Nick Farrell quits the Golden Dawn

Long time champion of the Golden Dawn, Nick Farrell has finally admitted that the system is broken and can’t be fixed.

In a surprise announcement, Farrell announced that his Magical Order of the Aurora Aurea  can no longer be considered a traditional Golden Dawn group, although it will continue to use rituals and teachings.

In a Facebook interview with Watchers of the Dawn,  Farrell said that the Golden Dawn egregore was blighted with all sorts of “astral parasites” and had been doing its best to kill itself.

“If you are in a group which claims that it is Golden Dawn, you open yourself to all the problems suffered by the original order,” Farrell said.

He thinks that the original Golden Dawn egregore was a quasi-masonic order that admitted women and it had problems adapting to the magical techniques which were bought in by Mathers.

“Having your order head being an ego crazed loon also harms the egregore, as does having an order that rises against its leadership or encourages political knifings…  The Golden Dawn had all these problems and will encourage them to happen again and again,” Farrell added.

Now if you say “I am Golden Dawn” you open yourself to all those anti-magical, megalomaniacal problems.  But if you try to do something new then the egregore will fall on you like a free-falling elephant, he said.

“The Magical Order of the Aurora Aurea, particularly in is second order is more experimental, so we have been getting in the neck from that egregore and its antics are distracting,” he said.

Farrell was dismissive of those who claimed that they needed a connection to the Golden Dawn because of the mystical power of a tradition.

“When you look at the Golden Dawn history, those groups that have been the most successful have been those who have done their best to distance themselves from its egregore. Felkin was a case in point.  He wired his Whare Ra Order to the Rosicrucian current in Europe and bypassed the toxic Golden Dawn order completely.”

This gave Felkin the ability to do what he liked and not be bound by rules set by the old egregore, he said.

“This is what we have done with the Magical Order of the Aurora Aurea… we have our own link to the past currents of the Golden Dawn which does not feature the Order itself.  We use its rituals, and all its teachings, but we have our own vision about how these are supposed to play out.”

The last straw was the universal adoption in the mass media of the name “Golden Dawn” by the Greek Fascist movement.

“Association with a hate group on an international scale does more damage to the Golden Dawn than the Horos Scandle… Who wants your magic order sitting on Google ranking next to neo-nazis?”

Already the confusion between the name Golden Dawn and the Greek Nazis has happened.  One mentally ill person listed all the occult golden dawn members as being organizers of the Far Right in Europe and the US, he said.

“That cannot help but destroy any good that the Golden Dawn can be associated with.  It is reaching a point where running a “golden dawn” group is like swimming in a public pool full of floating turds…. You end up trying to avoid them all the time rather than getting on with the business of swimming.”

The advantages of saying “I am a member of a Golden Dawn group” of people knowing where you are coming from, are now eclipsed by those who think you are “neo-nazi” or connected with the Golden Dawn in-fighting or other stuff.

Anyway a group should not need to “look to the past for any particular knowledge or security, but to its future”.

Farrell said it was better to pour new wine into new skins and be more secure in the Magical Order of the Aurora Aurea’s independence and ability to move in its  own direction.

“We have basically grown up, and don’t need that name any more, ” he concluded.

 

 

 

David Griffin loses key ally to schism

Comedy Golden Dawn Supreme Pooh-Bah David Griffin has suffered yet another major set-back after one of his key members has deserted him and taken his temple with him.
“G ∴ M + R has, however, initiated a process that is towards ever greater autonomy, until finally at the winter solstice in 2013, separates itself completely from HOGD / A + O and appoints his former Nordic jurisdictions as completely independent and autonomous, and himself as a totally unique words resident of Hyperborea,” Google translate tells us.
Tomas Stacewicz’s key job in Griffin’s Rosicrucian Order of the AO was to spin long false histories  to bolster his dear Leader’s claim to supremacy over any one else in that long winded tradition.
Griffin lost his connection to Jean Pascal Ruggiu‘s secret chiefs  for the crime of not giving his secret chief enough money. Griffin had fallen out with Ruggiu which meant that he no longer had access to the alchemical material he hoped to repackage as third order teachings. Stacewicz seems to sense that Griffin had nothing more to offer and has slung his hook.
We have run some of his various blogs through Google translate and it appears that Stacewicz was opposed to the dumbing down of the Golden Dawn teachings with new age lingo and hard sell.
According to his blog, he has schismed his Swedish Temple to form a new order with the title Hermetiska Orden av Den Gryende Morgonrodnaden which we are assured is impossible to say when you are pissed, although we found it tricky when we were sober.
Nevertheless it appears, judging by the history Stacewicz has provided on his webpage he is claiming lineage from David Griffin himself. This lineage depends on a character called Desmond Burke who pretended he was a 7=4 in the AO so that he could dress up with his mates in a pretend temple. In a letter he admitted that he had no right to give lineage to anyone (see letter below).
So what must be particularly galling to Griffin is that Stacewicz has not chucked him because he is full of bullshit, he has gotten rid of him because he thinks he can do it better. Either that, or Stacewicz is truly dumb enough to still believe David’s lineage spin. Stacewicz has written long blogs about the importance of lineage so we guess he still needs something.
He appears to have done his best to craft his new order within the Griffin/Ruggiu myth about a 111 year cycle of reformation which happens to coincide with whatever date with their forming of the AO in 1999.
“Interesting to mention in this context is that the Rosicrucian tradition dictates a general reformation cycle of 111 years, which is broken down into smaller reformations about a decade. This seems to correspond quite well with Sun’s heartbeat on 11 years. In fact, the words of its Swedish packaging, which now calls itself the Hermetiska Orden av Den Gryende Morgonrodnaden , have recently implemented such a minor decenniel reformation. Turn of the year 2013-14 represents a time when our solar heart beats its kind again and Aurora borealis reveals himself again as the strongest, a Nordic Dawning Aurora – Aurora Nascente in Hyperborea!” says Google translate.
While Stacewicz’s temple is small, the loss of a loyal follower must be a blow to Griffin who is now left with his wife and pro-bono property lawyer Jorge Helvia who is no doubt readying some nicotine stained, smoke soaked, documents to impress the Judge in the case which is overseeing a trademark claim against his order by the deep pocketed and legally well-resourced AMORC.
One of AMORCs arguments against Griffin is that he does not have a presence in Europe so should not be allowed the trademark in that country. If that is the case then Stacewicz’s defection could spell the end of Griffin in the EU, unless his Paris temple (which he appears to have named in the same way that Ryan Air has named Luton Airport “London Airport”) and more than one member.

The letter in which Bourke says he has no lineage to give

Anonymous attack site… us?

There is a rumour trying to circulate in the various esoteric blogs which we follow that we are somehow an anonymous attack site which was set up to target a specific magical group.

Ironically the source of these rumours  is a site which has been launching attacks on other Golden Dawn groups where the blogger refuses to sign his name or identify him or herself.

The site in question uses the same layout and graphics as one run by our favourite comedy Golden Dawn leader David Griffin, however the literary quality is much better so we think it is more of a fansite of one of Griffin’s younger followers.

Like his mentor, Fr ATLV has no problem pontificating about how nice life would be if everyone got along, and how terrible these “anonymous attack blogs” are.

Like his mentor he fails to see that it is classic case of the “pot calling the kettle black.”  Having a long lecture about anonymous attack sites written anonymously is bad enough, but when you park it next to a blog where you rehash Griffin’s long debunked libel that Nick Farrell was member of SRIA you start to look stupid.

To his credit, Griffin has deleted a lot of these posts himself and started running adverts for his AO-Golden Dawn business on his blog instead.  We only hope that he has learnt his lesson and instead of attacking other occultists and making outrageous claims he will start training people and doing some proper magical work.

BTW Fr ATLV is incorrect when he sees us as an attack blog on his order.  Since we have been in operation we have published news on several different orders and different traditions — including Griffin’s sworn enemy Robert Zink.   If you notice we have been naming and shaming individuals and not their Orders.

If Griffin had not been such a tosser to others, we would not have cared about his Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn outer order of the Rosicrucian Order of the Alpha et Omega business at all.

Members of that particular group might wonder how much more credible they would be as a magical group if they did not have Griffin making them look like idiots.  We have been emailed by some seemingly good people in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn outer order of the Rosicrucian Order of the Alpha et Omega who seem to be getting on with their lessons.

It is a little strange when two out of three of them begin each email with the phrase “but we stay out of the inter order politics.”

Unless Fr ATLV and Griffin kick off again, we can’t much news coming our way from Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn outer order of the Rosicrucian Order of the Alpha et Omega.   But this is actually the goal of Watchers of the Dawn. We want to keep an eye on leaders who previously thought that they could behave as they liked and no one would call them out on it.  Now with Watchers around we really hope that group leaders will start to modify their behaviour.

UPDATE:  The anonymous attack site has deleted some posts and changed its links in a bid to stop us linking.  He has replaced it with a  new  post saying that Watcher of the Dawn is being disrespectful because we reported that something was wrong with the Chief of a Golden Dawn Order expelling a member because he insisted on following his doctor’s medical advice.   If you think this is reasonable behavior and should be kept secret we feel sorry for you. We can only assume that who ever your chiefs are, are even more autocratic for you to consider this to be normal and worthy to be kept secret.

In the meantime when Chiefs of any Esoteric Group is behaving badly we will be reporting it.  We are sorry that that this blogger thinks it is a good idea to continue allow Chiefs to abuse their students.

We have updated the links so our readers can see the mental leaps this person is avoiding making and pity him.

Lastly we are not connected to your Golden Dawn wars.  We are none of the people who are mentioned anywhere even those who write comments in our site.

The short of this is if the AO Golden Dawn wants to be left alone by Watcher of the Dawn, it is  going to have to stop attacking people.  While you have an attacking blog or behave badly we will be watching and you will be reported.

Golden Dawner expelled for following doctor’s advice

A Golden Dawn member was expelled because his fellow chiefs believed he should not have been following them and not his doctor’s advice.

In a blog post , which was cross-posted on Facebook, Níall MacSiúrtáin has recounted his expulsion from the Ancient and Honourable Order of the Golden Dawn.

MacSiúrtáin has epilepsy and he had taken medication which gave him weight gain, concentration problems, and extreme reaction to Sun.  The Irish sun would leave him with bad sunburn.

Since he had not had a major seizure since 2007 MacSiúrtáin’s doctor decided to take him off his meds. That did not sit well with his chiefs, Dean Wilson and Gerald Dempsey, who mentioned it as a reason for his expulsion to members.

A letter written by Dempsey, which was leaked to MacSiúrtáin by people within the Ancient and Honourable Order of the Golden Dawn, effectively claimed that MacSiúrtáin had a psychological disorder which made him risk his health by going off his meds.

“I belief it is wiser for him to abandon all occult pursuits until he addresses this decision to abandon his meditation.”

Dempsey emphasized his right to say all this by saying he was a trained counsellor.  However Dempsey is not a psychiatrist and is not qualified to give medical advice.

After MacSiúrtáin posted the leaked letter we got in touch with him and he told us that Dempsey and Wilson knew his doctor was involved in his decision.  He has carried on his magical path and not had any fits since.

But looking at the letter it is fairly clear there is much more to MacSiúrtáin’s expulsion.

Dempsey, Wilson and MacSiúrtáin formed the Dublin temple under Nick Farrell’s Magical Order of the Aurora Aurea.  Farrell refuses to allow people below the 5=6 grade form a full temple and the highest grade they had  was  4=7.  In the meantime they had to travel to Rome to get their initiations, but were forbidden to initiate.

Dempsey was the Imperator, Wilson was the Premonstrator and MacSiúrtáin was the Cancellerious. Dempsey and Wilson quit MOAA  and the future of their small group was in doubt.  MacSiúrtáin was not keen on transferring to a new order under Wilson and at the time all the material and funds were under his control.

“He spent more time getting the advice of Nick Farrell than he did listening to his fellow co-chiefs.  In fact he originally said he was staying with MOAA, and only changed his mind after much discussion and arguing with [Wilson] and I,” Dempsey wrote.

In Dempsey’s letter he said that waiting period “baffled us” after all why wouldn’t anyone want to toss their GD oath into the rubbish bin, give up access to an experienced teacher and follow the 4=7 Wilson who is still in his early 20s?

After some weeks, MacSiúrtáin agreed to join what was going to become the Ancient and Honourable Order of the Golden Dawn and so that problem was effectively removed.

“Dean convinced me that life with a temple was better than having to go to Rome for initiations.  He was going to promote himself to 5=6 so that he could initiate people.”

The temple’s assets were effectively transferred over and the group could begin operation under Wilson.

Once the transfer had taken place it was clear that MacSiúrtáin was surplus to requirements and it was time to be knifed.  Wilson and Dempsey claimed that MacSiúrtáin was inability to do Cancellarious and insisted he quit and hand over any MOAA assets.

The letter expelling MacSiúrtáin said they gave him time to “resign to save face”.  When he failed to do so, they expelled him.

Dempsey’s letter to members looks like an old-fashioned backstab which was supposed to stop any members following MacSiúrtáin  and take away the members he had bought into the group.

The points it listed were simply a list of gripes that Wilson and Dempsey had been holding against MacSiúrtáin for some time and many had been resolved.   The idea appears to have been to fling enough shit in a particular way and hope that enough stuck to prevent an exodus.

The letter was supposed to show that MacSiúrtáin was too unstable to be a member of their order and they should not trust him to lead them anywhere.

The fact that MacSiúrtáin had several copies of Dempsey’s secret  email sent to him from members of the group which indicates that not everyone appreciated Dempsey and Wilson’s methods. In Neo-pagan circles MacSiúrtáin is widely liked.

In his blog MacSiúrtáin has done a good job of answering all 11 allegations set against him, even if none of it was current or put to him as a reason for being expelled.

It looks like the Ancient and Honourable Order of the Golden Dawn is not Ancient or particularly Honourable and is just another young and ‘orrible GD group..

The reason why MacSiúrtáin was told he was expelled

The Reason that MacSiúrtáin was expelled according to a secret backstabbing email sent to members of the Ancient and ‘Orrible Order of the Golden Dawn.

Golden Dawn bad-boy Robert Zink is back

Arguably one of the most controversial Golden Dawn chiefs of the late 20^th century is attempting to rebuild his much schismed Esoteric Order of the Golden Dawn.

Robert Zink, who managed to keep the name of the group, has been laying low since he was awarded the Order of the Golden Boot by his own order three years ago.

In the 1990s Zink’s Order of the Morning Star was more akin to a money-making sex cult which used the Regardie version of the Golden Dawn as a wrapper.

It was incredibly successful drawing in large numbers to quite well equipped temples.  For those who could not get to one of its temples, Zink devised a method of Astral Initiation.  This involved handing over cash for an initiation and then a ritual would be performed in your absence, possibly. 

Zink managed to recruit some highly technical people into his group and they staged online wars between his sock puppets and those of the other “sole trading” Golden Dawn business run by David Griffin. 

Griffin managed to get the upper hand by attempting to trademark the name Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, only to be beaten to the punch by Chic Cicero.  While those two battled it out in court, Zink kept a low profile, even while he benefited from the fact that Cicero’s action prevented him being sued by Griffin.

An even bigger scandal erupted when Zink left his wife for the daughter of one of his students Raphaela, who was pregnant with his child.  Various attempts were made to post Raphaela’s birth certificate online to prove that she was underage at the time of their child’s conception.

Curiously after that incident, Zink appeared to calm down considerably. He became a married man and his Second Order became less cultish and more Roman Catholic.   There were even attempts to rehabilitate his group within the wider GD community. In fact the only thing that was a little odd was that money appeared to disappear when it was in his presence.

One example was the case of the Cicero Fighting Fund.  Zink raised thousands of dollars through his temples to help Cicero in his long running legal battle with Griffin.   Certainly his members remembered giving him the money.  However Cicero never received any of it.

Zink never really was that successful in the UK.  He never managed to find enough British people who would set up a temple for him and his workshops received poor reviews.  But then again British people viewed his hard sales techniques with some suspicion.

However Zink’s operation collapsed soon after his marriage with Raphaela ended.  His order, which was now starting to contain some fairly good people were starting to wonder why on earth they needed him.    Some group leaders felt that associating with him was getting them nowhere, while others felt the cash should be going to them.

Some of the groups merged into other Golden Dawn Orders, others just collapsed completely.  Some of those which remained operating continued his astral initiation system and continued more or less with the same methods.

Zink was attempting to make a living running courses based around The Secret and his own Ruach Healing courses.  The Ruach healing was supposed to be Zink’s answer to Reiki.  It was essentially Israel Regardie’s Middle Pillar, but repackaged with the idea of running graded courses, like the New Age Reiki programme.

Now it seems that Zink is remembering his glory days and trying to “get the band back together.”  Old members are being contacted and set up temples within the Esoteric Order of the Golden Dawn again.

According to his Facebook advert, he appears to be targeting those members who fell away, or are dissatisfied with the spin off orders that replaced him.

In at least two cases he has offered those who have lower grades in the spin off orders, adept grades if they set up groups for him.

This is a standard Golden Dawn trick. If you want your order to have a temple in a particular town, find someone with a little experience and then offer them a Second Order grade so that they don’t have to do the Outer Order work.   The new adept is motivated, but completely untrained in the system.

So far it is a moot point if Zink has been successful.  There were rumours of a temple starting up in Toronto, but since occult bookshops in that town have not suddenly found all their stock with “Esoteric Order of the Golden Dawn” bookmarks we are not putting much stock in that.

If anyone has heard anything, feel free to post in the comments.  BTW we will be watching for libel on these posts as we really are expecting to see Griffin and Zink to be at each other’s throats trying to attract attention again.

Golden Dawn’s David Griffin caught lying again

One of our favourite sources for news, the Sole Proprietor of the  Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn outer order of the Rosicrucian Order of the Alpha et Omega business. David Griffin appears to have a huge problem which has sent him spinning like a top.

We have reported how his secret chiefs have abandoned his business in a row about money and how he lied about it  by claiming his former best friend was “joking”.   Now it appears that his Secret Chiefs have contacted his enemy Nick Farrell.

Grand Mudslinger of the Order of the Porkie Pie.
David Griffin 10=1 and friend.

For a month Farrell issued a Secret Chiefs challenge where he said that if physical secret chiefs existed they should get in touch with him and prove it.  He then proceeded to fill his blog with articles about the different types of “secret chiefs” in the Western Mystery tradition and how they were not physical supermen.

The conclusion of where this was heading was obvious.  No physical secret chief would show up and Farrell would declare that they didn’t exist. But it appears that Farrell was sitting on a piece of news that Griffin, did not expect.

Namely that a member of the same cabal which claimed to be Griffin’s secret chiefs met with him at a Rome coffee shop and offered to place his Magical Order of the Auroa Aurea under them in return for higher grade material.  What was doubly embarrassing to Griffin was Farrell said “no” because he did not believe he was dealing with a real secret chief.

“Secret Chiefs are supposed to be spiritual supermen.  They are supposed to have transcended occult orders. Yet this focus on politics, esoteric orders, money etc was entirely mundane and therefore suspect,” Farrell wrote in his blog.

In another slight to Griffin,  Farrell noted that this particular secret chief did not seem to want to know about his occult ability or knowledge as it was clear they would take anyone with enough money.

“..he had selected me for his grand plan, but it did not really matter what I could do… I could have been a complete loon and I would have been in, provided that MOAA provided his groups with cash and members,” Farrell wrote.
Farrell’s description of the man he met had  a strikingly similar pedigree to Griffin’s secret chiefs — there were mentions of the Osiris Order, the Grand Orient, Scottish Rite freemasonry, the Italian strain of Misraim and Myriam, sex magic and Alchemy, all “authorities” which have slipped into Griffin’s blogs over the years.

Alex Sumner pointed out in his blog  theOrdine Osirideo Egiziano (Order of Osiris the Egyptian)  is the outer order of the Confraternita Terapeutica e Magica di Myriam (The Magical and Therapeutic Brotherhood of Myriam).  The Order is for the wealthy and runs a like the movie Eyes Wide Shut.  Its adepts talks a lot about sex magic and alchemy.

We emailed Farrell and asked if he met Griffin’s own secret chief and he said that he doubted it.

“I am fairly sure I know who Griffin’s secret chief was and it was never this guy.  However I think they were related.  This lot appear to be all associated by groups and the same ideas.  I was emailed by one person who is connected to the same scene and told that the guy I spoke too was the boss of them all.  I hope for their sake he wasn’t.”

Griffin’s answer to this particular problem was to lie about it .  He wrote in his blog that Nick Farrell met Master R.  Master R, or Master Racoczi, was supposed to be the Secret Chief who contacted the founder of Builders of the Adytum, Paul Foster Case.   He then used that to rubbish Farrell’s claims saying that Racoczi was a Transylvanian and not a Corsican so that solves everything!

Like most Griffin lies he was clearly hoping that his followers did not read Farrell’s post and relied on his interpretation of it.

Farrell never mentioned Master Racoczi and clearly said that the person he met was human.  Farrell has refused to say who it was that he met, telling us that “it was a condition of the meeting.” Also, unlike Griffin claimed, Farrell took nothing from this “secret chief” and certainly did not do what Griffin did and hand over the keys to his Order.

“The conversation was open, and interesting, but after a while he realised that I was not going to follow his views.  Nor was I going to buy that he was a Secret Chief in anyway.  An interesting man, an adept of something, but not anything like the physical secret chief’s which we had been writing about, if they ever existed,” he wrote.

So where did Griffin get his claim that Farrell deserved to be rubbished because he said he met the famous Comte St Germaine?  The fact is that he MADE IT UP. In other words you can counter the truth with a lie, build the lie into a fantastic event which only happened in your own mind and then rubbish it.  Problem sorted.

Instead Griffin has, once again, revealed that he has some real problems telling the truth and will lie and spin to cover his embarrassment at being caught out. One has to wonder why anyone would believe anything that comes from Griffin’s lips.  Yet he still expects his followers and the esoteric world to trust him.

Griffin is right, trust is very important in occult leaders.  Particularly as he is asking us to trust teachings, which he claims he got from Secret chiefs and no one has ever seen, are of a quality which makes his group superior to everyone else’s.  At this rate he should rename his AO as the “Order of the Porkie Pie.”

Who are the Watchers of the Dawn?

This week has been great for us newswise and we keep getting requests asking who we are and what are our intentions.

This blog started after a “tired and emotional” conversation between a group of us after particularly successful party in Oxford. Some of us had been on the British Occult scene for the last three decades and new lots of stories about people getting shafted by their occult leaders.

Part of the reason they have been able to get away with it is that there is a conspiracy of silence which exists between some of these leaders and their victims.  It is not considered “done” for such antics to be made public, but as a result there was no good watchdog for the occult scene.   Politicians are forced by the press to keep their noses more or less clean, but there is no press for the occult scene.

If you look at online magazines they are all reporting either teaching or advertising a group leader’s meetings or books.  There is very little wider questioning of their more dodgy moves. As a result they keep repeating the same moves and damaging the same types of people.

This goes on for years until they finally die and people crawl out of the woodwork and say what a shithead that particular leader was.  While we do not doubt that unpleasant leaders and brilliant occult ability often go hand in hand, this lack information often means that when you pop up and say “Bill Gray was a racist” people act all surprised.  People need to be informed of the inconsistencies so that they are informed.   Then when a leader goes throws them out of their group because they are concerned that they might be a challenge to their leadership, they are at least can say “well I expected this to happen eventually.”

The reason we are doing this anonymously is to protect our sources.  If you know us, then chances are an astute paranoid occult leader might know who our sources are.  Also it makes it a little difficult for them to track us down and sue us into silence.   We know of three groups which are fond of using lawyers to silence those who have a story to tell, even if those writs never actually eventuate.

One of us is a lawyer so we check the content carefully before we publish to make sure we don’t break any UK libel laws.   So if any leaders are thinking of suing, they had better be damn sure of themselves and have deep pockets.

In fact we are sitting on several really good stories about one Golden Dawn group with information provided by insiders, including a couple chiefs from the same order.  We can’t report it because we can’t prove it, even if an attack blog would run it and not care.

One of us is involved in an OTO group, but the rest of us are just part of a loose affiliation that hold “rituals” at a particular Oxford pub.  We don’t care about any group’s politics we are only interested in a good story if people cock up.

Already one group leader is trying to portray us as an “attack site against his order” and issues orders to his disciples warning against us.  We find this funny as we would not be paying any attention to his group unless he was not been giving us such good stories and his members had not been supplying us with good leads.

Anyway since we started this site there appears to be some other things we need to cover.  Firstly there are stories which affect the magical community generally, such as the Cameron thing.  We have also seen that there are some stories which need to be written about the antics of certain people within the occult community who really are taking the piss.  We originally wanted to expose the lies of occult leaders but it might end up being a news site for the general magical occult community.

We depend on people emailing us with stories.  We can’t guarantee we will publish them, but we will check them out.

 

UPDATE For the record we so far have not had material sourced from anyone mentioned in this blog by name.  The stories have come from the Internet and other blogs and are there already, they have not been seen.  We are hoping to break some more original stuff if people drop us an email.  Due to some emails we have had we would like to say that the following people have not contributed anyway to Watcher of the Dawn.  Mike Magee, Aaron Leitch,  John Paternoster [who he? ed], Pascal Rugiu, Nick Farrell, Bob Stewart, Josephine McCarthy,  Ina Custers-van Bergen or anyone else.  However if you would like to be a secret contact we will keep your name secret (we have to know who were are talking to so we can confirm your story but will not pass that on to anyone).

Griffin tells Pascal Rugiu he is a joke

The Sole Proprietor of the  Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn outer order of the Rosicrucian Order of the Alpha et Omega business David Griffin, has told his former number two that he must be joking when he claimed the business’ secret chiefs had abandoned him

As we reported here Pascal posted on Facebook that he was the only link that Griffin had for the Third Order which were cut when he resigned.  He said that he introduced Griffin to the secret chiefs in his home.   So if members of the AO wanted secret chiefs with their magic order they needed to talk to him.

That would not normally have indicated that the AO had lost its secret chiefs, as they might have continued to work independently with Griffin.  But Ruggiu said that Griffin had angered the Secret Chiefs greatly.

“They say he has betrayed them!” he wrote in Facebook. The Master told Ruggiu that Griffin did not help him, but “just exploited him” and wrote a “very insulting letter to the council of Masters.” The result was that the Secret Chiefs decided to leave him.

Today Griffin this week printed “a clarification” of Ruggiu’s outburst saying that it was” a joke” because one of the  secret chiefs were staying  at his house for four months when Pascal said it.  He was apparently preparing to give top secret information to the people who showed up at his workshop in April. That  secret chief later asked Pascal to take down the post and he apparently did, at least according to Griffin.

However like most of Griffins histories, he has failed to get his dates right which probably means he is not telling the full story.  Ruggiu’s comments on Facebook were written in May, well after the Secret Chief had returned to Italy or Paris or wherever he lived.  According to Griffins dating this must have been at the latest February assuming it happened at all.  Griffin’s conference was in April.

Alas this means that Ruggiu’s information about the state of mind of the secret chiefs is more recent than anything that happened before Griffin’s April workshop.  Perhaps the row that Ruggiu is referring to is the mind of the Secret Chief AFTER he left Griffin.  Then there is the letter that Ruggiu is referring to which claims the Secret Chiefs had cut off contact with Griffin after a rude letter.  The secret chief said that Griffin had failed to support him, perhaps they were expecting their Vegas gambling debts to be covered.  Still it sounds like the secret chief got back from Vegas and was suitably pissed off.

We would have thought that a Secret Chief who is an alchemical master he should be able to generate enough gold himself, or having trained Griffin for four months should have expected Griffin to generate enough cash himself.  Besides Griffin claimed two years ago that he could turn lead into gold, we would have thought he would have been rolling in it by now.

Ruggiu has been quiet about the whole matter and when he was asked about it said he would be making a statement later which has never arrived.  Meanwhile it seems that Griffin is keeping up the story that he is connected to Ruggiu’s secret chiefs and insisting that they think he is their great new hope and Ruggiu’ is nothing to them.

 

 

Stacewicz’s historical brains are scrambled by challenge

No problems of ego here. Stacewicz’s Facebook picture is Mathers’ picture with his own face stuck on it.

It seems that David Griffin’s effective number two was caught out spinning fake facts to his Facebook listeners.

Tomas Stacewicz, who is the Imperator of David Griffin’s Swedish Temple was caught out trying to re-invent history in accordance to his leader’s latest crackpot theory again.

For those who came in late, Stacewicz writes long rambling cut-and-paste histories which are supposed to prove that Griffin is right, black really is white, and Griffin’s Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn outer order of the Rosicrucian Order of the Alpha et Omega,  sole trader business  really is the original AO order. Griffin calls Stacewicz’s pieces “scholarly” in a bid to make them even more important.

Unfortunately for historians and Griffin, Stacewicz’s use of sources would get him kicked out of a fourth form history class and he does not seem to show any of the skills we expect from Swedish academia.

Wading in to the secret chiefs debate, Stacewicz questioned a statement by Nick Farrell that Secret Chiefs were always male.

Writing in his blog, Farrell had said  :” The only recorded meetings with secret chiefs in the flesh are universally with males.  It appears that females do not qualify.  There is no racial bar; they are allowed to be Indians, Native Americans, Chinese, Arabs, Jews, Etruscans, Egyptians.  There have been few recorded secret chiefs who were of African descent.  If you were hoping your secret chief could be a black woman you could be out of luck.”

Stacewicz said that this was “rubbish” and says a lot about that particular “G.D. leader’s ignorance in these matters”.

He said that Secret Chiefs were all alchemists and do not make any distinction between women and men.

Then he said that” priestessess [sic]  were a very important if not central to these mysteries”.  We guess they made the alchemists tea, as they do not seem to have shown up in any important meetings with other occultists.

Stacewicz had not actually proved anything. a fact that the Spanish BOTA member Riccardo Cobb picked upon.  Cobb appears very interested in Secret Chiefs as he tries to establish the history of BOTA which depends on them for its lineage.

Cobb asked Stacewicz what historical examples there had been of women secret chiefs.  After all there are loads of myths about them surely if they were common, then why have no myths involving women shown up?

Sensing that his leader was in trouble, another Griffinite Victor Guillen said that Stacewicz was not going to name any names because they were all secret.

In otherwords, Stacewicz with all his genius in history could name a  female secret chief, but they were all secret so he did not have to prove it.

Cobb said that he was not interested in knowing who the secret chiefs of Griffin’s order were, he just wanted to know what historical examples there had been of female secret chiefs.

Stacewicz then popped up and said “I know several names, but as Victor just said, that is not disclosed information anymore and for good reasons.”

He told Cobb to read his long and rambling post about the Third Order and the Secret Chiefs and the Golden Yawn  while it would not answer Cobb’s question, it would probably give him something to do and not question Stacewicz’s historical pronouncements ever again.

In summery Stacewicz saying Farrell is ignorant and not telling the truth about secret chiefs, he can’t prove it, but people have to believe him because he says so. After all he is just the sort of person people should trust uncritically.

Goetic magician slams out of date “secret masonic” magic

Respected British Goetic magician Jake Stratton-Kent has blasted what he calls the tendency for ritual magicians to form masonic style groups.

Writing in his Yahoo group, the author of Geosophia, said there were lots of reasons he find the ‘Masonic’ model a dead loss in the many, areas of modern magic where it applies.

Masonry was good as a cover for free thinkers in an age when – for example – non-attendance at Anglican church was an imprisonable offense in England.

“That time is over.  The whole Secret Society model is not only unhelpful, but actively counter-productive. It is the principle reason why so much energy is expended fighting tiny little wars between factions (between witch groups, between rival Golden Dawns, between thelemic groups etc etc),” he said.

He believes that energy could be better spent incorporating the real advances in recovering our tradition made possible by non-secretive sources like academia.

Stratton-Kent said that one reason parts of the grimoire community are advancing faster than any other area nowadays is that it doesn’t automatically include the masonic model.

“Whether in Magical Orders or Witchcraft [the masonic model] leads to infighting, stagnation and parochialism,” he said.

He added that he had no more time for ‘invented history’, which the entire occult world seems to rely on to an alarming extent.

One of the things that gets Stratton-Kent’s goat is that witch groups or magical orders have been unable to indicate that they have possessed any privileged information on his specialist subject goetia.

“Since the C19th the goetia has hardly moved at all – at least, not among occultists. Even if someone is jealously guarding material from deeper into the C18th/C19th it still lacks a lot of context, info and insights now available from modern scholarship, the papyri,” he said.

Things have stood still for so long that modern research has got further along without them, and esoteric groups don’t want to catch up.

Stratton-Kent said that there is a major epidemic in recent modern occultism which he dubs the “dark fluff” movement based around the teachings of Kenneth Grant and Michael Bertiaux.

“There are so many ‘darker than thou’ types out there playing silly games with the Qliphoth, Necronomicon, Atlantean initiations and such. The grasp of the roots of magic in this ‘niche’ is even more bogus than the ‘occult establishment’ of the C19th and its offshoots, “Stratton-Kent said.

He said that such types were just establishment  “Spookying up the Golden Dawn, Crowley and modern witchcraft with a dash of Lovecraft and Qliphoth.”

None of them was more informed about the real roots of Western magic in goetia.

Stratton-Kent feels that masonry was being used as a substitute for elements of the magical tradition we’d either lost, or felt uncomfortable with in a more orthodox religious environment.

Virtually every western school has relied on Masonry to fill in the gaps for so long that they are no longer very interested in recovering what it that was being substituted.

“There is so much Masonic bathwater that has to go to make room for real babies in the bath, and change frightens people,” Stratton-Kent said.

The masonic approach means creating a bogus history and Masonry predominate, even though there is much better information and different structures available.

He maintained that the roots of what has been called ‘black magic’ by later philosophies and religions, is in fact an incredibly rich tradition distinct from them, not defined by opposition to them, or even reliant on  qabalistic or neoplatonic terms.

“By clinging to bogus history and the secret society model, we are selling ourselves very short indeed as Western magicians,” he said.

Weighing in on the side of the “masonic groups” Aaron Leitch, writer of Secrets of Magical Grimoires, told the Yahoo group the magical orders and secret societies did have a place in the Western Mystery Tradition.

He said that they are not using Masonry to “fill the gaps” of anything, if anything they are doing things the other way around.

“Masonry has removed itself from its own mystical underpinnings so far that, these days, young Masons are apt to seek out the Golden Dawn to fill in gaps,” Leitch said.

He cited the case of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn chief adept Chic Cicero who joined the Masons with the intention of learning something about the origins of the GD.

“After reaching the position of Grand Commander of Florida, he found nothing useful in that regard – and in fact found himself teaching them the mysteries behind their tradition,” Leitch said.

He agreed that the orders were not going in the direction that Stratton-Kent  was pulling.

“Even my own Solomonic work (which you know is pulling in pretty much the same direction as yours) is done outside the confines of my order. But I just can’t see my work in the order as some sort of detriment to my Solomonic work,” he said.