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Damn.
Maybe one for the WF Lounge, but let's NOT do this any more.
Paid, so not posting the link, but copying the free section here.
Before it all gets lost in the mist of time, I appreciate Nick Farrell sharing details about the tacky, shabby low-information quality of the 20th century magic scene.
And did Francis King really look a self-serious George Costanza? He probably got into the occult for the chicks, man.
------------------------------------
------------------------------------
Francis King and the Hermanubis fraud
An early attempt at faking a lineage
by Nick Farrell
------------------------------------
In the 1970s, the occult writer Francis King (10 January 1934–8 November 1994) hit on a wizard wheeze which would have been impossible 20 years later and still has ramifications today.
Despite having yet to run an occult order, he wanted to create a British supergroup featuring all the big names in the magic scene. Naturally, he would be in charge.
This was a very 1970s-style occult idea. The scene was small enough for everyone to know everyone else, large enough for them to hate each other, and vague enough for a bold claim to travel further than it deserved. Most of the surviving magical groups were private, half-private, or operating on inherited fragments of teaching. The old Victorian and Edwardian certainties had gone, but their smell lingered in the curtains. Anyone who could produce a few papers, a bit of authority, and the right tone of weary importance could sound plausible.
King understood the value of that tone. He had the writer’s advantage and could make things sound connected, historical, and significant. He knew that occultists like nothing more than being told they are heirs to something hidden, preferably something other people were too stupid, vulgar, or spiritually unready to receive.
The order’s structure included a year-long correspondence course to teach the basics before initiating those who passed into a proper temple. It is possible King thought the “names” he wanted to attract would run their own groups based on the teaching and format he gave them.
That structure made sense on paper. A correspondence course gave him reach, income, and control over the initial teaching. The temple gave the whole scheme the aura of legitimacy. The famous names would provide glamour and local authority. Each would become, in effect, a franchise-holder in a new British magical federation. If it had worked, King would have placed himself at the centre of a network without having to do the slow, boring, thankless work of building a functioning order from the ground up.
His problem was that while he was a known occult writer and researcher, King had no pull with the Wiccans and Dion Fortune-influenced groups which dominated the occult scene. He tried to capitalise on his knowledge of the Golden Dawn to draw them together under his umbrella, and made the temple structure he was building into a Golden Dawn order.
This was clever, at least in the way a fox getting into a henhouse is clever. The Golden Dawn still carried prestige. Even those who did not want to practise its system knew it was important. It had connections to Yeats, Mathers, Westcott, Waite, Crowley, Felkin, Fortune, Regardie, and half the mythological furniture of 20th-century occultism. Like Schroedinger’s cat, it had the advantage of being both dead and alive at the same time, which made it ideal for magical entrepreneurship. Enough of it had vanished to allow speculation. Enough of it had survived to make claims look convincing.
Choosing the Golden Dawn was logical. King had written some Golden Dawn books, had a long correspondence with Israel Regardie and had access to some authentic papers. But King had another problem which would cause similar difficulties for those trying to establish Golden Dawn groups in the 1980s and later. The Golden Dawn structure forbade him from forming one without lineage or the nod of a chief.
This was not a minor technicality. In a system like the Golden Dawn, authority was transmitted through temple initiation and grade. You could study the rituals from books, memorise the knowledge lectures, paint the tools, recite the god-names, and still lack the one thing that mattered to the old order: the right to open a temple. The system was hierarchical to its bones. It did not care that someone had enthusiasm, notebooks, or an original golden dawn brass candlestick bought from a junk shop in Camden. It wanted authorisation.
This is where later Golden Dawn groups repeatedly ran into trouble. The publication of rituals made the system available, but availability did not solve the authority problem. Regardie had preserved the material, but preservation did not create chiefs. People could work the system privately, and many did, some even set up study groups. But claiming to restore the Golden Dawn as a temple order required something more. If you lacked lineage, you either admitted you were reconstructing the system or you manufactured a bridge to the past. The first approach was honest, but less attractive. The second approach sold better, and that was what King tried to pull.
King resolved the problem by inventing his lineage and creating a fictitious temple called Hermanubis, which he claimed was based in Bristol.
Apparently, this Stella Matutina temple continued after the main temple shut and provided him with the authority before it disappeared without a trace.
The vanished temple was useful because it could not answer back. It gave King the authority he needed while leaving no awkward members, papers, or surviving officers to contradict him. The fact that he claimed it was an offshoot of the Bristol helped. It was close enough to sound plausible and far enough from the usual Golden Dawn centres to make gaps in the record easier to explain. As long as nobody pressed too hard, Hermanubis could function as a convenient bridge between King’s ambitions and the authority he lacked.
What King did not know, is that one of the former chiefs of the Bristol temple had spoken to Golden Dawn researcher Robert Gilbert. It seemed that while the temple had not had a meeting since the 1960s it had never formally shut. There certainly was not daughter temple either.
King managed to convince others of the temple’s existence. Ithell Colquhoun listed the temple in her biography of Mathers, Sword of Wisdom. Colquhoun while extremely well connected to the Alpha et Omega, was fond of believing whatever she was told so was not exactly reliable. Her book has been cited by many people who want to fit their bogus lineage into a historical frame.
This shows how easily occult history can become infected. A claim appears in conversation, then in private correspondence, then in a book, and suddenly it develops a paper trail. Once it’s in print, it starts breeding. Later writers cite the book, then other writers cite them, and before long a phantom temple starts moving through history wearing borrowed shoes. It never needed to exist in the first place.
King pitched his group as the heir to the true, unpublished secrets of the Golden Dawn that Israel Regardie did not know. Some ideas leaked into his book, Techniques of High Magic, and outlined what he hoped to sell as this secret wisdom. This included swapping the elemental weapons so that the wand, rather than the dagger, represented air, and the sword, rather than the wand, represented fire. I have seen this attribution in the Servants of the Light, and I am told the same applies to Wicca and Inner Light, of which King was a member. It was never secret teaching in any Golden Dawn temple, and I suspect it was intended to make Golden Dawn teaching more palatable to those who were not familiar with it.
The weapon swap is relevant because, at first glance, it seems perfectly reasonable. You can make a case for a wand as air and a sword as fire without much strain. In a general magical system, you can argue it either way. The wand can direct breath and spirit. The sword can flash, cut, burn, and blaze. The problem is that the Golden Dawn system was not built from casual symbolic association. Its attributions were part of a larger structure involving tarot, Enochian, ritual movement, grade symbolism, the Tree of Life, and the internal logic of its elemental work. Change one part and the whole pattern collapses like an Ikea shelf.
The dagger as air and the wand as fire fitted the order’s symbolic grammar. The dagger cut, divided, analysed, and separated, all proper functions of air in the Golden Dawn’s ritual language. The wand directed will and force and belonged naturally to fire. The weapon swap might have helped Wiccans or Fortune-influenced magicians feel more at home, since many of them were used to a different set of associations. But presenting it as hidden Golden Dawn teaching was another matter. That sort of thing is how confusion becomes tradition, and then tradition becomes something people defend with the sincerity normally reserved for family illness.
King put the work in. The correspondence course was established and took on students. Mike Magee published this course in the Hermetic Tablet.
The course shows that King was not just spinning grandiose nonsense in the pub. He built a workable-looking system, with lessons, structure, and a path that appeared to lead towards initiation. Students could enter it and imagine themselves moving upwards through something real. Which is, unfortunately, what makes this bit so awkward. He produced something persuasive enough that other people put their faith in it.
King made the equipment for his temple and called on a few friends to attend the inaugural meeting of the restored Hermanubis. No rituals were performed, but photographs of the event were taken. These photographs were later used in King’s picture book Magic.
The photographs matter because they gave the fantasy a body. Occult history loves photographs. Robes, wands, banners, and the dim lighting of a suburban temple can do more persuasive work than a page of argument. Once photographed, an event appears to have happened, it did not matter that no rituals were performed or that an opening without temple work is a little like launching a restaurant by photographing the cutlery. The image did its job, it made Hermanubis look real.
But like all good plans, it failed totally. When those who had completed the correspondence course finished, they found no lodge to join. One student kept writing and never received a reply.
That is the point where the thing becomes grubby. Students had been led to expect a path. They were not just buying information. A correspondence course in itself would have been fine, but they were sold the beginning of a temple system. When they reached the door, there was no door. There was only the myth of Hermanubis, and silence.
It is unclear why King decided not to press ahead with his cunning plan. In the days before the internet, it was not as if he would ever be rumbled. What is more likely is that he could not sell the concept as a supergroup to other orders. Running esoteric groups is like herding cats, while setting up an esoteric supergroup is like trying to organise a flock of chickens with their heads cut off.
Occult groups might accept borrowed material and historical mythology, but they were not eager to submit to another occultist’s umbrella. Every group already had its own chiefs, contacts, sources, dead teachers, or whatever method it used to explain why it should not listen to anyone else. King may have hoped that the Golden Dawn name would override those loyalties. That was optimistic.
There may also have been a practical reason. Running an order sounds thrilling only to people who have never tried it. People imagine occult chiefs spending their evenings bathed in purple light, receiving cosmic instructions. The reality involves paperwork, subscription reminders, ritual corrections, bruised egos, melodrama, and occasional complaints that an enemy has interfered with someone’s subtle body. A correspondence course is easy enough. A living temple demands organisation, patience, and a willingness to deal with other occultists for longer than is healthy.
King’s group was formed long before the rediscovery of Whare Ra, the unearthing of a ton of Golden Dawn manuscripts and the heavy work done by different groups using the system. Had King’s group been operational in the 1990s, he would have faced an angry mob of members armed with pitchforks, having taken them for a ride for 20 years.
The later Golden Dawn revival changed the mood considerably. More source material surfaced, more people practised the rituals seriously, and it became much easier to compare printed texts, surviving documents, oral claims, and actual practice. That was bad news for fake lineages, which had previously enjoyed a more relaxed relationship with reality. Then the internet came along and made every argument permanent and searchable.
King’s claim came from a world where information moved slowly, and personal authority could still pass for evidence. A writer could invoke private transmissions or conversations with people who were, very conveniently, nowhere to be found. Most readers had no practical way to check. By the 1990s and 2000s, unfortunately for that sort of thing, claims had to get past archives, former members, and researchers with an unhealthy emotional investment in footnotes.
The Hermanubis fantasy looks like an early rehearsal for the later Golden Dawn wars, where occult groups fought over lineage and authority with the grim determination of people defending a parking space outside the Temple of Thoth.
As Tony Fuller notes, King retreated from the Hermanubis story before his death. In the 1989 revised edition of Ritual Magic in England, republished as Modern Ritual Magic, he wrote: “I am now satisfied that the modern Bristol Temple in this chapter had no connection with either the original Golden Dawn or the Cromlech Temple.”
It must have been very easy for him to prove it to himself.
King’s correction is careful but evasive. He never explains how the claim entered the record, who told him, or why he accepted it. He just detaches the Bristol temple from the Golden Dawn and Cromlech and moves on. The fantasy isn’t confessed, only toned down.
However, the group's legacy remains. I am still contacted by those asking me when Hermanubis closed and if it had any modern offshoots. During the Golden Dawn wars, one American insisted that Hermanubis existed and that he had lineage from it. This was not one of the usual suspects. Another thing you find are those who insist that there is a secret tradition where the Golden Dawn did have such a thing as an Air Wand and a Fire Sword.
This is how modern occult history gets forged: through a useful lie. Hermanubis gave King the authority he didn’t have, later students the comfort of continuity, and later fantasists a lineage to wave about when reality got inconvenient. A temple that never properly existed ended up doing more work than many real ones, which is depressing, but hardly surprising.
It also shows what goes wrong when reconstruction gets passed off as inheritance. There’s nothing wrong about reconstruction; much of modern magic is built on it. We work with fragments, broken lineages and systems that have to be worked back into life by intelligent practice. Things go bad when reconstruction is repackaged as secret continuity. Then the work turns theatrical, and someone starts charging for the act.
Francis King did real work as a writer. He brought obscure material into circulation, published valuable sources, and opened doors for later readers. None of that excuses Hermanubis. A writer can preserve history and distort it at the same time.
By inventing Hermanubis to found a Golden Dawn order he was never entitled to lead, King produced a fake lineage, scrambled attributions, disappointed students, and created a ghost temple that still drifts through modern occultism, looking for fresh victims.
Paying subscribers can hear this article read (and download it) below the paywall
Maybe one for the WF Lounge, but let's NOT do this any more.
Paid, so not posting the link, but copying the free section here.
Before it all gets lost in the mist of time, I appreciate Nick Farrell sharing details about the tacky, shabby low-information quality of the 20th century magic scene.
And did Francis King really look a self-serious George Costanza? He probably got into the occult for the chicks, man.
------------------------------------
------------------------------------
Francis King and the Hermanubis fraud
An early attempt at faking a lineage
by Nick Farrell
------------------------------------
In the 1970s, the occult writer Francis King (10 January 1934–8 November 1994) hit on a wizard wheeze which would have been impossible 20 years later and still has ramifications today.
Despite having yet to run an occult order, he wanted to create a British supergroup featuring all the big names in the magic scene. Naturally, he would be in charge.
This was a very 1970s-style occult idea. The scene was small enough for everyone to know everyone else, large enough for them to hate each other, and vague enough for a bold claim to travel further than it deserved. Most of the surviving magical groups were private, half-private, or operating on inherited fragments of teaching. The old Victorian and Edwardian certainties had gone, but their smell lingered in the curtains. Anyone who could produce a few papers, a bit of authority, and the right tone of weary importance could sound plausible.
King understood the value of that tone. He had the writer’s advantage and could make things sound connected, historical, and significant. He knew that occultists like nothing more than being told they are heirs to something hidden, preferably something other people were too stupid, vulgar, or spiritually unready to receive.
The order’s structure included a year-long correspondence course to teach the basics before initiating those who passed into a proper temple. It is possible King thought the “names” he wanted to attract would run their own groups based on the teaching and format he gave them.
That structure made sense on paper. A correspondence course gave him reach, income, and control over the initial teaching. The temple gave the whole scheme the aura of legitimacy. The famous names would provide glamour and local authority. Each would become, in effect, a franchise-holder in a new British magical federation. If it had worked, King would have placed himself at the centre of a network without having to do the slow, boring, thankless work of building a functioning order from the ground up.
His problem was that while he was a known occult writer and researcher, King had no pull with the Wiccans and Dion Fortune-influenced groups which dominated the occult scene. He tried to capitalise on his knowledge of the Golden Dawn to draw them together under his umbrella, and made the temple structure he was building into a Golden Dawn order.
This was clever, at least in the way a fox getting into a henhouse is clever. The Golden Dawn still carried prestige. Even those who did not want to practise its system knew it was important. It had connections to Yeats, Mathers, Westcott, Waite, Crowley, Felkin, Fortune, Regardie, and half the mythological furniture of 20th-century occultism. Like Schroedinger’s cat, it had the advantage of being both dead and alive at the same time, which made it ideal for magical entrepreneurship. Enough of it had vanished to allow speculation. Enough of it had survived to make claims look convincing.
Choosing the Golden Dawn was logical. King had written some Golden Dawn books, had a long correspondence with Israel Regardie and had access to some authentic papers. But King had another problem which would cause similar difficulties for those trying to establish Golden Dawn groups in the 1980s and later. The Golden Dawn structure forbade him from forming one without lineage or the nod of a chief.
This was not a minor technicality. In a system like the Golden Dawn, authority was transmitted through temple initiation and grade. You could study the rituals from books, memorise the knowledge lectures, paint the tools, recite the god-names, and still lack the one thing that mattered to the old order: the right to open a temple. The system was hierarchical to its bones. It did not care that someone had enthusiasm, notebooks, or an original golden dawn brass candlestick bought from a junk shop in Camden. It wanted authorisation.
This is where later Golden Dawn groups repeatedly ran into trouble. The publication of rituals made the system available, but availability did not solve the authority problem. Regardie had preserved the material, but preservation did not create chiefs. People could work the system privately, and many did, some even set up study groups. But claiming to restore the Golden Dawn as a temple order required something more. If you lacked lineage, you either admitted you were reconstructing the system or you manufactured a bridge to the past. The first approach was honest, but less attractive. The second approach sold better, and that was what King tried to pull.
King resolved the problem by inventing his lineage and creating a fictitious temple called Hermanubis, which he claimed was based in Bristol.
Apparently, this Stella Matutina temple continued after the main temple shut and provided him with the authority before it disappeared without a trace.
The vanished temple was useful because it could not answer back. It gave King the authority he needed while leaving no awkward members, papers, or surviving officers to contradict him. The fact that he claimed it was an offshoot of the Bristol helped. It was close enough to sound plausible and far enough from the usual Golden Dawn centres to make gaps in the record easier to explain. As long as nobody pressed too hard, Hermanubis could function as a convenient bridge between King’s ambitions and the authority he lacked.
What King did not know, is that one of the former chiefs of the Bristol temple had spoken to Golden Dawn researcher Robert Gilbert. It seemed that while the temple had not had a meeting since the 1960s it had never formally shut. There certainly was not daughter temple either.
King managed to convince others of the temple’s existence. Ithell Colquhoun listed the temple in her biography of Mathers, Sword of Wisdom. Colquhoun while extremely well connected to the Alpha et Omega, was fond of believing whatever she was told so was not exactly reliable. Her book has been cited by many people who want to fit their bogus lineage into a historical frame.
This shows how easily occult history can become infected. A claim appears in conversation, then in private correspondence, then in a book, and suddenly it develops a paper trail. Once it’s in print, it starts breeding. Later writers cite the book, then other writers cite them, and before long a phantom temple starts moving through history wearing borrowed shoes. It never needed to exist in the first place.
King pitched his group as the heir to the true, unpublished secrets of the Golden Dawn that Israel Regardie did not know. Some ideas leaked into his book, Techniques of High Magic, and outlined what he hoped to sell as this secret wisdom. This included swapping the elemental weapons so that the wand, rather than the dagger, represented air, and the sword, rather than the wand, represented fire. I have seen this attribution in the Servants of the Light, and I am told the same applies to Wicca and Inner Light, of which King was a member. It was never secret teaching in any Golden Dawn temple, and I suspect it was intended to make Golden Dawn teaching more palatable to those who were not familiar with it.
The weapon swap is relevant because, at first glance, it seems perfectly reasonable. You can make a case for a wand as air and a sword as fire without much strain. In a general magical system, you can argue it either way. The wand can direct breath and spirit. The sword can flash, cut, burn, and blaze. The problem is that the Golden Dawn system was not built from casual symbolic association. Its attributions were part of a larger structure involving tarot, Enochian, ritual movement, grade symbolism, the Tree of Life, and the internal logic of its elemental work. Change one part and the whole pattern collapses like an Ikea shelf.
The dagger as air and the wand as fire fitted the order’s symbolic grammar. The dagger cut, divided, analysed, and separated, all proper functions of air in the Golden Dawn’s ritual language. The wand directed will and force and belonged naturally to fire. The weapon swap might have helped Wiccans or Fortune-influenced magicians feel more at home, since many of them were used to a different set of associations. But presenting it as hidden Golden Dawn teaching was another matter. That sort of thing is how confusion becomes tradition, and then tradition becomes something people defend with the sincerity normally reserved for family illness.
King put the work in. The correspondence course was established and took on students. Mike Magee published this course in the Hermetic Tablet.
The course shows that King was not just spinning grandiose nonsense in the pub. He built a workable-looking system, with lessons, structure, and a path that appeared to lead towards initiation. Students could enter it and imagine themselves moving upwards through something real. Which is, unfortunately, what makes this bit so awkward. He produced something persuasive enough that other people put their faith in it.
King made the equipment for his temple and called on a few friends to attend the inaugural meeting of the restored Hermanubis. No rituals were performed, but photographs of the event were taken. These photographs were later used in King’s picture book Magic.
The photographs matter because they gave the fantasy a body. Occult history loves photographs. Robes, wands, banners, and the dim lighting of a suburban temple can do more persuasive work than a page of argument. Once photographed, an event appears to have happened, it did not matter that no rituals were performed or that an opening without temple work is a little like launching a restaurant by photographing the cutlery. The image did its job, it made Hermanubis look real.
But like all good plans, it failed totally. When those who had completed the correspondence course finished, they found no lodge to join. One student kept writing and never received a reply.
That is the point where the thing becomes grubby. Students had been led to expect a path. They were not just buying information. A correspondence course in itself would have been fine, but they were sold the beginning of a temple system. When they reached the door, there was no door. There was only the myth of Hermanubis, and silence.
It is unclear why King decided not to press ahead with his cunning plan. In the days before the internet, it was not as if he would ever be rumbled. What is more likely is that he could not sell the concept as a supergroup to other orders. Running esoteric groups is like herding cats, while setting up an esoteric supergroup is like trying to organise a flock of chickens with their heads cut off.
Occult groups might accept borrowed material and historical mythology, but they were not eager to submit to another occultist’s umbrella. Every group already had its own chiefs, contacts, sources, dead teachers, or whatever method it used to explain why it should not listen to anyone else. King may have hoped that the Golden Dawn name would override those loyalties. That was optimistic.
There may also have been a practical reason. Running an order sounds thrilling only to people who have never tried it. People imagine occult chiefs spending their evenings bathed in purple light, receiving cosmic instructions. The reality involves paperwork, subscription reminders, ritual corrections, bruised egos, melodrama, and occasional complaints that an enemy has interfered with someone’s subtle body. A correspondence course is easy enough. A living temple demands organisation, patience, and a willingness to deal with other occultists for longer than is healthy.
King’s group was formed long before the rediscovery of Whare Ra, the unearthing of a ton of Golden Dawn manuscripts and the heavy work done by different groups using the system. Had King’s group been operational in the 1990s, he would have faced an angry mob of members armed with pitchforks, having taken them for a ride for 20 years.
The later Golden Dawn revival changed the mood considerably. More source material surfaced, more people practised the rituals seriously, and it became much easier to compare printed texts, surviving documents, oral claims, and actual practice. That was bad news for fake lineages, which had previously enjoyed a more relaxed relationship with reality. Then the internet came along and made every argument permanent and searchable.
King’s claim came from a world where information moved slowly, and personal authority could still pass for evidence. A writer could invoke private transmissions or conversations with people who were, very conveniently, nowhere to be found. Most readers had no practical way to check. By the 1990s and 2000s, unfortunately for that sort of thing, claims had to get past archives, former members, and researchers with an unhealthy emotional investment in footnotes.
The Hermanubis fantasy looks like an early rehearsal for the later Golden Dawn wars, where occult groups fought over lineage and authority with the grim determination of people defending a parking space outside the Temple of Thoth.
As Tony Fuller notes, King retreated from the Hermanubis story before his death. In the 1989 revised edition of Ritual Magic in England, republished as Modern Ritual Magic, he wrote: “I am now satisfied that the modern Bristol Temple in this chapter had no connection with either the original Golden Dawn or the Cromlech Temple.”
It must have been very easy for him to prove it to himself.
King’s correction is careful but evasive. He never explains how the claim entered the record, who told him, or why he accepted it. He just detaches the Bristol temple from the Golden Dawn and Cromlech and moves on. The fantasy isn’t confessed, only toned down.
However, the group's legacy remains. I am still contacted by those asking me when Hermanubis closed and if it had any modern offshoots. During the Golden Dawn wars, one American insisted that Hermanubis existed and that he had lineage from it. This was not one of the usual suspects. Another thing you find are those who insist that there is a secret tradition where the Golden Dawn did have such a thing as an Air Wand and a Fire Sword.
This is how modern occult history gets forged: through a useful lie. Hermanubis gave King the authority he didn’t have, later students the comfort of continuity, and later fantasists a lineage to wave about when reality got inconvenient. A temple that never properly existed ended up doing more work than many real ones, which is depressing, but hardly surprising.
It also shows what goes wrong when reconstruction gets passed off as inheritance. There’s nothing wrong about reconstruction; much of modern magic is built on it. We work with fragments, broken lineages and systems that have to be worked back into life by intelligent practice. Things go bad when reconstruction is repackaged as secret continuity. Then the work turns theatrical, and someone starts charging for the act.
Francis King did real work as a writer. He brought obscure material into circulation, published valuable sources, and opened doors for later readers. None of that excuses Hermanubis. A writer can preserve history and distort it at the same time.
By inventing Hermanubis to found a Golden Dawn order he was never entitled to lead, King produced a fake lineage, scrambled attributions, disappointed students, and created a ghost temple that still drifts through modern occultism, looking for fresh victims.
Paying subscribers can hear this article read (and download it) below the paywall
