by Marcus Katz
Qualification of Knowledge
We turn now to a subject which appears to be altogether missing in recent studies of initiation, such as Bogdan and Bell, which focus upon the definition of the term and its ritualised forms, the difference between initiation and rites of passage, and typologies.[316] That is to say, and this is certainly clearly presented in the works of the French traditionalist (and esotericist) René Guénon (1886-1951), the concept of qualification and, more importantly, landmarks – a term that Guénon felt so fitting he kept it in the English, as it has “no exact equivalent in French.”[317]
There are further tests which have not been published, neither in Regardie, who originally published the Golden Dawn materials in several volumes between 1937 and 1940, nor later versions. In a 4=7 paper in the hand of F.L. Gardner, on the ‘Tattvas of the Eastern School’, there are not only descriptions of the activities suited to each of these ‘tides’ which are active throughout the day, means of using these tides, through meditation, for curing disease and forecasting future events, but also a practical test of skill.[318] The means of testing the skill of the Philosophus in these matters is by placing “five bullets or counters” of the colours of the tattvas in one’s pocket and selecting blind the correct counter which relates to the tide of that time of day. A further instruction suggests that with time, the practitioner can select two counters to calibrate more accurately to the shades between passing tattvic tides.
This is Reserved for a Higher Grade
But did the Golden Dawn members commit themselves to this curriculum, and did it achieve its stated intention to prepare the candidate for nothing less than “preparation for immortality”? According to Israel Regardie (1907-1985) there was some difficulty for the average student:
... the basic knowledge material was all disconnected data and pretty much of a closed book. All he could do was memorise the stuff by rote, and ask questions of the Officers of the Temple he belonged to. They may or may not have been too helpful. One of the common clichés was that the elucidation of this or that set of notions was reserved for a higher grade. Very frustrating![319]
And although Regardie goes on to suggest that the student working through the outer order curriculum would have been in possession of a great deal of material, he notes that it would have probably not been integrated, even though it was handed out ‘piecemeal’. With a lack of supervision, it would have also not been committed to memory or tested. This is later confirmed when he writes:
... despite the fact that the papers on the Pentagram and Hexagram rituals suggest, nay demand, that the contents be committed to memory, few apparently took this injunction seriously. Instead of being content with the rubric of the ritual stating that for example the invoking Pentagram of Air should be traced in the Air, or that the banishing Hexagram of mercury should be traced, the members whose papers I have seen drew the appropriate figure. This of course suggests that the figures were not committed to memory, and that the member had to draw the appropriate figure on the pages of the ritual in order to jog his memory.[320]
However it was delivered and received, there was one clear goal with this content – that the student learn correspondence between all aspects of their experience:
For it is the science of correspondences he is studying the whole time, whether between the Divine Powers and the Universe, between these and man, or between these again and the different planes and developments in the life of Nature.[321]
The Failure of the Golden Dawn
It is here, in this specific enterprise, I propose, that the Golden Dawn can be said to have truly failed, as it became swallowed up by personal and political feuds documented ably elsewhere,[322] it increasingly failed to teach the curriculum of correspondence, thus disengaging the ritual activities – merely performance pieces without proper preparation – from the taught symbolic language of magic.
The latter was neglected as arcane symbolism relegated to the futile delivery of exoteric knowledge (i.e. the Hebrew alphabet) without due application in practical exercise. It was indeed a triumph of politics over policy, a failure to adhere to the most elementary principle of the project. A private letter of 1899 to F.L. Gardner held in the Yorke Collection (Warburg Institute, University of London) illustrates this failure in the resignation of one particular member:
Doubtless you know of my resignation from the GD. I got tired of the empty monotony of mere ceremonial without any real explanation of its import and significance if there is any at all worth knowing that I did not previously know.[323]
This member, F.J. Johnson, was first initiated in 1889, visited Clipstone Street many times during 1893, after being initiated into the second order at the start of that year, and left in 1899.[324] His trajectory summarises both the curriculum and the failure; four years to work through the outer order work – with an initial rush of excitement (he visited the vault at Clipstone Street some 13 times in the year after his initiation, “invariably to collect or return manuscripts”[325]) leading to a six year disillusionment following his entry to the Second Order, ending in resignation.
Perhaps it could also be argued that initiates were not taught to apply their teachings to their own lives and transformation. Similarly, higher order material may not have been ready for them, leaving them in a vacuum; nor, possibly, where it was doing so, was the impact of their practical work on their lives being supervised. In an analysis of Mathers and the teachings of the order, Nick Farrell has raised these issues, which he sees as a “cautionary tale” and “fatal flaw” at length.[326] The curriculum may also have failed in its transmission and reception away from the charismatic leaders who regulated its delivery and monitored its results. It was hardly set up for distance learning, particularly overseas. A critical letter of resignation in 1921, from Lilli Geise (?-1924) of the Thoth-Hermes Temple of the A.O. (Alpha et Omega) in New York, to Brodie-Innes, stated the curriculum as a major cause of discontent, intimating also that there had been prior instructions not to develop the curriculum by introducing other elements from her close experience with her teacher (and later, husband), Paul Foster Case (1884-1954). Regarding MacGregor Mathers, she wrote to Brodie-Innes:
I have, however, no faith in the source of his initiation, on account of the very unsatisfactory curriculum up to the grade which I reached, including the books of the Z.A.M. Second Order ... Then the utter lack of guidance from the very beginning in this country, about 18 years ago. There never were really any capable leaders.[327]
It is apparent that the curriculum can function as a cohesive device within the structure of an organisation often led by a few charismatic individuals in a hierarchical fashion. In the story of Paul Foster Case, we see his split from the New York Thoth-Hermes Temple of the Golden Dawn (Alpha et Omega) being precipitated in part due to a disagreement about the place of teachings on sexual magick within the curriculum. Moina Mathers had written to him:
..... I have seen the results of this superficial sex teaching in several Occult Societies as well as in individual cases. I have never met with one happy result.[328]
Incidentally, an unpublished version of the curriculum for Theoricus Adeptus Minor (c. 1894) does contain a suspicious item of study in this light, namely “the opening of the knowledge of the masculine and feminine potencies necessary unto the manifestation of all things.”[329] Other changes of the curriculum followed. When Case founded his own order in 1922, the Builders of the Adytum (BOTA), following his development of a magical curriculum in terms of a comprehensive correspondence course in 1902, he purged all reference to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn’s usage of Enochian magic:
B.O.T.A. is a direct off-shoot of the Golden Dawn, but its work has been purged of all the dangerous and dubious magic incorporated into the Golden Dawn’s curriculum by the late S.L. MacGregor Mathers, who was responsible for the inclusion of the ceremonials based on the skrying of Sir Edward Kelly. There is much in these Golden Dawn rituals and ceremonies that is of the grea
test value; but from the first grade to the last it is all vitiated by these dangerous elements taken from Dee and Kelly. Furthermore, in many places, the practical working is not provided with adequate safeguards, so that, to the present writer’s personal knowledge, an operator working with the Golden Dawn rituals runs very grave risks of breaking down his physical organism, or of obsession by evil entities.[330]
It is worth digressing upon the changes that Paul Foster Case affected upon the Golden Dawn magical curriculum, not only on its content but on its delivery – specifically into the American market. A revealing letter from Case to Israel Regardie, dated 10 August 1933, recounts his experience and reasoning for re-inventing and re-presenting the Golden Dawn teachings, a project which proved successful as BOTA maintain a strong presence in the United States, South America, Australia, and Europe. Another off-shoot of this project is the Fraternity of the Hidden Light, Fraternitas L.V.X. Occulta:
The curriculum of the Fraternitas L.V.X. Occulta, or Fraternity of the Hidden Light, is a structured, graduated system which utilizes grades as a means of identifying the level of a student for the purpose of receiving the Ancient Wisdom teachings.[331]
Alumni of the Golden Dawn
Were there successful graduates of the Golden Dawn educational endeavour, and if so, how can this be measured? The failure of the order as a stable organisation within a relatively short period of time left many members disenchanted. This has been demonstrated, particularly during the period whilst the main business of the order was circulating a petition for the expulsion of one of its members, Annie Horniman (1860-1937).[332] Ironically, it was Horniman who had written a Flying Roll in 1893 encouraging beginners to work with “patience and hope” and claimed “none of us who have made sacrifices for it [the order] in a right spirit are disappointed with the result.”[333] Following the collapse of the order, there was little overt trace of its legacy of trained Adepts. Whilst commenting on an article on Betty May (?-?), in the Worlds Pictorial News, the stage magician and esoteric student Chris van Berne (1871-1950), a follower of Aleister Crowley, wrote to another follower, Norman Mudd (c.1890-1934) in 1925:
I meet several of the old G.D. but they know very little. Some of the Bradford crowd are still searchers, but the rest are only book collectors.[334]
In fact, van Berne estimated the number of ‘real workers’ to be 15 or less. His lack of enthusiasm that the teachings would be transmitted beyond a select group is also evident. In response to the news that Thomas Burgoyne (1855-1934) was to publish a book through Foyles in London, he writes:
... as I have nearly all the M.S.S. of that extinct society [the Golden Dawn], also the H.B. of L. [Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor], I have written to them [Foyles] to say that I think the work will be quite wrong, in facts and details. I have not had their reply yet.[335]
The Strange Reward
“Sing out the song; sing to the end, and sing The strange reward of all that discipline.”
— W.B. Yeats, A Vision
As we have seen, a certain level of commonality of orders, grades and rituals, in addition to the actual content and delivery of teachings, is evident across many of the schools of Western esotericism. It is proposed, however, that the cosmological grounding of the Western esoteric tradition in a world of hierarchies and intermediaries, allied with a Gnostic concern of self-deliverance, logically requires a curriculum of praxis and theoria which not only reflects this cosmology, but necessitates a mechanism to deliver a promised salvation.
The Hermetic corpus clearly commences with this framework, and we will briefly return to this early articulation of a world of degrees as quoted earlier from the Hermetica.
Whilst these degrees or stages originally depicted (much like the Ancient Egyptian Book of Coming Forth by Day) the after-death ascent and return to the heavens and salvation, to initiates, this is a clear depiction of a way of exhaustion; as each zone or grade is attained, the psychic devices of the ‘Earthborn man’ (‘child of Earth’ in the Golden Dawn Neophyte initiation) are disabled, in order that the next grade can be attained, and ultimately entry into the ‘Ogdoadic region’ is attained.
Rather than dismiss the content of a ritual which falls outside established concepts of initiation – for example, the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram – in favour of more accessible academic ground like the role of an initiation in re-establishing patriarchy et al, we might look to understand the reasoning behind the ritual being promoted as fundamental to a student’s progression in the magical curriculum.
That content – that the ritual is a ‘banishing’ – and its position in the teaching order of many groups is the key factor. Dion Fortune, commenting on Israel Regardie’s publication of the magical curriculum as the Complete Golden Dawn System of Magic, wrote of the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram, and Regardie’s publication of it:
It is this formula which is given to the student immediately on initiation long before he is taught any practical working, in order that he may protect himself in case of Astral trouble. If Mr. Regardie is justified in drawing back the veil at all, then he is, undoubtedly justified in providing the necessary protection against anything untoward that may come through the veil. The Lesser Pentagram is of the nature of a fire extinguisher, and it is very necessary to have some such device handy when one ventures into such highly charged levels of the unseen as are contacted by the methods he describes.[336]
We may conclude that in all cases, the curriculum is seen as preparatory; a series of steps (literally grades, gradus, Latin ‘step’) towards an ultimate goal which transcends those lessons but is entirely reliant upon them – that of gnosis or enlightenment. The ladder is laid down at the end of the ascent, as we have seen indicated in the Mutus Liber.
Mutus Liber, Final Plate
That the goal may be attained is seen in the structuring of the orders to reflect a hidden hierarchy – an Invisible Church or Invisible College – whose masters have accomplished the Great Work. By entering into the curriculum, and taking the oaths, the candidate is initiated into this implicit framework, promising that through their work, they will strive to master the elements of their being. In both the Theoricus ritual of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and a paper from that order on ‘The General Guidance and Purification of the Soul’, in order to learn self-knowledge and direct the forces of nature, the candidate is instructed:
Be thou therefore prompt and active as the Sylphs, but avoid frivolity and caprice. Be energetic and strong like the Salamanders, but avoid irritability and ferocity. Be flexible and attentive to images like the Undines, but avoid idleness and changeability. Be laborious and patient like the Gnomes, but avoid grossness and avarice.[337]
It is that the elemental rituals of the order, the paraphernalia of ‘fan, lamp, cup, and salt’ represent this curriculum, teach it and reflect it as an enactment of enchantment, a play of the mundus imaginalis, so that the candidate may be lead out of the ‘darkly splendid world’.
We may see a specific cohesion of the WEIS within the curriculum of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, drawing together and disseminating esoteric teachings in an attempt to provide no less than an education in magical ascent and liberation. This was not merely a reaction to the disempowerment of the male (Carnes, 1989) or against a disenchantment of the world (Owen, 2004). Neither was it entirely a flight against reason (Webb, 1971), although these views provide multiple lenses through which we might contextualise the life of those developing and pursuing such a curriculum.
The ideal of the curriculum and its place in the overall practice of the WEIS is more than the second perspective viewpoint or analysis. Despite recognising that a member had limited time to devote to the practice of a curriculum, despite the lack of support for distance learners, and an over-burdensome language obscurum per obscurius, and despite the eventual fragmentation of teaching through public scandal, the lofty idealism, the Promethean ambition of the curriculum of the WEIS remains:
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br /> Our subject of study is inexhaustible for it is the Universe itself whose Mysteries we seek to fathom by the aid of that Secret System of Correspondences and Formulas, the especial knowledge of our Order the Keys of the Wisdom of all Time. Our Grades therefore form the ladder which aids us to mount upwards towards this end, a ladder in which not one rung is wanting neither is there a Lacuna. We appeal to the soul by the secret formulas hidden in our Ceremonies; to the mind by the special studies of the Order, to the body by the Stations and movements in the Temple and to the whole being by the combinations of these.121
Conclusion Part Two
This concludes the second part of Volume 0 of The Magister on Kindle. Now that the extremely academic work is presented on the recent history of occult groups, teaching and structure, we can move on to more practical, psychological, magical and mystical matters in the final section and then the remaining ten volumes of this series.
The third and concluding part of The Magister Vol 0 outlines the connection between psychology and magick, and then provides a range of practical rituals and exercises in order to get you started on this profound path of western spiritual development.
Whilst some of these may have been covered in other books, they are presented here in the context of a forty-year period of practice, experience and study which has revealed many new aspects of the rituals and their proper place and practice within the whole spiritual journey. They have also been extensively worked by a range of individuals and groups from neophytes to adepts and their consequences fully experienced and incorporated into our teaching.
