The New Reformed Orthodox Order of the Golden Dawn began as a class assignment. In 1967 Sarah Erif Thunen taught a graduate seminar on ritual at San Francisco State University, and she asked a student, Aidan Kelly, to write a Witches' Sabbath for the class to perform. The exercise did not end when the semester did. Kelly and a group of friends, among them e.l.f. Silverlocke, Glenna Turner and Judy Kellogg, kept meeting, kept refining the liturgy into a full eightfold wheel of seasonal rites, and signed a founding charter on Halloween 1967.
The name is a joke with a straight face. It borrows the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn's name while having no lineage connection to it at all, ceremonial magic society and Bay Area Wiccan circle sharing only a label. What NROOGD actually offered the wider Wiccan movement was different and, in its way, more consequential: proof that a coven could write its own liturgy from scratch and have it work, rather than needing an unbroken initiatory chain back to Gerald Gardner's England.
That composed liturgy did not stay contained. Pieces of it, and the working method behind it, spread into the wider eclectic Wicca that grew through the 1970s and after, an influence larger than the tradition's own small membership would suggest. It remains active as one strand within modern eclectic Wicca in the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond.