Treating the rituals of Golden Dawn as a literary text

(Please remember that one of my majors in college was literature while you are reading this. I wrote this as comment in a Facebook discussion on associating the officers of Golden Dawn with various Tarot cards, and believe that some of my readers might be interested in this comment, even if they do not belong to that FB group.)

I think that a lot of the layers in the GD rituals are hardwired into the system by the Cipher Manuscript and the basic set of assumptions that eventually find their expression in the original Z documents. It does not matter if you use the Spirit model or the Psychological model or whatever other model you want. The Cipher Manuscript, the ritual scripts, and the Z documents are a piece of literature, and it can be analyzed though the lens of literary studies.

The Cipher Manuscript associates the Tarot with planets and deities. Once you bring in the idea that the officers, and other forces (places of potent power on the floor of the lodge) are associated with deities (in the form of god-forms), it is natural to make the link between the officers and invisible stations to the Tarot (though the planets and deities).

This linkage creates a situation that once the idea is put forth that (for instance) the Hierophant is the Sun, that we will also associate the Sun card with the office. Furthermore, it opens up the box that says the other six officers who move in the Neophyte ritual are associated with the other six classical planets, and their associated Tarot cards.

Because the creator of the Cipher Manuscript did this type of linkage, and the first generation of GD initiates read this type of linkage into the system, following generations have discovered that though a process much like literary analysis that they can puzzle out more linkages that have always been present, but invisible upon first reading of the text of the rituals. (Note that a performance of a ritual is a reading of the text, much like the performance of a Shakespeare play is a reading of the text of that play.)

What students of the system, such as Jack Taylor, Pat Zalewski, and myself, are doing is merely exposing the implications of what the original authors of the text (Cipher, ritual, Z docs) wrote into the text itself. Now what you do with it will depend upon what model you are using, but the task of literary analysis remains the same no matter what model you choose to use (just like in literature, you can read the same text using several different literary theories).

Trying to make the Lesser Ritual of the Pentagram interesting

One of the joys of being in Golden Dawn, or any other esoteric group for that matter, is that occasionally you can see one of the officers crack up. Each officer has their particular burden to bear. In the case of the Praemonstrator, it is having to lecture about a subject that they have done fifteen million times before (or so, it feels to them).

A particular amusing lecture to watch the Praemonstrator around is when they have to talk about the Lesser Ritual of the Pentagram. Due to the neccessarity of it being taught to every new member (aka Neophyte), most of us have attended this lecture a million times (ok, maybe it just feels like a million times). The only thing that I can imagine more boring than attending the lecture would be teaching it. You can see the eyes of the Praemonstrator twitch as they think about having to do yet another round of teaching it.

The only solution I have seen for this problem (how many times can you watch the same lecture over and over again) is to treat the lecture as if you have two audiences---one being the Neophyte, the other audience everyone else. For the Neophyte, you teach the standard "Here is where you move; these are the symbols you draw; these are the words you say." For everyone else, you take a dartboard, divide it into six parts, and throw a dart at it.

The Lesser Ritual of the Pentagram has seven layers just like the rest of the Golden Dawn rituals have. The lowest is the physical layer (the part that you are showing to the Neophyte). Everyone else gets a lecture corresponding to the layer that the dart landed in. It is not the most ideal way of teaching, but it cuts down on the snoring and eye twitching.

And if you somehow have not attended the lecture on the Lesser Ritual of the Pentagram fifteen million times, then you might enjoy reading this post on Augoeides about the Lesser Ritual of the Pentagram (click on sentence).