History of the Order of the Golden Dawn

[Ceres]

I already went to Wikipedia, but I am interested if anyone has any tidbits of information beyond when it was formed who started it and where. Nothing is too obscure :hahugh:

[Ben Gruagach]

"The Golden Dawn Scrapbook" by R. A. Gilbert is a good one if you want the honest dirt on the organization and some insight into the personality conflicts that brought about the group's dissolution.

What sorts of info were you looking for? How it got started? What the "foundational myth" was and how much of it was true? How it affected occultism in the English speaking world?

[David19]

I don't know much about the Golden Dawn, so i think others can help you more than me, but i've heard that several famous people were members (Aliester Crowley and W.B. Yeats, a poet), i think it started sometime in the Victorian period (somewhere after 1800?).

[Ben Gruagach]

Here's a link to the Wikipedia entry (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermetic_Order_of_the_Golden_Dawn) that Radikalwomyn mentioned in her first post.

It gives a good basic explanation of the Golden Dawn and its history. It's a good place to start.

[Ceres]

It was a good place to start. What is the 'foundation myth', Ben?

[Ben Gruagach]

It was a good place to start. What is the 'foundation myth', Ben?

The foundational myth is the (not necessarily historically true) explanation that they give about how the group started.

Here's how they explain the origins of the Golden Dawn:

Dr. William Wynn Westcott, Dr. William R. Woodman, and Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers all knew each other through their involvement in Freemasonry. Woodman was also involved in Rosicrucian groups. Westcott claimed he obtained a mysterious "cipher manuscript" in 1886 which provided details about occult rituals for a group known as the Golden Dawn which the document claimed was running in Germany.

The three managed to decipher the manuscript and found they also contained a contact name and address in Germany for a woman named Fraulein Sprengel. The story goes that Westcott wrote to Fraulein Sprengel and she authorized them to start up a British branch of the Golden Dawn, and authorized the three men to head the group there.

As the British Golden Dawn group progressed they started to put more emphasis on the idea of "invisible chiefs" with whom the top people (Mathers in particular) claimed to be in regular contact. So with the authority of the German parent group (through Fraulein Sprengel) and also the "secret chiefs" behind them the group was able to attract lots of new members in Britain and over the years spawned a handful of lodges in Britain as well as in Paris and elsewhere outside the UK. These other lodges were supposed to answer back to the parent lodge in London.

That's how the myth goes anyways.

The problem with this foundational myth is that there apparently never was a German parent Golden Dawn group, nor was there a Fraulein Sprengel who answered letters let alone who authorized the formation of the UK branch of the Golden Dawn. And the "secret chiefs" had this tendency to communicate with people through long-distance telepathy (the chiefs were believed to live somewhere on a mountaintop, or perhaps in a holy site in India, or in some other place inaccessible to 99.999% of people in the UK) so it was pretty much impossible to confirm that they existed at all let alone guided the Golden Dawn leaders.

A lot of the questions about the foundation myth came to the fore as personality conflicts among the group's leaders heated up. Mathers for instance had moved to Paris, but wanted to be made the sole head of the group after Woodman (one of the original three founders) died in 1891. Westcott also had problems with the group because his membership in it was considered scandalous and detrimental to his career as a British government coroner. (His employers forced Westcott to resign from the Golden Dawn in 1896.)

As various individuals and factions squabbled over who should take over the leadership, and what direction the group should go (focussing on magickal work as opposed to other non-magickal work) Mathers made some rather silly mistakes in trying to blackmail some people into getting his way. There were even court cases with one member against another in order to try and gain the upper hand! Through it all it was revealed that the whole Fraulein Sprengel thing was more or less a fraud.

That book I mentioned earlier, "The Golden Dawn Scrapbook" by R. A. Gilbert, goes into the gory details about the conflicts over leadership which led to the breakup of the Golden Dawn around 1900. Fortunately though splinter groups kept the Golden Dawn materials alive, and Israel Regardie helped as well by publishing the Golden Dawn teachings in the late 1930s. Getting the Golden Dawn teachings in a published form like that made it much easier for others to draw on them and what the Golden Dawn accomplished was not completely lost.

[Ceres]

Wow thats that was detailed!

[Cerulean_damselfly]

Some useful bits and pieces:

Women of the Golden Dawn
http://www.boudicca.de/gdwomen-e.htm


Useful book lists, biographies of whose who, ideas to start
http://www.hermeticgoldendawn.org/index.shtml

If you are interested in specific people such as William Butler Yeats, Pamela Colman Smith, Arthur E. Waite, Aleister Crowley*...tons of research material out there. I'd be glad to recommend some further links to start if you name someone specifically of interest...

As some of these personalities have been key in Western tarot developments, some rich historical links and ideas are scattered online...some may be helpful to you researchers. Some of these historical personalities have been discussed in a friendly tarot forum I've enjoyed being in for years...

Best regards,

Cerulean_Damselfly

*Corrected spelling after kind note on my goof. Thanks!

[Ben Gruagach]

Alexander Crowley...

I think you probably mean Aleister Crowley, right?

[Cerulean_damselfly]

Ben,

Thanks much for the correction!

I did an edit.

Best regards,

Cerulean_Damselfly

[Seren_]

The cipher manuscripts can be found online at http://www.hermetic.com/gdlibrary/cipher/ . The manuscript was "revealed" by Westcott in 1887 after it was given to him by and old friend. The order was officially founded in 1888 (the same year as Jack the Ripper was doing his thing, by the by) and by 1896 had over 300 members in a number of lodges. The Golden Dawn was relatively radical for its day because it accepted women as well as men.

The cipher used in the manuscript was produced by Abbot Johann Trithemius (1462-1516) in his book Polygraphiae. Once they deciphered it, they found they had the basics for the ten grades and structure of the order and the outlines for the initiation rituals. The magical rituals like The Lesser Ritual of the Pentagram weren't included in the cipher manuscript and are thought to have been written by MacGregor Mathers, based on sources like Eliphas Levi and a Jewish prayer called the Bedtime Shema.

When the Golden Dawn began to fall apart in 1900, after Mathers' increasingly controlling and eccentric behaviour prompted Florence Farr from the Isis-Urania temple in London to suggest the order should close down, Mathers responded by claiming that the letter from Anna Sprengel granting permission for the establishment of a lodge in London had been forged by Westcott. Mathers evidently suspected Farr's motivation for writing to him was an attempt to restore Westcott and replace Mathers in the Order if he agreed to shut down operations. Although Westcott was forced to retire from active participation in the Golden Dawn, it seems he was still very much involved in the background judging by the letters that Gilbert makes reference to.

His response therefore seems to have been an effort to undermine any authority Westcott may still have wielded with the London lodge memebers, but instead it backfired. Westcott offered no comment on Mathers' allegations (which infuriated Mathers), and to make matters worse Mathers then sent someone from the Paris lodge over to London to assume control on his behalf. This someone was Aleister Crowley, a man who the members of the London lodge knew well, because they had rejected him for initiation a while ago on the grounds that he was "a questionable initiate".

Crowley attempted a farcical and theatrical takeover attempt, arriving at the lodge in full ceremonial regalia. His attempts were foiled by W B Yeats, famous poet and Golden Dawn initiate, but the lodge was never the same again and two years later formally ceased to exist when a schism split the members in two.

Arthur Waite (of Rider-Waite tarot fame) took over the original lodge, Isis-Urania, but had no interest in magic and took the lodge in a more mystical direction, renaming it the Independent and Rectified Rite. Not everyone followed Waite, and some members formed other groups, preserving the original Golden Dawn principles more fully. Crowley went on to form his Thelemic group and was extremely influential to a young man named Israel Regardie, who worked as his private secretary in Paris for a while.

One group, the Stella Matutina went on to host a number of members who later came to be well known for their own orders and works on the Qabalah, like Dion Fortune (and her Society of the Inner Light), and Israel Regardie (initiated in 1933). The temple died a slow death and became dormant by 1939, but its legacy lived on mainly due to Regardie's work to publish the Golden Dawn documents and throw the secrecy of the order out of the window. It caused a lot of controversy at the time.