Al said..
>>I'm looking at whether Golden Dawn-derived groups could be considered a 
>>religion by some set of the standard markers for such.....  I'm actually 
>>growing dissatisfied with it as a thesis area and would rather focus on 
>>the Golden Dawn directly but I am having problems coming up with ideas 
>>that are approachable.<<

I recently read Mary Greer's "Women of the Golden Dawn' whcih I thought 
would be not very good but it was actually quite good. In it I was 
interested to see how members of the Golden Dawn, for example Florence Farr 
when she "found / met / contacted" an "Egyptian Adept" - represented by some 
sort of Egyptian staute in the British Museum I think it was - she said 
something to the effect that "Yes, on the astral plane I tested the Egyptian 
Adept with some of our grade signs to see what level of initiation they had 
achieved...". I was amused that the G.D. would have thought that an ancient 
Egyptian would have been expected to recognise Golden Dawn grade signs - as 
signs of initiation - that had some sort of (assumed by the GD members) 
equivalence in ancient Egypt - as initiation signs. (I may just be clueless 
there as to the origin of those grade signs, I know the air sign is meant to 
represent the Egyptian god Shu, is it not). It seems that the GD felt that 
their system was universal or at least authentically ancient, or something 
like that. And that some ancient Adept actually cared about being helpful 
regarind transmitting some useful information to modern magicians.

I thought it was pretty interesting also how much they - people like the 
prolific Moina and Magregor Mathers - depended on scrying the astral to work 
out the bones of rituals that they didn't have the whole text for. That was 
fascinating. Not that I don't think one could find "material" from the 
astral, but how much people used to seem to do it (and may do so still, but 
I haven't really come across that sort of thing, people I know tend to work 
with established rituals, or when they do write their own they don't tend to 
say that they "got it from the astral plane", or from an Adept - they say 
they constructed it themselves). I remember when they were working with W.B. 
Yeats on the Celtic system they were replying very heavily on obtaining the 
information to flesh the system out from astral contacts. Moina and Magregor 
seemed to have a "Pagan" sort of Cult of Isis going on there at one stage 
too. I know they spent a lot of time in the British Museum researching 
toexts, but I was really intrigued by the way they used scrying to flesh out 
the rest of their rituals, and the fact that they seemed to believe this to 
be authentic historical information. (I don't necessarily think that scrying 
is inauthentic, but I tend to the suspicious I must admit in that 
department. But hey! Why am I surprised in the case of the Golden Dawn? It 
is not like communicating with the otherworld is not part of human 
spirituality is it, and people were/are always claiming that a god told them 
to do this or that...).

This referring to, deferring to, some sort of (invisible) authority 
regarding the origins and legitimisation of (occult) rituals is very 
interesting to me.

~Caroline.