Exoteric Lodge Order Membership and the Esoteric Lodges

Frater AIT over on his blog just mentioned that every Senior Adept that he personally knows is a Freemason. And he asks if he is missing anything by not being one himself. Well, it depends on what you are hoping to get out of Freemasonry. It also depends a lot on the culture of the particular esoteric Order that you belong to.

(For the purposes of this post, I am defining Exoteric Order as a group that is organized for purposes that are mundane: insurance, networking, social pleasure, etc.---daily "real world" concerns. I am defining Esoteric Orders as those organized for magical and mystical purposes---or "mumbo-jumbo and a lot of crap" as one Freemason called it [which just goes to show that not all Freemasons are going to welcome members of Golden Dawn or Wicca or OTO into their lodges].)

I know one Esoteric Order (a Golden Dawn Order in fact) where every single Adept Minor is a Master Mason. Why? Because it is in their bylaws. In that particular Order, you are required to be a Master Mason in order to become an Adept Minor. The reason is that the leaders of this Order believe that it shows a certain level of commitment to become a Master Mason. (Hmmm, I guess the lodges in their neighborhood are harder to get into than some of the local ones.)

This bylaw has an odd effect...there are no female Adept Minors in that Order. And there will never will be unless they change the rule. For some of us, this is viewed as a violation of the very landmarks of Golden Dawn which historically is open to both men and women, as well as RR et AC (the very Adept Minor oath states that one will consider both sexes equally for admission). For bloody sakes, Moina Mathers was an Adept Major (6=5), and Florence Farr was an Adept Minor (5=6) THAM---you can't tell me that they were Master Masons. This bylaw is one of the reasons that I will never join that Order.

I know another Esoteric Order where they consider Master Mason to be the equivalent of the Adept Minor Grade. I know of a member who conned his way into Master Mason (he had no intention of actually working Freemasonry after he got advanced), just so that he could jump over several Outer Order Grades and become a Hierophant. Not only did he abuse Freemasonry, he promptly left the esoteric Order he was in and started his own (promptly closing the loophole so no one else could do the same).

I myself have been a member of several Orders---outside of learning lodgekit and making some social contacts, I learned nothing of use to me for my Golden Dawn work.

So how did the idea that a Freemason degree is somehow as good (or perhaps better) as a Golden Dawn Grade arise? Simple, we can blame it on the fact that all three of the Founders of the Hermetic Golden Dawn (Isis-Urania #3) were members of the SRIA. In addition to that, the Sprengel letters state that there is an Order in Europe (though the letters also state that initiations are not done in lodge, so this part of the theory is on shaky ground). Those who hunt for Third Order typically look for another Order (the safest place for a Third Order member to hide from members of Golden Dawn is actually inside Golden Dawn itself).

The logic goes: If the Founders of the Order were Freemasons and SRIA, then there must have been a reason for it; therefore, we must give those members with Freemason backgrounds more authority.

Here is the counterargument: Membership in Freemasonry was just normal for the times. There is no esoteric significance in it---it is like having  health insurance today.

In the United States, over six million men out of 21 million were members of one Order or another in 1899. There were over three hundred fraternal Orders in the United States, and about 1000 different degrees. Each year 200,000 thousand more men joined. If one includes minorities and women, forty percent of the adult population belonged to at least one fraternal Order.

The sheer numbers alone undermine the argument that membership in another Order was what set the Founders of Golden Dawn apart from the general population.

My grandmother was a member of the Woodmen of America. The neighbors on both sides of the house I lived in while attending high school were members of exoteric Orders. At least one of my teachers was a member of an Order. You cannot tell me that exoteric membership prepares one for magical work. It is only in my generation that exoteric Order membership is rare.

The whole idea that membership in an exoteric Order, especially Freemasonry, really needs to be laid to rest. If you are going to join Freemasonry, do both Golden Dawn and Freemasonry a favor and do it because you actually want to work the Freemason degrees and not because you want to boost your status in Golden Dawn.

Roots of Golden Dawn: Part 4

And while we are considering terms that people assign different meanings to, and then forget that others are using other meanings for the same term, which causes a great deal of arguments, let's look at the term: Secret Chief.

In Golden Dawn, there is a lot of smoke and mirrors surrounding this term. Whether or not, an Order has made contact with the Secret Chiefs, or even believes in their existence, is the source of much of the opinion in the Golden Dawn community about whether or not a particular branch, or leader, is legitimate or not.

There are those who use the term Secret Chief to talk about entities that exist on the astral plane, who have evolved past the point of needing bodies, or perhaps never having a physical form in the first place; these entities are said to guide and inspire the Orders from a higher plane. Exactly when an entity becomes a Secret Chief and not just a random entity (angel, saint, demon, god, muse, old dead guy) is unclear. Aleister Crowley is the most notorious individual who claimed such contact, but he is definitely not even close to being the only one to make such a claim.

Others use the term to describe members of the ultimate esoteric secret society, so secret that even those they contact are not allowed to know their real identities. They are Uber-Adepts, of at least the 8=3 Magister Templi Grade, and more often than not are members of another esoteric tradition. They tend to be from regions that birth new esoteric traditions and movements.

A big point of concern among those who care about such things is whether or not these Secret Chiefs have actually crossed the Abyss or not. Some say that only those who have crossed the Abyss can be Secret Chiefs. Others say that it is not crossing the Abyss that counts, but the production and use of the elixir of life.

These are the two most common definitions of Secret Chief.

(There is another definition that rests solely on function, but you are unlikely to run into anyone that seriously gives it the time of day.)

The problem with both of these definitions, and their variations, is that the access to the Secret Chiefs is so terribly restricted that only a single person in any particular generation, or time period, can be in contact with them. And when more than one person, or Order, claims to have access to them, one has to presume that someone is lying, or perhaps delusional.

(There is also the slight matter of higher fraud: how can you be sure that your "Secret Chief" is not lying about being a Secret Chief?)

In the end, the only advice I can give is to beware of the disagreement in how people are using the term, and judge leaders and Orders solely on their usefulness to you personally.

~~~To Be Continued~~~

How long should one be in Golden Dawn?

One of the disturbing things that I notice about the modern branches Golden Dawn, or at least something it is distrubing to me, is the fact that many treat the Golden Dawn system as something you do for a certain amount of time and then stop after you reach the end of the system.

Part of this trend is that many people have no experience with the non-Golden Dawn Orders. Traditionally in such Orders as the Freemasons, the Elks, and the Lions, one is a member for life. This is especially true of the Freemasons--even if you cease to attend lodge and quit paying dues, you are still a Freemason. You may not by in good standing; but unless you are expelled, you are still a Freemason.

And at one time, even if you were not a member of a non-Golden Dawn Order, you knew someone that was. While I was attending High School, one of my next door neighbors was a member of the Odd Fellows. The town, Brush Colorado, also had a Lion's Club. I didn't think anything was unusual about that. And a hundred years ago, it wasn't that strange.

We forget that a cenury ago, the Orders were striving. Forty percent of the adult population were a member of one Order or another. That wasn't just old white dudes; women and minorities had their own Orders.

It is different today. My grandmother was a member of the Modern Woodmen of America, an Order which purpose is to provide insurance policies to its membership. For me, it is easier to do business with State Farm. This lack of experience with the phenomenona of the Orders and the type of people who join them handicaps our system.

Another handicapp which contributes to the tendency to consider one membership in the system as a temporary thing is the truncated revealing of the system. While the publishing of the core documents of Golden Dawn by Israel Regardie saved the system from extinction, it has also had the effect of freezing much of the system into a form that gives itself to chasing a title and then leaving the system.

In many ways, I consider myself lucky to have found my way into Hathoor Temple before I was exposed to much of the published material. For the members of Hathoor Temple, one was a member for life. Recieving the Grade of Adept Minor was not the end of your involvment with the Order; for them, Golden Dawn was a living, growing system.

It was because of this long view that their curriculum was an expanding one. This tradition carried over into Bast Temple when it formed. I encourage members of the system to take the long view and treat Golden Dawn and its offshoots as an organization that one will be a member for the entire length of their lifetime.