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The full curriculum of the Octagon Society, edited by John Michael Greer. From the Introduction:
Quite a few years have passed now since I studied occultism with the late John Gilbert. My original reason for seeking him out was that he was among the last surviving members of the Ancient Order of Druids in America (AODA), which I wanted to learn about. When I first made contact with him, I had no idea that AODA was part of a cluster of occult organizations, once independent of each other, which had ended up sharing members and techniques during the second half of the twentieth century.
One of those organizations was the Magickal Order of the Golden Dawn (MOGD). This had a convoluted history, as most occult orders do. It was John’s reworking of the material he received from one of his teachers, Dr. Juliet Ashley, who ran an organization called the Holy Order of the Golden Dawn. Dr. Ashley, in turn, based her order on a charter, rituals, and instructional material that she received in 1939 from Arthur Edward Waite, whose Holy Order of the Golden Dawn was one of the fragments left over from the collapse of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.
The MOGD had its own very distinctive system of training, by no means identical to the better-known Golden Dawn systems, and I found it very much worth studying. What sets it apart most noticeably from the Golden Dawn mainstream is that it doesn’t teach ceremonial magic. That may seem surprising, given the fixation on magic in the occult community these days, but there are reasons for it. First, magic is only one aspect of occultism, and it’s not necessarily the most important aspect; plenty of people who are interested in occultism aren’t interested in magic, nor does every occultist have the necessary talents to become a capable mage; and too much focus on magic is not necessarily a good thing.
