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The magical system used by Neopagan Witchcraft is not anything inherited from a secret tradition. Instead, all Neopagan Witches and ritual magicians use what is essentially the same system of ceremonial magic. This system can be traced back to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (HOGD), which was an offshoot of a Masonic-Rosicrucian organization, the Societas Rosicru-ciana in Anglia (SRIA). The Societas RosicruRosicru-ciana was founded by Robert Wentworth Little in 1865 and was supposedly based on old manuscripts (ap-parently owned by the psychic Fred Hockley) found in Freemasons’ Hall in England. In 1887, Dr. William Wynn Westcott, a London coroner and a mem-ber of the SRIA, obtained part of a manuscript, written in a cipher code, from the Reverend A. F. A. Woodford. In 1885, Woodford, a Mason, inherited the magical manuscripts owned by Hockley. Westcott claimed to have “decoded”

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the manuscript and to have discovered that it contained fragments of rituals for the “Golden Dawn,” a secret organization that apparently admitted both men and women as full members—a radical idea in Victorian London.

Westcott then asked an occultist friend, Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers (1854–1918), to “flesh out” the fragments of the manuscript into full-scale rituals that could be carried out by members of a magical lodge.

Mathers did so, using largely Masonic materials. He was uniquely qualified for this work, being a gifted classical scholar from a scholarly family. Mathers was a relative of Alice Liddell, whose father coauthored the most important Greek dictionary of the nineteenth century, and whose adventures in Won-derland were chronicled by the Reverend Charles Ludwidge Dodgson (Lewis Carroll). Mathers’s translations of The Greater Key of Solomon (the basic text of ritual magic) and of the Zohar (the basic text of Cabalism) are still stan-dard texts; his book on the Tarot is still in use.

At this time Westcott (or perhaps someone else) may have simply forged papers claiming to trace the “Golden Dawn” back to a Rosicrucian organiza-tion in Germany. These papers included the Nuremberg address of Anna Sprenger, a Rosicrucian Adept in touch with the Masters in the East. Math-ers and Westcott claimed to have written to her and to have received a great mass of information and rituals.

Among this information was a charter for the Isis-Urania Tem-ple of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, founded in Lon-don with Westcott, Mathers, and W. R. Woodman, Supreme Magus of the SRIA, as its ruling triumvirate.

The London Lodge of the Theosophical Society opened in 1883, and members of both it and the SRIA were among the early members of the Isis-Urania Tem-ple. For some reason the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn suited the temper of the times. During the first eight years of the lodge’s existence, more than 300 mem-bers were initiated, and these in-cluded some of the greatest literary and artistic figures of the times.

HOGD members (as revealed by Ithel Colquhoun’s appendixes of Sword of Wisdom: MacGregor Mathers and the “Golden Dawn”) HERMETICORDER OF THEGOLDENDAWN

William Butler Yeats was one of many famous members of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. (North Wind Picture Archive)

included Arthur Machen, Arthur Edward Waite, James M. Barrie, Sir E. A.

Wallis Budge, Hugh Schonfield, Florence Farr (at one time George Bernard Shaw’s lover), Maud Gonne (mother of Sean McBride, the founder of Amnesty International), and, most famous, William Butler Yeats (Maud Gonne’s lover).

An elaborate system of magical lessons and initiations was created and divided into ten magical grades corresponding to the ten sephiroth of the Ca-balistic Tree of Life, plus a “zeroth” grade for the neophytes. The grades also were grouped into three orders: Outer, Inner, and Third (or Secret). Initiates advanced through the Outer Order by passing a series of written examina-tions and undergoing a corresponding series of elaborate initiaexamina-tions. At some point, Mathers took the notebooks of Dr. John Dee, Elizabeth I’s advisor, and turned the information into a usable system that is now generally called Enochian Magic; it is, oddly enough, a strictly Christian magical system.

Note that all of this was financed by the HOGD members’ annual dues of 100 pounds sterling apiece—more than the annual earnings of an average British workman at that time. The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was very much a rich person’s club.

At first, the only members of the Inner Order were Mathers, Westcott, and Woodman, and they claimed to be directed by the Secret Chiefs of the Third Order, entities on the Astral Plane rather like the Secret Masters of theosophical belief. In 1891, Woodman died and was not replaced in his post within the Inner Order. At this time, Mathers created the initiation ritual for the Adeptus Minor grade, the first within the Inner Order, and gave the Inner Order a new name: Ordo Rosae et Aureae Crucis (“Order of the Ruby Rose and Cross of Gold”). Membership was by invitation only.

Mathers married Moina Bergson, daughter of the philosopher Henri Bergson. It is said that they never physically consummated their marriage.

Moina was very much Mathers’s partner in his magical work, as he was about to receive teachings from the Secret Chiefs through clairaudience, that is, hearing voices.

Mathers, though brilliant, was eccentric and financially incompetent.

His devotion to the HOGD had, by 1891, left him and Moina penniless. For-tunately, a wealthy member of the order, Annie Horniman, decided to be-come their benefactor in order to enable them to continue their work.

Hence, in 1891, the couple was able to move to Paris, where they set up a second lodge. Mathers continued to write teaching materials and send them to London. He became increasingly jealous of Westcott, and increasingly au-tocratic. He concentrated on translating another major magical treatise, The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abra-Melin the Mage, which was published in 1898.

In 1896, Mathers claimed that the Secret Chiefs had initiated him into the Third Order and that he therefore had supreme authority over the entire Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Horniman disputed his claims and was subsequently expelled from the society; so, of course, she cut off her financial support. The Matherses’ situation became increasingly more desperate.

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By 1897, the members of the HOGD had begun to suspect Westcott’s role in “creating” the organization and accused him of forgery. His resigned from his position and was replaced by Florence Farr. The stage was now set for the battle that soon ensued.

In 1898, young Aleister Crowley was initiated, and he rose rapidly in the organization, passing the examinations almost as fast as they could be admin-istered. Impatient with the slow procedures in London, in 1899 he went to Paris and insisted that Mathers initiate him into the Second Order. Mathers complied, but the London lodge, under Farr’s direction, refused to accept his initiation as valid. Crowley, who was fairly wealthy at the time, and Mathers now became allies. In 1900, Mathers sent Crowley to London to attempt to take over the London temple. According to Virginia Moore (in The Unicorn:

William Butler Yeats’ Search for Reality), when Crowley attempted to open the file cabinet in the office, Yeats, who was over six feet tall, picked Crowley up, held him overhead, walked to the front door, and threw Crowley down the stairs into the gutter of a London street. When Crowley returned, there was a constable standing on each side of Yeats’s desk.

Crowley retaliated by publishing some of the lodge’s secret rituals in his magazine, The Equinox. Crowley and Mathers engaged in a magical war with each other, and also parted ways. Crowley went on to found a rival organiza-tion, the Astrum Argentinum (“Silver Star”), and later joined and took over the Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO).

In 1900, with all of the original triumvirate gone, Yeats, who joined in 1890, was elected head of the Inner Order and tried to restore peace and unity. Unfortunately, the schisms were deep enough after a dozen years that the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn soon split into several separate or-ganizations. Followers of Mathers formed the Alpha et Omega Temple, which Moina continued to direct after Mathers’s death. In 1903, A. E. Waite and his followers broke away, forming a group that kept the Golden Dawn name but emphasized mysticism more than magic; after Waite left in 1915, the group went into a decline.

In 1905, the majority of the remaining members of the Isis-Urania Tem-ple reorganized themselves as the Stella Matutina, or Order of the Morning Star, with Yeats as their Grand Master. Yeats served in this position until 1917, when he married his young secretary, Georgie, settled down finally to married life, and, under Georgie’s influence, gave up the active magical work in order to concentrate on his poetry. The work Yeats produced during the last two decades of his life is generally acknowledged to be among the greatest literary work ever produced.

With Yeats’s departure, the Isis-Urania Temple was resurrected as the Merlin Temple of the Stella Matutina, which remained active into the 1940s.

The temple then went into a decline after its secret rituals were published by Israel Regardie, who had, at one time, been Aleister Crowley’s secretary.

However, it is interesting to note that Regardie did not publish any of the Christian magical materials used by the HOGD members.

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There do not seem to be any HOGD lodges in North America that were chartered directly by either the original Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn or the Stella Matutina. Instead, the American lodges trace their lineage back to the OTO or have begun “from scratch,” working with the copious infor-mation that has been published in recent decades on exactly how the lodges functioned at every level.

See Also: Mathers; Samuel Liddell; Ordo Templi Orientis Further Reading

Colquhoun, Ithell. Sword of Wisdom: MacGregor Mathers and the “Golden Dawn.”

New York: Putnam’s, 1975.

King, Francis. Ritual Magic in England, 1887 to the Present. London: Spearman, 1970.

Mathers, S. L. MacGregor, ed. and trans. The Greater Key of Solomon. Chicago: De Laurence, Scott, 1914.

Moore, Virginia. The Unicorn: William Butler Yeats’ Search for Reality. New York:

Macmillan, 1954.

Regardie, Israel. The Golden Dawn: An Account of the Teachings, Rites, and

Ceremonies of the Order of the Golden Dawn, 1937–1940, 2d ed. River Falls, WI:

Hazel Hills, 1969.