One of the things that I always find fascinating is how the egregores of the various esoteric traditions were [are] developed. In the Bible, we are told that at first, there was the WORD. In esoteric traditions, at first---there was the FOUNDER.
The founder of a system, or esoteric group, is the cornerstone upon which the entire system develops around; they are the keyhole, or first gatekeeper, that stands between the other members and the energy of egregore.
Think of the founder of a group as the initial programmer that creates a new computer program or operating platform. (Operating platform is probably more descriptive of the tradition in general; while the individual Orders and "Churches" are probably more akin to individual programs that run on the operating system.)
Except that not only is the founder the initial creator of ideas behind a group, they are also part of the very structure of the group.
In Hollywood myth, we are told that computer programmers always leave a backdoor into the systems that they create. In esoteric tradition, and religion for that matter, the founder does not have to create a backdoor, for they are a door into the system---in fact, they are the primary DOOR into the system.
Now, there are some implications to this, for instance you can't get rid of Jesus from Christianity---but you can get rid of Paul (vide gnostic literature). You can't remove Buddha from Buddhism (I am unaware of any attempts to do so). And you can't get rid of the creator of the Cipher Manuscript in Golden Dawn.
But note that you can build new structures upon their system once the founder is gone. I doubt that Christ or Frater Cipher would recognize the various multitude of structures that later people built on their ideas, and I really doubt that they would consider the "Bibles" of the various groups to be true statements of what they intended.
There are implications to this idea...if you think about them long enourgh, certain occult statements start to make sense. Of course, you do not have to worry about me being right---after all, the esoteric tradtions and religions are not like computer systems at all. *wink*
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2 comments:
Some very interesting thoughts, here! I've always thought of esoteric groups as a kind of implementation of a set of standards or models, which fits nicely in with the idea of sofware.
That said, it would never occur to me to introduce back-doors into a system when I could simply train and hand off a given implementation to its administrators and users. Nor would it occur to me to mislead those interested in my software with promises of features that do not exist or services I have no intention of delivering. It would be enough to act as a sort of consultant and watch a given system throughout its life cycle, adding new functionality where possible and fulfilling its intended purpose.
"The founder of a system, or esoteric group, is the cornerstone upon which the entire system develops around; they are the keyhole, or first gatekeeper, that stands between the other members and the energy of egregore."
I think the key word here is develops. If an esoteric group is developing its members properly, wouldn't it make sense that eventually some of them would tap into the same source, perhaps even more effectively than the founder did? In an organization where the founder is still living (rather than having passed into myth), might they not become depreciated at some point?
If the Golden Dawn is a software project, it's an open-source one.
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