Golden Dawn Manuscripts and Where Not To Find Them

As promised here is a follow-up to my post Golden Dawn Manuscripts and Where to Find Them, which I wrote a month or so ago.

Recently I had the very great privilege of inspecting a hitherto unknown cache of Golden Dawn documents, dating from 1893 to 1916. It was a veritable treasure trove – easily comparable to anything owned by Bob Gilbert or Tony Fuller, and certainly knocked material that has been published by Pat Zalewski into a cocked hat. However – and I want to stress this – I was enjoined to strict secrecy as to who owns it and where it is located – and the reason I was given was this:

The owner of this cache was afraid that, due to the overly-litigious nature of various Golden Dawn factions in recent years, one of them would try to engage the owner in an unseemly legal dispute over ownership.

I tried to re-assure the person who showed me the said cache that no modern organisation claiming to be the Golden Dawn has legal title to any of the property owned by the original order or the schismatic factions thereof. As far as I am aware, the Holy Order of the Golden Dawn closed in 1914; the AO was wound up in the 1960s; the last temple of the Stella Matutina was wound up in the 1970s; whilst Whare Ra broke away from the SM in the 1930s so it could not actually claim any property that had been owned by another SM temple. Hence, the current owner of the said trove probably has every right to hang on to it, and damn anyone who tries to come along with a writ.

This is probably a major reason why more archives of original Golden Dawn material are not resurfacing generally. Not because they don’t exist: but because the private collectors who have them in their possession have become disenchanted with all the law suits and wars of words fought between modern GD factions, and thus want to keep their heads below the parapet. In trying to validate their claims to trademarks – and their egos – these disputants have done irreparable harm to the cause of GD scholarship.