Practice · Orders · Overview

Orders

An order is a society you join by ceremony. It admits people one at a time, teaches them in a fixed sequence of grades, asks them not to repeat what they are taught, and holds that something is conveyed by the admitting that could not be conveyed by a book. Almost everything else in this study — the Tree of Life as it is usually drawn, the pentagram ritual, the Tarot's Hebrew letters — reached the present through one of these bodies rather than through a manuscript.

There are thirteen of them here, from a London tavern in 1717 to San Francisco in 1975. The listing is short on purpose. What takes the room instead is the question every one of them raises and none of them answers: how would you know?

Three kinds of source, and what each can carry

Everywhere else in this study the source is a book, and a book sits still: the 1597 Mirror of Alchemy says today what it said four centuries ago, and a quotation from it can be checked forever. An order does not sit still, and the three things a reader most wants to know about one — who founded it, what it came out of, and whether it still exists — are exactly the three its members, its rivals and its historians disagree about. So every statement in this section carries not just a source but a KIND of source, and the kinds are not interchangeable.

  1. What a body says about itself

    A constitution, a website, a history page. This is real evidence and it is evidence of one thing: what the body says. It cannot establish that a body is old, or that it received anything from anyone. Four of the thirteen rest on this alone and the listing says so in words, not in a badge — working, on its own word only.

  2. What historians have established

    The academic study of Western esotericism is about fifty years old and has its own journals and chairs. It supplies the answers nobody inside an order is well placed to give: whether a warrant is genuine, when a body actually stopped, what a founder took and from where. It is also where this section's least comfortable finding comes from, and that finding is about the most influential order on the page.

  3. What a court has decided

    Twice, two bodies using one name have gone to law, and a court has produced a public document saying which of them may use it. These are the only sources here that settle anything. It is worth being exact about how little they settle: a court decides who owns a name and a copyright, in one country, on the evidence put in front of it. It does not decide who inherited an initiation, and it does not claim to.

What can be gleaned, and what cannot

A reader coming to these bodies for the first time usually wants three things. Two of them are available and the third is not.

What they taught
Nearly all of it, for the older ones, and largely against their will. Crowley began printing the Golden Dawn's rituals in 1909 and Regardie printed its curriculum in 1937; the A∴A∴ published its own syllabus from the start; the O.T.O.'s constitution has been in print since 1919. What survives is the page for this.
What came out of what
Mostly, with dates, and with a clear line between the descents a historian states and the ones a body claims for itself. Evolution draws it, and every line on it carries the source that put it there.
How many people are in one
Nothing. Not for any body on this page, at any date. The Temple of Set is the clearest case because it states the refusal as policy rather than leaving it to be noticed — but no order here publishes a membership figure a reader could check, and an estimate from 1984 is the most recent number this study found for any of them.

Where to go next

  • The orders Thirteen bodies, 1717 to 1975, each with its dates, what it was for, what can be got from it, and whether anything of the name is working now.
  • Evolution What came out of what, in order, with the source for every line — and the four descents this study joined up rather than found stated.
  • What survives The documents a reader can actually open, three of them quoted here in full, and an account of what is missing and why.

These orders elsewhere in this study