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The Golden Dawn and the Rebirth of Western Magick
The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn proved indispensable — and burdensome — to modern occultism
The quest for a Western magickal tradition, or a remade variant of it, altered the face of occultism in the early 20th century.
The most influential effort occurred through the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a British-based initiatory group whose innovation was matched only by factional disputes and frictions among its leaders — which in turn precipitated still newer forms of occultism.
The traceable history of the Golden Dawn began in fall of 1887, when London coroner and Freemason William Wynn Wescott (1848–1925), came into possession of a folio of alchemical symbols and encrypted ritualist writings in English, French, Latin, and Hebrew.
The 60-leaf folio was accompanied by a sheet with the name and address of a mysterious (and possibly invented) German countess whom the bearer could contact for guidance.
Wescott said that he received these “Cypher Manuscripts” from the Rev. A.F.A. Woodford, a fellow Freemason who died that year. For his part, Woodford is sometimes said to have purchased the manuscripts from an antiquarian bookdealer in 1880; other accounts have him receiving them from Masonic scholar Kenneth R. H. Mackenzie, who died in 1886.
There is controversy over whether Wescott, seeking to endow himself with magickal authority (a common theme in occult history) forged the coversheet and follow up correspondence with the unseen Countess Anna Sprengel, sometimes said to have died in 1890.
In any case, Wescott claimed to have received from the countess news of hidden masters, later called “Secret Chiefs,” who maintained a Hermetic-Rosicrucian order into which he was provisionally invited. Wescott brought the material to two friends and colleagues with whom he was already involved in a…
