My contribution to this discussion:
Yes, the Golden Dawn was historically exclusive and elitist. The original group was so exclusive and elitist that their teachings were almost lost when the group broke apart. Who would have carried this spiritual knowledge to the next generation if Crowley and Regardie had not gone ahead and just published the Golden Dawn material for everyone to read? Had it not been for that, chances are that few people reading or posting on this website would ever have come into contact with this material.
Remember, even Dion Fortune was rejected from one of the post-G.D. groups for not having the right symbols in her aura. ("A perfectly unanswerable charge.") And Fortune had her own issues with mental illness. Would you have kept Dion Fortune out of your group too?
A lot has changed in the last century or so, and going crazy just ain't what it used to be. In fact, it's much more common, and it is foolish to pretend to understand all of the reasons for this societal shift. The very drugs demonized in these posts are the ones most frequently prescribed by doctors today.
Philip K. Dick said that sometimes going insane is the only sane response to an insane society. He was a visionary, too, but I doubt he would have been able to live up to these standards, either. Another potential G.D. reject!
Though Crowley was barely out of school when he joined the Golden Dawn, he immediately observed that "the members of the Order were as vulgar and commonplace as any other set of average people." Elitism be damned. We all start out as lead.
3 comments:
HI - thanks for this.
You ask,"Who would have carried this spiritual knowledge to the next generation if Crowley and Regardie had not gone ahead and just published the Golden Dawn material for everyone to read?"
Well of course there were and are several currents and Orders descending from the original Orders. A single public case in point is Whare Ra which carried the torch for well over 50 years.
I agree the majority of people practicing the GD do so via the Regardie compliations or groups based on them. However, the tradition would not have been lost. In fact most of the Inner Order material was not reproduced by either Regardie or Crowley as they did not have access to it. Some of this has come out recently thanks to folk like Pat Zalewski and Nick Farrell.
hope that bird don't poop
I love your blog.
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