A question that comes up frequently — and understandably — concerns the relationship between the Ogdoadic Tradition of the Christian Mysteries and the “Classic” Aurum Solis as presented in Denning and Phillips’ The Magical Philosophy series and still practiced today through bodies like the Ordo Astrum Sophiæ. The question usually takes some form of: Was the Christian emphasis always there, or is it a recent departure?
The short answer is that the Christian formulation is the original. The more Hermetically pagan, non-Christian presentation that most people associate with the Ogdoadic tradition via the Aurum Solis was, if not a departure, certainly a reframing — and a relatively recent one.
Here is what we know. The original material of the Societas Rotae Fulgentis — the Society of the Blazing Wheel, the oldest living vehicle of the Ogdoadic Tradition — was explicitly Christian. The introductory note to Osborne Phillips’s Stella Gloriosa (now out of print) states this plainly. Phillips there sets forth the full initiatory rites of the Stella Gloriosa Regenerationis “in the form used by the Society of the Blazing Wheel in the XIX century, prior to their adaptation for use in the Order of the Aurum Solis.” These are described as the “original rites,” constituting the authentic theurgic and thaumaturgical liturgies of the Ogdoadic Tradition, true to the S.R.F. originals and consistent with the “original, historical and intellectual formulation of the Ogdoadic Tradition, as these mysteries have been received and are safeguarded.”
The implication is clear: what was published in The Magical Philosophy is an adaptation. The rites Phillips later released from the S.R.F. archives are Christian. The versions in The Magical Philosophy are not.
From the beginning, there was a Christian presence within the Aurum Solis. Phillips, as the final Grand Master of the classic Aurum Solis eventually declared the Aurum Solis would return to the original Christian frame and become a Christian mystery school outright — a statement that surprised some members who had come to the tradition through the more Hermetic-pagan lens of the published works. But this declaration was not a pivot. It was a clarification — or, more precisely, a return to what had been there all along.
This matters historically, because there is no long-standing tradition of “pagan Ogdoadica” through the ages. The Ogdoadic signatures — the Fivefold Pattern of the House of Sacrifice, the Eight-pointed Star of Regeneration — appear in the traditions of the Hesychasts, in Byzantine art, in the architecture and ritual of the Knights Templar, in the mediaeval Sacrament of Baptism, in the writings of St. Bernard of Clairvaux and Marsilio Ficino, in the structure of the Tridentine Mass. The tradition was maintained and transmitted through the Christianity that defined the thought, philosophy, religion, culture, and esotericism of the Western world for nearly two millennia. The theurgists who carried it were Christians — and often clergy and clerics. They were not practitioners of some hidden pagan counter-tradition running beneath or alongside the Church. They were the Church. They were the Western intellectual tradition. Like the historically powerful and intellectually formidable women throughout Western civilization, they have simply been overlooked.
This is an important distinction. The Ogdoadic Tradition is not a “secret hidden tradition” in the romantic sense — not a buried Rosicrucian brotherhood or a suppressed pagan survival. It is all out in the open, woven into the art, architecture, liturgy, and mystical theology of Christendom. It is not merely a part of our rich cultural heritage but largely its very heart.
The “Classic” Aurum Solis presentation — with its synthetic Greek Hermetic forms, its array of pagan godforms, its Agathodaimon theology that can read as almost neo-pagan or Thelemic in structure — represents a modern reinterpretation of the original Christian material. And it should be said plainly: it is a powerful reinterpretation. It is a valid expression of the Ogdoadic Tradition and an incredibly potent system of Initiation and High Magick, as many of its practitioners and Adepti over the past half-century can attest.
It is, moreover, a genuine boon to the Ogdoadic Tradition that this expression continues to thrive in bodies like the Ordo Astrum Sophiæ, making that branch of Ogdoadic current accessible to a broader range of practitioners than the specifically Neoplatonic Hermetic Christian formulation alone could reach. The point here is not to privilege a “one true Ogdoadic way.” The tradition is large enough to sustain more than one authentic expression.
But a historical clarification is in order, because the Classic Aurum Solis presentation — however valid and effective on its own terms — should not be mistaken for the tradition in its original form. The Ogdoadic Tradition of the Christian Mysteries is not a “Christianized revision” of something originally pagan. It is the restoration of the original formulation — the form in which these mysteries were received, transmitted, and safeguarded through the centuries.