Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers

Mathers did the work. Whatever the order's founding fiction, the rituals, the grade structure, the Rose Cross and the elaborate synthesis of Kabbalah, tarot, astrology, geomancy and Enochian material into one graded curriculum are largely his construction, and they have outlasted every organisation that has carried them.

He was also a translator of real consequence, though an uneven one. His Kabbalah Unveiled (1887) works from Knorr von Rosenroth's Latin rather than the Aramaic, which limits it. His Key of Solomon (1889) and Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage (1898) put grimoire material into English for the first time in a usable form. The Abramelin translation in particular shaped a century of practice, Crowley organised his entire early magical career around its operation, and it was made from a single defective French manuscript in Paris rather than from the older and fuller German originals, a limitation not generally known to the people who worked the system from it.

The titles are a different matter. He styled himself MacGregor and later Comte de Glenstrae, claiming Highland Jacobite descent; the family was not Highland and the county title has no basis. Like Westcott's German adept, it is a claimed authority with nothing behind it, and it belongs in the record next to the genuine achievement rather than instead of it. His autocracy and the disputed authority of his own Secret Chiefs broke the order apart in 1900.

Strip away the tartan and the titles and Mathers' concrete legacy is a shelf of translations that furnished the modern occult library. The Kabbalah Unveiled, his 1887 Englishing of Knorr von Rosenroth's Latin Kabbala Denudata, gave anglophone occultism its working text of three Zoharic treatises, wrapped in an introduction whose diagrams and vocabulary a century of students absorbed. The Key of Solomon the King, edited from British Museum manuscripts in 1889, standardised the most famous grimoire's pentacles and preparations.

The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage, translated in 1897 from a French manuscript in the Arsenal library, taught a method, the long retreat to attain the knowledge and conversation of the guardian angel, that Crowley placed at the centre of his own system; Mathers could not know that his French exemplar was a flawed and abridged descendant of fuller German texts, so the version that shaped a tradition preserves the manuscript's errors, including corrupted word squares that later editions repair. He also assembled the Golden Dawn's own curriculum, welding kabbalah, tarot, geomancy, alchemy and Enochian material into a single graded synthesis whose tables of correspondences remain the lingua franca of Western magic. Whatever is thought of Mathers as a chief, as translator and synthesist he decided, more than any contemporary, which books the revival would actually read.