New Reformed Orthodox Order of the Golden Dawn

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The New Reformed Orthodox Order of the Golden Dawn (abbreviated NROOGD) is a Wiccan organization/tradition/denomination that has little or nothing to do with the original Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. According to one of the founders of NROOGD, Aidan Kelly and his former spouse Alta Picchi Kelly, the name was chosen as a way to screen out would-be members lacking senses of humor (personal communication to Isaac Bonewits). Bonewits considers NROOGD to be the quintessential (and probably the first) "California Eclectic" Wiccan tradition, near the "liberal/heterodox" end of his Wiccan spectrum of "orthodoxy/heterodoxy."

My colleague Isaac's observation that the name did screen out some humorless people is quite true, but it was actually chosen in homage to William Butler Yeats, who headed the HOGD's true successor, the Stella Matutina, from about 1900 to about 1922. It was obvious to me in 1967, when I was preparing for my master's orals on Yeats, Blake, and Joyce, that the magical system used by Gardnerian witches was derived from that of the HOGD. It was much later that I learned that the exact pathway by which that system was transmitted was probably via Dion Fortune via Christine Hartley and Charles Seymour, either directly to Gardner, or to Edith Woodford-Grimes, or to someone in their immediate circle of occult friends. The full NROOGD name was devised in a discussion among the group who were creating the first ritual, and was brilliantly defended by another of the founders, the woman now known most often as e.l.f. Silverlocke. We considered ourselves to be unauthorized volunteers for the Gardnerian movement, but having no access to any secrets and having to devise our own rituals, we never claimed our initiations to be equivalent or even comparable to Gardnerian initiations. For the first two years of the NROOGD's existence, all our rituals were public, held usually in public parks, and attended often by hundreds of participants. Our success in being public Witches, rather than secretive, was one factor in the creation of the Covenant of the Goddess as a public "church" for the Craft movement and in the rise of public festivals during the late 1970s.