Transcription
November 1887, a letter arrives at the home of William Wincott, corner of Northeast London and a man of education and means. When you form a group which has allegedly oult knowledge, you have to have an origin story. The letter is the first communicate from a mysterious Anna Springle, a countess and founder of a secret German order. She is the connection to the Golden Dawn. With Sprangle's sanction, William Wyn Wescott founds a chapter of his very own. Shrouded in secrecy, this is the hermetic order of the Golden Dawn. These people, the majority of them, great minds and thinkers of the time. The secret society grows from a handful of adepts to five temples and hundreds of initiates. Is it a new religion or is it a lost one? What secrets do their oaths protect? And what was it that drew London's brightest lights into the fold? The difference between myth and history is often a fine one.
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In the 19th century, religious dogma loosens its hold as science gains ground, ushering in a sense of new possibilities. It was a time of immense change, social change, economic change, technological change. We had seen the monopoly of knowledge and power that had been held for hundreds of years by the Catholic Church challenged by the Protestant Reformation and increasingly challenged by the rise of the scientific method. We're talking about appear in the 1880s and 1890s. And what else is going on? Internal combustion engines, industrialization, the airplanes just around the corner. So everything is very much materialistic and contrary creatures that human beings are an emphasis on materialism in many people will create a desire for a kind of spiritual counterbalance to that. And in some ways there's nothing more esoteric and immaterial in some ways than the occult. The unbelievable became imaginable. Spiritualism, the idea that one could speak to the dead, was incredibly invogue. But the Victorians were also experimenting with crystals, tarot cards, and early forms of hypnosis. When Darwin's theory of evolution is popularized, now we have to confront the fact that as humans, we're not some kind of elevated being. We're another one of the animals. We were not gifted this world because we earned it or because we deserved it, but simply because we were an animal that was succeeding in the vicious marketplace of natural selection. People were terrified about the loss of meaning. And spiritualism sort of helped to fill that void by reintroducing the world of spirit, by reintroducing the idea of soul and the eternal.
But one event would launch the Victorian era's complete obsession with the mystical, mysterious, and occult. In March of 1848, three sisters living in upstate New York claim to hear knocks on walls and furniture. The phenomenon continues, and the girls and their mother attempt to communicate with the source of the knocking, asking it questions and receiving knocks in response. Of course, one of the great horrors of a materialistic physical world is loss. People were very close to death every day. We didn't have modern medicines. If there was some kind of way that we could have evidence that after the physical form dies, the spiritual form lives on, that would be a tremendous relief to many people. And this evidence appeared to show up in the 19th century with the Fox sisters in New York State who started to hear an odd rapping and tapping in their home. And so word of this gets out and the Fox sisters become celebrities. People like Sir Arthur Quinnand Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, becomes a huge fan of them. And again, when we see something happen that we don't understand a cause and effect, we come up with our own interpretation to understand what it means. A sound that we can't localize might be a ghost knocking or a spirit in the house when in fact it's something very innocuous. Our mind gets there, but it's based on what we're primed to believe and think.
Alongside spiritualism, a new impulse emerges. It's concerned with reviving the mysterious practices of the ancients. Practices from ancient Egypt, Greece, and Jewish mysticism become fashionable. It is on this stage that the hermetic order of the Golden Dawn emerges. So what you have in high society Victorian London is a rash of seance parties and different ways of entertaining the elite who had time and money and wanted to have their imagination and their senses tickled. As you start seeing this occurring in London, it's going to actually act a bit more like a virus. Other people are going to want to engage in it to show that they're part of that inroup. And you're going to see that the more you know or the more you believe, the more you fit in with others. and you start getting this kind of group think working together about this belief in spiritualism. But while for some a fascination with the dead and ancient civilizations was a pastime, for others it became a course study. There starts to be rumors of a secret society that has ancient knowledge. The Rosians. The Rosians probably one of the oldest secret societies. They were somewhat gnostic Christian in their concepts. They believed in the much older ideas of Christianity and Christian Rosen Cruz was the supposed founder of this belief system and this was all about delving into and penetrating the secret traditions of Christianity. These societies and movements were extremely popular and men wanted to be part of them for many reasons. First of all, you wanted the insight. You wanted to be able to to speak to someone who has passed on. You wanted to perform a ritual that's going to allow you to conjure something. There was great allure in that. But also, if you can master some of that and perform it for others, you're going to make money. you're going to attract a following. So, Rosacrusian groups are springing up all over Europe and they aren't necessarily united. They aren't necessarily connected again because it's based on inspiration. Basically, anybody can just form one and say that they are part of it. It's more of a feeling. It's more of an energy than it is a specific doctrine. And one of these groups is the scientist Ross rosana in Anglia. a large Rossian group that shows up in England. And what we see from that group is three members in particular, William Westcot, William Woodman, and Samuel Mats, who would go on to form a very influential occult society called the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.
The formation of the hermetic order of the Golden Dawn would depend upon one crucial moment in 1886 when Wescott is said to have found the cipher manuscripts within the library of the societiana in Anglia. He finds 60 folios watermarked with the year 1809. When you form a group which has allegedly oult knowledge, you have to have an origin story. You have to have an explanation as to how you came across that knowledge. The cipher documents were written in code containing astrological symbols and Hebrew letters. In order to decrypt the pages, Wescott would need help to decode manuscripts. Wescott recruits two of his fellow of societa in Anglia. colleagues William Robert Woodman and Samuel Little McGregor Matthers at the time. Woodman is Westcott Senior, the supreme magi of the societ Rosa in Anglia, Samuel Little McGregor Matthers is multilingual and a bit of a polymath. Together they set out to translate the cipher manuscripts. Did they have access to an ancient but universal knowledge that brought them to higher plains of consciousness using a tabular recta, a square table of alphabets, the numerals are substituted for letters of the Hebrew alphabet and read right to left. in deciphering these secret documents that were describing an occult order which had been formed in Germany sometime earlier. What's been discovered in the cipher manuscripts includes a gradea system that is not unlike other esoteric organizations like the roian a system with four grades of initiation starting as zealot and leading to philosophists. Also laid out is a curriculum of material that uses hermetic cabala as a framework for the study of astrology, tarot, geommancy, and alchemy concepts that are within the manuscripts formatted into a course of study. Is it a new religion or is it a lost one? They would have been perplexed by the possibilities. Of course, if somebody comes with a magic book with revealed truths, we should ask the question, well, where exactly did this book come from?
One of the most important things that was contained in the ciphers was not even the mysterious information on astrology and geommancy itself. But a single piece of paper which allegedly fell out and contained a name and an address. On it is scrolled the mailing address for one Anna Sprangle of Stoutgart, Germany. Who is this mysterious woman? Did she write these manuscripts? Could she explain what the men had found? She's said to be the love child of Ludwig I of Bavaria, and she is the connection to the Golden Dawn. So he then wrote to her, "What else would you do?" In Anna Sprangle's first letter, she claims the cipher manuscripts were once owned by someone named Abbe Constant. So Alas Louie Const lived in the early 19th century primarily, we're talking about the 1830s, studied for the priesthood, became a deacon, which is how he then got the title AB. He apparently lost his faith in Catholicism and then turned to a study of occultism and wrote a number of books, one of which was the dogma and ritual of high magic. He also had a pen name, Eleas Levy. His great goal is in sort of creating a mass market for occult ideas. What does it take somebody to believe you that you're telling the truth? We're really living in a society, especially back then, where if it was written down and signed, it meant something. A constant then lost track of the manuscript where it fell into the hands of Kenneth McKenzie and Frederick Holland. Frederick Holland had been a Freemason and fellow member of the societ Rosa in Anglia and founder of London's first spiritualist organization the charring cross spirit circle. He was a collector of old text and transcribed many occult manuscripts. He was also a known scrier, someone who purports to communicate with spirits through the use of crystals. McKenzie for his part was Holland's protege and autodidact who translated ancient texts from Germany and Denmark and eventually helped found the very same societ in Anglia of which Woodman and Wescott are a part. Unfortunately, Hollands and McKenzie's attempts to decipher the manuscripts and start their own chapter of the hermetic order of the Golden Dawn failed. However, Anna Sprangle then gave the men some exciting news. And Anna Sprangle, as the representative of the original order, said, "Yes, I give you my permission to form the order in England and to have lodges and to award degrees."
We can perhaps get some sort of idea from their biographies as to why they were so interested in starting this new movement. Woodman probably recognized he was coming to the end of his life. if he was older than the others. He probably knew he only had so much time left. And his desire to become part of eternity, to create something new, to give birth to something, particularly in the oult realm, played some great role in his decision. Now, Wescott was a coroner, and so every day would be confronted with evidence of the temporary nature of the material world lying in front of him on a slab. Now, how could you be confronted with that every day and not have a desire to go to the spiritual world to provide some kind of hope that this wasn't the end? Mathers was an interesting character. He had some would argue a kind of abrasive personality. And you could see how in somebody like that, the idea of forming a new society, especially a society that had to do with secret knowledge, secret powers, would really appeal to somebody who had his kind of disposition. Anna Sprangle informs the men that she's not alone in sanctioning them to start their own society. They have also been given a supreme authority from none other than the Secret Chiefs. The idea of secret chiefs or superior beings, this becomes a very key element to many secret societies and to the idea of where they're gaining their information from. So we are looking beyond God. They are the ultimate all knowing universal beings in pure energy form only channeled to specific people who are able to hear the messages and from there they are then passed on to people in these societies. It's the idea of some sort of level of authority above human. And many of these doctrines they're ascended humans. They had once lived on earth as men, but then they had attained such enlightenment that they had then gone on to become these kind of godlike creatures as about as vague and mumbo jumboy as you can possibly get. The power of a secret society is the knowledge, the secrets that they have. Now, that knowledge tends to be based on revealed knowledge rather than empirical knowledge because it's hard to hide empirical knowledge because empirical knowledge is based on observation because it's based on measurement and testing. Anybody can do the same tests and come to the same conclusions. Whereas revealed knowledge is protected because it's a unique relationship between the person and the spirit world. That gives them a level of authenticity to convince others to join. With the sanction of the secret chiefs, did they have access to an ancient but universal knowledge that brought them to higher plains of consciousness?
The temple is named Isis Urania number three after Greek goddess of astronomy and poetry Urania and Egyptian goddess of fertility Isis. When you walk into it, you see all sorts of mystical elements everywhere from Greco columns, Egyptian hieroglyphs. You've got all sorts of mystical symbols around from variety of religions. It's a real hodgepodge, almost a kind of spiritual food court where you could go in and get a sample of of all sorts of different traditions all brought together in this strange headquarters. Although William Wescott is head of the Isis Urania Temple, Samuel Liddell McGregor Mats takes the lead in developing the curriculum for London's newest secret society. Using the skeletal framework offered by the cipher manuscripts, McGregor Mathers draws from esoteric texts, ancient traditions, Christianity, occult practices, and Cabala to create the order's grades. Did they have access to an ancient but universal knowledge that brought them to higher plains of consciousness? Years later, documents would reveal the lengths to which McGregor Mats went to create a unifying structure for the new hermetic order of the Golden Dawn. Pretty much the hermetic order of the Golden Dawn, there's nothing terribly original in it. It was repackaging everything from tarot to alchemy to the secret chiefs to ritual magic. They didn't invent any of these things.
To reach enlightenment, the order's adepts must progress through a series of grades whose framework is based on the tree of life, the centerpiece of ancient Jewish mysticism and Cabala. It's many years of study to even begin to grasp the Jewish Cabala. It has the Jewish alphabet and the tree of life marks points on your body. But the hermetic cabala is very different. Hermetic Cabala emerged in the Renaissance. Jewish Cabala was absorbed, reinterpreted, and taught by thinkers like Henrik Cornelius Agria, a magical occult writer, astrologer, and alchemist who actually believed his interpretation of Cabala was the oldest form of ancient religion. He pairs concepts like the tree of life with Egyptian and Greek mythology. astrology, alchemy, and other occult practices like tarot. The Golden Dawn believed that studying the system of the Western Cabala will get the person to the highest level of enlightenment. The Golden Dawn is the end stage that the members of the hermetic order were trying to reach. They're going to go up level by level till they can get to this point which really embodied all the creational energies of the universe were in this golden dawn and you could get to that stage. Really what they're saying is you can get to be like a god. So it could be very enticing to promise somebody that they would end up having total control. Even if the journey is going to be hard, people will strive towards it. It is this interpretation that McGregor Mats draws upon when creating a syllabus for the new occult order. What they were starting to realize is this notion of a universal ancient religion that all of these modes of worship and communication between humans and the otherworldly can be tied together. They're historical artifacts of a singular truth. All hermetic magic is based on one fairly simple yet complex idea and that is as above so below. It's this idea that you can perform rituals in the physical world which then go off and affect the spiritual world which then again comes back and affects the physical world. At times spanning months of study, each level requires the adepts to master the system of symbols almost like passcodes to another reality to complete written exams and to be initiated by Wescott and the ISIS urania chiefs. After each level, adepts were treated to initiations held under lock and key. Within a year, Wescott, Woodman, and McGregor Mathers have initiated 23 new members. These people, the majority of them, great minds and thinkers of the time, great writers, great poets, great artists, and the greatest occult thinker of all time believed they could take themselves into another mental space, an astral journey, somewhere new, different, and not available to us mere mortals who didn't invest heavily in the timeconsuming practice of magic. You know, on the one hand, you can look at the Golden Dawn and you can argue it was a kind of occult supper club for bore dilotants. You're now being brought in and you can never tell people about this. It's a secret and you'll be sworn to secrecy and you will know things that other people don't. the nepheight ritual or the initiation ritual for the Golden Dawn. It's all about the robe that you wear and the sash that you have and the objects that you carry, but becoming inducted into this neopight ritual. You're moving through the space in a clockwise manner, following the direction of the sun. They're very theatrical. After initiation, adept grades are recorded in the ISIS Urania's log book, tracking their advance through the order. It's important to understand the amount of work and time that goes into climbing the ladder. It would have taken years and a lot of hard work and dedication. You can't just enter into the first degree and have access to higher realms. You have very rigid grades that you have to go through up from zelator for instance to maggus. It would have taken a lot of commitment but people did it and not just any people a lot of cultural celebrities of the period. Part of the oath is giving them the promise of this divine science to get to the level of the golden dawn. But what's interesting in the oath is they're swearing to not use it for evil. So they've already made a distinction that it's a tool and it could be used for either side. As a secret society, particularly a secret oult society, you're always walking a bit of a fine line. On the one hand, the power that you have in your society comes from the secret knowledge that you were guarding. On the other hand, if you guard too much and you release nothing, how can you build a reputation? How can you gain new members? Now, there was one member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn named Israel Regardi who perhaps went a little bit too far in one direction in that he actually wrote and released a massive tome detailing the rituals and the knowledge of the hermetic order. Now, this meant that basically anybody could pick up this book and perform the rituals themselves. And it did result in several chapters of the order springing up all over the world.
By the 1890s, the hermetic order of the Golden Dawn boasts over a 100 members. But just who were these adepts willing to spend years learning this esoteric material? Bearing in mind this is an exclusive group, it is a group which demands commitment, oathtaking and confidentiality. One of the hermetic order of the Golden Dawn's earliest members and a great source of recruitment is Irish poet and dramatist WB Yates. When Yates comes to London, he actually forms his own esoteric order, the Dublin hermetic order, which has no relation to the hermetic order of the Golden Dawn. He quickly becomes involved in Rosacrruianism and seeks election with the hermetic order of the Golden Dawn. He starts like everybody else in the outer circle as a neophite and he works his way up and he gets to the very highest echelon within the organization in a fairly quick period of time. He loved a bit of supernatural experimentation. His magical motto was demonstr which quite literally meant the devil is the reverse of God. He was an incredible calling card for the society. With WB Yates and his connections in the literary and theater community, Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn makes its way from being a haven for Freemasons to being a social networking society, albeit one devoted to self- betterment, enlightenment, and the theoretical underpinnings of magic. The Golden Dawn, unlike the other secret societies, they allow women. Another very important woman in the Golden Dawn is Florence Far. She was a actress. She was a playwright. She was a director. She loved the dressing up. She loved the rehearsal, the performance. This was all part of the magic discipline to her. And of course, there was Olivia Shakespeare who was a writer. And all of these, incidentally, were possibly the lovers of Yates. And another one, most famously the woman he was really in love with was the actress Maud Gon. It's hard to imagine that Wescott and McGregor Matthers and Woodman would ever have expected to see the influx of these kinds of names into their secret oathbound society. Nor would they have imagined the creative collaborations that came out of it. You do have to wonder though to what degree the people who are practicing this feel that they are actually doing genuine magic or are they simply putting on an interesting show?
By 1890, the Hermetic Order is brimming with literary and theater icons as well as prolific mystics and members of the London set. They are drawn in by word of mouth, having rubbed elbows with members at society events and other secret society meetings. But two prominent deaths are about to recalibrate the order's power dynamics. The first in 1890. Wescott receives a letter saying Anna Sprinkle has died. So their connection to the Secret Chiefs is gone. And so now they have to start looking at how they're going to handle this within the organization and who is going to be next in line to be able to access this information. A little over a year later, William Woodman, co-founder of the order, also passes away after a short illness. He names Wescott as successor to the leadership of the SRA and leaves a power vacuum at the helm of the hermetic order of the Golden Dawn. And that leaves Wescott and Mathers. Mathers seems to have been much more ambitious and scheming. Samuel Liddell McGregor Mats makes another grand gesture towards leadership. He claims to have been contacted personally by the order's secret chiefs. He is now the only one in contact with these ethereal beings. This is very convenient. There is no way to actually verify he's in contact with these spiritual beings. But having been the de facto leader of the Golden Dawn for almost 5 years, adepts have no real choice but to believe him. Your audience is so willing to believe at this stage what is the capacity for the human being to go beyond what appears to be reality. There is a real capacity to exploit the individual.
One of the first things McGregor Mats does to demonstrate his newfound power is to renovate the Isis Urina tomb to resemble Christian Rosenran's tomb. So in 1891 with the help of his wife Moina McGregor Mats builds a twocale replica of the Christian roads and CR tomb in the temple. In doing so he's paying homage to his roian past in the most overt way possible. But McGregor Mather's next move would sweeten the pot for Adepts, suspicious of his contact with the secret chiefs. After spending 9 months reviewing the hermetic order of the Golden Dawn's arcane teachings, eager adepts could now be initiated into the second order, where three new grades could be found. Adeptist Minor, Adeptus Major, and Adeptus Exemptus. These grades would give them hands-on experience and knowledge in the art of practical and ceremonial magic. Humans have been attempting divination for thousands of years and have used a variety of tools for that purpose. Everything from the endrails of an animal to the tea leaves at the bottom of a cup. The particular one that was of interest to the order was Cabala, which was a kind of numerology to look into texts, not for necessarily the content of those texts, but what secret numbers are concealed within the very words of those texts. The argument being that if you do that properly, all of the future can be laid right in front of you.
In 1892, McGregor Mats leaves London with wife Moa Mathers to start a third temple, which he calls a Hatherther after the Egyptian sky deity Hatherther. Mats thought Paris was apparently a cooler place to live. He was behaving sort of like an absentee king in some way over the lodges. The temple is founded with financing from Golden Dawn member Annie Hornman. Her family's legacy is the very famous in Southeast London, the Horny Man Museum. She was an extraordinary patron of the arts, I suppose you might describe her as, and certainly was one of the big money pots behind the Golden Dawn, and helped sustain it in many of its members who were pretty much on their uppers. Cuz I tell you what, magic didn't make you very much money. She's actually putting money into many different avenues for them and allowing them to have amazing wardrobe and props and all of these things. She has a lot of influence within the Golden Dawn and is able to hold her own with any of the men in the order. With Wescott left to run the ISIS urania temple, highranking members like Florence Bar and WB Yates continue their work in the Inner Order.
In 1896, William Wyn Wescott does something careless. Upon exiting a handsome cab, he leaves a number of important hermetic order of the Golden Dawn documents behind. They are found and given to local authorities. The higher up a person is held in esteem, the further they have to fall. He was a professional man and once apparently it leaked out that he was mixed up with a bunch of occult weirdos. His choice was to either lose his job or resign. At any rate, he was forced out. He left and that then left Samuel McGregor Mats. So Mats then appoints Florence Far to be his sort of deputy as he sees it in London. She doesn't seem to see it that way and thinks that really she's in charge of the much larger portion of the whole organization centered in England and that therefore she's more important than Mats is. What comes next is an attempt by McGregor Mats to secure his own authority. He sends a manuscript emphasizing that he is the sole leader of the hermetic order of the Golden Dawn. The order is a victim of its own success. Once it gets large enough to quote a yeetss poem, the center can no longer hold. In 1900, Florence Far delivers her resignation. In a letter to Wescott, whom she considers a friend, she describes the downward slide of the London Temple and says she'll stay until McGregor Mats finds a replacement. It's not that Florence Far isn't competent. She's a gifted stage actress and from the stories that come out a gifted magi as well, but a bureaucrat she's not.
With the Isis Urania Temple in disarray, the hermetic order of the Golden Dawn welcomes what would become one of their most infamous members, Alistister Crowley. A renowned mystic, a world wanderer, an occult phenomenon, and an embracer of the profane, Crowley is initiated into the temple of Isis Urania in the year 1900 with the motto per durabo Latin, for I will endure until the end. He's like every other human being. He's a mass of contradictions, and there are things to admire, and there are things to detest about him. Dear Edward Alexander, as he was initially known, was something of a spoiled young boy, came from a home that invested him with plenty of self-belief and lots of money. He was, of course, going to rebaptize himself, Alistister Crowley, still famous in the world of all that is occult and magic. He ends up as a precocious soul going to Cambridge, but he does not leave with a degree. He does have other things to his name. A love of chess, of mountaineering, and a firm conviction that everything in life is ephemeral, except for the pursuit of the tradition of magic. There were a lot of strong personalities in the order, but perhaps the strongest one was Alistister Crowley. He was seen as a person who had a lot of promise. But at the same time, there were other people in the order who had a difficult time with some of his activities, some of his behaviors. He seemed to be trying to take the order into a darker direction.
Over the course of a few months, Crowley settles into his new life as an adept of the hermetic order of the Golden Dawn. studying, taking tutorship from roommate and fellow Golden Dawn member Alan Bennett, and binging on drugs while performing Golden Dawn rituals like that of the Gisha in which he summoned demons. McGregor Matther seems to be quite starruck by Crowley, something that will bite him in the end. So destructive was Crowley that it led people to question whether this was in fact on purpose. Was he sent in as a kind of agent in order to destroy the group from within? It's Yates who lodges the objection to keep Crowley out of the inner lodge with McGregor Matthers unable to vote as he's in France and is one of the leaders of the ISIS Urana Temple. Crowley's initiation cannot take place without Yates's consent. To bypass Yates, Crowley goes to Paris where a willing Mathers inducts his proteéé in the inner order. And back in London, Yates can't stand Crowley. What they do is they launch an occult attack at this pretender of magic. Effectively, it's black magic. And according to Crowley, it seems to work because he declares that his rosy cross that he wears around his neck goes white. His rubber cape apparently bursts into flame, which is yes, defying science, and his horse keeps bolting at the sight of him. The placebo effect is extremely strong. If somebody casts a spell on you and you really believe it, there's a good chance you're really going to feel the effects of that spell. So, in that way, magic does have a reality to it.
Crowley finally returns to 36 Bllythe Road on the morning of April 17th, 1900. Crowley's come back with orders from Mathers to take back the temple. So he goes and gets the landlord to let him into the building and while he's in there has a locksmith change all the locks. Once inside, he proceeds to consecrate the vault with his own magic. He also finds the roll call paperwork in the temple and signs his name under the adeptist minor grade. When the other members of the order arrive and their keys don't work, they call the police. A constable arrives, but since the landlord is gone for the day, he can't tell who to kick out. Eventually, they all leave and Yates again calls the locksmith and has the locks changed once more. He does spells to reconsecrate the vault as it was before. That is until 2 days later. On April 19th, 1900, London adepts are summoned to 36 BL once more. This is known as the battle on Ble Road. Crowley dressed fullon in Scottish Highland regalia. So he's wearing a kilt and a sporin and he's got a big crusader's cross around his neck, a big black cross. And he's wearing an Egyptian Osiris mask and literally pushing the door in and shouting inside and he goes up the staircase. Now, the temple's on the main floor, but Yates is said to be sleeping upstairs, so he wants to confront him. So, he starts up the stairs, and Yates has two white magicians with him present. And they start to hurl words at Crowley. And Crowley starts to hurl words back. And now there's these magical words filling this temple. And somehow Cwley ends up getting knocked down the flight of stairs and falls and ends up getting up and he leaves in a huff and he's very angry. Cwley is using his magical accutramont to lend himself a moral authority in the hermetic order based on the symbology that the order believes in. Not to convince Yeets, but to convince the other members that he has the right to lead the temple and Yeetsz no longer does. And in this battle of psychology for the other members, Yeetsz ends the battle by pushing Cwley down the stairs. So as he's falling down the stairs with all of his mystical accuchants on, you can't see him as having any type of authority anymore. And that ends the confrontation and Cwley leaves. The London Order of the Golden Dawn actually sues Cwley for his actions. a court case that they end up winning. The money from the case is used to pay the rent for the temple for a couple of years. After the case, Cwley leaves the order and goes to New York City.
The internal wars and rivalries between the hermetic order of the Golden Dawn and its factions could only signal its demise. By 1939, it was completely dormant. Organizations like the Golden Dawn often have lofty aspirations that almost never materialize in reality. They almost always are imshed in what are petty personal disputes over ego and power. Crowley, although he loses interest in the Golden Dawn itself, which has effectively rejected him, he certainly hasn't lost interest in the pursuit of magical attainment, which he is going to pursue literally in all four corners of the earth. He goes to Mexico. You're going to find him any minute, climbing up the highest peak of the world, K2. He hangs out for a bit in Cairo. He channels some Pharaoh's advisor. He's going to write his rule of law. Then he's going to come back and he's going to rehash a lot of the teachings of the Golden Dawn that Mus had initially written down and formalized. And Mus is going to challenge him for plagiarism and he's going to do that unsuccessfully. This is very much Crowley asserting himself. He is ultimately an individualist. He's certainly not a team player and he's all about his own glorification in this extraordinary occult world of magic.
Though the legacies of its former members are undeniable, questions about what happened behind closed doors at the temple of Isis Urania remain. Were its members truly capable of magic? Did they have access to an ancient but universal knowledge that brought them to higher plains of consciousness? Now, the whole question about this later is whether there ever was an Anna Sprangle because no one's ever been able to demonstrate she ever existed or whether Wescott just made the whole thing up to give a backstory. But regardless of whether Wescott made it up or not, the Golden Dawn left this kind of oult image of what other people wanted to create later. A lot of our ideas of what a magician might look like, for example, draw very heavily from the way that Mathers composed himself and dressed himself. The idea of the evil dark magician is completely drawn from the character of Crowley. And in a more practical sense, things like tarot cards, which are still used today, were actually designed by order member Arthur Wait. The fact that it did last so briefly, if anything, just adds to the romanticism of it. And since the whole thing was sort of about mystery and romance to begin with, that played a big role in how it has maintained its hold in our zeitgeist.
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Heat. Heat.
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