Controversies

The Order’s foundation depends on the Sprengel correspondence and the Cipher Manuscripts; the historicity of the German lineage they purport to document is rejected by mainstream scholarship.

The 1900 schism in London arose in part from the conduct of Aleister Crowley, then a recent initiate sponsored into the Inner Order in Paris by Mathers over the London adepts’ objection. Subsequent legal disputes between Mathers and Crowley over the publication of Order rituals (the Equinox case of 1910) became a public rupture.

Israel Regardie’s 1937–40 publication of the Order’s rituals and instructional papers was condemned by surviving initiates as a breach of oath; Regardie defended the publication on the grounds that the system would otherwise be lost.