The Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor taught by manuscript. Members received instruction papers, worked alone or in small groups, and the practical content, on the training of the will, on scrying, and on sexual practice, went further into technique than most contemporaries would put in writing. The material circulated in Britain, France and the United States in the mid 1880s and reached people who would matter later, including members of the Theosophical Society who were dissatisfied with its lack of practice.
The public phase ended in 1886, when the press established that Thomas Henry Burgoyne, the order's secretary, was Thomas Dalton, previously convicted of fraud. The order effectively dispersed in Britain, though its material continued to circulate and its French branch, under Papus and others, fed into the Martinist revival.
Its historical importance is out of proportion to its size and its lifespan. It supplied a working, practical, correspondence-taught system some years before the Golden Dawn, it transmitted Paschal Beverly Randolph's sexual material into European occultism, and that material reached Reuss and through him the reformed O.T.O. A great deal of what the twentieth century treated as the deep secret of Western magical orders can be traced to a short-lived body run by a man using a false name.