Egyptian Lore in Golden Dawn
The current of Egyptian energies runs deep in the Golden Dawn system of magic and spiritual development. Each officer (visible station) and important floor position (invisible station) has an Egyptian god associated with them. Each of these gods and goddesses were chosen because of a specific aspect (ex. Horus' martial aspect), then combined with other energies (ex. Enochian and astrological) to create a godform.
Golden Dawn was one of the first, if not the first, esoteric Order to include actual lore from Ancient Egypt in its system. The exoteric reason for the inclusion of Egyptian lore was the rise in public interest in Egyptian mysteries following the rediscovery of the true meaning of the Egyptian hieroglyphics.
The skill to read the hieroglyphics had only been rediscovered a few years before the creation of the Cipher Manuscript, the outline (first draft) of the rituals of the Outer Order of the Golden Dawn. The unknown creator of the Cipher Manuscript, most likely Kenneth MacKenzie, mentions that the Pillars should have illustrations from select chapters of the Book of the Dead. This particular mention means that the Cipher Manuscript could not have been created before 1855. The creator of the Cipher Manuscript made no effort to conceal the fact that the Golden Dawn was a creation of Victorian English occultism.
It was William Wynn Westcott and Samuel Liddell (MacGregor) Mathers who created smoke screens to conceal the actual age of the Golden Dawn system. While understandable in the context of the Victorian culture that Isis-Urania #3 was constitutioned under, there has been an unfortunate tendency to continue this tread; today, it is other cultures and ages that modern leaders of Golden Dawn claim to descend from, but the goal is the same---to conceal the fact that Golden Dawn is a modern creation.These attempts to conceal the relative age of our tradition end up creating difficulties when students try to understand certain aspects of our magical tradition.
For instance, Harparkraat (Harpocrates), Horus the Babe, is associated with the Sign of Silence, which in Golden Dawn is associated with secrecy and the sacred mysteries. If one goes back to the lore of Ancient Egypt, Harparkraat was merely the baby Horus, sucking one of his fingers. It was the Greeks and their mystery cults that saw Horus the Babe holding his finger to his lips to indicate the strict silence of the initiate. With the loss of the ability to read what the Ancient Egyptians actually wrote about Harpocrates, the Hermetic and alchemical traditions assumed that the Ptolemic Greeks knew the true meaning behind the image of Horus the Babe holding his finger to his mouth.
The ideas of the Ancient Eygptians, Ptolemic Greeks, Hermetics and alchemists, were combined with the ideas of the Victorian Freemasons and Theosophists in the athanor of Golden Dawn to create the Harpocrates that our magical tradition uses. Harpocrates, in the eyes of an initiate of our divine mysteries, is a sign of someone newly came to our system of spiritual development (Neophyte), the innocence of childhood, the mysteries of the Holy Fool, the silence of those who know when they encounter someone not yet ready to hear the truth, and a source of protective energies, among other things.
The study of Ancient Egyptian lore is essential to the student of our tradition, but it must be combined with the threads of the other parts of our tradition to come to a full understanding of the rich fabric that Golden Dawn clothes its rituals with.