Stella Matutina (Order)

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Stella Matutina ( Latin for 'morning star') was the name of the magical successor order of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, founded in 1903 . After the final collapse of the Golden Dawn and the dissolution of the Isis-Urania Temple No.3 , Robert William Felkin gathered those members who wanted to maintain the magical tradition of the order, while the more mystically oriented members Arthur Edward Waite in the Independent and Rectified Rite of the Golden Dawn followed.

history

With the support of John William Brodie-Innes , Felkin established the Amoun Temple in London as the new main temple of the Stella Matutina . In its heyday, between 1904 and 1910, 72 men and women were initiated here alone. Later, on the initiative of Felkin, at least two or three other temples were built in Great Britain : The Secret College (1916) in London, a temple that was only open to senior members of the Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia , and the Hermes Temple No. 28 (1916) in Bristol, who worked until 1970. Little reliable data is known about the Merlin Temple .

One of the most famous members was the writer and Nobel Prize for Literature, William Butler Yeats , who, although he had already passed all degrees in the Golden Dawn, went through all the stages of initiation again in the Stella Matutina . In 1911 he was elected Emperor of the Amoun Temple . He remained a member of the order until 1923.

An agreement was reached between the various factions of the original Golden Dawn, led by Felkin, Brodie-Innes and Waite, in which they recognized each other as leaders of their successor organizations and decided to share important information and the latest findings. However, John William Brodie-Innes violated this agreement by secretly establishing contact with MacGregor Mathers , again declaring himself loyal to him, and thus the revived Amen-Ra Temple No. 6 in Edinburgh subordinated to Alpha et Omega . Both Waite and Felkin continued to be on good terms with William Wynn Westcott , another co-founder of the original Golden Dawn.

Through Felkin's influence, the order took a path which he believed was in agreement with the real "secret superiors", by whom he understood the former "unknown superiors" of the old Gold and Rosicrucians . He hoped to be able to establish contact with these Rosicrucian "Unknown Superiors" in a magical way in the form of spiritual evocations. Therefore, appropriate necromancy practices were integrated into the order rituals.

Originally the Stella Matutina intended to take over the teachings of the Golden Dawn and to develop them further on a spiritualistic level, for which purpose spiritualistic quotes from the spirits were made. There were two groups within the Stella Matutina, each of which claimed to have the correct mediumistic access to Rosicrucian knowledge:

  • The " Rosicrucian " group, who claimed that they could use necromancy to put a medium into a state of obsession that made it possible to channel none other than the fictional, legendary character of Christian Rosencreutz as a controlling spirit .
  • The second group within the Stella Matutina, the so-called "Arabs", identified themselves from the outset as the sole owners of the original teachings of the legendary figure of Christian Rosencreutz , which they claim to have received from their Arab teacher Ara ben Shemesh.

In his search for secret superiors of the order of the Rosicrucians or the German origins of the Golden Dawn, Felkin came into contact with the Anthroposophical Society under the direction of Rudolf Steiner . He met Steiner in Berlin in 1910 , with whom apparently contacts had existed since 1906 . Felkin brought many of the members of his order to the Anthroposophical Society and borrowed some of his teachings from Steiner's work.

Similar to Mathers in Alpha et Omega , Felkin also created further initiation rituals in the Stella Matutina for the higher degrees of Adeptus Major (6 ° = 5 ❐ ), Adeptus Exemptus (7 ° = 4 ❐ ) and apparently even for Magister Templi (8th century ) = 3 ❐ )

1912 Felkins first trip to carried New Zealand , where he in Havelock North Temple No. Smaragdine Thalasses (Emerald of the sea) 49 founded. Before he finally emigrated to New Zealand with his family in 1916, he gave the temples of Stella Matutina in Great Britain extensive autonomy.

The Amoun Temple in London was continued by Christine Stoddart, William Reason and FN Heazell. In 1918/1919 Stoddart, who was apparently mentally ill, came to the conclusion that the order was a satanist organization and, as a Christian who had become conservative, publicly condemned the machinations, later also in two books in which she gave her impression that the Stella Matutina is a satanist- communist - Zionist conspiracy , which wants to achieve world domination by means of sexual energies. Because of their controversial denunciations, the Amoun Temple London had since been closed.

In 1933, Israel Regardie was admitted to the Hermes Temple in Bristol on the recommendation of Dion Fortune . However, he soon recognized the desolate condition of the order. After he had graduated from the order, there was a rift between Regardie and the order leadership, which he held against inability. In December 1934 he resigned from the order and collected all information still accessible to him about the Stella Matutina and the previous Golden Dawn. He broke his vows and published the entire material in four volumes, entitled The Golden Dawn , in order to save the knowledge from oblivion for future generations. This publication was certainly a death blow not only for the Stella Matutina, but also for most of the Alpha et Omega temples, who suddenly found themselves robbed of their secret tradition. Nevertheless, the activities of the Hermes Temple in Bristol lasted until the end of the 1960s, although these were now more related to the teachings of anthroposophy.

The south side of Whare Ra , the "House of the Sun"

The New Zealand branch of the Stella Matutina, however, experienced an unexpected flowering. The Emeraldine Thalasses No. 49 became known there under the name Whare Ra , which in the Maori language means "house of the sun". The initiation rituals and scriptures were revised again, with attempts to restore the original version of the Golden Dawn. After Felkin's death, his second wife, later his daughter Ethel, took over the reins of Whare Ra. The temple was active until 1978 when it was closed due to a lack of new members. Much of the temple furnishings and many textbooks were burned in a large fire. Nevertheless, some of the material survived.

literature

  • Karl RH Frick : Light and Darkness. 2 parts. Academic Printing and Publishing Company, Graz 1978.
  • Pat Zalewski: Golden Dawn Rituals and Commentaries, Rosicrucian Order of the Golden Dawn. 2nd edition 2010, ISBN 0-9823521-2-3 , ISBN 978-0-9823521-2-0 .
  • Pat Zalewski: Talismans & Evocations of the Golden Dawn. Thoth Publications, Loughborough, 2002, ISBN 1-870450-36-1 .
  • Robert S. Ellwood: Islands of the Dawn: The Story of Alternative Spirituality in New Zealand. University of Hawaii Press, 1993, ISBN 978-0-8248-1487-8

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See RA Gilbert: The Golden Dawn Companion , p. 41ff.
  2. ^ Karl RH Frick: Light and Darkness. Gnostic-theosophical and Masonic-occult secret societies up to the turn of the 20th century. Volume II Marix Verlag GmbH Wiesbaden 2005. ISBN 3-86539-044-7 . Pages 364, 365, pp. 381-385, p. 523.
  3. ^ Karl RH Frick: Light and Darkness. Gnostic-theosophical and Masonic-occult secret societies up to the turn of the 20th century. Volume II Marix Verlag GmbH Wiesbaden 2005. ISBN 3-86539-044-7 . Pages 382-385.
  4. ^ Karl RH Frick: Light and Darkness. Gnostic-theosophical and Masonic-occult secret societies up to the turn of the 20th century. Volume II Marix Verlag GmbH Wiesbaden 2005. ISBN 3-86539-044-7 . Pages 384-385.
  5. ↑ Some of it, u. a. Diagrams of the inner order and some tarot cards by Frank Salt can be found under "The Whare Ra Archives": http://www.hermeticgoldendawn.org/hermetic-art.html#wharera
  6. ↑ A picture of the original Whare Ra textbook on the pentagram ritual can be found here: http://www.hermetic.com/gdlibrary/pentagram/