Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn

Overview

The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was an initiatic magical order founded in London in 1888 by William Wynn Westcott, Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, and William Robert Woodman. Its graded curriculum drew together Hermetic Qabalah, alchemical symbolism, the Tarot, astrology, geomancy, and Enochian magic into a single synthesised system.

Although the original order operated for only about a decade before fragmenting, its rituals, lecture documents, and correspondence tables form the substrate of most subsequent Western ceremonial magic. The Order itself was secret in its operating period; the bulk of its material was made public by Israel Regardie’s four-volume The Golden Dawn (1937–40), an act regarded by surviving members as a serious breach.

Origins & history

The Order was established on the authority of a set of documents known as the Cipher Manuscripts, which Westcott claimed to have obtained and decoded. The manuscripts were said to authorise contact with a German adept, Anna Sprengel, who in turn chartered the new English order. Modern scholarship treats the Sprengel correspondence as almost certainly a fabrication by Westcott.

From a single temple in 1888 the Order grew to several temples across Britain and into Paris. In 1900 a dispute between Mathers and the London adepts produced a schism that the Order never recovered from. The principal successor bodies were the Stella Matutina (which Israel Regardie joined in the 1930s), Alpha et Omega (under Mathers), and the A∶A∶, founded by Aleister Crowley after his break with Mathers.

Beliefs & practices

The Golden Dawn system was structured into three orders, themselves divided into ten grades modelled on the sephiroth of the Qabalistic Tree of Life. The Outer Order (Neophyte through Philosophus) handled foundational knowledge lectures and basic ritual. The Inner Order (the Rosae Rubeae et Aureae Crucis, R.R. et A.C.) introduced practical magical work. A Third Order, comprising the “Secret Chiefs,” was nominal and inaccessible to incarnate members.

Practice combined banishing rituals (the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram is the best known), Tarot divination, scrying with the Enochian elemental tablets, and ritual invocations of god-forms drawn principally from the Egyptian and Hebrew pantheons.

Symbols

The Order’s emblems include the Rose Cross lamen worn by Inner Order initiates, the hexagram and pentagram in their Golden Dawn forms (each with its directional, planetary, and elemental attributions), and the Tree of Life as the master diagram organising the entire system. Egyptian iconography — particularly the figure of Thoth, Anubis, and the goddess Nuit — is heavily used in the rituals.

Notable figures

• Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers 1854–1918
  Co-founder; principal ritual architect

  Scottish occultist and translator who wrote or edited most of the Order’s ritual material. His translations of The Greater Key of Solomon, The Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage, and The Kabbalah Unveiled remain in circulation. After the 1900 schism he led the Continental and Alpha et Omega remnant from Paris until his death.

• William Wynn Westcott 1848–1925
  Co-founder; provided the Cipher Manuscripts

  London coroner, Freemason, and Rosicrucian (he was Supreme Magus of the Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia) who provided the documents on which the Order’s authority was founded. Withdrew from active leadership in 1897 after pressure from his employers regarding his occult activities.

• A. E. Waite 1857–1942
  Member; later head of a reformed branch

  English mystic, Mason, and prolific occult author who joined in 1891. After the schisms of the early 1900s he led a Christian-mystical reformulation of the Order. With the artist Pamela Colman Smith he produced the Rider–Waite Tarot deck (1909), the most widely used Tarot in the English-speaking world.

• Israel Regardie 1907–1985
  Stella Matutina initiate; published the Order’s material

  British-American occultist and chiropractor, briefly Aleister Crowley’s secretary, who was initiated into the Stella Matutina branch in 1934. His four-volume The Golden Dawn (1937–40) is the principal public source for the Order’s rituals and is the basis of every modern reconstructionist Golden Dawn body.

Controversies

The Order’s foundation depends on the Sprengel correspondence and the Cipher Manuscripts; the historicity of the German lineage they purport to document is rejected by mainstream scholarship.

The 1900 schism in London arose in part from the conduct of Aleister Crowley, then a recent initiate sponsored into the Inner Order in Paris by Mathers over the London adepts’ objection. Subsequent legal disputes between Mathers and Crowley over the publication of Order rituals (the Equinox case of 1910) became a public rupture.

Israel Regardie’s 1937–40 publication of the Order’s rituals and instructional papers was condemned by surviving initiates as a breach of oath; Regardie defended the publication on the grounds that the system would otherwise be lost.