An Egyptian Precedent, a Modern Curriculum

Ancient Egyptian priestly practice supplies the precedent the Golden Dawn drew on, though the systematic technique the order taught is properly understood as a modern reconstruction rather than a continuous inheritance. Egyptian temple ritual assigned priests specific roles impersonating deities in the performance of daily cult liturgy and in mortuary ritual, most notably a priest playing the part of Horus performing rites for the deceased understood as Osiris, and Egyptologists studying temple texts describe this identification as central to how the ritual was believed to function, the priest's ordinary identity giving way, for the duration of the rite, to the god whose actions the ceremony required.

The Golden Dawn, an English occult order founded in 1888 drawing heavily on borrowed and reconstructed Egyptian and classical material filtered through nineteenth-century Egyptology and comparative mythology, built assumption of the godform into its graded curriculum of initiation, with specific deity identifications assigned to specific ceremonial officers within the grade structure, a systematic pedagogical use considerably more formalised than anything the fragmentary Egyptian evidence itself describes in comparable technical detail. The technique passed onward through students and successors of the order, most consequentially Aleister Crowley, who carried assumption of the godform into Thelemic ritual practice, and from there into much of twentieth-century ceremonial magic and modern Pagan ritual, so that a technique practised today by ceremonial magicians and some Pagan groups worldwide descends far more directly from a nineteenth-century London occult society's reconstruction than from any unbroken chain reaching back to the Egyptian temples that first suggested it.