The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn
The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn
The Golden Dawn can be considered the fountainhead of what is popularly referred to in the present day as Western Ceremonial Magic. Through an eclectic manipulation of ancient, medieval, and renaissance occult beliefs and practices it birthed a coherent and cohesive curriculum of study and practice for individuals aspiring to explore worlds beyond the physical veneer of the universe and themselves.
In what follows I hope to explain that the Order’s origins are an example of humanity’s ability to creatively metamorphosize fictional and illusionary imaginings into vehicles for spiritual advancement onto a conscious historical timeline.
It is important to understand that the GD had nothing to do with religion. It was and is a system of self-empowerment achieved through symbolism and practice encouraging its practitioners to reap the rewards of contacting and conversing with what they referred to as the Holy Guardian Angel, a concept analogous to the daemon.
The Golden Dawn was founded in 1888 by three prominent English Freemasons, William Robert Woodman, William Wynn Westcott, and Samuel Liddell “MacGregor ” Mathers
Only a little imagination is required to perceive it as having been an outgrowth by these three members of the SRIA who desired more active and practical involvement with Ceremonial Magic than the SRIA was prepared to offer. Also, it was, in part, a reaction by its founders who desired to offer a Western alternative to the Eastern influences of Madame Blavatsky’s Theosophical Movement that had been making inroads into English society.
Origins
These desires for a Western tradition were largely inspired and fed by theories expressed in Lord Bulwer Lytton’s novel of occult aspiration, Zanoni, becoming the canon that clothed the myth of the order’s beguiling origins. In effect, spiritual fiction becomes physical reality.
The true first edition of “Zanoni,” was published in London in 1842. Often termed a “Rosicrucian novel” it might best be described as a story of romance and occult aspiration. It famously begins with a description of an occult bookshop in Covent Garden, London, now known to have been that of John Denley, the bookseller who for a time employed Frederick Hockley to copy and produce occult manuscripts. In the work, Bulwer-Lytton also described the discovery of an occult manuscript, written in secret cipher, which surely became the foundation myth of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.
In his introduction to Zanoni Lytton writes of a conversation he overhears between the narrator and an old man he meets in the bookshop who he believes to be a Rosicrucian.
“Is your work a romance?”
“It is a romance, and it is not a romance. It is a truth for those who can comprehend it, and an extravagance for those who cannot.”
At last there arrived the manuscripts, with a brief note from my deceased friend, reminding me of my imprudent promise.
”With mournful interest, and yet with eager impatience, I opened the packet and trimmed my lamp. Conceive my dismay when I found the whole written in an unintelligible cipher. I present the reader with a specimen: and so on for nine hundred and forty mortal pages in foolscap.
I could scarcely believe my eyes: in fact, I began to think the lamp burned singularly blue; and sundry misgivings as to the unhallowed nature of the characters I had so unwittingly opened upon, coupled with the strange hints and mystical language of the old gentleman, crept through my disordered imagination. Certainly, to say no worse of it, the whole thing looked UNCANNY”.
Unlike Freemasonry, membership in the Golden Dawn was and is open to both men and women.
History
The Golden Dawn’s history is a graphic illustration and not an unfamiliar study of the pitfalls of man’s attempt to materialize alien values upon the physical plane.
According to the Golden Dawn’s Official History lecture the order was founded upon a collection of manuscripts written in a basic cipher. According to Westcott, included with the documents was the name and address of a woman in Nuremberg, Anna Sprengel.
The origin and authenticity of these documents are at best ambiguous leading us to believe their origin in fiction and quite possibly created by Westcott himself.
Many theorists have speculated that Bram Stoker, author of Dracula and The Jewel of Seven Stars, and Egyptologist Wallis Budge, were members of the GD but thus far there has been no conclusive proof for this to have been the case. Although the general consensus of opinion is that they were not, this does not mitigate the possibility that they were influenced by acquaintances who were members of the order. Either way, the Golden Dawn is a practical system, and working with the Golden Dawn curriculum can reveal possibilities for the individual adaptation of the system to the practitioner’s specific magickal and or spiritual needs.
The Golden Dawn offered an eclectic program that synthesizes and projects tarot, scrying, magickal evocation, and other mystical practices upon the template diagram of the QBL Tree of Life. It uses these interwoven systems as inspiration for guiding magickal practice.
Be aware, that the Golden Dawn was not bound by religious orthodoxy and certainly didn’t adhere to beliefs such as praying or making sacrifices to “gods”. What it was bound by was a desire to empower individuals to reach their birthright which is to become more than human.
Gods were perceived as voices of the macrocosm speaking through each of us, their corresponding microcosmic selves, with messages for each of us alone.
Philosophy
The philosophy and ground plan of the GD was superimposed upon the QBL Tree of Life diagram. A candidate gravitated through the order’s teaching and correspondingly ascended the Tree through a series of examinations and ritual grades. All of these have close parallels with Freemasonry which was the universal background of each of the founding members.
Much of the educational material for the grades had its origins in The Key of Solomon, Lesser Key of Solomon, The Magus by Francis Barret, The Grand Grimoire, The Heptameron, Three Books of Occult Philosophy, and Dr John Dee’s conversations with spirits.
Barrett’s Magus was also influential on Joseph Smith, founder of the Church of Latter-Day Saints.
The Golden Dawn’s crowning glory is that its founders had the vision to take all this diverse material and reconcile it into a coherent and practical system. By welding it upon the QBL Tree of Life its members were provided with a template upon which this diverse material could be reconciled to become a coherent system of magical theory and practice.