Founding the Golden Dawn

In 1887 Westcott presented Woodman and Mathers with a set of enciphered manuscripts, since known as the Cipher Manuscripts, containing outlines of a graded system of ritual initiation. Their origin was and remains disputed: Westcott claimed a chain of transmission through a German contact named Anna Sprengel that most historians now treat as unverifiable or fabricated, while the manuscripts' actual content drew recognizably on earlier Rosicrucian and Masonic material the three founders already knew well. Whatever their true origin, the three men used the manuscripts as the charter for a new order, and in 1888 they founded the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in London, with Woodman, Westcott and Mathers standing as its three Chiefs.

Woodman brought institutional legitimacy and Kabbalistic learning to the new order, though he took a less active hand in its day to day direction and ritual writing than Mathers did. He continued serving simultaneously as Supreme Magus of the Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia until his death on 20 December 1891, only three years into the Golden Dawn's existence, after which Westcott and Mathers carried the order forward without him through its most influential decade.