The Secret Chiefs

The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was founded in 1888 on two documents. The first was a manuscript in cipher containing outlines of initiation rituals and a scheme of grades. The second was a correspondence with a German adept, referred to as Fraulein Sprengel, said to have been reached through an address found with the manuscript, who authorised the founders to establish a temple in England.

The correspondence was the warrant. Without it the order was three London Freemasons with an interesting document; with it, they were a chartered branch of a continuing tradition. William Wynn Westcott produced the letters, and Samuel Liddell Mathers wrote most of the rituals out of the cipher material and a great deal of additional reading.

In 1900 the arrangement came apart. Mathers wrote that the Sprengel letters had been fabricated by Westcott, and Westcott withdrew from the order. Mathers, having removed one warrant, asserted another, claiming his own direct contact with the Secret Chiefs, and members who would not accept it deposed him. Aleister Crowley, then a junior member, took Mathers side in the immediate quarrel and later advanced a claim of his own on a different basis. Historians of the order, working from the surviving papers, treat the Sprengel correspondence as a fabrication, and the cipher manuscript itself as nineteenth century rather than ancient.

The device is older than the order that made it famous. The Rosicrucian manifestos of the early seventeenth century announced an invisible college of adepts who could not be found by anyone who went looking, and the pattern recurs whenever a group needs to explain where a body of knowledge came from without producing a teacher who can be interviewed. Theosophy Mahatmas are the same shape, and so are the several later claims of contact made by leaders of magical orders in the twentieth century.

What it does institutionally is specific. Authority located in an unverifiable source cannot be adjudicated, so a dispute between two people who both claim it has no evidentiary resolution: it can only be settled by which claim the membership finds persuasive, or by separation. That is why the schisms in this tradition have the character they do, with each fragment claiming the true succession and none able to demonstrate it.

The device also protects a teaching from ordinary criticism, since an objection can always be met by saying that the objector does not have access. Scholars of Western esotericism generally treat that as its main function and read the Secret Chiefs as an authority-conferring literary convention rather than as a claim to be tested. Practitioners have read it otherwise, and some have interpreted the Chiefs as inner or psychological realities rather than as men living somewhere, which changes the claim considerably without abandoning the term.