This youtube video was made by Dean Wilson, a member of the Magical Order of Aurora Aura. He recorded a talk about the history of the Golden Dawn. It is an interesting video and it gives an overview about the extensive curriculum of the magical work that can be learned in a magical order. However the video is lacking some vital pieces of information which are important to get a complete picture of the modern Golden Dawn Tradition.
by Ina Cüsters-van Bergen
Lineage
Every adept starts as an apprentice. You step into the footsteps of the tradition that are left behind by the adepts of the former generations. The founders of the Golden Dawn were trained as Freemasons and Rosicrucians. As an apprentice going through the grades of your tradition, the intensity of the work slowly increases. You train using the curriculum of your order. It gives you access to an incredible amount of magical and mystical knowledge, that can easily keep you busy 15 to 20 years.
Continuing the work you can choose to go through the grade system of your school, and develop from an apprentice into an adept. As an adept you breath magic and you sleep magic. Having slowly become one with the legacy of the former generations, some adepts start to experiment along new and adventurous lines. This is what Samuel MacGregor Mathers and William Win Westcott did when they founded the Magical Order of the Golden Dawn, by expanding on the Cipher Manuscripts. They did this based on their masonic and rosicrucian training and on their talent, they were capable of developing a complete magical system based on mediaeval and renaissance magical texts. They did a fabulous job! And they were quite right to claim a lineage going back into the depths of history. How does this work? You can see it by looking at the development of the tradition:
L'histore se repete, and some of the generation of adepts that were trained in the Golden Dawn started to expand on the training that they were given as well. Aleister Crowley developed the philosophy of Thelema, Paul Foster Case did extensive work on the magical Tarot, Dion Fortune's Magnum Opus is based on her research in the Arthur Tradition.
Magnum Opus
In masonery they have a tradition when going through an initiation, that one walks over THE temple floor cloth, used by previous generations of initiates. You literally walk on the same ground as your ancestors towards your initiation. Every generation of adepts starts with incorporating the complete curriculum of the former generation. Then some of them expand on that material and they start to experiment along new lines of investigation. This is the way the tradition develops, and is rewritten to be understood by future generations. But you need to be very careful in doing this, because when you destroy THE temple floorcloth (the foundations of the Tradition), you destroy the connection with the Traditions for your students. This is the reason for the grade system, you have to be trained to the level of 5=6 of the Golden Dawn system to start to work at your Magnum Opus. It is similar to graduating for a diploma.
In this way adepts add their expertise to the curriculum. They develop their specialism. They start to write training material based on their investigations, and in this way a next generation magical school develops. The complete process from starting as an apprentice to the foundation of a magical school easily takes 15 years of intensive daily study, meditation, ritual. writing, preparing groupwork, learning to deal with magical group processes and so on.
As a comment to this youtube video Pat Zalewski wrote:
I was watching Dean Wilson presentation on the GD on youtube which many of you have seen. It went on to state that as Whare Ra, shut Chic and Tabby started and that was it (the rest of us suddenly dematerialized). Frankly that was about as one eyed as you could get. Now I love Chic and Tabby to bits and that was not the issue, but what was left out by Dean was the issue. If I was doing a GD presentation I certainly would not exclude Pat Behman, Bob Zink, Sanctuary of Maat, David Griffin or BOTA and its off branch under Paul Clarke. They all have their part to play. Any historian worth his or her salt should not ignore this because it is not convenient to do so. You could cover this in less than a minute.
I myself added:
I watched the presentation of Dean. It is very interesting. Pat already mentioned that some information is lacking. I also want to share some missing information. What is also missing is the fact that in the line of Dion Fortune, coming out of the SOL, there are already 5 different schools of a new generation. Two of them are already working completely independent. Circular Dorado, Academy of the Opened Ways, Chaioth ha Kadesh are working under the umbrella of SOL. Rising Phoenix Foundation and Hermetic Order of the Temple of Starlight are independent.
Each adept adds information to the curriculum
When you watch Dean Wilson explaining the curriculum of the Magical Order of Aurora Aurea you have to keep in mind that every magical school adds information to the curriculum and in this way they are slightly different. Aurora Aurea developed from the lineage of Israel Regardie, the Hermetic Order of the Temple of Starlight from the lineage of Dion Fortune. Having given you this background I hope you enjoy watching this video about the Golden Dawn Tradition, and I hope that my friend an collegue Nick Farrell does incorporate the further developments of the SOL lineage in his historical teaching classess 
- adept
- Aleister Crowley
- apprentice
- Arthur Tradition
- Bob Zink
- Cipher Manuscripts
- David Griffin BOTA
- dion fortune
- Freemasons
- Golden Dawn
- Hermetic Order of the Temple of Starlight
- Ina Cüsters-van Bergen
- Israel Regardie
- magic
- Magical Order of Aurora Aurea
- Magnum Opus
- Mediaeval magic
- Meditation
- mystic
- Nick Farrell
- O.T.O.
- Pat Zalewski
- Paul Clarke
- Paul Foster Case
- renaissance magic
- Rising Phoenix Foundation
- ritual
- rosicrucians
- Samuel MacGregor Mathers
- Sanctuary of Maat
- Temple Floorcloth
- Thelena
- Whare Ra
- William Win Westcott
Comments
Hi everybody,
when I read articles by Golden Dawn Adepti I always stumble over the way the 'problem' with the Secret Chiefs is dealt with. In a way it is kept very neatly seperated from the lineage question, it is dealt with in a way where I can never really decide whether the author thinks that the Secret Chiefs are an invention of Mathers himself, whether they are viewed as a lie and a trick that certain people used to gain authority over others within the order and legitimize their actions or whether they are considered pure myth and a somewhat embarrassing part of the Golden Dawn History. Or is there some reality behind them yet? I haven't really gotten it so far, I'm afraid.
To my mind the answer to that particular question has a lot of interesting implications. For one thing: what holds true for the Secret Chiefs would then equally be true for everything else that is unseen in occultism. But what about the observations of Moina Mathers then? Are they myth, too? Or fiction? What about mediumship, hypersensitivity, psychism? How can one explain these phenomena then (apart from pathologizing the people who show them). I also wonder: what about all the other spiritual traditions all over the world that work with the concept of divine inspiration? Is there something to it or not?
I would really, really be interested to hear the point of view regarding these questions from one of the people belonging to the GD, because that has been a very big question mark in my head for a couple of years now - quite apart from the fact that I find the questions fascinating. :-)
In LVX,
Julia
I have been thinking about your questions throughout the weekend, and here are my thoughts.
First of all, the concept of “Secret Chiefs”, “Inner Plane Contacts”, “Astral Adepti”, “Mahatmas” and what have you seems to be an ongoing feature of esoteric groups and societies. Now the question whether such claim are legitimate or not, whether there is a sense whether such beings are “real” in my opinion can only be answered by experience. People ‘on the inside’ will argue that their experiences speak for themselves, people ‘on the outside ‘ do not share those experiences and therefore will dismiss the whole idea as crackpot. To me, these claims about “Inner Plane Teachers” are attempt to express something ultimately ineffable regarding human experiences, and the only way to assess whether or not there is ‘truth to the claim’ is to see if it will work its way into your own experiences or not.
This is how I in general approach such ideas: when they are presented, I take them at face value and subsequently I will see if they will work for me or not. Some do and some don’t , and some just come to fruition later. The question whether such ideas and claims are ‘legitimate’, ‘real’ or otherwise is therefore postponed until my own experience can tell me if it works for me or not.
And yesterday, when I was watching a lecture on something completely different, something clicked when I heard the professor talk about whether superstrings are fundamental or composed out of something else. He argued that that is the wrong question to ask as it depends on the viewpoint of the theory behind it. Some versions of superstring theory say one, some say the other, but both make the same kind of statements about “the world” and are therefore both valid variants. An then he quoted Dutch physicist Gerard ‘t Hooft who allegedly has said: “ The question if a particle is fundamental or not is not the right thing to ask. You should instead ask which description is the most useful to help us understand it”.
I daresay that this statement apparently also applies to esoterics: does a certain idea work for me on my path to self development or not? If it does, keep it and use it. If not, by all means let it go. So, whether “Inner Plane Contacts” are ‘real’ may be beside the point; a better question is: “is the idea in itself useful? “ I think it is, as it keeps popping up in esoteric societies under different names and guises. A next question could be: OK, if it’s a useful idea, what is it used for? And then of course you will see “good” and “bad” uses of the same thing: either for self-development or for power play.
In LVX, Ron
Hi Ron,
I took some time, too, to think about your answer, and as much as your pragmatic approach to these questions applies to me, I'm not really happy with it. For one thing, it is a bit rash to assume that the GD understands the „Secret Chiefs“ to be what we call „inner plane beings“. From what I have understood, they can a) either be seen as (very) high initiates that run the order in the background. b) some sort of superhumans who have already reached the state of highest perfection OR c) what we call inner plane beings. Now, the first concept (and maybe the second also) is linked to an old occult belief of the 18th, 19th century, namely that there are secret orders whose adepts are altogether unknown but who have a high influence on the higher ranks of the more visible ones. I am absolutely not sure how the GD sees this today.
The second thing is that I believe the Secret Chief question for the GD cannot be solved by just saying „If the concept works for me, I believe in it, if not, then not.“ As far as I understood it (again, please correct me if I'm wrong) the Secret Chiefs are intrinsically linked to the highly important question of lineage and thus, to the legitimacy claim of certain orders. Nick Farrell has just written a book about this topic and shows there how, if you accept the existance of the Secret Chiefs, certain orders claim a false lineage. If you do not, on the other hand, other orders lose their claim to legitimacy instead. This is tricky business. In our branch of the tradition these problems do not show so much, but the legitimacy of our orders is also connected to the inner plane contacts, as one can see very well in the claim that a school is contacted.
The third, and for me, the most important question is how to deal with the concept in general. You can approach the question of the inner plane contacts from a philosophical, psychological or religious point of view: they can be seen as ethical concepts inspiring the individual, patterns inside your brain or you can see them as 'real', depending on what your own understanding of reality is. But they are very much at the basis of our understanding of the tradition. Compare it, for instance, to the role Jesus has within the church. No matter what your personal concept of Jesus is, he is the glue that holds the church as a spiritual organization together, he is the basis of the Christian belief system. I am totally opposed to any kind of dogma, but I still believe that a concept the spiritual system in question rests on should be regarded as a shared (and somewhat binding!) concept within the community, otherwise there will be no common ground. If you do not believe in Jesus, no matter if you have a philosophical, psychological or religious approach, why be in the church at all? Why be a buddhist when you write off the concept of the reincarnation of the lamas, f.e.? Plus, if you purely see it as a personal thing the question arises 'Who, then, do you serve?' That were just my fifty cents now. :-)
In LVX,
Julia
I want to add something to the original article, because now the emphasis lies on the youtube of Dean. My point is this:
The modern golden Dawn is from the Lineage of Israel Regardie, The BOTA from the Lineage of Paul Foster Case and the Hermetic Order of the Temple of Starlight from the lineage of Dion Fortune. In this way they are all brethren from the same parents, the original Golden Dawn and all have their roots in the Western Mystery Tradition going back to ancient Egypt and Babylon. A tradition that has shown its many different faces throughout the ages.
My point is that beside having the right papers there also needs to be an inner contact to the core of the work. Call it 'Secret Chiefs', call it inspiration or talent, it does not need to be a religious concept. It is comparible to scientific breakthroughs. There is nature physics, and then comes Einstein whose genious mind is capable of contacting a new level of until then unknown underlying structures and cosmic laws. In this example Einstein has walked across the tapistry of nature physics and contacted through his talent and mastership a new level of knowledge. That is what Samual MacGregor Masters did, what Dion Fortune and Paul Foster Case did. That is the challenge for us who walk in this beautiful tradition: be proud of and nurture what has been build by the former generations AND develop the next level.
What Dean is saying is that you cannot kill the Golden Dawn. When an order of the size of Whare Ra shut its doors, it heralded the beginning of a New Age of Modern Golden Dawn orders. There are always going to be those who you forget, and to be honest there are some out there which we would rather forget! I think the reason that Dion Fortune's branch did not get a mention was because although she had an initiatic link to the Golden Dawn, the tradition that she started was very different. Although the two sides are coming together much more now, a GD order will always be different from that tradition.
Nick Farrell
Hi Nick
Thanks for your comment. Yes I agree with you. Dion Fortune gave her own flavour to the teachings she received. This is what every really great adept does. One incorporates the teaching and develops it to the next level, without destroying the tapistry. In this way the modern GD and the Dion Fortune branch are like brother nd sisters coming from the same parents. And yes, they are coming together. Another difference is that the material of the GD branch is more public, and from Dion Fortunes branch the most important teachings are still under the rose.
The GD survived by some of its exmembers and their progenies starting up starting groups and others started through Regardie's published work.
One example of this problem of including all types of temples: The GD's major groups in the US are run through its remnants such organization such as BOTA and its offshoots under Paul Clark and also Pat Behman and the Ciceros, Bob Zink, David Griffin, Temple of Maat and their organizations and other associated groups through Dion Fortune's teachings. Beside this there are a host of independent temples all over the world of which cyber space has an ample list of.
Pat Zalewski
Post new comment