After many years saying that he
had a paper lineage to the Order of the Golden Dawn, David Griffin has finally
come clean and admitted that they are not worth the paper they are printed on.
Instead, he now has started saying what everyone else in the Golden Dawn has
been saying for years that a spiritual lineage where a person makes his or her
own contacts behind a magical order is the only way forward.
This spiritual journey has been
a long one for David. First, he claimed he had lineage from Israel Regardie
because he was initiated by Chic Cicero, and was a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn for a whole ten minutes before Cicero expelled him.
Teaming up with Pascal Ruggiu,
Griffin then started making some very strange claims about what was clearly a
paper lineage. The first was that he was given direct lineage from Whare Ra
from Pat Zalewski. This was based on a claim that Pascal and Griffin had
received lineage from Zalewski’s Laura Jennings when she ran a workshop in
Paris. This claim was later denied by Jennings who said that Ruggiu had asked
her for paper lineage, and she said no.
Then Griffin and Ruggiu started
to focus on Mather’s AO as a possible point for a paper lineage. It was claimed
that Tamara Bourkoun had an AO lineage and she had ordered Pascal to form
an outer order of the group. She was fortunately dead by that point, but
documents turned up which suggested that she was never a member of the AO and
her Order of the Pyramid and the Sphinx was based on something she
hatched up with Israel Regardie. In fact, the group used cut down versions of
the GD Bristol temple rituals. If she did tell Pascal to set up the AO in
France, she did not have any authority to do so.
The next,
and most pervasive lineage legend to come out of Griffin’s temple was the
bizarre story of Desmond Burke. Burke was a collector of masonic certificates
and claimed to be a 7=4 in both the AO and the SM, at least to friend of a
friend of Griffin’s, Robert Word. The friend set up a GD group based on a
lineage certificate that Burke claimed he had. The group did not last and he
passed the lineage on to Word. Word then wrote to Pat Zalewski and said
that he had been given the 7=4 and Pat could give him all the teachings
associated with that grade because Burke had not had them. Zaleswki said
no. Word then gave the AO linage to Griffin to form his AO group and photocopies from the Slater collection. The Slater Collection were AO documents
found in a museum which meant that Griffin could say with a clear conscious
that he had the real AO material.
Griffin
might have gotten away with this lineage, at least to his members, had he kept
his mouth shut. Instead, he saw this as a marketing method. After all, he
could now claim he was the only authorised AO temple. This set him at odds with
another marketing expert Robert Zink who was claiming that he had managed to
find authentic AO lineage in the US.
By making
it public, Griffin found himself being investigated by those who knew Burke.
Letters from Burke confirmed without a doubt that he had no connection to the
AO and had no right to give out anything. He said that he never had a 7=4 in
the AO or the SM.
Fortunately
for Griffin after writing those letters, Burke died, which meant that Griffin
could claim that the letters were misquoted or a forgery and an attempt to
smear a master occultist. We posted one up here and they are genuine.
Griffin by
then had acquired a would-be historian SR who continued to promote the idea
that paper lineages were valid and that Griffin had one. Using this
“research” as a flimsy intellectual base Griffin set himself up as the Pope of
the AO and claimed that his order was the real AO, with lineage from the
original Golden Dawn. When pressed to prove it, he would claim that he and his
order were being attacked. At no point did he ever present any proof of his
lineage to anyone.
The next
big problem for Griffin came about when Nick Farrell published the NISI
documents in two books Mathers Last Secret and King over the Water. For a
while, Griffin had claimed that the true teaching of the Golden Dawn went into
Mathers’ AO however Mathers Last Secret showed that Mathers did not provide any
new teaching to his order and made minimal changes to the Order. Griffin
attempted to claim that his order’s secrets had been profaned by the book, even
though it was clear that if his group was based on those rituals, its secrets
had long ago been profaned by Regardie. King over the Water was even more
problematic because it proved that the AO had been shut down in 1940 on the
orders of its Secret Chiefs. If the Secret Chiefs had ordered the AO to shut,
how was it possible for anyone to claim lineage to that group 50 years later?
Griffin by
this point, had been introduced to some friends of Ruggiu in
France and Italy. These were members of several different occult
organisations connected to the Order of Osiris and various strains of alchemy
and European Gnostic Churches. None of these had anything to do with the Golden
Dawn, but that did not stop Griffin and SR from claiming that they were the real
secret chiefs who inspired Mathers.
While they
were later to fall out with Griffin, it meant that he no longer had to claim
the paper lineages to prop up his AO myth. With his French and Italian secret
chiefs not returning his calls, Griffin realised something important about them
– it did not matter whether they were telling him what to do or not. He
could still claim that he was in contact with real secret chiefs and no one
could prove otherwise.
While no one else in the Golden Dawn community believed in his secret chiefs, it was
a matter of faith, something that historians like Bob Gilbert, Nick Farrell and
Pat Zalewski could not rip apart because they could not prove that they didn’t
exist either.
Today’s
announcement that Griffin is now claiming spiritual lineage to the AO means
that he has finally abandoned his belief in the paper lineage, which propped him
up in the past. It is short on mentioning secret chiefs too, so maybe he
has evolved past that idea.
Comments
Post a Comment