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| The Demise of the Golden Dawn by Richard Collet |
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It was the date of the Cyphers (1809) which was forged, not the contents. Waite said, “it is unsafe to challenge their remote German connection;” [that is to the older Rose and Gold Cross] Woodman set forth the Gnosticism, Neoplatonism and Kabbalism which would be used by the Golden Dawn. ( Briefly, Gnosticism is Dualism, Neoplatonism is Monism, and the Kabbalah follows a difficult but creative path between them)
Woodman worked with his fellow Soc. Ros. in Ang brother Rev A Woodford, also a Mason and clergyman,(3) who contributed an authentic 5 Grade Ritual outline, and the John Dee Enochian system, and the Crystal gazing methods of Frederick Hockley. Dr Wynn Westcott worked with them and proposed the formation of “a society for the study of the medieval occult sciences,” with all of these. This would be known as the Golden Dawn. It’s distant antecedents were Society of the Shining Light of Dawn of 1810 headed by the Kabbalist Johann Frederick Falk, ‘the Falcon,’ and the ‘Toward the Rising Dawn’ a Jewish Masonic Lodge in Frankfort. Lord Bulwer Lytton, the author, was associated with a French Lodge of this Order.
This, the actual slow germination of these ideas and practices which would become the Golden Dawn is much more interesting than the fictitious history, advanced by Dr Westcott. How could this fine, educated and principled man concoct a fabricated charter coming from a Fraulein A Sprengel of Nuremburg? The most tolerant or generous probability is that he was bound by Masonic Oath not to reveal his actual sources.
This brings us back to the issue of who moved the Fool Tarot card to a different initiation sequence and who moved the moon to Yesod; and Mercury to the feminine Pillar? And changed the Cypher Manuscripts as well. When Westcott in 1886 commissioned Mathers to fill in the outline of rituals in the Cipher Manuscripts, he let the sorcerer out of the Museum. Through 1887 Mathers had access to the Ciphers and most likely did the revisionist changing of the Sephirotic and Tarot sequences at that time. He regarded himself as already being under the guidance of the Secret Chiefs.(4) Thus he was confident enough to carry out the reassignment of planets to Sephiroth, and the sequence of the Tarots.
Westcott’s retirement, and the deaths of Little, Woodman and Woodford; allowed Mathers to assume complete Headship of the GD and steer it further in the direction of “a society for the practice of the medieval occult sciences,” not just “the study,” as in the Soc. Ros. in Anglia. Mathers did, however, produce good translations of the Kabbalah Unveiled, and the Scholomance, the Greater and Lesser Keys, the Goetia, the Howling, and the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage, a text which encompasses achieving Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel. Those GD members who used these indiscriminately brought trouble upon themselves. Crowley’s audacious attempt at Abramelin Magic lead to his meeting ‘Aiwass,’ a Mid-Eastern Solar-Phallic Spirit of questionable provenance. The Abramelin system was neither presented, nor practiced by the regular Golden Dawn, however.
Yeats wasn’t interested or overly concerned with the origin of the Order, but found in it methods something practical and workable. He termed it “a system of thought leaving my imagination free to create as it chose and yet make all that it created, or could create, part of one history, and that is the soul’s.”
What he found was the marvelous synthesis’ of mythology and symbolism which had been developed during the Masonic Rosicrucian period and made possible by the scholarship of Hockley and Mackenzie and Dr Woodman; and the Classical language abilities of Rev A Woodford. These men passed away before the fissuring began or even before the order was well started. Had these men not passed away, and had Westcott not departed, they could have restrained the autocratic mania of Mathers.
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