Attending Workshops

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.

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.

Want to buy a second hand Mathers' Lineage?

In the research I did for my new book King over the Water, I came across one very interesting fact which surprised me. There have been a number of Orders out there who claim that they have lineage from the Isis-Urania Temple of Mathers. This was the temple that Mina set up in London after her husbands death and which continued under one of her students Garstin. Garstin was not the supreme chief of that order. Mina had handed the chief-ship to someone else I have named in my book.

King over the Water ready for pre-order

This Supreme Chief was ordered in the 1940's to close the Order down. The AO's work,  it was said by them  had been done and it was no longer an appropriate vessel for the post war era. Garston and his two co-chiefs were commanded by the Secret Chiefs to take all the material they could find, equipment and vault and consign it to the flames.

According to Garston everything (other than personal equipment) was destroyed. This event coincidently coincided with Transhall-Hayes joining with Dion Fortune. The pair were motivated by TH's contacts to hatch out a new Golden Dawn tradition, although this never completely came about.

The AO did continue in a form under Carnegie Dickson. Dickson had been appointed the head of the AO by Brodie Innes. But he also became chief of the Bristol Temple and thus the two strains merged somewhat.  He ran Bristol but also a temple in London which recognised AO and SM).

What is important however is that if Mather's branch of the order was shut down by its secret chiefs then it could not give out any lineage. If any modern order believes in secret chiefs they must equally accept that the Death of the Mathers branch of the Order was ordered by them and therefore any lineage derived from that source must be bogus.

Equally it must be accepted that if the secret chiefs clearly allowed Carnegie Dickson and his lineage to continue in some form (and they seemed happy with the merger with the SM) then that branch of the AO tree died with the closure of the Bristol temple.

Lineage comes from the authority to set up a temple or Order. It is defined by the Order itself. In the case of Whare Ra it was defined by a 7=4 being given the link by someone qualified to receive it.

But this makes it tricky for any  modern AO order to claim direct living lineage from Mina Mathers' group.  They have to come up with the fact that they were ordered to shut by their temporal and secret chiefs in the 1940s. Unless they reject the doctrine of Secret Chiefs, they cannot claim a right to even exist, because the Secret Chiefs of the Order said they shouldn't. In many ways this could also explain why Carnegie Dickson stuck to the SM and Transhall-Hayes buried her magical gear. They took the Secret Chiefs seriously so they could not disobey them.  

King over the Water will come out in a couple of weeks and pre-orders for the hardback are going rather well. You can pre-order the limited edition here  the paperback will come out later in the year.

Ruby Tablet

Darcy Kuntz has just released his RUBY TABLET  which should be important reading for anyone interested in the Golden Dawn tradition.  Darcy is using the magazine to release documents which have been unpublished.  As you will be aware this is a particular bugbear of mine which in my view has made a small group of people who do no magical work more important to some groups than they should be.

There is a black market in trading of Golden Dawn photocopies which when they end up in the wrong hands, get traded for grades and favours. Sometimes if a group has a collection of photocopies it gives these out as proof that it has true lineage and other groups do not... even when the material was collected from this document trading racket.
I know of one person who was actually made a chief of an order on the basis of his collection and was given a 7=4 by the Order in question.  After a few years he died having never turned up at a meeting, but made a big thing about his grade to who ever would listen.
Anyway Darcy's magazine is available by donation, which should be about five dollars an issue. If it works then Darcy is promising to release more material from his collection as well as modern articles. This is something that the Golden Dawn community should support.