Disguising myself as a human being, I teleported to London, England, last night in order to attend a talk upon the Golden Dawn. I shall not reveal the precise location of the talk, nor who gave it, for reasons which I fear will become all too obvious.
Anywho – I have now been informed of the Truth about the Golden Dawn! So all you people like Chic Cicero, Robert Zink, David Griffin, Nick Farrell, Pat Zalewski, etc etc take note! Here is what I was told (I shit ye not):
- William Wynn Westcott did not play a major part in forming or running the Golden Dawn. He did not translate the Cipher Manuscripts, and when Macgregor Mathers emigrated to Paris, he did not run the English branch of the Order as Chief Adept in Anglia until his resignation in 1897.
- Westcott also was a fuddy duddy old man with a long grey beard when the Golden Dawn began, even though he was only 39 years old at the time.
- Samuel and Moina Mathers translated the Cipher manuscripts themselves.
- Moina persuaded Annie Horniman to join the GD by saying “Hey, it’s really cool, it’s like dropping acid.”
- When Macgregor & Moina Mathers emigrated to Paris, they retired from the Golden Dawn altogether and did not really do anything more for the Order (like creating the 5=6 ritual, designing the Vault of the Adepti or coming up with the inner order curriculum) from that point on.
- Florence Farr was thus left as the sole chief in charge. She and W B Yeats wrote a load of new rituals for the Golden Dawn, which can be found in Regardie’s Black Brick
. Probably.
- George Bernard Shaw was a member of the GD. So too was Oscar Wilde’s wife Constance who, despite only turning up for her neophyte ceremony and then not appearing in the Temple again, was a member of long-standing.
- No-one in the Golden Dawn who attended a temple outside London ever did anything of note, ever.
So let this be a lesson for you whenever someone purports to tell you the history of the GD!
Sol Ascendans - The Website of Alex Sumner 
Crowleyite was it? I have heard a lot of crap from some experts in other fields mostly those who want to portray Mina Mathers as a modern woman and a Goddess. If you believe them then Mina was responsible for all the colour in the second order and wrote the Minitus Mundum. Mina’s motto was leave no trace an her impact on the GD was to force Dion Fortune to leave and thus create Inner Light. As for a modern woman it is hard to find any modern woman who advocates sex as being unclean and total subservience to your husband.
Not Crowleyite per se – at least I don’t think so. I think it was just some person who had never been a member of a Golden Dawn order, nor had met or spoken to someone who was. It also didn’t help that the person held an innate distrust of any scholarly works on the GD written by Freemasons – so that’s Bob Gilbert and Ellic Howe out for a start.
Because Freemasons would never write negative things about the Golden Dawn would they 🙂 Oh that’s right they did.
Given that all three chiefs were masons he must think the whole lot was suspect.
They left out the really juicy bits – like Mathers’ cross dressing (he loved to wear skirts) and his bisexual relationship with Crowley in Paris!
I think you’ll find it’s called a kilt. I have included a link to Wikipedia so you can look it up. 🙂
Strangely enough, although all the assertions are obviously incorrect and uninformed there is a very small seed of truth in all or most of them – but these have been exaggerated all out of proportion.Even David Griffin’s comment about cross dressing has a relevance although he is confusing Mathers with Westcott. As some people will know, some rather curious items were found amongst Westcott’s possessions….
The strangest things I found in Westcott’s possessions was a crystal ball, and some bits and pieces relating to the GD. Which are not strange per se given the man, but have a cool factor for a GD nerd like myself.
Obviously you have access to better resources than me!