Origins of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn
The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was founded in London in February 1888 and, in a few years of active life before its schisms, became the single most influential Western esoteric order of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Its members included the poet W. B. Yeats, the magician Aleister Crowley, the actress Florence Farr, the scholar and tarot designer Arthur Edward Waite, the publisher John Watkins, and the psychical researcher and Fellow of the Royal Society Sir William Fletcher Barrett. Its graded curriculum of ritual, symbol, and meditation drew on the Hermetic tradition, on the Mystical Tree of Life, on astrological magic, and on Masonic ritual, and it gave its initiates an organized passage through the Western esoteric inheritance. The history of the occult in the modern period cannot be told without the Golden Dawn, and the esoteric revival of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries cannot be understood without the Cipher Manuscript from which the order emerged. The documentary history of the order was first opened up by Ellic Howe in The Magicians of the Golden Dawn (1972); the most useful biographical reference is R. A. Gilbert’s The Golden Dawn Companion (1986).
The Cipher Manuscript
The order’s founding document is the so-called Cipher Manuscript, a folio of handwritten pages in cipher. The text outlines a graded system of initiation, an order of officers, and a series of rituals keyed to the elements, the planets, and the signs of the zodiac. Each grade is associated with a particular symbol from the Western esoteric tradition, a particular color, a particular divine name, and a particular ritual teaching. The Cipher also alludes to a supposed Rosicrucian connection, claiming that the text was transmitted by certain Rosicrucian adepts to a Fräulein Anna Sprengel in Stuttgart, who in turn authorized its realization in England.
The Cipher Manuscript first surfaced in 1886, when William Wynn Westcott, then a London coroner and a member of the Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia, received it from the Reverend A. F. A. Woodford. Westcott, with his friend Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, an impoverished painter and self-taught Kabbalist, set about decoding the manuscript. By early 1888 they had succeeded. The decoded text, together with the alleged authority of Anna Sprengel, formed the basis of the Golden Dawn.
The authenticity of the Cipher Manuscript has been disputed since its discovery. Westcott’s claim to have corresponded with Anna Sprengel has been challenged, and the correspondence has never been produced. The current scholarly consensus, which has hardened since the 1970s documentary work of Ellic Howe, is that the Cipher is a nineteenth-century composite drawing on multiple sources: the ritual material of the Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia, the magical system of Éliphas Lévi (especially the Dogme et Rituel of 1854–56), the Christian Kabbalah of Knorr von Rosenroth’s Kabbala Denudata (1677–84), and the Memphis-Misraim material that Mathers himself had been working with. Israel Regardie, who published the bulk of the order’s rituals in The Golden Dawn (1937–40, revised 1969), argued for a more generous view of the document’s antiquity; R. A. Gilbert and John Patrick Deveney have argued, on the basis of internal evidence, that Mathers himself was the principal author. The question is in some sense academic: whatever its origin, the document became the spine of the Golden Dawn’s curriculum.
The Founders: Westcott, Mathers, and Woodman
The order was formally founded on 20 February 1888, and its three chiefs were William Wynn Westcott (1848–1925), Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers (1854–1918), and William Robert Woodman (1828–1891). Westcott was a London coroner, Mason, and student of Kabbalah; he brought the Cipher Manuscript and his Rosicrucian connections. Mathers was the order’s ritual genius, an impoverished painter who had been initiated into a Memphis-Misraim group in the early 1880s, and whose flair for ritual gave the Golden Dawn its distinctive style. Woodman, the eldest, was a dentist and senior Rosicrucian who gave the early order some of its institutional legitimacy; he died in 1891, only three years into the order’s life. The dynamic among the three was not equal: Westcott and Woodman were the legitimate public faces, Mathers was the producer.
Structure and Grades
The Golden Dawn’s curriculum was organized into a First Order and a Second Order. The First Order had five grades: the outer Neophyte (0°=0°), followed by the inner grades of Zelator (1°=10°), Theoricus (2°=9°), Practicus (3°=8°), and Philosophus (4°=7°). Each inner grade was associated with one of the four classical elements, a divine name, a sphere on the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, and a set of ritual knowledge, lecture, and study assignment. The Second Order, the Rosae Rubeae et Aureae Crucis, included Adeptus Minor (5°=6°), Adeptus Major (6°=5°), Adeptus Exemptus (7°=4°), Magister Templi (8°=3°), and Magus (9°=2°). The structure was modeled consciously on speculative Freemasonry. The main London temple was at Mark Masons’ Hall, 8–9 King Street, off Blythe Road; branches opened in Edinburgh (the Amen-Ra Temple), Bradford (the Ahathoor Temple), Weston-super-Mare (the Osiris Temple), and elsewhere.
Key Members
The Golden Dawn’s membership is one of the most remarkable in the history of Western esotericism. W. B. Yeats (1865–1939), the Irish poet and Nobel laureate, was initiated on 7 March 1890 and withdrew from the order in 1901; his involvement gave him a vocabulary of symbol, vision, and occult correspondences that shaped his later poetry and his prose work A Vision. Aleister Crowley (1875–1947) was received into the Minerval grade on 18 November 1898 and initiated as a Neophyte of the First Order on 6 January 1899; he rose to the Adeptus Minor (5°=6°) of the Second Order in 1900 before breaking with Mathers that same year, the break that led to the religion of Thelema, discussed in Aleister Crowley: Life, Works, and Legacy. Florence Farr (1860–1917) developed the practice of “vibratory” pronunciation of divine names and was Yeats’s collaborator on the Abbey Theatre circle in Dublin. Arthur Edward Waite (1857–1942), the scholar and designer, later founded the Fellowship of the Rosy Cross; he is best known for the Rider-Waite tarot deck of 1909, the subject of Tarot as a Tool of Divination. Other members included the poet George William Russell (AE), the writer Algernon Blackwood, the writer Arthur Machen, the publisher John Watkins, and the psychical researcher and FRS Sir William Fletcher Barrett.
The Schisms
The Golden Dawn’s unity broke in 1900 over the question of Samuel Mathers’s authority. In April 1900, Mathers, now living in Paris, attempted to reorganize the order and to discipline a London member; the London chiefs repudiated him. Crowley attempted to enforce Mathers’s orders by raiding the London temple at Mark Masons’ Hall, an episode known as the “Battle of Blythe Road,” and was expelled. The London chiefs reorganized the order as the Golden Dawn Independent and Exoteric; Mathers continued in Paris as the Alpha et Omega. A. E. Waite, who had joined the Independent group, broke with it in 1902 over the question of Christian symbolism and founded the Fellowship of the Rosy Cross in 1907. By 1903 the order had fragmented into at least five successor groups in Britain, each claiming the original lineage, and the original order never reunited. Each successor group carried some portion of the ritual system, and the constellation of Golden Dawn offshoots that emerged in Britain, America, France, Germany, and Australia kept the system alive through the twentieth century. The order’s rituals, the tarot attributions that Waite and the Golden Dawn codified, the tree-of-life correspondences, and the Kabbalistic framework all continue to shape contemporary Western esotericism.