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Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn 111
tongue-in-cheek “Well to Hell” story also
appeared in the Biblical Archeology Review. To the
chagrin of the editors, many of their readers took
the article seriously. Upon investigation, it was
found that the original Finnish article was actually
a letter to the editor, in which a reader had
repeated an item he had picked up from a
Christian newsletter. And the creator of the report
about luminous gasses congealing into a bat and
words appearing in the sky eventually confessed to
fabricating the incident as a way of demonstrating
the gullibility of conservative Christians.
See also Beast Computer Legend
For Further Reading:
Robinson, B. A. “Christian Urban Legends.”
http://www.religioustolerance.org/chr_cul.htm.
Ship of Fools. “Drilling to Hell.” http://ship-offools.com/Myths/03Myth.html.
Hellraiser
The 1987 film Hellraiser is based on Clive Barker’s
novel about a portal to hell, whose doorway is not
in any one place but is, rather, accessible from
anywhere. It is a passageway between the earth and
the underworld, through which both demons and
human beings can come and go. Cenobites are a
band of ghouls from the underworld who answer
the request of a narcissistic man who wants to
indulge in new sensual experiences. They take him
through the portal into the underworld, put him
into chains, and began to mangle his flesh until his
soul separates from his body. Computer games
and comic books now feature Baker’s Cenobites.
There have been a number of Hellraiser sequels.
Hell’s Angels
The Hell’s Angels motorcycle club is the most well
know of the many biker gangs. Formed after the
second world war, the expression Hell’s Angels was
taken from a U.S. Air Force squadron by the same
name. Other biker groups sport comparable infernal
monikers, such as the Canadian group, Satan’s
Angels. It is also common for members of this
subculture to decorate their clothes, bikes, and
even their bodies with diabolical images. Although
many bikers have identified themselves as followers
of the Devil in media interviews, few take this
identification seriously. Rather, in this context it is
clear that Satan is little more than a symbol of
rebelliousness, deployed to shock polite society.
The Hell’s Angels were sometimes romanticized
by journalists and other writers until the
Altamont Rock Festival in 1969. The Rolling
Stones had unwisely hired members of the Hell’s
Angels to handle security during the festival.
Although there are conflicting accounts about
exactly how it transpired, the Angels murdered a
young black fan while the Stones were performing
“Sympathy for the Devil.” This event subsequently
defined the Hell’s Angels in the minds of
many outsiders.
See also Crime; Heavy Metal Music
For Further Reading:
Baddeley, Gavin. Lucifer Rising: Sin, Devil Worship
and Rock’n’Roll. London: Plexus, 1999.
Scott, Miriam Van. Encyclopedia of Hell. New York:
Thomas Dunne Books, 1998.
Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn
The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was
formed in England in 1888 when a group trying to
make use of magic formulas using Francis
Barrett’s 1801 textbook on magic and alchemy,
The Magus, were introduced to the materials of
psychic Fred Hockley. S. L. MacGregor Mathers
was the founding member of the Hermetic Order
of the Golden Dawn and became its most important
leader. The Hermetic Order of the Golden
Dawn taught a disciplined approach to self-transformation
through a system of high magic and
became the group most credited with initiating
the revival of magic in the twentieth century.
Through the order’s most (in)famous member,
Aleister Crowley, the order would exercise a
profound influence on the ritual practices of
modern Satanism and of the Left-Hand Path
tradition more generally.
In the late eighteenth century, the persecution
of magical groups ceased. These groups came into
the public eye concurrently with the rise of a dilettante
interest in occultism in Western Europe. In
1801 Francis Barrett published The Magus. In the
early 1800s, Alphonse-Louis Constant studied the