Cipher Manuscripts - Possible Sources

Possible Sources

A variety of theories exist as to the real source of the Cipher Manuscript. Some of the more common ones include:

• Westcott and Mathers created all the Manuscripts and letters themselves, and created the origin myth of "Rosicrucian Adepts" to give credibility to their new Order.
• Mason and clergyman A.F.A. Woodford found the Cipher Manuscript in a secondhand bookstall on Wellington Road in London, and gave it to his friend Westcott to be decoded.
• The Sprengel letters were a forgery by Westcott, but the Manuscripts were written by Kenneth Mackenzie and/or other scholars of the S.R.I.A. (to which Westcott, Mathers and Woodman belonged as early as 1881). Fräulein Sprengel was a legend invented by Westcott to give lineage to the newly formed order. Westcott created the mythology of the Cipher Manuscripts' origins, knowing that a more esoteric source would carry weight with occultists of the era.
• There was no German order; the first Golden Dawn temple was a project of a secret group within the S.R.I.A. called the "Society of Eight". (By the time Westcott "discovered" the Manuscripts, all the members of the Society were deceased.) Fräulein Sprengel didn't really exist, but the Manuscript itself has true antiquarian origins, traceable to Johann Falk and passed through the hands of Francis Barrett, Eliphas Levi, and eventually to Mackenzie, Woodford and the S.R.I.A. (and the Society of Eight).
• There really was a German Rosicrucian order, sometimes referred to as the "Gold und Rosenkreutz," and it already had a branch in London, founded around 1810. Mackenzie was a member of this German order, into which he had been initiated by Count Apponyi of Hungary, and obtained the rituals described in the Cipher from them.
• The rituals in the Manuscripts were written by Baron Edward Bulwer-Lytton, honorary patron of the S.R.I.A. and author of an occult novel called Zanoni - A Strange Story, or by Frederick Hockley, the famous Rosicrucian seer and transcriber of occult manuscripts, and thence passed to Mackenzie.
• The Cipher Manuscript was legitimate, and the Golden Dawn is a valid offspring of an older Jewish order in Bavaria called Loge zur aufgehenden Morgenröthe, which translates to "Lodge of the Approaching Morning Light" or "Lodge of the Rising Dawn". This Order was founded to allow German Jews to conduct Masonic-style lodges since, at the time, Jews were banned from participation in Freemasonry.

In any case, no evidence has ever proven the existence of Fräulein Sprengel or her Lodge. (By Westcott's account, the other members of the German order supposedly objected to Sprengel's chartering of the Isis-Urania Lodge, and all further communications were cut off after she died.) The Isis-Urania Charter was written and signed only by Westcott, Mathers and William Robert Woodman. There are letters by Mackenzie that indicate the 'Society of Eight' existed, but nothing that describes what they actually taught or practiced. The symbolism and philosophy contained in the Cipher Manuscripts are not very different from that of high-degree Freemasonry and Rosicrucianism, and Mackenzie and the members of the S.R.I.A. were capable-enough esoteric scholars, with access to works on the Qabalah, Hermeticism, and Egyptology in Masonic libraries, to have combined it all into the form followed by the Golden Dawn.

However, there is no conclusive evidence to prove any of the proposed origins of the Cipher Manuscripts. Questions about the authenticity of the Manuscripts and the authority of the Isis-Urania Charter contributed to the first great schism of the Golden Dawn Order in 1900. In 1901, with the dissensions in the Golden Dawn, the poet W. B. Yeats, a member of the Order, privately published a pamphlet titled Is the Order of R.R. et A. C. to Remain a Magical Order? The true origins of the Cipher Manuscripts remain a mystery to this day.