Tuesday, January 22, 2008
FROM THE ASIATIC BRETHREN TO THE GOLDEN DAWN
Not only are the roots of Reform Judaism lodged in the Asiatic Brethren, so also are the roots of the Golden Dawn magical fraternity, and thus the O.T.O., lodged there as well.
Although the order of the Asiatic Brethren was short-lived its echoes affected a Jewish masonic lodge founded in Frankfurt in the wake of the Napoleonic conquest....it is relevant to give a brief outline of its history based largely on [Jacob] Katz's account. Apart from the Asiatic Brethren, various attempts had been made by German Jews to enter Freemasonry....Any lodges with Jewish members were, however, branded as irregular by the mainstream of German Masonry, which remained...resolutely Christian. This changed, however, with the Napoleonic conquest during which French affiliated lodges were established on German soil, in which the admission of Jews was given official approval in line with the policy of the Grand Orient in Paris. It was under these circumstances that a Jew named Sigismund Geisenheimer founded, under French aegis, the Loge de l'Aurore Naissante or, in German, Zur aufgehenden Morgenrothe, often called simply the Judenloge. The lodge, chartered in 1807 and ceremonially inaugurated the following year, was of mixed Jewish and Christian membership, and among the Christian members was Franz Joseph Molitor, the kabbalistic scholar who had been an important member of the Asiatic Brethren and had remained in close touch with Joseph Hirschfeld. At the inauguration he made a speech welcoming the event as symptomatic of the dawn of a new era in which all classes of men would look upon each other as brothers.(Source: Christopher McIntosh, THE ROSE CROSS AND THE AGE OF REASON, p. 175)
the Fraternity of the Asiatic Brethren had the characteristic to be the Qabalistic branch of Germany's Rosy+Cross, because it accepted among its members Jews which were attached to the Polish Qabalistic School of Shabattaï Zévi. As opposed to what many historians have believed until now, we discovered the proof that Asiatic Brethren did not disappear about 1800, but that they survived within the Masonic Order of l'Aurore Naissante ("the Nascent Dawn") in Frankfurt-am-Main, a Lodge which was recognized by the Grand Lodge in England in 1817. Kenneth MacKenzie (the writer of the Cipher Manuscripts of the G.D.) certainly knew about the existence of the Order l'Aurore Naissante since he claimed to be initiated in his youth into the Rosy+Cross in Vienna, Austria, in the entourage of the Count Apponyi who was an ambassador from Austria in Paris. Vienna had for a long time been the seat of the Fraternity of Rosy+Cross of Austria; but at the time when MacKenzie lived in Vienna, about 1840, the only branch of the Rosy+Cross Order which had survived was that of the Asiatic Brethren which had found refuge in the center of the Masonic Order of l'Aurore Naissante in Frankfurt-am-Main. Besides, it is in this city that the Reform of the grades and rituals of the Rosy+Cross Order of the Old System had taken place in 1777.
MacKenzie took as a starting point the Qabalistic lessons of the Asiatic Brethren to create the G.D. rituals. Indeed, there exists many common points between the qabalistic system of the G.D., that of the Asiatic Brethren, and that indicated in VIIème Livre of Moïse.
(Source: an excerpt from the Historical introduction of the Ahathoor N deg. 7 Temple of Paris, titled "Mathers and the Secret Chiefs" by Jean-Pascal Ruggiu & Nicolas Tereshchenko)
It was remarkable for me to learn that the eighteenth century Brothers of Light, and for that matter the Initiated Brothers of Asia, are direct antecedents of O.T.O. I have at hand some of their rituals. It is almost certainly correct that there are enough similarities in publicly available literature to link these bodies, both directly and through intervening manifestations such as the Theon-Davidson H. B. of L. of the nineteenth century.
(Source: T. Allen Greenfield, "The Scarlet Letter" Dec, 1998, "Hermetic Brotherhood Revisited")
Can the origin of the Golden Dawn to be found in a Masonic lodge? I believe so.
The clues for the Masonic genesis of Golden Dawn are many. The name of the Order as given in the Cypher Ms is in Hebrew, ChBRTh ZRCh AVR BQD, or according to Westcott’s translation, Chabrath Zerek Aour Bokhr or ‘Society of the Shining Light of Dawn’[2]. Gerald Suster, in a short essay rebuffing some of the claims of Ellic Howe, who wrote the definitive history of the Golden Dawn, quotes from Gershom Scholem’s book From Berlin to Jerusalem to the effect that there was a ‘so called Frankfurt Jewish Masonic Lodge named Chabrath Zereh Boqer Aour’[3]. This I believe is no coincidence.
The Frankfurt Jewish lodge did exist. It was chartered on June 17 1807 as Loge St. John de L’aurore Naissante by the Grand Orient of France when Frankfurt was occupied by the Grande Armee of Napoleon. A number of Jews petitioned the Grand Orient for a charter since they could not gain entry into the anti-Semitic German lodges of the day. L’aurore Naissante admitted both Jews and Gentiles, raising the Jewish members up to the degree of Master Mason, but the Christian members were entitled to the option of progressing through the ‘higher degrees’ of the Scot Rite, degrees which barred Jewish members from participation due to their Christian nature.
As part of the French Empire all restrictions against Jews had been lifted but with Napoleon’s defeat toleration ended and the Jewish Freemasons were again ostracised. With the withdrawal of Napoleon’s troops it was thought expedient not to be associated with anything French, so L’aurore Naissante immediately deleted any reference to the Grand Orient in its materials, changed its name to Loge zur aufgehenden Morgenrothe, and began to look for another obedience to associate with. They applied to Prince Carl von Hessen, himself a mason and one of the ‘movers and shakers’ of the ‘Asiatic Brethren’ which not only admitted both Jews and Gentiles but was also very involved in mystical, even occult, elements of Freemasonry and kaballah. Negotiations eventually broke down. Eventually in 1817 Morgenrothe found the full recognition it was seeking through August Frederick, Duke of Sussex, the Grand Master of the United Grand Lodge of England, who empowered the lodge to operate as a Masonic lodge without any restrictions, with the added assurance that ‘parallel degrees would be instituted for them’[4]. . Morgenrothe eventually left UGLE for membership in the Eclectic Covenant of Frankfurt in 1870.
One of the great points of significance in the history of the Morgenrothe is the desire for an alternative to the Scottish Rite accessible to Jewish members. It is possible that the Chabrath Zereh Boqer Aour was created to replace the Scot Rite and from this desire a set of rituals were drafted and discussed but never used. This possibility is made more intriguing by the fact Westcott gave the name of the German ‘Mother Temple’ of the Golden Dawn as Lichte, Liebe, Leben or in English ‘Light, Love, Life’, which is also the motto of the 18º of the Scot Rite of Freemasonry[5]. It is also perhaps significant that in English Masonry the Scot Rite is know as the Rose Croix, or Rose Cross, degrees. It is also worth noting that many of the foundation members were associated with both Baron von Hund’s Strict Observance Freemasonry as well as the Asiatic Brethren, both systems were full of mystical speculation.
(Source: mastermason.com website"Golden Dawn and its Connection to Freemasonry")
So it would appear that the Jewish heresy of Sabbatian-Frankism is still around today in the O.T.O. which, like Frankism, incorporates sexual rituals into its rites.
