Fräulein Sprengel’s pronouns

Another story about a dodgy document

I’ve posted a couple of articles recently - here and here - dealing with surprising claims that someone has discovered a lost sacred text. I want to finish this series by looking at a final story which fits broadly into the same category. It is an interesting example of how discovery stories are built up and demolished.

The story that we are concerned with relates to an eccentric organisation called the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. This was an occult society: its members practised secret rituals in an attempt to advance their spiritual development and make contact with the divine. It seems to have been the first occult order of its kind to achieve any real success in modern times. It was founded in London in 1888 by a group of high-degree Freemasons, and its numerous members included famous figures from the worlds of literature and drama: William Butler Yates, Florence Farr, Algernon Blackwood, Maude Gonne, Annie Horniman and Arthur Machen. (There are various modern organisations that claim to be following in the Golden Dawn tradition, but the last group that descended directly from the original order closed in 1978.)

The Golden Dawn is clearly of interest to scholars of esotericism. One obvious question that a historian might ask is: where did it come from?

When reading what follows, you have to bear in mind that occultists are often deeply concerned with issues of legitimacy and lineage. People often don’t want to admit that they made up their particular esoteric society five minutes ago. It has to be the continuation of a tradition founded by the Knights Templar or the ancient Egyptian priesthood or whoever.

The official origin story of the Golden Dawn was that its principal founder, a doctor called William Westcott, discovered by chance a mysterious manuscript from which the order’s rituals were constructed. This document - which still survives - is generally known as the ‘Cipher MS’ because it was written in an old esoteric cipher.

Where Westcott got the Cipher MS from was never satisfactorily explained. The most romantic version of the story is that it was found among the wares of a bookseller on Farringdon Road in London. There is nothing inherently impossible about this. You sometimes do find strange things among second-hand books.

Westcott claimed that among the leaves of the Cipher MS was a paper containing the details of a senior German member of a Rosicrucian order. The Rosicrucians were a Christian esoteric movement that emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The movement started as a hoax, but by the 1880s the Rosicrucians were a fairly established part of the esoteric scene. It was not implausible that Westcott might have stumbled on a sect of German Rosicrucians.

The person named in the mysterious paper was identified by the magical motto Sapiens Dominabitur Astris - ‘the wise person will be ruled by the stars’ - but her mundane name was Fräulein Sprengel. At this point, the red flags start appearing. The phrase Sapiens Dominabitur Astris is an unusual one and not widely known. It is mediaeval in origin - but it had recently appeared in an occult book published in London. This was Anna Kingsford’s edition of Valentin Weigel’s Astrology Theologized, which went on sale in 1886. By another odd coincidence, Fräulein Sprengel turned out to have the forename Anna.

Westcott claimed that he used the information that he had found to write to Sprengel. The two occultists allegedly exchanged a series of letters, in which Sprengel gave Westcott permission to found an English branch of her Rosicrucian society. This became the Golden Dawn.

Could Westcott’s story be true? Maybe. Westcott was able to point to the letters, written in German, as evidence that he really had been in touch with somebody called Sprengel. He might have been telling the truth.

If we go back to the Cipher MS, however, more red flags appear. The contents of the document appear to draw on the practices of another Rosicrucian order, the Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia (SRIA). As its name suggests, the SRIA was an English organisation rather than a German one (although it had been influenced by an older German body, the Gold- und Rosenkreuzer). The SRIA itself had an unusual relationship with secret and conveniently discovered documents: a man named Robert Wentworth Little was said to have taken the order’s rituals from papers that he had found in Freemasons’ Hall in London. Westcott, as it happens, was a member of the SRIA. Another person who passed through the SRIA was an occultist called Kenneth Mackenzie, whose style of writing (or at least drawing) is said to appear in the Cipher MS. Mackenzie had died quite recently, in 1886.

The first mention of the existence of the Cipher MS appears in a letter written by Westcott in October 1887 to a collaborator of his, Samuel Mathers. Westcott made no mention of Sprengel or Germany in the letter. The manuscript itself was probably a relatively recent creation. It was written on paper watermarked with the year 1809; but we can safely say that its contents cannot predate the mid-nineteenth century. It links the 22 paths of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life to the 22 trumps of the Tarot, and no-one had thought to make this link prior to the French occultist Éliphas Lévi in 1856. Perhaps Sprengel and the German Rosicrucians had been reading Lévi? Well, possibly. But the provenance of the document can probably be narrowed down further. It contains a Latin name (‘Pereclinus de Faustis’) which appears to have been taken from a Masonic book published in 1877, the Royal Masonic Cyclopaedia. Guess who the editor of the Cyclopaedia was? The SRIA guy Kenneth Mackenzie.

The suspicion must be that Mackenzie wrote the Cipher MS, and that Westcott got hold of it from his estate after his death, made up the rest of the story, and forged the letters from Sprengel. There is reason to believe that Mackenzie had been intending to use the manuscript for another magical order (the ‘Society of Eight’) which never got off the ground.

Suspicions about the truth of Westcott’s account of the discovery of the manuscript and the correspondence with Sprengel are nothing new. In 1900, Samuel Mathers claimed that Westcott had fabricated the story. Westcott, who had by now been forced to distance himself from the Golden Dawn for career reasons, didn’t admit the allegation. But he also didn’t deny it.

Now might be a good time to mention that Westcott’s personal papers contain a billhead from the Hotel Marquardt in Stuttgart, where Sprengel allegedly lived.

Yet no-one could prove that Westcott had faked the Golden Dawn’s origin story. The evidence was all circumstantial. And Westcott’s narrative had a degree of plausibility. There was a Jewish Masonic lodge in nineteenth-century Germany called the Golden Dawn (Goldene Dämmerung). It even had a branch in England. There was a straw here, for those who wanted to clutch at it. Some true believers were still trying to defend Westcott’s version of events as late as the 1980s.

The final nail in the coffin of Westcott’s story came from an examination of the letters that he brandished as proof of his right to found the Golden Dawn: the five letters that Sprengel allegedly sent to him through her secretary, together with one further letter from another German Rosicrucian that gave news of Sprengel’s death.

The content of the letters is banal and seemingly contrived; but that proves nothing in itself. Sometimes people write banal letters. In the early 1970s, the esoteric historian Ellic Howe confirmed that the missives were written on genuine German paper. Westcott seems to have taken the trouble to get them translated by a German-speaker, one Albert Essinger, who was an employee of a company that he had invested in. The letters contain errors of spelling and grammar, including errors suggestive of English influence. But they are also written in a difficult Gothic script that Westcott is unlikely to have known.

The final, damning revelation came in 2011, when Christopher McIntosh, the leading historian of Rosicrucianism, examined the letters again. He noticed something that everyone had overlooked up to that point: Fräulein Anna Sprengel had used masculine grammatical forms to refer to herself.

Westcott had gone to the effort of obtaining genuine German paper and involving a German-speaker, probably Essinger, in forging the letters. But he hadn’t told that person that Sprengel was a woman.

This destroyed what was left of the possibility that Westcott was telling the truth. He was caught by a seemingly obvious detail that he had failed to check. The lesson is that committing yourself to writing is always a risk - and if you’re going to try to carry off a hoax, you’d better make sure that the obvious details are covered as well as the obscure ones.