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The Canon · No. 094

The Golden Dawn & Thelema

Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn; the A∴A∴ and Ordo Templi Orientis

1888 / 1904 CE – present · Esoteric / Occult · Living · UK, US, worldwide

VII. THE MODERN AGE — 1800 – 1945

How many

Golden Dawn successor orders and Thelemic bodies together number in the low tens of thousands. The influence on modern occultism, and through it on popular culture, is disproportionate.

Who began it

The Golden Dawn was founded in London in 1888 by William Wynn Westcott, Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers and William Robert Woodman, on the authority of a cipher manuscript whose provenance was almost certainly fabricated. Thelema was founded by Aleister Crowley (1875–1947), a former Golden Dawn member, after an experience in Cairo in April 1904.

What it is for

For the Golden Dawn, systematic training in ceremonial magic and mystical attainment. For Thelema, the proclamation of a new aeon in which each person discovers and enacts their own true purpose.

What it worships

The Golden Dawn worked with the Judaeo-Christian and Egyptian god-forms as symbolic and invoked forces. Thelema centres on Nuit (infinite space), Hadit (the point of consciousness) and Ra-Hoor-Khuit (the crowned and conquering child of the new aeon).

What it holds

Golden Dawn: a synthesis of Hermetic Qabalah, tarot, astrology, alchemy, Enochian magic and Egyptian imagery, organised into a graded curriculum. Thelema: Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law — routinely misread as licence, and meaning the discovery and fulfilment of one's True Will, the deep purpose one exists to accomplish, which requires stripping away everything that is merely appetite or social conditioning. Its companion line is Love is the law, love under will. Every man and every woman is a star, each with its own orbit.

What it does

Ritual magic with prescribed tools, colours, names and gestures — the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram is the best-known and has been absorbed into virtually all subsequent Western occultism. Grade initiations mapped onto the Tree of Life. Scrying, astral projection, tarot. Thelema adds the Gnostic Mass, the Book of the Law's holy days, and Crowley's sex-magical instruction in the higher OTO degrees.

After death

Crowley taught reincarnation and claimed memory of previous lives. Thelemic doctrine holds that the individual star continues; the Book of the Law is dismissive of the fear of death, declaring death forbidden and calling it the crown of all. Beyond that both systems concentrate on attainment in this life rather than on eschatology.

Its texts

Golden Dawn: the Cipher Manuscripts and the ritual corpus, published by Israel Regardie in 1937–40 against his order's oath of secrecy, on the grounds that it would otherwise be lost. Thelema: Liber AL vel Legis (The Book of the Law, 1904), Magick in Theory and Practice, The Book of Thoth, 777.

Its branches

Multiple competing Golden Dawn successor orders; Ordo Templi Orientis; A∴A∴; Builders of the Adytum; and the wider field of ceremonial magic.

Of note

Almost everything the modern West associates with magic — the pentagram ritual, the Qabalistic tarot, grade initiations, elemental weapons — was assembled or standardised by these two bodies between 1888 and 1940. Wicca, chaos magic and most fictional magic systems inherit from them.

Its timeline

  1. 1888 CE Golden Dawn founded in London.
  2. 1888–1900 CE Members include W. B. Yeats, Maud Gonne, Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, Constance Wilde and Aleister Crowley.
  3. 1900–1903 CE The order fractures in a series of disputes, with Yeats and Crowley on opposite sides.
  4. <strong>April 1904 CE</strong> Crowley, in Cairo, writes the Book of the Law over three days, dictated, he says, by a discarnate intelligence named Aiwass.
  5. 1907, 1912 CE Crowley founds the A∴A∴; takes over the British section of the OTO.
  6. 1920–23 CE The Abbey of Thelema at Cefalù, Sicily; Mussolini expels him after a member's death and a hostile press campaign that dubs him the wickedest man in the world.
  7. 1937–40 CE Regardie publishes the Golden Dawn material.
  8. 1947 CE Crowley dies at Hastings, largely destitute.
  9. 1960s–present Rediscovery. Crowley appears on the Sgt. Pepper cover; Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page buys his house; Thelemic and Golden Dawn material becomes the backbone of the modern occult publishing industry.
  10. 1980s–present Chaos magic emerges as a stripped-down, belief-agnostic successor; Wicca's ritual structure is substantially Golden Dawn in origin.

Sources

Not yet checked against named sources. This entry is the house's reading; until it is checked, treat each claim as unverified. Correct it, with a source.

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