Origins & history

The Order was established on the authority of a set of documents known as the Cipher Manuscripts, which Westcott claimed to have obtained and decoded. The manuscripts were said to authorise contact with a German adept, Anna Sprengel, who in turn chartered the new English order. Modern scholarship treats the Sprengel correspondence as almost certainly a fabrication by Westcott.

From a single temple in 1888 the Order grew to several temples across Britain and into Paris. In 1900 a dispute between Mathers and the London adepts produced a schism that the Order never recovered from. The principal successor bodies were the Stella Matutina (which Israel Regardie joined in the 1930s), Alpha et Omega (under Mathers), and the A∶A∶, founded by Aleister Crowley after his break with Mathers.