When to part the Veil

As I have gotten closer to June, and the Open Full Moon ritual that I am conducting that month, I have once again find myself spending time kicking around the question of when is it ok to reveal information.

If we go back to the 1888 standard, it is never ok to reveal information unless someone is of the proper Grade to reveal it. This includes the very existence of the Order itself. The exception is the three Co-Chiefs, who can do whatever they want to do.

At some point in time, it became ok to admit that you belonged to an esoteric Order if you were talking to someone that you were willing to sponsor. I am not sure when that happened...and it probably was so unofficial.

Information-wise, there seems to been a standard that if the information existed in the public domain, then you could talk about provided that you did not reveal any of the initiated secrets. For an idea of how this worked, look at the little booklet that Mathers did on the Tarot; it is hardly a ringing advertisement for his expertise.

Aliester Crowley is accused of changing the standard, but that accusation is rather unfair. Despite all his faults, the information that he gave out was actually rather limited. There is also the fact that most of it was done in a very limited print run. We forget that the Equinox was a limited print run; and if you had a copy, then you were almost a de facto member of either the AA or the OTO.

Paul Foster Case's BOTA actually had a larger membership than both of Crowley's organizations. Of course with BOTA , you spend years and years in what Golden Dawn/RR et AC classified Outer Order.

Dion Fortune is a good example of someone who hinted at what initiates knew without giving anything away.

It is Regardie that broke open the piggy bank. But quite honestly in my opinion, what he published was just the tip of the iceberg---just enourgh to ensure that the system did not disappear, but not enourgh that a living esoteric Order was made unnecessary.

(Others will so disagree with me on this one. My question to them is: How bad off is your system that Regardie, or any of the others I mention in this blog post, have actually made your Order useless?)

Today, the information leaks are the Chic and Tabitha Cicero, Pat Zalewski, and Nick Farrell; or at least, they are the ones that most people pay attention to. And they pretty much restrict their stuff to NAM (Neophyte Adeptus Minor) and below. (In Pat's case, that is not completely true---he preserving the core bits of a higher Grade system without giving more than one percent of it away.)

There are some others who give hints; but for the most part, either their hints are for those who are already of the proper Grade to know (if you can figure it out from the hint, then you have the right to know it), or are meant to attract new members to their groups (sorry, I spent too much time as a businessman; if it looks like advertising, I presume that it is advertising).

(Of course, I am ignoring the people who just reprint the stuff that others have published, and who claim to understand it better than the rest of us. I think everyone knows my issues with these particular people.)

Now in my particular case, I am kicking around if it is proper to connect the dots between the hints a couple of people have made, plus add a big dollop of research and a dab of personal insight, and actually put it in article form. Outside of the hints, this is my own work; this is not a secret or teaching that was shown to me. But it definitely comes out of the Golden Dawn/RR et AC system.

And for the record, I realize that this question is just a personal issue. No matter what I actually decide, someone will get up on a soapbox and scream that I made the wrong decision. Because of that the only thing that will ultimately matter is making sure that I can live with myself in the morning.

Thanks for listening.