ORDER OF THE GOLDEN DAWN

The lighting and extinguishing of the candles in the Neophyte Ceremony represents more than simply opening and closing the Temple. It follows the principle of an expanding and contracting spiral, expressing the movement of Light from its central source into manifestation and its eventual return to that source. During the opening, the candles are lit from the centre outwards. This represents the emergence of Light from a single point, gradually extending its influence throughout the Temple....

The pentagram offers a fascinating way of bringing the Chinese Five Elements into dialogue with the elemental system of the Golden Dawn. This is not a claim that the two traditions historically shared the same system, nor that one element can simply be substituted for another. Rather, the pentagram can be used as a symbolic bridge, a geometric meeting place where two different elemental languages can illuminate one another. In the Golden Dawn system, the five points of the pentagram are...

In the Whare Ra Golden Dawn temple, in New Zealand, chakra centers and their effect on magic were discussed almost on a daily basis, a point missing in the original Golden Dawn corpus. In the teachings of Alice Bailey and the Tibetan Master Djwhal Khul, the relationship between the solar plexus center and the heart center represents one of the most important transformations in spiritual development. Bailey describes the solar plexus as the great center of personal desire, emotional...