Beyond the Fringe
A Victorian Eccentric and the Book That Announced the Occult Revival
Kenneth R.H. Mackenzie, born in 1833, was a precociously gifted student of language and culture. At 17, he was a regular contributor to Notes and Queries. His interests ranged beyond the then-dominant classical curriculum to embrace the study of European folk traditions and the civilizations of the East. He translated and annotated the work of a renowned Prussian Egyptologist, winning him the first of his honors—Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London—before the age of 21. His second—Member of the Royal Asiatic Society—was bestowed for the publication the following year of his Burmah and the Burmese, a study of the history and institutions of that country. He was later elected fellow of yet another learned society, the Anthropological Society of London.
But despite going on to publish several more translations, including a biography of Bismark and two collections of German folktales, the only further scholarly distinctions Mackenzie would receive were those he spuriously awarded himself. Though he signed the preface to his rendering of J.M. Wolf’s Fairy Tales as Kenneth R.H. Mackenzie, Ph.D., F.S.A., M.R.S.A., he was no doctor of philosophy. Nor did he ever hold the law degree he claimed when editing a quasi-masonic publication under the name Bro. Kenneth R.H. Mackenzie, IXº, LL.D, 32º.
As this last example shows, Mackenzie did not content himself with assuming unearned academic titles. After meeting the noted French occultist Eliphas Levi in Paris at the age of 29, he increasingly devoted himself to the pursuit of honors more exotic and exalted, such as Grand Patron of the Ancient Order of Ishmael, Supreme Grand Secretary of the Rite of Swedenborg, Arch Censor of the Royal Oriental Order of Sikha (Apex) and the Sat B’hai, and member of the elite Society of Eight.
These fraternities and others like them—including the Rosicrucian Society of England; the Ancient and Primitive Rite of Memphis-Mizraim; and the Fratres Lucis, or the Brotherhood of the Cross of Light—were exclusive initiatory societies of an Eastern or esoteric character. Despite professing ancient or medieval provenance, they had in fact been organized by British freemasons in the 1860s, 70s, and 80s. The proliferation of strange orders and rites in this period has come to be known as fringe masonry, and in this minor but influential cultural trend Mackenzie was a prime mover. He played a leading role not only in the development of the seven groups named above but—more salient to our purpose—in the promotion of the enthusiasms of this movement to a wider public.
Let us take a closer look at one of these groups, the Order of Ishmael. In 1872, Mackenzie claimed possession of the 36 degrees of this rite, “the basis of which,” he let it be known, he “had from an Arab in Paris.” That nameless Arab, by the way, was far from the most outlandish source for the rituals used by societies in this subculture. Those of the Fratres Lucis, for instance, were said to have been dictated to its current custodian, Mackenzie’s friend Captain F.G. Irwin, by the spirit of the eighteenth-century adventurer and occultist Cagliostro.
But what was the Order of Ishmael? Let us turn for information to a contemporary reference work published in installments between 1875 and 1877, the Royal Masonic Cyclopaedia. There we learn the society in question is also called the Order of Esau and Reconciliation, or the Order of Wanderers. Hints as to its nature, its symbols, its history and organization, the names of its offices, and various Arabic words and expressions used by its members are scattered across three score pages of the volume, but the main entry tells us, among other things:
This very ancient Eastern order has a legendary history like that of the Freemasons, and no doubt has claims upon the attention of mankind.…Until very recent years, there was a political section to the Order, but this has been altogether suppressed, and the objects for which the Order exists consist of mutual aid, instruction, and general enlightenment. The Chiefs of the Order reside habitually in the East and two of the three chiefs must always be east of Jerusalem. Branches of this Order, under Arch-Chancellors, exist in Russia, Turkey, Greece, Austria, Italy, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, France, Spain, Portugal, Africa, and the United Kingdom.
As the reader may have guessed, Mackenzie was himself the author of this volume, or at least its compiler. He had been commissioned by the publisher John Hogg to produce a more concise alternative to Albert Mackey’s recent thousand-page Encyclopedia of Freemasonry. He turned in a work that, in addition to entries supplied by himself and several fellow adherents of fringe rites, included many others taken directly from Mackey’s book without attribution.
But more irksome, surely, to the average reader was how much of the original material deals with subjects of questionable relevance. Two of the longest entries are those on the Kabbalah and the Rosicrucians, at 17 and 21 pages, respectively, and throughout the volume esoteric topics threaten to outnumber properly masonic ones. Nor is the scholarly standard always high: the 11 full pages devoted to Cagliostro incorporate details provided, at Mackenzie’s request, to Irwin by the subject himself, or rather his disembodied spirit. Entries are allotted to nearly all the various societies either concocted wholesale or dubiously imported by Mackenzie and his circle: LIGHT, BROTHERS OF (“A mystic order, Fratres Lucis, established in Florence in 1498.”), SAT B’HAI, ROYAL ORIENTAL ORDER OF (“The ceremonies are of an august nature, and the rite is elaborate, and yet appeals forcibly to the good sense of its members.”), SWEDENBORG, RITE OF (“It is difficult to describe its ceremonies, but it is interesting and perfect in its symbolism.”), and so on.
The entry for HERMETIC BROTHERS OF EGYPT raised some eyebrows, and not merely because for the sake of consistency it should have been listed as EGYPT, HERMETIC BROTHERS OF. “The body is never very numerous,” we are told,
and if we may believe those who at the present time profess to belong to it, the philosopher’s stone, the elixir of life, the art of invisibility, and the power of communication directly with the ultramundane life, are parts of the inheritance they possess. The writer has met with only three persons who maintained the actual existence of this body of religious philosophers, and who hinted that they themselves were actually members.
This is a bit unclear. Since by the author’s account there is no one who professes to belong to the group but merely three who hint they might, who is it whom “we may believe” on the subject? And then there is the fact that in an earlier report in the journal of the Rosicrucian Society on the similarly named “Hermetic Order of Egypt” Mackenzie asserted, “I have only met with six individuals who possessed it and of these two were German, two Frenchmen and two of other nations.” Assuming this to be the same group, as seems all but certain, how could the number of members he encountered have since fallen to three? Despite such discrepancies, the volume, though never popular with freemasons, was immediately esteemed by occultists of all descriptions.
Mackenzie’s generosity in advertising the claims of any improbable society he happened to hear of soon paid off. In the spring of 1874, Helena P. Blavatsky, a Russian emigré then living in New York City, made it known that she had been initiated into a secret Eastern order, the Brotherhood of Luxor. A member of her circle at the time was a recent British expatriate who belonged to Mackenzie’s coterie, and it has been speculated that it was he who passed the tidbit on to Mackenzie. The latter lost no time in adding an entry for LUXOR, BROTHERHOOD OF (“A fraternity in America having a Rosicrucian basis, and numbering many members.”). Madame Blavatsky went on to found the Theosophical Society, and Mackenzie was duly made an honorary member. His Cyclopaedia was cited in Blavatsky’s popular occult treatise Isis Unveiled in support of the reality of the Brotherhood of Luxor, though she denied the order had a “Rosicrucian basis,” insisting on the contrary that the Rosicrucians had based their teachings on the Brotherhood’s.
Mackenzie’s Royal Masonic Cyclopaedia has been said by one authority to have “distilled the essence of Victorian esoteric thought,” and by another to have “announc[ed] the occult revival of the nineteenth century” to the world. It thus looked both backward and forward. The work gathered up the results of the activity carried out over the previous decade by the network to which Mackenzie belonged and repackaged them in a handy format for dissemination beyond the narrow world of British fringe masonry, thus shaping the Occult Revival then just getting underway. The volume did not, in fact, do much to advance the fortunes of the minuscule quasi-masonic societies listed therein, most of which were either stillborn or moribund. What it did was to popularize a particular set of models for dreaming up strange and highly advanced secret orders.
In this light, it was perhaps the entry for the Hermetic Brothers of Egypt—a body which had no actuality even among Mackenzie’s friends—that proved most influential. The secret arts supposedly possessed by this fraternity are just the sort of thing hoped to be learned by those joining the avowedly occultist societies and orders that popped up in the mid-to-late 1880s. One such group, the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor, which was formed in 1884 (no doubt as a fusion between the Hermetic Brothers of Egypt and the Brotherhood of Luxor), taught practical occultism—clairvoyance, astral travel, the invocation of spirits, and a form of sex magic—by mail. The Hermetic Society, which split off from the Theosophical Society in 1884 to set aside the study of Eastern mysticism for the sake of Western occult traditions, likely also took its modifier from the same entry. And so, besides much inspiration and validation from Mackenzie’s book as a whole, did the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, founded in 1888 and still well known today.
Nor was that all the Golden Dawn borrowed from Mackenzie, as we will see in our next installment in this series on the roots of the Occult Revival: “Dr. Westcott Will Not Do.”
Sources
On Mackenzie’s life and influence, see Patrick D. Bowen, “The British Birth of the Occult Revival, 1869-1875,” Theosophical History, Vol. XIX, Issue 1 (January 2017) (note the linked article is an unedited version made available by the author) and A History of Conversion to Islam in the United States, Volume 1: White American Muslims before 1975 (2015); R.A. Gilbert and John Hamill, introduction to the Aquarian Press edition of the Royal Masonic Cyclopaedia (1987); Joscelyn Godwin, The Theosophical Enlightenment (1994); and two works by Ellic Howe: “Fringe Masonry in England 1870–85” (1972) and The Magicians of the Golden Dawn: A Documentary History of a Magical Order 1887-1923 (1972).
I consulted the Royal Masonic Cyclopaedia (John Hogg, 1877) and, on the genesis of the Order of Ishmael, “The Order of Ishmael or B’nai Ishmael” by John Yarker in the Rosicrucian Brotherhood (October 1907).