The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn: Magic Arts & the Occult Revival, published by Thames & Hudson (see Bookshop.org or Amazon). The Golden Dawn was a secret society operating in 1890s London which taught its students magic in the Western hermetic tradition. Its membership included artists, poets, actors, and novelists such as W. B. Yeats, Arthur Machen, Florence Farr, and Aleister Crowley, making it one of the most unconventional ‘arts clubs’ to have ever existed. Occultism inspired many of these individuals’ work, and as the Golden Dawn split into various warring factions, new generations of writers and artists responded in turn.
‘A cornucopia of a book, luxuriating in magical art and literature’ – Phil Baker, TLS
‘A lucid and useful study of the relationship between the modern ceremonial magic of the Golden Dawn tradition and the literary arts’ – Ronald Hutton, author of Triumph of the Moon
‘Taylor does an admirable job of depicting this largely forgotten subculture’ – New Criterion
‘For all their eccentricities, the adepts of the Golden Dawn tapped into extraordinary creative energies, and Taylor’s account of their activities is wildly enjoyable’ – The Spectator
‘A fascinating tour of the explosion of ritual magic in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and the extraordinary associated flowering of creativity and imagination that shaped the way we think about the occult today’ – Fiona Robertson, author of Stone Lands.
Weird: A Life of Arthur Machen in Six Unearthly Books, published by Yale University Press (coming January 2027), is a reappraisal of the supernatural writer and pioneer of the ‘weird tale’ Arthur Machen and the first biography for over thirty years. Machen’s distinctive style and unusual interests (occultism, the Holy Grail, Neolithic ‘fairies’), his membership in the Golden Dawn and unwitting invention of the Angel of Mons legend during the First World War, make him a fascinating subject. For a writer immersed in the writing, editing, translating and cataloguing of strange and controversial books, what better way to approach Machen than through five of his famous works — and a sixth, the biography written of Machen when he was still very much alive?
Recent articles:
‘Works of Initiation’, Fortean Times (August 2026)
‘Glad Rags at Dawn’, Literary Review (April 2026)
‘Lovecraft and Wales’, Lovecraft Annual 19 (2025)
‘Machen and The Sword of Wisdom’, Faunus 50 (Winter 2024)