Secret Societies
Aurum Solis
Hermetic Societies
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Origin from 1897
The Aurum Solis, meaning the Gold of the Sun, is a Western esoteric order devoted to the Hermetic and ceremonial magical tradition. It teaches a system of ritual magic, meditation, and self-transformation drawn from what it calls the Ogdoadic tradition, which it traces through Hermeticism, Neoplatonism, and the Renaissance mystery schools. The order works through grades of initiation and is known to a wider public mainly through the many books on ritual magic published by its leading members. It presents its path as a constructive high magic aimed at spiritual growth.
Facts
Open Questions
What Counted as EvidenceThe founding in 1897 and the names Charles Kingold and George Stanton come from the order's own account of itself. No independent record of either man, or of the order before its officers began publishing in the 1970s, has been found. 1 Nobody holds a position here, which is what separates this from a disputed founding. There is no scholarly argument that the 1897 date is false and none that it is true; there is one account, given by the body it is about, and nothing beside it. The atlas records the date as the order's claim rather than as documented history until an archive says otherwise. Origins
Origin Period Place of Origin FounderCharles Kingold and George Stanton 1 Status
Status TodayIn active religious use 1 Continues today, active in Britain and worldwide Learn More
An Order Built on What It Calls the Ogdoadic Tradition
The Aurum Solis is a Western ceremonial-magical order whose name means the gold of the sun, and it is distinguished chiefly by the particular lineage of the tradition it claims to work.
The Ogdoadic current
Founded in England in 1897 within the wider occult revival of the period, the order teaches a system of ritual magic, meditation and self-transformation that it traces to what it calls the Ogdoadic tradition, a Hermetic current it identifies with the number eight and with a line of Western esoteric practice reaching back, on its own account, to late antiquity and the Renaissance. Its method is practical and ceremonial rather than devotional, aimed at the development of the individual.
Known through its books
The Aurum Solis became widely known in the later twentieth century through the extensive published writings issued under the names Melita Denning and Osborne Phillips, whose multi-volume system of magic carried the teaching of the order to a readership far larger than its membership. Like several orders of its type it has passed through reorganisations and changes of leadership, and its public profile rests more on its literature than on any visible institutional presence.
A Tradition That Begins with the People Who Described It
Aurum Solis presents itself as the current expression of an Ogdoadic tradition, an eightfold Western initiatory current running through the Hellenistic and medieval periods and distinct from the Kabbalistic mainstream that the Golden Dawn worked in. The order gives a founding date of 1897 and names Charles Kingold and George Stanton as its founders.
Nothing in that account can be checked. No independent record of Kingold or Stanton has been produced, and the earliest verifiable activity is the revival of the order in 1971 by Vivian Godfrey and Leon Barcynski, who published extensively as Melita Denning and Osborne Phillips. Their multi-volume Magical Philosophy is where the Ogdoadic tradition is set out at length, and it is the source for essentially everything written about the order since.
That does not make the material worthless. The system is coherent, its ritual technique is workable, and its emphasis on the Hellenistic sources is a real corrective to a field that treats the Kabbalistic model as the only option. What it does mean is that the correct description is a twentieth century synthesis presented as an ancient current, which is a description that fits a good deal of this field. The atlas records the claim, records that it rests on the order's own testimony, and does not decide it.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
The order traces its tradition through Hermeticism and its published system is Hermetic ceremonial magic. The descent is the order's account of itself; the practice is what can be read.
Neoplatonism is the second half of the descent the order claims, and the Ogdoadic scheme it teaches is built on a Neoplatonic reading of the soul's ascent.
Present in Region
Given as an English order in its own account, and known to a wider public through books its officers published in Britain and the United States from the 1970s.
Related To
The Aurum Solis presents its Ogdoadic line as its own rather than as a descent from the Golden Dawn, and works a different ritual system. The two are set beside each other because the order reached the public through the same English ceremonial milieu, not because either came out of the other.
Sources
Open Questions (1 open question)
Did the Aurum Solis exist before its officers began publishing in the 1970s, and were Charles Kingold and George Stanton real men?
The 1897 founding and both founders' names rest on the order's own account and on nothing else that has been produced. No lodge record, no correspondence and no third party notice of either name from the period has come to light, and no scholar has argued the point either way, so this is an absence rather than a disagreement.
What would resolve this An archival search for the two names in English civil registration, probate and census returns for the period, together with a search of the surviving papers and membership rolls of the English occult lodges of the 1890s, and, if the order will open them, its own pre-1971 papers. Any one of the three would move the question.
Archival history; history of Western esotericismJ. Gordon Melton, Encyclopedia of American Religions
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