Abstract
The magical legacy left behind by Victorian occultists was formulated from a hodge-podge of esoteric subjects. Some of these had become closely entwined much earlier in the history of Western magic while others were brought into the fold during the nineteenth century owing to the efforts of British and French occultists including Golden Dawn chief, Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers. Victorian magic is heavily reliant upon the idea of invented tradition. The various esoteric traditions incorporated into late nineteenth-century occultism were very much influenced by this process and Golden Dawn magic itself was the result of its creators engaging in the practice of inventing tradition. Part of this practice involved the most striking characteristic of Western magic, its reliance on the method of synthesis. The close relationship between magic and synthesis and magic and invented tradition dates back centuries, and is witnessed most significantly during the days of the Renaissance magi. In order to understand the importance of this synthesis and invented tradition in the formulation of Victorian occultism, we must look to the origins of this process. Leaving nineteenth-century Britain for the moment we must now examine the Western magical tradition inherited by Victorian occultists so we can better understand the building blocks of British magic.
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Notes
R.A. Gilbert, Revelations of the Golden Dawn: The Rise and Fall of a Magical Order (London: Quantum, 1997), 34.
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.
Antoine Faivre, Access to Western Esotericism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 90.
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.
In her biography of Mathers, Ithell Colquhoun, however, does not argue that this account is true as she also offers the explanation that Westcott may have manufactured them. Ithell Colquhoun, Sword of Wisdom. MacGregor Mathers and ‘The Golden Dawn’ (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1975), 77.
Howe, Magicians of the Golden Dawn, 39 and Francis King, Modern Ritual Magic. The Rise of Western Occultism (Bridport, Dorset: Prism, 1989), 48.
Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, Practical Instruction in Infantry Campaigning Exercise (London: City of London Publishing Company, 1884).
Mathers, The Fall of Granada: A Poem in Six Duans (London: Williams and Strahan, 1885).
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.
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.
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© 2011 Alison Butler
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Butler, A. (2011). A New Magic. In: Victorian Occultism and the Making of Modern Magic. Palgrave Historical Studies in Witchcraft and Magic. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230294707_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230294707_2
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