Respected British Goetic magician Jake Stratton-Kent has blasted what he calls the tendency for ritual magicians to form masonic-style groups.
In his Yahoo group, the author of Geosophia said there were many reasons he found 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 offence in England.
“That time is over. The whole Secret Society model is not only unhelpful but actively counter-productive. It is the principal reason so much energy is expended fighting tiny little wars between factions (between witch groups, between rival Golden Dawns, between thelemic groups, etc),” he said.
He believes energy could be better spent incorporating the fundamental 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 get 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 least, not among occultists. Even if someone is jealously guarding material from deeper into the C18th/C19th, it still lacks much context, info and insights now available from modern scholarship, the papyri,” he said.
Things have stood still for so long that modern research has gotten 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 on 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, and Atlantean initiations. 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 such types were just establishments “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 within 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 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 predominates, 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 are a vibrant 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 that magical orders and secret societies did have a place in the Western Mystery Tradition.
He said 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 to learn 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 going in a different direction than 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.
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