The Secret City: London's Hidden History of Magic, Mystery, and the Occult.

  Buy Now (Click Link) The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, for all its brilliance and influence, was a fragile and volatile organisation. Its members were brilliant, ambitious, and often deeply eccentric individuals, and its hierarchical structure was a breeding ground for jealousy, power struggles, and schism. In 1900, less than twelve years after its founding, the order would be torn apart by a magical civil war, a bitter and often bizarre conflict that would pit the order’s London adepts, led by the poet W.B. Yeats, against its flamboyant and rebellious leader, Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, and his fearsome new champion, the young Aleister Crowley. Crowley Vs Yeats The Seeds of Rebellion: Mathers’ Autocracy The conflict had been brewing for years. Mathers, who had become the sole leader of the order after the death of Woodman and the resignation of Westcott, had moved to Paris and was ruling the order from afar. His leadership style became increasingly autocratic and erra...