Jones and Baker agreed Crowley was a sincere aspirant after the mysteries, and that it was time to introduce him to what Jones later described as a “club”; a place to socialise and meet one's friends. This club was The Order of the Golden Dawn; probably the most influential magical order there has ever been. Although it had a fairly large membership it managed to be a discreet, semi-secret society, and unlike Theosophy it looked to the Western hermetic tradition rather than the East, giving its members a grounding in astral projection, Kabbalah, tarot, alchemy, visualisation, and ceremonial magic. It was quasi-Masonic but unlike conventional Masonic orders it admitted women on equal terms, and its members included W.B. Yeats, Maud Gonne, Arthur Machen, tea heiress Annie Horniman, actress Florence Farr, Oscar Wilde's wife Constance, and the writer Algernon Blackwood.
It was founded in 1888 by three men with Masonic backgrounds and esoteric, Rosicrucian interests: London coroner Dr William Wynn Westcott, who lived at 396 Camden Road;1 retired doctor Dr William Robert Woodman, who lived at 28 Greville Road, Maida Vale; and Samuel Liddell ‘MacGregor’ Mathers, who was effectively a professional occultist and relied on the support of patrons, notably Annie Horniman. He had lived in Great Percy Street, near King's Cross; and at Stent Lodge, Forest Hill, near the Horniman Museum (where W.B. Yeats visited him, as remembered in his 1901 essay ‘Magic’); but by the time Crowley knew him he and his wife Moina were based in Paris.
The Golden Dawn began with a manuscript, known as the Cipher Manuscript, that somehow came into the hands of Westcott in 1887; the best known version of the story says he got it from the Reverend A.F.A. Woodford, an elderly clergyman, who allegedly found it on the once legendary Farringdon Road pavement book market. This was a goldmine for old books and manuscripts, and hung on in very reduced form until 1994.2
More recent research suggests the Cipher Manuscript came to Westcott among the posthumous papers of Kenneth Mackenzie (1833-1886), an eminent Freemason, and that Mackenzie had written it himself (in which case the prime foundational site of the Golden Dawn might be considered Mackenzie's house out in Isleworth, the long-ago demolished 4 Wellington Villas on Wellington Road, now the A3603). Mackenzie was a man of considerable scholarship, whose works include a book on Burma and a well-respected encyclopaedia of Masonry (although his interests also included spiritualism and astrology: he had an astrological system for picking horse-race winners, and like Mathers he lived in near-poverty). He had met with the influential French occultist Eliphas Levi in Paris and, probably inspired by Levi, his magical pseudonym was Baphometus, after the alleged idol of the Templars.
The cipher was not difficult to read, and Westcott recognised that it was based on an artificial alphabet found in Johann Trithemius's Polygraphiae, first published in 1518. It contained skeletal rituals with a Masonic flavour for something called the Golden Dawn, so Westcott asked Mathers – who had a genius for such things – to flesh them out into workable rituals. They also invited Woodman to be the third chief, and in 1888 the three of them had the business up and running.
Westcott apparently found a further leaf of old paper in the manuscript, which mentioned a high-ranking German adept, a Fraulein Sprengel; members of her order took magical mottoes as their names, and Sprengel was Soror Sapiens Dominabitur Astris. There was even an address where she could be reached. Westcott wrote, and in due course received a series of letters from her secretary, a Frater In Utroque Fidelis, establishing the GD's heritage as the British branch of a long-established continental occult order. By June 1890 she had authorised a charter, establishing an Isis-Urania Temple No.3 of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn – but then, sadly, a letter in different handwriting, from a Frater Ex Uno Disce Omnes, announced that she had died, so further enquiries were unfortunately impossible.
No one now believes this story, and on various grounds – bad German, for one – it is considered to be a hoax: a magnificently fertile hoax, almost certainly by Westcott himself, building on Mackenzie's manuscript. Nevertheless, it is the version of the story that Crowley himself knew and told (“a cipher manuscript was found on a bookstall by a Dr Woodman, a colleague in magical study of Dr W. Wynn Westcott”), giving the whole business a material origin, a solid bricks-and-mortar reference (“there is nothing dishonest about the Farringdon Road, except its inhabitants”). And so the Farringdon Road holds its place in the foundational myth of the Golden Dawn.
The Golden Dawn has been described as W.B. Yeats’ “church and university”, and much the same could be said of Crowley. Yeats also said that although some of the Golden Dawn material was “obvious and melodramatic”, and in this it “resembled Masonic rituals”, there was “much that I thought beautiful and profound.” And Arthur Machen writes “it was a stumer – or stumed – to use a very old English word…3 Its originators must have had some knowledge of Freemasonry; but, so ingeniously was this occult fraud ‘put upon the market’ that, to the best of my belief, the flotation remains a mystery to this day. But what an entertaining mystery; and, after all, it did nobody any harm.”