The Golden Dawn and Agrippa's magic squares

In 1888 three London Freemasons, William Wynn Westcott, Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers and William Robert Woodman, founded the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Within a few years the order gathered a few hundred members, including figures such as the poet William Butler Yeats, the actress Florence Farr, the writer Arthur Machen and the scholar Arthur Edward Waite. In its system of teaching, no small part came directly from the pages of Agrippa.

The cipher manuscripts and the origins

According to the founders' account, the order arose from a group of manuscripts written in a simple code, the so-called Cipher Manuscripts, which contained outlines of initiation rituals. Westcott also claimed to have come into contact with a German adept who supposedly authorised the foundation. Historians regard this correspondence as very probably invented, and the origin of the manuscripts also remains disputed.

Beyond the foundation legends, the Golden Dawn was above all an enterprise of erudition and synthesis. Mathers, the most active of the founders, worked at the British Museum and published translations of magical texts such as the Key of Solomon, in 1889, and the Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin, in 1898.

The second book of De occulta philosophia

The second book of De occulta philosophia is devoted to celestial and mathematical magic: numbers, harmonies, geometrical figures, astrological images. In chapter twenty-two Agrippa presents seven numerical squares, each associated with a planet, from the square of Saturn, three by three, to that of the Moon, nine by nine. From each he derives seals and characters attributed to the intelligence and the spirit of the planet.

The Golden Dawn adopted these tables, often called kameas, and included them in its teaching on planetary correspondences. From the same repertoire, and in particular from the third book, come the secret alphabets reproduced by Agrippa, such as the one called Theban and the one called Celestial. Geomancy too, taught to members of the order, had among its main sources the Renaissance texts of the Agrippan tradition.

Agrippa himself had warned readers that his book contained many things said in veiled form, and that those who tried to use it without understanding its foundation would be disappointed. The members of the Golden Dawn took this warning seriously, but in their own way: they read the tables as schemes to be fitted into an initiatory path by grades, ordered according to the sephirotic tree of the Kabbalah, which had no comparable function in the Renaissance text.

A reinterpreted legacy

One should not, however, imagine a direct continuity. Members of the Golden Dawn mostly read Agrippa through the English translation of 1651, Barrett's reworking and the mediation of Éliphas Lévi. They combined him with Christian Kabbalah, Victorian Egyptology, tarot interpreted in Lévi's manner and Masonic elements, in a system that the sixteenth-century philosopher would not have recognised as his own.

The order split around 1900 amid personal and doctrinal conflicts, and various successor groups arose from it. For the historian the Golden Dawn remains a significant chapter in Agrippa's legacy: it shows how Renaissance materials, detached from their theological and philosophical context, could become the basis of a new modern esotericism, destined to influence much of twentieth-century occultism.