Origin from 1967
An independent eclectic Wiccan tradition that originated in a university ritual-studies class in the San Francisco Bay Area, unrelated in lineage to the ceremonial Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn beyond its borrowed name. Its self-composed liturgy, written rather than inherited from an initiatory line, spread widely through later American Wicca.
Facts
Belief
Defining Doctrinal PositionNo fixed pantheon or liturgy; each practitioner composes their own 2 Originated from a "Witches' Sabbath" ritual Aidan Kelly composed for a 1967 graduate ritual-studies seminar at San Francisco State University, then developed into a full eightfold-wheel liturgy; the group's own composed rites, rather than a claimed unbroken initiatory line, spread through American eclectic Wicca in the decades after. Origins
Origin Period Place of OriginSan Francisco Bay Area, California, United States 1 FounderA group of friends including Aidan Kelly, e.l.f. Silverlocke, Glenna Turner and Judy Kellogg (Greenwood), who signed a founding charter on 31 October 1967. 1 Learn More
A Ritual Written for a Class That Kept Going
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.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Belongs to Tradition
Wicca, Religions Self-identifies as an eclectic Wiccan tradition; composed independently rather than descending from Gardnerian lineage.
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