Book of the Tomb is now public

A few weeks ago, there was a bunch of talk about how to properly paint the colors of a Golden Dawn (RR et AC) Vault of the Adepts. One of the pieces of evidence trotted out was the Book of the Tomb.

The Book of the Tomb was a (probably) Alpha and Omega document; in recent times, it has been circulated among those involved in building Vaults for their respective Orders. When it was used as evidence, it was done in such a way that I knew that it was about to become public knowledge. Basically, it was a "Trust me, this is what it says" statement.

Today, as the tradition stands, you can not cite a unpublished document and expect people to trust you. Thanks to the publication of so much of the Golden Dawn material and (let's call it) the War of the Orders, the general Golden Dawn community distrusts anyone who claims to have exclusive access to unpublished material. And to cite an unpublished paper as evidence, especially when numerous copies are in various Temple libraries is just begging for it to be published.

Whether this is a good thing or not is debatable. I have my opinion about it; I think that most people know my opinion without me repeating it yet again.

What important is that just a few weeks later, someone has put up a copy of the Book of the Tomb up on the internet. And a lot of people are going to thank him (it is Nick Farrell if you not stumbled across the pdf yet); others are going to throw rocks.

And what can we learn from this? Don't brag about having access to an unpublished document, citing it as evidence, if other people also have copies of it. That type of behavior just invites people to publish stuff, especially when they read the instructions completely different than you do.

[For the record, if anyone from Bast Temple is reading this, I passed Hathoor Temple's test on this material before seeing a copy of the Book of the Tomb.]

Anyone who is looking for a copy of this pdf Book of the Tomb can find it on Farrell's website.