David Griffin admits he has no direct paper lineage to the Golden Dawn

Earlier this week when we ran a story saying that David Griffin was claiming that Nick Farrell agreed with him about lineage, it appears we missed that he had actually changed his mind and backtracked on a decade-old claim that he had paper lineage to the original Golden Dawn . Because he is now denying that he ever said that a paper lineage from the GD was important, what is important is a spiritual lineage, we decided to open our file and remind our readers of David Griffin’s lineage claims. As you can see below, he championed some bizarre paper lineages for ages. We welcome David Griffin finally seeing sense in this matter (flip flopping?), he seems to have realised that he can’t really keep lying to the Golden Dawn community about fake histories and lineages. Historians have long said that there is no one with a direct linage to the Golden Dawn but there those who can claim a spiritual link to it.  By admitting this David Griffin has finally acknowledged that others also have that link and there is nothing special about his AO. 

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.