Introduction 1 a New Order
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Notes Introduction 1. Alex Owen, The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 120. 2. Corinna Treitel, A Science for the Soul: Occultism and the Genesis of the German Modern (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 3–4. Such scientists included Karl Friedrich Zöller, a well-respected professor of astrophysics at the University of Leipzig, physicists William Edward Weber and Gustav Theodor Fechner, mathematician Wilhelm Scheibner and the psychologist Wilhelm Wundt. 3. Owen, The Place of Enchantment. 4. Treitel, A Science for the Soul. 5. David Allen Harvey, Beyond Enlightenment: Occultism and Politics in Modern France (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2005). 6. For a thorough discussion of the struggle by historians to establish the enchanted nature of the modern see Michael Saler ‘Modernity and Enchantment: A Historiographic Review,’ American Historical Review, 2006 111 (3): 629–716. 7. Nicola Bown, ‘Esoteric Selves and Magical Minds,’ History Workshop Journal, 2006 61 (1): 281–7, 284, 286. Similar criticism comes from Michael Saler. Michael Saler, review of The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern, by Alex Owen, American Historical Review 2005 110 (3): 871–2, 872. 1 A New Order 1. R.A. Gilbert, Revelations of the Golden Dawn: The Rise and Fall of a Magical Order (London: Quantum, 1997), 34. 2. Gilbert, Revelations, 45. 3. Ellic Howe, The Magicians of the Golden Dawn: A Documentary History of a Magical Order 1887–1923 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972; York Beach, Maine: Samuel Weiser, 1978). Gilbert, Revelations. 4. Howe, Magicians of the Golden Dawn, 36. 5. Antoine Faivre, Access to Western Esotericism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 90. 6. William Wynn Westcott, ‘Data of the History of the Rosicrucians’, in The Magical Mason. Forgotten Hermetic Writings of William Wynn Westcott, Physician and Magus. Ed. R.A. Gilbert (Wellingborough: Aquarian Press, 1983), 39. 7. Westcott, ‘Data of the History of the Rosicrucians’, 34–5. 8. Howe, Magicians of the Golden Dawn, 8–9. 9. In her biography of Mathers, Ithell Colquhoun, however, does not argue that this account is true as she also offers the explanation that Westcott 183 184 Notes may have manufactured them. Ithell Colquhoun, Sword of Wisdom. MacGregor Mathers and ‘The Golden Dawn’ (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1975), 77. 10. Colquhoun, Sword of Wisdom, 75. 11. Howe, Magicians of the Golden Dawn, 2. 12. Howe, Magicians of the Golden Dawn, 5–25. 13. Colquhoun, Sword of Wisdom, 68–9. 14. Howe, Magicians of the Golden Dawn, 39 and Francis King, Modern Ritual Magic. The Rise of Western Occultism (Bridport, Dorset: Prism, 1989), 48. 15. Moina MacGregor Mathers, introduction to S.L. MacGregor Mathers’ Kabbala Denudata: The Kabbalah Unveiled (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., Ltd., 1926), xii. 16. Howe claims that not even the most determined genealogist could have established Mathers’ descent from the Macgregors of Glenstrae. Howe, Magicians of the Golden Dawn, 39. 17. Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, Practical Instruction in Infantry Campaigning Exercise (London: City of London Publishing Company, 1884). 18. Mathers, The Fall of Granada: A Poem in Six Duans (London: Williams and Strahan, 1885). 19. Colquhoun, Sword of Wisdom, 73–4. 20. The publisher, George Redway, acquired the copyright of other works by Mathers, including Fortune-telling Cards. The Tarot, its Occult Significance and Methods of Play, 1888, and The Key of Solomon the King: Clavicula Salomonis, 1889. Redway paid Mathers £35 for the copyright of The Kabbalah Unveiled. Howe, Magicians of the Golden Dawn, 41. 21. For a complete account of these internal conflicts see Howe, Magicians of the Golden Dawn, 110–38. For a detailed discussion of the particular nature of Horniman’s discontent see Alex Owen, The Place of Enchantment, 101–3. 22. William Wynn Westcott, A letter to Frederick Leigh Gardner as cited in Howe, Magicians of the Golden Dawn, 165. 23. Mathers, Letter to Florence Farr, Howe, Magicians of the Golden Dawn, 210. 24. Owen, Place of Enchantment, 79. 25. Gilbert, Revelations, 37. 26. Mathers, The Grimoire of Armadel, Ed. Francis King (New York: Samuel Weiser, 1980). King gained access to the original manuscript through the collection of Gerald Yorke and it now rests in the library of the Warburg Institute. 27. Owen, Place of Enchantment, 83. 28. Colquhoun, Sword of Wisdom, 94–5. 29. Colquhoun, Sword of Wisdom, 273. 30. Westcott, ‘The Golden Dawn’s Official History Lecture’ in Francis King’s Modern Ritual Magic, 217. 31. Golden Dawn member Frederick Leigh Gardner produced a catalogue of the Westcott Hermetic Library. This catalogue is reprinted in George Mills Harper, Yeats’s Golden Dawn (London: MacMillan Press, 1974), 290–305. 32. Howe, Magicians of the Golden Dawn, 44. 33. John Watkins in Colquhoun, Sword of Wisdom, 172. Notes 185 2 A New Magic 1. Wouter J. Hanegraaff, New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1990), 390. 2. James Hankins, Plato in the Italian Renaissance (Leiden, New York: E.J. Brill, 1990; 1994), 282. 3. See D.P. Walker’s monumental work on Ficinian magic, Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella (London: Warburg Institute, 1958; Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 1975). 4. Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic, 52. 5. Hanegraaff proposes that Renaissance esotericism is made up of six com- ponents. These are the two philosophical traditions, Neoplatonism and Hermeticism, three traditional sciences of astrology, alchemy and magic, and one current of theosophical speculation, cabala. Hanegraaff, New Age Religion and Western Culture, 388. 6. Gershom Scholem provides the most comprehensive and exemplary schol- arship on Jewish cabala and its historical transmission in his Kabbalah (New York: Quadrangle, 1974). 7. Scholem, Kabbalah, 182. 8. Scholem, Kabbalah, 182. 9. Scholem, Kabbalah, 183–4. 10. Scholem, Kabbalah, 197 and Frances A. Yates, The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), 19. 11. Pico della Mirandola, Conclusions 9.9 and 9.13 in Syncretism in the West: Pico’s 900 Theses (1486) The Evolution of Traditional Religious and Philosophical Systems, trans. S.A. Farmer (Tempe, Arizona: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1998). 12. Eugenio Garin, Astrology in the Renaissance. The Zodiac of Life, trans. Carolyn Jackson and June Allen. Revised by Clare Robertson (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983), 44 and 45. 13. Yates, The Occult Philosophy, 20. 14. Moshe Idel in his introduction to Johannes Reuchlin’s On the Art of the Kabbalah De Arte Cabalistica, trans. Martin and Sarah Goodman (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993), vii and G. Lloyd Jones in his introduc- tion to Johannes Reuchlin’s On the Art of the Kabbalah De Arte Cabalistica, trans. Martin and Sarah Goodman (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993), 10. 15. For the best biographies on Agrippa see Charles Nauert’s Agrippa and the Crisis of Renaissance Thought (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1965) and Marc van der Poel’s Cornelius Agrippa, The Humanist Theologian and his Declamations (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1997). 16. Nauert, Agrippa and the Crisis of Renaissance Thought, 231. 17. Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, De Occulta Philosophia. Three Books of Occult Philosophy, ed. Donald Tyson (St Paul: Llewellyn Press, 1992), Book One, chapter LX. 18. Agrippa, De Occulta Philosophia, Book Two, chapter XLII. 19. Agrippa, De Occulta Philosophia Book Three, chapter XXXII and XXXIII. 20. Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, 1604 edition, ed. Michael Keefer (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 1991), 1.i.118–19. Interestingly, 186 Notes one of the two magicians Faustus claims won him over to the practice of magic is named Cornelius. 21. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus, the 1818 text (London: W. Pickering, 1993), 22. 22. Agrippa, Three Books of Occult Philosophy, ed. Donald Tyson (St Paul: Llewellyn Press, 1992). 23. Percy Bysshe Shelley, St. Irvyne, or the Rosicrucian (London: J.J. Stockdale, 1811). Edward Bulwer-Lytton Zanoni (London: Saunders & Otley, 1842). For a fascinating discussion of the theme of Rosicrucianism in literature see chapter 11, ‘The Rosicrucian Adept in Literature’ in Christopher McIntosh, The Rosicrucians: The History, Mythology, and Rituals of an Esoteric Order (York Beach, Maine: Samuel Weiser, 1997). 24. Israel Regardie, The Golden Dawn, first edition (Aries Press, 1937–40); sixth edition (St. Paul: Llewellyn Publications, 1997). 25. Regardie, The Golden Dawn, introduction to the first edition. 26. Francis King, Ritual Magic of the Golden Dawn (Rochester, Vermont: Destiny Books, 1997); originally published as Astral Projection, ritual magic, and alchemy (London: Spearman, 1971). 27. R.G. Torrens, The Secret Rituals of the Golden Dawn (Wellingborough: Aquarian Press, 1973). 28. The Complete Golden Dawn Cipher Manuscript, ed. and trans. Darcy Küntz (Edmonds, WA: Holmes Publishing Group, 1996). 29. The Complete Golden Dawn Cipher Manuscript. 30. R.A. Gilbert, The Golden Dawn Companion. A Guide to the History, Structure and Workings of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. (Wellingborough: Aquarian Press, 1986), 176–98. 31. See Harper’s Yeats’s Golden Dawn for how Yeats’s work was affected by Golden Dawn magic and symbolism. 32. Howe, Magicians of the Golden Dawn; Gilbert, Golden Dawn Companion; Gilbert, Revelations. 33. Gilbert, Revelations, 29. 34. Ellic Howe, private letter to Gerald Yorke, MS 2, Yorke Collection. 35. Howe, Magicians of the Golden Dawn, 27; Joscelyn Godwin, The Theosophical Enlightenment (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 362. 36. Howe, Magicians of the Golden Dawn, 58. 37. The Complete Golden Dawn Cipher Manuscript. 38. Torrens, Secret Rituals of the Golden Dawn, 87. 39. William Wynn Westcott, private letter to F.L. Gardner, 1912, MS 2, Yorke Collection. 40. Gilbert, Revelations, 45–6. 41. Regardie, The Golden Dawn, 53–5. 42.