Practice · Orders · What survives
What survives
A society that admits people by ceremony and asks them to keep quiet about it ought to leave nothing behind. These left a great deal — some published deliberately, some published by members who had promised not to, and some produced in court. This page is what a reader can open, and what they cannot.
In their own words
Three of these bodies published constitutions old enough to be out of
copyright and clean enough to quote. Every passage below was cut from
its source by script/extract_order_passages.rb, which names
each one by the words it begins and ends with and refuses a phrase that
is missing or ambiguous; none of it was typed from a book.
The Theosophical Society, 1875
They are three, and have been so from the beginning. (1). To form the nucleus of a Universal Brotherhood of Humanity without distinction of race, colour, or creed. (2). To promote the study of Aryan and other Scriptures, of the World’s religion and sciences, and to vindicate the importance of old Asiatic literature, namely, of the Brahmanical, Buddhist, and Zoroastrian philosophies. (3). To investigate the hidden mysteries of Nature under every aspect possible, and the psychic and spiritual powers latent in man especially. These are, broadly stated, the three chief objects of the Theosophical Society.
In plain English The Society's three aims, from its co-founder, in 1889. Only the third is occult in the ordinary sense; the first is a statement about human brotherhood and the second is comparative religion. A body whose published objects are these can admit almost anybody, which is how it grew as fast as it did.
The members of the Theosophical Society at large are free to profess whatever religion or philosophy they like, or none if they so prefer, provided they are in sympathy with, and ready to carry out one or more of the three objects of the Association.
In plain English Membership asks for sympathy with the objects, not assent to a doctrine — the difference between a society and a church, and the difference most of the bodies on this page inherited. The sentence before it is the other half of the arrangement: there is an Esoteric Section as well, and the open objects are what the outer body is for.
Ordo Templi Orientis, 1906, on its earliest constitution
Learn then that our Holy Order has but Three True Grades; as it is written in The Book of the Law: The Hermit, The Lover, and the Man of Earth. It is but for convenience that these grades have been separated into Three Triads.
In plain English Eleven degrees are the arrangement; three are the thing arranged. An order's grade list is the part a reader meets first and the part that means least without the ceremony behind it.
The Man of Earth takes no share in the Government of the Order; for he is not yet called upon to give his life to it in service; and with us Government is Service, and nothing else.
In plain English What the grades are for, in the document's own words: rank is duty rather than privilege, and the lowest grade is excused government because it has not yet been asked to give anything up.
A∴A∴, 1907
IT is necessary, my dear brothers, to give you a clear idea of the interior Order ; of that illuminated community which is scattered throughout the world, but which is governed by one truth and united in one spirit. This community possesses a School, in which all who thirst for knowledge are instructed by the Spirit of Wisdom itself; and all the mysteries of nature are preserved in this school for the children of light. Perfect knowledge of nature and of humanity is taught in this school. It is from her that all truths penetrate into the world ; she is the school of all who search for wisdom, and it is in this community alone that truth and the explanation of all mystery are to be found.
In plain English The claim every one of these bodies makes in some form: that behind the visible society there is an invisible one, and that the visible society is its outer expression. It is unfalsifiable by design, and it is what makes a broken lineage survivable — the real order was never the one with the minute book.
The Revisers wish to acknowledge gratefully the translation of Madame de Steiger, which they have freely quoted.
In plain English The A∴A∴'s account of itself is a rewrite of a book published in 1802 by Karl von Eckartshausen, and the headnote says so. Nothing had to be uncovered to establish it: the borrowing is printed on the page, above the text that borrows.
Published by people who had promised not to
The Golden Dawn is the best-documented order in this section and published almost none of it itself. Crowley began printing its rituals in The Equinox from 1909, having been initiated into it and obligated to secrecy; Israel Regardie printed the curriculum in four volumes from 1937, from the papers of the Stella Matutina, after the original temples had fractured.
This is worth stating plainly because of how much of this study rests on it. The Tree of Life as this site draws it, the pentagram ritual as it follows it step by step, the Hebrew letters on the Tarot trumps — all of that reaches the present through material two men published in breach of an obligation. It also means what survives is one successor body's version, at one date, in one temple, and not a neutral record of what every Golden Dawn temple did. Regardie's volumes are still in copyright, so this study cites The Golden Dawn by page and never quotes it.
Produced in court
The strangest archive in this section. Because the O.T.O. held Crowley's copyrights, the question of who succeeded him was worth money, and a question worth money gets asked in a place that keeps records. Two reported decisions came out of it — Motta v. Samuel Weiser, Inc., 768 F.2d 481 (1st Cir. 1985), and McMurtry v. Society Ordo Templi Orientis, 819 F.2d 1146 (9th Cir. 1987), with certiorari denied the following year. Both are free to read in full. The Golden Dawn's name has been through the same mill more recently, in the Northern District of California in 2005.
What they are evidence of needs saying carefully, because it is easy to overstate in either direction. A court decided who may use a name and hold a copyright in the United States. It did not decide, and was not asked to decide, who inherited an initiation — and the bodies that lost did not stop existing.
Cited here, and not quoted
Three of this section's best sources are in copyright. They are named so a reader can go and get them, cited by page, and never reproduced — the rule this study already follows for Scholem, Fortune and Kaplan.
- The Cambridge Handbook of Western Mysticism and Esotericism — Cambridge University Press, 2016. Asprem's chapter 'The Golden Dawn and the O.T.O.' (pp. 272–283) is this study's scholarly anchor for both orders: what they were, when they ran, and what was new about treating an initiatory order as a vehicle for teaching magic.
- ‘Fräulein Sprengel’ and the Origins of the Golden Dawn: A Surprising Discovery — Aries: Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 11.2, Brill, 2011. An article in Aries 11.2 (2011), pp. 249–257, reporting the first fresh examination of the German Sprengel letters since Howe's in 1972: the writer refers to himself throughout with MASCULINE endings, which the English correspondence Westcott produced does not show.
- World Religions and Spirituality Project — Online, Virginia Commonwealth University. A scholarly reference project of signed, dated profiles of religious and spiritual movements, free to read. This study cites it for bodies that no book of its own covers — the Theosophical Society, the O.T.O., the Church of Satan and the Temple of Set.
One more is cited and not quoted for a different reason entirely. Anderson's Constitutions of the Free-Masons of 1723 is long out of copyright, and it is where the lodge, the grade and the obligation enter this story. It cannot be quoted because no scan of it survives its own typography: the first Charge comes back from the OCR as “is dblig'd;by Meer to o tie modittfaw”. A quotation no reader could trust is worse than no quotation, which is the answer Ripley's Compound of Alchymy already gets in the alchemy section for exactly the same reason.
What no order publishes
How many members it has. Not one body on this page gives a figure a reader could check, at any date. The Temple of Set is the only one that states the refusal as policy rather than leaving it to be inferred, which makes it the honest case rather than the unusual one; the most recent membership number this study found for any order here is an estimate from 1984.
And the thing an order exists to do. Every document above describes a ceremony or the structure around one. None of them is the ceremony working on somebody, which is what the whole apparatus is for and the one thing that was never going to survive into a text.