N o problems of ego here. Stacewicz’s Facebook picture is Mathers’ picture with his face stuck on it. David Griffin’s number two has been caught spinning fake facts to his Facebook listeners. Tomas Stacewicz, who is the Imperator of David Griffin’s Swedish Temple, was caught out trying to re-invent history in accordance with his leader’s latest crackpot theory. For those who came in late, Stacewicz writes long, rambling cut-and-paste histories which are supposed to prove that Griffin is right, black really is white, and Griffin’s Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn outer order of the Rosicrucian Order of the Alpha et Omega, sole trader business really is the original A.O. order. Griffin calls Stacewicz’s pieces “scholarly” to make them even more critical. Unfortunately for historians and Griffin, Stacewicz’s use of sources would get him kicked out of a fourth-form history class, and he does not seem to show any of the skills we expect from Swedish academia. Wading into the secret...

A war has broken out between what was seen as one of the magical dream couples of the 1990s, Bob Stewart (pictured) and Josephine McCarthy. The pair divorced in 2000, and much water should have passed under the bridge between them, but there is still a scrap over who created what in the magical system they had worked on during that period. A few years ago, Stewart moaned that some of McCarthy's websites were breaching his copyright because she had stolen his ideas. McCarthy, not wishing to have an expensive court battle, pulled the sites but told him to sling his hook. All seemed quiet for several years until McCarthy published a series of popular occult books which included elements of her earlier work. In May 2013, Stewart wrote: "Josephine Dunne (now Josephine McCarthy) joined me in teaching workshops in the late 1990s, as we were married then. She came as a beginner into an existing network with the difficult prospect of working with many established group members who had ...

If UK Prime Minister David Cameron gets his way, esoteric sites such as this one will be banned in the UK. In a move not seen since the repeal of the Witchcraft Act, Cameron wants his “porn filter” tuned to delete “esoteric interests.” The discovery that occultism was on the list of filtered content was found using a freedom of information request.  It is not as if David was prepared to tell people who did not look first. It is not clear what Cameron has against the occult. Maybe the thought of people dancing naked in the New Forrest brings him out in a cold sweat.   But occultists, witches and druids can be reassured that their religion, beliefs and philosophies will be purged from the British web to “protect children”. The man who cares about his child enough to leave her in a pub because they forgot he bought her is presuming to lecture others. While it will be possible for occult groups to have websites and for these to be found by those looking, under Cameron’s law t...

Bikram Yoga founder Bikram Choudhury has been accused of some less than enlightening antics, including rape, sexual harassment, and racism. The claims come from an ex-employee and two former students. According to the Jezebel news site, the cultish guru has a charming turn of phrase, waxing poetic about his penis, women’s bodies, and marriage. One of his students, Sydney Towne, kept a diary of Bikram’s antics when she trained with him full-time for three months last year. He apparently dislikes so many types of people that “a list seemed like the only way to keep track of it all,” she said. The reason she did not walk was because she loved Bikram Yoga but hated the way Bikram himself completely took advantage of people. “He preys on people, and there’s such a cult of personality around him that people don’t question his clearly inappropriate behaviour,” she said. Bikram talks a lot about his ability to avoid eating and sleeping and claims that sleeping is a “number one crime.” He alway...

The venerable Rosicrucian Order AMORC appears to have entered the Golden Dawn wars by opening a trademark dispute with David Griffin’s Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, Outer Order of the Rosicrucian Order of the Alpha et Omega. At issue was the use of the words and logo on Griffin’s own trademark.  The words involved were the “Rosicrucian Order” which AMORC felt were too similar to its own trademark. Griffin said he had trademarked the term the Rosicrucian Order in Europe and anyway, it was generic. “The fact that AMORC is only one of many Rosicrucian orders is further made evident by the Wikipedia article on Rosicrucianism. Rosicrucianism is a school of thought, a school of  thought with a corresponding body of tenets and beliefs, in the same way that capitalism, socialism, anarchism,” Griffin’s brief wrote. Griffin also said that the Griffin was granted sole and exclusive ownership to the name “Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, Outer Order of the Rosicrucian Order of the ...

Golden Dawn historian Nick Farrell hit back at David Griffin’s claims that he was a spy on behalf of SRIA trying to bring down his business. David Griffin loses another clay-slinging contest. Griffin, runs his Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the outer order of the Rosicrucian Order of the Alpha et Omega, as a sole trader-style business. As you can read here, Griffin has been erroneously claiming that Nick Farrell is an agent of the Masonic SRIA organisation, which he claims is a Nazi bunch of Satanists with a born-again Christian agenda. While Farrell has never defended himself against such attacks, we found evidence that he was not a member of SRIA at all and wondered, with the rest of us, why Griffin would produce such an obvious porkie pie. This morning, in his blog, Farrell confirmed what we had written, saying that he has never been a member of SRIA and he can’t work out what Griffin is banging on about. “How is it possible for me to be a spy for two orders that I am not a memb...