Meeting the Secret Chief

He was exactly what you would expect from a secret chief.  Well, dressed, calm, urbane, and clearly well off.  He managed to look younger than he was. He told me he was a Corsican of aristocratic pedigree.

We met in a coffee shop close to St Peter’s so that my wife, Paola, who works in the area,  could act as a translator so that he would be more comfortable talking.

He was extremely interesting having been connected with lots of magical orders and alchemical groups that I had never heard of.  In one breath he was in something called the Osiris Order, the next it was Grand Orient and Scottish Rite freemasonry and the Italian strain of Misraim and Myriam.  There were lots of great French alchemists named, his greatest love appeared to be Alchemy and he threw a lot of alchemical words into the conversation which I totally failed to understand.

There were so many orders and systems of magic involved with his life it was a wonder he had time to do any of them.  I asked him why he was involved in so many and he said it was “for the cause.”

The “cause” apparently was to fix Europe by uniting it under a Priest-King and a synarchic system of government similar to that which was discussed in Plato’s republic.

“We have placed contacts in many occult orders and in high places in government,” he said.

It was interesting because this was exactly the sorts of offer that Samuel Mathers was getting from his associates in Paris in the 1900s.  He even hoped that this occult revolution would mean he would get a small kingdom in Scotland.

This person did want to do something with the Magical Order of the Aurora Aurea.  In return he would give us access to information which we could place in our higher orders.  There would be some costs for this training and we would be required to support the cause.

“The alchemical methods which we teach will ultimately make you very wealthy, which is why we do not give them away without a cost,” he said.

I was also left with a typically Star Trek problem out of all this.  In largely awful Star Trek V: The Final Frontier Kirk encounters a being which claims to be God.  Not just any god but God itself.  The God wants to get off a planet on a starship and return to ruling people.  But as James Kirk himself says “what does God need with a Star ship?”

Secret Chiefs are supposed to be spiritual supermen.  They are supposed to have transcended occult orders. Yet this focus on politics, esoteric orders, money etc was entirely mundane and therefore suspect.

If you have reached a certain state you do not join lots of Orders you focus on just one and you make it better.  Order collecting is something which indicates a need to belong and empire build, also something I do not expect from a secret chief.

The other issue was money.  His way was going to prove expensive and even if I had that sort of cash right now, parting would not make sense.

One of the things he told me he could do was transmute metals into gold, so why was he asking me for money?   Surely if he needed money he could just whip up a few kilograms of gold.

He had no idea what any of the passwords or grade signs for the Magical Order of the Aurora Aurea were, and indeed was very shaky on his knowledge of the Golden Dawn system.  My point is that why would a Secret Chief who knows so little about my magical system be of any use to me – unless I really did want to play his international political games.
He also did not seem to want to test my ability or knowledge either?   It was as if he had selected me for his grand plan, but it did not really matter what I could do.   In fact I could have been a complete loon and I would have been in, provided that MOAA provided his groups with cash and members.

It was fairly unlikely that any of the groups that he was involved with would be much interest to me, as I lost interest in joining lots of groups when I found the Golden Dawn could cover all my needs.  While I would work with other groups and experiment with other systems it would always be in the context of the Golden Dawn.

He suggested that some of these different order materials could be worked in to the higher grades of the order.  However those grades are more mystical.  There is no room for anything that comes from the head after the 6=5 indeed the 7=4 is about making your own direct contacts with the One Thing and expressing it in matter.

There was little about God in his conversations.  He talked about a pagan purity which would restore Europe, but this was not his main focus.  He talked about teachings coming from Egypt but never once mentioned Egyptian Gods.  Indeed his personal paganism was not Italian at all but Norse which he said encapsulated the value of purity and a hatred of weakness.

“We are finished with every weakness and compromise that turning the check which is derived from its Semitic-Christian root, has infected our blood and our intelligence,” he said.

He said that without returning to such a pagan tradition there was no liberation, no true restoration, or a conversion to the true values of spirit, power, hierarchy, and Empire.

While the idea of a return to a more pagan approach to religion was appealing to me, his approach seemed simplistic and just another way of obtaining control and training the masses rather than having true spiritual meaning.  Magic to me is about a personal experience of the divine and not anything like this.

The conversation was open, and interesting, but after a while he realised that I was not going to follow his views.  Nor was I going to buy that he was a Secret Chief in anyway.  An interesting man, an adept of something, but not anything like the  physical secret chief’s which we had been writing about, if they ever existed.

Anyway we agreed to stay in touch…. But I learnt a lot about Secret Chiefs in that meeting in a coffee shop around the corner from St Peters.

What went wrong with the Whare Ra vault?

The Whare  Ra vault

The Whare Ra Vault is the last surviving, and certainly the most used vault ever created by a Golden Dawn order.  It was built incredibly solidly with secret panels in the Mars Wall which lead to special smaller rooms for the 6=5 and 7=4.  It was so solidly built that when Whare Ra closed its doors it tried to scrape off the colours and found it too difficult.  Instead they ripped up the carpet and the light from the roof, sealed it up and pretended it was not there.  It was later discovered by the new muggle owners who thought they had bought a house designed by the famous Kiwi architect Chapman Taylor and discovered the secret panel with the vault in it by accident.
One would think that a vault which had been in use for more than 60 years would be buzzing with power and energy.  Most people visiting the room know would be completely underwhelmed.  That is because the last Chief, John Herman von Dadelszen cleared the room, but we will get to that issue later.
The truth of the matter was that the Whare Ra vault had a fairly sinister reputation.  Part of the problem was that it was always wrong and it is not clear why.  The colours were not based on anything that Whare Ra had written down.  Even allowing for paint to lose its colour over the years, the Whare Ra vault was too dark.  Some of the colours which had been selected where muddy and brown, and you would think that someone over 60 years would have done something about it.  But they didn’t.  Also several of the walls were in the wrong place.  I know why, but it appears that Whare Ra went with the idea because it fitted with the concept of vault being at Tiphareth with the hidden 6=5 door to the left and the Jupiter room on the right.  However Whare Ra’s scheme for the Vault do not fit that.

After Mrs Felkin died, standards at Whare Ra dropped and some people started carrying out experiments that she would not have approved of.  According to one elderly Whare Ra member, Barbara Naan told me that the 6=5 room was being used by a group of adepts to carrying out experiments using Mather’s Goetia.  The adepts involved in this circle were not named, but it is clear that they knew enough to get something but not enough to control it.
What happened was never talked about, but suddenly that room was only being used for the 7=4 initiation and nothing else.  To make sure that no one used it easily (7=4 initiations were rare) the chiefs ordered that it be used as a storage with full with old boxes.
Life at Whare Ra went on, but it appeared that there was something rotten in the vault.  Several of the later people who went through the 5=6 started to complain of odd feelings. It is difficult to say if some of those were from the initiation itself or something else.  For example, one person I spoke to who was one of the last few 5=6s told me this:
“After my initiation I stood in the door of the vault with my crook and staff.  There was such a strong feeling that “this is all an abomination” that I had the urge to destroy the enter vault.  I never went back to that vault ever again.”
After Whare Ra was closed the house was offered to members of the Order and then sympathetic associates.   The head of BOTA Will Chesterman told me that he had been offered it and gave buying it serious consideration.
He went up there and looked around, but said that there was something really horrible about the place and he realised that it would “take too much effort to clear.”   That might have been dig at the Whare Ra people.  There was very little love lost between Chesterman and the elders of Whare Ra anyway.  However that was one of the few times I ever heard Chesterman describe something psychically.
Pat and Chris Zalewski’s teacher Jack Taylor told them not to go to the vault because it had been contaminated.  When Chris Zalewski attempted an astral visit she found the astral form of Taylor barring her way.
The old Whare Ra adepts used to meet at the Chivalric Hall and it was there I heard some other interesting stories.  The first was that the first “muggle” owners of the house left because they found it haunted and it was scaring the children who were using the old temple and its vault as playroom.  I was not able to confirm this at all.  However one story was recurring.
Von Dadelszen was a stickler for ritual in the masonic way.  Everything had to be done perfectly right.  A laywer, and Mayor of Havelock North he carried himself with perfect authority and conviction.  The only problem was that he did not realise that the vault had more than one level.  He thought that was the physical vault and then any astral stuff which was contained within it.   To be fair he did do a good banishing, but he did not know how to dissolve the higher levels of the vault.  It was a moot point if he even knew they existed.   What he effectively did, according to Barbara and Percy Wilkinson was push the “inner vault” and all its astral goodness outside the physical structure.   Percy told one of his students that it had been attached to a tree in the garden. 
Several of Jack’s students visited Whare Ra at the invitation of the owners and were walking around the garden where they found a tree stump.  One of the students was incredibly psychic and told me that the energy which came off it was like nothing she had ever felt before.  She was not sure if it was good or bad, but it was certainly powerful and in the wrong place.

The Magical Order of the Aurora Aurea Vault

I know exactly what she means and what it was.  MOAA’s vault is portable and assembled in my living room.  We have to set it up and consecrate it every time.  Shut it down and disassemble it.  The first day after our first 5=6 initiation, I was sitting at the computer and had the feeling was being watch. I saw quite clearly a vortex  about three feet from the ground hovering above the floor exactly where centre of the vault had been.  What I did was shift that energy to the correct level, but I had not realised myself before that I needed to do that.  The Book of the Tomb did not contain instructions for a portable vault.
But it occurred to me that if that was the sort of power that had been generated by one initiation and one consecration, what would be the power of a vault which had operated for nearly 60 years.  Von Dadelszen had pushed that to that tree (which later died) and it remained anchored to the material level. As far as I am aware it is still there, although it would not surprise me if someone had tried to do something about it by now.

I don’t believe that the soul of the vault would have caused much in the way of problems (other than killing the tree) and the connection might even fade with time.  What is in the 6=5 room, may not go so easily… cue spooky music.

Testing a secret chief

One of the reasons I have insisted on my secret chiefs test is because it is very important that there is some form of scientific testing of the concept.  One of the reasons I have kept banging on about it is to knock a particular problem on the head.

If you are running a group you can tell the world that you have a Secret Chief which gave you extraordinary information.   You can say that out of all the other magical orders, this superman gave you the best occult information which is available which “he” refuses to let other magic groups have.  What you are telling the world is that you are better than others because there is a system of Secret Chiefs out there, and they are only talking to you.  You can tell them that this secret chief gave you grade material for the 8=3, 9=1 and 10=1 grades which means that you have a system which carries on well into the future.
If any outside group calls you out on this, you can imply that they are jealous that they do not have your secret chief and are still relying on a system which was more or less stalled at 5=6.
But the secret chiefs are strangely selective about who they picked and what information they gave them.  For example Paul Case was famously contacted by Master R and yet he insisted that his order only go as far as 5=6.  Felkin’s Whare Ra went to 9=2 although these were mostly administrative more than magical grades.
One of the good parts of about having information put into higher grades is that few people will ever see them.    If the outer order of a Golden Dawn temple is working, then less that 10 per cent of people will get to the 5=6 level.  There is a big exodus after people reach the 5=6 too and the number of 6=5s is absolutely tiny.   So it means that by the time people reach a level when they can get your secret chiefs teaching there are going to be very few in number, if any.   If they get to that level, there is no guarantee that the material is any good.  They might open the secret box and discover it is empty, which if your secret chief never existed might be the case.
So what you have is effectively Jam tomorrow scam which is protected by the fact that you claim these teachings are so special that they have to be kept secret from the great unwashed. 
That would be all very well but that means that the only way anyone has of testing your secret chief’s abilities, is to look at those people who they gave the teaching too.  
 Have they shown signs that those teachings have transformed them into intensely spiritual beings or even competent magicians.  Have these secret chiefs made the mistake of imparting their secrets to paranoid megalomaniacs. What magic do they do?  What is the quality of their particular teaching.  When I write something I am forced to acknowledge the influence of my teachers, so what is the standard of the work of these particular “secret chief influenced” orders?
The only other choice, as Pat Zalewski has said is to prove that your secret chiefs exist.  Pat believes it should be done with academic rigor looking at the documents that these Secret Chiefs wrote and judging them by those.

However the answer from those who believe in Secret Chiefs is that no documentation was given out due to the secret nature of the instruction.
But as Pat pointed out even Felkin brought back rituals and instructions he got from Steiner, such as the Etheric Link ritual and the Process documents, which makes the no documentation claims a nonsense.
“Even a cursory examination of charters and letters between various high level hermetic orders that existed from the 19th century would render that claim toothless,” wrote Pat. 
 He finds it odd that people are expected to believe is that an SC gave detailed instruction to Mathers for his Second Order (including rituals) and the SC nor Mathers wrote any of this down.
 If a Secret Chief told   Mathers the Convoluted Forces information and he had to remember and pass it on verbally it would have been a task that defies any common sense analysis.
Yet there are those who continue to insist that they have met secret chiefs.  Pat said that he had a conversation with one Chief who claimed that he had met a secret chief.
“I asked him how he knew he was and the answer I got was “I just knew”.  Well that sums it up! No proof, just talk,” Pat wrote.
 This is why I am being silly about the grade signs.  This is a perfectly legitimate way of testing if someone is a secret chief which can be useful to a working order.  If they do not know the password of the aion, then they will know less about MOAA than a neophyte which need to use it every day.  If they do not know the grade signs of the 7=4 then they do not know as much as the physical chief of the order who they are supposed to be guiding.
“Just knowing” that someone is a secret chief is not enough.  If physical chiefs exist then they have to provide physical proof of their existence.
It is worthwhile noting that Mathers only ever met one person he thought was a physical secret chief.  He failed to test this person with the grade signs which would have indicated that they were a fraud.  Had he done so the history of the end of the Golden Dawn might have been a little different.  That Secret Chief was the con-woman Madam Horos.