The Ideas, reception

The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn

The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, almost always called simply the Golden Dawn, was an occult society founded in London in 1888 by three Freemasons: William Wynn Westcott, Samuel Liddell Mathers (who was already signing himself S. L. MacGregor Mathers in The Kabbalah Unveiled, London, 1887) and William Robert Woodman. It admitted men and women, who studied Kabbalah, astrology, alchemical symbolism, geomancy and tarot grade by grade, and from 1891-1892 it had an inner circle devoted to ceremonial magic (Museum of Freemasonry catalogue, collection GBR 1991 GD; Denisoff, 2013). It held together until the crisis of 1900, split in 1903, and its longest-lived branch, the Stella Matutina in New Zealand, was dissolved in 1978 (Heritage New Zealand). Its authority rested on two documents: a cipher manuscript of disputed authorship and some letters in German from a supposed adept, Anna Sprengel, which the British historian Ellic Howe judged to be fabricated after having them examined by an expert in 1971 (Howe, 1972, pp. 6-7). This page separates three layers: what the documents and archives say, what is disputed (who wrote the manuscript and who invented Sprengel), and what was made of the order afterwards, from Aleister Crowley to tarot decks. It does not describe ceremonies or exercises.

1887 or 1888: how it began

Formally, the order began in London in 1888; the earlier date, 1887, comes from Westcott’s own account of how he found its documents. Its three founders belonged to the Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia (SRIA), a society interested in occultism, Kabbalah and Masonic symbolism and open only to Master Masons. Woodman presided over it, with the title of Supreme Magus, and Westcott and Mathers sat on its council. Westcott was a physician and deputy coroner for the London district of Central Middlesex; a coroner is the official who investigates violent or unnatural deaths and those of unknown cause. Howe places the appointment in 1881; Davis thinks it likely that Westcott began to serve in the spring of 1883, though she records a source that gives 1881, and in her summary she marks both dates with a question mark (Howe, 1972, pp. 8 and 37; Davis, 2024, pp. 24 and 2808 of the PDF).

The story Westcott left in his papers begins with a cipher manuscript. According to a note of his, in February 1886 the Reverend A. F. A. Woodford, a well-known Masonic writer, told him of some manuscripts in cipher that he had in his possession. According to a copy Westcott himself made of a letter dated 8 August 1887, Woodford was sending them to him and advising him to look in Germany for an old “soror” whose motto was Sapiens Dominabitur Astris: “She did live at Ulm”. The original of that letter does not survive, and Woodford died on 23 December 1887, so nobody could confirm the story (Howe, 1972, pp. 5-9). According to that account, which Howe summarizes as the traditional story, Westcott received the manuscript in 1887 and deciphered it the same year; Denisoff repeats the year of the decipherment (Howe, 1972, p. 1; Denisoff, 2013).

The founding date has two answers because there were two acts. On 12 February 1888 the three signed pledges of loyalty to the new society (Denisoff, 2013). The warrant authorizing the first temple, Isis-Urania No. 3, is undated; in 1915 Westcott wrote on a postcard to Robert Felkin: “Warrant signed March 1st, 1888”. Westcott paid Mathers to engross it and himself signed for Sprengel, with her motto (Howe, 1972, pp. 17-18). By the end of March 1888 the order had nine members; the first initiates of Isis-Urania were Mina Bergson, Mathers’s future wife and sister of the philosopher Henri Bergson, and Theresa Jane O’Connell (Howe, 1972, p. 49; Davis, 2024). The year 1887 given in some works comes from the members themselves. In 1916, in his booklet Data of the History of the Rosicrucians, Westcott wrote that the Isis-Urania temple had been formed in 1887 “by permission of S.D.A. a continental Rosicrucian Adept”; S.D.A. are the initials of the motto attributed to Sprengel. In 1937 Israel Regardie, who quotes that booklet, wrote that the order had been established in 1887 and that its first English temple opened the following year (Regardie, vol. 1, 1937, pp. 16-17 and 21).

That same year, 1888, temples were opened at Weston-super-Mare (Osiris) and Bradford (Horus); in 1893 Amen-Ra, in Edinburgh, joined them (Museum of Freemasonry catalogue; Denisoff, 2013). The Ahathoor temple in Paris, where Mathers had lived since 1892, was consecrated on 6 January 1894 under a warrant Westcott had drawn up on 3 January; Denisoff gives 1893 for both temples, but the documents Howe reproduces fix the consecration in January 1894 (Davis, 2024; Howe, 1972, pp. 35, 113 and 295). The registers Howe published add up to 315 initiations in all the temples between 1888 and 1896, 189 of them in London (Howe, 1972, pp. 48-49).

The cipher manuscript

The so-called Cipher Manuscript is a bundle of sheets of notes in English written in an artificial alphabet taken from the Polygraphia of Abbot Johannes Trithemius (1462-1516). It is not a secret language but a letter substitution that Westcott could transcribe without difficulty (Howe, 1972, pp. 11-12). It contains outlines of the admission ceremonies of five grades, from Neophyte to Philosophus, and breaks off there (Museum of Freemasonry catalogue; Howe, 1972, p. 3, quoting A. E. Waite). Almost all the paper comes from a single batch, and half a dozen sheets bear an 1809 watermark; Howe also points to a brownish ink that, in his judgement, was chosen to make the manuscript look old (Howe, 1972, p. 3). The watermark dates the paper, not the writing.

The originals are now at the Museum of Freemasonry in London, in the Golden Dawn collection, reference GBR 1991 GD 1/1/1-8. The Warburg Institute of the University of London holds photostats (ff. 1-57) and a deciphered transcription (ff. 1-58) in the Gerald Yorke collection, NS 2 (Museum of Freemasonry catalogue; Warburg Institute, catalogue of the Yorke collection). Who wrote the notes, and when, is unresolved. The museum catalogue states that it is now generally accepted that they are the work of Kenneth Mackenzie, who died in 1886, as ritual sketches for the Society of Eight, founded in 1883 by Frederick Holland, or for the Sat B’hai, of about 1871. Waite, who knew the founders, concluded in 1938 that the notes were considerably later than 1870 and had not been written by Westcott, Woodman or Mathers. Howe judged it impossible to know. Denisoff records other proposed origins: the papers of the occultist Frederick Hockley, a second-hand bookstall, or a forgery by Mackenzie himself (Museum of Freemasonry catalogue; Howe, 1972, pp. 3-4 and 10; Denisoff, 2013).

The letters attributed to Anna Sprengel

Anna Sprengel, the German adept who supposedly authorized the order, has left no trace outside Westcott’s papers. Among the sheets of the manuscript was another, also in cipher, according to which the German “soror” was called Fräulein Sprengel, was one of the chiefs of “die goldene Dämmerung” and received her mail through one Herr J. Enger at the Hotel Marquardt in Stuttgart. Howe suspected that this sheet had been added to the manuscript and was not part of it (Howe, 1972, pp. 6 and 12). There followed, according to Westcott, five letters in German written on her behalf by a secretary between November 1887 and March 1890, authorizing him to found the order and to sign for her; another, dated Dahme, 23 August 1890, announced that she had died on 20 July (Howe, 1972, pp. 6 and 17). Westcott never claimed to have seen her in person, only to have corresponded with her (Howe, 1972, p. 13). Sprengel’s city changes with the source: Ulm in the copy of Woodford’s letter, Stuttgart in the cipher sheet, Nuremberg in Regardie’s 1937 book (Regardie, vol. 1, 1937, pp. 19 and 21).

On 16 February 1900, in a letter to Florence Farr, Mathers wrote that Westcott had never been in communication with the “Secret Chiefs” of the order, “he having either himself forged or procured to be forged the professed correspondence between him and them”, and that he, Mathers, had known it for years, his tongue tied by an oath of secrecy that Westcott had demanded of him before showing him what had been done; if this was true, Mathers had been an accomplice. In the same letter he claimed that “Sapiens Dominabitur Astris” was in Paris helping him: he meant an American swindler who called herself Mrs Horos and who deceived him for a short time (Howe, 1972, pp. 4-5 and 209-211; Denisoff, 2013). As Waite recalled, Westcott did not admit the charge and replied that his witnesses were dead. An inquiry by the order came to almost nothing (Howe, 1972, pp. 4-5).

The modern examination was made by Ellic Howe, who found the original letters in a private deposit handed over in the 1920s to the library of English Freemasonry, now part of collection GBR 1991 GD (Howe, 1972, p. 5; Museum of Freemasonry catalogue). In 1971 he submitted them to the Zurich document examiner Oskar Schlag, whose report pointed to spelling and grammatical mistakes and anglicisms that no German would have made; the writer who announced Sprengel’s death referred to her in the masculine (Howe, 1972, pp. 6-7). Howe also asked the Württemberg state archive in Stuttgart to search for Sprengel and Enger in the residents’ registers, without result (Howe, 1972, p. 13). His conclusion was that Westcott invented Sprengel and arranged for the letters to be fabricated in order to give the order a German origin, and that there was no other reasonable explanation (Howe, 1972, pp. 6-7). It is the position the museum catalogue takes today: according to its description of the collection, researchers believe that Westcott created the Sprengel story to give the order a legitimate provenance and to attract serious occultists and Freemasons (Museum of Freemasonry catalogue).

The legend lived on after the split. Robert Felkin, head of the Stella Matutina, searched for the supposed German chiefs on journeys to the Continent and corresponded with a patient of his, Anne Sprengel, who he said was a niece of the Fräulein Sprengel of the letters (Museum of Freemasonry catalogue).

The documents, in order

How it was organized

The order copied the structure of a lodge: numbered grades, from Neophyte (0=0) to Philosophus (4=7), each with its admission ceremony and its examinations. Between 1888 and 1891 it was above all a theoretical school of Kabbalah, astrology, alchemical symbolism, geomancy and tarot (Museum of Freemasonry catalogue). Unlike Freemasonry, it admitted women on equal terms with men (Denisoff, 2013). Above those five grades, Mathers organized in 1891-1892 the Second Order, the Ordo Rosae Rubeae et Aureae Crucis (“of the Red Rose and the Golden Cross”), whose first grade drew on the legend of the tomb of Christian Rosenkreutz in the Rosicrucian manifestos. Mathers and his wife built a replica of that tomb, the “Vault of the Adepts”, and in that inner circle members moved from study to ritual practice (Museum of Freemasonry catalogue; Howe, 1972, p. 75). Only Mathers claimed to communicate with a Third Order of “Secret Chiefs”, and that monopoly was one of the causes of the later disputes (Denisoff, 2013).

Where Hermes comes in

The word “Hermetic” in the name does not mean that the order commented on the Greek treatises attributed to Hermes. Westcott himself explained in 1894 what he understood by it: the tracts associated with the name of Hermes are concerned with an arcane wisdom “developed in three directions”, theosophy, alchemy and magic (Westcott, 1894, preface). In practice, “Hermetic” named a programme of occult sciences: the same one the order taught grade by grade (Museum of Freemasonry catalogue). To tell Hermeticism apart from the currents it is often confused with, see Hermeticism and its neighbours.

The leaders did reissue Hermetic texts. Westcott edited the series Collectanea Hermetica, published by the Theosophical Publishing Society; its second volume (1894) reprints the English translation of the Pymander that Everard published in 1650, with seventeen “books” attributed to Hermes (see Corpus Hermeticum), and the third was announced with notes by “S.S.D.D.”, Florence Farr’s motto in the order (Westcott, 1894; Howe, 1972, p. 51). In the preface Westcott presented Hermes as a teacher of the Egyptian priests “at a time almost certainly anterior to that commonly associated with Moses” (Westcott, 1894, preface). That is the old thesis of the prisca theologia, which Isaac Casaubon had taken apart in 1614 by dating the treatises to the Roman period. In the same preface Westcott admitted that the treatises had not come down in their original form and that the Neoplatonists and the Alexandrian school, and perhaps later Christian philosophers, had altered many lines and possibly some doctrines, but he held that they preserved very ancient Egyptian ideals. One of the founders thus maintained in 1894, with qualifications, an antiquity that had been taken apart almost three centuries earlier (Westcott, 1894, preface, p. iv).

The rest of the system gathered materials from different periods: the Christian Kabbalah of the Renaissance (see Shem ha-Mephorash), the “angelic” material in the diaries of John Dee, from which derive the tablets and the boards for “Enochian chess” kept in the museum archive (Museum of Freemasonry catalogue), the tarot read through the Hebrew letters as in Éliphas Lévi, though in a different order, and the tables of correspondences. The historical lecture for neophytes, drafted by Westcott (Howe, 1972, p. 22) and reproduced by Regardie, presented the order as “an Hermetic Society whose members are taught the principles of Occult Science and the Magic of Hermes”, and counted Lévi, who died in 1875, among the adepts of the order (Regardie, vol. 1, 1937, p. 16). Calling all this “Hermetic magic” or “theurgy” is a usage of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, not of the Hermetica (see Theurgy).

The crisis of 1900

In 1900 the Second Order in London broke with Mathers, the order’s chief in Paris, over his admission of Crowley and his forgery charge against Westcott. The ground had been prepared in March 1897, when Westcott resigned his offices in the order; according to the museum catalogue, he did so to keep his post as coroner, when the authorities learned of his connection with it (Howe, 1972, p. 168; Museum of Freemasonry catalogue). From then on the actress Florence Farr ran the order in London as the representative of Mathers, who lived in Paris (Howe, 1972, pp. 168-169). The tensions went back further: on 3 December 1896 Mathers had expelled Annie Horniman (Howe, 1972, p. 135).

The trigger was Aleister Crowley. The London Second Order refused to admit him, and Mathers admitted him on his own authority in Paris on 16 January 1900 (Howe, 1972, p. 206). Farr had written to Mathers in January; the text of that letter is not known, but from Mathers’s reply it can be inferred that she proposed closing the Isis-Urania temple (according to the museum catalogue, dissolving the order). Mathers replied on 16 February with the charge of forgery against Westcott (Howe, 1972, pp. 209-210; Museum of Freemasonry catalogue). On 17 April Crowley presented himself as Mathers’s envoy at the Second Order’s premises, at 36 Blythe Road, and briefly took over the “Vault” (Howe, 1972, p. 218). On the 19th he came back in Highland dress and a black mask; the landlord called a policeman, who ordered him to leave, and that same day the committee of the Second Order suspended Mathers. The events of those days are known as the Battle of Blythe Road (Howe, 1972, pp. 225-226; Museum of Freemasonry catalogue). On 21 April a meeting of the Second Order, with twenty-two present, adopted a new constitution, and the statement printed in May declared that, of the fifty to sixty members of the London Second Order, all but five had ceased to recognize Mathers as chief (Howe, 1972, pp. 227-228). Mathers, his wife, Crowley and their supporters were left outside (Museum of Freemasonry catalogue).

Aleister Crowley in the order

Crowley (1875-1947) was initiated as a Neophyte on 18 November 1898, with the motto Perdurabo, and by the spring of 1900 he was already out: his time in the order lasted less than a year and a half (Howe, 1972, p. 193). He neither founded nor led it, and the London Second Order never recognized the grade Mathers gave him in Paris (Howe, 1972, pp. 208 and 226). Later he published texts of the order in his journal The Equinox; in March 1910 Mathers went to court to stop him printing the ritual of entry to the Second Order, and failed (Howe, 1972, p. 166). The papers of that lawsuit are in the archive of the Museum of Freemasonry (Museum of Freemasonry catalogue). What Crowley built afterwards, with his own orders and doctrines, is another story.

Scandal, division and end (1901-1978)

After the crisis the order lost members in a public scandal and split for good in 1903; its longest-lived branch, in New Zealand, was dissolved in 1978. In 1901 a criminal case put the order in the newspapers. An American couple, Frank and Editha Jackson, who called themselves Theo and Laura Horos, had taken copies of the order’s documents from Paris and set up in London an order of their own that served as a cover for their crimes (Denisoff, 2013; Museum of Freemasonry catalogue). At the Old Bailey session that opened on 16 December 1901, the court sentenced Frank Dutton Jackson, for rape, to fifteen years’ penal servitude, and Editha Loleta Jackson, as an accomplice, to seven (Proceedings of the Old Bailey, t19011216-79). The trial made Golden Dawn texts public and many members left (Museum of Freemasonry catalogue). In June 1902 those who remained were told that the society would henceforth be called the Hermetic Society of the M. R., after the German word Morgenröthe, “dawn” (Howe, 1972, p. 242).

The final break came in 1903. After the annual meeting, A. E. Waite and Marcus Worsley Blackden kept the Isis-Urania temple, announced their position in a manifesto of 24 July, of which Howe found no copy, and gave their group a mystical rather than a magical direction: this was the Independent and Rectified Rite, which Waite closed in 1914 in order to found the Fellowship of the Rosy Cross the following year (Howe, 1972, pp. 252-253; Museum of Freemasonry catalogue). Those in favour of magical practice followed the physician Robert Felkin into the Stella Matutina, with its Amoun temple in London, and those loyal to Mathers, who after the break of 1900 had formed a rival Isis temple, headed by Mathers and run by Dr E. Berridge, continued in the order later called Alpha et Omega (Museum of Freemasonry catalogue).

The Stella Matutina was the longest-lived branch. Felkin founded a temple at Havelock North, in New Zealand, in 1912 and settled there in 1916 (Museum of Freemasonry catalogue). The scholar R. A. Gilbert describes that temple, Smaragdum Thalasses, as the only flourishing temple of the order when Regardie published the rituals, the others being in decline, and notes that it survived under the name Whare Ra into the 1970s (Gilbert, 1997, p. 196). Felkin’s house, Whare Ra, designed by the architect James Walter Chapman-Taylor and built from 1913, was both a home and the seat of the order; after his death in 1926 it was run by his widow and his daughter, and the order was finally dissolved in 1978. The building has been protected since 1990 as a Category 1 historic place (Heritage New Zealand, no. 4407). In England, the Hermes temple in Bristol became independent in the early 1920s and lasted until about 1972 (Museum of Freemasonry catalogue).

Israel Regardie joined the Stella Matutina in 1933 or 1934, and between 1937 and 1940 he published in Chicago, in four volumes, the rituals and instruction texts of that branch; the second volume carries the heading “The Stella Matutina or Golden Dawn” (Regardie, vol. 2, 1938). What circulates today as “Golden Dawn rituals” is therefore the version of a successor branch, printed almost fifty years after 1888. According to Denisoff, in 2013 several associations still claimed a spiritual or historical lineage from the original order (Denisoff, 2013), and as early as 1983 Gilbert mentioned recent groups that claimed descent from the cipher manuscript (Gilbert, 1983, p. 79); both belong to the reception, and this page does not assess them.

Waite, Pamela Colman Smith and the 1909 deck

The tarot deck now known as Rider-Waite was the work of two members of the order, A. E. Waite and the illustrator Pamela Colman Smith. Arthur Edward Waite (died 1942) joined the order in January 1891. According to Howe, he left it shortly after reaching the grade of Philosophus (4=7) in April 1892 and came back years later (Howe, 1972, p. 71). The order’s records summarized by Davis give other dates: Waite stopped paying his dues, in 1893 he was treated as having resigned, and on 17 February 1896, after a vote, he was readmitted; Davis gives as her source the certificate of readmission, GD 2/3/1/9, in the order’s collection at the Masonic library in London (Davis, 2024, pp. 349 and 2556 of the PDF). In 1903 Waite led the mystical branch (Museum of Freemasonry catalogue). Pamela Colman Smith was initiated in November 1901 (Davis, 2024). The Victoria and Albert Museum, which holds cards from the deck they made together, notes that they met as members of the Golden Dawn (V&A, E.423-1934).

The deck was not a publication of the order but of a commercial publisher. In the December 1909 issue of The Occult Review, a William Rider & Son magazine, its editor announced “a new pack of Tarot Cards”, which he expected to have on sale by about 10 December, lithographed by Sprague & Co. and sold in a case with Waite’s handbook, The Key to the Tarot, for seven shillings (The Occult Review, X, 6, December 1909, pp. 300-301). In the same issue Waite presented the cards as designed by Pamela Colman Smith and wrote that they had rectified the symbolism “by reference to channels of knowledge which are not in the open day”, without saying which (ibid., p. 307 ff.). The V&A dates the first edition to 1910; the 1909 announcement explains why both dates circulate. On when and how the tarot was joined to Hermeticism, see Tarot: the invented pedigree, and the real one.

Members known outside occultism

The most famous is the poet William Butler Yeats, Nobel laureate in Literature in 1923 (NobelPrize.org). According to a note of his found by the scholar Virginia Moore, he was initiated on Friday 7 March 1890 in Mina Bergson’s studio, with the motto Demon Est Deus Inversus; in his Autobiographies he placed it in 1887, a good example of why documents from the time are better evidence than recollections (Howe, 1972, p. 69). He stayed in the order and in the Stella Matutina until the early 1920s, and his occult papers, with a series devoted to the Golden Dawn, are in the National Library of Ireland (Howe, 1972, p. 69; NLI, W. B. Yeats Occult papers).

Also in 1890 came Annie Horniman, later a theatre manager, and the actress Florence Farr; in November 1891, the Irish activist Maud Gonne, who according to her autobiography left because of the Masonic connections she saw in the order (Howe, 1972, pp. 51 and 71; Davis, 2024). The chemist William Crookes, a Fellow of the Royal Society, received the Neophyte grade in June 1890 and had already withdrawn by September (Howe, 1972, pp. 50-51). Constance Wilde, wife of Oscar Wilde, was initiated in November 1888 (Davis, 2024), and the writers Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood joined in November 1899 and October 1900 respectively, when, according to Howe, the most interesting period of the order was already over (Howe, 1972, p. 52).

Two names repeated online are not on the list of initiates. There is no proof that Bram Stoker, the author of Dracula, ever joined: Gilbert writes that he was never a member, despite what is often claimed, though he was a friend of the lawyer J. W. Brodie-Innes, who was (Gilbert, 1983, p. 81; Davis, 2024). Pamela Colman Smith, also a member of the order, worked with Stoker at the Lyceum Theatre (V&A, E.423-1934). Arthur Conan Doyle recounted in his memoirs that around 1898 a neighbouring doctor invited him to join “a secret society of esoteric students” and that he declined (Conan Doyle, Memories and Adventures, 1924, ch. XV); Davis identifies that doctor as Henry Pullen-Burry, a member of the order (Davis, 2024).

What is disputed

Three questions remain open. The first is the cipher manuscript: who wrote it, when, and where it came from. The museum catalogue leans towards Mackenzie and states that Westcott obtained the manuscript after Mackenzie’s death. Waite ruled out the three founders, Howe declared it impossible to know, and Denisoff, who sees in Waite’s dating support for Mackenzie’s authorship, records other proposed origins; the 1809 paper does not date the writing (Howe, 1972, pp. 3-4; Museum of Freemasonry catalogue; Denisoff, 2013). The second is complicity: whether Westcott acted alone or whether Mathers, who in 1900 said he had known of the deception years before, took part in it; his own accusation implicated him (Howe, 1972, pp. 4-5). The third is which act counts as the foundation: 1887, the year in which, according to Westcott, he deciphered the manuscript and received the first letter attributed to Sprengel, or February and March 1888, the pledges and the warrant.

On Sprengel there is more agreement: Howe concluded in 1972 that Westcott invented her, and according to the museum catalogue that is what researchers believe today (Howe, 1972, pp. 6-7 and 13; Museum of Freemasonry catalogue). Denisoff presents her as part of Westcott’s account, without giving a verdict (Denisoff, 2013).

Common myths

“It is an ancient order, heir to the Rosicrucians or to Egypt.” It was founded in 1888; Westcott’s historical lecture, which derived it from German Rosicrucians and counted Lévi among its adepts, is a foundation legend (Regardie, vol. 1, 1937, p. 16; Howe, 1972, pp. 17 and 22-25). “A German adept, Anna Sprengel, authorized the foundation.” The letters do not survive examination and there is no trace of her in Stuttgart (Howe, 1972, pp. 6-7 and 13). “The cipher manuscript is medieval.” The alphabet was copied from a book by Abbot Trithemius, who died in 1516; the paper bears an 1809 watermark and Waite judged the notes to be later than 1870 (Howe, 1972, pp. 3-4 and 11-12). “Crowley founded or led the order.” He was a member between November 1898 and the spring of 1900, and London did not recognize his grade (Howe, 1972, pp. 193, 208 and 226). “Bram Stoker and Conan Doyle were members.” For Stoker there is no proof; Conan Doyle turned down an invitation (Gilbert, 1983, p. 81; Conan Doyle, 1924). “The Golden Dawn published the Rider-Waite tarot.” The deck was designed by Pamela Colman Smith following Waite’s directions and sold by William Rider & Son, which announced it for December 1909 (The Occult Review, December 1909). “Regardie’s rituals are those of 1888.” They are those of the Stella Matutina, printed between 1937 and 1940 (Regardie, vol. 2, 1938). “It is the same as the Greek Golden Dawn.” No: the Greek neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn (Χρυσή Αυγή), which in English bears exactly the same name, has no connection with the order; in 2020 a court in Athens found seven of its leaders guilty of directing a criminal organization (Amnesty International, 2020).

How to read it

Three layers, in order. The fact: a London society of 1888, created by three Freemasons of the SRIA on the basis of some ritual sketches in cipher and a German authorization that does not survive examination, with 315 initiations up to 1896, a crisis in 1900 and a split in 1903. The debate: who wrote the cipher manuscript and how much Mathers knew. The reception: Crowley and The Equinox, Regardie’s four volumes, the 1909 deck and the associations that have claimed the order’s lineage. All three are history; only the first describes the order of 1888. For the model from which it took its legend, see Rosicrucian manifestos; for the French occultist who assigned a Hebrew letter to each major arcanum of the tarot, building on an idea already in circulation since 1781, Éliphas Lévi; and for the order’s place among the different senses of the word “Hermeticism”, What is Hermeticism.

Key facts

Name	Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn; usually just the Golden Dawn
Founded	London, 1888: pledges signed on 12 February; warrant of the Isis-Urania temple signed on 1 March, according to Westcott (1915)
Founders	William Wynn Westcott (1848-1925), Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers (1854-1918) and William Robert Woodman (1828-1891), Freemasons of the Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia
Temples	Isis-Urania (London), Osiris (Weston-super-Mare) and Horus (Bradford) in 1888; Amen-Ra (Edinburgh) in 1893; Ahathoor (Paris), consecrated on 6 January 1894
Initiations	315 in all the temples between 1888 and 1896, 189 of them in London (registers published by Howe, 1972)
Documentary basis	Cipher manuscript (Museum of Freemasonry, London, GBR 1991 GD 1/1/1-8) and letters attributed to Anna Sprengel, held to be fabricated since Howe (1972)
Inner circle	Ordo Rosae Rubeae et Aureae Crucis, organized by Mathers in 1891-1892
Crisis	1900: forgery charge (16 February), Battle of Blythe Road (17-19 April), removal of Mathers (21 April)
Branches after the split	Independent and Rectified Rite (Waite, 1903-1914), Stella Matutina (Felkin, from 1903) and Alpha et Omega (loyal to Mathers, from a rival Isis temple formed in 1900)
End of the Stella Matutina	Whare Ra temple (Havelock North, New Zealand), active into the 1970s; the order was dissolved in 1978
Not to be confused with	The Greek neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn (Χρυσή Αυγή), which shares the name

Fair questions

What is the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn?

An occult society founded in London in 1888 by three Freemasons, William Wynn Westcott, Samuel Liddell Mathers and William Robert Woodman. It admitted men and women, taught Kabbalah, astrology, alchemical symbolism, geomancy and tarot grade by grade, and from 1891-1892 had an inner circle devoted to ceremonial magic. After the crisis of 1900 it divided, and the break became final in 1903.

Was it founded in 1887 or in 1888?

Both dates have an explanation. 1887 comes from Westcott’s account, which nobody could confirm: according to him, that year he received and deciphered the manuscript, and a note of his dates to 26 November the arrival of the first of the letters attributed to Anna Sprengel, which is undated; it is also the year given by Westcott himself in 1916 and by Israel Regardie in 1937. The formal foundation dates from 1888: the founders signed their pledges on 12 February, and the warrant of the first temple, Isis-Urania, was signed on 1 March according to a postcard of Westcott’s from 1915.

Did Anna Sprengel exist?

No trace of her has been found outside Westcott’s papers. Ellic Howe searched for her without result in the state archive in Stuttgart, where a cipher sheet placed her, and the expert who examined her letters in 1971 found mistakes and anglicisms that no German would have made; Howe concluded in 1972 that Westcott invented her. That some sources place her in Nuremberg and others in Ulm or Stuttgart is part of the same problem.

Was Aleister Crowley a member of the Golden Dawn?

Yes, for less than a year and a half. He was initiated in London on 18 November 1898; the London Second Order refused to admit him, and Mathers did so on his own authority in Paris on 16 January 1900. After briefly occupying the order’s premises in Blythe Road on 17 April 1900, he was shut out along with Mathers. Later he published texts of the order in his journal The Equinox.

Which famous members did it have? Were Bram Stoker or Conan Doyle members?

The best known is W. B. Yeats, initiated in 1890 and Nobel laureate in 1923. Florence Farr, Annie Horniman, Maud Gonne, Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, Constance Wilde and the chemist William Crookes also passed through it. There is no proof that Bram Stoker joined, although he was a friend of a member, the lawyer J. W. Brodie-Innes. Conan Doyle recounted that he was invited around 1898 and declined.

When did the Golden Dawn end, and is it connected with the Greek Golden Dawn party?

The original order broke apart in the crisis of 1900, lost many members after the Horos trial in 1901, changed its name in 1902 and in 1903 was left divided into three branches; that is why some works give 1900, others 1901 and others 1903 as its end. The longest-lived branch, the Stella Matutina of Whare Ra, in New Zealand, was dissolved in 1978. It has nothing to do with the Greek neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn: they share only the name.

Sources & further reading

• Museum of Freemasonry (London), collection GBR 1991 GD, “The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, its members and related bodies”, description at AIM25 (history, scope and content, provenance; consulted 30 October 2026).
• Ellic Howe, The Magicians of the Golden Dawn: A Documentary History of a Magical Order 1887-1923, with a foreword by Gerald Yorke (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972), Open Library entry; in copyright, cited by page (p. xxv; ch. 1, “Suspect Documents”, pp. 1-25; pp. 35-37, 48-52, 69-75, 113, 135, 166-169, 193, 206, 208-211, 218, 225-228, 242, 252-253 and 295).
• Dennis Denisoff, “The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, 1888-1901”, BRANCH: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century History, ed. Dino Franco Felluga (January 2013), branchcollective.org.
• R. A. Gilbert, The Golden Dawn: Twilight of the Magicians, with a foreword by Israel Regardie (Wellingborough: The Aquarian Press, 1983), Open Library entry; in copyright, cited by page (pp. 79 and 81).
• R. A. Gilbert, The Golden Dawn Scrapbook: The Rise and Fall of a Magical Order (York Beach, Maine: Samuel Weiser, 1997), Open Library entry; in copyright, cited by page (p. 196).
• Warburg Institute (University of London), Gerald Yorke collection, catalogue NS 1-49, NS 2: photostats of the cipher manuscript (ff. 1-57) and transcription (ff. 1-58), PDF of the catalogue (consulted 30 October 2026).
• Sally Davis, Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn: Biographies of Members, version 6 (Zenodo, 7 April 2024), DOI 10.5281/zenodo.10938903, CC BY-NC-ND 4.0, zenodo.org.
• W. Wynn Westcott (ed.), Collectanea Hermetica, vol. II: The Pymander of Hermes (London: Theosophical Publishing Society, 1894), preface; Harvard copy digitized by Google at Internet Archive.
• S. L. MacGregor Mathers (trans.), Kabbala Denudata. The Kabbalah Unveiled, a translation of three books of the Zohar (London: George Redway, 1887), title page; Wellcome Library copy at Internet Archive (public domain).
• Proceedings of the Old Bailey, session of 16 December 1901, ref. t19011216-79 (Frank Dutton Jackson and Editha Loleta Jackson), oldbaileyonline.org (consulted 30 October 2026).
• The Occult Review, vol. X, no. 6 (London: William Rider & Son, December 1909), “Notes of the Month”, pp. 300-301, and A. E. Waite, “The Tarot: A Wheel of Fortune”, p. 307 ff., Internet Archive (IAPSOP).
• Victoria and Albert Museum, “Rider-Waite-Smith deck”, card The Fool, no. E.423-1934, collections.vam.ac.uk (consulted 30 October 2026).
• Israel Regardie, The Golden Dawn: An Account of the Teachings, Rites and Ceremonies of the Order of the Golden Dawn, 4 vols. (Chicago: The Aries Press, 1937-1940): vol. 1 (historical lecture, p. 16; introduction, pp. 17-21) and vol. 2 (heading “The Stella Matutina or Golden Dawn”); copies uploaded by users to the Internet Archive (rights not verified; cited for reference only).
• Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga, “Whare Ra”, list no. 4407, Category 1, heritage.org.nz (consulted 30 October 2026).
• National Library of Ireland, “W.B. Yeats Occult papers, c. 1890-1937”, Collection List No. 60, catalogue entry, Internet Archive copy of 2015.
• Arthur Conan Doyle, Memories and Adventures (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1924), ch. XV, Project Gutenberg no. 66991.
• NobelPrize.org, “William Butler Yeats, Facts”, nobelprize.org (consulted 30 October 2026).
• Amnesty International, “Greece: Golden Dawn verdict sends a clear message against the politics of demonization across Europe”, press release, 7 October 2020, amnesty.org (consulted 12 November 2026).