Discovery
William Wynn Westcott, a London Deputy Coroner, member of the S.R.I.A. and one of the founders of the Golden Dawn, claimed to have received the manuscripts through Rev. A. F. A. Woodford, who was a colleague of noted Masonic scholar Kenneth R. H. Mackenzie. The papers were to have been secured by Westcott after Mackenzie’s death in 1886, among the belongings of Mackenzie’s mentor, the late Frederick Hockley, and by September 1887, they were decoded by Westcott.
The Manuscripts also contained an address of an aged adept named Fräulein (Miss) Anna Sprengel in Germany, to whom Westcott wrote inquiring about the contents of the papers. Miss Sprengel responded, and after accepting the requests of Westcott and his partner and fellow Mason Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, who had helped translate the texts, issued them a Charter to operate a Lodge of the Order in England. Westcott's first Golden Dawn temple was the Isis-Urania Temple, styled "No. 3." Temple No. 1 would have been Fräulein Sprengel's lodge, and No. 2 was supposedly an abortive attempt at a lodge by some unnamed persons in London (possibly a reference to Mackenzie and other S.R.I.A. members some years earlier).
Read more about this topic: Cipher Manuscripts
Famous quotes containing the word discovery:
“The gain is not the having of children; it is the discovery of love and how to be loving.”
—Polly Berrien Berends (20th century)
“The virtues of society are vices of the saint. The terror of reform is the discovery that we must cast away our virtues, or what we have always esteemed such, into the same pit that has consumed our grosser vices.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write.”
—Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881)