of the order rests on one person's vision and they are the only one which can implement that vision.

However this is not the same thing, as Robert has been claiming, “that there is only one adept” and all must obey. Instead it is more that a leader has created a one universe that all in that universe must work within otherwise they are not doing it “right”.

The question which Robert's rebels have had to face is “what do you do if you disagree with the chief and his universe?” There is only one honourable and respected path here. You quit.

You take those who believe in your ideas and set up an alternative school based around your own concepts. You send back all the course material you have received and write your own. In short you become the Chief with a new school and tradition.

What I will say next will not impress the rebels and will probably break many inter order protocols but will stand as a bit of a warning. For your revolt to succeed and your temples to continue you must form your own order based around the new ideas you have. You must jettison those elements within your Order which made it Robert Zink's vision of the Golden Dawn. Otherwise you will be condemned to repeat all the mistakes of the EOGD and end up much like the pigs in Animal Farm. 

Before anyone evokes the revolt of the adepts in the original Golden Dawn as a precedent, lets be clear that they were all aware that the moment the revolt took place that they had to set up new Orders. Mathers set up his AO, the rebels set up Morgan Roth (after calling themselves the Hermetic Society). The later split into the Stella Matutina and the Holy Order as another rift developed between the Masons and the Magicians.

Firstly the rebels have attacked Robert Zink and made him the scapegoat for all their problems. This was an error. It raises darker questions. Many of them have built their esoteric careers thanks to Robert. They took grades from him and if he was doing wrong, you were willing allies to the Golden Dawn image he created. Comments about Robert's methods have existed for more than a decade and most of them were his loyal lieutenants. No one outside the order believes for a moment that he acted on his own without their  knowledge, help and blessing. If the list of sins against Robert is as detailed as they say, he certainly was not sending out emails, setting up websites, attacking other orders by himself. It seems unlikely that in a hierarchical organisation any of you could have risen to the top by disagreeing with the Chief Adept, so implication in his “crimes” is almost certain.

There are many who left the Esoteric Order who never met Robert Zink who never the less suffered at the hands of the chiefs of his temples. If Robert was behaving badly, his temple chiefs must have, at the very least, been towing the line and obeying orders.

Looking at the list of those who have rebelled, I noticed that three of them have not only kept the grades that they received at Robert's hands but have rushed to take upon themselves his titles. I also noticed that there was the assurance that the temple was going to continue to run “Power Weekends” which are Robert's idea and framed in his “sales speak” language. In short they appear to be keeping the Esoteric Order running in the same manner as it always has. So what was the point of a revolt?

It appears, to the outsider, be a simple power grab from within the order against the leadership, rather than a Geboric attempt to remove an errant leader. If this perception is wrong, then it is unfortunate, especially as there equally appears to be among the rebels those who believed they were doing the right thing in removing a person they thought was doing the wrong things.

The problem is that Robert has been doing these things for a very long time and it seems strange that there seems to be an epiphany that has suddenly become moralistic and clearly unable to see their involvement.

The only way anyone can do the “right thing” is to set up a new order with a completely different egregore. This would give everyone a break from the past and allow a new order to grow from the ashes of the old.

Do not think that I am siding with Robert in all this.  I think the way he has handled the revolt is equally incorrect.   Once a revolt happens on this magnitude the Chief has to hand on the order to a chosen successor or set up his Order, under a new name. Robert should understand that the current situation is an indication that what ever started the Esoteric Order wants a change of focus and the status quo is no longer viable. You cannot say, like I notice Gaddafi is also trying, that there is no revolt and you have lost no territory. If the list is as long as it appears Robert has lost almost all of his temples. However if you have three or four people loyal you can always start again.

Robert needs to take those who remain loyal to him and use them as the nucleus for a new group which follows his direction. He will now be free to run his courses or another order in the way he likes. Unlike the rebels, he does not have to rewrite too much of his material, unless he wants to take advantage of the break to make things work better according to his vision.

The Esoteric Order of the Golden Dawn as we know it is over. If everyone, rebels or Robert, try to maintain the status quo its death will get messy.   There will be legal arguments and copyright feuds, and both sides will attack until they are exhausted. The lessons of the EOGD need to be learned by both sides and the methods not done the same way. Otherwise history will just repeat itself and there will be more revolts from those who believe that it is possible to ascend in an occult order by bumping off the chief. This is a bad thing for any occult order.  It is clear that what ever was being done in the Esoteric Order was not right for the GD egregore and reform was needed.

I wish both sides in this success and that their groups will grow and develop the Golden Dawn tradition. But there is a lot of work on both sides to create new groups from the Esoteric Order and at the moment both sides think they can rule using the old ways. But occult groups do not work like that and it is time for something new.