The Golden Dawn - 4/sept/2024

THE GOLDEN DAWN

Founded March of 1888, emerged from the soup of para masonic sects and groups. 

Its basically paramasonic structure + the doctrine of western esotericism.

Hanegraaf notes:

Starts on 576

• The immediate inspiration for the Golden Dawn was a masonic Rosicrucian body, the Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia, that had been established in 1867.

• People kept getting in to the SRIA wanting to study and practice magic, but that wasn’t cool in the SRIA. They realized they needed a new body .

• It was the brainchild of Frederick Holland, an industrial chemist who joined the S.R.I.A. in April 1882. It attracted a dude named Kenneth Mackenzie. 

• They made a new organization called the Society of Eight, which had no structure or systematic teaching.

• So Kenneth Mackenzie went shopping for systemic structures. He kept joining different ritual orders with names like The Royal Oriental Order of Sikha and the Sat B’hai.

• When he died, he left the outlines for his new initiatory ritual structure in outline, in code. 

• These texts were discovered by other members of the SRIA, and they became the foundation for the Golden Dawn.

• William Wynn Westcott, a London coroner and prominent member of the S.R.I.A., took over the post of Grand Secretary of yet another small masonic body, the Swedenborgian Rite, together with his predecessor’s papers.

OH THATS WHAT HAPPENED. HOW HAS THIS NEVER COME UP BEFORE? THATS INCREDIBLY IMPORTANT. HE WAS THE ONE WHO TRANSLATED THEM.

• Around the time, the Hermetic Society, a lecture society made to propagate the western esoteric tradition, shut down because its founder died. Both Westcott and Mathers were lecturers. 

• Westcott called Mathers and asked for help developing the Manuscripts into a full system. He also didn’t tell Mathers where he got the manusctipts. Saying he got them from a “Masonic Historian” the rev AFA Woodford, who -conveniently for Westcott- died 2 months later. 

HOLY SHIT

The Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia or S.R.I.A, studies, but does not practice, magic. This was a problem for one Kenneth Mackenzie. He wanted to get practical. He wanted to light the candles and say the chants and actually really properly try to talk to the angels. Unfortunately for him, while the S.R.I.A were leading the pack on the study and preservation of the doctrine of Western Esotericism, they had no ritual structure. Nobody in the S.R.I.A. wanted to put on cloaks and chant while waving around a ritual dagger. This could not do. Mackenzie needed to explore some other societies. So, near the turn of the century, he got together with some likeminded friends, and went a-hunting.

They called themselves The Society of Eight, and they would join orders with delightfully 1875 names like “The Royal Oriental Order of Sikha” and the “Sat B’hai.” Mackenzie took notes. When Mackenzie died on July 3rd, 1886, he left behind a manuscript, written entirely in a 15th century cipher. Its contents were an outline for how to combine the S.R.I.A.’s doctrine with the ritual structure of an honest-to-god mystical society.

This Cipher Manuscript would fall into the hands of fellow S.R.I.A member William Wynn Westcott, one of the few people on earth who could recognize and decode the manuscript. (If you are curious, it was written in Trithemius’s Polygraphiae cipher.) 

When Westcott realized what he had, he got to work building one of the most influential ritual systems in western history. And by got to work, I mean he called Samuel and Moira Mathers and asked them to design most of the rituals and structures. Crucially, he would not tell Mathers where he got the manuscript. He would say he received the manuscripts from a masonic historian named A.F.A. Woodford, implying that the text was far older and more historically significant than it actually was. This was a gamble. If Mathers ever questioned the veracity of the manuscripts, he could easily speak to Woodford, and the whole jig would be up. Luckily, Woodford would die barely two months later. His claim to the core document of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was now set in stone. 

Then Westcott got really clever. He included a note in the manuscript, written in the same cipher, from one Fräulein Sprengel, otherwise Soror Sapiens dominabitur astris – ‘a chief among the members of die goldene dammerung’ and established a mail correspondence. Writing as Frau Sprengel, Westcott would weave a fantastic and mythical history for the Hermetic order of the Golden Dawn, and give himself the authority to found a new lodge in her name. 

This new Golden Dawn lodge would be based on SRIA’s structure, and a SRIA lodge needed three chiefs to run. Westcott was one, Mathers was two (whether he believed it or not), their third would be an accomplished hebraist and kabbalist named William Robert Woodman, who happened to be the current Supreme Magus of the S.R.I.A. By their powers combined, they would found their new order. On March 1st, 1888, they would consecrate the Isis-Urania Temple No. 3, of the Order of the G.D. in the Outer’