THE GOLDEN DAWN
Twilight of the
Magicians
The Rise and Fall of a Magical Order
6. EMANATION
…
Dion Fortune, under her real name
of Violet Firth – her penn-name was derived from her Order motto ‘Dea Non
Fortuna’ – joined the London Temple of Brodie-Innes Alpha and Omega in 1919,
working under Maiya Curtis-Webb (later to be Mrs. Tranchell-Hayes), whom she
took as a model for her fictional heroine Vivian le Fay Morgan. For reasons
never made clear, (but assuredly not for the reasons implied in Crowley ’s scurrilous poem
about Maiya:
Mrs. Webb does what she can,
As a lustry Lesbian, to make a
Sappho of the filly,
Who never trots to Piccadilly
Girl to girl, and man to man,
Is part of her plan… [and so on, ad nauseam]
…in 1904 Regardie transferred his
allegiance to the Stella Matutina.
Even here he became disillusioned
by the opposition of elderly members to practical magic. Dismayed by an
ossified system, Regardie determined to risk their deadly and hostile currents
of will – deeming these to be equally ossified – and began, in 1936, to publish
‘The Teachings, Rites and Ceremonies of the Order of the Golden Dawn’. By the
time the fourth volume had appeared in 1940, many members of the Stella
Matutina had become reconciled to the work – if only for the practical reason
that the existence of a printed ritual removed the need for manual copying. A
further result of his action was the birth of ‘The Brothers of the Path’, a
movement founded in Yorkshire by Anthony Greville-Gascoigne; it was inspired by
Regardie’s work, devoted to the promotion of his type of occultism, and it
published a journal called The Golden
Dawn, to which Regardie contributed a justification of his work. But the
journal, the Brotherhood and its ideals all vanished in the Second World War.
None of the original Temples survived – the Hermes
Temple in Bristol
lasted longest, dying in 1972 with its last chief, who protested to the end the
non-existence of the rival Hermanubis
Temple Balls Pond Road
and I believe it to have been no more than a chimera. Other, more recent
innovation exists, claiming descent from the cipher manuscripts, and to the
various offshoots of the old Order that struggled across the Atlantic still
survive in the form of Paul Foster Case’s Brotherhood of the Adytum. But
Mathers has gone, Felkin has gone and Waite has gone. Perhaps only the Secret
Chiefs remain.
In 1966 a box was found on the
beach near Selsey
Beach
7. KINGDOM
The Golden Dawn gave birth to
magicians, charlatans and eccentrics of many kinds, but it did not produce a
single man or woman of genius. Yeats was unquestionably profoundly influenced
by the Order, but his poetic genius would have flowered whatever path he had
taken, while Mathers brought his magical genius fully fledged to the Order.
Others, however industrious, fascinating or influential, did not affect the
mainstream of English literature, art or thought; but they did create many
curious byways, exploring them with the aid of the principles and practices of
the Golden Dawn, and these byways have kept their fascination for dreamers and
critics alike.
In the literature the most
enduring of these byways is within the genre of occult fiction, for while ghost
stories and fairy tales have always been with us, tales of sorcery and
supernatural evil set in the real world of the present were something new to
the reading public at the turn of the century. Truly ‘occult’ fiction may be
said to have begun with Dracula
(1897), and the enormous popularity of this tale of vampires and evil powers
undoubtedly encouraged publishers to take up similar fiction from other, less
known authors. Dracula itself cannot
be laid at the door of the Golden Dawn, for Bram Stoker (despite popular claims
to the contrary) was never a member, but he was friend of Brodie-Innes and they
did discuss their mutual interest in the dark side of occultism. The true forte
of the literati of the Golden Dawn
was in producing tales that depended for their effect upon an unquestioning
acceptance of the reality of supernatural forces and the validity of rituals
designed to control them. These stories are invariably structured around a hero
who fills the role of a supremely wise Initiate or, more frequently, a ‘psychic
detective’, using his occult training to solve supernatural problems and to
combat earthly and unearthly evil. Without the existence of the Golden Dawn
such fiction could not be written, so closely does it depend on activities and
ideas prevalent in the Order; and it deserves examining in depth, for its
places in the history of popular fiction has never been critically assessed.
The first author to bring the
Order to the aid of his fiction was Algernon Blackwood, whose hero, John
Silence, was modeled on a real member of the Golden Dawn, but one it has not
been possible to identify, save by the initials that appear in the dedication of
John Silence, Physician extraordinary
(1908): ‘To M.L.W. the original of John Silence and my companion in many
adventures’. Blackwood was a member of Waite’s faction of the Golden Dawn after
1903 but he has joined in 1900 so that he would have been familiar with the
rituals and the ethos of the Order when still in its magical state.
The her of his tales is an ideal
Rosicrucian, healing the spiritually sick without charge and evidently trained
by more traditional Rosicrucians that those of the Golden Dawn:
In order to grapple with cases of
this peculiar kind, he had submitted himself to a long and severe training, at
once psychical, mental and spiritual. What precisely this training has been, or
where undergone, no one seemed to know – for he never spoke of it, as indeed,
he betrayed no single other characteristic of the charlatan – but the fact that
he had involved a total disappearance from the world for five years, and that
after he returned and began his singular practice no one ever dreamed of,
applying to him the so easily acquired epithet of quack, spoke much of the
seriousness of his strange quest and also for the genuineness of his
attainments.
…
(изв. THE AQUARIAN
PRESS Wellingborough, Northamptonshire, first published 1983)
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