Cipher Manuscripts

A set of documents in coded Latin and English which William Wynn Westcott claimed to have obtained in 1887 and which served as the founding authority for the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. The manuscripts purportedly authorised contact with a German adept named Anna Sprengel, who in turn chartered the new English order. The Sprengel correspondence is now generally regarded by historians as a fabrication, most plausibly by Westcott himself; the manuscripts are read as a deliberate fictive provenance constructed to give the new Order the appearance of an older lineage.