Currently available to stream on Apple TV is a six-part documentary series – Secret Societies: In the Shadows – exploring the history of clandestine brotherhoods from the Knights Templar to the Freemasons. The subject of its final episode is the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, described as: ‘A society that included Bram Stoker, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and H. P. Lovecraft as a members [sic]’. What do these three names have in common? All were writers known for supernatural themes. All were responsible for popularising certain kinds of genre fiction and for the invention of characters now embedded in pop culture (Dracula, Sherlock Holmes, and, well, Cthulhu?). But far more crucial to the subject of the documentary, there is no evidence whatsoever that any of them were members of the Golden Dawn.
The Order of the Golden Dawn was a society of ritual magic operating in its original form in Britain during the 1890s. Ruled by a triad of Secret Chiefs, members studied a synthetic blend of alchemical symbolism, Kabbalah, tarot, astrology, and Egyptian magic. Women were permitted to join (unlike Freemasonry) and its membership was generally middle class, many of them doctors, lawyers, clergymen (one or two), and bored theosophists. But part of the GD’s reputation as an exotic Victorian undergrowth can be pinned down to the writers and artists who entered its ranks. W. B. Yeats was initiated into the Isis-Urania Temple in 1891 and remained within the society for over twenty-five years. The ‘wickedest man in the world’ Aleister Crowley joined in 1898 but was expelled during the rift of 1900 for very bad behaviour. The society’s brief and explosive existence, attracting rumour and scandal, has meant that the idea of the GD has become a magnet for falsities and fictions. Surely it was a secret society, and theoretically anyone could have been a member? Surely it makes sense for a writer of gothic fiction – if others such as Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood were known members – to have ties to such a group? But the society kept detailed records of the names and addresses of its students. William W. Westcott, a London coroner and freemason, seemed even to have enjoyed the administrative labour. It is therefore possible to know with a great deal of certainty who was in the GD, where they lived, and to which Temple they belonged.
Which is why, as perfectly coherent as the intermingling of Dracula and an occult society might sound, Bram Stoker was unlikely to have been a student of the GD. It is true that he knew several members quite well: the artist Pamela Colman Smith (who illustrated Stoker’s Lair of the White Worm in 1911), the Irish writer Constance Wilde (wife of Oscar, and a very early initiate), and the lawyer John Brodie-Innes, head of the Amen-Ra Temple in Edinburgh for most of the 1890s. Brodie-Innes dedicated his novel The Devil’s Mistress to Stoker in 1915. Conceivably Stoker might have been privy to the GD’s activities – he may even have been asked to join – but even if he was exposed to its inner workings he never sought, or was granted, membership.
Arthur Conan Doyle, writer, spiritualist, and psychic investigator almost was a member. Medical doctor Henry B. Pullen Burry tried to recruit him in 1898, an episode Conan Doyle related in an article for Pearson’s Magazine over twenty years later:
Pullen Bury was the name. He was a student of the occult, and my curiosity was aroused by learning that he had one room in his house which no one entered except himself, as it was reserved for mystic and philosophic purposes … Finding that I was interested in such subjects, Dr. Bury suggested one day that I should join a secret society of esoteric students. The dialogue between us ran somewhat thus : –-
‘What shall I get from it?’
‘In time, you will get powers.’
‘What sort of powers?’
‘They are powers which people would call supernatural. They are perfectly natural, but they are got by knowledge of deeper forces of nature.’
‘If they are good, why should not everyone know of them?’
‘They would be capable of great abuse in the wrong hands.’
Conan Doyle was eventually satisfied with Pullen Burry’s answers because he allowed the doctor to ‘go ahead with the next step, whatever it may be’. He was awakened in the early morning a few days later by a ‘queer and disagreeable’ tingling like an electric shock. Pullen Burry then visited him with the news that he had passed examination: ‘Now you must say definitely whether you will go on with it. You can’t take it up and drop it’. Realising that the GD would actually require serious study and dedication from him, Conan Doyle politely declined the offer.
As for the writer of weird tales H. P. Lovecraft, he was born in 1890 and lived most of his life in Providence, Rhode Island. Any knowledge of the GD would have come to him obliquely from the pages of Arthur Machen’s Things Near and Far (1923) in which Machen briefly recalls his time in ‘the Twilight Star’, but Lovecraft cannot have known what society was being described. He valued the supernatural stories of Algernon Blackwood, whose novel The Human Chord made use of genuine occult practices. Of course Lovecraft’s own fiction is populated by cults subservient to his pantheon of Elder Gods (the Esoteric Order of Dagon in ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’, for example), and later occultists such as Kenneth Grant reckoned that Lovecraft had himself been initiated into a New England witch cult (again, without a shred of real evidence), which may be why his name is here associated with the GD. By the 1920s there were several US-based Temples, but Lovecraft was not the type to know about these, let alone make contact with them. At this point, given that HPL documented his life meticulously in journals and multi-page letters to friends and family, it is a lazy assertion to claim him as a member of the Golden Dawn.
Several other ‘pseudo-members’ appear now and again – creatives who were active during the 1890s and early 1900s and who often moved in the same circles as GD students. These include Sax Rohmer (creator of the supervillain Fu Manchu) and Edith Nesbit (children’s author and Fabian). The latter especially is an example of how a rumour can evolve into the guise of established fact; now that Alex Owen, in her magisterial survey of the British occult revival The Place of Enchantment (2004), has Nesbit as a member, this rumour has become impossible to dispel. Their names often crop up in asides or as part of biographical entries. For historians of the GD (I suppose that includes me in a roundabout way), these unresearched slips are annoyances, but I’ve come to enjoy spotting these shadow recruits, these spurious spagyrists. Besides, the society itself was founded on fiction, its origin story partly inspired by Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s 1842 novel Zanoni. Isn’t it kind of appropriate for the Golden Dawn to continue generating its own myth?
Reading list:
R. A. Gilbert, The Golden Dawn Companion (Thoth Publications, 2021)
Barbara Belford, Bram Stoker: A Biography of the Author of Dracula (New York: Knopf, 1996)
Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘Early Psychic Experiences’, Pearson’s Magazine (March 1924), 203-210
Alex Owen, The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern (University of Chicago Press, 2004)
Kenneth Grant, The Magical Revival (Muller, 1972)
A good investigation into Edith Nesbit and the Golden Dawn by Phil Hine