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Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome to Unexplained with me your host, Richard McLain Smith. For each week we explore another true tale of high strangeness. If you're new here and you're a fan of expertly told atmospheric stories about the strange and unexplained, then you've come to the right place, and please subscribe to the show if you haven't already done so. I'm very excited to be taking Unexplained to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival this year. I'll be performing at the Space's Surgeons Hall venue at ten oh five pm every night from August seventh to the twenty ninth, except for the sixteenth and twenty third. You can get tickets at THESPACEUK dot com. Forward Slash shows Ford Slash twenty twenty six, Ford Slash Unexplained hyphen Live. For those watching on YouTube, you can find the link below. With all that out of the way, this is Unexplained, Season nine, Episode twenty eight Laughter Cracking through the Walls. It's late in the evening of November eighth, eighteen ninety five, down at the Physics Institute of the Julius Maximilians University of Wurtzburg. Fifty year old physicist Wilhelm Runtgen is hard at work. For the past few weeks, he's been tinkering with a cathode tube. The tube itself is simple enough to describe, a sealed glass cylinder with almost all the air sucked out of it and a metal plate fixed at each end. Rentgun connects one plate to the negative element of a rudimentary battery and the other to the positive and completes the circuit through an induction coil. Then, after turning off the lights, he throws the switch inside the tube. With nothing left to get in its way. An invisible stream leaps across the near vacuum from the negative plate toward the positive one, what physicists have taken to calling a cat cathode ray, but what it actually consists of is still as yet unknown. The glass starts to glow faintly, as if it had suddenly decided to come alive. Then something even stranger begins to happen. Bntgun catches it out at the corner of his eye, some distance away, much further than a cathode ray could possibly reach. A small screen coated in barium platinum cyanide is glowing a luminescent green. Confused, Rentgun covers the cathode tube with sheets of black cardboard, but the screen still glows. He wraps another and then another around it, but still nothing reduces that strange, eerie glow. He moves the screen further away, but nothing changes. He puts a thick book between the tube and the screen, a thousand pages of paper, more than enough to stop any light that he knows of, but still the screen keeps glow. Then Brongan holds up his own hand in front of the catho tube and stares in utter amazement at what has just appeared on the screen, the inner architecture of himself, the bones of his fingers moving when he moves them. Wilhelm Rogan has just discovered the X ray. For the next six weeks, Brogan tells no one about his discovery, not his colleagues, not even his wife. When she finally presses him to tell her what he's become so preoccupied with, he gives her the only honest answer he has that if he told people what he'd discovered, they would say he'd gone completely mad. So he stays in the dark alone, running the same tests again and again, checking and rechecking, a result that he can barely bring himself to believe. When at lasts he writes the phenomenon up, he doesn't even dare give it a proper name, it is so strange and incomprehensible. He names it simply X, the mathematic symbol for a quantity that is yet to be solved. In truth, what he's discovered, though he doesn't yet have the language for it, constitutes a whole being punched clean through the Victorian idea of a solid, visible universe. Within months, the rest of the world will be forced through that same hole, forced to accept that the air carries invisible waves, that matter gives off energy that nobody can see, and that even the human body is not quite the solid, determinate thing that most might have it be. It would be almost two decades before anyone proved what the X ray actually was, a radioactive wave of light too short for any human eye to see. But Rundgan's discovery had set in motion an earth shattering paradigm shift in our understanding of the universe, which would ultimately lead to the birth of quantum mechanics. Meanwhile, in London, at almost exactly this same moment, a rather different set of investigators were embarking on a set of experiments of their own, a loose brotherhood and sisterhood of poets, actors, doctors and mystics who never once doubted that the true architecture of the universe lay hidden behind the visible one. Much like Urgan, they too believed that all they needed was the right instrument or the right ritual to bring it into view. They had no catho tube and no barium platinum cyanide coated screen. What they had instead was a mysterious magical cipher, a stranger's letters, and an unshakable conviction that if he could just speak the right words into the dark in the right order, something would eventually answer. Of the hermetic order of the Golden Dawn. You're listening to Unexplained, and I'm Richard McLean Smith. One afternoon in the summer of eighteen eighty six, down at the strange and imposing Freemason Hall in central London, the British headquarters of the Freemason movement, the Reverend Adolphus Woodford was busy collating the papers of his close friend and fellow Mason, Kenneth Mackenzie Mackenzie had just recently died, and Woodford was keen to get his papers in order. Both men were also members of another secret society, the Society Rosicruciana in Anglia, or the Rosicrucian Society of England, which was founded by a man named Robert Little in eighteen sixty seven. For many, despite its mystical connotations and promises of divine enlightenment, the Freemason movement was really little more than an elaborate old boys club for networking and pulling favors. To that end, Little established the Society Rosicruciana for Sria in the hope of drawing together like minded fellow Masons to work on a genuine pursuit for divine knowledge. The Rosicrucian name that Little borrowed wasn't his own invention. It reached back over two and a half centuries to a set of anonymous German pamphlets that appeared in the early sixteen hundreds describing a secret brotherhood founded by a mysterious figure called Christian Rosenkrauts. According to the legend, Rosenkrauts had traveled through the Middle East as a young man, gathering secret wisdom from Arab and Sufi scholars, before returning to Europe to fuse it with Gabala alchemy and Christian mysticism, and founding a hidden order to guard and pass on what he'd learned. When his tomb was supposedly des covered a full one hundred and twenty years after his death, his body inside was said to be perfectly preserved, untouched by decay, surrounded by symbols and hidden knowledge meant only for the initiated, Like many searches of divine knowledge before him, Robert Little was inspired by the legend and hoped that his own Rosicrucian society, the SRIA, could serve as a kind of British outpost to continue the same search that the original Rose Accrutionans had supposedly embarked on to unlock the secrets of the universe. But it wasn't long before the SRIA had its critics too. Sure they were learning more, but for some members it was all too Academic. Members like Reverend Adolphus Woodford, wanted to go further, so when he was gathering Kenneth Mackenzie's papers from his office, he couldn't help but be intrigued by the strange manuscript that he discovered tucked away at the back of one of his cupboards. Leather bound and written on cloth paper, with its jumble of occult symbols and strange combination of letters and diagrams, it was quite clearly some kind of magic text. But Woodford couldn't understand a word of it, and so, as the story goes, he passed it on to his friend and fellow Rosicrucian Society member William Wynn Westcott, a forty year old coroner. Westcott was also desperate to get his teeth into something a little more practical. Westcott had apparently never seen anything like it before. The strange ruins on the pages before him seemed closer to Egyptian hieroglyphs or some alien language than anything he'd encountered in his casual study of ancient oem Arabic or Chinese. Even Russian cyrillic and the Greek alphabet seemed closer to Latin script than the unusual series of circles and arrows, triangles and squares which confronted him now. But the more he read, the more he began to understand that what the manuscript most closely resembled was a form of Hebrew, perhaps rendered with a trithemia cipher, in which ordinary numerals were swapped out for letters. The last page of the manuscript seemed to have a partial key that was written in a mixture of French and Latin, and Westcott's mind couldn't help but drift to the burnished black granite of the Rosetta Stone in the British Museum. William Westcott had stood before the Rosetta Stone on many occasions as a young man, and absorbed the almost magical quality of its power. It seemed to breathe through the glass of its holding display case, and left everyone who viewed it feeling as though they had been in the presence of a portal to another world. He felt like Jean Francois Champollion, the famous French philologist who first deciphered the meaning of the ancient Egyptian symbols adorned on the rock some sixty five years prior. In eighteen twenty two, Westcott is said to have spent long evenings with his newly acquired document, pouring into his books and trying to uncover their extraordinary secrets. Having hit a dead end is said to have turned to his closest confidants from the Rosicrucian society, the older William Woodman, who was a doctor like Westcott, and the younger, more eccentric Samuel Mathis. Like Westcott, Mathers was also multilingual with a deep knowledge of mystical texts. By September eighteen eighty seven, Westcott finally had a service of translation of the document, which became known as the Cipher Manuscripts. What it apparently revealed once decoded was something closer to an instruction manual than a text, outlines for a set of graded initiatory rituals combining rose Accrucianism, Kabbala, and hermetic magic, and instructions for the correct ways to engage in a whole host of mystic practices, including astrology, tarot alchemy, and even necromancy communicating with the dead. It was an entire architecture for a magical order that, as far as William Woodman, Samuel Mathers, and William Westcott could establish, did not yet exist anywhere in the world. But it wasn't necessarily the Cipher that mattered most to what came next. It was something that was said to have been scrawled almost as an afterthought, on the manuscript's end paper, in a hand noticeably different from the rest of the document an address. The name attached to it was Fraeulein Anna Sprangle, the address Nuremberg, Bavaria. Nobody in Westcott, Woodman's or Mathers's circle had ever heard of her, and so, in the hope of understanding more about where the manuscript had truly come from, it is said that Westcott decided to write her a letter. A reply is said to have come late on a cold November evening in eighteen eighty seven, and it would change the shape of not only his life, but many occult luminaries for years to come. Members of such organizations often take a new name for themselves, or a motto, as it was called. Sprangle's reply to Westcott is said to have begun with the words, Hair Westcott, you may sign my motto on any paper if the need arise, saypians domin arbiter astris, the wise man will rule the stars. Fraulein Anna Sprangel, as it supposedly transpired over the letters that followed, was no ordinary correspondent. She claimed to be the illegitimate daughter of King Ludwig I of Bavaria and the Irish dancer and adventurer Lola Montez, whose affair had caused a great scandal at the time. She claimed also to have broken away from the Rosea Crucian Order some decades earlier, once its teaching struck her as too closely tethered to Christian orthodoxy for her taste. She wanted to venture somewhere other. She didn't just want to worship gods, she wanted to meet them. To that end, she supposedly claimed to have established an entire magic order of her own, Order of the Golden Dawn to help make this a reality. But Sprangle, as she apparently said, didn't answer to herself alone. Above her stood a higher authority, a body of enigmatic individuals called the Secret Chiefs, who she was apparently in constant communication with. They were the true source of all genuine occult wisdom. According to Westcott, Sprangle then revealed to him that the Cipher manuscripts constituted the movements founding Charter, and as a reward for their brilliance in deciphering them, William Westcott, William Woodman, and Samuel Mathers were invited to establish a British branch of the Order, since there had apparently already been an aborted effort to set up a lodge, as they are called, under the tutelage of Kenneth Mackenzie, in whose papers the cipher had apparently been found, and with Sprangle's Lodge being numbers one, Westcott, Woodford and Maths called their lodge number three, it became known as the isis Urania Temple, and so in eighteen eighty eight, in a set of rented rooms at Tavy's Inn in Hoburn, London, the isis Urania Temple opened its doors. Such was the fascination with the occult in London social circles at the time, Membership grew quickly. Unlike the Masonic lodges which this new Order had sprung from, women were admitted here as full equals, with permission to examine candidates. One evening in eighteen ninety, during a gathering for potential new initiates, Samuel Mathers was introduced to a young William Butler Yeates, who was already making a name for himself as a poet and playwright. Mathers handed Yates a small card with a symbol painted on it, and told him simply to close his eyes and try to envision the symbol in his mind. Yates, a little amused, took the card as asked, and then placed it on his forehead and closed his eyes. Just then something in his face darkened, and the smile dropped from his lips. With a start. He opened his eyes again, apparently completely stunned. Yates claimed to have suddenly found himself in a desert scattered with ancient ruins. Then, from out of nowhere, a great black shape had appeared, hauling itself upright out of the ruins on two enormous hands. Mathers smiled riley. It was a being of the Order of the Salamanders, he said, one of the elemental spirits. The card was supposed to correspond to a detail that Yates had no way of knowing. William Butler Yates joined the Golden Dawn in March eighteen ninety, taking the name Damon s Deus in versus the Devil is God inverted. He quickly became an enthusiastic recruiter for the order, bringing in famed actor Florence Farr, among many others. But then, in the autumn of eighteen ninety came a problem. According to William Westcott, Anna Sprangle had stopped writing to him. What came instead, some accounts say, was a strange, anonymously written letter stating that she had died. Others say it was something stranger still that the letter instead claimed that Sprangle had acted against the wishes of the Secret Chiefs in telling Westcott and the others that they could open a lodge in England. From this point on, according to the author of the letter, there would be no further contact with Sprangle or anyone above her. Either way, the result was the same. If Westcott, Woodman, and Mathers wanted to keep going, they would have to somehow plead their case directly to the Secret Chiefs, whoever and wherever they were. By now, the eccentric Samuel Mathers, a far more charismatic and outgoing figure compared to Woodman and Westcott, had become the organizations to facto leader. This position was further solidified when Woodman died suddenly in December eighteen ninety one. At this point, Maths wasn't employed and had been relying on the generosity of wealthy benefactor Annie Horneman to keep him and his wife, Moyna afloat. Moyner and Horneman had become friends while studying together at the prestigious Slade School of Art in London. It was Moyner who encouraged Horneman to join the Golden Dawn, which she did in eighteen ninety. Not long after, Hornaman came into a significant inheritance, and thanks to no little encouragement from Maths, she became the Order's most important financial backer. But even her wealth had its limitations, and so running low on money, Mathers and Moyner decided to relocate to Paris, perhaps feeling his grip on the Order beginning to weaken. From such a distance, it seemed Maths would have to do something drastic to reassert his authority. That something came with a startling announcement sometime in early eighteen ninety two. According to the man himself, Mathers had apparently done what no one had managed since Sprangle's silence. He had made contact with the Secret Chiefs late one evening in a darkened room of his apartment. Mathers had apparently channeled some kind of connection to the mysterious group, which it turned out weren't a shadowy group of powerful men, as some had assumed, but supernatural beings whose knowledge of esotericism stretched back thousands of years, having apparently made contact with the so called Secret Chiefs, which incidentally sound not too dissimilar to Terence McKenna's clockwork else if you're familiar with them, Mathers gave one of them a name, lux Tenebris light out of Darkness. He claimed to communicate it with this member directly on an astral plane. What exactly passed between them he would never fully explain, but it was enough it seemed to convince the rest of the Order that from now on, he, operating with the full support of the Chiefs, was the Order's rightful leader. Mathers then claimed that the Secret Chiefs had revealed instructions for an entirely new tier within the Order, known as the Second Order, built around a ceremony called the Deptus Minor Ritual. Up to this point, for its first four years, the Golden Dawn's teachings, despite its original intentions to be a more practical approach to the occult, were almost entirely theory based. Nobody had actually been taught to practice magic. The Second Order changed all of that entirely. Now members were for the first time instructed in the real mechanics of the craft, how to scry with mirrors and crystals, how to evoke spirits and demons, and how to send your own consciousness traveling out of your body into some other place entirely. A physical vault was constructed at the Order's temple in Hoburn, where initiates could complete their ascension into the Second Order, a small windowless chamber built to exact specifications. It contained a raised bed known as the pastos, an altar, four painted tablets representing fire, water, air, and earth, and an oversized crucifix known as the Cross of Obligation. Initiates in full ceremonial regalia would lie down on the pastos in near total darkness, with the Rosicrucian Cross placed over the chest, while others already initiated into the Second Order stood around them, chanting in low, overlapping voices. Many, including W. B. Yates, claimed to have strange visions while participating in the ceremony, but perhaps this was all utter buncom Perhaps as many suspect Maths' story about making contact with the so called Secret Chiefs was just a cynical and egotistical invention to exploit the good faith of the Order's members and take charge of the organization. So, how we might ask, did so many undeniably intelligent people fail to see through this and continue to stay committed to the Order? Well, the simple truth is, if the accounts are to be believed, all those rituals and magic teachings that Mathers had apparently learned over the years and later under the guidance of the Secret Chiefs actually worked. It has just gone past eight o'clock on the evening of May thirteenth, eighteen ninety six, in a hot and stuffy rented room in central London. A caudron sits at the center of the floor what one witness later simply called the hell broth, its contents given over to a low simmer, the air above it growing thicker by the minute. Around it stands four robed figures deep in concentration. That the center of them is a woman dressed in white, a yellow sash at her waist, an indigo nemes cloth, the striped headdress of a pharaoh covering her hair. Outside these four walls Florence far is one of the most celebrated actors on the London stage, a woman whose voice, according to those fortunate enough to see her perform, could make an entire house fall silent in awe. But in here she is something else. Around her neck hangs the seal of the Spirit. They have come here to raise Tafts arthurth Spirit of Mercury, a figure that some might call malevolent. Beside her stands the pale and willowy Alan Bennett, Bellow, Golden Dawn member and one of the most learned and respected occultists in London, Famed for his especially deep knowledge of the Egyptian Book of the Dead, Those who knew him call him simply the White Knight. Has written the ritual himself, a precise sequence of invocations designed to draw something up out of whatever plane it inhabits and hold it briefly inside the boundary of this room. They are joined by Charles Rosser and Frederick Lee Gardner, and together the four of them have spent weeks preparing for this moment. Bennett begins as the order always began, by making the mark of the carbalistic cross, imagining a blinding column of light. He touches the crown of his head, then traces it down to his chest, before drawing a second column of light from one shoulder to the other. Next come the words intoned repeatedly and so deeply that they vibrate in a rhythmic hum through each of the participant's chests until the air itself seems to hang heavy with them. Then Far traces the signal of Taftarthurus into the steam above the cauldron, as the four of them repeat the spirit's name over and over again into the dark. At sixteen minutes past nine. It works, as the participants will all later attest. First an arm appeared, then a leg, then appearing to gather itself out of nothing into something, a gray human shape appears, standing where a moment before there had only been steam and candlelight, and with it an unmistakable sense of power fills the room, pressing on all four of them at once. The participants stare wide eyed at it as it holds for a few brief seconds and then suddenly disappears. We don't know what any of them actually saw that night. What we do know, according to Alan Bennett's own way Words, is that within days three of them became severely unwell, with grim and horrible diseases. As he put it, it was called the taft Arthurrath Evocation. Later that year, William Westcott, still a chief adept in the organization, ceased all public engagement with the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Some said it was because of his role as the Crown Coroner that his association with magic was starting to be questioned. As a trusted man of science and reason, whatever it was, Samuel Mathers wasted no time in replacing him with Florence Farr, though many members in time, like benefactor Annie Horneman, came to distrust Samuel Mathes's validity. By eighteen ninety eight, the Order that he, William Westcott and William Woodman had built out of a strange manuscript and an enigmatic woman who many claim might never even have existed did in the first place, had grown into something with well over one hundred members drawn from every level of late Victorian society, including poets, actors, doctors, and clergymen. None of the Order's underlying uncertainty seemed to slow anyone down. If anything, the not knowing was the engine that kept the whole thing Turning. On November eighteenth, eighteen ninety eight, at the isis Urania Temple, a twenty three year old young initiate knelt before Samuel Mathers to be inducted into the Order. He had a hefty private income, an appetite for ceremony, and a hunger for exactly the kind of secrets that the Golden Dawn professed to have. He took the name Freighter Perdurabo, Brother I shall endure, and over the next six years his presence inside the Golden Dawn would do more to tear the Order apart than any secret chief reel or invented had ever managed on their own, and perhaps took his teachings further than anyone else did too. Its name was Alistair Crowley, but that's another story. This episode is written by me, with additional material provided by James Connor Patterson. Please remember to like and subscribe if you've enjoyed the show Unexplained as an AV Club Productions podcast created by me Richard McLain Smith. All other elements of the podcast, including the music, are also produced by me. Unexplained. The book and audiobook is now available to buy worldwide. You can purchase from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Waterstones and other bookstores. Be sure to follow us on Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook at Unexplained Podcast and on X and Blue Sky at Unexplained Pod. Until next time, stay strange and dissonant.
Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome to Unexplained with me your host, Richard McLain Smith. For each week we explore another true tale of high strangeness. If you're new here and you're a fan of expertly told atmospheric stories about the strange and unexplained, then you've come to the right place, and please subscribe to the show if you haven't already done so. I'm very excited to be taking Unexplained to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival this year. I'll be performing at the Space's Surgeons Hall venue at ten oh five pm every night from August seventh to the twenty ninth, except for the sixteenth and twenty third. You can get tickets at THESPACEUK dot com. Forward Slash shows Ford Slash twenty twenty six, Ford Slash Unexplained hyphen Live. For those watching on YouTube, you can find the link below. With all that out of the way, this is Unexplained, Season nine, Episode twenty eight Laughter Cracking through the Walls. It's late in the evening of November eighth, eighteen ninety five, down at the Physics Institute of the Julius Maximilians University of Wurtzburg. Fifty year old physicist Wilhelm Runtgen is hard at work. For the past few weeks, he's been tinkering with a cathode tube. The tube itself is simple enough to describe, a sealed glass cylinder with almost all the air sucked out of it and a metal plate fixed at each end. Rentgun connects one plate to the negative element of a rudimentary battery and the other to the positive and completes the circuit through an induction coil. Then, after turning off the lights, he throws the switch inside the tube. With nothing left to get in its way. An invisible stream leaps across the near vacuum from the negative plate toward the positive one, what physicists have taken to calling a cat cathode ray, but what it actually consists of is still as yet unknown. The glass starts to glow faintly, as if it had suddenly decided to come alive. Then something even stranger begins to happen. Bntgun catches it out at the corner of his eye, some distance away, much further than a cathode ray could possibly reach. A small screen coated in barium platinum cyanide is glowing a luminescent green. Confused, Rentgun covers the cathode tube with sheets of black cardboard, but the screen still glows. He wraps another and then another around it, but still nothing reduces that strange, eerie glow. He moves the screen further away, but nothing changes. He puts a thick book between the tube and the screen, a thousand pages of paper, more than enough to stop any light that he knows of, but still the screen keeps glow. Then Brongan holds up his own hand in front of the catho tube and stares in utter amazement at what has just appeared on the screen, the inner architecture of himself, the bones of his fingers moving when he moves them. Wilhelm Rogan has just discovered the X ray. For the next six weeks, Brogan tells no one about his discovery, not his colleagues, not even his wife. When she finally presses him to tell her what he's become so preoccupied with, he gives her the only honest answer he has that if he told people what he'd discovered, they would say he'd gone completely mad. So he stays in the dark alone, running the same tests again and again, checking and rechecking, a result that he can barely bring himself to believe. When at lasts he writes the phenomenon up, he doesn't even dare give it a proper name, it is so strange and incomprehensible. He names it simply X, the mathematic symbol for a quantity that is yet to be solved. In truth, what he's discovered, though he doesn't yet have the language for it, constitutes a whole being punched clean through the Victorian idea of a solid, visible universe. Within months, the rest of the world will be forced through that same hole, forced to accept that the air carries invisible waves, that matter gives off energy that nobody can see, and that even the human body is not quite the solid, determinate thing that most might have it be. It would be almost two decades before anyone proved what the X ray actually was, a radioactive wave of light too short for any human eye to see. But Rundgan's discovery had set in motion an earth shattering paradigm shift in our understanding of the universe, which would ultimately lead to the birth of quantum mechanics. Meanwhile, in London, at almost exactly this same moment, a rather different set of investigators were embarking on a set of experiments of their own, a loose brotherhood and sisterhood of poets, actors, doctors and mystics who never once doubted that the true architecture of the universe lay hidden behind the visible one. Much like Urgan, they too believed that all they needed was the right instrument or the right ritual to bring it into view. They had no catho tube and no barium platinum cyanide coated screen. What they had instead was a mysterious magical cipher, a stranger's letters, and an unshakable conviction that if he could just speak the right words into the dark in the right order, something would eventually answer. Of the hermetic order of the Golden Dawn. You're listening to Unexplained, and I'm Richard McLean Smith. One afternoon in the summer of eighteen eighty six, down at the strange and imposing Freemason Hall in central London, the British headquarters of the Freemason movement, the Reverend Adolphus Woodford was busy collating the papers of his close friend and fellow Mason, Kenneth Mackenzie Mackenzie had just recently died, and Woodford was keen to get his papers in order. Both men were also members of another secret society, the Society Rosicruciana in Anglia, or the Rosicrucian Society of England, which was founded by a man named Robert Little in eighteen sixty seven. For many, despite its mystical connotations and promises of divine enlightenment, the Freemason movement was really little more than an elaborate old boys club for networking and pulling favors. To that end, Little established the Society Rosicruciana for Sria in the hope of drawing together like minded fellow Masons to work on a genuine pursuit for divine knowledge. The Rosicrucian name that Little borrowed wasn't his own invention. It reached back over two and a half centuries to a set of anonymous German pamphlets that appeared in the early sixteen hundreds describing a secret brotherhood founded by a mysterious figure called Christian Rosenkrauts. According to the legend, Rosenkrauts had traveled through the Middle East as a young man, gathering secret wisdom from Arab and Sufi scholars, before returning to Europe to fuse it with Gabala alchemy and Christian mysticism, and founding a hidden order to guard and pass on what he'd learned. When his tomb was supposedly des covered a full one hundred and twenty years after his death, his body inside was said to be perfectly preserved, untouched by decay, surrounded by symbols and hidden knowledge meant only for the initiated, Like many searches of divine knowledge before him, Robert Little was inspired by the legend and hoped that his own Rosicrucian society, the SRIA, could serve as a kind of British outpost to continue the same search that the original Rose Accrutionans had supposedly embarked on to unlock the secrets of the universe. But it wasn't long before the SRIA had its critics too. Sure they were learning more, but for some members it was all too Academic. Members like Reverend Adolphus Woodford, wanted to go further, so when he was gathering Kenneth Mackenzie's papers from his office, he couldn't help but be intrigued by the strange manuscript that he discovered tucked away at the back of one of his cupboards. Leather bound and written on cloth paper, with its jumble of occult symbols and strange combination of letters and diagrams, it was quite clearly some kind of magic text. But Woodford couldn't understand a word of it, and so, as the story goes, he passed it on to his friend and fellow Rosicrucian Society member William Wynn Westcott, a forty year old coroner. Westcott was also desperate to get his teeth into something a little more practical. Westcott had apparently never seen anything like it before. The strange ruins on the pages before him seemed closer to Egyptian hieroglyphs or some alien language than anything he'd encountered in his casual study of ancient oem Arabic or Chinese. Even Russian cyrillic and the Greek alphabet seemed closer to Latin script than the unusual series of circles and arrows, triangles and squares which confronted him now. But the more he read, the more he began to understand that what the manuscript most closely resembled was a form of Hebrew, perhaps rendered with a trithemia cipher, in which ordinary numerals were swapped out for letters. The last page of the manuscript seemed to have a partial key that was written in a mixture of French and Latin, and Westcott's mind couldn't help but drift to the burnished black granite of the Rosetta Stone in the British Museum. William Westcott had stood before the Rosetta Stone on many occasions as a young man, and absorbed the almost magical quality of its power. It seemed to breathe through the glass of its holding display case, and left everyone who viewed it feeling as though they had been in the presence of a portal to another world. He felt like Jean Francois Champollion, the famous French philologist who first deciphered the meaning of the ancient Egyptian symbols adorned on the rock some sixty five years prior. In eighteen twenty two, Westcott is said to have spent long evenings with his newly acquired document, pouring into his books and trying to uncover their extraordinary secrets. Having hit a dead end is said to have turned to his closest confidants from the Rosicrucian society, the older William Woodman, who was a doctor like Westcott, and the younger, more eccentric Samuel Mathis. Like Westcott, Mathers was also multilingual with a deep knowledge of mystical texts. By September eighteen eighty seven, Westcott finally had a service of translation of the document, which became known as the Cipher Manuscripts. What it apparently revealed once decoded was something closer to an instruction manual than a text, outlines for a set of graded initiatory rituals combining rose Accrucianism, Kabbala, and hermetic magic, and instructions for the correct ways to engage in a whole host of mystic practices, including astrology, tarot alchemy, and even necromancy communicating with the dead. It was an entire architecture for a magical order that, as far as William Woodman, Samuel Mathers, and William Westcott could establish, did not yet exist anywhere in the world. But it wasn't necessarily the Cipher that mattered most to what came next. It was something that was said to have been scrawled almost as an afterthought, on the manuscript's end paper, in a hand noticeably different from the rest of the document an address. The name attached to it was Fraeulein Anna Sprangle, the address Nuremberg, Bavaria. Nobody in Westcott, Woodman's or Mathers's circle had ever heard of her, and so, in the hope of understanding more about where the manuscript had truly come from, it is said that Westcott decided to write her a letter. A reply is said to have come late on a cold November evening in eighteen eighty seven, and it would change the shape of not only his life, but many occult luminaries for years to come. Members of such organizations often take a new name for themselves, or a motto, as it was called. Sprangle's reply to Westcott is said to have begun with the words, Hair Westcott, you may sign my motto on any paper if the need arise, saypians domin arbiter astris, the wise man will rule the stars. Fraulein Anna Sprangel, as it supposedly transpired over the letters that followed, was no ordinary correspondent. She claimed to be the illegitimate daughter of King Ludwig I of Bavaria and the Irish dancer and adventurer Lola Montez, whose affair had caused a great scandal at the time. She claimed also to have broken away from the Rosea Crucian Order some decades earlier, once its teaching struck her as too closely tethered to Christian orthodoxy for her taste. She wanted to venture somewhere other. She didn't just want to worship gods, she wanted to meet them. To that end, she supposedly claimed to have established an entire magic order of her own, Order of the Golden Dawn to help make this a reality. But Sprangle, as she apparently said, didn't answer to herself alone. Above her stood a higher authority, a body of enigmatic individuals called the Secret Chiefs, who she was apparently in constant communication with. They were the true source of all genuine occult wisdom. According to Westcott, Sprangle then revealed to him that the Cipher manuscripts constituted the movements founding Charter, and as a reward for their brilliance in deciphering them, William Westcott, William Woodman, and Samuel Mathers were invited to establish a British branch of the Order, since there had apparently already been an aborted effort to set up a lodge, as they are called, under the tutelage of Kenneth Mackenzie, in whose papers the cipher had apparently been found, and with Sprangle's Lodge being numbers one, Westcott, Woodford and Maths called their lodge number three, it became known as the isis Urania Temple, and so in eighteen eighty eight, in a set of rented rooms at Tavy's Inn in Hoburn, London, the isis Urania Temple opened its doors. Such was the fascination with the occult in London social circles at the time, Membership grew quickly. Unlike the Masonic lodges which this new Order had sprung from, women were admitted here as full equals, with permission to examine candidates. One evening in eighteen ninety, during a gathering for potential new initiates, Samuel Mathers was introduced to a young William Butler Yeates, who was already making a name for himself as a poet and playwright. Mathers handed Yates a small card with a symbol painted on it, and told him simply to close his eyes and try to envision the symbol in his mind. Yates, a little amused, took the card as asked, and then placed it on his forehead and closed his eyes. Just then something in his face darkened, and the smile dropped from his lips. With a start. He opened his eyes again, apparently completely stunned. Yates claimed to have suddenly found himself in a desert scattered with ancient ruins. Then, from out of nowhere, a great black shape had appeared, hauling itself upright out of the ruins on two enormous hands. Mathers smiled riley. It was a being of the Order of the Salamanders, he said, one of the elemental spirits. The card was supposed to correspond to a detail that Yates had no way of knowing. William Butler Yates joined the Golden Dawn in March eighteen ninety, taking the name Damon s Deus in versus the Devil is God inverted. He quickly became an enthusiastic recruiter for the order, bringing in famed actor Florence Farr, among many others. But then, in the autumn of eighteen ninety came a problem. According to William Westcott, Anna Sprangle had stopped writing to him. What came instead, some accounts say, was a strange, anonymously written letter stating that she had died. Others say it was something stranger still that the letter instead claimed that Sprangle had acted against the wishes of the Secret Chiefs in telling Westcott and the others that they could open a lodge in England. From this point on, according to the author of the letter, there would be no further contact with Sprangle or anyone above her. Either way, the result was the same. If Westcott, Woodman, and Mathers wanted to keep going, they would have to somehow plead their case directly to the Secret Chiefs, whoever and wherever they were. By now, the eccentric Samuel Mathers, a far more charismatic and outgoing figure compared to Woodman and Westcott, had become the organizations to facto leader. This position was further solidified when Woodman died suddenly in December eighteen ninety one. At this point, Maths wasn't employed and had been relying on the generosity of wealthy benefactor Annie Horneman to keep him and his wife, Moyna afloat. Moyner and Horneman had become friends while studying together at the prestigious Slade School of Art in London. It was Moyner who encouraged Horneman to join the Golden Dawn, which she did in eighteen ninety. Not long after, Hornaman came into a significant inheritance, and thanks to no little encouragement from Maths, she became the Order's most important financial backer. But even her wealth had its limitations, and so running low on money, Mathers and Moyner decided to relocate to Paris, perhaps feeling his grip on the Order beginning to weaken. From such a distance, it seemed Maths would have to do something drastic to reassert his authority. That something came with a startling announcement sometime in early eighteen ninety two. According to the man himself, Mathers had apparently done what no one had managed since Sprangle's silence. He had made contact with the Secret Chiefs late one evening in a darkened room of his apartment. Mathers had apparently channeled some kind of connection to the mysterious group, which it turned out weren't a shadowy group of powerful men, as some had assumed, but supernatural beings whose knowledge of esotericism stretched back thousands of years, having apparently made contact with the so called Secret Chiefs, which incidentally sound not too dissimilar to Terence McKenna's clockwork else if you're familiar with them, Mathers gave one of them a name, lux Tenebris light out of Darkness. He claimed to communicate it with this member directly on an astral plane. What exactly passed between them he would never fully explain, but it was enough it seemed to convince the rest of the Order that from now on, he, operating with the full support of the Chiefs, was the Order's rightful leader. Mathers then claimed that the Secret Chiefs had revealed instructions for an entirely new tier within the Order, known as the Second Order, built around a ceremony called the Deptus Minor Ritual. Up to this point, for its first four years, the Golden Dawn's teachings, despite its original intentions to be a more practical approach to the occult, were almost entirely theory based. Nobody had actually been taught to practice magic. The Second Order changed all of that entirely. Now members were for the first time instructed in the real mechanics of the craft, how to scry with mirrors and crystals, how to evoke spirits and demons, and how to send your own consciousness traveling out of your body into some other place entirely. A physical vault was constructed at the Order's temple in Hoburn, where initiates could complete their ascension into the Second Order, a small windowless chamber built to exact specifications. It contained a raised bed known as the pastos, an altar, four painted tablets representing fire, water, air, and earth, and an oversized crucifix known as the Cross of Obligation. Initiates in full ceremonial regalia would lie down on the pastos in near total darkness, with the Rosicrucian Cross placed over the chest, while others already initiated into the Second Order stood around them, chanting in low, overlapping voices. Many, including W. B. Yates, claimed to have strange visions while participating in the ceremony, but perhaps this was all utter buncom Perhaps as many suspect Maths' story about making contact with the so called Secret Chiefs was just a cynical and egotistical invention to exploit the good faith of the Order's members and take charge of the organization. So, how we might ask, did so many undeniably intelligent people fail to see through this and continue to stay committed to the Order? Well, the simple truth is, if the accounts are to be believed, all those rituals and magic teachings that Mathers had apparently learned over the years and later under the guidance of the Secret Chiefs actually worked. It has just gone past eight o'clock on the evening of May thirteenth, eighteen ninety six, in a hot and stuffy rented room in central London. A caudron sits at the center of the floor what one witness later simply called the hell broth, its contents given over to a low simmer, the air above it growing thicker by the minute. Around it stands four robed figures deep in concentration. That the center of them is a woman dressed in white, a yellow sash at her waist, an indigo nemes cloth, the striped headdress of a pharaoh covering her hair. Outside these four walls Florence far is one of the most celebrated actors on the London stage, a woman whose voice, according to those fortunate enough to see her perform, could make an entire house fall silent in awe. But in here she is something else. Around her neck hangs the seal of the Spirit. They have come here to raise Tafts arthurth Spirit of Mercury, a figure that some might call malevolent. Beside her stands the pale and willowy Alan Bennett, Bellow, Golden Dawn member and one of the most learned and respected occultists in London, Famed for his especially deep knowledge of the Egyptian Book of the Dead, Those who knew him call him simply the White Knight. Has written the ritual himself, a precise sequence of invocations designed to draw something up out of whatever plane it inhabits and hold it briefly inside the boundary of this room. They are joined by Charles Rosser and Frederick Lee Gardner, and together the four of them have spent weeks preparing for this moment. Bennett begins as the order always began, by making the mark of the carbalistic cross, imagining a blinding column of light. He touches the crown of his head, then traces it down to his chest, before drawing a second column of light from one shoulder to the other. Next come the words intoned repeatedly and so deeply that they vibrate in a rhythmic hum through each of the participant's chests until the air itself seems to hang heavy with them. Then Far traces the signal of Taftarthurus into the steam above the cauldron, as the four of them repeat the spirit's name over and over again into the dark. At sixteen minutes past nine. It works, as the participants will all later attest. First an arm appeared, then a leg, then appearing to gather itself out of nothing into something, a gray human shape appears, standing where a moment before there had only been steam and candlelight, and with it an unmistakable sense of power fills the room, pressing on all four of them at once. The participants stare wide eyed at it as it holds for a few brief seconds and then suddenly disappears. We don't know what any of them actually saw that night. What we do know, according to Alan Bennett's own way Words, is that within days three of them became severely unwell, with grim and horrible diseases. As he put it, it was called the taft Arthurrath Evocation. Later that year, William Westcott, still a chief adept in the organization, ceased all public engagement with the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Some said it was because of his role as the Crown Coroner that his association with magic was starting to be questioned. As a trusted man of science and reason, whatever it was, Samuel Mathers wasted no time in replacing him with Florence Farr, though many members in time, like benefactor Annie Horneman, came to distrust Samuel Mathes's validity. By eighteen ninety eight, the Order that he, William Westcott and William Woodman had built out of a strange manuscript and an enigmatic woman who many claim might never even have existed did in the first place, had grown into something with well over one hundred members drawn from every level of late Victorian society, including poets, actors, doctors, and clergymen. None of the Order's underlying uncertainty seemed to slow anyone down. If anything, the not knowing was the engine that kept the whole thing Turning. On November eighteenth, eighteen ninety eight, at the isis Urania Temple, a twenty three year old young initiate knelt before Samuel Mathers to be inducted into the Order. He had a hefty private income, an appetite for ceremony, and a hunger for exactly the kind of secrets that the Golden Dawn professed to have. He took the name Freighter Perdurabo, Brother I shall endure, and over the next six years his presence inside the Golden Dawn would do more to tear the Order apart than any secret chief reel or invented had ever managed on their own, and perhaps took his teachings further than anyone else did too. Its name was Alistair Crowley, but that's another story. This episode is written by me, with additional material provided by James Connor Patterson. Please remember to like and subscribe if you've enjoyed the show Unexplained as an AV Club Productions podcast created by me Richard McLain Smith. All other elements of the podcast, including the music, are also produced by me. Unexplained. The book and audiobook is now available to buy worldwide. You can purchase from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Waterstones and other bookstores. Be sure to follow us on Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook at Unexplained Podcast and on X and Blue Sky at Unexplained Pod. Until next time, stay strange and dissonant.
