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Long hast thou dwelt in darkness. Quit the night and seek the day! Welcome to the Temple of Thoth-Hermes serving Denver, CO, and the surrounding areas. We are an officially sanctioned Temple of the Order of the Golden Dawn Collegium Spiritu Sancti. Our goal is to provide quality and knowledgeable training in the esoteric arts of The Golden Dawn system. We offer personal mentoring, local and online classes, special workshops, an annual intensive week-long conclave and a connection to a world-wide fraternity with others who seek and study the Western Mystery tradition. All of our Temples and Sanctuaries are run by some of the top trained Adepti in the world. Their goal is to maintain a high standard of excellence in learning and teaching throughout the entire Golden Dawn community by furthering research into the magical and esoteric arts. Our school of magic is designed to take you from the entrance of the threshold in the grade of Neophyte all the way to the highest aspirations of your soul in the grades of Adepthood. We are proud to not only offer these local and distance training tools to help the modern day mage receive a complete education in the esoteric arts, but also what we feel to be the three essential elements needed by any Golden Dawn Order who may seek to offer instruction in Magic and Alchemy. The first and most important is Initiation. Initiation is not about personal meditation, or merely being taken through a ceremony, or even reading a script to find the symbolic meaning in the ritual. It’s about receiving a gift of magical power (called Current) from more experienced magicians who themselves have received it from a chain of Hierophants going back centuries. The bestowal of this Current is not only meant to make your magical abilities more powerful, it also starts an alchemical (transformational) progression that gradually awakens the latent powers of your soul much faster than you could on your own. Initiation is a system that builds on itself and has the powers of the esoteric Masters of the ages interwoven within its energies, thus you are given a magical gift that has been prepared for you through the training of all the magicians who have gone before you. Additionally, magic done by multiple people working together is exponentially more powerful than the sum of the individual magicians working by themselves. One may argue that one has access to the same benefits of initiation through a self-initiation book, but consider this: you are doing it on your own, not with a Temple full of people working for your benefit who have been trained and initiated themselves into the Mysteries of Sacred Magic. If you were to attempt self-initiation you would be performing the role of your own Hierophant and doing so for the first time, rather than receiving it from experienced and ordained Officers who have initiated and trained hundreds before you. Tapping into the current of initiatory power and change is exponentially more powerful when you receive those energies from the hands of no less than seven trained and experienced magicians through proper Initiation. Second, learning magic from books or from the internet is like trying to learn martial arts from the same media. Overtime you may become well versed on theory and have learned a few tricks, but you would never excel to your true potential as if you were properly trained in a dojo by a real master. There is just too much to learn that can not be written down, only experienced, demonstrated and drilled. Likewise, books cannot answer your questions or discuss difficult concepts with you like in-person training with experienced mentors and Adepti at one of our local Golden Dawn Temples or Sanctuaries. Or, if local attendance is not an option, there is still our annual week long conference as well as online classes, and private topic and grade specific forums. Third, despite popular belief, only a portion of the instructional materials of the Golden Dawn are available on the internet or published in books. Even if you manage to find some “secret Inner Order” teachings online, the likelihood that you would be able to understand them, even after years, without training and initiation is slim. But what is even more important than the recorded teachings of the Golden Dawn is the rich, oral tradition that has been handed down throughout the history of the Golden Dawn. Just as the Yogis and Masters of all traditions throughout the ages have kept their most powerful secrets safely guarded, so do we hand them down from teacher to student from “mouth to ear” keeping true to our roots as an authentic Golden Dawn Order. If you are serious about becoming a magician, or are seeking to grow as one, joining an Order is an essential part to your personal and spiritual development. Here in the Order of the Golden Dawn Collegium Spiritu Sancti and at The Temple of Thoth-Hermes in Denver, we will teach you the skills needed to discover your enlightenment and the fulfillment that it brings. We will also teach you how to share your new found knowledge and spiritual gifts by helping and healing others through the power that you will gain starting from day one…your initiation into the grade of Neophyte. The benefits aside, seeking magical initiation and training is a very serious matter. It quite possibly may be the most important decision of your life as it has the power to shape every day of your life thereafter. Think carefully before you make this leap. One should neither reach too quickly for nor reject out of hand the treasure that we are offering. V.H. Frater I.C.L., 6=5 The Great Work Why define the Great Work? It is important to define the terms we use clearly, especially in a magical path. For insufficient definition leads to: the belief that such terms are not meant to be defined (or they can’t be). the assumption that we don’t have clear definitions to provide. a misunderstanding that the purpose of the Hermetic Path is to create rather than discover. Terms must be specific for our progress to be productive. Clinging to beliefs inhibits demonstrated knowledge. The Hermetic Magician is a Scientist, not a Believer. What is true must be provable. Assumption distracts the magician from appropriate investigation. Never assume or you will trade valuable discoveries for comfortable pretensions. Misunderstanding leads to confusion and frustration. When misunderstanding causes failure, it is common to give up entirely and label the Path fraudulent. In the Golden Dawn Tradition, the Great Work is the process of fulfilling a three stage development of the Soul, referred to in older Traditions as “The Three Degrees”. They are: 1. The Knowledge and Conversation of the Higher Genius 2. Fulfillment of the Divine Will 3. Entering the Invisible STAGE 1 The Higher Genius is the “true self”, the immortal spark of the Creator in you, incorrectly perceived at a beginning stage as separate from you and thus often being referred to as the “Holy Guardian Angel”. It is your true teacher in life, fully aware of what your purpose is in incarnating as a physical being and what exactly you must do to achieve enlightenment. This part of your soul is a fountain of accurate and provable Truth about yourself and Reality. Knowledge of the Higher Genius is a state of illumination of your consciousness that demonstrates to you the existence of your Higher Genius and how to accurately identify it from other parts of your soul and from entities outside of yourself. Conversation of the Higher Genius is a state of illumination of your consciousness that enables you to frequently access the guidance and information of your Higher Genius and accurately interpret the messages imparted The methods our Order uses to assist the initiate to approach the Knowledge and Conversation of their Higher Genius includes: Alchemy, Ritual Magic, Pathworking, Divination, Invocation, Angelic Summoning, the Assumption of Godforms, Skrying, and Astral Projection. In order to be successful with this approach, however, the initiate must direct their magical intentions towards true and demonstrable knowledge of self and reality. To realize their full potential, the initiate must enact what they learn through these arts in corresponding behavioral changes. STAGE 2 The Divine Purpose or True will is a series of tasks and/or realizations that are assigned to you by your Higher Genius to achieve in your lifetime and constitute the reason for your personal existence as a physical individual. Despite the more generous assertion by some that all people fulfill what they are meant to, the fact is that the Tradition is clear that the average person never completes even a fraction of their Divine Purpose. Why is this? A clear and direct knowledge of one’s Divine Purpose and a deliberate use of the Free Will to effect it are essential elements of this effort. For each person there is one and only one most efficient Path to fulfill the Great Work in one lifetime and your Higher Genius knows exactly what that is. The Divine Purpose is not merely a series of physical acts. You must align your will with the Will of the One Mind of which we are all part. Misalignment is, in fact, a deliberate or unconscious defiance against the Divine Purpose for the benefit of lesser interests. What is the effect of fulfilling the Divine Purpose? The effect that fulfilling the Divine Purpose has upon you is a profound level of spiritual evolution, without which the next stage would never be more than a myth and a fantasy. The method our Order uses to assist the initiate to fulfill their Divine Purpose is to inspire the initiate to take full and appropriate advantage of the tools taught in this path to achieve the Knowledge and Conversation of their Higher Genius and then to advocate that they turn to that perfect teacher to learn what is necessary to fulfill their Divine Purpose. STAGE 3 Entering the Invisible is the attainment of the maximum level of spiritual evolution that is possible with the tools and conditions that material existence supplies such that only in ascending to a higher level of existence can your further progress and destiny continue. Only the Higher Genius can lead the initiate to this great achievement. The Tradition When speaking of the Tradition we are essentially referring to three things: The Purpose of this System The Approach it takes to fulfill that Purpose The Style that garbs that Approach Defining a Tradition in this way is key to understanding what a system actually promises and what it can accomplish. Understanding this adjusts the aspirant’s expectations, giving them a more accurate view of the possibilities and limitations inherent in a system. Such a definition provides a valuable metric for self-evaluation in determining how well one is or is not fulfilling the point of a Tradition. The Purpose of the Golden Dawn Tradition is: to inspire the Initiate to devote themselves to the Great Work. to prepare the Initiate with the skills and character that are necessary to fulfill the Great Work. The Approach of the Golden Dawn Tradition is: to provide the experience of Initiation laid down by the cipher manuscripts and interpreted by S.L. MacGregor Mathers and William W. Wescott. to provide instruction in the esoteric subjects taught by Mathers, Wescott and other Adepti of the late 1800s and early 1900s along with select later contributors. The Style of the Golden Dawn Tradition includes: Hebrew Qabalah European Rosicrucianism Egyptian Paganism Hermetic Alchemy Hellenic Eleusinian, Kabiric, Neo-Platonic, and Neo-Pythagorean Mysteries Generic inclusions of other cultural methodologies that support or enhance one of the above. What the Tradition is NOT an alternative society for the hobbyist, the lonely, or the outcast seeking attention. Enlightenment, not social satisfaction, must be your primary objective. a promise that you will accomplish the Great Work or become what society would consider a better person. Fulfillment of the Great Work or, to a lesser degree, the general improvement of the self requires that you take full and appropriate advantage of the benefits that initiation and instruction in these arts offer you. http://www.thoth-hermes.org/ http://www.goldendawncollegium.com/ |
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