The Golden Dawn's London

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About 1893 the officers of Isis-Urania Temple issued a printed notice whose single sentence holds the order’s whole London: “you must not enter Mark Masons’ Hall by the front door, but go under archway and down passage, entering by a door on the right.” The side passage was the arrangement in miniature. The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn — the society that rebuilt ceremonial magic for the modern West — never owned a building in the city of its birth. Its London was rented: hired Masonic halls, upstairs rooms over a builder’s office, a painter’s studio in Fitzrovia, desks in the British Museum Reading Room, a bookseller’s counter off Charing Cross Road. The earliest account books itemize storage and removal of temple furniture between ceremonies; the temple existed wherever the furniture was set up.

The hired halls

Isis-Urania No. 3 began its work on 1 March 1888 under three chiefs — the coroner William Wynn Westcott, Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, and Dr. William Robert Woodman — in a hired Masonic hall — by convention the Mark Masons’, a side order of Freemasonry whose Grand Lodge then met at 8A Red Lion Square, Holborn. In the early 1890s the Mark Grand Lodge moved into a new Mark Masons’ Hall in Great Queen Street, beside the Freemasons’ Hall complex, and there the Outer Order’s documented ceremonial life ran from at least 1893 to 1902. A printed summons of 16 June 1894 calls the 0°=0° and 3°=8° ceremonies there; the equinox meetings of both Orders gathered there; and on the evening of 18 November 1898 Aleister Crowley walked in a candidate and walked out Frater Perdurabo.

The Outer Order’s grades — the ladder of Hermetic Qabalah — did not always need a hall. The earliest initiations of the order’s most famous members took place in the Fitzroy Street studio of the painter Mina Bergson, Vestigia, the temple’s first initiate and afterward Moina Mathers: Annie Horniman received the Neophyte grade there in January 1890, and W. B. Yeats was initiated there on the evening of Friday, 7 March 1890. The administration hid as carefully as the ritual: until 1892 candidates’ letters went to the Sanitary Wood Wool Company at 11 Hatton Garden — Westcott’s surgical-dressings firm, the order’s postal cover.

The Vault and its four addresses

Behind the Outer Order stood the Second Order, the Rosae Rubeae et Aureae Crucis, and at its center the one ritual structure the order ever built: the Vault of the Adepti, the seven-sided painted chamber prescribed in the Rosicrucian Fama Fraternitatis — the tomb of Christian Rosenkreutz raised again above a London pavement. In the Adeptus Minor ceremony the candidate was bound to the Cross of Suffering and the Chief Adept rose from the pastos, the coffin at the Vault’s heart: the founder’s death and resurrection, enacted in rented rooms. The first Vault was built in 1891 at Thavies Inn, off Holborn Circus, probably in a room of Westcott’s company, lately moved there from Hatton Garden. Annie Horniman passed through it first, on 7 December 1891, in a chamber still being finished — by her own testimony “the roof was not on the Vault and the painting on the Crook and Scourge was wet.”

The Vault moved house three times, and the moves survive in fine detail. Westcott’s diary for Wednesday, 10 August 1892, reads “4.30–5 in pastos. Decided on Clipstone Street” — the chief lying in the symbolic coffin before settling on new premises. Two days later he agreed on a lease with George Atkinson, a sign-writer, for two rooms at 24–25 Clipstone Street, a dingy thoroughfare off Great Portland Street whose neighbors ran from a hairdresser and two sculptors to the German Waiters’ Society. The adepts’ wives and lady members did the cleaning themselves, since no outside eye could fall on the Vault; Yeats signed the Order Diary there in July 1893; Brodie-Innes remembered being “very happy at Clipstone Street, but certainly it was dirty, noisy, smelly and immoral and many objected to it.” In August 1894 the Second Order took a short lease at 62 Oakley Square, Camden Town, by June 1895 the declared headquarters of the R.R. et A.C. On 21 September 1897 the adepts consecrated their last premises: the first-floor rooms at 36 Blythe Road, West Kensington, a turning just west of Olympia, above the offices of the builder C. E. Wilkinson; the Second Order’s library was shelved and cataloged there that same September.

Two days in April

The schism of 1900 was fought over those rooms. From Paris, on 16 February 1900, Mathers wrote Florence Farr the letter that broke the order, charging that the Sprengel correspondence — the German warrant behind the temple’s founding — was Westcott’s own forgery. London convened a committee of investigation; Mathers refused to recognize it; in late March the Second Order voted, with only five voices against, to depose and expel him. His counterstroke arrived in person. Crowley — raised to the Second Order by Mathers in Paris that January after London had refused to advance him — reached the city on 14 April as Mathers’s Temporary Envoy Plenipotentiary, having already reconnoitered Blythe Road on the 6th and found the Vault locked. On Tuesday, 17 April he seized the rooms and changed the locks. On Thursday the 19th, Yeats and E. A. Hunter, having squared the landlord Wilkinson, were in possession when Crowley reappeared at about half past eleven — in Hunter’s contemporary report, “in Highland dress, a black mask over his face… an enormous gold or gilt cross on his breast, and a dagger at his side.” A constable was sent for; Crowley withdrew. That same day Julian Baker wrote to Hunter about securing the Outer Order’s property at Mark Masons’ Hall against a similar raid; the legal echo — a police-court summons against Farr, taken out in the name Edward Aleister — ended when Crowley’s own solicitor withdrew it and undertook to pay five pounds in costs.

Members’ London

The order’s working map was always larger than its leases. Mathers worked daily among the desks of the British Museum Reading Room, where in 1887 he met the Slade student Mina Bergson, and from its collections he quarried the order’s working corpus: John Dee’s angelic papers, condensed there and at the Ashmolean into the Enochian system; the Bornless invocation, built on a Greek magical papyrus in the collection; Neophyte-ritual material adapted from C. W. Goodwin’s 1852 edition of a Graeco-Egyptian magical text. A. E. Waite judged that even the sources of the order’s founding Cipher Manuscripts were “to be found no further off than the British Museum.” A few streets away stood the Slade School in Gower Street, where Horniman and Bergson had met as students in October 1882 — the friendship that later financed Mathers and gave the temple its first initiate.

The commerce of the milieu had its own addresses. John M. Watkins, a Theosophist lodge-founder alongside Westcott, began his occult book business as a catalog in March 1893 and settled in 1901 at 21 Cecil Court, where the shop still trades; he distributed, then published, Mathers’s Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage (1898). Crowley kept a flat at 67 Chancery Lane under the alias Count Vladimir Svareff, furnished with two temples, where Allan Bennett lived and taught magic through 1899. A private house in Talgarth Road hosted a small Second Order circle from 1897. Florence Farr’s Sphere group — twelve members working with symbols drawn from the Tree of Life under the direction of an Egyptian adept present in his astral form, first reached through a fragment of his mummy case — held its Sunday-noon workings near, though never inside, 36 Blythe Road, widening its sphere from the room to London, the Earth, and the constellations; the quarrel over such private groups ran into 1902. The city could also bite: a confidence-trickster couple armed with order papers obtained from Mathers in Paris ran their Theocratic Unity scheme from a rented house in Gower Street, and their conviction at the Old Bailey on 20 December 1901 put the Golden Dawn’s Neophyte ritual into open court and the London press.

Recovering the addresses

The lease-chain is recoverable because the order’s paperwork outlived its secrecy. Ellic Howe’s The Magicians of the Golden Dawn (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972), the documentary history built from surviving diaries, summonses, and correspondence, established the sequence of addresses — Thavies Inn, Clipstone Street, Oakley Square, Blythe Road — and printed the day-by-day record of April 1900. R. A. Gilbert’s The Golden Dawn Scrapbook (Quantum, 1997) reproduces the ephemera in facsimile — the side-passage notice, the Clipstone Street Order Diary, the Sphere group’s printed instruction of March 1901 — as close as a reader now comes to the order’s physical paperwork. Mary K. Greer’s Women of the Golden Dawn (Park Street Press, 1995) recovers the same streets from the side of the women who paid for and ran much of what happened on them: Farr, Horniman, Moina Mathers, Maud Gonne. Alex Owen’s The Place of Enchantment (University of Chicago Press, 2004) reads the map whole, placing British occultism’s museum desks, studios, and hired halls inside metropolitan modernity. The hall that anchored it all has its documentary fix in the Survey of London (vol. 5, 1914), which records Markmasons’ Hall on part of the old Conway House site in Great Queen Street — the architectural record of a vanished building.

The diaspora of the temples

After Mathers’s deposition the topography came apart slowly, then all at once. A general meeting at Mark Masons’ Hall on 3 May 1902 vested the order’s government in Percy Bullock, Dr. Robert Felkin, and J. W. Brodie-Innes; on 26 June 1902 the membership learned that the very name had gone underground, the order now trading as the Hermetic Society of the Morgenröthe. In 1903 the split became geography. Felkin and Brodie-Innes constituted the Stella Matutina, whose mother-temple Amoun worked in Bassett Road, North Kensington, until it closed about 1919 amid police attention and the breakdowns of two members; A. E. Waite’s mystical wing held the rump of Isis-Urania as the Independent and Rectified Rite until 1914, replacing it in July 1915 with his Fellowship of the Rosy Cross; Mathers’s loyalists continued as the Alpha et Omega, in whose London temple Dion Fortune trained under Moina Mathers until her expulsion in 1922. Felkin emigrated in 1916, and the system’s longest life was lived farthest from London: the Smaragdum Thalasses temple — Whare Ra, at Havelock North in New Zealand — worked it until 1978.

Of the order’s own city, one address still answers. 36 Blythe Road stands, a Victorian commercial terrace with a café at street level and the contested first-floor rooms above — the only Golden Dawn working address in London still identifiable. The Great Queen Street hall vanished in the twentieth-century rebuilding of its block; Thavies Inn was destroyed in the Blitz; the Clipstone Street terraces went under redevelopment. The papers traveled a longer circuit home. In 2008 the Museum of Freemasonry, housed in Freemasons’ Hall on Great Queen Street, acquired a private Golden Dawn archive that includes the Cipher Manuscripts themselves — so the documents that warranted the temple now rest a few doors from the ground where its members once went under the archway and down the passage, entering by the door on the right.

→ In the library: Mathers — The Kabbalah Unveiled (1887) · Westcott — Sepher Yetzirah (1911)

→ Related: Golden Dawn Lineage · Hermetic Qabalah · Occult Paris · Freemasonry · Theosophy · S L Macgregor Mathers · W Wynn Westcott · Rosicrucianism