Anonymous ID: 716884 May 9, 2018, 6:51 a.m. No.1347807   🗄️.is đź”—kun   >>7952 >>7975 >>8073

NZ has quite the occult history… interesting read

 

https://www.noted.co.nz/currently/history/strange-magic-a-history-of-nzs-own-school-of-witchcraft/

 

It’s against this backdrop we find William Westcott eagerly examining an encrypted manuscript that has fallen into his hands. A medical doctor and Crown coroner, Westcott is also a Freemason and studious occultist able to decipher the strange code. In the papers, he finds an address for the mysterious (so mysterious some people believe he made her up) Anna Sprengel, who is supposedly a secret chief in an ultra-underground German sect. They begin to correspond and Sprengel instructs Westcott to form a ceremonial magical society, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.

 

For a few short years, the Golden Dawn flourishes. Nobel Prize-winning poet W.B. Yeats and novelist/occultist Aleister Crowley are among its members; temples are built; there are meetings, robes and incantations; there is ceremonial drug use and the summoning of angelic beings – enough carry-on to keep the scriptwriters and novelists of the next century in material for years. Then comes internal bickering, plus an embarrassing and very public court case (involving conmen, stolen papers and a charge of statutory rape), until in 1902 the Golden Dawn falls apart, splintering into different groups.