Golden Dawn
This entry exists because Vrill cites them, and nobody here can say why.
The citation was made once, by a hand that did not explain it, and the person who made it does not remember. That is the whole provenance and the entry is not going to improve on it.
The Cult of the Golden Dawn is named on this wiki in exactly one place: the Vrill entry, which states that the body has dedicated itself for the study and cultivation of Vril and says nothing further. inherited
What can be said from outside
There is a real body to point at, which is more than can be said for several entries in Category:Cults. unverified
A ceremonial magical order was founded in London in the late 1880s, drew in a number of people who became publicly known for other things, produced a substantial body of written material, and fractured within about a decade in the manner the Iron Law of Cults describes and largely for the reasons it gives. Its documents are not secret. Much of it is in print.
Two observations the wiki thinks are worth making:
- It is contemporaneous with the Fabian Society, founded in the same city four years earlier. Two London societies of the same decade, one ceremonial and one administrative, both intending to work slowly on a world they considered improvable. The wiki has no evidence of contact between them and notes the coincidence because it is the sort of thing that is usually noticed later. contested
- It fractured, and the fragments outlived it. Which is the usual outcome and means that anything now claiming the name is claiming a lineage of the kind Elder Cults describes — unexaminable without ending it.
What cannot be said
Whether any of that is what our own Vrill entry meant. firsthand · Gershon
The citation may refer to the historical order. It may refer to something else that shares the name, of which there have been several. It may have been written from a half-memory of something read once. We have asked and the answer is that it is not remembered.
The wiki is recording this rather than quietly resolving it, because a citation whose reason is lost is the exact object this entire project is about. Elder Cults argues that inherited material descends from bodies that will not confirm a word of it; that entry is about a problem centuries deep. This one is a few years old, inside our own archive, in a page one of us wrote, and it is already irrecoverable. ⚠ warning
If the Vrill connection is real, this body would be one of very few documented as working on cultivation rather than expenditure, which would make it considerably more interesting than its size suggests. If it is not real, then an entry on this wiki has been asserting a dedicated research programme on the strength of nothing at all, for years, and we found out by trying to check. contested