The Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor was an esoteric order of the 1880s that stood apart from its contemporaries in two ways: it was avowedly practical, and it worked by correspondence.
Practical occultism at a distance
Active from the early 1880s and associated with Max Theon, Peter Davidson and Thomas Henry Burgoyne, the brotherhood taught a system of practical occultism, including training it described as the development of inner powers, and claimed descent from older hidden traditions. Unlike the ceremonial lodges that would soon follow, it emphasised individual practice transmitted through mailed instruction to members in Britain, the United States and elsewhere, an early instance of the mail-order mystery school.
Small, brief and consequential
The brotherhood was short-lived as an organisation and was damaged by scandal surrounding Burgoyne, but its influence outran its size. Its teachings, particularly on inner development and on sexual magic, fed into later currents, and figures connected with it carried its ideas into subsequent movements, including the work of Theon in France and the wider reception of its written material. It is remembered less as an institution than as a channel through which a particular strand of practical occultism entered the modern Western esoteric mainstream shortly before the founding of the Golden Dawn.