III. The Golden Dawn

I N T R O D U C T I O N his friend 'to indicate the certainty and reality of the life beyona the grave'.

Three days later, just half an hour past midnight, Mackenzie, who was lying in bed, not thinking of Buckley, of whose death he was not yet aware, suddenly felt 'a cold clammy hand very gently placed upon his forehead'. Not surprisingly, Mackenzie turned round in order to see what had caused this odd and frightening sensation. He saw 'the spirit of Buckley, in his usual dress, standing at his bedside with a portfolio under his arm, exactly as he had so often seen him in life'. Mackenzie claimed that after he had recognised the figure it 'retreated towards the window, but after remaining there most distinctly visible both in form and feature for more than two minutes, it slowly faded away'.

This apparition, which Mackenzie saw twice more, seems to have had a profound effect upon his intellectual development. He began to attend seances and to make a study of spiritualism, already becoming fashionable since the commencement of D. D. Home's spectacular mediumistic career in the previous year. More significantly, he became almost the first English student of the works of Eliphas Levi-Dogme de la Haute Magie had been published in 1854 and its companion volume, the Rituel, in 1856-and I suspect that he fell completely under the spell of that writer's limpid French style and ingenious romanticisation of the magical tradition, for by 1861, when he had two long interviews with Levi, his attitude towards the French mage was one of veneration. I am certain that Levi found his English visitor's solemnity difficult to cope with-Mackenzie actually mistook his host's tobacco-jar for a valuable statuette of the goddess Isis-and reading between the lines of Mackenzie's lengthy account7 of these visits it is clear that Levi indulged in a good deal of leg-pulling.

There is no doubt that Mackenzie developed into what is sometimes called 'an advanced occultist'; he claimed a continental Rosicrucian initiation from a mysterious Count Apponyi, he became an important figure in a masonic Rosi-

7 This account is reprinted in full in my Ritual Magic in England (Neville Spearman Ltd. 1970).

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I N T R O D U C T I O N crucian organisation, the Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia, he studied magic (whch he defined as 'a psychological branch of science, dealing with the sympathetic effects of stones, drugs, herbs, and living substances upon the imaginative and reflective faculties') and, when he died, he left behind him notebooks dealing with the extraordinary Enochian magical system of the Elizabethan occultists Dee and Kelley.

m. The Goltlen DaWll

Mackenzie spent a good deal of time in Europe-both his French and his German were excellent-and I am inclined to believe that working-notes made by him of rituals he had witnessed in some German Rosicrucian temple were the basis of the odd cipher manuscripts that were found by the Rev. A. F. A. Woodford amongst the papers of Fred Hockley, who had died in 1885. It was the discovery (and transcription) of these manuscripts that was the immediate cause of the foundation of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the organisation whose activities and teaching were largely responsible for the survival of the so-called 'Wes tern Esoteric Tradition' and whose members, although few in number, exerted an enormous, while sometimes hidden, influence on their own time and times since.

These manuscripts are of such importance that I feel it worth spending a short time upon an examination of their contents. Early in 1970 shortly after the completion of my Ritual Magic in England, Mr. Ellie Howe, a distinguished historian of the printing industry, showed me a xerox copy of what I am now convinced was A. E. Waite's own transcription of the original manuscript. At first I thought that there was a faint possibility that the Waite manuscript was not a copy of the original document but was simply a cipher manuscript concocted by Waite himself in order to validate the rituals he had written (circa 1910) for the Holy Order of the Golden Dawn-a splintergroup controlled by Waite and one of his friends. Later, however, with the permission of the London collector who owns the original, Mr. Howe allowed me to make a detailed examina33

I N T R O D U C T I O N tion of the photocopy and to complete its decoding into English, a task which had been begun by Mr. Howe himself. It soon became clear to me that my suspicions were quite unjustified; for although the manuscript was full of errors, they were not the errors of someone transcribing an English text into an alphabetic code; rather were they the mistakes of someone (presumably a professional scribe) mechanically copying symbols of whose real significance he was quite unaware.

I am sure that the ordinary reader of this introduction would be bored if I went into a lengthy technical examination of the contents of the cipher manuscript; I shall therefore confine myself to simply stating my observations and conclusions in tabulated form : (a) The manuscripts give an outline of five allegedly Rosicrucian grade rituals-Neophyte, Zelator, Theoricus, Practicus, and Philosophus-all except the first of which are attributed to various stations on the Qabalistic Tree of Life. I found these rituals to be in a form far less skeletonic than I had expected, for even such minor points of detail of the design of the sash worn by initiates are given. As I compared the manuscript rituals with those actually used in the Golden Dawn I realised that the latter owed far more to the former than they did to the synthetic genius of S. L. MacGregor Mathers. (b) Those-they include Crowley, Regardie and myself-who have condemned Mathers for introducing an excessively complicated and, to some extent, antagonistic symbolism into the 'Grades of the Elements' have been quite wrong to do so. Our criticisms may have been justified, but, if so, they were aimed at the wrong target; for the confusion of symbols (even to the appearance of the Samothracian gods known as the Kabiri) comes from the manuscript, not from Mathers. (c) The manuscripts originated in the latter half of the nineteenth century, for their eclectic approach makes an earlier date inherently improbable; the high-grade masonic rituals of the eighteenth century are often boring and always technically inferior to the manuscript rituals, but their symbolism is usually consistent. If, for example, a ceremony is centred around the tomb of some obscure Old Testament figure one is not suddenly 34

I N T R O D U C T I O N dragged off to the coffin of Mahomet or the Vault of Christian Rosycross ! {d) While the basic structure of the rituals was probably based on someone's {Mackenzie's? ) observation of a Rosicrucian temple in Europe (Germany ? There is some resemblance to 1 777 rituals of the Golden Rosicrucians) a good deal had been added from English sources-for example, the 'Enochian words of power' given in the elemental grades. {e) Whoever prepared these manuscripts had a profound knowledge of even the most obscure of English occult writings; there are phrases that seem to come from such almost unknown sources as the works of the seventeenth-century mystic Jane Lead and the slightly later group of her followers known as the Philadelphians. (£) Those-they include that distinguished Yeats Scholar Kathleen Raine-who have stated that Yeats had a hand in 'working up' the Golden Dawn rituals are incorrect. There are two sentences in the later Golden Dawn rituals that are identical with lines of Yeats poetry; both are in the original manuscripts. In other words, Yeats was quoting the rituals, not vice versa. (g) Either the author of the manuscripts drew upon the writings of Eliphas Levi or, more probably, they both drew upon the same unknown sources. Thus both a diagram of 'Daniel's Man' and a diagram of the 'Altar of Incense' that appear in the manuscripts are identical with diagrams appearing in the supplement to the French edition of Levi's Key of the Greater Mysteries.

The London temple of the Golden Dawn, named Isis-Urania and working the rituals given in the cipher manuscripts, was founded on March 1 st, 1 888, its three chiefs being Dr. Woodman, an elderly physician, W. Wynn Westcott, the Queen's Coroner for North-East London, and that flamboyant character G. S. L. MacGregor Mathers. While the newly initiated Neophyte was assured that ' the Order of the Golden Dawn, of which you have now become a member can show you the way to much secret knowledge and spiritual progress, it can . . . lead . . . students . . . to the Summum Bonum, True Wisdom, and Per35