From
1886 to 1918, a very influential New Thought periodical, The World’s Advance
Thought, describing itself as “the Avant-Courier of the New Dispensation”
was published in Portland by Lucy A. Rose Mallory, whom no less an admirer of
New Thought than Leo Tolstoy described as “the most important woman in America”.
In
1901, astrologer Llewellyn George founded both the Portland School of Astrology
and Llewellyn Publishing in Portland. Now located in Minnesota, Llewellyn
Worldwide has become the world’s largest publisher of New Age and occult books.
In
Pullen-Burry’s time, popular Rosicrucianism arose in the United States, and
took ready root in Portland. Max Heindel’s Rosicrucian Fellowship established a
group in Portland within months of the Fellowship’s founding in 1909. Public classes studying Heindel’s books met
regularly in the Portland public library. By 1923 The Triangle, a
periodical of Spencer Lewis’ AMORC, was able to report that in Portland “the
work is going on . . .with the usual enthusiasm”, and that the Imperator of the
Order would be visiting the Portland AMORC group for a week. Also in 1923, J C
F Grumbine relocated his Rosicrucian and mystical Order of the White Rose from
Cleveland to Portland, where it continued to operate until his death in 1938.
Azoth:
The Occult Magazine of America was edited from 1917 to 1921 by two consecutive Adept
Praemonstrators or chief teachers of the New York temple of the AO (the Mathers
loyalist branch of the Golden Dawn), firstly Michael Whitty and then (briefly)
Paul Foster Case. In August 1921, in the same issue in which Pullen-Burry
advertised his course of 123 mail-order lectures on Occultism, the magazine
posted its statement of ownership. One of the ten owners was William E. Lilie
of Vancouver, Washington USA, an integral part of the Portland metropolitan
area.
At
the Vernal equinox in 1920, a significant event transpired in Portland for
another Golden Dawn Adept, for it was here that William Butler Yeats, on a
lecture tour of America, received his famous samurai sword as a gift from Junto
Sato.
End
of Adam Forrest’s section; so back to Sally Davis who would like to comment
that although there isn’t any direct evidence for it, surely Henry must have
known most of the people Adam mentions; and most of the societies and
magazines.
Sources
and follow up for Adam Forrest’s section:
Chasing
Down Emma: see Marc Demarest’s blog on the history of spiritualism, at
ehbritten.blogspot.co.uk. Though you do
have to be patient!
Lucy
A Rose Mallory: a number of references to her on the web, and you can read
copies of her magazine The World’s Advance Thought at www.iapsop.com
Max
Heindel, writing name of Carl Louis von Grasshof. There’s a wikipedia page on him: 1865-1919,
born Denmark. Worked as an engineer for
the Cunard Line. Settled 1903 in Los
Angeles, joined the TS and studied astrology.
Author of several works on Rosicrucianism, particularly The
Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception (1909).
Important work with Rudolf Steiner.
Died 1919 in California.
Harvey
Spencer Lewis, also known as Sar Alden; and Wisar Spenle Cerve. There’s a wiki on him: 1883-1939. Author, commercial artist. Founder (1915) and first imperator of the
Ancient and Mystical Order Rosae Crucis (AMORC). I could see copies of the journal The
Triangle via google; all from the 1920s.
Jesse
Charles Fremont Grumbine; no wikipedia on him as yet. Upstate Cauldron: Eccentric Spiritual
Movements in Early New York State by Joscelyne Godwin. SUNY Press 2015: p253 Grumbine BD heads a
list of what looks like the teachers in an academy; as chair of metaphysics,
ontology and divinity. On p311 Cayuga is
listed as where Grumbine had his first ministry, in 1884 as clerk to the Universalist
Society. As founder of the Order of the
White Rose also known as the Order of Melchisedek.
At www.iapsop.com magazine The Rosicrucian
Brotherhood volume 2 number 8 July 1908 announced the founding of the
Ancient Order of Melchisedek, Brotherhood of Jesus.
I
noticed a very large number of publications by Grumbine on a wide range of
esoteric subjects including Auras and Colors; Clairvoyance; Clairaudience;
Spiritualism and Channeling; Psychometry and Psychic Skills - etc.
1910
Henry
appears on the US Census, living in Mr and Mrs Martin’s lodging house in
Multnomah, Portland Ward 4. This year,
for the first time, his entry in the British GMC also gave an address in
Portland - 247½ Fifth Street Portland.
Sources:
GMC
Register 1910
p217.
Via
Familysearch to US NARA 1910 census entries GS film number is 1375299:
household in Portland Ward 4,
Multnomah. Just noting that Henry was
still describing himself as married. The
census didn’t ask people their occupation, unfortunately.
JULY
1910
Henry
began offering private tuition in chemistry and natural philosophy.
Source:
Henry’s advert, in the Morning Oregonian 6 July 1910 p15 in the small
ads.
Comment
by Sally Davis: this is probably the point at which he gave up his job at the
saw mill, the last work he had (it would appear) in which he was an employee,
rather than self-employed.
DATE
DIFFICULT TO ESTABLISH BUT AFTER 1910, PROBABLY AFTER 1918
Henry
tried to make a living by selling typescripts of individual lectures from the
set of evening classes now at the Freemasons’ Library and catalogued there as
SRIA 1938m.
Sources:
Letter
from Henry to Michael Whitty, publisher of the occult magazine Azoth;
written 7 June 1919. You can read the
letter at www.heruraha.net, the Temple
of Thelema website. It and a series
Henry sent to Paul Foster Case were posted there in March 2010 by Jim Eshelman
who was able to see the original letters but doesn’t say where they are now; as
at March 2010 they hadn’t been published.
Set
of 4 volumes at the Freemasons’ Library in Covent Garden, catalogued as SRIA
1938m. In Volume 1: The Hermetics of the
Bible p67 a little note dated November [1920] says that copies of the lectures
contained in the volume could be bought for 25cents per lecture.
1912/1913
AND POSSIBLY LATER
Henry
was living at 311 East 48th Street Portland.
Source:
GMC Register 1913 p222.
Comment
by Sally Davis: I do find it curious that Henry was still wanting to be
registered with the British General Medical Council; because after many years
of rootlessness he had now found himself a niche in the USA. He continued to send in his details to the
GMC for its register until his death.
20
DECEMBER 1914; 3pm, Room 300 of the Alisky Building, Portland Oregon
Meeting
- possibly the first meeting - of a group calling itself Ekklesia Number 1 of
the Ekklesiae Autochristophysis. Henry
was an important member of this group; possibly its leader and founder. It still existed in 1920.
Sources:
announcement of the meeting, called a public “service”, in the Sunday
Oregonian of 20 December 1914; published Portland.
Source confirming
Henry’s involvement in the group: set of 4 volumes at the Freemasons’ Library
in Covent Garden, catalogued as SRIA 1938m.
In Volume 1: The Hermetics of the Bible, p1 and on the first page of
each lecture, a Mrs Helen Bailey of 251 West Broadway Portland is named as
honorary secretary of Ekklesia 1.
Lecture 67 p67 announced that the annual meeting of Ekklesia 1 would
take place on Sunday 21 November [1920] at the K P Hall at 409 Alder,
Portland.
?FROM
DECEMBER 1914 TO 1921 (though possibly not continuously)
Henry
gave a series of weekly lectures to the group known as Ekklesia 1 of the
Ekklesiae Autochristophysis. His
lectures were typed up and bound in the volumes now in the Freemasons’ Library
and catalogued as SRIA 1938m.
Sources:
the four volumes (one in two parts) SRIA 1938m.
Long
comment by Sally Davis on the four volumes of typescript now in the Freemasons’
Library as catalogue number SRIA 1938m.
This
is a monumental work: there are 1789 pages which contain 912,390-ish words; it’s
the result of research, astral travelling and writing by Henry over 35 years,
and meetings of one or more occult groups in Portland over eight years. Though I’m not sure what Henry intended when
Ekklesia 1 was set up in late 1914, by the time he was finishing off the last
of the volumes he did have a clear sense of what they were all for, a purpose
very much at the heart of the occult world of his times - and you can include
some at least of the GD members in that, he was not the only member writing
along the same lines. All the volumes
are laid out as a series of lectures, a set of evening classes in hermetics.
First
and second volumes of the four: The Hermetics of the Bible; and The Occultism
of the New Testament. Although they were
typed up during 1920, the lectures resulted from discussions and other work,
that Henry mentioned as having gone on several years before; so they were the
first set of classes he thought of.
Henry’s thesis was that the Bible is an occult text book, and its full
meaning will only be made clear if you read it as a Kabbalistic text. The Hermetics of the Bible concentrates on
the Old Testament, particularly the Book of Ezra, the Psalms especially 82 and
119, the causes and results of the Jewish captivity in Babylon, and a
Kabbalistic interpretation of the creation myth in Genesis. The Occultism of the New Testament focuses on
St John’s Gospel, and on what is predicted in it about the new Age in which
Henry now believed he was living.
Third
volume of the four, which is so big it’s in two parts: Science and Hermetic
Philosophy. Each lecture has a date on
it and the full set of lectures was delivered weekly between January 1918 and
May 1920. In it, Henry (I suppose
inadvertently) showed why he was no longer a practising doctor. He now hated the methods and the assumptions
- essentially the whole idea - of contemporary, mechanistic science; on the
grounds that it discounted the idea of the constantly re-born, ever-developing
soul; rejected the idea of god or gods; and suggested the descent of Homo
sapiens from apes. Henry hoped that the
new Age would bring forth a hermetic science, based on axiom verified by means
of astral travel to other realms and communication with their non-human
inhabitants, rather than hypothesis verified by observation and experiment; and
carried out by trained Adepts rather than scientists. In the two parts of the course, Henry argued
that evolution is not about species, but about souls. He believed that everything on this planet,
even rocks, had some form of consciousness and a soul, however basic and inert,
which could move forward - essentially upward through reincarnations in
ever-more-complex species - towards reincarnation in a human body, a particular
high point but not the last stage in a soul’s development. He also believed that elsewhere in the cosmos,
entities existed that were at a higher level of consciousness than humans. In Part 2 (begun in December 1918) Henry
concentrated on human biology and psychology and social organisation. The importance to Henry of the writings of
Heer Rose of The Hague is clear in it - Rose and the French advocate of
reincarnation Allan Kardec appear in Henry’s lis of the few people chosen to
receive some hints as to what the imminent next Age of history would consist
of. (Henry had read Kardec’s work
probably in the English translation made by GD member Anna Blackwell.) Rose and Kardec had been given their
information by what Henry describes as (Part 2 Lecture 89 p533) entities
representing the “great Cosmic Order of super-man souls...the Adepts of
spiritual science”. Science and Hermetic
Philosophy ends with a series of lectures on Death and After - what happens to
the soul after the death of its latest human body.
Henry
was aware of some at least of the most recent discoveries of materialist
science. In Part 1 Lecture 2, given
January 1918, p2 he said that “Substance...is matter in vibration” with
different substances vibrating at different rates - a description with
string-theory overtones; and he described the atom as an arrangement of
electrons in balance. He was also very
excited by the discovery of radium and X-rays; and by experiments with
spiritualist mediums: he was convinced that they provided evidence of the
continuation of the soul - of life after death.
However, most 19th and 20th-century science only
indicated to Henry how far Mankind had to go before the souls that inhabited
the human bodies of the contemporary world could move to any higher level of existence.
Fourth
and last volume: The Aquarian Age, lectures delivered by Henry between May 1920
and September 1921. These lectures make
clear - or clearer - what was now the purpose of Ekklesia 1 (I’m not at all
sure that its purpose at the outset was the same). Its members were not just students of
hermeticism listening to Henry as their occultist teacher. Henry now thought of himself as an Adept
successor to Heer Rose of The Hague, whom he now met regularly on his astral
travels. In Henry’s astral travelling
and other occult practices he had also met entities that had confirmed the
arrival of the Age of Aquarius and told him what would be the main differences
between it and its Piscean predecessor.
The people of Ekklesia 1 - the people listening to the lectures - were
to be trained as mediums and would use that training to find out more still
about the Aquarian Age. They would
communicate those findings to the public at large. The result would be the re-establishment of
the Golden Age of Ibez, a civilization that had existed first in the Mexican
Gult and later in the Pacific, around 1 million years ago; led by the group
known as the White Lodge who were now in charge of the rescue of Mankind from
the state it had got into when Ibez sank into the ocean. The lectures gave details of what Aquarian
society would be like; but warned the mediums-to-be of the dangers of the
Aquarian Age being prevented from taking root by the efforts of black magicians
in the world (by which Henry meant most scientists, and big business). He ended the whole great effort by denying
the Brotherhood of Man - as each soul has two unique parents, each human is an
only child-cum-soul - and proclaiming instead (Lecture 66 given September 1921,
p393) a “universal Father-Mother” of all souls.
How
typical Henry’s beliefs were, amongst occultists of the time, I really wouldn’t
know, I’m not an occultist myself although I gather from some that are, that
Henry’s views were not original. Other GD members (Ellen Gaskell for example)
certainly shared the conviction that the world was (at last) leaving the
Piscean Age of unquestioning monotheism and moving into the Aquarian Age of
religion based on knowledge: an age in which hermeticists would come in from
the margins to take their proper place at the centre of soul and social
development. Both Ellen Gaskell and
Henry thought of themselves as heralds of the Aquarian Age. It was, I think, how Henry had come to justify
to himself his desertion of his family; and his poverty and loss of social
status since: he had a higher purpose and could not expect reward in this life
- which, after all, was only the latest life of his soul’s progress through
reincarnation to another level of existence.
I
also wonder about whether Henry would still have counted himself as Christian
at this stage in his life. In Science
and Hermetic Philosophy and again in The Aquarian Age, he describes
Christianity as being degraded and commercialised and part of the problem not
the solution.
For
more on this business of the astrological ages:
Ibez
became most widely publicized as part of the Theosophical legends on Atlantis
and Lemuria in Alice Bailey's A Treatise on White Magic (1934). You can read
the relevant section online at:
http://www.light-weaver.com/bk/magic/magi1161.html
Alice
Bailey A Treatise on White Magic published 1934 in London by J M Watkins
and in New York by the Lucis Publishing Co.
For
some of the Theosophic teachings about Ibez with footnoted sources, try:
http://www.hiddenhistoryhumanity.com/8A%20Shamballa%20Mayans%20Brazil%206th%20RR%20I.htm
Comment
by Sally Davis on whether the Bible is a kabbalistic document. All I know about the Kabbalah is contained in
Kabbalah: A Very Short Introduction by Joseph Dan, Gershom Scholem
Professor of Kabbalah at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Published Oxford University Press 2007. On p13 Dan says that Jewish esotericism dates
from the first century CE and later; and (p6) that the “kabbalah...first
appeared in southern Europe in the last decades of the twelfth century”. The Sefer Yezira, much used by my GD members,
appears first (p17) in the Jewish European culture of the tenth century. Though most modern scholars assume that its
origins were third or fourth century, it’s in the absence of certain evidence
as no copies exist from that early.
BY
1919
Henry
had moved from East 48th Street Portland; though I don’t know where
he went to.
Medical
Register 1919
p147 with Henry’s address as “Portland Oregon USA”.
JUNE
1919
Henry
began to correspond with Michael Whitty; so he had found out about the
existence of the occult magazine Azoth.
The correspondence ended (as Henry no doubt hoped it would) with Henry
writing an article for the magazine.
Source:
letter from Henry to Michael Whitty, publisher of the occult magazine Azoth;
written 7 June 1919. You can read the
letter at www.heruraha.net, the Temple
of Thelema website. It and a series
Henry sent to Paul Foster Case were posted there in March 2010 by Jim Eshelman
who was able to see the original letters but doesn’t say where they are now; as
at March 2010 they hadn’t been published.
More
information on Azoth:
Azoth:
A Monthly Magazine Devoted to... Volume 7 numbers 1 to 6; and Volume 8 number 1. You can read volumes 7 and 8 at www.iapsop.com/archive/materials/azoth/
and there are a few more details about the magazine, which was published by the
Azoth Publishing Co Inc of Cooperstown New York, from 1917 to August 1921. Editor: Michael Whitty; sub-editor (by 1920)
Paul Foster Case; with specialist editors including Frank C Higgins, whose
specialism was freemasonry - works by Higgins are mentioned by Henry in one of
the volumes catalogued as SRIA 1938m.
Comment
by Sally Davis: I’m not sure how and when Henry found out about Azoth - I guess
he heard it on the American occult grapevine.
If he hadn’t known of its existence already, he would have learned
through Michael Whitty, that an offshoot of the Alpha and Omega Order (founded
by Samuel Liddell Mathers after he’d been expelled from the GD in 1900) existed
in New York - the Thoth Hermes Temple.
Whitty was its senior figure in the late 1910s, and his protégé Paul
Foster Case its rising star. Henry would
have found some familiar names amongst the writers who appeared in Azoth: as
well as Mathers, E W Berridge had items published in it. Whitty died late in 1920. There’s an obituary in Occult Review
volume 33 number 2 February 1921 p75 though it has virtually no coverage of
Whitty’s time in the USA. Whitty turns
out to have been English by birth (born 1862).
He was the grandson of the original Michael John Whitty, founder of the Liverpool
Daily Post.
JULY
1920 TO JANUARY 1921
Henry’s
article appeared in Azoth: Occult and Religious Symbolism.
Source:
see iapsop website details immediately above.
?AROUND
1920, 1921
Ekklesiae
Autochristophysis either morphed into or was taken over by a more dynamic
Portland-based group.
Source:
this is a bit of speculation by Adam Forrest, based on his knowledge of occult
activity in Portland Oregon in the years after the first World War and a
careful reading of the local sources for both groups.
BY
1921
The
Brotherhood of Atlantis and Ibez had been founded.
Sources,
both discovered by Adam P Forrest: Morning Oregonian of 20 March 1921,
obituary notice for Linus M Clark of 10½ 16th Street North,
Portland; who is described as a member of that Brotherhood. Source for Henry as another member of the
Brotherhood, possibly its leader after Clark’s death: announcement of Henry’s
funeral, in Oregonian 3 January 1927.
DECEMBER
1920 TO MID-1921 and possibly later but I couldn’t find evidence of later
Henry
corresponded with Paul Foster Case.
Comment
by Sally Davis: Henry’s letters to Whitty and to Foster Case are more or less
the only source for what he’d been doing in the years between 1898 and (say)
1908; and also the only source I know of for his comments on the struggles of
the GD in the late 1890s.
Source:
extracts from Henry’s letters (but not the replies), posted in March 2010 at www.heruraha.net, website of the Temple of
Thelema, by Jim Eshelman. Eshelman seems
to have been able to see the letters but doesn’t say where they are now; as at
March 2010 they hadn’t been published.
Eshelman had been intending to write an article on HPB as a 7=4; but the
set of letter-extracts were as near as he got to that.
For
further information on Paul Foster Case: wikipedia; and a timeline compiled by
Lee Moffitt and dated 26 September 1997 at
kcbventures.com/pfc/documents/timeline.pdf. Moffitt suggests that Foster Case was
grateful to be noticed by a member of the original GD - he felt it gave his
position at the Thoth Hermes Temple greater legitimacy - he had only been a
member of it for a few years when he took over as the Temple’s senior occultist
after Whitty’s death.
EARLY
1923
Henry
met Arthur Conan Doyle again, in Portland.
Conan Doyle found Henry much like he had been in the 1890s - “full of
Rosicrucian lore, and occult knowledge”.
The
Man who created Sherlock Holmes: the life and times of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle by Andrew Lycett. Weidenfeld and Nicolson 2007: p209-10; p210,
p423-26. Conan Doyle passed through
Portland during a lecture tour.
1925
Henry’s
book Qabalism was published.
Source:
Qabalism originally published by The Yogi Publication Society of
Chicago; available on demand now through Kessinger Legacy Reprints.
Comment
by Sally Davis: in his book, Henry puts forward a lot of the arguments that
figured in the lecture series volumes (SRIA 1938m). I did notice a couple of changes in his
thinking, though. In the Preface to Qabalism
he said that the Kabbalah is the secret wisdom of the White Lodge of the
Ibez civilization, and seemed to be trying to deny that the Jews had anything
to do with it other than uncomprehendingly passing the wisdom on, via the
Bible. Henry also included a chapter on
the life and work of Philo Judaeus; who was hardly mentioned in the SRIA 1938m
volumes. Henry did mention the mystical
writings of Heer Rose of The Hague; but only ever referred to 10 sephiroth,
rather than the 12 he suggested Heer Rose was advocating in the SRIA 1938m
volumes.
30
DECEMBER 1926
Henry
Pullen-Burry died of toxaemia in Multnomah Hospital. The soul that had occupied his body was
released to await its next rebirth.
Source:
Oregonian 3 January 1927: death and funeral announcement.
GMC
Register 1927
p168 had an entry for Henry Pullen-Burry for the last time. His address was given as 413 Goodnough
Buildings Portland. That’s not his
house, or at least I think not: it was the meeting place where Henry was
delivering his lecture series during 1920 and 1921.
AFTERMATH
- SRIA 1938m. How the volumes might have
come to end up in the Museum of Freemasonry in London.
All
the volumes have a name handwritten on the inside of the leather binding: “C C
Adams”. That’s Cecil Clare Adams
(1891-1963) son of the architect Henry Percy Adams of the London-based practice
Adams Holden and Pearson. After
Winchester and RMA Woolwich, in 1910 Cecil went into the Royal Engineers. He survived the first World War and the
second, being awarded the MC and retiring with the rank of Colonel. In 1917, during a tour of duty in Ontario
Canada, Cecil married Louisa Augusta Kirkpatrick. They had one child, Margaret Cecil Adams,
born back in England in 1921.
Cecil
had a lifelong interest in the occult.
In 1913 he was initiated into A E Waite’s Independent and Rectified
Rite. By the early 1920s he was a
freemason and member of Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia’s Metropolitan College;
from which so many of the GD’s original members had come, around 1888-89. He also joined the freemasons’ lodge Quatuor
Coronati 2076, founded in the late 1880s as a forum for the study of the
history and symbolism of freemasonry.
Though the demands of his profession meant that he couldn’t always
attend meetings of the SRIA or QC2076, he rose through the ranks in QC2076 and
served as its WM in 1940. In 1949 he was
paid the compliment of being asked to give the United Grand Lodge of England’s
annual Prestonian Lecture. The subject
of the lecture was always left to the chosen lecturer; Cecil spoke about Our
Oldest Lodge.
All
in all then, a likely reader of lectures on the Kabbala and the Aquarian
Age. Quite how Cecil found out about
Henry’s sets of lectures I don’t know; perhaps he stumbled across Azoth, the
first issues of which were published while he was stationed in Canada; or
perhaps he knew through IRR friends of the existence of the Thoth-Hermes Temple
and went to Canada with letters of introduction. Somehow, he got plugged into occult circles
in the US, and eventually bought what is probably a full set of the lectures
Henry gave to his Ekklesia 1 between 1918 and 1921. It was probably Cecil that had the
typescripts bound in leather; and in due course either he or his heirs gave them
to the SRIA, where they are now part of its library at the FML.
Sources
for Cecil Clare Adams: see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ for Cecil’s father and
www.mallandain.com/rf.fulcher.mathieson.htm,
for his father’s affair with Cecil’s step-mother Alice Mathieson whom he
married in 1898 when her divorce came through.
Familysearch
Ontario Marriages 1869-1927 now housed at Toronto, GS film number 002130760
There’s
an obitiary in Royal Engineers’ Journal published by the Institution of
Royal Engineers; volume 77 1963 p318.
Initiation
into the Independent and Rectified Rite: RAG p174 C C Adams, taking the motto
Verum exquiro.
For
SRIA: I looked at the Metropolitan College’s Transactions of 1920-25;
edited by W John Songhurst and privately printed. The issue of 1921 p17-18; issue of 1922
p30-31; and issue of 1924 p20 show Cecil beginning to progress up the ranks of
the College’s officers towards spending a year as its Celebrant. However he doesn’t appear in the issue of
1924, presumably because he had been posted abroad. He was still a member though (p64), at level
Vº. He also appeared in the issue of
1925 p57 as VIIº.
Quatuor
Coronati 2076: via google to Ars Quatuor Coronati 2076 volume 52 1941
p283 Cecil C Adams as the previous year’s WM, installing the coming year’s
one.
His
lecture: at public.76465.fr01.ikeepincloud.com a list of those giving the UGLE’s
Prestonian Lecture.
Either
Cecil Adams was lending his copies around, or there were other copies of some
of Henry’s lectures in circulation in London in the 1920s. In the Gerald Yorke collection there are some
notes by Dr Carnegie Dickson on that part of The Hermetics of the Bible which
covers Genesis chapter 1, the creation story days 1 to 3 (but not 4 to 6); and
on the earlier part of The Occultism of the New Testament, where Henry
considers St John’s gospel up to the end of its chapter 5.
Source:
Gerald Yorke Collection NS32, notebook at least partly used by Carnegie
Dickson.
Comment
by Sally Davis: Carnegie Dickson was the son of Dr George Dickson who was a
member of the GD in Edinburgh in the 1890s.
Carnegie Dickson was initiated into the GD’s daughter order Stella
Matutina in July 1909. Stella Matutina
suffered in the years after its founder, Dr Robert William Felkin, emigrated to
New Zealand; but was revived by Carnegie Dickson and other London-based members
in the 1920s.
Sources:
RAG
p41, p142, p165.
Gerald
Yorke Collection of GD and Crowley papers, now at the Warburg Institute
University of London. Catalogue number
NS32: Notebook used by Rev A H E Lee and Dr Carnegie Dickson. Carnegie Dickson’s notes of Hermetics of the
Bible Lectures 34 to 44; and notes on part of The Occultism of the New
Testament.
BASIC
SOURCES I USED for all Golden Dawn members.
Membership
of the Golden Dawn: The Golden Dawn Companion by R A Gilbert. Northampton: The Aquarian Press 1986. Between pages 125 and 175, Gilbert lists the
names, initiation dates and addresses of all those people who became members of
the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn or its many daughter Orders between 1888
and 1914. The list is based on the
Golden Dawn’s administrative records and its Members’ Roll - the large piece of
parchment on which all
new
members signed their name at their initiation.
All this information had been inherited by Gilbert but it’s now in the
Freemasons’ Library at the United Grand Lodge of England building on Great
Queen Street Covent Garden. Please note,
though, that the records of the Amen-Ra Temple in Edinburgh were destroyed in
1900/01. I have recently (July 2014)
discovered that some records of the Horus Temple at Bradford have survived,
though most have not; however those that have survived are not yet accessible
to the public.
For
the history of the GD during the 1890s I usually use Ellic Howe’s The
Magicians of the Golden Dawn: A Documentary History of a Magical Order
1887-1923. Published Routledge and
Kegan Paul 1972. Foreword by Gerald
Yorke. Howe is a historian of printing
rather than of magic; he also makes no claims to be a magician himself, or even
an occultist. He has no axe to grind.
Family
history: freebmd; ancestry.co.uk (census and probate); findmypast.co.uk;
familysearch; Burke’s Peerage and Baronetage; Burke’s Landed Gentry; Armorial
Families; thepeerage.com; and a wide variety of family trees on the web.
Famous-people
sources: mostly about men, of course, but very useful even for the female
members of GD. Oxford Dictionary of
National Biography. Who Was Who. Times
Digital Archive.
Useful
source for business and legal information: London Gazette and its Scottish
counterpart Edinburgh Gazette. Now easy
to find (with the right search information) on the web.
Catalogues:
British Library; Freemasons’ Library.
Wikipedia;
Google; Google Books - my three best resources.
I also used other web pages, but with some caution, as - from the
historian’s point of view - they vary in quality a great deal.
Copyright
SALLY DAVIS
12
September 2015
Find
the web pages of Roger Wright and Sally Davis, including my list of people
initiated into the Order of the Golden Dawn between 1888 and 1901, at:
www.wrightanddavis.co.uk
***