The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn

Is anything of the name working now?

The name is in use, and contested

The original order broke up between 1900 and 1903 and its temples continued under other names. Bodies working today use the name; at least two of them have sued each other over it in a United States federal court. This study takes no view on which is entitled to it, and records that the question has been asked in the only forum that produces a public answer.

What can be gleaned from it

Nearly all of it, and not by the order's choice. Crowley printed its rituals in The Equinox from 1909 and Regardie printed the curriculum in 1937. Most of what this study says about the Tree of Life, the pentagram ritual and the Tarot trumps reaches it through that material. Its own warrant is the one thing that did not survive examination.

Founding

• Founded 1888

  Asprem gives the order's working life as 1888 to 1903, which is also why this study records an ending for it.

  • 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

• Founder William Wynn Westcott

  • 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

• Founder Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers

  • 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

• Founder William Robert Woodman

  Supreme Magus of the S.R.I.A., brought in as the third chief and dead by 1891. This study's chronology has no page for him.

  • 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

In the chronology: William Wynn Westcott, Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers.

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

• Came out of founded_by_members

  All three founders were members of the S.R.I.A., and the Golden Dawn's grade ladder is the S.R.I.A.'s. It admitted women on the same terms as men, which the S.R.I.A. did not.

  • 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: Stella Matutina, Alpha et Omega, A∴A∴.

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.

On the record

• Its warrant to exist a cipher manuscript and letters from a German adept, Fräulein Sprengel disputed

  The order's authority to exist rested on a correspondence with a German Rosicrucian nobody has since been able to find. McIntosh's examination of the German letters in 2011 — the first since Howe's in 1972 — found that the writer refers to himself with MASCULINE endings throughout, which is not what a Fräulein would write. This study records the finding and does not extend it: what the grammar shows is that the German is not by the woman the English correspondence describes.

  • ‘Fräulein Sprengel’ and the Origins of the Golden Dawn: A Surprising Discovery, Aries 11.2 (2011), pp. 249–257 in copyright — cited by locator, not quoted
  • 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

• The name, in dispute litigated in the United States, N.D. Cal., 2005 contested

  One body calling itself the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn sued another over the name. Cited for the fact of the suit, not its outcome.

  • The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, Inc. v. Griffin, No. 3:05-cv-00432 (N.D. Cal., filed 31 January 2005) court record — CourtListener, docket