LWIA 4.3: The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn

There's a story Brian Eno tells about being commissioned to create the startup sound for Windows 95, whereby the agency provide a huge list of adjectives about how the music should sound—futuristic, inspiring, sentimental, etc—before specifying that the whole thing had to be three and a quarter seconds long.

Anyway, that's how covering the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in a thousand words felt.

With chapter nine, titled simply “From Hell,” Moore’s newfound dedication to magic finally spilled into the pages of his great work. Before long this would be visible across his work—his Image comics of the period are littered with little references like having an extradimensional being named Aiwass, the insane Spawn in the future taking the title of Ipissimus, or the self-description of one of the clones of John Colt as “the part that’s left after the soul is gone” and an “abandoned husk.” But “From Hell” was the first place that his interests manifested in his work. Indeed, it happens on the third page, where Inspector Abberline is buttonholed by an adolescent boy named Alexander who asks whether he thinks the killings might be a work of magic. Abberline scoffs, declaring that “it’s all a pile of bollocks and there’s no such thing as magic,” to which young Alexander fixes him with a disdainful look before proclaiming, “you’re wrong. Goodbye.” Although the fact that Alexander was the birth name of Aleister Crowley was, perhaps, a bit obscure for most readers, the Tundra and Kitchen Sink editions helpfully included several pages of annotations in the back of every issue where Moore could snark about how he “later changed his name to Aleister for largely numerological reasons when he discovered that the letters in Alexander only added up to the second cousin of the beast.”

Indeed the references come hot and heavy over the early portions of the book. When Gull is brought before Queen Victoria to explain why, exactly, silencing the would-be blackmailers has to be done with “such excessive ghastliness,” he explains that they serve as a warning to the Illuminati, which he explains “has reached England via a recently founded order called ‘The Golden Dawn.’” Three pages later, Gull is running into William Butler Yeats, who he taunts about his membership in the Golden Dawn, which he describes as “a splinter, split from the bough of Masonry, no longer nourished by its truths nor anchored by the roots of its tradition, soon to wither.”

The story of the Golden Dawn begins with William Wynn Westcott, a Freemason and a member of the Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia, a Rosicrucian order whose membership was drawn entirely from the Masons, as well as of the Theosophical Society. In 1887 Wescott was given a sixty page document by one of his Masonic brethren, Adolphus Frederick Alexander Woodford. Known as the Cipher Manuscripts, these consisted of pages of strange glyphs, which Westcott identified as a cipher from Johannes Trithemius’s 16th century compendium the Polygraphia, and quickly set about decoding. The actual origins of the Cipher Manuscripts remain unclear and hotly debated. They’re generally taken to have been written some time after 1855, as they make use of Éliphas Lévi’s connection between the Tarot and the Kabbalah, and they’re plainly British given that the decrypted plaintext is in English, but beyond that one can only speculate.

Appended to the manuscript—at least according to Westcott—was an additional page with directions on how to contact a supposedly famous Rosicrucian named “Fraulein Sprengel” at the Hotel Marquardt in Stuttgart. Westcott proceeded to contact her, whereby she explained that she had contact with the Secret Chiefs—a group of powerful adepts living on the astral plane. Acting as their representative, Sprengel granted Westcott a charter to establish a British branch of her order, the Golden Dawn; shortly thereafter, Westcott announced that Sprengel was deceased. All of this, it must be stressed, was complete nonsense. The additional page of the Cipher Manuscripts providing Sprengel’s address is plainly written in different handwriting than the rest of it, and reads left to right, whereas the rest of the manuscript reads right to left. No evidence of Sprengel’s existence has ever been found, and it is almost universally agreed that she was an invention of Westcott’s in order to justify his subsequent creation of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.

Aiding him in this task was Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, a fellow Freemason and Rosicrucian, who Westcott tasked with translating the descriptions in the Cipher Manuscripts into full blown rituals. This was no small task. For instance, the first initiation ritual for the grade of neophyte at one point instructs the candidate to be stopped and have an exchange with the Hiereus—one of the officers in the order. In the Cipher manuscripts this exchange is denoted thusly:

HS: Pass not til you know my name

C: Darkness

HS: Fear not—pass on.

Mathers expands this, specifying that the candidate should be threatened with a sword as the Hiereus proclaims “Thou canst not pass by me saith the Guardian of the West unless thou canst tell me my name,” to which the candidate is to respond “Darkness is thy name, the Great One of the Paths of the Shades,” at which point the sword is slowly lowered as the Hiereus says “Child of Earth, fear is failure. Therefore be without fear, for in the heart of the coward virtue abideth not. Thou hast known me, so pass thou on.”

In other words, Mathers took the structural notes contained within the Cipher Manuscripts—which consisted of little more than a composite summary of various esoteric traditions—and made them into the poetry and theater of actual rituals. This proved a smash success, unifying a variety of independent traditions into a one-stop shop for esoteric knowledge that, crucially, allowed women to be full members, and the Golden Dawn soon became a trendy and vibrant organization that, at various times, saw actress Florence Farr, authors Algernon Blackwood, Sax Rohmer, and Arthur Machen, Irish revolutionary Maud Gonne, and, of course, William Butler Yeats all join.

For the first several years the Golden Dawn consisted of what is now referred to as the Outer Order—a series of degrees mapping to the lower reaches of the Tree of Life. Eventually, however, Mathers produced a second set of rituals granting three further degrees and access to the Inner Order, the Ordo Rosae Rubeae et Aureae Crucis, or Order of the Red Rose and the Golden Cross. More interestingly, however, he claimed that he had obtained these rituals by making his own contact with the Secret Chiefs.

It would be easy to scoff at this. The Secret Chiefs, after all, originate in Westcott’s Sprengel hoax. Mathers even knew as much, or at least he figured it out by 1900 when he wrote to Florence Farr to tell her that Westcott “either himself forged or procured to be forged the professed correspondence” with Sprengel. And yet there is no evidence that Mathers was being disingenuous when he claimed to have made independent contact with them; by all appearances he had a genuine mystical experience, and a tremendously powerful one at that. And whatever one might think of the validity of that experience, the fact remains that Mathers was able to derive another set of poetic and effective rituals out of it. Westcott may have made it all up, but once again it came true anyway.

In 1896 Westcott stepped down from involvement in the Golden Dawn for reasons that are not entirely clear, leaving Mathers in complete control. This was awkward for several reasons. For one, Mathers had decamped to Paris while the center of Golden Dawn activity remained the Isis-Urania Temple in London. For another, Mathers became increasingly dictatorial in his leadership, resulting in growing restlessness among the British contingent. Things came to a head when Aleister Crowley, a young hotshot of a member who’d torn through the degrees of the Outer Order, was blocked by leadership at the Isis-Urania Temple from ascending to the Inner Order on the broad grounds that he was a complete cunt, which, admittedly, he was. Crowley made an end-run around their leadership and traveled instead to Paris, where Mathers initiated him into the Inner Order, only to have the Isis-Urania Temple refuse to recognize this. After a dispute in which Crowley, dispatched by Mathers to seize control of the Temple and start administering loyalty tests, was removed from the premises in full ritual gear after Yeats called the cops on him the order collapsed into a series of splinter factions around the turn of the century.

One of these factions, of course, was forged by Crowley, who would have his own contact with the Secret Chiefs a few years later. Another was the Stella Matutina, or Morning Star, which in 1933 was joined by Israel Regardie, who had served for a few years as Crowley’s personal secretary. Regardie was deeply unimpressed with the organization, and proceeded to write a tell-all, My Rosicrucian Adventure (later reprinted as What You Should Know About the Golden Dawn), followed by a four volume set detailing all of the group’s rituals. Another strand came from Pamela Coleman Smith and Arthur Edward Waite, who together designed an Golden Dawn-derived Tarot deck that quickly became the default template for modern decks.

In this regard, then, Gull’s denunciation of the order to Yeats was, like much of what he says in From Hell, at once accurate and misleading. For one thing, the entire conversation was an anachronism on Moore’s part—Yeats didn’t actually join the Golden Dawn until 1890. And, obviously, his declaration that the Golden Dawn would soon wither was literally true. But for all that his declaration that “the older ways have yet more blood in them” was literally true within From Hell, it would be the Golden Dawn, not Freemasonry, that formed the cornerstone of the twentieth century’s western occult tradition.