Reviewed by David Brizer
The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn:
Magic Arts and the Occult Revival
by Felix John Taylor
Thames & Hudson
April 2026, 304 pages, ISBN-13: 978-0500029183, 279 pp.
These were millennials of an entirely different stripe: wizards, mages, would-be alchemists, all reaching for the stars, concentrated largely in Britain, France, and the United States, around the turn of the twentieth century. To this day, some are cultural icons, the rest are beloved fixtures in the firmament of metaphysical dabblers and curiosity-seekers everywhere. Aleister Crowley; William Butler Yeats; Rudolf Steiner; Madame Helena Blavatsky…luminaries of spirit journeys, of summonings, of kabbalistic hasty puddings.
They joined magickal societies, participated in elaborate highly stylized rituals to contact disincarnate astral entities, archangels and demons; they elaborated their workings in public lectures, broadsides, in a treasure trove of literature and graphic art, of turn-of-the-century millennialism, apocalyptic foreboding, and more than occasional shafts of intuition and light.
Who were they? Infused with the temper of the times, with zeal based on syncretic interpretations of Freemasonry, Rosicrucianism, world mythology and religion, people like Alphonse Louis Constant (aka ‘Eliphas Levi’), Papus, Franz Bardon, and Violet Firth (aka ‘Dion Fortune’) wrote books, staged rituals, and captured the imaginations of millions, even to this day, the world over.
Felix John Taylor, in The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, aptly identifies sources of the metaphysical thrill that coursed through readers and wannabe participants of magickal workings. (‘Magick’ being a medieval rendering of ‘magic’, later popularized by Crowley in his tome, Magick in Theory and Practice.) Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s novel Zanoni, about an ancient immortal master who gives up eternal life for human love, catalyzed and popularized the quest of hermetic seekers. Zanoniis a suitable preface to occult societies like Order of the Golden Dawn (1888 – 1908) and its American, Los Angeles-based counterpart, Builders of the Adytum (B.O.T.A.,1922 – present day.) Golden Dawn, as well as B.O.T.A., offered correspondence courses-incantations by mail-with which aspirants could scale the kabbalistic Tree of Life, station by station, to achieve various hermetic grades.
Much of the writing and instruction was brilliant, spooky, consisting of a latter-day conflation of alchemical elements, kabbalistic Sephiroth (centers of consciousness and energy), and recondite Tarot symbolism. Authors of these tracts went to the best universities, were awesome scholars, and jump started their essays into the au-dela with sumptuous, sometimes gorgeous prose. (Zanoni, Aleister Crowley’s. novel Diary of a Drug Fiend, and Joris-Karl Huysman’s novel La-Bas are excellent launch pads for the curious to start.)
Felix John Taylor achieves a grand academic sweep of the field. His Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn: Magic Arts and the Occult Revival is a work of prodigious scholarship, tracing in minute detail the origins, the rivalries, the infighting inherent to magickal team building. Chapters are devoted to the Celtic devotions of Yeats; the often archaic perorations of Arthur Edward Waite; the fictions of fantasy tale-spinner Arthur Machen; to the artwork of Aubrey Beardsley and Pamela Coleman Smith. (Smith’s otherworldly drawings were foundational to Tarot card packs, used to this day.) Felix John Taylor is a scholar, masterly, inclusive; his chapters on bête noir Aleister Crowley, and deeply readable Dion Fortune, are citation-heavy footnotes to a tradition of literary legerdemain and flamboyance.
Partisans of the arcane will tell you which books (‘Grimoires’, translation ‘grammars’) inspired their devotion to the occult. The dogma and ritual of hermetic ‘science’ take off from Yoga-inspired practices like deep breathing, active imagination, and a process of what is best described as a process of self-exaltation. Armed with magickal weapons, aided by Hebrew, Latin, and neologistic ‘words of power’, occult aspirants draw down spirit familiars and extravasations of chakra energy, by means of self-induced trance states.
Reading Eliphas Levi, Dion Fortune, Paul Foster Case is an education in comparative mythology. Their reflections on tarot and kabbalah symbolism are avatars of J.G. Frazer’s Golden Bough, and its more contemporary incarnation Joseph Campbell’s Hero With a Thousand Faces. In modern popular literature, The Secret, Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code, the works of Paulo Coehlo and Umberto Eco, commit the same [grievous] felony: they promise the world, the light, thegodhead, but invariably leave the reader hungry for resolution…What is the meaning of life? Are there higher worlds? Where does individual consciousness end and ‘collective unconscious’ begin?
So many referents, so many names and pathways..Felix John Taylor doesn’t spare the impressionistic reader, his book is chock full of historical detail and minutiae. Taylor’s historical microscope is all-seeing, replete with wry commentary, terrific full-page illustrations, and page upon page of citations.
But his Golden Dawn misses the heart and soul of the thing. Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn promises a full-scale exposition of the art and literature of modern hermeticism, but doesn’t convey the excitement and audacity of the magickal thinkers and their work. Readers might gladly sacrifice the overly inclusive exposition for a more impassioned consideration. The occult trope is endlessly fascinating, inspirational, more often than not the convergence of many vectors of inspired writing and art. A more exuberant literary criticism, on the order of say, Edmund Wilson, highlighting the snaky and rococo spins of Waite, Crowley, Fortune, Israel Regardie, the others, would have served Taylor’s aims better. Further, his painfully detailed narratives of origins, rivalries, and backbiting in the occult societies could have been more accessibly detailed in graphic form, by means of genealogical/organizational tables and charts. Mention of Himalayan explorer/Victorian shaman and author Alexandra David-Neel would have been welcome as well.
Taylor’s book will be a delight to poetasters of the arcane. Taylor’s erudite excavations parallel some of the pitfalls of the occult schools themselves: Don’t get hung up on gematria, on numerology, on individual formulae…The aim of magickal societies is to suffuse the mind of acolytes with living spirit, with multi-sensory passion, in order to explore the further reaches of personal and collective unconscious. We would like to know if Felix John Taylor’s extensive research at the British Museum, and elsewhere, ever caught his soul on fire.
About the reviewer: David Brizer’s novel The Secret Doctrine of V.H. Rand, about the trials of an occult stumblebum, in the uproarious company of Rudolf Steiner, Eliphas Levi, Madame Blavatsky, was published by Fomite in 2023. His work appears in AGNI, Exacting Clam, Typo, Calliope, Rain Taxi, Compulsive Reader, Another Chicago, Vol 1 Brooklyn.