As you may know, I don't do Golden Dawn. It brings out the worst in me.
However, it's a good system for other people. Many of my friends are doing really well in that particular vibe.
Nick Farrell, author of When a Tree Falls, Tarot Revelations, Egyptian Scarab Oracle, Magical Pathworking: Techniques of Active Imagination, Making Talismans: Living Entities of Power, and Gathering the Magic: Creating 21st Century esoteric Groups (and I'm betting many more titles to come, titles with colons, yea, and verily titles also without colons), has announced the Magical Order of Aurora Aurea (MOAA). It's website is www.auroraaurea.com, and if you want to see his announcement, it's at THIS LINK.
Nick's got a level head on his shoulders, and so far I haven't seen any reason to suspect he's going to turn into another Robert Zink. If you're looking for a Golden Dawn group to join with minimal baggage, but as much "lineage" as any other GD Order, I'd suggest checking out MOAA. I expect it to be a major shaping force of the next generation's experience with the GD. I'd like to see it become the phoenix that rises from the ashes of the inter- and intra-Order wars (both online flame wars and offline magical wars) of the late '90s and early 'aughts. I'd like to see it capture the goal of the original members of the GD and achieve the empowerment that allowed the English magicians to fight the Germans in the Aethyrs as well as the airs above Europe in WWII.
Head for the Red: The ongoing adventures and insights of a magician's attempts to accomplish the Great Work.
I don't know Nick as a person, but I certainly enjoy his writing and the information he shares. Talismans and Magical Pathworking are both excellent books that I'm pleased to have on my shelf. I saw this announcement earlier and thought it would be interesting to see how this new order develops.
ReplyDeleteR.O., didn't you start with the Golden Dawn tradition? I had the impression that's where you started and learned "the basics" before moving to your current path.
I've wondered what kind of background and experience you had before working Liber Samekh. It's getting a little off-topic, but I've been wanting to ask.
I learned the basics mostly from Kraig's Modern Magick in my teens. In my early 20s, I bought Crowley's Big Blue Brick (Book IV), and actually studied it in depth. Add in some neopaganism (Celtic Magic, brief ADF stuff, and hanging around Asatru and Wiccans), some RAW and Pete Carroll, a dash of Spare, and that about sums up my early exposure to stuff.
ReplyDeleteAll of it was based directly or indirectly on Golden Dawn techniques. It wasn't until I started hanging out online in actual Golden Dawn forums that I started seeing the results of the system in practice on a large scale. What I saw made me ill, and angry, so I scrapped the whole GD thing in disgust and went back to the sources.
As I was researching the source material (Barrett, Agrippa, Sefer Yetzirah, Hermeticism), I started doing Samekh. Dehn's translation of Abramelin hadn't come out yet, and I wouldn't touch Mathers with a 10-foot pole at the time, so I figured Crowley had at least based Samekh on a real Hermetic ritual, so it was close enough to the original to work. I was still operating in the basic framework of Thelema/GD, that is, Elemental Initiations, K&CHGA, then integration of the higher spheres and lower spirits. Except I skipped the elemental initiations. In retrospect, that may have been a mistake.
After being exposed to some really cool magi who also happened to be GD, my disgust with all of the Golden Dawn faded to something more realistic, a general disappointment with the people who claim to represent the highest levels, and respect for those who trudge away at the Work who don't bother with publicity.
Could you please give us some more info about this business about GDers fighting Germans in the Aethyrs?
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure where you get this impression of Robert Zink except maybe from all the B.S. spewed about during the flame wars.It's regretable the amount of slandering that occured on on all sides by a few wing nuts.Having met him he didn't come off as an egositical cult leader only interested in making a bunch of money.Like a lot of people in the great work he tries to make a living out of it.But the truth is nobodys getting rich running orders and the motivation is the love of the tradition.He doesn't micro manage his order and encourages his adepts to build on the tradition.
ReplyDeleteI think it's great that Nick is starting a new order and think that the diversity of orders out their can ony help move the Golden Dawn forward ....
Eldritch, the GDer's warfare with occult Germany is documented in Ancient Magicks for a New Age by Alan Richardson and Geoff Hughes.
ReplyDeleteMike,
ReplyDeleteI have dealt with Zink and the fallout of his personal and direct actions for years now. My impression of him is based on my personal interactions with him publicly and privately. I've also had to deal with the messes he made of people's lives through his inept and ignorant use of magic on several occasions.
The fact that he isn't getting rich running an order has nothing to do with anything. The only love he has for the order is based on the perceived "Power" he gets from being its leader, even though his actions continue to reveal a dearth of any spiritual achievement, initiation, or comprehension of the forces he may have read about but has never integrated into his sphere.
The EOGD does work for some people, up to a point, but the techniques he uses to initiate people into his "inner order" are spiritually dangerous. Grades are granted regardless of Work performed, and the chances that you'll be initiated by a person who actually has the spiritual credentials to perform the initiation are slim to none. Some people literally exchanged sex for Grades. When you get your Latin Motto, it's chosen at random by a couple of volunteers with no Latin experience working from a Latin-English dictionary on a weekend in their office. And then there's the poppets. And the abuse of watermelons.
There are rituals ex-members have designed to cleanse the sphere of magicians who have been abused and molested by Zink and his lackeys within the EOGD. The spiritual damage is mercifully easy to heal, but the psychological scars last for years.
I heard bad things about him, and saw the damage he did to people, and rather than take it at face value, I interacted directly with him personally. I gave him the benefit of the doubt. It didn't take long to learn he was as black-hearted as his reputation implies.
Abuse of watermelons???
ReplyDeleteHe is referring to the famous Golden Dawn watermelon stabbing ritual. Robert Zink had a bunch of Golden Dawn members stab a watermelon with swords while pretending it was David Griffin.
ReplyDeleteAt the time Robert Zink was getting the entire order to do black magic against David Griffin, telling us that Griffin was trying to kill him.
This is nothing compared to the "bowl of desire" he did to coerce Rafaela to his bed when she was 15.
I may have heard rumors about Rafaela and the bowl of desire, but I don't remember any details if I have, nor am I interested in them. I don't know that he ever did anything like that.
ReplyDeleteMost recently I've run into him pretending to be someone else and hyping his own work and appearances on yahoo groups. I'm hoping that means his order is drying up and blowing away, and he's desperate.