Is the Golden Dawn doomed?

I had an email from a person who I respect who works with the Rosicrucian movement in Germany. Very well connected, they seem to have strong links to the original Golden Dawn. They are also about to publish material which they claim will show that the Golden Dawn was a waste of space and will identify the real sources of magic and Rosicrucianism. Interesting stuff but the point was that the person was making a very valid point.

“When the head of a Golden Dawn order, like David Griffin feels that it is perfectly acceptable to order his group to attack a writer online there is something deeply rotten in the egregrore of the system,” he said.

His argument was that David Griffin is not the first, nor will he be the last because something within the Golden Dawn system encourages conflict. He was experienced in magic and did not think that it was anything to do with the fact that the rituals had been published. His theory was that because too many people who should not rise to the top have done so the Golden Dawn is completely tainted.

This mirrors another friend of mine in the UK who said something similar. Her view was that people were not receiving valid training within the Golden Dawn system. Actual understanding of the system was not difficult, but application of techniques was shonky. People were taking techniques that they only intellectually understood and were performing rituals that were going no where. She saw the flame wars within the Golden Dawn as symptomatic of kids playing with matches.

Both these people were opposite sides of the coin. The first was hard esoteric masonry and the other was hard inner magical. Both were writers and neither understood what I was doing with the Golden Dawn.

Too much Golden Dawn can be bad for your health

One of the reasons that the Magical Order of the Aurora Aurea did not call itself Golden Dawn was to distance itself from the Golden Dawn and its flame wars. Calling ourselves Hermetic anything was not an option. The Golden Dawn was not the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn anyway and besides it was felt that we would be different from what had gone before in that we would emphase the magical training systems of the Golden Dawn.

The next thing that we did was to take the rituals and look at them from a magical perspective. Pat Zalewski did some stirling work in this regard and his Magical Rituals and Commentaries has proved vital to the approach we took. However we are not running the Magical Order of the Aurora Aurea based entirely on Pat's book either. What happened was as we researched and took the ritual down one way we found that it could be locked together slightly differently from the way Pat suggested. It was not that Pat was wrong, but because we placed emphases one thing and not another we had to do something else later on. Pats system is beautiful and elegant and fits together... but so does ours but in a slightly different way.

But what was interesting is that if you had the Whare Ra ritual in front of you, you would probably not notice any scriptural changes. What did change was the Inner work we did to expand the Z documents. These required work all the way through the outer order. Idea followed idea and we had to rewrite our version of the Z docs several times before it was sorted out. This ended up with a ritual structure which would satisfy my German friend or English friend they ever saw it being used.

Then there came the other inner material which started to construct the group and the order in its own image. This was the toughest bit for me because of my bad experiences with contacts before. But with the right safeguards in place this opened up a new dimension to the work and the training that we have to do.

In our second order tests and training are mostly magical and the process is fairly intense. By the time people have reached that grade they are expected to contribute. The oath is not loyalty to a person but to the work. A chief is expected to rule by consensus and not according to their own game plan. A contact might come through and say “this needs to happen” but if the chief does not believe it and neither to the group then decisions are not made.

All this has created something I really like and approach to magic which I feel is correct and balanced.

The Golden Dawn has been a cult for some.

So the answer to my friends was, yes the Golden Dawn itself would be rubbish if leaders take Regardie and do the rituals without putting in the proper magical and ritual work. But I think that it has a lot more going for it than other people see when they see the antics of some Golden Dawn leaders. But I can also see it is not for everyone. People who accept what their leadership says, without question, have no place in magic. Neither do leaders who think of making such orders.

Some Golden Dawns have been overtly racist

Certainly there are Golden Dawn groups out there who have members who are anti-Semitic or other non-christian religions, anti-women, anti-gay and yet they are allowed to go up the grades in some groups.

But that does not apply to a well run Golden Dawn group which works the system properly. Such a group can develop material and truly transform its members. Its leaders have to develop too because the material and the rituals cannot help but transform them.

This is why I am still involved with the Golden Dawn. Although it is also possible that our Egregore has few meeting points with most modern groups. We have a different name, a different philosophy and work pretty hard at the work. Some while I get that then then I will remain hard at work. 

David Griffin flips his lid over King over the Water

King over the Water had been getting good reviews from a  large number of people who I did not know and I was feeling pretty pleased. I also had the nod from some of the more serious scholars in the occult community that it was a very good history.  Then over night three "one star"reviews appeared on Amazon. The people who made the posts were known associates from David Griffin's AO. This was a bit of a surprise to me as one of them included his wife who he claimed had nothing to do with the AO or the Golden Dawn.  It was also strange because David and his group had been surprisingly friendly lately and I hoped that his days of bogus legal threats and online defamation where over.

 Anyway tt was clear that neither David's wife nor one person had read the book and another one had not got passed the introduction.  The latter made a startling impassioned claim that David was the “real deal” nor is he running a personality cult. I guess a personality cult follower would order his followers to attack people online where as a spritual follower of Maat would rely on the universe to do it for him.

Now any of you who might have read King over the Water might be aware, I do not mention David Griffin and his Order anywhere in the book. That is because my book is a history of Mathers and the Golden Dawn and is not interested in modern reconstructions of it. The cult of personality thing hardly applies to David but it does apply to another group that at one time claimed to be the only descendant of the AO which he knows very well about (it is fairly obvious if you read the context).

Anyway David posted in one of his Order news letters the following order:

Carete Fratres et Sorores,

Most of you are already aware that for nearly two decades now, our order has been under nearly constant attack. We have been sued in court in an unsuccessful attempt to prevent us from continuing to even call ourselves Golden Dawn. We have been attacked with defamation on a host of websites, fora, and blogs belonging to leaders of other Golden Dawn orders nearly non-stop for 20 years.

I am sad to report that the defamation attacks have now spread to published books as well. Two years ago, at the same time that he founded a Golden Dawn order he calls the Magical Order of Aurora Aurorae, Nick Farrell published the hitherto secret Alpha et Omega initiation rituals.

The egregore of a magical order is like the roots of the plant. In the same manner that a plant depends on having its roots safely buried in the darkness where they can draw sustenance from the Earth, a Hermetic order depends on the secrecy of its practices and its rites of initiation.

Therefore, in response to Farrell's attack, to protect the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and the Rosicrucian Order of Alpha et Omega, the Secret Chiefs of the Third Order gave the Alpha et Omega new magick and mysteries for our Second Order to replace the material that Farrell published in attempting to destroy our order. They also assisted me to revise all of our initiation rituals so that they would be safe from Farrell's evil as well. Of course, Nick Farrell denies that there was any attack on the Fratres et Sorores of the Alpha et Omega and pretends that he was only doing a "service to the Golden Dawn community" in publishing the A.O. rituals.

Nick Farrell, with the release of his latest book, however, can no longer hide behind this flimsy excuse for attacking every single member of our order. In the introduction to this new book, Nick Farrell writes:

"By the end of the 20th Century this availability of [Golden Dawn] information enabled various reenactment groups to be established. Some of these groups are sound... Unfortunately, other groups border on religious or political cults, typically centered on a single leader.... Typically such groups claim a link to that section of the Golden Dawn Order known as the Alpha et Omega or AO."

With this open attack on the reputaton of each and every one of the good brothers and sisters of our order, the thousands of initiates of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and of the Rosicrucian Order of Alpha et Omega, Nick Farrell has slipped up and exposed his covert attempts to destroy our order for what they are.

Let there be no doubt about it.

The above is defamation pure and simple. The Rosicrucian Order Alpha et Omega is certainly not a personality cult. In fact, I go out of my way to keep my personality out out of the forefront of our order's teachings. In fact, I rarely even teach in our classroom to avoid this problem. Moreover, our Second Order is a true Rosicrucian College of the Adepti. Finally, none of you have ever heard me, even once, putting my own personality ahead of the teachings of our order.

In the A.O., it is the spiritual development of our members that is placed in the forefront, not the personality of any one person. For Nick Farrell to claim otherwise in a published book is an offense against every single brother and sister of the Alpha et Omega.

For Nick Farrell to falsely suggest in a printed book that our order is a political or religious cult is beyond offensive.

These flame war attacks against our order have gone on more than long enough. Nick Farrell owes a personal and public apology in book form to every single member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and of the Rosicrucian Order of Alpha et Omega.

I have been fighting relentlessly for nearly 20 years to defend the reputation of our order. There is, however, only so much that I can do alone. The time has come for all of the good brothers and sisters of the Alpha et Omega to step up to the plate and to assist me to defend the reputation of our order as well as the reputation of each and every one of you. The time has come break your silence and speak out with our entire host of loud voices against this travesty of injustice that is being perpetrated by Nick Farrell against every single member of this order.

For nearly two decades I have born nearly the entire responsibility for the defense of the reputation of our order on my shoulders alone. In 20 years, I have never even once previously issued a general appeal for assistance to defend our order's reputation of the members of our order.

This time, however, Nick Farrell has gone too far. Let us remember that a rose also has thorns, and that thorns also are quite necessary to protect the roots of the rose, without which there would be no beauty or perfume.

I urge you, therefore, to take the following three concrete actions:

1. First of all, I urge you to boycott purchasing any or Nick Farrell's books until he withdraws his attacks on our order from publication.

2. More importantly, I urge you to go Amazon.Com. Look up Nick Farrell's "King Over the Water" and "Mathers Last Secret" and give each of these books attacking our order an extremely negative review, exposing Nick Farrell's flame war against our order and demanding that Farrell pull his defamatory statements out of print and end his attacks on the Rosicrucian Order of Alpha et Omega and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn once and for all.

3. I further urge you also to go to each of Farrell's other books and post reviews demanding that Farrell pull King Over the Water out of print and that he publicly apologize for his defamatory statements to each and every member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and the Rosicrucian Order of Alpha et Omega.

In this way, we will not only make our voices heard in the true strength of our numbers. We will also punish Nick Farrell for his attacks in the place he loves most - his wallett.

After all, it is money that lies at the root of Nick Farrell's attacks on all of the good brothers and sisters of the Rosicrucian Order of Alpha et Omega and of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.

Sub Umbra Alarum Tuarum, Isis
GH Frater Lux ex Septentrionis
Imperator, Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn
Archon Basileus, Rosicrucian Order of Alpha et Omega

You might wonder why the chief of an order who claims to be constantly the victim of a flame war might be ordering his members to attack me for publishing a book which records a history  stops in the 1940s with the death of the AO. Is there something in that history which shows that David's own history is made up?

The book David Griffin is trying to ban.

You might wonder what it is about the truth in this book which has got David Griffin and his order so riled up. When you find out what it is can you tell me?

Now I should remind readers that David Griffin has on this blog threatened to take all my books, scan them and distribute them. You have to ask yourself, is this the sort of person who is showing any degree of spiritual maturity? Is this someone who would be picked by spiritual forces to lead other people to the light? The short answer is that I do not know, but I do think that if I was a member of his order I would be questioning why I was a member of group that attacks another person for writing a book he does not agree with.

No chief that asks their members to act as their personal brown shirts to take down information which should be in the hands of the wider Golden Dawn community can be take seriously.

This is not the Golden Dawn tradition nor is this magic.  

The Mongrol child

Over the years I have read a lot of books on magic. I have also experienced the way that different groups work. All of them have a philosophy behind them, some even had a religion. They all worked in their way, some better than others.

Yet the big problem is that generally they conflict in crucial ways, and above all, they could not be all right.

Occultism is really a mongrel orphan child whose suspect parents abandoned it long ago. While we can see its existence in various ideas through-out history, it is fair to say that it never existed in the way it does now.  All these different streams are integrated as part of your magical and spiritual life.  I dont believe in Atlantis so when I read a book which talks about it, Ihave to see the point at what the person is getting at rather than the literal truth of it.

 Some of this weirdness  is to do with the religion of the ancients. Although the Greeks like to see mysteries being performed in Ancient Egypt or Syria it was more that they had something in common with their own religious practice. Certainly the concept of “occultism” in Ancient Egypt was nothing like what we see in magical practice.

What happens when you don't honour the Gods and Goddesses

The state religions of Ancient Rome were nothing like the pagan practices we see today. The Romans regarded the Gods as something you did not want to piss off. You did your sacrifices if something went wrong or if you wanted a god to look favourably on your projects and that was it. The idea of a personal relationship was foreign even among the Mystery cults. In fact that was something that is the gift of Christianity to the mass of Europeans, although there were precursors in ancient times.

Some of the techniques of the magician have come down to occultism and these are often thanks to older texts being translated during the late Middle Ages. But again they are collections of bits here and there. The idea that there was an occult system in Ancient Egypt or Babylonia only exists in the minds of those people who read texts and saw, like Herodotus before them, his mystery system mirrored them.

In my early training I was told that the book of the dead was an initiation ritual that adepts went through while they were still alive. The poor kid was wrapped up as Osiris and stuck through the funeral ritual and locked up in his tomb for three days. During those three days he would journey to the stars. It makes for a wonderful idea and indeed the Whare Ra 6=5 was a cut down version of it.

I ain't dead it is my 6=5 ritual.

But is it true? If you look at the book of the dead and the pyramid texts before them, it clearly was not like that. Religiously you could see why a Priest of Thoth would want to see a young initiate thinking themselves as an Osiris while they were still alive. We see no proof of this written on any temple walls or papyrus.

Instead what we see is an evolution of thought and basic ideas which get strung together during the Renaissance and sometimes ideas get confused. I am fairly certain for example that the obssession with secrecy comes from the fact that the freemasons used the model of the craft guilds which required an oath of secrecy to protect their industrial secrets from other towns. Certainly we don't see the wandering magicians and shamans in Egypt being told to keep anything secret.

Ancient Roman Ritual or cooking show prototype?

 

 

 

If we want to know what the best time, with the most developed form of occultism there ever was, we do not need to look to the past. We need to see the mongrol child as it has grown up today. Now is the best time to experience magic, now is the best time for esoteric groups.  The same applies to the Golden Dawn. It certainly was not better under Westcott or Mathers.  It is a much more interesting and fun experience now after the years of development that has gone into the system.