The Golden Dawn Scrapbook: The Rise and Fall of a Magical Order

R. A. Gilbert is a historian of Western esotericism, and this Samuel Weiser book is his scholarly history of the rise and fall of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the influential late nineteenth century magical order. Its strength is that Gilbert worked from the order's own surviving documents and correspondence as a specialist historian of the movement, giving the account real documentary grounding rather than repeating esoteric legend uncritically. Its limit is that it is a history of one specific order's institutional rise and collapse, so a claim about the wider ceremonial magic tradition the Golden Dawn drew on, or about the later organizations descended from it, needs a source with that broader scope.