Practice · Orders · The Golden Dawn and its descendants

Alpha et Omega

between 1903 and 1913 · England, France and the United States

The branch that stayed loyal to Mathers after the 1900 revolt, renamed. Moina Mathers ran it after his death in 1918.

Is anything of the name working now?

The name is in use, and contested

The original body is not known to have survived the Second World War. The name is in use again today. This study has not established a connection between the two and does not assert one.

What can be gleaned from it

Two of the most productive people in modern occultism left it within months of each other in 1922 — Paul Foster Case and Dion Fortune — and each founded a body that is still teaching. Its importance is almost entirely in what walked out of it.

Founding

  • Founded between 1903 and 1913

    The branch loyal to Mathers, renamed at some point in that window. The vagueness is the sources', and it is what a rename inside a collapsing body looks like from outside.

    • The Cambridge Handbook of Western Mysticism and Esotericism, Egil Asprem, ‘The Golden Dawn and the O.T.O.’, pp. 272–283 in copyright — cited by locator, not quoted

What it came out of, and what came out of it

  • Came out of schism

    • The Cambridge Handbook of Western Mysticism and Esotericism, Egil Asprem, ‘The Golden Dawn and the O.T.O.’, pp. 272–283 in copyright — cited by locator, not quoted

Bodies this study records as coming out of it: The Society of the Inner Light, Builders of the Adytum.

A descent is a claim in this database and never a column, so every line above and below carries a source. See Evolution for the whole chain and for what the five kinds of descent mean.