What set the NROOGD off was Sarah Erif Thunen’s graduate seminar in ritual, taught by James Broughton at San Francisco State University in 1967. The term project was to co me up with a ritual that the class could participate in. Knowing that I had been gathering data since 1955 (I had read every relevant book I could find; there were then only about a dozen), Sarah asked me if I could create a “Witches’ Sabbath” for her class, which I did. Given a first draft of this ritual, a group of friends (which included Glenn Turner) began meeting to rehearse and rewrite it. Since Glenn and Judy A. also wanted to be priestesses, and since we were fascinated byGraves’ concept of the Threefold White Goddess, we created a three-priestess ritual that has ever since been a hallmark of NROOGD Sabbats. In the course of the rehearsals, we named the group in honor of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and especially of William Butler Yeats, and signed a charter for it onOctober 31, 1967.

A Brief History of the New Reformed Orthodox Order of the Golden Dawn, Part I, [A Brief History of the New Reformed Orthodox Order of the Golden Dawn, Part I | Aidan Kelly (patheos.com)}

After working the ritual for Sarah’s class at Muir Beach Lodge in January 1968, during which we observed no significant changes in our consciousness, our group of friends nevertheless transformed into an informal study group that met at Joe and Glenn’s home almost every Saturday night during the next year. In these conversations we pooled out knowledge of the occult arts and sciences, mythology, classical religions, and many books, those by Margaret Murray, Gerald Gardner, but especially Robert GravesAs we evolved our own system of correspondences,theories of divination and parapsychology, our fascination withGraves gave the NROOGD rituals and stories a distinct flavor of their own.