The Forged Charter of the Golden Dawn

The Cipher Manuscripts are the sixty-odd folios, written in a simple substitution cipher (a Renaissance figure-alphabet found in a work of Trithemius), that sketch the grade structure and outline rituals from which the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was built in 1888. Their origin is the founding puzzle of the order. William Wynn Westcott, a London coroner and Freemason, said he had obtained them among the papers of a deceased brother, deciphered them, and found among them the address of a German adept, Fraulein Anna Sprengel, whose supposed correspondence granted him the authority to found the order.

Scholarship, notably the work assembled by Ellic Howe and followed by later historians, has concluded that the Sprengel letters were forged, almost certainly by Westcott himself, to supply the new order with a continental pedigree it did not have: another instance of the recurring pattern by which an esoteric body manufactures an ancient warrant. The manuscripts themselves are genuine documents of the 1870s or 1880s; it is the charter of authority attached to them that was fabricated. S. L. MacGregor Mathers then expanded the terse outlines into the full rituals.