Practice · Orders · The Golden Dawn and its descendants
Servants of the Light
1964 as the Helios course; Servants of the Light from 1973 · Jersey
A correspondence school founded when Gareth Knight and John Hall appointed W. E. Butler its Director of Studies. Butler had been trained in Dion Fortune's Fraternity of the Inner Light.
Is anything of the name working now?
Working, on its own word only
A body of this name teaches online and names its current Director of Studies. It stands here on its own word.
Its own account of itself is at https://www.servantsofthelight.org/about-sol/, 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
A worked example of how a descent is actually claimed. Its own page states the chain — Butler trained under Fortune, Fortune's fraternity came out of the Golden Dawn — in one sentence, which is both the most common form these claims take and exactly as much evidence as a body's own website can be.
Founding
-
Founded 1964 as the Helios course; Servants of the Light from 1973
- World Religions and Spirituality Project, the school's own About page, read 21 September 2026 — World Religions and Spirituality Project in copyright — cited by locator, not quoted
-
Founder W. E. Butler, appointed by Gareth Knight and John Hall
- World Religions and Spirituality Project, the school's own About page, read 21 September 2026 — World Religions and Spirituality Project in copyright — cited by locator, not quoted
What it came out of, and what came out of it
-
Came out of claims_succession
The school states the chain itself, in one sentence: Butler was trained in Dion Fortune's Fraternity of the Inner Light, which came out of the Golden Dawn. That is a claim of training rather than of charter, and it is the form nearly every modern lineage claim takes.
- World Religions and Spirituality Project, the school's own About page, read 21 September 2026 — World Religions and Spirituality Project 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.