Index
Traditions
Each entry follows the same structure so they can be compared. New entries are added as research is completed and sources are checked.
The traditions covered on this site are the principal currents of organised Western esotericism over the last four hundred years. The earliest, Rosicrucianism, dates to a set of anonymous German manifestos published in the 1610s. The most recent, chaos magick, emerged from a small-press magical scene in northern England in the late 1970s. Between them sit the major fraternal and initiatic orders — Freemasonry and its rites, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the Ordo Templi Orientis — the religious systems they have shaped or that have grown alongside them (Thelema, Theosophy, modern Wicca and traditional witchcraft), and the twentieth-century Satanic organisations.
Each entry uses the same outline so readers can compare across them: an overview, the documented origins and history, the tradition’s stated beliefs and practices, its recurring symbols, the notable figures associated with it, the controversies that surround it where any are documented, and a list of sources. Where a tradition has distinct sub-bodies, rites, or branches with their own organisational identity, those appear as nested entries.
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Freemasonry
1717 (Premier Grand Lodge)A fraternal initiatic system structured into lodges, dating in its modern form to early eighteenth-century Britain, with elaborate ritual, moral instruction, and a global organisational footprint.
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Ordo Templi Orientis
c. 1895–1906 (Germany)An initiatic order founded in early twentieth-century Germany, restructured by Aleister Crowley as a vehicle for the religious and magical system of Thelema, with which it is now closely identified.
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Thelema
1904 (reception of The Book of the Law)A religious and philosophical system promulgated by Aleister Crowley after a 1904 episode in Cairo, founded on the maxim “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.” It is the doctrinal framework of the modern Ordo Templi Orientis but exists independently of any single organisation.
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Rosicrucianism
1614 (first manifesto)A current of Western esoteric thought announced by anonymous early-seventeenth-century manifestos describing a secret brotherhood of physician-philosophers, and continued today by several public bodies that claim its lineage.
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Theosophical Society
1875 (New York)A late-nineteenth-century esoteric movement that introduced South and East Asian religious vocabulary into Western occultism and shaped almost every subsequent Western esoteric current of the twentieth century.
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Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn
1888 (London)A late-Victorian initiatic order that synthesised Hermetic Qabalah, alchemy, Tarot, astrology, and ceremonial magic into the curriculum that has underpinned almost all subsequent Western magical practice.
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Wicca
1954 (publicly)A modern initiatory religion centred on a goddess and a horned god, an eight-festival ritual year, and a system of three initiatory degrees, publicly emerging in mid-twentieth-century England through the writings of Gerald Gardner.
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Traditional Witchcraft
Mid-twentieth century onwardsA loose family of modern witchcraft currents distinct from Wicca, generally darker in tone, less doctrinally fixed, and drawing on folkloric, cunning-craft, and Sabbatic-witchcraft strands rather than on the Gardnerian liturgy.
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Church of Satan
1966 (San Francisco)An atheistic religious organisation founded by Anton LaVey in 1966 that uses the figure of Satan as a symbol of carnal nature, individualism, and rejection of conformity. It is not a theistic religion and does not worship a literal devil.
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Chaos Magick
1978 (publicly)A late-twentieth-century approach to magical practice that treats belief itself as a tool, drops the requirement that practitioners commit to any particular cosmology, and freely mixes symbol systems on the basis of what produces results.