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.

My portrait of Dion Fortune.

The Medium On Her Wedding Day. Digital. 2009.

"One of Dion Fortune's readers...returned a well thumbed copy of "The Winged Bull" to the publishers for fear of corrupting the scavengers if it ended up in the trash can..." -Gareth Knight

Literally, a resource, for once.

Esoteric occult PDFs by Crowley, Blavatsky, Frater Achad, Dion Fortune, and so on. Good stuff. Click here.

Talks on Dion Fortune

New (to us) insight on Dion Fortune, courtesy of Gareth Knight.

Smack! Down! Dion Fortune Style.

SOA* 2008 winner Annie Besant with her proposed
World Teacher Jiddu Krishnamurti, and handbag.

We were just on our way up to Chesed ourselves when we came across this passage in The Mystical Qabalah:

19. It is to the Sphere of Chesed that the exalted consciousness of the adept rises in his occult meditations; it is here that he receives the inspirations which he works out on the planes of form. It is here that he meets the Masters as spiritual influences contacted telepathically, without any intermingling of personality. This is the true, and the highest, mode of contact with the Masters, contact with them as mind to mind in their own sphere of exalted consciousness. When the Masters are seen clairvoyantly as robed beings, the colours of whose robes indicate their ray, they are being perceived reflected into the sphere of Yesod, which is the kingdom of phantasms and hallucinations. We are treading on precarious ground when we have to meet the Masters here. It is here that the anthropomorphic form is given to the spiritual inspiration which so misleads those psychics who cannot rise to Chesed. It is thus that the announcement of a spiritual impulse flowing out upon the world gets interpreted as the coming of a World Teacher.

Oh yes. She did.

"Team Annie" and "Team Dion" shirts are currently being printed.

A Passage That Perfectly Describes Us

"Binah," from Qabalah Art Gallery

The initiate of the Greater Mysteries is known by his serenity and impersonal attitude in all the relations of life. He knows how to be still and let the powers he has set in motion carry out the work. He knows how to await the ripening of souls and not force a premature development by personal pressure. The initiate never goes about doing good; he never trespasses uninvited upon the spiritual privacy of another. He acts by what he is, not by what he does. He works on himself, makes something of himself, and then the forces that radiate from him without effort on his part bless and illuminate. If he is calm, he calms his environment. If he has wisdom, those who are in his company unconsciously take on his attitude and he has no need to proffer unsolicited advice. Because he knows the reality of eternity, he is content to let time do its work. He is characterized by two things, the power to be still and wait, and the power to stand absolutely alone. Until we know how to be still, mentally as well as physically, we cannot handle power; and until we know how to stand absolutely alone in perfect equilibrium and contentment, we cannot accomplish the works are done in polarity. Finally, the initiate is prepared to work without seeing result, playing his part on the Great Plan that unfolds through the ages of planetary time.

-Dion Fortune, from Dion Fortune and Tarot

Lovecraft's Point Of Inspiration

Qoph, Hebrew letter meaning "back of the head"

Daath, the mysterious, invisible Sephirah, which is never marked upon the Tree, is
associated in the Western svstem with the nape of the neck, the point where the spine meets the skull, the spot at which the development of the brain from the notochord took place in our primeval ancestors.

Daath is usually held to represent the consciousness of another dimension, or the consciousness of another level or plane; it essentially represents the idea of change of key.

-Dion Fortune, The Mystical Qabalah

More Scenes From A Life With Crowley

The girl was thin to emaciation; her eyes sunken in her head and surrounded by black circles; her lips carmined with so vicious a lipstick that she looked as if she had been kissing the wet paint on a pillar-box. Her clothing consisted of an exceedingly figure-revealing djibbah of dingy green. She looked like a sickly and unclean nymph who had had altogether too much attention from Pan.

-from Dion Fortune's fictionalized description of a mistress of Aleister Crowley in The Winged Bull.

It is unclear whether Fortune's description is meant to evoke Leah Hirsig, the best-known of Crowley's Scarlet Women, or if it is a composite.

Dion Fortune on divinity.

Adam and Eve by Mushtaq Baht

Here was the key for which he had always been searching! The key to the mystery of faith. The faith that would persist in believing, despite all disillusionment, that round the next corner it would find the Real and the Good. The gods of men's worship were not things in themselves, but the creations of the created -- the forms under which man represented to himself his ineffable Creator and Sustainer, the form changing as man's power of understanding increased. The forms did not matter; peppery old Jehovah with his long white beard and golden crown could go into the discard without anybody being damned; and, equally, those who liked him could go on worshipping him still, without being damned either. You could help yourself to the kind of god that suited you, so long as you realised that he was only a dramatisation. The real thing was behind all the gods, and no man had ever dramatised It. On your head be it if you made yourself a nasty god that liked blood-sacrifices; or a silly god, who wanted to make a pink sugar confectioner's heaven of this tough old earth. The nearer you got to the facts in your conception of God, the better for you, but no man's concept had ever been the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, nor ever would be. When he reached that stage he would just quietly pass out and go free. God was the Absolute, whatever that might mean. Murchison shrewdly suspected it meant nothing. Anyway, it was no use to the average human brain, which needed bulk to work on, same as the intestines. It had to have images and a story.

-From the editor's partly-unglued copy of Dion Fortune's 1936 novel, The Winged Bull

"That Strange Hill"

This comprehensive site about Glastonbury, home of occultist Dion Fortune, covers many of the myths and traditions about the sacred town.