Hey Herm,
There is a basic logical leap I think most people will have a hard time making for you. The Golden Dawn founders bent over
backwards to fabricate an "ancient" link to the "Rosicrucian adepts." They cyphered and obfuscated and outright lied to their members. We know this. It's documented exhaustively. Hell, they cribbed material from every occult resource in the British Museum and forged letters in German from the ersatz "Frau Sprengel" and got busted for it publically before everything went south. If the Golden Dawn DID have legitimate ties to a secret occult order of remote antiquity, why fabricate all that other folderol? And if Mathers' Hermetic source was in Paris, how did he get conned in Paris there at the end by shameless scam artists like the Horos couple, dragging the Order into a rape and fraud case that exposed rituals to the newspapers?
The trouble with your theory is that it not only doesn't fit the known facts, it ties itself in knots (Error-boros) to create incredible conjectures that ALSO don't fit the known facts...
Isn't it sensible to look at the evidence and posit that the founders of the Golden Dawn synthesized a lot of esoteric material to create an occult order in the late nineteenth century? All the texts they used and hierarchy they adopted, all the "cutting-edge" science and archaeology that got incorporated, all of the comparative mythology and orientalist imperialism dates their curriculum to that exact moment in time. By insisting that Mathers
must have "accidentally found" the Golden Dawn material and it
must have been from a "Unfathomed Library" where shadowy "Rosicucian Adepts"
must have stashed it, you're ignoring the possibility that he was involved in or privy to its creation. Ditto Levi "finding" his singular ideas fully formed in an uncatalogued "Mysterious Manuscript." So these conjectures start to seem like a tissue of over-the-top Dan Brown credulity supported by scant research and
Alice in Wonderland reasoning: verdict first, trial after.
Scholars already
know what their sources were... that is to say, we know what they studied and the origins of the various strands of thought. Their occult syntheses were original and their own. Why couldn't these men have had the (contradictory, imperfect, strange, idiosyncratic, infectious) ideas themselves? Heaven knows they incorporated enough wacky, ridiculous, untutored mistakes in their writings indicative of people painting in bold strokes with partially comprehended material. If the knowledge was given to both of them by a "Secret Brotherhood" why is it so full of errors and contradiction? Unless in turn, that Rosicrucian order was populated by plagiaristic, deluded, semi-schooled megalomaniacs... and frankly where did THEY find it?
Someone had to think of it. Someone has to have the idea at some point. Situating something in antiquity only guarantees its age, not its accuracy. Personally, I'd rather give Mathers and Levi (and all their ilk) credit for what they accomplished. They changed the world.
Scion