Last week, I was reading a discussion about the unpublished Golden Dawn material. Or rather lack of new stuff. And I have a few thoughts about the whole subject.
Personally, I think that we are near the bottom of the barrel for original Golden Dawn material. Most of the Westcott and Mathers material (outside of the A&O stuff) has been published; or at least, the important parts have been mined for material already. Despite this, people are going to continue to hunt for access to unpublished material...buyer beware,
We are not going to end up seeing anything published that is going to radically change how modern Golden Dawn is practiced. Nor are people's opinions about Westcott, Mathers and their contact (or lack of) with the Secret Chiefs going to change. People are going to continue to believe what they believe---buyer beware.
And if we are curious about unpublished stuff, we really need to consider widening the search to beyond the Golden Dawn and the A&O---unless of course, you believe that Westcott and Mathers got it perfectly right in the first place. People are going to continue to change things to suit their belief system...again, buyer beware.
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3 comments:
When you have the rare opportunity to personally inspect material that gives off so awesome a vibe that you have spontaneous lucid dreams for days afterwards - then you can decide whether or not the bottom of the barrel has been reached.
Bear in mind that I am not just talking about material from progressively higher grades, but also the personal papers from the 5=6 work of various Adepti - which in one sense is more valuable because it shows the true genius of the Golden Dawn.
Who cares? The 'unpublished stuff' springs from our own Work.
Most of the material published has been invisibly edited and isn't the original material. All of the Regardie "big book" material is full of unmarked Regardie edits. It will transition from GD material to Regardie's with no warning except for change in authorial tone.
I'd like to see transcripts of actual texts published without editing. That's what scholars actually do. When I did my MA thesis on GD material, I had to use Ransom Institute material because none of the published texts met the bar to be used for academic work.
That said, I'm planning to publish transcripts of Allan Bennet's notebooks (as copied by J.F.C. Fuller) from the Ransom Institute archives. This is one of my projects for the next year and gives a snapshot of early 1890's era Golden Dawn material as recorded by one of the early adepts.
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