Practice · Orders · Overview
Orders
An order is a society you join by ceremony. It admits people one at a time, teaches them in a fixed sequence of grades, asks them not to repeat what they are taught, and may hold that initiation conveys something a book cannot. Much of modern ceremonial magic — the Tree of Life as it is usually drawn, the pentagram ritual, the Tarot's Hebrew letters — reached the present through one of these bodies rather than through a manuscript.
This section covers orders founded between 1717 and 1975. It separates an order's account of itself from historical research and from the narrower questions settled in court records.
Three kinds of source, and what each can carry
An order can change, split or disappear, and its members, rivals and historians may disagree about its founders, descent and present status. The evidence here is therefore identified as self-description, historical research or a court record. These sources answer different questions.
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What a body says about itself
Constitutions, websites and official histories establish what a body says about itself. They do not independently establish its age or lineage. Entries based only on such material are marked working, on its own word only.
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What historians have established
Historical scholarship assesses warrants, dates, institutional continuity and the sources used by founders. It can confirm or challenge an order's own account.
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What a court has decided
In two disputes, courts produced public decisions about which body could use a name or copyright. Such decisions settle those legal questions in a particular jurisdiction; they do not determine who inherited an initiation.
What the records show
The surviving records are uneven. They preserve much of some older orders' teaching and many claims of descent, but reliable membership figures are rare.
- What they taught
- Much of it survives for the older orders, often through unauthorized publication. Crowley began printing the Golden Dawn's rituals in 1909 and Regardie printed its curriculum in 1937; the A∴A∴ published its own syllabus from the start; the O.T.O.'s constitution has been in print since 1919. What survives is the page for this.
- What came out of what
- The documented and claimed lines of descent are shown separately, with dates. Evolution draws it, and every line on it carries the source that put it there.
- How many people are in one
- None of the orders listed here publishes a verifiable current membership figure. The most recent sourced estimate in this section dates to 1984; the Temple of Set explicitly treats membership numbers as private.
Where to go next
- The orders Bodies founded from 1717 to 1975, with their dates, purposes, surviving material and present status.
- Evolution Documented and claimed lines of descent, with a source for each connection.
- What survives The documents a reader can actually open, three of them quoted here in full, and an account of what is missing and why.
These orders elsewhere in this study
- Their people In the chronology: Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, William Wynn Westcott, Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, Aleister Crowley, Dion Fortune.
- What they practised The pentagram ritual and its companions, followed through the wording the Golden Dawn's successors printed.
- What they taught The Tree of Life as the Golden Dawn arranged it — and, beside it, the Jewish arrangements it is not.
- Their books The source books used here, with free editions where available.