I remember reading a quote about MacGregor Mathers, something to the effect that he claimed to be a Scots noble from the clan of Macgregor, all of which was untrue. I am not surprised to see that googling his name now produces a highly sanitized set of biographies on the first page or two. Everywhere I go on the net, when my inclination is primarily spiritual or spiritualist, as soon as I shuffle down through the first few leaves, I’m likely to find – not necessarily something substantial – but a peculiar odor, a peculiar fragrance that suggests the presence of his leavings. And further study commonly uncovers a trademark. I could say that what fascinates me is how often the trademark is remote and hidden, or only appears in some vague or tangential form. But, of course, the practitioner can insist, just as the biographers of Mathers insist about his dissembling, that this is simply a sign of the first rule of ‘the craft’. But since the trademark is more commonly like a watermark, hidden in a page that claims to be scholarly or represent some formal and obviously institutional presence, I find that the deception verges on that impolite concept, namely, fraud.
            I have to acknowledge my debt to the Golden Dawn. G. R. S. Meade undoubtedly helped point me toward gnosticism, with his scholarly work in that direction. And, of course, I can claim an initiatory succession in the poetry, precisely. Ezra Pound studied with W. B. Yeats, who of course was thick in the early Dawn. I had a fellow poet and friend, whose work I still honor, who was a light if not a mentor to me, when I was still young in the craft. He focused on Lowell, who studied with Pound. My friend studied briefly with Lowell, and when he returned, I experienced a profound connection through the line, fully opening the lineage to me, as poets. But I am willing to share that lineage publicly. Granted that being a poet is something that only a true poet would understand. And while there are in fact a great many writers with strong poetic voices, writers who should be recognized and subsidized as poets in their communities – in an ideal society – at the same time, John Berryman’s assertion that all genuine poets are friends, ‘because there are so few of us’, is also true.
            And I have to acknowledge that the Golden Dawn helped keep the occult or spiritualist influence alive in a time of pervasive and even overwhelming anti-spiritualism. But if it had not been the Golden Dawn, it would have been some other movement or group of movements. Spiritualism does not require any particular organization.

             And this is my primary objection to the Golden Dawn. It represents a specific moment of culture, and that moment is largely past. The real critique of Mathers begins in the attack on his translation work, particularly in the Kabbala. With the emergence in public of legitimate Jewish Kabbalists, with their explanations ranging from direct praxis to the highly scholarly, and the recognition of the dedication required in terms not only of the Hebrew itself, but of the history and cultural context as well, it becomes clear that accusing Mathers of amateurism involves more than a mild understatement. But what I’m pointing to here is the fact that the Golden Dawn treated no historic tradition, finally, any better than it treated Kabbala. While Meade or A. E. Waite could write or edit an exquisite scholarly text, here and there – studies that in some cases retain their value to this day – the Golden Dawn practitioners were not only inveterate masters of the blender, the homogenization of traditions was elemental and invariable. Kabbala may or may not become the backbone of Golden Dawn ritual, but it was the infantile Kabbala of Mathers’ translation of Knorr von Rosenroth’s already highly suspect text. At the time of the Golden Dawn, gnostic texts that had long been lost were discovered in the Old Slavonic and translated into modern European languages. And these, along with the already known gnostic works, become part of the mix. While, if I remember correctly, no direct link exists between the earlier occultist, ‘Eliphas Levi’, and the founders of the Golden Dawn, his texts were instrumental in the formation of the work. We can go back to the Emerald Table of Hermes Trismegistus, and other late neo-Platonic convolutions. We can hark back to the grimoires of the Middle Ages. We can even go back to the Rosetta Stone and the first translations of Egyptian hieroglyphics, since they produced an initial wave of scholarly Egyptology, revealing many specifics about Egyptian religion, which instantly found their home in European occultism under the pretext of ancient indigenous traditions.
            As a consequence, the purveyors of the modern occultism grounded in the Golden Dawn – which often presents itself in guises other than occultism – is nevertheless founded on the specific occultist eclecticism of a hundred years ago. In almost all of the areas under consideration, our understanding has changed and developed in profound and often radical ways. Nor would a contemporary spiritualist or spiritualist group, beginning from scratch today, assemble a practice from the same pieces and in the same order or proportions. The Golden Dawn is a portrait of a time, and needs to be laid to rest. Claims to lineage from the Dawn as authority should not only be suspect, they should be invalidating.

             This is not to say that any given practitioner was a charlatan or that any given practice was a humbug. We have reports that, in their peculiar verisimilitude, strongly suggest that teachers in the tradition were often legitimately spiritually endowed as well as capable of offering genuine initiations. The problem is that the tradition is ultimately a construct only appropriate to a given time, that its elements were so diffuse and multifarious that it had no real formal cogency from the first, apart from the community and its practice, and finally that the set of threads which emerged from the center diverged so rapidly and completely that present reference to the Dawn through a ‘lineage’ essentially signifies nothing, unless we were to know the lineage explicitly and be given some substantive record, which, of course, ‘the craft’ precludes.
            There is also the general problem of spirit itself. In a sense, spirit has no form. And in a sense, any form is grounded in spirit. Spiritualism is ultimately about where we are coming from, because, as an ‘object’, spirit is ineffable. Therefore, the power of spirit resides in the ‘interface’, that is, in the natural ‘boundaries’ between one’s given world and the ‘region’ of ‘pure spirit’. But these ‘boundaries’ are not different from vocational structure. Any prolonged and appropriate practice of a ‘craft’, that is, of any serious vocation, can lead not only to spiritual grasp, but also to a substantive body of spiritual understanding, through which ‘initiations’ become possible.