Practice · Orders · The Golden Dawn and its descendants

Builders of the Adytum

1922 · United States

Paul Foster Case's school, begun in the year he left Alpha et Omega. It teaches by correspondence course rather than by temple attendance, which made it the first of these bodies a person could belong to without knowing anybody in it.

Is anything of the name working now?

Working, on its own word only

A body of this name publishes a current correspondence course from Los Angeles and says it has been running for over a hundred years. It stands here on its own word.

Its own account of itself is at https://www.bota.org/bota/history, read on 21 September 2026. What a body publishes about itself is evidence of what it says; this study records it as that.

What can be gleaned from it

Its Tarot deck, which Case designed on Golden Dawn attributions and which is still in print, and the fact that its teaching was posted to members as lessons. Worth noticing what its own history page does NOT say: it names Case and his successor and does not mention the order he came out of.

Founding

  • Founded 1922 unsourced this study's reading

    The body's own history page gives no founding year; it says the order has been sustained for over a hundred years. 1922 is the year Case left Alpha et Omega. Recorded as unsourced for the same reason as the Society of the Inner Light's. SEARCHED AGAIN IN OCTOBER 2026, AND THE YEAR GOT LESS CERTAIN RATHER THAN MORE. Three candidate years are in circulation and they do not all belong to the same body. The usual 1922 traces, through Wikipedia's footnote, to a self-published occult site and not to any scholarship, so this study cannot take it. Accounts of Case give 'by 1923' for the School of Ageless Wisdom, probably in Boston, which is a correspondence course under a DIFFERENT NAME and may be the thing actually founded; and they date the forming of Builders of the Adytum to after an alleged communication from a Master R. in the summer of 1921, which is a revelatory origin story rather than a documentary date and cannot be checked at all. 1922 is therefore kept as the sorting convention and not as a finding. A scholarly entry does exist — David V. Barrett on B.O.T.A. in Peter Clarke's Encyclopedia of New Religious Movements, Routledge 2006 — and it is NOT cited here, because this study has not read it. Naming it as a source for a year nobody here has seen on its page would be the fabrication this section exists to avoid. It is the obvious next thing to check with a library.

    • World Religions and Spirituality Project, not covered by WRSP; B.O.T.A.'s own history page, re-read 7 October 2026, still gives no year and says only that the order has run for over a hundred years — World Religions and Spirituality Project in copyright — cited by locator, not quoted

  • Founder Paul Foster Case

    Named on the body's own history page. This study's chronology has no page for him.

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

  • Came out of founded_by_members contested this study's reading

    Case had been a member of Alpha et Omega and left it. The body's own history page does not mention that order at all, which is why this is recorded as contested: the descent is asserted from outside and not claimed from inside.

    • 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

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.