Liber XIII · High Magick · Chapter VI: Magical Orders
Stella Matutina and Alpha et Omega: Golden Dawn Successors
How the Golden Dawn split after 1900 into the Stella Matutina, the Alpha et Omega and Waite's rite: leaders, temples, quarrels, Whare Ra and decline.
The Stella Matutina and the Alpha et Omega were the two main magical orders that grew out of the break-up of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn after 1900. The Alpha et Omega remained loyal to S. L. MacGregor Mathers and, after his death, to his widow Moina; the Stella Matutina, led by Dr Robert Felkin, continued the London adepts' tradition and was the order from which Israel Regardie published the Golden Dawn rituals. Both preserved and changed the Golden Dawn system until their decline in the mid-twentieth century.
After the Golden Dawn Schism of 1900§
The original order's crisis is told in our history of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. In brief, the London adepts of the Second Order rejected the authority of Mathers, who lived in Paris, after he claimed in early 1900 that the founding documents had been forged by his co-founder William Wynn Westcott. Mathers' attempt to seize the order's vault and papers through Aleister Crowley in April 1900 failed, and the London members expelled him.
Without a head claiming contact with the Secret Chiefs, the London body struggled to agree on what it was for. Some members wanted practical magic and clairvoyant work; others, led by Arthur Edward Waite, wanted a contemplative Christian mysticism. The embarrassment of the Horos trial of 1901, in which a pair of fraudsters who had briefly gained Mathers' confidence were convicted of serious crimes and the Golden Dawn's rituals were mentioned in court, added to the strain. By 1903 the London order had divided.
Three Branches: Waite, Felkin and Mathers§
The Independent and Rectified Rite§
Arthur Edward Waite took control of the original Isis-Urania temple and reworked its rituals to remove most practical magic, emphasising the mystical path and the symbolism of the Holy Grail and the Rosy Cross. His Independent and Rectified Rite lasted until 1914; in 1915 he founded a new body, the Fellowship of the Rosy Cross, with rituals of his own composition.
The Stella Matutina§
The members who wished to continue the magical curriculum gathered under Robert William Felkin, a physician who had worked as a medical missionary in Africa, and John William Brodie-Innes, an Edinburgh lawyer and novelist who led the Amen-Ra temple. Their order took the name Stella Matutina, "the Morning Star", and its London temple was called Amoun. W. B. Yeats, who had been one of Mathers' chief opponents in 1900, became an active member and remained involved for many years.
The Alpha et Omega§
Mathers kept the loyalty of the Ahathoor temple in Paris and of a number of members in Britain and America. During the first decade of the century his branch came to be known as the Alpha et Omega (A.O.). Its London temple was led for years by Edward Berridge, a homeopathic physician who had sided with Mathers in 1900. Brodie-Innes later returned to Mathers' allegiance, bringing part of the Scottish membership with him, a sign of how fluid these loyalties were.
The Stella Matutina and the Search for the Secret Chiefs§
The Stella Matutina inherited the Golden Dawn's grade system and Second Order teaching, but Felkin added his own emphases. Like Mathers before him, he believed that legitimate authority could come only from the Secret Chiefs, superhuman adepts behind the order. He sought contact with them both in trance work, through communications attributed to an Arab teacher on the inner planes, and by travelling to Germany before the First World War in search of surviving Rosicrucian adepts. On these journeys he met the anthroposophist Rudolf Steiner, whose ideas influenced the order's later teaching, though Steiner never accepted Felkin's hopes of a formal link.
The Stella Matutina also extended the higher grades. Material for the Adeptus Major and Adeptus Exemptus grades, only sketched in the original order, was developed in this period, and the order produced additional papers on healing, astral work and clairvoyance. Much of this later material is of uncertain authorship and is less well documented than the original Golden Dawn papers.
Whare Ra in New Zealand§
In 1912 Felkin visited Havelock North in New Zealand, where a group of Christian and esoteric seekers had invited him, and founded a temple there called Smaragdum Thalasses, the "Emerald of the Seas". He emigrated permanently in 1916. The house that became the order's home there, Whare Ra, designed by the architect and member James Chapman-Taylor, contained a fully equipped temple and a seven-sided Vault of the Adepti beneath it, described in our article on the Vault of the Adepti. Felkin died in 1926, but the New Zealand temple continued to initiate members for decades and closed only in 1978, making it the longest-lived temple of the original Golden Dawn lineage. The house survives as a private residence and has attracted historical interest for its intact ritual architecture.
The Alpha et Omega under Moina Mathers§
Mathers died in Paris in November 1918, and leadership of the Alpha et Omega passed to Moina Mathers, an accomplished artist and seer in her own right. She moved to London and continued to govern the order until her death in 1928. Her period is best known through two relationships that ended in conflict.
The first was with Dion Fortune (Violet Firth), who was initiated into an A.O. temple in London in 1919 and studied under Moina. Fortune's growing independence, and the publication of writings that Moina felt disclosed order teaching, led to a break in the late 1920s. Fortune later described what she believed was an occult attack during this period, and readers have often assumed Moina was its source, although Fortune's own account is guarded. She went on to found the Fraternity of the Inner Light, discussed in our article on Dion Fortune.
The second was with the American musician and occultist Paul Foster Case, a senior officer of the A.O.'s Thoth-Hermes temple in New York, who left after a dispute with Moina around 1921–1922. He founded the school that became the Builders of the Adytum. After Moina's death the Alpha et Omega dwindled, and its remaining temples had largely ceased to work by the Second World War.
Decline, Exposure and Publication§
The Stella Matutina in England fared little better. In the 1920s Christina Mary Stoddart, one of the chiefs of the Amoun temple, became convinced that the order and its hidden masters were part of a sinister international conspiracy. She investigated the order's sources, found them wanting, and later published conspiratorial books under the pen-name "Inquire Within", beginning with Light-Bearers of Darkness (1930). Amoun went into abeyance, though the Hermes temple in Bristol continued.
It was in the Hermes temple that the young Israel Regardie was initiated in the early 1930s. Disappointed by what he saw as the order's decay and the poor grasp of its chiefs, he left within a short time and published its rituals and teachings as The Golden Dawn (1937–1940). His action ended the secrecy on which both successor orders had depended. Crowley had already printed some of the rituals in The Equinox from 1909, provoking an unsuccessful attempt by Mathers to stop publication in court, but Regardie's edition was far more complete.
Both successor orders survive mainly through their documents and the people they formed. Yeats's later work, Fortune's novels and textbooks, Case's tarot teaching and Regardie's books carried their teaching into the wider culture, and the modern revivals of the Golden Dawn surveyed in our guide to magical orders draw on Stella Matutina papers far more than on the original order's few surviving manuscripts.
Frequently asked questions§
What is the difference between the Stella Matutina and the Alpha et Omega?§
The Alpha et Omega was the branch loyal to Mathers and later Moina Mathers, while the Stella Matutina was formed by London and Edinburgh adepts under Robert Felkin after they rejected Mathers' authority. Both used the Golden Dawn system, but the Stella Matutina developed additional higher-grade material.
Was W. B. Yeats a member of the Stella Matutina?§
Yes. After opposing Mathers in 1900, Yeats joined the Stella Matutina and remained an active member for many years. His magical work there fed into his poetry and his later book A Vision.
What was Whare Ra?§
Whare Ra was the house Robert Felkin built at Havelock North, New Zealand, which contained a Golden Dawn temple and Vault of the Adepti. Its temple, Smaragdum Thalasses, continued working until 1978.
Do the Stella Matutina and Alpha et Omega still exist?§
The original orders ceased to function during the twentieth century; the last temple of the lineage, at Whare Ra, closed in 1978. Some modern groups use these names or claim descent from them, but they are separate organisations.
Sources and further reading§
- The Magicians of the Golden Dawn — Ellic Howe, 1972
- The Golden Dawn: Twilight of the Magicians — R. A. Gilbert, 1983
- Women of the Golden Dawn: Rebels and Priestesses — Mary K. Greer, 1995
- Ritual Magic in England: 1887 to the Present Day — Francis King, 1970
- Yeats's Golden Dawn — George Mills Harper, 1974
- The Golden Dawn — Israel Regardie, 1937
- Light-Bearers of Darkness — Inquire Within (Christina M. Stoddart), 1930