Golden Dawn

Read this before anything else

A real body, in the public record, that this wiki knows almost nothing about.

It is named here once, in Vrill, and the connection between the two has never been set out.

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.

The vrill connection

Unestablished, and worth stating what it would mean if it holds. contested

Vrill traces the term through a nineteenth-century novel and the occultists who read it as a disclosure rather than as fiction. This order belongs to that decade and that milieu — London, the 1880s, ceremonial practice built on material read as recovered rather than invented — which is the period in which the concept stopped being a novel's device and became something people worked on.

If the connection is real, this is one of very few bodies documented as working on cultivation — increasing the supply rather than spending it carefully — which would make it considerably more interesting than its size suggests. The wiki cannot show the connection and does not have a source for it beyond its own single line. unverified

How this entry was assembled

Drawn from: One line in Vrill. The public historical record of the order, which is extensive and which we have barely read.

Compiled by: Gershon.

Known weaknesses: We cannot establish that the two halves of this entry are about the same body. The Fabian Society observation is a coincidence of date and city and is presented as nothing more.

Wanted: Anything connecting the order to vrill specifically. A reading of the published material by someone who has actually done it.