The Golden Dawn - 30/nov/2024

THE GOLDEN DAWN

Founded March of 1888, emerged from the soup of para masonic sects and groups. 

Its basically paramasonic structure + the doctrine of western esotericism.

OUTLINE

Basically, the HOGD is what brought magic into the 20th century

SECTION 1 DA EARLY YAERS

Nobody would let Kenneth Mackenzie practice magic. The world was full of secret societies and esoteric fraternities that promised the inner secrets of the world. So, he became a freemason and worked his way up the ranks. No dice. So, he joined the Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia, the biggest baddest secret society there was. It was closer. The SRIA were an esoteric order, but they were still very christian. You could read about magic to your heart’s content, but practicing magic was explicitly forbidden. Nobody would let Kenneth Mackenzie practice magic. So he decided to figure it out himself. 

Kenneth Mackenzie shopped around. He met with different organizations, ones with wonderfully 1882 names like the Royal Oriental Order of Sikha, and the Sat B’hai, to research their structures. He was looking for a magic school. A system with graded tiers like the SRIA, but for learning magic. He did not find that. But he took extensive notes on what his ideal organization would look like. He also took these notes in code, specifically a Trithemius cipher, as in Johannes Trithemius, who supposedly taught both Paracelsus, and Heinrich Agrippa. 

Then, on 3 July 1886, Mackenzie died. End of Act 1.

William Wynn Westcott was a London coroner, and a prominent member of the SRIA. He had just taken over as leader of a small Masonic body known as the Swedenborgian Rite. Among his predecessors' papers, he discovered the Cipher Manuscripts. Curious, he identified the cipher (Trithemius’s Polygraphae) and translated the document. It is clear that Westcott knew he was holding the opportunity of a lifetime, and he knew just how to play it. 

His first order of business is to ask for help. Westcott was a schmoozer, his real skill was networking, advertising, putting wizard butts in wizard seats. He was not the type to write rituals or build systems. He informs fellow occultist Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, a man who was simply the correct choice for the task. He was a hardass, a man who believed in the value of rigorous textual analysis and staunch orthodoxy, the closest thing the 19th century occult had to a benedictine monk. If anyone could build an entire system of rites, with lectures and rituals to go along with them, it was Samuel Mathers. Their new system would be a combination of the SRIA, the Swedenborgian Rite, and the Cipher Manuscripts. 

Crucially, Westcott does not tell Mathers where he got the manuscripts. Westcott says he got them from a masonic historian named A.F.A. Woodward, who died two months later before anyone could corroborate the story. 

Additionally, Westcott adds another document to the manuscript, a letter, written in the same cipher, from a mystery “Frau Sprengel.” This mysterious figure was a “Chief among Chiefs” of an ancient organization called the Order of the Golden Dawn, who gave Westcott the authority to start a lodge in her name. Said lodge needed three chiefs. The first two were obvious Westcott and Mathers, the third was William Robert Woodman, the current supreme magus of the SRIA. 

SO WHAT DOES THE HOGD ACTUALLY DO?

Imagine if wizards had a bar exam. There are ten levels, each with their own exam you have to pass. Learn the right chants and rituals, study the lectures, show up for your test. If you perform the ritual correctly, you get upgraded to the next level. This is easier said than done. These rituals require discipline and devotion over the course of months if not years. Requirements along the lines of “say the required prayer at sunrise every day for nine months” or “abstain from sexual intercourse for three months.” are common requirements for ritual purification.

But what do you get? You pass your bar test and level up, what happens? You get to practice the law. You become a gear in the big clock of the universe. Past a certain point, you even get to be a small part of everyone’s god. Don’t ask me how that works. I haven’t passed the test. 

By 1894, they had 331, but they’d only actually written the first five of ten grades. Westcott didn’t care what the actual rituals were, so he gave Mathers free reign to write the higher mysteries. Westcott focused on recruiting. His approach was clever, placing cryptic ads in local papers that would entice the sort of person they were looking for. Which worked extremely well. 

SECTION 2 DA TROUBLE STARTS

In 1981, Woodman dies. Mathers is now in relatively uncontested control of the ritual elements of the Golden Dawn. People begin to question his strict orthodoxy. By 1893, he expelled Theresa O’Connel, one of the earliest initiates of the order, over a minor disagreement. (look more into this) Despite the Golden Dawn being a relatively egalitarian organization, Mathers and Westcott tried to limit female access to the Vault of the Adepts, and thus the higher grades. This kicked off a larger conversation about Mather’s leadership.

[great place to talk about how the women in the golden dawn basically wrote all the doctrine while the men actually performed the rituals.] 

This was especially pertinent for Annie Horniman, (some little anecdote about who she was), one of the wealthiest patrons of the GD, who had been providing significant funds for the temple. She expressed unease at the “unorthodox sexual doctrines” of fellow adept Dr. Berridge. Mather’s response was a raving, power-mad letter that did nothing to make Annie feel more comfortable. (did she withdraw?)

To make matters worse, in 1897 Westcott was forced to withdraw from the order. Turns out the English government didn’t like the idea that one of their paid coroners was also a wizard. While Westcott was under investigation, it left Mathers in complete control of the order. 

Infighting is one thing, but a government investigation combined with overbaring leadership was too much for some lodges. Mathers received several formal letters from other lodges, asking to shut down. Mathers denied the requests, and went further. He claimed that he was the only one truly in communication with the Secret Chiefs, and that the Sprengel Letter had been forged. 

This concretized his leadership, rallied the remaining lodges to his banner, and quadrupled the membership of the golden dawn within the space of a year- Im just kidding it had the exact opposite effect. If the letter was forged, then obviously there were never any secret chiefs to begin with. This effectively destroyed any remaining confidence in Mather’s leadership. Foot, meet bullet. 

FALLIN APART

Florence Farr immediately goes to westcott to ask him about the allegations. If the Sprengel Letter was a forgery, it raised some serious questions about the bureaucratic and spiritual authority of the Golden Dawn itself. Mathers had no proof beyond good old fashioned Unverified Personal Gnosis. Mathers had to be evasive. (how?)

Mathers also made the mistake of trusting one Aleister Crowley, and admitting him to the Second Order in Paris after he had been denied access in London. This gave Crowley the authority to “show up in London as Mathers representative, charged with reclaiming the Order for its erstwhile Chief.” Those are sarcasm quotes. 

Mather’s only play was to claim he met the real Anna Sprengel, in the form of a woman named Madame Horos. Horos turned out to be a con artist, stole the Golden Dawn’s books, fled to london, and started her own fake version of the order. She and her husband were eventually arrested, tried, and jailed, for criminal fraud and rape. Very publicly tried, I might add. This was disastrous for the Golden Dawn. For the general public, organizations like the Golden Dawn were already a source of mistrust and perl-wringing. For the magically inclined, their rituals were made public, which detracted from the sacred-ness of it all, and was frankly embarrassing for many of the members. Many chose to outright leave. 

The remaining members were split. Half wanted Farr’s smaller, informal ceremonies among cadres of adepts. The others were loyal to Mather’s strict orthodoxy. No compromise was reached, and the order disbanded in 1903. 

Although, Waite did manage to scrape together the orthodox mystics, and wrangled the Isis Urania temple into shape, founding the “Independent and Rectified Rite” on July 8th 1903. This new temple was now explicitly Christian, which attracted some members that otherwise balked at the Golden Dawn and magic in general.

They would attract some other stragglers from the shattered order, eventually naming the new temple the Alpha Et Omega. Although, Mathers was already an old man. He would die in 1918 leaving his wife Mina in charge. “Her management of the Order was no less idiosyncratic and authoritarian and she alienated the most able members, among them most of her American followers and the young Dion Fortune, who left to found the Fraternity of the Inner Light.”

Some folks did break off to start their own temples, to humble success. Felkin (who?) started the Smagardium Thessalay temple in New Zealand. The Amoun Ra temple in england stayed active, even though a former member C.M. Stoddart, was convinced they were a force of supernatural evil. 

Waites Independent and Rectified Rite caused problems. They kept trying to reach out to other societies like the Stella Maturtina, printing rituals for both societies to use, but this quickly ended over interpretation of terms. Over time, Waite became increasingly skeptical of the Cipher Manuscripts. One of his co-chiefs, Blackden, and a majority of his followers, insisted that they were of Egyptian origin, meaning that Waite did not have complete control over their interpretation. From a more cynical perspective, this could be seen as a move to prevent another Mathers from happening. But within twelve months, Waite (I think) created a new order, the Fellowship of the Rosy Cross, but it was in no sense a continuation of the Golden Dawn. 

DEATH AND REBIRTH

The traditional Golden Dawn did survive. It continues today thanks to the actions of a rogue member of the Stella Matutina: Francis Israel Regardie, who entered the Hermes Temple in 1933 following an earlier initiation into the Societas Rosicruciana in America (a quasi-masonic body that had borrowed the Outer Order rituals of the Golden Dawn). Regardie firmly believed that the teaching and rituals of the ORder should be available to all. So, over a four year period, from 1973 to 1940, he published the greater part of them. This allowed smaller temples to pop up, claiming not illegitimate lineage from the original body. They were doing the same rituals after all. 

The continued existence of the Golden Dawn is a testament to the impact they had on magical history. Damn near every organization attempting to formally practice magic these days has its roots in the Golden Dawn, or a member of the Golden Dawn. They were the blueprint. If anything, they were proof that formal magico-religious practices can exist outside of traditional religious structures, a mystery cult who studies other mystery cults, mystics of all mysticism. 

NOTES

Starts on 576

• The immediate inspiration for the Golden Dawn was a masonic Rosicrucian body, the Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia, that had been established in 1867.

• People kept getting in to the SRIA wanting to study and practice magic, but that wasn’t cool in the SRIA. They realized they needed a new body .

• It was the brainchild of Frederick Holland, an industrial chemist who joined the S.R.I.A. in April 1882. It attracted a dude named Kenneth Mackenzie. 

• They made a new organization called the Society of Eight, which had no structure or systematic teaching.

• So Kenneth Mackenzie went shopping for systemic structures. He kept joining different ritual orders with names like The Royal Oriental Order of Sikha and the Sat B’hai.

• When he died, he left the outlines for his new initiatory ritual structure in outline, in code. 

• These texts were discovered by other members of the SRIA, and they became the foundation for the Golden Dawn.

• William Wynn Westcott, a London coroner and prominent member of the S.R.I.A., took over the post of Grand Secretary of yet another small masonic body, the Swedenborgian Rite, together with his predecessor’s papers.

OH THATS WHAT HAPPENED. HOW HAS THIS NEVER COME UP BEFORE? THATS INCREDIBLY IMPORTANT. HE WAS THE ONE WHO TRANSLATED THEM.

• Around the time, the Hermetic Society, a lecture society made to propagate the western esoteric tradition, shut down because its founder died. Both Westcott and Mathers were lecturers. 

• Westcott called Mathers and asked for help developing the Manuscripts into a full system. He also didn’t tell Mathers where he got the manusctipts. Saying he got them from a “Masonic Historian” the rev AFA Woodford, who -conveniently for Westcott- died 2 months later. 

HOLY SHIT

The Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia or S.R.I.A, studies, but does not practice, magic. This was a problem for one Kenneth Mackenzie. He wanted to get practical. He wanted to light the candles and say the chants and actually really properly try to talk to the angels. Unfortunately for him, while the S.R.I.A were leading the pack on the study and preservation of the doctrine of Western Esotericism, they had no ritual structure. Nobody in the S.R.I.A. wanted to put on cloaks and chant while waving around a ritual dagger. This could not do. Mackenzie needed to explore some other societies. So, near the turn of the century, he got together with some likeminded friends, and went a-hunting.

They called themselves The Society of Eight, and they would join orders with delightfully 1875 names like “The Royal Oriental Order of Sikha” and the “Sat B’hai.” Mackenzie took notes. When Mackenzie died on July 3rd, 1886, he left behind a manuscript, written entirely in a 15th century cipher. Its contents were an outline for how to combine the S.R.I.A.’s doctrine with the ritual structure of an honest-to-god mystical society.

This Cipher Manuscript would fall into the hands of fellow S.R.I.A member William Wynn Westcott, one of the few people on earth who could recognize and decode the manuscript. (If you are curious, it was written in Trithemius’s Polygraphiae cipher.) 

When Westcott realized what he had, he got to work building one of the most influential ritual systems in western history. And by got to work, I mean he called Samuel and Moira Mathers and asked them to design most of the rituals and structures. Crucially, he would not tell Mathers where he got the manuscript. He would say he received the manuscripts from a masonic historian named A.F.A. Woodford, implying that the text was far older and more historically significant than it actually was. This was a gamble. If Mathers ever questioned the veracity of the manuscripts, he could easily speak to Woodford, and the whole jig would be up. Luckily, Woodford would die barely two months later. His claim to the core document of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was now set in stone. 

Then Westcott got really clever. He included a note in the manuscript, written in the same cipher, from one Fräulein Sprengel, otherwise Soror Sapiens dominabitur astris – ‘a chief among the members of die goldene dammerung’ and established a mail correspondence. Writing as Frau Sprengel, Westcott would weave a fantastic and mythical history for the Hermetic order of the Golden Dawn, and give himself the authority to found a new lodge in her name. 

This new Golden Dawn lodge would be based on SRIA’s structure, and a SRIA lodge needed three chiefs to run. Westcott was one, Mathers was two (whether he believed it or not), their third would be an accomplished hebraist and kabbalist named William Robert Woodman, who happened to be the current Supreme Magus of the S.R.I.A. By their powers combined, they would found their new order. On March 1st, 1888, they would consecrate the Isis-Urania Temple No. 3, of the Order of the G.D. in the Outer’

The order is structured in ranks. Each rank corresponds to a different sephirot, with Neophyte, the lowest rank, being situated below the tree. 

The “Outer order” was structured like this: 

Neophyte 0=0, 

Zelator 1=10 (Malkuth)

Theoricus, 2=9 (yesod)

Practicus, 3=8 (Hod)

Philosophus, 4=7 (Netzach)

Above this was this second, Inner Order, the order of Adepts, but they wouldn’t build out those ranks until 1891. 

Within a year of founding, they would have more than 60 members and two additional lodges.

Blavatsky forbade members of the esoteric sector from joining other orders but Westcott was able to assuage her worries. This would give us two more lodges, one in edinburgh and one in Paris. 

By 1894, they had 331 members

“As initiates progressed, so they were expected to become increasingly familiar with the Hebrew alphabet, the meaning of kabbalistic [→ Jewish Influences], alchemical [→ Alchemy] and → tarot symbolism, the technicalities of → astrology and other forms of divination [→ Divinatory Arts], and the names and natures of the Elemental Beings – in all of which areas of study they were duly examined. In addition, they were required to meditate and to become proficient in the Rituals of the Pentagram, but this was the sole activity that could possibly be construed as magical, everything else provided for members of the Golden Dawn in the Outer being a part of traditional Western esotericism.”

“This Order comprised the three Adept Grades that corresponded to the three sephiroth in the kabbalistic World of Briah. These were the 5=6 Grade of Adeptus Minor, corresponding to the sephira Tiphereth; the 6=5 Grade of Adeptus Major, corresponding to Geburah; and the 7=4 Grade of Adeptus Exemptus, corresponding to Chesed.”

“Neither Westcott nor Woodman had shown any great enthusiasm for a working Second Order, but Mathers was eager to develop rituals for the Adept Grades and to construct a “Vault of the Adepts” around and within which the ceremonies could be worked.”

Yeah that sounds like Mathers

“Mathers was a ritualist of genius and in the Golden Dawn system they were transformed into spectacular dramas of death and resurrection, worked within a Vault that he designed and constructed”

Westcott carefully grew the ranks, placing cryptic comments in the appropriate journals. This attracted the literary and artistic avante-garde of the 1890s.

The first of these was Mina Bergson, who joined and became the first to enter the second temple. She also married Mathers. 

MINA MATHERS SWEEP

THE EIGHTY-PERSON ORDER

“By this time there were some eighty members of the Order, but only three others who would play any significant role in its affairs: Annie Horniman, the daughter of a tea magnate; the actress Florence Farr; and the poet → W.B. Yeats”

Then you had the professionals like scientists, biologists, mathematicians, etc. 

And A.E. Waite; the Egyptologist M.W. Blackden; and the magician and farceur → Aleister Crowley

In 1981, woodman dies. Things go smoothly for a bit. More people hit the Second Grade. They have acess to the ritual vault, and the library, this makes them start questioning Mathers leadership. Mathers was strictly orthodox. 

“In 1893 he had suspended, and later expelled, Theresa O’Connell, one of the earliest initiates of the Order, over a minor dispute, while Westcott attempted (probably at Mathers’s instigation and

ultimately without success) to limit the activities of female adepts in the Isis-Urania Vault. These attempts to impose discipline were followed by a more serious affair that brought to light signs of real discontent among the adepts.”

“Annie Horniman, who had been providing regular funds for Mathers and his wife, expressed increasing unease at both the unorthodox sexual doctrines of a fellow adept, Dr. Berridge, and his behaviour towards the lady adepts. But when, in 1896, she complained of this to Mathers he reproved her and accused her of mental imbalance, later adding accusations of insubordination and incompetence.”

Further proof that the women were the real powerhouses behind the GD

This is when Mathers published that weird letter. He was clearly slipping and mad with power. 

Well, Anne Horniman was a large chunk of the temple’s funding

“This was further inflamed in 1897 by the sudden withdrawal of Westcott from any active role in the Golden Dawn in response to pressure from the civil authorities, who objected to a Crown official (Westcott was a coroner) being involved in a magical Order.”

HERE

So now mathers was the only guy in charge. People were so disasttisfied with how he ran things, that some lodges considered closing down the temples. 

“Mathers’s response, in a letter of March 1900 to Florence Farr, was to deny their request and to make an extraordinary claim about Westcott that undermined the integrity of the Golden Dawn and threatened to destroy the Order. Mathers claimed that he alone had ever been in communication with the Secret Chiefs and that Westcott had forged the original correspondence with Anna Sprengel. What he seems to have failed to recognise is that if the members of the Order believed him then they would realise that the Golden Dawn was an utter sham, based upon forgery and deceit.”

Obviously, Farr immediately went to Westcott to ask him about he allegations. But Mathers had no proof, and Westcott had to be evasive. 

“He had made the mistake of trusting Aleister Crowley and of admit- ting him to the Second Order in Paris, even though Crowley had been denied such advancement in London.” 

LOL

“In April 1900, Crowley arrived in London as Mathers’s representative, charged with reclaiming the Order for its erstwhile Chief.” 

LOL

So, Mathers also claimed he met the real Anna Sprengel, in the form of a woman named Madame Horos, who turned out to be a con artist, stole the golden dawns books, fled to london, and started her own spurrious version of the order.She and her husband were eventually arrested, tried, and jailed for criminal fraud and rape. The trial was DISASTROUS for the GD. 

Several of their rituals were made public. This made many of the members just outright leave.

The remaining members were split between Farr’s desire to do small informal ceremonies among cadres of adepts, while Mathers wanted to do the rigorous orthodox shit. No compromise was reached. The order disbanded in 1903.

Waite managed to scrape together the orthodox mystics, and took control of the Isis Urania temple, founding the “Independent and Rectified Rite” on July 8th 1903. The new rite was now explicitly Christian, and attracted some members that otherwise would have balked at magic.

They would attract some other stragglers from the shattered order, eventually naming the new temple the Alpha Et Omega. 

Mathers would eventually die, in 1918 and Mina would take over. 

“Her management of the Order was no less idiosyncratic and authoritarian and she alienated the most able members, among them most of her American followers and the young → Dion Fortune, who left to found the Fraternity of the Inner Light.”

We love womens wrongs

Waite eventually became increasingly skeptical of the Cipher Manuscripts. One of his co-chiefs, Blackden, insisted that they were of Egyptian origin.

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