Exploration of Hermetic Thought
Theurgy, Magic & Science
Welcome to John Michael Greer, it is an honour to speak to you, and thank you for taking the time to answer our questions.
John Michael Greer, is an prolific and well known author of occult studies. Venturing into the depths of esoteric thought, His titles include the profound intricacies of concealed philosophy, where cryptic revelations from Dion Fortune and the Cosmic Doctrine resonate through the epochs. Exploring the verdant essence of Druidism, we shall untangle its enigmatic webs and pay homage to its significance for a harmonious existence interwoven with the natural realm. Come along as we shed light on the hidden recesses of existence, uncovering the catalyzing potency of age-old wisdom in a contemporary milieu.
Britain has a rich and ancient tradition of magical practices such as Druidry and Witchcraft to the formation and practice of modern day magical societies.
JMG: Rich, yes. Ancient? No. More on this further on.
1. Comparative Organizational Structures
FBP: How do the organizational structures of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, Ordo Templi Orientis, Freemasonry, Witchcraft, and Druidry compare? Are there notable similarities or differences in how these groups are structured?
JMG: I can’t really speak to Witchcraft, as I’m not an initiate of any Witchcraft tradition and it frankly has never interested me that much; to each their own. The others—well, it’s quite simple. Starting in the middle of the 19th century, most Western esoteric traditions borrowed the organizational structures of Freemasonry lock, stock, and barrel. The lodge system, to give that set of structures a convenient name, was the standard organizational framework for most voluntary social groups in the Western world between 1850 and 1950; labor unions, friendly societies, youth groups, and nearly every other kind of organization you care to name other than churches and business corporations borrowed the Masonic framework of local lodges chartered by a central grand body, admitting new members by way of one or more initiation rituals.
Since 1950, in turn, all of these groups except for Freemasonry have tended to drift away from the lodge system. The drift has proceeded at different speeds; very few Druid organizations make use of the lodge system (though the one I headed for twelve years, the Ancient Order of Druids in America, still does); the OTO is still more or less run in the classic way, though independent splinter groups are starting to appear more frequently now that Aleister Crowley’s writings (including the OTO initiation rituals) are out of copyright; and the Golden Dawn scene is divided more or less evenly between groups that at least try to follow the lodge system and independent groups that don’t.
I tried back in 1998, with a book titled Inside a Magical Lodge, to renew interest in the lodge system among modern occultists, because it really does have a lot of benefits, and deals effectively with some of the problems that most often cripple attempted working groups. Ironically, the book became very popular among Freemasons, who welcomed a nice clear explanation of what they were doing, but sold very poorly among occultists.
2. Philosophical Distinctions
FBP: Could you highlight key philosophical distinctions between the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, Ordo Templi Orientis, Freemasonry, and Druidry? What core principles or beliefs set each apart from the others?
JMG: I’m going to start by bracketing Freemasonry here and then setting it aside. Freemasonry was once an esoteric tradition; at this point it’s a men’s club mostly interested in charity and good fellowship, which history has supplied with a collection of medieval rituals performed by rote. I say this as a Freemason myself; you’ll hear the same thing from nearly every Mason—and they are very much in the minority—who has a background in Western esotericism. Whatever its original esoteric dimensions might have been, Masonry today espouses and teaches a philosophy indistinguishable from the sort you’ll find in most Protestant churches.
With regard to the others, t’s a mistake to focus attention on principles or beliefs when discussing Western esoteric traditions, because the Western esoteric traditions are focused on experience rather than belief. They are gnostic in the original sense of the word. Bentley Layton, in his fine translation of the Gnostic scriptures, translates the word gnosis as “acquaintance,” and it’s an insightful choice; the point of gnosis is not to know something in a discursive way, much less to believe in the right opinion, but to have the kind of personal, experiential knowledge that Michael Polanyi wrote about in his book Tacit Knowledge.
A metaphor may help clarify the distinction here. Imagine that you had a passionate year-long affair with someone who was a secret agent living under a fictitious cover story. Everything you know about that person in a discursive sense—every fact about that person you think you know—may be completely false; nonetheless, there are ways in which you know that person extremely well. The kind of knowledge that can be faked by a cover story is episteme in Greek; the kind that can’t be faked, personal acquaintance, is gnosis.
This is relevant because there is remarkably little uniformity of philosophy and belief among the members, including the senior members, of the traditions we’re discussing. A Druid ceremony with a dozen people present may well have a dozen different beliefs represented, including varied flavors of monotheism, polytheism, pantheism, panentheism, animism, atheism, and those who don’t know what they believe but still find the rituals moving and meaningful. Nor is this seen as any kind of problem. Experience, not belief, is central.
3. Initiation and Ritual Comparisons
FBP: In terms of initiation rituals and ceremonies, what are the contrasting elements among the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, Ordo Templi Orientis, Freemasonry, and Druidry? How do these ceremonies contribute to the unique identity of each tradition?
JMG: Druidry is the outlier here, because Druid initiations vary dramatically from one Druid order to another, and even sometimes within the same order. There is no common ground other than a habit of using various forms of Celtic symbolism and some degree of reverence for nature. As for the others, I’m not an initiate of the OTO, so there’s not much I can tell you about its initiation rituals, and I am a Freemason, so there’s even less I can tell you about its initiation rituals! I know this doesn’t make life easy for scholars.
In very general terms, however, classic lodge initiation rituals all have the same basic pattern. The candidate is brought into a lodge that has been set up to represent some specific symbolic structure. There are usually things done to the candidates to make them a little disoriented—blindfolding them and moving them around a space about which they know nothing is the standard method—and there’s at least one moment when the candidate is frightened, not drastically, but enough to get a reaction. Then the blindfold comes off, the lights come up, and the symbols and teachings of the degree are presented. It’s the specific symbols and teachings of each degree that give it a unique character.
4. Symbolism Across Traditions
FBP: Symbolism plays a crucial role in many esoteric traditions. Can you draw comparisons between the symbolic languages used in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, Ordo Templi Orientis, Freemasonry, and Druidry? Are there recurring symbols or distinct symbolic systems in each?
JMG: All of them draw from the particular symbolic language evolved in the Western world during the Renaissance from classical and medieval sources; you can find most of the symbols using in lodge initiations, for example, in Renaissance emblem books. In some degrees of some orders there are specific symbolic languages that are used—for example, the Cabala gets a lot of work in the Golden Dawn rituals—but they all belong to that same common body of symbolism.
5. Practical Applications and Ritual Practices
FBP: How do the practical applications and ritual practices within the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, Ordo Templi Orientis, Freemasonry, and Druidry differ? Are there specific rituals or practices that stand out as unique to each tradition?
JMG: Other than its initiations and a few other group ceremonies, Freemasonry has no ritual practices to speak of—again, these days, it’s a men’s club that has formal dinners and raises money for charities. The Golden Dawn and the OTO have a shared body of ritual practice because Aleister Crowley, who restructured the OTO from top to bottom after becoming its head in the English-speaking world, was a Golden Dawn initiate. As for Druidry—“ask three Druids, get five answers” is a common joke among Druids these days, and for good reason. I know of no ritual practice that is shared by more than a modestly sized minority of Druids.
Part II: Historical Development of Magic
FBP: In tracing the historical development of magic in the UK, how have specific magical traditions or practitioners played a significant role in shaping the landscape from the Renaissance era to contemporary times?
JMG: The entire history of occultism is a history of specific traditions and practitioners. It has no other history, since the Western esoteric tradition has no institutional setting more enduring and no popular basis more widespread than little circles of practitioners following a variety of traditions. That’s been true since the birth of Western esotericism in archaic Greece, and of course it remains true today. To speak of the history of British magic is to discuss John Dee and his fellow Elizabethan occultists, practicing traditions rooted in classical antiquity and reshaped by the Italian Renaissance; to go on to successors such as Thomas Rudd and Francis Barrett, who reworked the same traditions to meet the needs of their own times; from there, to proceed to the great occult revival of the late 19th century, with its twin hubs of Theosophy and the Golden Dawn and important figures such as G.R.S. Mead and William Wynn Westcott; and from there, via such successors as Dion Fortune, to the present.
1. Witchcraft and Druidry
Witchcraft and Druidic traditions were known to be of an oral tradition and most lost to tales of legend and folklore. Specifically in Witchcraft due to the persecution of this craft such practices would have been forced underground due to Pope Innocent VII denouncing it as an act of heresy in 1484 and following that was made a capital offence in 1563.
JMG: It’s crucial to step back from half a century of mythologizing here and stress one point: modern Witchcraft and Druidry are not descended from the older traditions whose names they borrowed. Modern Druidry began in the mid-18th century in an eccentric subculture of English and Welsh religious dissidents, who made up what they didn’t borrow from the popular literature of their time. Modern Witchcraft began in the mid-20th century when Gerald Gardner, a student of Aleister Crowley and a member of the Folklore Society, pieced together an assortment of Western occult notions and dressed (or, rather, undressed) them in the claims of a medieval witch-cult his close friend Margaret Murray was busy publicizing just then. (Her books on the subject are now universally considered crackpot pseudohistory by scholars.) Her core inspirations, in turn, were not surviving medieval traditions but the speculative reworking of those traditions set in motion by Jules Michelet’s La Sorcière and Matilda Joslyn Gage’s Woman, Church and State, and expanded by Charles Godfrey Leland in Aradia: The Gospel of the Witches. The retrospective social construction of medieval witchcraft as a primeval goddess cult is a fascinating study in 19th and 20th century popular culture, and I hope it gets an adequate historical study someday.
In an academic paper published in 1989, Anthony Davies of the University of Groningen noted that in the surviving literature, there were five separate accounts of Anglo-Saxon witches recorded in Anglo-Saxon or Norman England. Four of these, he argued, represented witches who were “little more than literary constructs”, owing more to the folk tales of the time than to any actual magical practitioners.
JMG: This doesn’t surprise me at all.
FBP: In your research have you found any supporting evidence of the magical practices of WIcca practices?
JMG: If by this you mean evidence that supports the notion that today’s Wicca goes back any further than Gerald Gardner, no, quite the opposite. Jim Baker’s solidly researched book The Cunning Man’s Handbook is a very good and heavily documented overview of what was actually practiced by folk magicians in Britain in the Renaissance and early modern periods. It has nothing in common with any form of modern Wicca. This is all the more striking in that Baker began his research hoping to prove that Wicca had the ancient roots its founders claimed for it.
FBP: How do modern day Wicca societies such as the Alexandrian Wicca differ from ancient practices as far as we can tell and is there an organised method of magical development?
JMG: There’s essentially no common ground between modern Wicca and what’s known of ancient and medieval folk magic. Wicca isn’t a folk tradition—like the rest of Western occultism, it’s a movement among dissident intellectuals who mostly come from urban and suburban backgrounds.
2. Druidry
Who were the Druids? The honest answer is that we really don’t know.
Most of what was written about them in ancient times vanished forever when the Roman Empire collapsed in the fifth century of theCommon Era. All the surviving texts written about the Druids when they still existed add up to a total of ten pages or so in English translation.
This meager harvest offers little solid knowledge. Druids lived among Celtic tribes in Gaul (modern France), Britain, Ireland, and apparently nowhere else. Their name may have meant “wise ones of the oak,” although scholars have suggested many other interpretations. They taught a secret wisdom that probably had something to do with trees, and their sacred places were groves in the forest. Some classical writers call Druids philosophers; others call them wizards. Not once do the sources call them priests, although this is how most archeologists interpret them today. Several sources divide them into the three categories of Bards, Ovates, and Druids, the Bards being poets, the Ovates diviners, and the Druids teachers.
Custom forbade writing down Druid teachings, and Druids-in-training had to memorize prodigious amounts of lore in verse form.
Some students took twenty years to complete the course of study, which included theology, astronomy, and divination. After finishing their studies, Druids formed a privileged class, exempt from taxes and military service.They settled disputes and could part warring armies on the brink of battle.
John Micael Greer
From your title The Druidry Handbook, Druids we can ascertain this sect were highly educated and their training methods appear to be rigorous, so much so they were revered in society. I am intrigued why they did not receive the same treatment as the witches and where do you think their knowledge base came from?
JMG: The last Druids known to history were in the 6th century AD, when they tried and failed to stop the conversion of the Picts to Christianity. Some scraps of Druid tradition and practice survived in bardic schools in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, but those schools had been thoroughly Christianized centuries before they faded out in the early modern period. This notion of Druids lurking in the undergrowth for 1300 years, and then suddenly popping out of hiding just in time to hand their mysteries to a bunch of British fringe intellectuals, needs to be put out to pasture—or sent to the glue factory. It didn’t happen.
10. FBP: If one were wishing to join the OBOD (Order of Bards, Ovates & Druids) Mystery School what would one expect to find?
JMG: You’ll want to talk to somebody from the current OBOD leadership about that. I took the OBOD course back in the 1990s, and it’s been completely revised at least once since then.
FBP: I wonder if you could expand on some of the aspects of the OBOD, such as the devotional practices which include nature connection, sacred listening, and reciprocity.
JMG: This is a good example of what I just mentioned. None of these things were part of the OBOD course when I took it.
FBP: Within modern Druidry is there a specific magical developmental structure?
JMG: Ask three Druids, get five answers! Generally speaking, though, most Druid traditions don’t put much if any emphasis on magic at all.
FBP: You have been a strong advocate for Druidry and aided in its growth, what inspired you to actively promote the return of this ancient mystery school?
JMG: A chapter of accidents. In 1994 I was encouraged by a friend to join OBOD, and found its teachings and practices fascinating and worthwhile. In 2003 I became first a member and then, with very little preparation, the head of the Ancient Order of Druids in America, a nearly defunct Druid order (it had fewer than a dozen living members when I joined it), and felt that its teachings and practices were valuable enough to make the effort to preserve them. Several other odd events of the same kind followed from there. I’m sure there are a great many other traditions just as deserving of the kind of help I gave Druidry, but Druidry is the tradition I stumbled into and so that’s where I put my shoulder to the wheel.
Magic
FBP: Can you elaborate on any notable shifts or adaptations in magical practices during specific historical periods in the UK and how these changes have contributed to the diversity of magical traditions today?
JMG: The great transformation of British magic, as of Western magic in general, came in the late 19th century when the revival and reorientation of magic launched by Eliphas Lévi found an audience in Britain. Before then, magic was nearly always an imitation of medieval and Renaissance practice—while Francis Barrett’s The Magus was first published in 1801, for example, its entire body of theory and practice comes from Renaissance occultists such as Cornelius Agrippa and Trithemius. It was after Lévi showed that magic could be understood in terms of modern worldviews that the great upsurge in newly minted magical traditions began.
FBP: How has the incorporation of knowledge and magical practices from other systems influenced the development of magical traditions in the UK, and can you provide examples of notable crossovers that have shaped these traditions?
JMG: I’ve already alluded to one of these—the borrowing of Masonic lodge practice by occult societies in the 19th century. Another is the wholesale importation of Hindu and Buddhist spiritual concepts and practices into the Western tradition that was set in motion by H.P. Blavatsky’s Theosophical Society. This sort of borrowing is constant in occultism, because of the focus on experiential gnosis mentioned earlier; since occultism isn’t about fixed beliefs but about personal experiences, it’s relatively easy to borrow practices that facilitate such experiences and traditions that appear to explain them.
FBP: What are some specific benefits that magical systems, rooted in historical practices, can offer to modern-day spiritual seekers in terms of personal growth, mindfulness, or a deeper connection to the spiritual realm?
JMG: Ah, but that’s not what magic is for. If you want personal growth, mindfulness, and a deeper connection to the spiritual realm, meditation and prayer are more useful tools. Magic is a way to cause change. It relates to spirituality in much the same way that engineering relates to pure science. The scientist tries to understand nature; the engineer sets out to use that understanding to make things happen. In the same way, there are a great many occult practices that focus on insight, understanding, and personal interaction and integration with the spiritual realm, but magic focuses on taking those things and using them to cause changes in the world and in the practitioner.
FBP: Can you discuss how the integration of magical systems into contemporary spiritual practices addresses the needs and challenges faced by individuals in the modern era, and what advantages they bring to the spiritual seeker?
JMG: Many spiritual systems these days encourage a generally passive approach to the world. This has many advantages, especially for those people who are too busy trying to make things happen, but it has its own problems and pathologies. Magic, by contrast, is active; it trains the active will and focuses attention on making changes happen in oneself and the world. Thus it’s a useful counterbalance to excessive passivity.
FBP: I would also be interested in your opinion of where you think magic stands today. From being a taboo subject to one that is popularized in modern culture.
JMG: The taboo status of magic oin the past has been massively overstated in recent years. For most of British history, magical practitioners have been a recognized part of society, and as long as they at least made an appearance of affirming the same religious notions as their neighbors, nobody worried about them. Yes, there were occasional outbursts of persecution in the early modern period, but those were localized exceptions to a broader rule; from the early Middle Ages to the present, your ordinary rural or small town cunning man or wise woman, your ordinary urban astrologer or mage, could typically count on spending a long and tolerably prosperous life without the least risk of being bothered by the authorities.
FBP: How do you perceive the current societal view of magic, considering its historical status as a taboo subject, and what factors have contributed to its increased acceptance and popularization in modern culture?
JMG: The current status of magic in popular culture really is nothing new. In the 18th and 19th centuries, for example, books of party games and entertainments for young women usually had at least one chapter dedicated to fortune telling, using cards, dice, or various other methods. If anything, magic is less widespread now than it was in the 1920s or the 1970s. There is an odd foreshortening of collective memory that makes it easy for many people to forget this, and come to believe that the ongoing presence of magic in popular culture is something new.
FBP: In your opinion, what role do media, entertainment, and cultural shifts play in shaping the public perception of magic today, and how has this evolution impacted the way magical practices are embraced or criticized in contemporary society?
JMG: Magic always exists in a complex and contentious relationship with its portrayals in popular culture, and especially with its inevitable distortions in entertainment media. The Harry Potter novels, for example, presented a funhouse-mirror distortion of magic, which then got picked up by those ends of the occult scene most attuned to pop culture. The same thing happened during the early 19th century, when portrayals of magic in Gothic novels helped shape popular notions about magic, and in turn were reflected in those 19th century occult circles most open to pop culture influence. The same thing can be traced much further back—for example, in the interplay between Roman magically oriented fiction and magical practice in the Roman Empire.
Central to this interaction is the habit of exaggerating the effects of magic, which is pervasive in the pop culture of most ages. The things that the characters in the Harry Potter novels do with magic cannot actually be done with real magic. The same thing is true of the magic in Gothic novels, or for that matter Apuleius’s The Golden Ass, the most famous Roman occult novel, in which the main character is turned into a donkey by drinking a magic potion.
Real magic is subtle and works within the ordinary physical laws of the universe; that can be done in fiction—Dion Fortune did it very well in her occult novels, and I’ve tried to do the same sort of thing in my Ariel Moravec occult-detective novels—but it’s something that by and large only practicing occultists do. The exaggerated magic of pop-culture entertainment is more popular precisely because it reassures the reader that the things it portrays can’t really happen, and so allows them to treat the whole subject as pleasant make-believe.
FBP: Is there anything else you would like to add?
JMG: The most useful thing that can be done by anyone who wants to understand magic is to read books on the subject written in earlier times, both books of magical instruction and pop-culture writings about magic. The foreshortening of collective memory I mentioned earlier is a potent force for misunderstanding, since it allows people to pretend that the past was something it wasn’t. To read the Golden Dawn papers in the light of Victorian Gothic novels such as Bulwer-Lytton’s Zanoni, or for that matter to read the Graeco-Egyptian magical papyri in the light of Apuleius, is to gain access to a view of the history of magic that is not only more nuanced but also, and crucially, less mythologized.