Toward Ecosophy

Last week, at the conclusion of a five-part sequence of posts here on Pythagorean numerology, I mentioned that those posts were among other things knowledge lectures for the relaunch of the eccentric Golden Dawn offshoot I more or less inherited from my late teacher John Gilbert. That attracted a great deal of enthusiasm, so I plan on proceeding a little more directly than I’d originally anticipated.

What I have in mind for this project differs in some details from his order, the Magickal Order of the Golden Dawn (MOGD), just as that differed from Juliet Ashley’s Holy Order of the Golden Dawn, that from Waite’s Holy Order of the GD, that from the Hermetic Order of the GD, and that from whatever source inspired Westcott and Mathers to get the whole ball rolling in the first place. To mark the distinction and avoid confusion, I’ve given this new venture a different name, the Fellowship of the Hermetic Rose—FHR for short.

I have a great deal of material from the MOGD to edit, format, and post—four or five times as much, for example, as I had from the Order of Spiritual Alchemy. John’s system included its own idiosyncratic take on the Tree of Life, its own distinctive symbolism for the grades of initiation, its own grade rituals, and a great deal of other material on a galaxy of occult topics. I plan on working that up as time permits, and I’m going to do my best to post something here every week, but it’s still going to take quite a while.

The FHR has eight grades of initiation, as follows:

0° Candidate

1° Seeker

2° Sojourner

3° Server

4° Student

5° Teacher

6° Initiate

7° Adept

Of these, the 0° is a preliminary degree for those who are exploring the work of the Fellowship but have not yet made a commitment to that work.  The 7° is an inner degree which is to be attained by the individual through his or her own efforts, and remains a wholly private matter when and if it is attained. (Anyone who proclaims himself or herself an Adept of the FHR thus proves by that act that he or she isn’t one, and also the he or she doesn’t know the first thing about the Fellowship’s teachings and traditions.) The grades between these two endpoints correspond very roughly to the historic Golden Dawn grades, as follows:  Seeker to Neophyte, Sojourner to Zelator, Server to Theoricus, Student to Practicus, Teacher to Philosophus, and Initiate to Portal.

All the work of these grades, and the grade initiations themselves, are designed to be performed by the individual member through his or her own efforts.  A member who reaches the grade of Teacher is qualified to found a temple, if three other members join in, but this is optional at best and irrelevant at worst. Individual work is the heart of the system. The primary goal of that work is the attainment of wisdom through the practice of ritual, meditation, and divination, and the study of traditional occult teachings. The secondary goals of the work are the development of a good general grounding in occultism that can then be applied to many other practices, on the one hand, and on the other, reaching a professional level of skill in at least one form of divination. (John was a brilliant tarot reader, but he encouraged students to master whatever mode of divination they preferred, as well as getting a general grasp of a few standard methods.)

There is no hierarchy in the FHR beyond the necessary structure of degrees. Any person who successfully completes the work as far as the Teacher grade can open a temple and serve as its head. Any person who successfully completes the work as far as the Initiate grade is in possession of the full tradition and may do with it as his or her personal spiritual vision directs. This includes the right to go off and set up a separate working using whatever variations on the material he or she chooses to use, just the way I’ve done here. (Occult traditions routinely pup offshoots this way—it seems reasonable to acknowledge that, and not try to fulminate uselessly against it.)

The foundations of training in the system will be familiar to my regular readers. (Where do you think I got this approach?)  The daily practices are a daily discursive meditation, a daily divination, and a protective ritual—John Gilbert strongly recommended the Sphere of Protection but he also allowed members to practice the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram and Middle Pillar exercise instead if they found those more suitable; the FHR will continue that tradition, and add the Judson exercise as a third option. If you haven’t settled on one of these, try all three while you’re in the Candidate degree and see which works for you. If you already follow a system of training that includes these three elements as daily practices, why, you’re good, and you can do the rest of the FHR work as a supplement to that system.

In addition to the daily practices, weekly practice of a home temple ritual, a sequence of elemental scryings, invocations of your Guardian Angel or Guardian Genius, and a whale of a lot of divination will be part of the training ahead. All told, you can expect to put 30 minutes or so every day into the basic daily practices, and one to three hours a week into other work, plus time spent reading and studying.

Prospective members will doubtless want to know what membership costs and what they will need to provide in terms of material requirements. Membership is free. In terms of equipment, you will need a small table or folding tray to serve as a temporary altar for some practices, and an altar cloth to put over it would be nice. You will need a chair that you can set up facing the altar.  You will need four candles—one each colored red, yellow, blue, and green—and appropriate holders for them. You will need one standard Rider-Waite tarot deck, the one shown on the right—yes, it has to be that specific deck. If you prefer to use a different tarot deck for divination, that’s fine, but you need the Rider-Waite for ritual purposes.

You will also need a pair of small pillars, 6” to 18” tall, which you can put on the sides of your altar; one is black, one white. If you have woodworking skills, making them from wood is the best option, but you can use anything else that works—if you can’t afford much, get two cardboard cylinders from the centers of paper towel rolls, cover one with white paper and the other with black paper, and tape or glue one end of each to a small square of heavy cardboard so they stand up. (Drop something small and heavy into the bottom of each to help with this.)

You will also need symbolic representations of the four elements. To begin with, these are very simple—an incense burner and your choice of incense for fire, a folding fan for air, a cup or bowl of water for water, and a small bowl of salt for earth. Over the course of your training you will replace these with a wand, a book, a cup, and a pentacle; instructions for making or buying these will be included. (Yes, a book for air, not a dagger. That’s one of the distinctive features of this system. There are complicated reasons for it; one of them is the very old rule against bringing anything of a metallic nature into a temple of the mysteries, which some of my readers will have encountered in a different context.)

Some books will also be recommended. All of them are available for free download.

So that’s what you have to look forward to, dear reader, if you decide to climb aboard this very odd train and ride it into the distance. If, having read the above, you’ve decided you want to give it a try, and are willing to start experimenting with the basic practices of the Fellowship, why, by the power in me invested as an Initiate of the Fellowship of the Hermetic Rose, I proclaim you received and welcomed in due form as a member of the Candidate grade.