For two decades Westcott held one of Victorian London's more public offices, coroner for the north east of the metropolis, presiding over inquests on drownings, factory deaths and murders, while simultaneously running, under the motto Sapere Aude, a secret order teaching kabbalah and ritual magic. The two lives were kept in strict parallel: by day the careful medical bureaucrat, author of a standard work on suicide statistics; by night Supreme Magus of the Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia and a founding chief of the Golden Dawn.
In 1897 they touched. Papers relating to the order were, by accident or by malice, brought to the attention of his superiors, and Westcott recorded that he was given to understand it did not become a coroner of the crown to be also a magician. He chose the coronership, resigning his Golden Dawn offices, though he retained the SRIA and his masonic research work, and the order passed fully into Mathers' hands, with consequences that unfolded in the schisms that followed. The episode is the neatest surviving illustration of the social contract of Victorian occultism: respectable men could pursue the occult seriously provided the pursuit stayed invisible, and the sanction for visibility was professional rather than legal. Westcott ended his days in South Africa, still writing on the kabbalah, a man who had chosen, when forced, the daylight career, and kept the other flame quietly burning.