It seems a silly question, but there are lots of GD organisations out there which are carrying out initiations which cannot have had more than a psychological effect on candidates. 1. Were you present for the initiation? For a long time there was a scam where a group made you a distance member by conducting “an astral initiation.” It meant that a team of officers initiated your name on a list. There is absolutely no tradition of this in the GD and those who have been “astrally initiated” show no signs that such a ritual has taken place. 2. Did the initiation take place roped together with a group of other candidates? While the AO did this, it is not possible to
AO
Table of Shewbread issues
The Table of Shewbread is an important diagram within the Golden Dawn’s 1=10, and yet when anyone is required to draw it, they discover that it creates more questions than anyone can supply answers. In the Magical Order of the Aurora Aurea we used a colour version of the 1=10 as shown in Pat Zalewski’s Inner Order of the Golden Dawn (pictured). The colouring of the diagram came from a Whare Ra member and was based on an AO paper. However our order also requires people to draw the diagram in a workbook and from that a member came back to me with the following question:– Why does it differ from the Stella Matutina version printed in Israel Regardie (pictured)? The
WAS THE SUN SUPPOSED TO SET ON THE GOLDEN DAWN?
Perigrin Wildoak has unleashed another storm by daring to suggest that the Golden Dawn was supposed to to die . Many have made the mistake of seeing Peri’s posts as saying that Golden Dawn groups should pack up and go home because they are not connected to the forces behind the original Golden Dawn. I don’t think he is saying that, but he is absolutely correct the Golden Dawn was meant to die. There are a lot of myths spread about by modern magical groups without a GD connection which claim that the secret chiefs or contacts abandoned the GD because it had failed as an experiment. Others claimed they walked away because secret knowledge was published. Others claim that it
FILLING OUT THE GOLDEN DAWN RITUALS
Those who like to believe that the Golden Dawn rituals are perfect and cannot be adapted might be shocked to discover that I disagree and that there are parts of the elemental grade rituals which are just meaningless filler, mistakes or ideas that do not actually work. What is alarming is that some of these bugs have been in the rituals since 1888 and no one has dared to touch them because the order leaders have told them that they are perfect. As a result, they scan the rituals carefully to find a hidden truth that was probably not there in the first place. The GD rituals were written in a very short space of time to a particular template provided by
SHOULD WE BURY SECRETS IN THE MISTS OF AVALON?
I had a shock today when I read how Marion Zimmer Bradley protected her pedophile husband who committed serial sexual abuse and how her daughter has been saying that the fantasy writer was violent and sexually abused her too. Like the writer Jim Hines who wrote the blog with all the details, I was a big fan of Zimmer Bradley who opened up the Arthurian mysteries to me. The world she portrayed was full of strong feminist figures fighting against some really unpleasant male aggression. Now that world and those characters and world is dead to me. They are the creations of a writer who did not mean a word of it. Her fantasy worlds were not an expression of what she
Beyond the Sun released
Beyond the Sun – the secret teachings of the Missing Golden Dawn Order (click to order)“This book contains the Secret Inner Order Teachings of the missing order of the Golden Dawn – Whare Ra. Whare Ra managed to keep secret and above all keep running long after the other Golden Dawn magical orders had given up the ghost. Closing in the late 1970s the Order was founded by Dr Robert Felkin nearly 100 years ago. Working in New Zealand, Whare Ra became a secret forefront of occult teaching.Nick Farrell publishes the Second Order Rituals of this Order including the 6=5 and 7=4 in their complete and unedited state as well as the 6=5 training papers and lectures. He also examines the
Magical Egregore 101
Since the Magical Order of the Aurora Aurea decided to leave the Golden Dawn, there has been some somewhat strange comments about egregores including one very confused comment from one clearly uninformed “chief of an order.” Ironically there was been one comment from a chap who has spent a long time claiming I was not Golden Dawn for years, suddenly insisting I was because I did the same rituals as him. It is nice to be wanted, I guess!Since I learnt about egoregore early on in my training it never occurred to me that people did not really understand how they worked, so I thought I better explain. If anything it will make why we have walked away from the
Golden Dawn astral initiation rituals do not work magically
I am famous for being blunt and the headline statement will get a few people upset. I have said over a number of years that I do not believe that astral initiation into the Golden Dawn work, but have not said why.I would LOVE astral initiation to work. As the head of an order, it would mean that I could set up temples in the US or other far-flung parts of the world at a great rate. If I was charging fees for this, I could make a bomb. It would enable groups to be established without me having to bring people to Rome for training. In short, astral initiation is a tool for empire building rather than creating magicians.
Diagrams in the Golden Dawn
Few of the diagrams of the Golden Dawn are used in the Modern Golden Dawn initiation rituals. This is because many modern Golden Dawn orders were based on the rituals printed by Israel Regardie just before the Second World War in his Golden Dawn book. The Bristol temple was going through a phase of removing parts of the ritual it did not understand or felt were cumbersome and the versions of the rituals that Regardie experienced were these cut down rite. The candidate still saw the diagrams, they were given to him or her during their course work and that was felt to be enough.When deciding on the rituals of the Magical
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