It's important to read histories of magical groups when you can, not limiting yourself to accounts of the high-profile Victorian and early-modern lodges like the AMORC, Theosophical Society, and the Golden Dawn, which are easy to learn about. Also look into the slightly more obscure Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor, the Fraternitas Saturni, the Typhonian OTO, Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth, the Illuminates Of Thanateros, The Church of Satan (early history up to 1975), AMOOKOS, and the Radha Soami Satsang Beas.
Try to trace the influences flowing between these groups over time the way you'd look at how various art movements inform and react to each other. There's a powerful similarity between schools of art and schools of magic.
Do this in order to understand the group you're currently in. What is its inner structure? Is it a kind of post-Masonic grade system? Where did that originate and how did the leaders of your group make it different (or not)? If you're in a BTW Gardnerian / Alexandrian coven, you can learn a lot about where your rituals and traditions came from and how they've evolved. If you have a more religious structure with priests and novices and monks, etc., why? Who gave them these titles and what do they signify? Do the positions themselves confer power or simply reflect the attainments of the people in them? Why is this important?
One of the many good reasons for doing this kind of research is because otherwise you're a slave. Grand High Mucketymuck tells you the only way you're ever going to reach enlightenment (or endarkenment, depending on the dominant aesthetic of your organization) is by standing on your head for 30 minutes at dawn every day. Does he do this? Well, he's so far above you that what he does for his own enlightenment is not something you are developed enough to comprehend. Right?
But maybe you look into the history of your magical lodge and learn that back in 1970, Larry, the founder, went to India for a month and came back with all kinds of practices that he used to rewrite the lodge's mail-order curriculum. Then Larry started calling himself a "swami." Swami Larry. He died like a regular human being from a heart attack in the 80s. But no one criticizes Swami Larry because he's a 700th degree Adept of the Fifth Circle of Elemental Gnosis on the Plane of Dark Moorkhata. Well, okay.
Maybe, by reading the tell-alls and unauthorized memoirs of initiates who have fallen away or been exiled from the organization (every group has angry ex-members willing to shout about how corrupt and wrong it all was), you also find out about all sorts of sex scandals and power struggles in its history. After a lot of reading, you may realize that, in magical groups, this is not the exception, it's the rule. What are you going to do with that realization?
You're faced with a decision: do you overlook what you have learned and decide you're getting a lot out of the morning headstands and the astral trips to Disney World on the Plateau of Leng and the long dream conversations with Mephistopheles. Or do you say to yourself, "Wait just a fucking minute. I'm being told I won't be worthy to ascend to the Third Sphere of Gorgoplablaggah for another 3 years, at which point I'm supposed to be able to levitate—but I've never seen any of the High Adepts floating. I did see them get stunningly drunk and high at the last meet-up, though. I remember that pretty clearly. Am I being played for a fool?" No, my child, you are playing yourself. They're just collecting your dues and spending the money on Bud Lite and propane for their trailers.
Bottom line: learn history if you want to understand the present. It is better to understand and be disappointed or faced with unpleasant truth than to live in a fantasy world—especially one handed to you in order to support an organization that has hypocrisy in its DNA. And all spiritual groups have some degree of hypocrisy in them. Trust me on this. I was a priest of a magical-religious organization (that I do not talk about on social media) for a long time. If I've learned anything in those years, it's the following:
- What you get out of participating in a magical group can be inherently useful and meaningful to you no matter how messed-up some of the other initiates have been or are. Hypocrisy doesn't automatically invalidate the work because you're the one doing it for yourself in your life. You can't do the spiritual work of another. That's actually a very good thing.
- Magical groups are made by people the way servitors are made—to contain a particular force or set of forces beyond words. The power of naming spirits and naming magical currents is that doing so gives you the ability to work with them. But the map is not the territory. If you are an adept in the Circle of Osiris, the name "Osiris" might just be a tool, an interface mechanism for a force within you and beyond you that is not human and doesn't have human boundaries. This matters because when you realize that Swami Larry was full of it 90% of the time, you shouldn't overlook the other 10% where he was communing with this force and using it to create a group that could initiate people into its knowledge and conversation. Swami Larry might have been a conman. But he might have also had valuable lessons to teach. And fate may have been using him for this purpose above and beyond his ability to comprehend what was going on. How is your personal fate working in this situation? What is your magical history and how has it led you to this group? Isn't that a critically important question to ask?
- Magical groups are flawed because people are flawed. Part of becoming an adept is either realizing and accepting this (yes, the previous Grand High Mucketymuck was a sexual predator . . . but we got rid of him . . . right? Right?) or being honest with yourself that you can't accept it (I will only follow an immaculate messiah figure who is clearly beyond criticism . . . ). If you're looking for a perfectly moral or perfectly sincere and enlightened magical lodge with perfect leadership, you don't belong in one. It's far better to walk a solitary path and hold yourself to those high ideals. That way, when you fail, you can be clear about why you did instead of having to wonder whether you're stuck in some broken and false hierarchy.
- No magical person (actually no person at all, but this is especially true of esoteric types) stands still. Maybe the high-level initiates were once very sincere and potent and now they're in a 40-year rest cycle. Maybe they started out as conmen and now they're actually serious and trying to do the real thing. Can you tell?