Alison Butler's Victorian Occultism and the Making of Modern Magic, Invoking Tradition, published by the academic press Palgrave Macmillan, is a scholarly history of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and its ritual practice. Its authority rests on standard academic peer review and on Butler's method of tracing Golden Dawn ritual language and structure to identifiable published sources the order's founders actually drew on, rather than accepting the order's own claim of a secret unbroken lineage. Its strength is precisely that documentary tracing, which lets a reader see where a given ritual element actually came from. Its limit is scope: it is a study of one specific order's origins and sourcing within the broader Victorian occult revival, not a comprehensive history of every related tradition the revival touched.
Facts
Assessment
Reliability Tier1
Alison Butler's Victorian Occultism and the Making of Modern Magic, Invoking Tradition, published by the academic press Palgrave Macmillan in 2011, is standard peer reviewed academic scholarship, the top tier reflecting Butler's documentary method of tracing Golden Dawn ritual language to identifiable published sources, notwithstanding that its scope is one specific order's origins rather than the wider Victorian occult revival. NotesTraces Golden Dawn ritual to identifiable published sources rather than to a secret lineage.
Citation
AuthorAlison Butler
PublisherPalgrave Macmillan
Publication Year2011
Source Typeacademic monograph
Claims Backed By This Source (14 claims)
This source backs 14 claims across the atlas. As facts: 9 well-attested. Plus 5 entities citing it as a general reference with no single fact or relationship attached.
Disposition By Topic
- Sources, 7 claims: 7 well-attested.
- Esoteric Texts, 2 claims: 1 well-attested, 1 general references.
- Historical Figures, 2 claims: 2 general references.
- Subcategories, 2 claims: 1 well-attested, 1 general references.
- Secret Societies, 1 claims: 1 general references.
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