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158 Magic and Magical Groups
pattern has, in fact, been typical for the last two
centuries. The pattern we see is that of a charismatic
leader beginning an organization, which grows well
during his or her lifetime, and usually attracts as its
most prominent members people who have been
or still are members of most of the other extant
occult organizations. Upon the leader’s demise, the
organization usually fractures into two or many
factions, as the other members struggle to decide
who will assume the mantle of the founder, and
these factions generally then become independent
organizations, which repeat the cycle.
Most contemporary magic goes back to that of
the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn
(HOGD), which was an offshoot of a Masonic-
Rosicrucian organization, the Societas Rosicruciana
in Anglia (SRIA), founded by Robert
Wentworth Little in 1865, and supposedly based
on old manuscripts found in Freemasons’ Hall,
apparently the ones owned by Hockley. The
London Lodge of the Theosophical Society was
opened in 1883, and members of both these
lodges were among the early members of the
HOGD, which was founded in 1888 by W. R.
Woodman, A. F. A. Woodford, W. Wynn Westcott,
and Samuel Liddell Mathers (1854–1918; a relative
of Alice Liddell, whose father coauthored the
most important Greek dictionary of the nineteenth
century, and whose adventures in
Wonderland were chronicled by the Reverend
Charles Ludwig Dodgson); all but Woodford had
been members of the SRIA, but it was Woodford
who in 1885 inherited the magical manuscripts
that had been owned by Hockley. Westcott
proceeded to “decode” them, and Mathers then
built a new magical system upon them. These
papers also included the Nuremberg address of
one “Anna Sprengel,” a Rosicrucian Adept in touch
with the Masters in the East. Mathers claimed to
have written to her, and to have received a great
mass of information and rituals, along with a
charter for the Isis-Urania Temple.
After the other two founders died, Westcott
resigned in 1887 to concentrate on the SRIA, of
which he was Supreme Magus, leaving Mathers in
complete control of the HOGD. In 1892 Mathers
moved to Paris, where he married Moira, the
daughter of the philosopher Henri Bergson, and
from where he proceeded to direct the affairs of
the HOGD. The four had claimed to have a
charter and a set of rituals from the “secret chiefs”
of the Rosicrucian order in Germany, but in fact it
was all written by Mathers. Mathers was one of the
most brilliant amateur scholars of his generation,
who also translated The Greater Key of Solomon
and several major cabalistic treatises, and who
wrote a major book on the Tarot. The HOGD
attracted a stellar cast from among Britain’s
middle-class intellectuals. Its members (as
revealed by Ithel Colquhon’s appendixes) included
Arthur Machen, Arthur Edward Waite, James M.
Barrie, Sir E. A. Wallis Budge, Hugh Schonfield,
Florence Farr (at one time a lover of George
Bernard Shaw), and Maud Gonne (a lover of Yeats
and mother of Sean McBride, the founder of
Amnesty International).
The most famous member of the HOGD was
William Butler Yeats, who joined in 1890, and
remained a devout member (according to Virginia
Moore’s masterful biography) until 1900, when a
fight over whether Mathers could bring Aleister
Crowley rapidly up into the leadership of the
organization shattered it into several factions.
Most of the members left with Yeats to form the
Stella Matutina (Morning Star), which Yeats
served from 1901 to 1917 as Grand Master.
Mathers and Crowley kept the original name, but
their minority organization soon foundered.
Crowley, after “channeling” the Book of the Law in
1904, founded his own organization, the Astrum
Argentinum (Silver Star), in 1907, and began
publishing The Equinox in 1909 in order to spread
his ideas. He had also become a member of the
Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO, Order of the Eastern
Temple) by 1912. The OTO had been founded
around the turn of the century by a German
named Karl Keller, and it taught a form of sex
Magick. According to the painstaking research of J.
Gordon Melton, the OTO was actually based
largely on the secret sex-magic teachings of P. B.
Randolph, founder of the Fraternitas Rosae
Crucis, a major Rosicrucian society in America.
Crowley succeeded Theodor Reuss as Outer Head
of the OTO in 1922, and was recognized as head of
the OTO by a majority of its members in 1924–25,
but the organization then divided in two over the