Al Tinnin Vault

The official governing body of Adepti that Thuban Temple is attached to is known as “al Tinnin Vault”. With humility and perseverance, our Adepti have collectively amassed over a hundred years experience in the R.R. et A.C. tradition. Based on the personal decades of individual work our Inner Order members have spent in study and practice, we have forged ahead in developing our own unique curriculum.

For those parties who may be further interested to know more about what it is we do, our Inner Order works the full Adeptus Minor sub-grades as well as the grades of Adeptus Major and Adeptus Exemptus. Thus our members who have been further invited into its pale, partake in the classical rituals of a fully functioning R.R. et A.C. Second Order.

Our Vault was built over a period of two years during 2009 and Spring 2011 in a communal group effort between its own Adepti, who funded the endeavour and devoted many hours to its construction, and the Adepti of various other RR et AC groups who assisted in its theory and construction.

While it is unseemly that any more be said about this structure in this place, let it be known that al Tinnin Vault welcomes correspondence and Society between itself and all Golden Dawn Inner or Second Orders.

To contact al Tinnin Vault's Cancellarius: altinnin.cancellarius@gmail.com

THE CONSTELLATION OF DRACO

Image Credit: Istituto di Fisica Generale Applicata, Università degli Studi di Milano

The winding constellation of Draco, whence al Tinnin Vault has received its namesake from, is symbolic of the oblique course of the stars. "The Egyptian hieroglyph is that of a star-studded serpent, each shimmering scale representing a star."¹ It was once the polar constellation, and its alpha star or Thuban was the pole star 4,800 years ago. As the millennia clicked past, Draco pulled out of alignment with the northern pole and became the serpent that chases its own tail. This may lend itself to an identification with Norse mythology, which tells of a serpent named Oroborus that bites its own tail at the edge of the world.

While Draco has now slumped around Polaris, the current pole star, there is a procession of the ecliptic pole, as illustrated in the diagram above. While the lion-serpent attributed to Leo and Teth has come to be commonly recognized as the Gnostic solar-path of the sun through the zodiac, Draco itself marks this same progression around the pole. Therefore, Draco is arguably also the serpent from The Universe card, where it has an expanded meaning of the entire 72 quinances of the Zodiac.

Another interpretation was that in the war of the giants, this was the dragon that was brought into battle against Minerva, the goddess of battle and learning who seized the serpent and threw it into the sky where it became fixed as a constellation. Draco has also been taken to be the dragon killed by Cadmus with the assistance of Minerva, when he was on his quest to find his sister Europa, whom Jupiter had carried away.

In the tale of Hercules, he slays the dragon who guarded the golden apples in the garden of Hesperides, near Mount Atlas in Africa. When Juno presented the apples to Jupiter, she raised the Dragon to the heavens as the constellation to reward it for its fidelity. While the Dragon of the Herculean myth was a guard of the golden apples, this tale may well be the origin of the serpent that offered the fruit to Eve in the Garden of Eden. Finally, when the latter story is viewed from a Gnostic perspective, it is the serpent that brings humanity wisdom through its offering of the forbidden fruit.

These quaint tales involving Draco and Minerva show an important antithetical relationship between the nature of any intellectual learning, and especially that of a spiritual nature. They contrast the mystery schools which Minerva is a patroness of, and the inner Gnostic wisdom of the true most high that the serpent is but a messiah thereof. It is this that led A.E. Waite to comment on the Heirophant card that "He is the ruling power of external religion, as the High Priestess is the prevailing genius of the esoteric, withdrawn power" in his prolifically available, but scarcely understood work, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot. For that which may be taught is not the eternal truth, but a mere attempt to express ones own experience thereof.

¹From The Geography of the Heavens, and Class Book of Astronomy, by Elijah Hinsdale Burritt and Thomas Dick