Episode #204- Who Were the Magicians of the Golden Dawn?

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Friends, I need to tell you about a magical battle.

A showdown between two powerful experts in the occult arts.

The combatants both identified as magicians, but they were not to be confused with purveyors of stage illusions or masters of sleight of hand.

These magicians practiced real magic.

This was a magic drawn from ancient systems of mystical knowledge.

They were not entertainers peddling amusing tricks.

Each man was a scholar with deep knowledge of the arcane, who had honed his magical will through hours of meditation and solemn ceremonies.

These men truly believed that they could bend the laws of nature, summon powerful spirits, and imbue objects with magical properties.

Now, you might assume that this earnest magical battle must have taken place in the far distant past.

Surely these magicians were ancient or medieval fellows, living in a time and a place when a belief in magic was far more common.

But you would be wrong about that.

This particular battle took place right at the dawn of the 20th century, in the year 1900.

The magical combatants were none other than the celebrated Irish poet William Butler Yeats and the infamous occultist Alistair Crowley, the man eventually dubbed the wickedest man in the world by English newspapers.

Both men were members of a secret society known as the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.

The group had originally been founded in London in 1888 and was dedicated to the study of occult knowledge and the development of so-called practical magic.

W.B.

Yeats had been an early initiate into this magical society.

He had risen through the ranks and by 1900 was one of the elite few who claimed membership to the exclusive Second Order of Adepts, a designation only conferred on the most skilled and learned magicians.

The younger Alistair Crowley was a relative newcomer to the society, but in just a few years he had managed to move through the various magical ranks of the society's first order with remarkable speed.

Even though Crowley was a more junior member of the Golden Dawn, he believed himself to be a powerful magician whose skills had surpassed his more highly ranked brothers and sisters.

By the year 1900, on the eve of our battle, a schism had developed in the Golden Dawn, and Crowley and Yates found themselves on different sides of the divide.

Crowley was part of a group aligned with one of the society's original founders, an occult magician who called himself MacGregor Mathers.

A series of controversies and bombshell allegations had rocked the very foundation of this magical order.

In the tumult, Mathers and a small group of loyalists had been banned from the Golden Dawn's London Temple.

But on this particular night in 1900, Alistair Crowley was intent on gaining access to this holy sanctum.

What was Aleister Crowley's goal that night?

Well, accounts vary.

Some of the more dramatic tellings claim that Crowley believed that he could reclaim the temple from a group of magicians he believed were traitors.

Other versions claim that Crowley was hunting for some very specific documents pertaining to the founding of the magical society.

It remains unclear.

Now, when we use the word temple to describe this meeting place, we're being pretty generous.

Far from being a grand monument to the occult, this particular temple was actually just a series of modest second-floor apartments located at 36 Blythe Road in London.

Today, if you visit 36 Blythe Road, you'll notice that the ground floor is occupied by an unpretentious English breakfast place called George's Cafe.

So, yeah, the most high-profile magical duel of the 20th century was

actually fought on the staircase above George's Cafe.

Crowley arrived at 36 Blythe Road that night, decked out in the equivalent of magical armor.

He was dressed in a costume that was meant to make him look like a chieftain from the highlands of Scotland.

Significantly, he was decked out in a MacGregor tartan that had been given magical protective properties by his patron, MacGregor Mathers.

He also carried a ceremonial Scottish dagger or dirk that had been similarly imbued with magical power.

One version of the story even claims that Crowley was wearing a mask meant to look like the ancient Egyptian god Osiris, which, if true, makes for a wonderfully weird get-up.

A Scottish tartan topped up with an Egyptian mask.

Nice.

Other versions I've read make mention of a black mask, and others don't make mention of any mask at all.

But I like to imagine Crowley wearing the mask of Osiris because, you know, my god, that's good.

We're told that sometime after sundown, Crowley, in his magical armor, barged through the front door of the temple, which led to a staircase to the second-floor apartments.

Hearing the commotion, W.B.

Yeats and the other magicians who had been gathered at the temple rushed to the top of the stairs.

There they saw Crowley making the sign of the inverted pentagram with his hands and intoning the syllables associated with powerful and destructive spells.

Yeats and his crew quickly countered.

They cast their own spells of protection and lobbed powerful incantations back at Crowley as he steadily made his way up the stairs.

We're told that Crowley, Yates, and all the other magicians of the golden dawn present used every magical invocation they could in this battle.

Elemental spirits of fire and wind were called upon.

Angelic protectors were summoned from the ether.

Demonic familiars were conjured from the void.

Curses and counter-curses were hurled back and forth.

And yet neither Yates nor Crowley seemed to be affected by this magic.

No matter the curse, Yates could not be moved, nor could Crowley be stopped from ascending the stairs.

It's almost as if the magic wasn't working.

As Crowley neared the top of the stairs, the Irish poet unleashed one final devastating attack.

Yeats' biographer Richard Ellman described it like this, quote,

when Crowley came within range, the forces of good struck out with their feet and kicked him down the stairs.

End quote.

Yeah.

Realizing that his arcane curses weren't having much effect, Yates resorted to the tried and true tactic of kicking his opponent upside the head.

Turns out, Crowley's magical armor was of little use when confronted with a well-timed kick to the noggin.

So ended the magical duel known as the Battle of Blythe Road.

Ever since, there have been all sorts of conflicting accounts of this quote-unquote battle.

The version I just gave you comes largely from Yates' biographer, Richard Ellman.

For his part, Crowley never confirmed that this confrontation ever happened.

In his autobiography, or auto hagiography, as he dubbed it, oh man, what a guy, Crowley admits that he traveled to London as an emissary for his teacher McGregor Mathers, but he does not mention this particular embarrassing incident with Yates on the staircase.

But if there's ever been an unreliable narrator, it's Aleister Crowley.

We talk a lot about lying sex witches on this podcast.

Well, Aleister Crowley might be the first real lying sex witch we've ever covered.

Calling this absurd little tussle a battle is kind of ridiculous.

And yet, it's fitting for the members of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.

Key to their whole endeavor was a belief that every action had a deep significance.

Nothing was frivolous.

After all, an outsider might look at a magical rite performed by members of the Hermetic Order and might scoff at the elaborate costumes, the moody set dressing, the magical talismans, and the sonorous incantations.

An outsider might think that the whole thing was as ridiculous and absurd as the Battle of Blythe Road.

But the initiated knew that the opposite was true.

What might seem like vain theatrics were actually reality-bending observances which could make a human being more like a god.

The members of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn believed themselves to be the custodians of a secret knowledge, and by extension, a secret history.

But was this secret history just another fake history?

What was this strange secret society?

Why did it thrive in the 1890s only to flame out dramatically in the early 20th century?

How did it get to the point where former magical brothers found themselves fighting on the stairs above George's Cafe.

Let's put it all together today on our fake history.

Episode number 204, Who Were the Magicians of the Golden Dawn?

Hello, and welcome to Our Fake History.

My name is Sebastian Major, and this is the podcast where we explore historical myths and try to determine what's fact, what's fiction, and what is is such a good story that it simply must be told.

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Okay, this week we are headed to London in the late 19th century to explore the often misunderstood world of the occult.

The word occult carries all sorts of negative and ghoulish connotations.

It's often associated with dark and malevolent forces.

The occult is popularly lumped in with things like witchcraft, devil worship, black magic, and contact with the restless dead.

If you're old enough, then you might remember that the music video for Michael Jackson's Thriller started out with a disclaimer from the artist informing us that the horror movie-inspired clip, quote, in no way endorses a belief in the occult, end quote.

So you might be forgiven for assuming that the occult was all about werewolves, dancing zombies, and the funk of 40,000 years.

But the word occult more precisely refers to something that is hidden or whose origin is obscure.

For instance, in medicine, the word occult is still used in that sense, as in an occult tumor, a cancer where the original or primary tumor cannot be found.

As such, occultists are interested in hidden aspects of reality.

The expert Alexandra Owen has explained that in the 19th century, quote, occultism was generally understood to refer to the study of or search for a hidden or veiled reality and the arcane secrets of existence.

This search for arcane secrets was also usually paired with an interest in mystical spiritual experiences.

What makes something a mystical experience?

Well, once again, Alexandra Owen explains that it refers to, quote, an immediate experience of oneness with a divinity, an experience that could be perceived as a divine gift, end quote.

So traditionally, occultists were more interested in mind-expanding philosophy and ecstatic religious experiences than they were spooks and ghouls.

Now, it's been argued that a type of occult seeking has been around for millennia.

The so-called mystery religions of the ancient Mediterranean involved initiates taking part in secret rituals that they were sworn to never disclose.

As the name suggests, mystery religions gave their initiates access to sacred mysteries, that is, religious teachings that are only accessible to those who have been through the ordeal of initiation.

The promise of the mystery religions was a deeper, more intense mystical relationship with the deity they worshipped.

In the 19th century, interest in this type of spiritual experience came roaring back, especially in the UK.

In many ways, this was a revival of a revival.

A few centuries earlier during the Renaissance, or the early modern era, if you prefer, European scholars were translating previously rare or inaccessible ancient texts with a new zeal.

The dialogues written by the famous Greek philosopher Plato were revived as essential reading.

And with that came a renewed interest in a whole body of Plato-inspired philosophy known as Neoplatonism.

Along with this came an interest in other obscure or lost compendiums of ancient wisdom.

Among these were a collection of texts known as the Hermetica.

This was a collection of mystical, philosophical, and magical treatises attributed to a figure known as Hermes Trismegistus, the thrice great Hermes.

In the 15th and 16th centuries, European scholars considered the writings of Hermes Trismegistus to be among the most important pieces of wisdom literature ever written.

In 1462, the Florentine scribe Marsilio Ficino was hard at work translating the recently acquired works of Plato so his patron, the famous Cosimo de' Medici, could read them before he died.

But then, in that year, he came across a previously unknown set of Hermes' writings.

So he dropped everything, put his translations of Plato on hold, and got to work translating what became known as the Corpus Hermeticum.

It was believed that this Hermes Trismegistus was a very ancient figure, considerably older than Plato, and accordingly, considerably more sage and possessed of a deeper wisdom.

When it comes to wisdom literature, the rule of thumb has always been the older, the better.

So, in the 15th century, Hermes was arguably more important than Plato.

The widely held belief was that Hermes Trismegistus had been a a contemporary of Moses, or he may have even lived before the biblical flood.

He was certainly associated with the Greek god Hermes, hence the name, but he was also connected to the Egyptian god Thoth, the ibis-headed deity associated with art, science, writing, and magic.

Was this Hermes Trismegistus the avatar of these gods, or a great ancient philosopher who inspired the mythology of both Hermes and Thoth?

It was unclear to the 15th century translators, but most experts agreed that Hermes Trismegistus was clearly one of humanity's greatest teachers.

The world of philosophy that grew out of these revived texts became known as the Hermetic tradition, Hermetic coming from Hermes.

Of the many magical and mystical ideas that were associated with the Hermetic tradition, the most enduring was a concept known as the Prisca Theologia, or the ancient theology.

This was a belief that there was one original divine truth imparted near the beginning of time to Hermes and a handful of other great sages.

This truth had informed all of the world's religions and philosophies, but in each case it had been communicated in a diluted and imperfect way.

The pure, undiluted truth, the Prisca Theologia, had become a cult, hidden from all but the most dedicated seekers.

However, the Hermetic tradition took a real hit in the 1700s.

As the Hermetic texts became the focus of more rigorous scholarship, it became clear that they were not nearly as ancient as the Hermetic devotees had been claiming.

The best evidence seemed to suggest that the writings of Hermes Trismegistus had been penned sometime around the first century AD by a handful of anonymous Greek-speaking authors, likely from the Egyptian city of Alexandria.

The combination of Platonic, Jewish, and Egyptian traditions evident in the texts really spoke to that particular time and place.

The combined worship of Hermes and Thoth as a singular deity was also common in Hellenistic Egypt dating to the time of the Ptolemaic kings.

So, Hermes Trismegistus was likely a pen name for a group of writers who were writing centuries after Plato.

This alleged super ancient text was actually just kinda ancient.

All the stories about Hermes Trismegistus from before the flood, well, many now judged that to be fake history.

This would prove to be a perennial problem in occult circles.

Texts assumed to be ancient fonts of wisdom would be exposed as considerably more recent creations, or worse, modern forgeries.

Similarly, great occult teachers who claimed to have supernatural powers and contact with ancient sages were often exposed as charlatans.

Occult, hidden histories were often just fake histories.

But the Hermetic tradition did not die so much as it went underground.

In the 17th century, the idea of the Prisca Theologia was taken up by the Freemason adjacent society known as the Rosicrucians.

Rossicrucian literature that emerged in the 1600s advocated a type of Christian mysticism that was deeply inspired by the Hermetica.

Now, the Rosicrucians had their own robust mythology that I'm sure I will explore in greater detail one day.

But for now, what you need to know is that Rossicrucian ideas were incorporated into some branches of the Freemason movement.

This meant that Masons were getting exposed to the Hermetic tradition and other occult ideas.

This continued into the Victorian age, when mystically inclined Freemasons found fertile ground to develop new and more adventurous esoteric societies.

In 1888, three Freemasons living in London would claim that they had come into possession of some mysterious texts.

The discovery and decoding of these documents would lead to the foundation of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, arguably one of the most influential magical societies in history.

So let's head to London in the 1880s to explore exactly how and why a society of sincere magicians was able to take root.

In 1888, two men acquainted through their Freemason temple, W.T.

Wescott and Samuel Little Mathers, got together to examine some remarkable manuscripts that had just come into Wescott's possession.

On top of being active Freemasons, these two men were also part of England's best known Rosicrucian society, the Societas Rossicruciana in Anglia.

As such, these two fellows had been dabbling in mysticism and the Christian-flavored occult study that was characteristic of their chosen secret society.

Aside from these fairly exotic interests, Wescott was an otherwise typical Victorian gentleman who worked as a coroner in London.

Mathers was something else.

Having come from a hard-scrabble background in Burnemouth, Mathers moved to London in the 1880s and proceeded to completely reinvent himself.

He rechristened himself MacGregor Mathers and claimed that he was, in fact, a dispossessed Scottish nobleman whose family had been part of the Jacobite rebellion a century earlier.

He even claimed that one of his august ancestors had been made a count by King Louis XV of France, a title that he, MacGregor Mathers, now held.

Was any of this true?

No,

probably not.

But MacGregor seemed to understand the value of ancient provenance and a storied heritage.

But by 1888, he had gained a reputation in London as an occult researcher of some accomplishment.

A year earlier, he published a well-received translation of the 17th century mystical text known as the Kabbalah Denudata.

Kabbalah, which is a centuries-old Jewish mystical system and philosophy, formed the backbone of much of 19th century occult study.

Specifically, occultists like MacGregor Mathers gravitated towards a concept in Kabbalah known as the Tree of Life.

The Tree of Life is a diagram illustrating the various realms of existence, from the most basic human level of perception all the way up to the experience of God.

McGregor Mathers and others who would become interested in ceremonial magic believed that Kabbalah offered a path for gaining supernatural powers.

By ascending the tree of life, you could become like God yourself.

Or, so said the occultists.

So, when W.T.

Wescott came into possession of some unusual manuscripts, he reached out to Mathers, a man he knew to be a bit of an expert when it came to obscure mystical texts.

Now, the question of exactly how Westcott came into possession of these papers is a matter of some controversy.

According to to the occult author Israel Rigardi, there are at least three stories about how Westcott got his hands on these documents.

One story claims that he simply came across them while perusing a bookstall on Farrington Street in London.

Another story claims that Westcott inherited the personal library of a fellow Mason, in which he found these documents.

But the story that's most often cited is that these documents were passed to Westcott from an elderly Mason named Reverend A.F.A.

Woodford.

Woodford claimed to have rescued the documents from a Masonic library.

After looking them over, he believed that they might be German Rossicrucian texts filled with ancient wisdom and magical lore.

The only problem was that they were written in a strange cipher.

Woodford could not crack this code, so he passed the papers on to Wescott.

Luckily, Wescott was an expert when it came to secret codes, especially secret codes that made reference to occult literature.

He discovered that the code was from a 16th century French alchemy text that, of course, he had read.

With the help of MacGregor Mathers, the two soon discovered that the text contained instructions for a number of magical rituals.

The texts also referenced the quote-unquote brothers and sisters of a German secret society known as the Golden Dawn.

Finally, and most exciting of all, these papers provided an address for one Fraulein Sprengel, an adept in this German order.

So, Wescott wrote this Fraulein Fraulein Sprengel a letter asking for guidance and with the sincere hope that he and Mathers might get permission to found their own Temple of the Golden Dawn in London.

Amazingly, Ms.

Sprengel wrote back.

Fraulein Sprengel wasn't just any old woman living in Germany.

She was a powerful magician possessing remarkable supernatural powers.

Further, she was in contact with a group of individuals even more powerful than herself.

These were the true founders of the Golden Dawn.

They were magical adepts, possibly hundreds of years old, who through deep study had attained nearly godlike abilities.

However, these sages kept their identities secret and chose instead to quietly and carefully share their wisdom with the select few who demonstrated that they were worthy.

Wescott and Mathers would only ever refer to these powerful, mysterious sages as the secret chiefs of the Golden Dawn.

But Frulein Sprengel clearly liked the tone of Wescott's letter because she gave her blessing for him and Mathers to found a London chapter of the society and to use the rituals prescribed in the encoded documents.

So it was that in 1888, the Isis Urania Temple of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was founded in London.

Now, if that story seems convoluted, Well, that's kind of the point.

Occultism is defined by a a search for clues.

These clues take you on a winding, sometimes confusing path, but if you stick with it, you will eventually be rewarded with profound discoveries.

Two curious gentlemen are passed an obscure manuscript that needs to be decoded, that gives them an address, that introduces them to a German woman who finally gives them the big revelation that secret wizards have a cool magical club that they get to be part of.

Now, longtime listeners might find some elements of this story a little familiar.

Way back in season two, we did a three-part series called Who Was the Mother of the Occult, where we explored Madame Helena Blavatsky and her Theosophical Society.

As you might remember, Madame Blavatsky claimed that all her mystical knowledge came from a group of superpowerful sages known as the Mahatmas, or the Ascended Masters, that she had met deep in the Himalayas while she was hiking in Tibet.

Chief among these Ascended Masters was a fellow named Kut Humi, who Blavatsky claimed to be in telepathic communication with.

Now, if you want to get deep into what Blavatsky did with all this information and the history of the Theosophists, then please check out that series from season two.

I bring this up because Helena Blavatsky was a contemporary of Mathers and Wescott.

They all knew each other and ran in the same circles.

One source even claims that Blavatsky approached McGregor Mathers to take on a leading role in the Theosophical Society during its early days.

Now, the truth of that is debated, but it seems very clear that Mathers and Wescott had the Theosophical Society in mind when they founded their Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.

It's notable that they had similar origin stories.

The authenticity of these organizations were underpinned by contact with secret chiefs, superpowerful, mystical figures operating at an arm's length distance from the actual group.

But what made the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn different from the Theosophical Society was its focus on what was called practical magic.

You see, while Madame Blavatsky claimed to have all sorts of supernatural abilities, she wasn't really in the business of teaching others how to become magical.

Theosophy was more philosophical in nature.

As it developed, it became increasingly influenced by Buddhism, to the point where Blavatsky was saying in public that she was basically a Buddhist.

Some of those who were attracted to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn were folks like the Irish poet W.B.

Yeats, who had been theosophists, but had become frustrated with the fact that Blavatsky seemed to be the only one who was allowed to do magic.

The promise of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was that in this society, the initiated would learn how to do real magic.

To that end, Mathers and Wescott developed a unique synthesis of many different occult traditions that were floating around Victorian society.

Now, of course, they claimed that this system was not just their invention.

It was communicated to them by Fraulein Sprengel, who in turn got the goods from the secret chiefs.

At the heart of the Golden Dawn teachings were the writings of Hermes Trismegistus, hence the name Hermetic in the organization's title.

The magic being taught was first and foremost the quote-unquote magic of Hermes.

This was then combined with the Jewish Kabbalah tradition.

The Kabbalistic tree of life was adapted by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn to give one's magical progress a sense of structure.

As one became a more powerful magician, you were thought to be ascending through the tree of life.

This was then supplemented with a healthy dose of ancient Egyptian-inspired ritual.

In the 1880s, Egyptology was having a bit of a moment in Britain.

British archaeologists were creating more and more ancient Egyptian artifacts back to London every day, and the accompanying scholarship was casting new light on the ancient Egyptian kingdoms.

Mathers was especially interested in this and was known to spend hours in the reading room of the British Museum poring over newly published work on ancient Egyptian religion.

As such, the initiation ceremonies developed by the Golden Dawn borrowed heavily from Egyptian rites described by late 19th century archaeologists.

These rites were then flavored by the types of initiation ceremonies common in Masonic temples and the mystically inclined Rosicrucian temples.

Finally, the Golden Dawn also incorporated what they understood to be pagan Celtic magic.

Now, this was an especially ahistorical and romanticized version of pagan Celtic magic.

MacGregor Mathers, in particular, became convinced that various Scottish tartans had latent magical powers associated with them.

Now, if this seems like a fairly incongruous mishmash of traditions, you're not wrong.

But it was connected to the idea of the Prisca theologia,

the idea that all of the world's religions and wisdom traditions came from the same root, a divine truth at the heart of everything.

As such, common themes between all these traditions were emphasized and were pointed out as evidence of the Prisca theologia.

The Golden Dawn taught that through focused study, an initiate could gain a deep insight into the human condition and the secret workings of the natural world.

This deep understanding would give a focused magician the ability to change the natural world.

These changes would be small at first, but would become more profound as the magician's power grew.

The ultimate goal of a magician in this order was to become immortal, to discover the so-called philosopher's stone.

But it was generally recognized that that would be out of reach for most people on the path.

As far as Westcott and Mathers knew, only the secret chiefs had ever managed to achieve this goal.

However, it was believed that through the correct application of ritual magic, an individual could become clairvoyant and clairaudient, that is to see and hear things happening far away or even at different times in the past or future.

A talented magician could use rituals to become invisible or appear luminous.

The Golden Dawn initiates also believed that there was a hidden world of spirits that could be summoned and sometimes put to work.

Different rituals could conjure so-called elementals, that is, spirits associated with earth, wind, fire, and water.

Other rituals could connect a magician with a powerful deity.

Usually, these were Egyptian gods.

As the years went on, MacGregor Mathers became particularly interested in the creation of magical talismans.

This involved invoking a powerful spirit or Egyptian deity and then imbuing a chosen object, be it an amulet, a wand, a vase, or a mask, with the power of that conjured spirit.

By the turn of the century, some of these Golden Dawn magicians had accrued quite a a collection of powerful talismans.

But the thing about ritual magic is that it was difficult to do and often didn't work.

It was understood by initiates that it took years of study and the long cultivation of both a magical will and a magical imagination to actually do any of this stuff.

Now, one of the defining characteristics of the Hermetic order of the Golden Dawn was its rigid hierarchical structure.

Did I say it right that time?

I think I said it right that time.

There were three orders of the organization, first being the lowest, and third being the highest.

Each of these orders was then subdivided into various ranks.

There were five ranks in the first order, three in the second, and three in the third.

Each of of these ranks corresponded to one of the 11 levels on the Kabbalistic tree of life.

Now, in practice, this kind of worked like a suburban karate dojo.

Everyone started as a neophyte, the first level of the first order, and then worked their way up.

And just like a karate dojo, every time you ascended, you got to wear a new color.

In the karate dojo, your yellow belt might become a green belt.

In the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, your long black ceremonial robe might be exchanged for a blue ceremonial robe.

When you were first initiated, you got to choose a magical name.

This was usually a Latin phrase that had some sort of connection to occult learning.

Once you hit a certain milestone, you were allowed allowed to choose a new magical name.

To give you a sense of what these names were like, the poet W.B.

Yeats was initiated as Daemon est Deus Inversus,

or the Devil is God inverted.

In order to level up, an initiate needed to pass an exam that was invigilated by a more superior member of the order.

So in the early levels of the First Order, there wasn't a lot of practical magic going down.

It was all about working your way through a prescribed reading list, memorizing the Hebrew terms associated with the tree of life, and demonstrating a mastery of basic occult terminology.

There was homework, and only people who did their homework got to move on to the next level.

In practice, this meant that by the time you were engaged in rituals that were were supposed to produce a real magical effect, you were already pretty invested.

You'd read a bunch of books, you'd spent hours studying for exams, and you'd been through multiple initiation and ascension rituals.

You were primed for a magical experience.

But an interesting thing about this internal structure was that no one was in the third order.

The third order was for the secret chiefs only.

At first, Mathers and Westcott only claimed the rank of Adeptus Minor, which was the first rank in the second order.

So, at first, all of the initiates were just trying to get to that second order.

Because that's where the real magic went down.

And no one was in the third order.

You had to be a secret chief.

So just forget about it.

So

this is all to say that the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was a complicated but deeply theatrical secret society.

There was a lot to learn if you were serious about becoming a magician.

But along the way, your journey towards the top of the tree of life was punctuated by some pretty wild rituals that involved elaborate costumes, magical talismans, metaphoric deaths and rebirths, and the demonstrations of practical magic by some of the order's more senior members.

So, who exactly was drawn to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn?

How did the cipher work of Westcott and Mathers eventually attract a fairly vibrant community of occult seekers?

Then, why after 10 years of magic did it all fall apart?

Well, let's let's take a quick break, and when we come back, we'll get into it.

To understand the Hermetic order of the Golden Dawn, I think you need to understand exactly how the wider world of the occult fit into late Victorian society.

The revival of occult study in the 19th century went hand in hand with a number of philosophical, intellectual, and spiritual currents running through Western culture at the time.

This was an era marked by huge technological changes and revolutionary scientific breakthroughs.

Traditional explanation for the world and humanity's place within it were increasingly being challenged by new discoveries being made by science.

The most jarring example, arguably, was the work of Charles Darwin that confronted people with a new way of thinking about the origins of all animal life and by extension, human beings.

The universe was being demystified by an increasingly empirical and scientific worldview.

While some Victorians cheered these changes, others were less enthused.

This created what many experts have called the quote-unquote Victorian crisis of faith.

The writer Jamie James has pointed out that this unmoored feeling that accompanied the widespread questioning of age-old religious dogmas was beautifully expressed by the British poet Matthew Arnold.

In the 1867 poem Dover Beach, Arnold wrote, quote,

The sea of faith was once too at the full and round earth's shore, lay like folds of a bright girdle furled, but now I only hear its melancholy long, withdrawing roar.

But if the sea of faith was withdrawing, it was not without the accompanying reactions and counter-reactions.

Perhaps that was the roar Arnold was writing about.

One of those reactions has come up many times before on this podcast, and that was spiritualism.

This was the popular practice of attempting to contact the spirits of the dead through mediums, seances, and other rituals.

You might remember from our series on Houdini, how the famous stage magician went on a personal quest to discredit and debunk the spiritualist mediums he believed were scamming bereaved families.

Now, many of the people who would eventually get involved with the Golden Dawn had been deeply curious about spiritualism.

We know that W.B.

Yeats stayed involved in seances and other so-called psychical experiments even after joining the Golden Dawn.

But while members of the Golden Dawn and other similarly aligned occultists accepted the reality of spiritual forces at work in the world, they generally looked down on spiritualist mediums.

One of the ideas that animated spiritualism was that certain individuals were born with a gift or a sensitivity that allowed them to communicate with the spirit world.

Anyone could be a medium if they possessed this gift, or so went the thinking.

People interested in occult magic saw this as amateurish and chaotic.

The occultists believed that the spiritualists could neither control nor understand the forces that they were engaging with.

Magicians, on the other hand, were scholars of the arcane.

They weren't interested in simply experiencing ghostly phenomena.

Anyone could do that.

They were interested in understanding, directing, and controlling this phenomenon.

They wanted to impose their will on nature.

Historian Alexandra Owen has pointed out that in this way, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn represented a synthesis of two currents in Victorian society, usually presented as being opposed to one another.

On the one hand, magic and occult study was filling a spiritual void left by the withdrawal of the sea of faith.

On the other hand, the magicians were approaching magic like scientists.

They even referred to what they were doing as an occult science.

They believed in ghosts and other spiritual entities, but the magicians insisted that all of this phenomena could be rationally categorized, mapped, and then manipulated.

You had to go to school for this stuff.

A magical ritual was all about the precise arrangement of symbols, sounds, and gestures.

It had to be done with the precision of a scientific experiment.

For these magicians, creating magic was like synthesizing a chemical compound.

If you didn't follow the correct procedure or use the correct ingredients, it might not work.

To me, it seems like they had the heads of rational, science-minded Victorians and the hearts of some of the more whimsical spiritualists.

Alexandra Owen has also pointed out that occult magicians also embraced a type of individualism that was common to middle-class bourgeois folks of the age.

She writes that the Golden Dawn, quote,

taught complete mastery of a complex magical arcana, together with total self-mastery and an indomitable will, are the foremost prerequisites for magical adeptship.

Self-mastery, self-assertion, and control of nature are familiar features of a bourgeois individualism usually associated with the 19th century.

⁇

In other words, these would-be wizards were the magical extension of the bourgeois Victorian self-made man,

or, as the case may be, self-made woman.

You see, another unique feature of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was that women were welcome.

The Golden Dawn may have grown out of the men's club of Freemasonry, but this new magical order was emphatically co-ed.

Not only could women become initiates, they could rise to the very top of the order's magical hierarchy.

As the 1880s became the 1890s and membership of the Golden Dawn started to steadily grow, nearly as many women were initiated as men.

By the turn of the century, a number of women, like the London stage stage actress Florence Farr, were among the most senior members of the order.

Like many secret societies, to become an initiate, you needed to be invited by an existing member.

This meant that membership grew slowly but steadily in the 1890s.

New initiates were drawn from all different walks of life, but they were mostly young adults, usually people in their 20s and early 30s, often drawn from progressive political circles.

Many of them were artists, poets, and actors from solidly middle-class backgrounds.

It should be no surprise that this highly theatrical magical society attracted London's theater kids.

The poet William Butler Yates was initiated after a few years of mingling with occult researchers around London.

Yeats then brought in a number of the society's best-known women, like actresses Florence Farr and Maude Gawne.

He also brought in Annie Horneman, the heiress to a tea-importing fortune whose family money ended up bankrolling many of the society's activities,

which, by the way, were fairly modest.

The apartments, which constituted the temple, needed to be rented.

Ritual robes needed to be made by costume makers.

the place needed to be decorated, a library needed to be furnished, but that was basically it until McGregor Mathers started fleecing her for more cash.

But more on that in a minute.

Now, here's the question.

Did these magicians ever actually

do any real magic?

Well, they certainly claimed that they did.

Mathers, Yeats, Aleister Crowley, and Florence Farr would all report instances of clairvoyance.

Crowley would eventually claim that he had contacted a powerful spirit named Iwas, also known as the Egyptian god Horus, who then dictated to him his magical treatise known as the Book of the Law.

It was claimed that MacGregor Mathers could stimulate visions in other people's minds.

On one notable occasion, he demonstrated this power to W.B.

Yates.

According to Yates, during a magical ritual, Mathers handed him a sigil.

This was an arcane symbol that had been cut out of cardboard, because, you know, they cut this stuff out of cardboard.

He then instructed Yates to close his eyes.

According to Yates, quote,

There rose before me mental images that I could not control.

A desert and a black titan raising himself up by his two hands from the middle of a heap of ancient ruins.

End quote.

Mathers then explained that Yeats had glimpsed an elemental spirit, quote, a being of the order of salamanders, end quote.

Salamanders in this context being powerful fire spirits.

Now, was this a type of hypnotic suggestion?

A trick trick of mentalism, or real magic derived from occult science?

You can decide.

Many of these magicians kept what were known as magical diaries, where they recorded their experiences with magic.

Many included vivid descriptions of what's known as astral travel.

This was where, through a magical ritual, one's spiritual essence left the physical body and then traveled through time and space.

A magical diary kept by Annie Horneman detailed a number of these astral travels.

On one particular afternoon, she and a fellow golden dawn magician, the erstwhile stockbroker Frederick Gardner, traveled to the planet Saturn.

They did this by invoking magical names while they placed a circle of indigo on a white background.

After invoking the names, a hexagram of light appeared before the two magicians.

They then passed through this hexagram into a ray of indigo and white light.

This eventually faded and they perceived before them the quote great dark world of Saturn, end quote.

This was just one of many astral voyages that they made to other planets in the solar system.

Three weeks later, they used a similar method to investigate Jupiter.

Now, did they do this for real?

Well, this is the thing about much of the magic that you read about from the Golden Dawn.

On the one hand, these astral travelers left us detailed and nuanced accounts of their journeys.

If you're inclined to believe in something like astral travel, then that can feel like proof.

My personal bias is

I don't really think these folks were doing magic.

The astral travel stories seem to me like a shared imaginative experience, kind of like an improvised theater scene that the actors have convinced themselves is real.

The same can be said about the images that appeared unsolicited in Yates' mind's eye.

It seems like most of the magic was happening in the minds of the magicians.

But perhaps that's my bias getting in the way.

Others think that they really did this stuff.

You can decide.

And if you're curious if these magicians were using drugs, the answer is yes, but not as much as you might think.

Many magicians started experimenting with hashish.

Medically prescribed cocaine was incredibly common, as were opioids like laudanum and medically prescribed heroin.

Believe it or not, heroin was being used as a treatment for asthma at the time.

It seems like many of these magicians were dabbling with drugs, but getting high wasn't really part of the golden dawn rituals.

Also, none of the drugs I just listed typically have hallucinogenic effects so strong as to explain astral travel.

Now, the well-known English libertine Aleister Crowley, who joined the Golden Dawn in the late 1890s, would go on to experiment more deeply with drugs in his magical practice.

But that was still years ahead.

Now, Crowley is sometimes blamed for the breakup of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.

But this gives him a little too much credit.

Crowley would eventually form his own magical society, some would call it a cult, known as Thelema in the decades that would follow.

His brand of ritual magic would become increasingly sexual, and this was the cause of much of his scandalous reputation.

To the London tabloids that like to report on the rumors about Crowley, his love of magically themed orgies and his apparent bisexuality is what had him dubbed the quote-unquote wickedest man in the world.

Now, one day, I'm sure I will do a deep dive into Crowley's whole trip, but for now, suffice it to say that his evil reputation was more than a little exaggerated.

You will sometimes read that Crowley's interest in so-called black magic caused a rift in the Golden Dawn.

His subsequent ejection from the Order culminated in the Battle of Blyth Road.

This isn't quite true.

The dissolution of the Order of the Golden Dawn was a bit more complicated than that.

By the mid-1890s, a number of people like Yeats and Florence Farr had been with the Order long enough that they had been admitted into the elite second order.

This meant that there was now a super secret elite group inside what was already a super secret elite group.

This clique of elites met separately from the first order and performed magical rituals that everyone agreed were way cooler and more intense than what was done in the first order.

This second order was incredibly exclusive.

Just because you had passed all the levels in the first order did not necessarily mean that you would be admitted to the second.

Only the coolest magicians could get in.

This was the magical VIP room.

Then in 1897, one of the founders, W.T.

Westcott, resigned from the order.

Why?

Well, apparently his involvement in this secret society had not remained so secret.

He was apparently warned by a colleague that he might lose his job as a coroner of the crown if it became widely known that he was, quote, foolishly posturing as one possessed of magical powers, end quote.

Wescott's departure coincided with MacGregor Mathers asserting himself more dominantly as the one true authority in the group.

Now, the irony was that he was doing this from a distance.

A few years earlier in 1892, Mathers had lost his day job as the curator of a small private museum.

So he relocated to Paris.

There he and his wife started a new chapter or temple of the Golden Dawn.

Mathers also translated a previously hard-to-find book of 16th century magic, and he started developing a new magical rite based on what he had learned about the ancient Egyptian Isis mystery cult.

He was busy, but these endeavors did not exactly pay the bills.

Luckily, his activities were being financed by the astral traveling tea heiress, Annie Horneman.

But as time went on and Mathers' expenses continued to mount, their relationship became strained.

Horneman eventually threatened to cut Mathers off and the two had a huge falling out.

Now back in London, administration of the Isis Urania Temple fell largely to the actress Florence Farr.

But Farr didn't necessarily enjoy this role.

She was an artist and not particularly interested in organization and administration.

And for a whimsical collection of occult magicians, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn sure did produce a lot of paperwork.

On top of that, she missed the guidance that had come from W.T.

Westcott.

So in the year 1900, Farr wrote a letter to McGregor Mathers asking his permission to resign her post.

In that letter, she mentioned that she wanted to spend time working with the now independently operating W.T.

Westcott.

When Mathers read this, he was infuriated.

Not only was this an administrative headache, but Farr was insinuating that Wescott was a more trusted magical authority than he was.

So, in anger, Mathers shot back a letter that completely rocked the foundations of the order.

In the letter, Mathers accused Wescott of being a fraud.

Further, he claimed that Wescott had, quote, never,

and that's in all caps,

never been at any time either in personal or in written communication with the secret chiefs of the Order, having himself either forged or procured to be forged the professed correspondence between him and them,

end quote.

Now, it seems like Mathers was just trying to discredit his former magical brother, but he'd used the equivalent of the nuclear option.

And that came with mutually assured destruction.

By insisting that Westcott had never, and that's in all caps,

been in contact with the secret chiefs and had forged every document, Mathers was insinuating that all of the Order of the Golden Dawn's founding documents had been fakes.

Those strange cipher manuscripts?

Forgeries.

Wescott's special letters of permission from Fraulein Sprengel?

Forgeries.

If this was true, then how long had McGregor Mathers known about this?

Had he been hoodwinked by Wescott, or had he helped perpetrate the fraud?

In either case, Mathers had claimed that his status in the Order of the Golden Dawn had been bestowed on him by the secret chiefs.

If W.T.

Westcott had not been in communication with the secret chiefs, then

did they even exist?

What about Fraulein Sprengel and the German Temple of the Golden Dawn?

Was that real?

Once again, an occult organization had a fake history problem.

After Florence Farr shared this letter, the London magicians had a lot of questions.

So a committee was formed to get to the bottom of this.

This committee included W.B.

Yeats, Florence Farr, and all the other members of the Inner Second Order.

When they approached Westcott about these accusations, he was cooperative and insisted that he was innocent of any fraud.

But when the committee asked to see the original encoded manuscripts and the letters from Sprengel, Westcott claimed that he could no longer find them.

They were gone.

Whoa, guys, so weird.

Where are they?

Oh, no.

I would give them to you if I could, but I don't know.

Come on, man.

As for Mathers, He refused to leave Paris and report to this committee.

As far as he was concerned, this committee had no authority to order him about.

He was still one of the founding chiefs of the Golden Dawn, so he didn't need to answer their questions.

And so came the split.

The London Group decided that they were no longer going to be taking any direction from McGregor Mathers.

So they declared themselves to be the new chiefs of the order.

Now,

what I find interesting is that the London group was able to soldier on despite the fact that everything about the order's founding had been called into question.

Some of the magicians seem to have simply trusted that Wescott wasn't a liar and weren't overly fussed that he couldn't find the documents.

Others seem to have been of the mind that they shouldn't throw the magical baby out with the bathwater, so to speak.

Even if Sprengel and the secret chiefs were a fraud, they still believed that the larger esoteric tradition that grounded their magic had value.

Rejecting MacGregor Mathers didn't necessarily mean rejecting Kabbalah or the magic of Hermes.

Now, of course, there were some who remained loyal to Mathers, most notably Alistair Crowley.

Crowley had joined the Golden Dawn in 1898, and in just two years, he had passed every exam and had ascended through all five levels of the First Order.

This was an impressive feat, given the amount of homework involved.

Now, Crowley wanted nothing more than to be admitted into the Second Order and to be given the rank of Adeptus Minor.

The London Clique of Second Order Insiders simply would not let him into the club.

Why?

Well, it's unclear.

It's sometimes guessed that they didn't like that Crowley had an interest in black magic, but there's not really any evidence to support that.

The best answer seems to be that it was a simple personality clash.

The members of the Second Order just didn't like him.

For his part, Crowley claimed that W.B.

Yates was always jealous of his poetry.

He claims in in his autobiography or auto-hagiography that, quote, what hurt Yates was the knowledge of his own incomparable inferiority, end quote.

Yeats, one of the 20th century's most celebrated poets, he was jealous of Crowley's poetry.

Okay.

Now,

it might be an exaggeration that Crowley was the wickedest man alive in the early 20th century, but I think it's fair to say that he was a messy hoe who lived for drama.

When Crowley was shut out of the second order in London, he decided to travel to Paris.

There, he got Mathers to do the initiation personally.

It was from Mathers that he got his much sought after magical rank of Adeptus Miner.

He then pledged that he would return to London, raise Mathers' flag, gather together a group of loyalists, and reaffirm MacGregor Mathers' control over the Order of the Golden Dawn.

The result was the Battle of Blythe Road.

And so we have come full circle.

After 12 years of esoteric study, solemn ritual, and magical self-discipline, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn more or less came to an end with a swift kick to Alistair Crowley's head.

After the year 1900, the group of remaining London magicians would change their society's name to the Hermetic Society of the Morganroth.

But this incarnation was short-lived.

The next few years were defined by a number of schisms that led to at least four different magical societies who had all descended from the Hermetic order of the Golden Dawn.

These schisms were mostly due to personality conflicts between the members and only partially due to differing magical philosophies.

In retrospect, I can't help but notice that the Golden Dawn really began to crumble when its history was thrown into question.

The revelation that Westcott and Mather's origin story may have been a helpful bit of fiction and that the founding documents were likely forgeries, if they'd ever even existed, was completely destabilizing.

The occult tradition was built on the idea that secret knowledge had been carefully passed down by learned sages from one generation to the next.

If a link in that chain turned out to be based on lies and deception, well, then maybe the whole occult enterprise was riddled with fake history.

The Golden Dawn taught that magic was only possible if the will was focused and the magician truly believed in the seriousness of their undertaking.

In other words, if you didn't believe, then your magic couldn't work.

In a way, the movement that was born out of the Victorian crisis of faith was undone by its own crisis of faith.

Okay,

that's all for this week.

Join us again in two weeks' time when we will explore another historical myth.

Before we go this week, I need to give a shout-out to the following people: big ups to

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To Nicholas Logan,

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and to Jacob Micheloni.

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My name is Sebastian Major.

And remember, just because it didn't happen doesn't mean it isn't real.

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