SRIA

The Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia is the small Masonic study society in which the Golden Dawn was incubated. It still exists, and it has never been more than a few hundred members, but for the history on this map it is the hinge.

It was founded in London in 1867 by Robert Wentworth Little, a clerk at Freemasons' Hall, who said he had found old Rosicrucian papers in the archives there. Kenneth Mackenzie, an occult scholar with a fondness for improving a story, added that he had been received into the order by German Rosicrucians on the Continent. Neither claim can be checked, and neither needs to be. What the founders actually had was the literature of the Golden and Rosy Cross, and from it they took the nine-grade ladder from Zelator to Magus, grouped into three orders, with a Supreme Magus at the top. Membership was restricted to Master Masons in good standing who professed the Christian faith. The novelist Bulwer-Lytton, whose Zanoni had done more for the Rosicrucian myth than any manifesto, was persuaded to become Grand Patron.

It was not a magical order. Members met in colleges to hear papers on Kabbalah, alchemy, Hermetic philosophy and the history of the Rosicrucians, and to work a set of simple grade ceremonies. Mackenzie's Royal Masonic Cyclopaedia of 1877 gives a fair picture of its intellectual furniture. The society's importance lies in who sat in the room. William Robert Woodman, a physician, became Supreme Magus in 1878. William Wynn Westcott, a coroner and Hermetic scholar, was Secretary General. Samuel Liddell Mathers, a young man with no income and a genius for ritual, joined in 1882 and read a paper on the Kabbalah the following year.

Those three were the founders of the Golden Dawn. In 1887 Westcott produced a set of cipher manuscripts, which he said had come to him from the papers of a deceased Mason, and which sketched five grade rituals in an outline that matched the SRIA's own. Mathers wrote them up into full ceremonies. Westcott supplied a German Rosicrucian adept, Anna Sprengel, whose letters authorised the new order and who was later shown never to have existed. In March 1888 the Isis-Urania Temple opened, with Woodman, Westcott and Mathers as its chiefs and the SRIA's nine grades as its structure.

The new order did what the SRIA could not. It admitted women, it admitted non-Masons, and it practised: ritual, Kabbalistic meditation, divination, skrying, ceremonial magic, all of it taught by grade. The SRIA had been a reading room. The Golden Dawn was a laboratory built with the same blueprint.

The society carried on quietly, with Westcott as Supreme Magus from 1891 until his death, and it exists today in England, Scotland, America and elsewhere, still requiring Masonic membership and still reading papers. On this map it matters for one reason: it is the room in which the Rosicrucian ladder, the Masonic habit of secrecy and grade, and the Christian Kabbalah of Knorr and Lévi were held together long enough for three men to decide they could build something larger. Everything on the Golden Dawn side of modern occultism comes through that door.