King over the Water
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Nick Farrell & Melissa Seims - AUTHOR
King over the Water – the history and rites of Mathers' AO
Forthcoming new release with Melissa Seims through Thoth Publications
Featured article from the book:
Genius of the Golden Dawn
Over the years there has been much talk about who was the genius of the Golden Dawn. Various cases have been made for William Wynn Westcott, Samuel Mathers or even some more shadowy characters. Nick Farrell tries to find the answer.
The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn is the bedrock tradition for modern occultism. There are very few modern orders that do not lean on the Order in some way. One of the things that made the Golden Dawn unique was the eclectic way that it gathered a wide range of esoteric material and linked it together into a system. This symbolic system is so detailed that it is almost impossible to remove something from it without endangering the system somewhere else. Common sense dictates it would take a genius to come up with a system that deep. You need a visionary who can see where all the pieces fit and make sure that there are papers available to students that explain your vision. There are two obvious candidates for this genius – the founders William Wynn Westcott and Samuel Mathers.
Mathers in particular gets the most backing. Looking though many of the magical books that mention the Golden Dawn, it is he who figures in the writers' eyes as the inventor of the system. Some of this seems fair enough. After all it wasn't it Mathers who wrote the rituals? Didn't he develop the great eclectic poem 'The z Documents' which enabled much of the outer order of the Golden Dawn to be seen through magical eyes? It was he who created the Second Order with its glorious vault. Westcott on the other hand drifted off into SRIA and quit the GD just before the revolt against Mathers' rule.
Yet there are flaws in this argument; one which when co-writer Melissa Seims and I came to write King over the Water: the history and rites of Mathers' AO became fairly obvious. Firstly, people have assumed that the Golden Dawn that Mathers' was involved with was the same one that we know today. Secondly they believe that he wrote most of the material and lastly he personally used his own system. Even Ellic Howe in his Magicians of the Golden Dawn dismisses Westcott as a simple administrator, while Mathers was a 'magician personified'.
It has been one of the myths of the Golden Dawn that Mathers was a genius because he single handily wrote the rituals. The myth goes that Westcott, upon translating the Cipher manuscripts, was unable to turn them into rituals himself and so asked Mathers to write them. However the only person to imply this was Mathers, who made the general claim in a letter to the rebels in February 16, 1900 that "every atom of knowledge of the order from 0=0 to 5=6" had come from him alone. However he never backed up that statement and later smoothed over the waters with Westcott.
However Mathers did not write the Cipher manuscripts, nor did he translate them or have much to go on other than what Westcott told him. The cipher manuscripts also show that Enochian words were added in Westcott's handwriting to the elemental grade rituals.
Westcott had copies of letters from Mathers asking permission to write up the grades from 0=0 to 4=7. Obviously the person in control was Westcott. Then the next question you have to ask is how good was his work? One would think that we would see some brilliant writing, but instead the early Golden Dawn rituals are bland, bald and very masonic. There is little creative or particularly original.
Hegemon: Child of Earth, arise and enter the darkness.
Kerux: Very Honoured Hierophant is it your pleasure that the Canidate be admitted?
Hierophant: It is. Admit (name of aspirant) who will hereafter be known by the motto (motto). Frater Stolistes and Dadadouchos assist the Kerux in the reception.
Compare this with the later Stella Matutina rite:
Hierophant: I give permission to admit (name of aspirant) who loses his name and will be henceforth known among us as (motto). Let the Stolistes and Dadadouchos assist in the reception.
Hegemon: Inheritor of a Dying world, arise and enter the darkness.
Stol: The Mother of Darkness hath blinded him with her hair
Dad: The Father of Darkness hath hidden him under his wings.
Hierophant: His limbs are still weary from the wars which were in heaven.
Thus it would seem that Mathers' Golden Dawn ritual was not the exciting magical event that it would later become.
This is further seen in the elemental grade rituals where the rite seems to be focused on presenting the candidate with a series of black and white drawings.
And what of the days when there were no candidates. It would appear that the temple would be opened and closed and, much like a masonic meeting a fairly dull business meeting would take place.
But Mathers was busy writing flying rolls and papers right? No. These came much later. Either he or Westcott wrote the knowledge papers based on material seen in the Cipher manuscripts.
It can be seen that the actual work Mathers, Westcott and Woodman was to create a masonic style side order that would allow the study of certain occult symbols. Unlike SRIA, there were no papers written and not much to distinguish the Golden Dawn from Freemasonry.
Mathers wrote a Portal grade a year after the Order was started. Its goal was to unite the other elemental grades under the control of spirit. Not only did it remove the Order's dependence of the order on the Cipher documents as its sole source of material.
The first person to go through the Grade was Mina Mathers on 10 September 1889.
Once free of the constriction of the cipher manuscripts, one would expect to see Mather's ritual genus shine. However it doesn't. The Portal rite is even duller than the outer grade rituals, shorter and is simply a presentation of more diagrams and tarot cards.
It is not clear if, when they were written, that Mathers ever intended it to assume any important portal to a future second order. After nine months in the grade you would be declared a nominal 5=6.
However if Mathers had seen how impressive the SM rites were to become he might have spent a bit more time on them.
Mathers moved to Paris and in 1892 he claimed that he had met a secret chief Dr Thiessen, from Liege, who used the magical motto Lux E Tenbris (Light in Darkness) who gave him the right and rituals to start a Second Order which would teach practical magic to those who had passed through the Golden Dawn. Westcott saw the material that Mathers had been given and agreed.
With a motto like that, one would expect Thiessen to have some sort of Masonic connections. Lux E Tenbris is the motto of the Scottish Rite of Masonry. On 30 July, Mathers wrote to Westcott and told him that he had been in "much communication with Frater LET and other chiefs since I have been over". Westcott was also excited; particularly as the material that Mathers was showing him was of a different order from what he had seen in England. He wrote back and told Mathers that it seemed that he had made contact with a higher adept. Mathers agreed.
The 5=6 ritual appeared. Mathers seems to have taken elements given by this mysterious adept from Liege and fused it with rituals from SRIA.
At the same time there came the fantastic Z documents which over laid a magical technique over the outer order and gave a formula that turned a somewhat dry masonic ritual into something that could be used to charge a talisman or get a spirit to physical manifestation. There is also the fairly cryptic Man, Macrocosm paper which gives a fairly powerful introduction to the Sphere of Sensation. We also see Book T, which was an inspired description of the Tarot.
But we cannot be sure how much of this material or genius belonged to Mathers, or how much was a cut and paste from Lux E Tenebris. Certainly the 5=6 is nothing like what Mathers had written before, or would write again.
Mathers or Tenebris? Or was someone else involved again. We know that other adepts were also inspired at this time. Take for example the design of the Vault. Mathers' rite does not say much about it, other than recount the official material from the Manifestos. Yet the person who seems to be writing the most about the Vault is Westcott. It is his material, based on a lecture, that remains in both the SM and the AO. It is Westcott, along with other adepts who were writing the bulk of the Flying Rolls.
Logically, if Mathers was the genius of the Golden Dawn we would expect to see him function brilliantly after he was expelled by the adepts.
In our book King over the Water: the history and rites of Mathers' AO, we publish these rites for the first time. But while there is some new material within them, Mathers also reveals a shocking disregard for basic ritual practice and his own Z documents.
In our book are detailed 'short cuts' which Mathers believes are safe to perform. Some of these, in our opinion, would have rendered the initiation null and void – a poor drama dressed as magic. Not only can people be roped together to perform mass initiations, the number of consecrations and purifications can be reduced, and circumambulations dropped.
That which is 'orthodox' stretches the interpretation of the Z documents and makes key points difficult if not impossible to obey. True, a couple things have been added, that are ritualistically good, but these are not the work of genius but more an attempt to make the ritual slightly different from that which was being performed by the rebels or the SM.
But what of the 6=5 and 7=4 rituals that Mathers was supposed to have written? Well although there is no doubt that these existed at some point in the AO's history, there is little evidence that they were actually used. Certainly in the Isis temple under Berridge they were not. After you passed a test, entrance to the 6=5 was given upon payment to Mathers of the equivalent of the modern equivalent of $1000. It is not clear what the fee was for a 7=4, but it is certain that there was no rite performed and it appeared that it was simply one of Mathers methods of milking money from his temples.
When dealing with Mathers we are also compelled to look at what his input into the magical field was. Here we have a person who had no job and could have been writing occult material flat out. Arthur Waite, who was also a journalist, wrote countless books and papers. Writing rituals for someone who is a genius should have been something Mathers did in his lunch hour. It wasn't. His output is, bluntly pitiable and shows little loyalty to the system that seeks to immortalise his name. There are 700 pages in the 'Golden Dawn' and another 300 in Francis King's Flying Roll book. Of them Mathers hand can only been seen in less than half of them. Such is the general lack of originality, it should have been possible for a jobless writer without any genius at all to knock them up in six months.
Westcott, on the other hand, was coming up with many new ideas that were inspired by the system. We can see him projecting tarot and the tree onto the heavens, and tinkering with the enochian tablets to provide a very interesting tabloid which is only now just being investigated. He was running two Orders, several side orders and held down a proper job.
However that is not saying that Westcott was the genius of the Golden Dawn either. He did not come up with the Cipher manuscripts, nor did he write them up. He was the administrative expert who made it all happen and, when he wanted, he could show how clever he was. But he didn't, he believed that Mathers was contacted by the right people, seen or unseen, and even joined Mathers' AO with the same powers that he had under the old Golden Dawn. However it is clear that if the Golden Dawn hand been left to these two, it would have remained a masonic style order with a spice of magic. Somehow the Golden Dawn became much more than that.
The Rebels, under Felkin, and the AO, under John Brodie Innes, took it in another direction. Under both these people each symbol was examined and re-examined. That which became a simple gesture had many meanings, nothing in an initiation could be dropped (literally or figuratively). Inspired by the symbols that were first revealed by Westcott and Mathers, rebel Morgan Rothe adepts, who probably included Brodie Innes and Felkin rewrote the rituals to the state that we know them today. Felkin would write his own 6=5 and 7=4 rituals that were inspired by Mathers' 5=6.
Brodie Innes would later return to the Mathers ones when he took over his AO. But would bring the same 'magical ideas' into that order that impressed Dion Fortune and her teacher Maiya Tranchell-Hayes. Later, Fortune would complete her magical training in Felkin's Stella Matutina and apply the lessons she learn into her system. This Inner Light tradition would have great impact on many modern magicians. This created something particularly magical and unique. When this phase of the Golden Dawn died out in 1978, with the closure of Whare Ra in New Zealand, it opened again, this time in Georgia, to enable modern thought to be incorporated.
So who then was the Genius of the Golden Dawn. Well the answer is that the tradition was, and always will be, bigger than one or two people.
Westcott and Mathers depended on the writer of the Cipher manuscripts. Westcott needed Mathers connection with European adepts. Mathers would later depend on Lux e Tenbris. Both of them were too limited to carry it further so it took the likes of Felkin and Brodie Innes flesh out more details. Again it required modern people like Fortune and Regardie to take it to the next stage. Finally it requires the hundreds of adepts that have passed through its doors to develop the system further and make it more powerful.
It is the nature of occultists to find links between symbols -- It proves the interconnectivity of all things. The genius of the Golden Dawn has been to motivate adepts and students to find links between a particular set of symbols and produce something so unique and magical that its founders would never have dreamed possible. Rather than looking to the past to find the genius of the Golden Dawn, we should be looking at the present. What is with us now does not stop evolving and deepening. It is a tradition that is alive and has its own genius.
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