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Over the last couple of days, Morgan Drake Eckstein has written a couple of thoughtful articles about the present state of the Golden Dawn community, with one drawing parallels with the broader Pagan community and even with the American political scene. You can find this article here. There are several things in these articles, however, that Morgan appears to have misunderstood, or perhaps is pretending not to understand. In the following open letter, I address these issues:
Care Frater Morgan,
Congratulations on a humorous and insightful article, which I by and large enjoyed. You have eloquently delineated several of the challenges presently facing our common Golden Dawn community. For example, you wrote:"WHAT ONE DOES NOT NEED TO IMAGINE IS THE LACK OF COMMUNICATION BETWEEN THE TWO SCHOOLS."I THINK YOU HAVE HIT AN ESSENTIAL NAIL ON THE HEAD HERE. I APPLAUD YOU FOR ENCOURAGING GREATER DIRECT, FRATERNAL COMMUNICATION BETWEEN TRADITIONALIST AND RECONSTRUCTIONIST GOLDEN DAWN ORDERS. CERTAINLY THE FRATRES ET SORORES IN THE HOGD/AO ARE OPEN TO THIS. EVERYONE from the Golden Dawn community is welcome to post on the HOGD/AO Yahoo forum for example, here.
Sadly, most of the leaders of the Golden Dawn reconstructionist camp, on the other hand, stubbornly refuse any direct, fraternal dialogue. Despite the HOGD/AO trying to promote harmony in the GD community for years, they refuse any and all direct, fraternal dialogue. On the one hand, they refuse to post on our forum. On the other hand, they also refuse to allow anyone from our order to post any reply directly on their forum either. It is this intransigent stubbornness from the reconstructionist camp that unnecessarily perpetuates tension in our Golden Dawn community, with the respective camps reduced to talking past one another from their respective soapboxes across the internet.
Next you wrote:The primary issue is whether or not to accept the existence of an European Third Order acceptance of such implies that you are willing to follow their public Head and spokesperson, are willing to increase your level of secrecy to the point where all published material are no longer considered valid (including the Mathers material) and all the rituals and lessons have been rewritten to re-install absolute secrecy, and are willing to be expelled if one of your fellow lodge members breaks their secrecy oath. Acceptance also implies that all modern developments of the Golden Dawn system (aka any that developed after the Cipher Manuscript) will someday be abandoned.Here I can not at all agree with you. No one has ever said that all modern developments need to be abandoned. No one has said that anyone needs to follow anyone else either. Have you really so completely misunderstood, or are you simply making this up and falsely attributing it to Golden Dawn traditionalists?
In reality, the HOGD/AO has said over and over for years that there is plenty of room for diversity in the Golden Dawn community. This is what makes the GD community grow and thrive.
Diversity is a good thing. Our order, at least, is willing to live and let live. It is the GD reconstructionist camp that constantly has been attacking the traditionalist Golden Dawn orders, and certainly not the other way around. we at the HOGD/AO fully embrace diversity in the Golden Dawn community, even if we do not always agree with you and others on everything.
Again, I find your honesty and insight demonstrated about direct communication in our community to be highly commendable. Sadly, however, it appears that you are not always willing to fully embody such a lofty and admirable level of integrity, as in when you wrote today:
"As far as I have been able to determine from the outcries of the internet police is that if someone does not agree absolutely with your opinion, your lesson plan, your Grade system, and your version of Golden Dawn history, then it is flame war."Aw come on, Morgan. Please quit pretending to be stupid as it is obvious that you are not. You know full well the difference between flame war and honest, fraternal discussion and debate. You also know full well that the HOGD/AO encourages and fosters fraternal discussion and debate, and does not pretend to be any sort of internet police.
It is also true, however, that after nearly two decades of recurrent and repeated attacks on our order not only on the internet but even in court as well, that I personally have precious little tolerance left for such destructive behavior in our community.
"So what is flame war?", you ask. Do I really need to spell it out to you even yet once again? Well, OK, let's give you the benefit of every doubt.
Fraternal discussion becomes flame war, in my opinion, when fraternal discussion is hijacked by cheap rhetorical tactics. These include but are not limited to the use of "talking points", repeated over and over, propaganda style. You can tell that a discussion has degenerated into flame war, when the person you are engaging ignores every counter argument, and merely repeats their talking points over and over. Do you really need concrete examples of this? OK, go over to Pat Zalewksi's Yahoo forum and search for the search terms "secret chiefs, SC, third order," or "Desmond Bourke."
What do you find with such a simple search? - Hundreds upon hundreds of attack posts repeating the same "talking points" over and over like a broken record. Our order's leaders and members have wasted literally thousands of hours rebutting the "talking points" that have been written over and over on these subjects on that forum, propaganda style for well over a decade.
And guess what?
Every single rebuttal, every single refutation, has simply been ignored.
And guess what else?
The same talking points have simply been repeated over and over, propaganda style for over a decade.
Enough is enough already.
Sincerely,
David Griffin
Magic is the claimed art of altering things either by supernatural means or through knowledge of occult natural laws unknown to science. Magic has been practised in all cultures, and utilizes ways of understanding, experiencing and influencing the world somewhat akin to those offered by religion, though it is sometimes regarded as more focused on achieving results than religious worship. Magic is often viewed with suspicion by the wider community, and is commonly practised in isolation and secrecy. Modern Western magicians generally state magic's primary purpose to be personal spiritual growth, many seeing magic ritual purely in psychological terms as a powerful means of autosuggestion and of contacting the unconscious mind.[citation needed] Modern perspectives on the theory of magic broadly follow two views, which also correspond closely to ancient views. The first sees magic as a result of a universal sympathy within the universe, where if something is done here a result happens somewhere else. The other view sees magic as a collaboration with spirits who cause the effect.
Rituals
Magical rituals are the precisely defined actions (including speech) used to work magic. Bronislaw Malinowski describes ritual language as possessing a high "coefficient of weirdness," by which he means that the language used in ritual is archaic and out of the ordinary, which helps foster the proper mindset to believe in the ritual. S. J. Tambiah notes, however, that even if the power of the ritual is said to reside in the words, "the words only become effective if uttered in a very special context of other action." These other actions typically consist of gestures, possibly performed with special objects at a particular place or time. Object, location, and performer may require purification beforehand. This caveat draws a parallel to the felicity conditions J. L. Austin requires of performative utterances. By "performativity" Austin means that the ritual act itself achieves the stated goal. For example, a wedding ceremony can be understood as a ritual, and only by properly performing the ritual does the marriage occur. 'Emile Durkheim stresses the importance of rituals as a tool to achieve "collective effervescence," which serves to help unify society. Psychologists, on the other hand, describe rituals in comparison to obsessive-compulsive rituals, noting that attentional focus falls on the lower level representation of simple gestures. This results in goal demotion, as the ritual places more emphasis on performing the ritual just right than on the connection between the ritual and the goal. However, the purpose of ritual is to act as a focus and the effect will vary depending on the individual.
[edit] Magical symbols
Magic often utilizes symbols that are thought to be intrinsically efficacious. Anthropologists, such as Sir James Frazer (1854-1938), have characterized the implementation of symbols into two primary categories: the "principle of similarity," and the "principle of contagion." Frazer further categorized these principles as falling under "sympathetic magic," and "contagious magic." Frazer asserted that these concepts were "general or generic laws of thought, which were misapplied in magic."[10]
[edit] The Principle of Similarity
The principle of similarity, also known as the "association of ideas," which falls under the category of "sympathetic magic," is the thought that if a certain result follows a certain action, then that action must be responsible for the result. Therefore, if one is to perform this action again, the same result can again be expected. One classic example of this mode of thought is that of the rooster and the sunrise. When a rooster crows, it is a response to the rising of the sun. Based on sympathetic magic, one might interpret these series of events differently. The law of similarity would suggest that since the sunrise follows the crowing of the rooster, the rooster must have caused the sun to rise.[11] Causality is inferred where it should not have been. Therefore, a practitioner might believe that if he is able to cause the rooster to crow, he will be able to control the timing of the sunrise.
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With two terminology posts in a row I must be turning into a curmudgeon or something. "You kids spell your damn words right!" Thankfully this one is probably my last on the subject, at least for awhile.
Every so often some nightclub performer comes along and decides to call what they do "magick" in order to, I guess, sound cool or something even though what they are doing is clearly stage magic. Another of these is apparently on the loose, named Odes Odhner.
Odhner calls what he does "magick," something that blends traditional nightclub-type magic, with majik, a kind of magic that examines occult practices of the present and past.
Hang on a second there. What the hell is "majik?" That can't be a real word!
See, when Aleister Crowley proposed that "magic" be used to describe stage magic and "magick" be used to describe the spiritual practices of theurgy and thaumaturgy he was simply reverting to the Elizabethan spelling of the word. It's English, just with a more archaic spelling. But "majik?" It's clearly Odhner's own goofy terminology, and Kelly-Anne Suarez, the journalist writing the article, buys it without a second thought. Maybe she just couldn't be bothered to check.
Here's a quick reference for future lazy journalists.
MAGIC: Stage magic, as practiced by nightclub magicians, mentalists and so forth.
MAGICK: Spiritual practices drawn from the Western Esoteric Tradition.
MAJIK: A completely made up word, or one of the above written by someone who is borderline illiterate.
See the difference?
I think I'm probably done with this topic as the terminology becomes more muddled every time I look into it. In my opinion Crowley's use of two (and only two) distinct spellings makes sense, but once you start throwing in every possible phonetic variation in order to look "edgy" or "cool" or something else that translates as "just plain stupid" the whole thing becomes a losing battle for anyone who values precision and consistency.
It's too bad, really. Complaining about this may seem overly pedantic, but if folks could agree on standard spellings for their terms it would make the Internet a whole lot more useful for those of us who do actual magical research.
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This image has always fascinated me. It is of course the enititiy 'Lam' which wicked man extraordinaire Aleister Crowley claimed to have summoned in the early twentieth century. He had apparently contacted this entity through a series of magical rites entitled the Almantrah Working. One of the reasons that this image has fascinated me is the uncanny resemblance it bears to another fairly striking drawing of another Entity that was encountered by a man some 60 odd years after LAM.
This is the face of the female entity that Sci-fi writer/Alien Abductee Whitley Strieber claimed to have encountered in his best selling Communion. As has been pointed out by others long before me, you can't help but see a resemblance. Very strange indeed. But I guess thats the world of the Fortean for you. I will leave you with these photos to look over for now.
Further/Recommended reading to learn more:Aleister Crowley's Lam ">
ALEISTER CROWLEY AND THE LAM STATEMENT by Ian Blake
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