The two Pillars of the Golden Dawn Qabalah

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Revised 2014-03-18

TO THE GENTLE reader. This blog post is actually a sanitized version of a previous text entitled Revealing the latest tactics of the Inquisition which was addressing something that Olen Rush had said on his now disused blog which is quite irrelevant today, so I won’t repeat it now. Looking back on the original version, I feel that the majority of its contents was the result of a alien paradigm that I no longer want to support and that clearly is the product of the Wrath World to use a Böhmean term. I have also removed all of the comments as these refer to the part that is sanitized. However, the other half have some relevance today, as it explains my view on the two pillars that constitute the Golden Dawn Qabalah, the Sabbatian Qabalah stemming from the Asiatic Brethren and the Hermetic or Christian Qabalah with its origins in the Italian Renaissance and the Florentine Platonic Academy.

First of all I want to acknowledge Mr. Rush’s level of scholarism in the field of Sabbathian Qabalah, the Asiatics, the R.R. et A.C., etc. He has been somewhat of a champion in forging a link between the Asiatic Brethren and the Golden Dawn, which is documented on my blog in the posting entitled The Origins of the Qabalah of the Golden Dawn and its follow-up The Frankist Qabalah, and lastly in my essay Was Jacob Frank a Rosicrucian? One of his earliest appearances was on the International Golden Dawn Forum, and in these my three articles on the Golden Dawn Qabalah I have quoted Mr. Rush extensively. I must admit that his postings over at that yahoo-group inspired me to do my own research and through these efforts I had developed a good fraternal relationship with him on the Internet. 

So, regarding the Holy Qabalah of the Golden Dawn it in part constitutes of the Sabbatian Qabalah (as transmitted to the overtly Sabbatian Asiatic Brethren and the Jewish lodge in Frankfurt, the Loge sur Aufgehenden Morgenröthe established in 1807), and that of the Reinassance “Hermetic” Qabalah (which the Asiatics were lacking). This unique blend of these two important Qabalistic streams makes the Golden Dawn Qabalah unique in respect of all other Fraternities, including the Asiatics.

But the Sabbatian component of the Golden Dawn Qabalah, surely enough (through the Cypher Mss.), found its way through the Asiatics. It may perhaps have been transmitted through Samuel Hayyim Falk and Frederick Hockley as well. However, the Sabbatian component or aspect of the Golden Dawn Tradition is also indebted to Kenneth MacKenzie in its establishment, him being the important link between German Rosicrucianism and the Golden Dawn through his own intermediary society, the Fratres Lucis (which was a continuation of the tradition of the Asiatic Brethren, whose forerunner was called Fratres Lucis).

There is no doubt that there is a strong presence of the Sabbatian Qabalah in the Golden Dawn. However, the Reinassance form of “Christian” or “Hermetic” Qabalah shouldn’t be underestimated either. If any this latter form of the Qabalah constitutes the major part of the Qabalistic teachings of the Golden Dawn, spiced up as it were, by the antinomian “heretic” teachings of the Sabbatians. As an example, the Tree of Life glyph as used in the Golden Dawn, together with the corresponding Hebrew letters attached to the 22 Paths, came from Athanasius Kircher’s Oedipus Aegyptiacus in 1652, i.e. from the Hermetic stream of our Tradition. This illustration has been attached to the header of this post.

We shouldn’t forget that while the Asiatics were overly Qabalistic (with their foundation in the Hebrew / Jewish tradition), the Golden Dawn was overly Hermetic tracing its origins in the Reinassance and beyond, predating anything Sabbatian (or even Lurian). Thus, the Sabbatian component was a later addition which was fused to the Rosicrucian current through the Asiatic Brethren in the 18th Century, and later transmitted through the Loge sur Aufgehenden Morgenröthe, whose Hebrew name was that of Chevrah Zerach Bequr Aur (on the Golden Dawn Cypher Mss. we find the almost identical phrase: “Chevrah Zerach Aur Bequr”). But the Hermetic Qabalah has a stronger foundation and older origins compared to the Sabbatian in the Golden Dawn.

S∴R∴