Crowley took his impending initiation into the Golden Dawn very seriously; he asked Baker if anyone had died during the ritual. It came around on 18 November 1898, in Mark Masons’ Hall, 64-65 Great Queen Street, Covent Garden.1 The vast Masonic edifice that now stands there, dominating the street in its strangely inconspicuous way, only dates from 1927-33. The previous building that Crowley knew was completed in 1869: part of the façade survives together with the ‘Tavern’ portion, both now part of the Connaught Rooms, where the banqueting rooms from the 1869 building are now the Grand Hall.
Cowley was initiated as a Neophyte of the Isis-Urania Temple, taking the name Perdurabo (“I shall endure”) but he found it an anti-climax. Having sworn the aspirant to Masonic-style secrecy, whereby the slightest breach of his oath would incur “a deadly and hostile current of will, set in motion by the Greatly Honoured Chiefs of the Second Order, by the which I should fall slain or paralysed, as if blasted by the lightning flash”, they then entrusted him with the Hebrew alphabet, the names of the planets and their attribution to days of the week, and some very basic Kabbalah. This, he thought, was fourth-form schoolboy stuff.
Nor did the membership impress him: instead of the Sanctuary of Saints they were “an abject assemblage of nonentities… as vulgar and commonplace as any other set of average people.” Crowley was not the first person to be struck by this: Maud Gonne, the beautiful and aristocratic Irish woman adored by Yeats, thought they were “the very essence of British middle-class dullness”. Talking to Baker and Jones, they saw his point of view, but told him not to be too hasty. This was only the Outer Order, and he hadn't yet seen the Second Order.
The Golden Dawn was divided into eleven grades in three Orders. Members of the Outer Order were largely restricted to theory, and after Neophyte the grades went up through Zelator, Theoricus, Practicus, and Philosophus.
From Philosophus one could proceed to the Second Order. After the theory of the Outer Order, members of the more secretive Second Order were instructed in the actual practice of ceremonial and ritual magic, and Mathers named it the Ordo Rosae Rubeae et Aureae Crucis (the Order of the Rose of Ruby and Cross of Gold) or the R.R. et A.C. for short: this had three further grades, Adeptus Minor, Adeptus Major, and Adeptus Exemptus. Between 1894-96 the R.R. et A.C. Second Order met at 62 Oakley Square, a rather gloomy location north of Euston (not far from Westcott's house) and by the time of Crowley's initiation Second Order activities were held at 36 Blythe Road, Hammersmith.
The Second Order was ruled by three Adeptus Exemptus chiefs: Mathers, Westcott, and the non-existent Anna Sprengel. Above the Second Order, across the ‘Abyss’, were three further theoretical grades of Magister Templi, Magus, and Ipsissimus, but these were almost super-human beings. Ultimately the authority came from the Secret Chiefs, who existed largely on the astral plane and only interfered in human affairs occasionally, somewhat like the Hidden Masters of Theosophy.