WEBVTT - Season 09 Episode 28: Laughter Cracking Through the Walls 0:00:00.080 --> 0:00:03.400 Hello, and welcome to Unexplained with me your host, Richard 0:00:03.520 --> 0:00:07.280 McLain Smith. For each week we explore another true tale 0:00:07.320 --> 0:00:10.080 of high strangeness. If you're new here and you're a 0:00:10.080 --> 0:00:14.400 fan of expertly told atmospheric stories about the strange and unexplained, 0:00:14.840 --> 0:00:17.720 then you've come to the right place, and please subscribe 0:00:17.720 --> 0:00:20.360 to the show if you haven't already done so. I'm 0:00:20.440 --> 0:00:22.960 very excited to be taking Unexplained to the Edinburgh Fringe 0:00:23.000 --> 0:00:26.480 Festival this year. I'll be performing at the Space's Surgeons 0:00:26.520 --> 0:00:29.600 Hall venue at ten oh five pm every night from 0:00:29.680 --> 0:00:32.720 August seventh to the twenty ninth, except for the sixteenth 0:00:32.800 --> 0:00:36.960 and twenty third. You can get tickets at THESPACEUK dot com. 0:00:37.080 --> 0:00:41.240 Forward Slash shows Ford Slash twenty twenty six, Ford Slash 0:00:41.320 --> 0:00:45.040 Unexplained hyphen Live. For those watching on YouTube, you can 0:00:45.040 --> 0:00:48.600 find the link below. With all that out of the way, 0:00:48.640 --> 0:00:53.880 this is Unexplained, Season nine, Episode twenty eight Laughter Cracking 0:00:53.920 --> 0:01:08.119 through the Walls. It's late in the evening of November eighth, 0:01:08.240 --> 0:01:11.760 eighteen ninety five, down at the Physics Institute of the 0:01:11.840 --> 0:01:16.800 Julius Maximilians University of Wurtzburg. Fifty year old physicist Wilhelm 0:01:16.880 --> 0:01:20.800 Runtgen is hard at work. For the past few weeks, 0:01:20.880 --> 0:01:24.360 he's been tinkering with a cathode tube. The tube itself 0:01:24.440 --> 0:01:28.160 is simple enough to describe, a sealed glass cylinder with 0:01:28.280 --> 0:01:30.760 almost all the air sucked out of it and a 0:01:30.760 --> 0:01:34.760 metal plate fixed at each end. Rentgun connects one plate 0:01:34.840 --> 0:01:38.039 to the negative element of a rudimentary battery and the 0:01:38.080 --> 0:01:41.280 other to the positive and completes the circuit through an 0:01:41.280 --> 0:01:46.400 induction coil. Then, after turning off the lights, he throws 0:01:46.440 --> 0:01:50.680 the switch inside the tube. With nothing left to get 0:01:50.720 --> 0:01:54.560 in its way. An invisible stream leaps across the near 0:01:54.680 --> 0:01:58.240 vacuum from the negative plate toward the positive one, what 0:01:58.320 --> 0:02:01.200 physicists have taken to calling a cat cathode ray, but 0:02:01.320 --> 0:02:04.640 what it actually consists of is still as yet unknown. 0:02:05.680 --> 0:02:08.560 The glass starts to glow faintly, as if it had 0:02:08.600 --> 0:02:13.919 suddenly decided to come alive. Then something even stranger begins 0:02:13.960 --> 0:02:17.480 to happen. Bntgun catches it out at the corner of 0:02:17.480 --> 0:02:21.840 his eye, some distance away, much further than a cathode 0:02:21.880 --> 0:02:25.880 ray could possibly reach. A small screen coated in barium 0:02:25.919 --> 0:02:32.560 platinum cyanide is glowing a luminescent green. Confused, Rentgun covers 0:02:32.560 --> 0:02:35.680 the cathode tube with sheets of black cardboard, but the 0:02:35.720 --> 0:02:40.760 screen still glows. He wraps another and then another around it, 0:02:41.320 --> 0:02:45.960 but still nothing reduces that strange, eerie glow. He moves 0:02:46.000 --> 0:02:50.360 the screen further away, but nothing changes. He puts a 0:02:50.360 --> 0:02:53.480 thick book between the tube and the screen, a thousand 0:02:53.520 --> 0:02:56.600 pages of paper, more than enough to stop any light 0:02:56.680 --> 0:02:59.959 that he knows of, but still the screen keeps glow. 0:03:00.960 --> 0:03:04.000 Then Brongan holds up his own hand in front of 0:03:04.040 --> 0:03:07.760 the catho tube and stares in utter amazement at what 0:03:07.919 --> 0:03:12.480 has just appeared on the screen, the inner architecture of himself, 0:03:13.280 --> 0:03:17.720 the bones of his fingers moving when he moves them. 0:03:17.919 --> 0:03:28.680 Wilhelm Rogan has just discovered the X ray. For the 0:03:28.720 --> 0:03:32.320 next six weeks, Brogan tells no one about his discovery, 0:03:33.080 --> 0:03:36.920 not his colleagues, not even his wife. When she finally 0:03:37.000 --> 0:03:40.000 presses him to tell her what he's become so preoccupied with, 0:03:40.680 --> 0:03:43.280 he gives her the only honest answer he has that 0:03:43.400 --> 0:03:46.320 if he told people what he'd discovered, they would say 0:03:46.360 --> 0:03:51.040 he'd gone completely mad. So he stays in the dark alone, 0:03:51.600 --> 0:03:55.760 running the same tests again and again, checking and rechecking, 0:03:55.800 --> 0:03:58.320 a result that he can barely bring himself to believe. 0:03:59.520 --> 0:04:02.560 When at lasts he writes the phenomenon up, he doesn't 0:04:02.560 --> 0:04:05.160 even dare give it a proper name, it is so 0:04:05.360 --> 0:04:10.400 strange and incomprehensible. He names it simply X, the mathematic 0:04:10.480 --> 0:04:13.040 symbol for a quantity that is yet to be solved. 0:04:14.040 --> 0:04:16.960 In truth, what he's discovered, though he doesn't yet have 0:04:17.040 --> 0:04:20.679 the language for it, constitutes a whole being punched clean 0:04:20.839 --> 0:04:25.839 through the Victorian idea of a solid, visible universe. Within months, 0:04:26.120 --> 0:04:28.120 the rest of the world will be forced through that 0:04:28.200 --> 0:04:32.680 same hole, forced to accept that the air carries invisible waves, 0:04:33.279 --> 0:04:36.760 that matter gives off energy that nobody can see, and 0:04:36.800 --> 0:04:39.800 that even the human body is not quite the solid, 0:04:39.880 --> 0:04:44.200 determinate thing that most might have it be. It would 0:04:44.200 --> 0:04:47.000 be almost two decades before anyone proved what the X 0:04:47.080 --> 0:04:51.240 ray actually was, a radioactive wave of light too short 0:04:51.320 --> 0:04:55.600 for any human eye to see. But Rundgan's discovery had 0:04:55.640 --> 0:04:59.200 set in motion an earth shattering paradigm shift in our 0:04:59.320 --> 0:05:03.000 understanding of the universe, which would ultimately lead to the 0:05:03.000 --> 0:05:08.479 birth of quantum mechanics. Meanwhile, in London, at almost exactly 0:05:08.520 --> 0:05:12.200 this same moment, a rather different set of investigators were 0:05:12.240 --> 0:05:15.880 embarking on a set of experiments of their own, a 0:05:15.920 --> 0:05:21.359 loose brotherhood and sisterhood of poets, actors, doctors and mystics 0:05:21.400 --> 0:05:24.320 who never once doubted that the true architecture of the 0:05:24.440 --> 0:05:29.360 universe lay hidden behind the visible one. Much like Urgan, 0:05:29.880 --> 0:05:32.159 they too believed that all they needed was the right 0:05:32.240 --> 0:05:35.760 instrument or the right ritual to bring it into view. 0:05:36.880 --> 0:05:41.200 They had no catho tube and no barium platinum cyanide 0:05:41.279 --> 0:05:46.160 coated screen. What they had instead was a mysterious magical cipher, 0:05:46.880 --> 0:05:51.240 a stranger's letters, and an unshakable conviction that if he 0:05:51.279 --> 0:05:54.279 could just speak the right words into the dark in 0:05:54.360 --> 0:06:01.160 the right order, something would eventually answer. Of the hermetic 0:06:01.279 --> 0:06:06.320 order of the Golden Dawn. You're listening to Unexplained, and 0:06:06.440 --> 0:06:17.640 I'm Richard McLean Smith. One afternoon in the summer of 0:06:17.680 --> 0:06:21.560 eighteen eighty six, down at the strange and imposing Freemason 0:06:21.600 --> 0:06:26.080 Hall in central London, the British headquarters of the Freemason movement, 0:06:26.760 --> 0:06:30.480 the Reverend Adolphus Woodford was busy collating the papers of 0:06:30.520 --> 0:06:35.320 his close friend and fellow Mason, Kenneth Mackenzie Mackenzie had 0:06:35.400 --> 0:06:38.400 just recently died, and Woodford was keen to get his 0:06:38.480 --> 0:06:42.240 papers in order. Both men were also members of another 0:06:42.400 --> 0:06:48.840 secret society, the Society Rosicruciana in Anglia, or the Rosicrucian 0:06:48.920 --> 0:06:52.080 Society of England, which was founded by a man named 0:06:52.160 --> 0:06:56.760 Robert Little in eighteen sixty seven. For many, despite its 0:06:56.800 --> 0:07:01.560 mystical connotations and promises of divine enlightenment, the Freemason movement 0:07:01.720 --> 0:07:04.800 was really little more than an elaborate old boys club 0:07:05.120 --> 0:07:09.760 for networking and pulling favors. To that end, Little established 0:07:09.760 --> 0:07:14.640 the Society Rosicruciana for Sria in the hope of drawing 0:07:14.680 --> 0:07:18.280 together like minded fellow Masons to work on a genuine 0:07:18.320 --> 0:07:22.960 pursuit for divine knowledge. The Rosicrucian name that Little borrowed 0:07:23.400 --> 0:07:26.680 wasn't his own invention. It reached back over two and 0:07:26.720 --> 0:07:30.360 a half centuries to a set of anonymous German pamphlets 0:07:30.400 --> 0:07:34.360 that appeared in the early sixteen hundreds describing a secret 0:07:34.400 --> 0:07:40.080 brotherhood founded by a mysterious figure called Christian Rosenkrauts. According 0:07:40.120 --> 0:07:43.240 to the legend, Rosenkrauts had traveled through the Middle East 0:07:43.280 --> 0:07:46.600 as a young man, gathering secret wisdom from Arab and 0:07:46.720 --> 0:07:50.440 Sufi scholars, before returning to Europe to fuse it with 0:07:50.520 --> 0:07:55.120 Gabala alchemy and Christian mysticism, and founding a hidden order 0:07:55.360 --> 0:07:58.520 to guard and pass on what he'd learned. When his 0:07:58.680 --> 0:08:01.880 tomb was supposedly des covered a full one hundred and 0:08:01.960 --> 0:08:06.040 twenty years after his death, his body inside was said 0:08:06.080 --> 0:08:11.640 to be perfectly preserved, untouched by decay, surrounded by symbols 0:08:11.640 --> 0:08:16.160 and hidden knowledge meant only for the initiated, Like many 0:08:16.200 --> 0:08:20.360 searches of divine knowledge before him, Robert Little was inspired 0:08:20.400 --> 0:08:24.080 by the legend and hoped that his own Rosicrucian society, 0:08:24.560 --> 0:08:28.480 the SRIA, could serve as a kind of British outpost 0:08:28.800 --> 0:08:32.200 to continue the same search that the original Rose Accrutionans 0:08:32.480 --> 0:08:36.720 had supposedly embarked on to unlock the secrets of the universe. 0:08:37.760 --> 0:08:41.320 But it wasn't long before the SRIA had its critics too. 0:08:42.600 --> 0:08:45.480 Sure they were learning more, but for some members it 0:08:45.600 --> 0:08:50.800 was all too Academic. Members like Reverend Adolphus Woodford, wanted 0:08:50.800 --> 0:08:54.679 to go further, so when he was gathering Kenneth Mackenzie's 0:08:54.679 --> 0:08:58.040 papers from his office, he couldn't help but be intrigued 0:08:58.120 --> 0:09:02.360 by the strange manuscript that he discovered tucked away at 0:09:02.360 --> 0:09:14.240 the back of one of his cupboards. Leather bound and 0:09:14.280 --> 0:09:18.040 written on cloth paper, with its jumble of occult symbols 0:09:18.360 --> 0:09:22.360 and strange combination of letters and diagrams, it was quite 0:09:22.440 --> 0:09:27.800 clearly some kind of magic text. But Woodford couldn't understand 0:09:27.840 --> 0:09:31.240 a word of it, and so, as the story goes, 0:09:31.640 --> 0:09:34.359 he passed it on to his friend and fellow Rosicrucian 0:09:34.480 --> 0:09:39.240 Society member William Wynn Westcott, a forty year old coroner. 0:09:40.360 --> 0:09:43.480 Westcott was also desperate to get his teeth into something 0:09:43.520 --> 0:09:48.640 a little more practical. Westcott had apparently never seen anything 0:09:48.840 --> 0:09:52.800 like it before. The strange ruins on the pages before 0:09:52.840 --> 0:09:57.240 him seemed closer to Egyptian hieroglyphs or some alien language 0:09:57.600 --> 0:10:01.320 than anything he'd encountered in his casual study of ancient 0:10:01.440 --> 0:10:06.640 oem Arabic or Chinese. Even Russian cyrillic and the Greek 0:10:06.640 --> 0:10:10.800 alphabet seemed closer to Latin script than the unusual series 0:10:10.800 --> 0:10:15.120 of circles and arrows, triangles and squares which confronted him now. 0:10:16.280 --> 0:10:18.520 But the more he read, the more he began to 0:10:18.600 --> 0:10:22.160 understand that what the manuscript most closely resembled was a 0:10:22.160 --> 0:10:26.720 form of Hebrew, perhaps rendered with a trithemia cipher, in 0:10:26.760 --> 0:10:30.800 which ordinary numerals were swapped out for letters. The last 0:10:30.840 --> 0:10:33.720 page of the manuscript seemed to have a partial key 0:10:33.840 --> 0:10:36.240 that was written in a mixture of French and Latin, 0:10:36.960 --> 0:10:40.559 and Westcott's mind couldn't help but drift to the burnished 0:10:40.600 --> 0:10:51.120 black granite of the Rosetta Stone in the British Museum. 0:10:51.720 --> 0:10:55.400 William Westcott had stood before the Rosetta Stone on many 0:10:55.440 --> 0:10:58.920 occasions as a young man, and absorbed the almost magical 0:10:59.000 --> 0:11:02.480 quality of its power. It seemed to breathe through the 0:11:02.520 --> 0:11:05.840 glass of its holding display case, and left everyone who 0:11:05.960 --> 0:11:08.360 viewed it feeling as though they had been in the 0:11:08.400 --> 0:11:12.280 presence of a portal to another world. He felt like 0:11:12.400 --> 0:11:17.640 Jean Francois Champollion, the famous French philologist who first deciphered 0:11:17.640 --> 0:11:20.760 the meaning of the ancient Egyptian symbols adorned on the 0:11:20.840 --> 0:11:25.440 rock some sixty five years prior. In eighteen twenty two, 0:11:25.640 --> 0:11:28.200 Westcott is said to have spent long evenings with his 0:11:28.360 --> 0:11:31.800 newly acquired document, pouring into his books and trying to 0:11:31.880 --> 0:11:36.720 uncover their extraordinary secrets. Having hit a dead end is 0:11:36.760 --> 0:11:39.319 said to have turned to his closest confidants from the 0:11:39.400 --> 0:11:44.079 Rosicrucian society, the older William Woodman, who was a doctor 0:11:44.240 --> 0:11:50.040 like Westcott, and the younger, more eccentric Samuel Mathis. Like Westcott, 0:11:50.520 --> 0:11:55.120 Mathers was also multilingual with a deep knowledge of mystical texts. 0:11:55.960 --> 0:11:59.800 By September eighteen eighty seven, Westcott finally had a service 0:11:59.840 --> 0:12:03.760 of translation of the document, which became known as the 0:12:03.880 --> 0:12:09.960 Cipher Manuscripts. What it apparently revealed once decoded was something 0:12:10.000 --> 0:12:14.080 closer to an instruction manual than a text, outlines for 0:12:14.160 --> 0:12:19.880 a set of graded initiatory rituals combining rose Accrucianism, Kabbala, 0:12:20.160 --> 0:12:24.560 and hermetic magic, and instructions for the correct ways to 0:12:24.679 --> 0:12:29.240 engage in a whole host of mystic practices, including astrology, 0:12:29.760 --> 0:12:36.920 tarot alchemy, and even necromancy communicating with the dead. It 0:12:37.040 --> 0:12:40.280 was an entire architecture for a magical order that, as 0:12:40.320 --> 0:12:45.120 far as William Woodman, Samuel Mathers, and William Westcott could establish, 0:12:45.520 --> 0:12:49.400 did not yet exist anywhere in the world. But it 0:12:49.440 --> 0:12:53.400 wasn't necessarily the Cipher that mattered most to what came next. 0:12:54.240 --> 0:12:56.600 It was something that was said to have been scrawled 0:12:56.840 --> 0:13:01.000 almost as an afterthought, on the manuscript's end paper, in 0:13:01.080 --> 0:13:04.240 a hand noticeably different from the rest of the document 0:13:05.360 --> 0:13:10.240 an address. The name attached to it was Fraeulein Anna Sprangle, 0:13:10.920 --> 0:13:17.679 the address Nuremberg, Bavaria. Nobody in Westcott, Woodman's or Mathers's 0:13:17.800 --> 0:13:21.760 circle had ever heard of her, and so, in the 0:13:21.800 --> 0:13:24.960 hope of understanding more about where the manuscript had truly 0:13:25.000 --> 0:13:28.800 come from, it is said that Westcott decided to write 0:13:28.800 --> 0:13:32.160 her a letter. A reply is said to have come 0:13:32.280 --> 0:13:35.360 late on a cold November evening in eighteen eighty seven, 0:13:35.760 --> 0:13:38.199 and it would change the shape of not only his life, 0:13:38.559 --> 0:13:43.600 but many occult luminaries for years to come. Members of 0:13:43.600 --> 0:13:47.719 such organizations often take a new name for themselves, or 0:13:47.760 --> 0:13:51.520 a motto, as it was called. Sprangle's reply to Westcott 0:13:52.080 --> 0:13:55.080 is said to have begun with the words, Hair Westcott, 0:13:55.520 --> 0:13:58.080 you may sign my motto on any paper if the 0:13:58.160 --> 0:14:04.120 need arise, saypians domin arbiter astris, the wise man will 0:14:04.200 --> 0:14:15.559 rule the stars. Fraulein Anna Sprangel, as it supposedly transpired 0:14:15.600 --> 0:14:20.320 over the letters that followed, was no ordinary correspondent. She 0:14:20.400 --> 0:14:24.000 claimed to be the illegitimate daughter of King Ludwig I 0:14:24.280 --> 0:14:28.600 of Bavaria and the Irish dancer and adventurer Lola Montez, 0:14:29.160 --> 0:14:32.040 whose affair had caused a great scandal at the time. 0:14:32.920 --> 0:14:35.760 She claimed also to have broken away from the Rosea 0:14:35.840 --> 0:14:39.960 Crucian Order some decades earlier, once its teaching struck her 0:14:40.000 --> 0:14:44.480 as too closely tethered to Christian orthodoxy for her taste. 0:14:44.600 --> 0:14:48.560 She wanted to venture somewhere other. She didn't just want 0:14:48.600 --> 0:14:53.600 to worship gods, she wanted to meet them. To that end, 0:14:54.200 --> 0:14:58.200 she supposedly claimed to have established an entire magic order 0:14:58.240 --> 0:15:02.720 of her own, Order of the Golden Dawn to help 0:15:02.840 --> 0:15:07.560 make this a reality. But Sprangle, as she apparently said, 0:15:08.320 --> 0:15:13.440 didn't answer to herself alone. Above her stood a higher authority, 0:15:14.080 --> 0:15:18.720 a body of enigmatic individuals called the Secret Chiefs, who 0:15:18.800 --> 0:15:22.840 she was apparently in constant communication with. They were the 0:15:22.880 --> 0:15:27.920 true source of all genuine occult wisdom. According to Westcott, 0:15:28.320 --> 0:15:32.640 Sprangle then revealed to him that the Cipher manuscripts constituted 0:15:32.720 --> 0:15:36.200 the movements founding Charter, and as a reward for their 0:15:36.240 --> 0:15:41.520 brilliance in deciphering them, William Westcott, William Woodman, and Samuel 0:15:41.520 --> 0:15:45.680 Mathers were invited to establish a British branch of the Order, 0:15:46.960 --> 0:15:50.080 since there had apparently already been an aborted effort to 0:15:50.160 --> 0:15:52.840 set up a lodge, as they are called, under the 0:15:52.880 --> 0:15:56.480 tutelage of Kenneth Mackenzie, in whose papers the cipher had 0:15:56.520 --> 0:16:01.480 apparently been found, and with Sprangle's Lodge being numbers one, Westcott, 0:16:01.480 --> 0:16:06.480 Woodford and Maths called their lodge number three, it became 0:16:06.600 --> 0:16:11.440 known as the isis Urania Temple, and so in eighteen 0:16:11.480 --> 0:16:14.720 eighty eight, in a set of rented rooms at Tavy's 0:16:14.760 --> 0:16:19.360 Inn in Hoburn, London, the isis Urania Temple opened its doors. 0:16:20.400 --> 0:16:23.560 Such was the fascination with the occult in London social 0:16:23.600 --> 0:16:28.600 circles at the time, Membership grew quickly. Unlike the Masonic 0:16:28.640 --> 0:16:32.040 lodges which this new Order had sprung from, women were 0:16:32.080 --> 0:16:36.160 admitted here as full equals, with permission to examine candidates. 0:16:37.120 --> 0:16:40.960 One evening in eighteen ninety, during a gathering for potential 0:16:41.000 --> 0:16:45.000 new initiates, Samuel Mathers was introduced to a young William 0:16:45.040 --> 0:16:48.080 Butler Yeates, who was already making a name for himself 0:16:48.120 --> 0:16:52.080 as a poet and playwright. Mathers handed Yates a small 0:16:52.160 --> 0:16:55.000 card with a symbol painted on it, and told him 0:16:55.040 --> 0:16:58.200 simply to close his eyes and try to envision the 0:16:58.240 --> 0:17:02.880 symbol in his mind. Yates, a little amused, took the 0:17:02.960 --> 0:17:06.000 card as asked, and then placed it on his forehead 0:17:06.240 --> 0:17:11.320 and closed his eyes. Just then something in his face darkened, 0:17:11.760 --> 0:17:15.360 and the smile dropped from his lips. With a start. 0:17:15.600 --> 0:17:21.359 He opened his eyes again, apparently completely stunned. Yates claimed 0:17:21.400 --> 0:17:24.520 to have suddenly found himself in a desert scattered with 0:17:24.640 --> 0:17:29.359 ancient ruins. Then, from out of nowhere, a great black 0:17:29.400 --> 0:17:33.280 shape had appeared, hauling itself upright out of the ruins 0:17:33.520 --> 0:17:39.359 on two enormous hands. Mathers smiled riley. It was a 0:17:39.440 --> 0:17:42.520 being of the Order of the Salamanders, he said, one 0:17:42.520 --> 0:17:45.800 of the elemental spirits. The card was supposed to correspond 0:17:45.840 --> 0:17:49.439 to a detail that Yates had no way of knowing. 0:17:56.760 --> 0:18:01.760 William Butler Yates joined the Golden Dawn in March eighteen ninety, 0:18:01.800 --> 0:18:06.240 taking the name Damon s Deus in versus the Devil 0:18:06.359 --> 0:18:10.919 is God inverted. He quickly became an enthusiastic recruiter for 0:18:10.960 --> 0:18:16.000 the order, bringing in famed actor Florence Farr, among many others. 0:18:16.720 --> 0:18:20.960 But then, in the autumn of eighteen ninety came a problem. 0:18:21.320 --> 0:18:25.920 According to William Westcott, Anna Sprangle had stopped writing to him. 0:18:26.760 --> 0:18:30.680 What came instead, some accounts say, was a strange, anonymously 0:18:30.720 --> 0:18:35.439 written letter stating that she had died. Others say it 0:18:35.520 --> 0:18:39.480 was something stranger still that the letter instead claimed that 0:18:39.560 --> 0:18:43.440 Sprangle had acted against the wishes of the Secret Chiefs 0:18:43.480 --> 0:18:46.159 in telling Westcott and the others that they could open 0:18:46.160 --> 0:18:50.080 a lodge in England. From this point on, according to 0:18:50.119 --> 0:18:52.680 the author of the letter, there would be no further 0:18:52.760 --> 0:18:58.119 contact with Sprangle or anyone above her. Either way, the 0:18:58.200 --> 0:19:02.600 result was the same. If Westcott, Woodman, and Mathers wanted 0:19:02.640 --> 0:19:05.440 to keep going, they would have to somehow plead their 0:19:05.480 --> 0:19:10.200 case directly to the Secret Chiefs, whoever and wherever they were. 0:19:11.359 --> 0:19:15.520 By now, the eccentric Samuel Mathers, a far more charismatic 0:19:15.640 --> 0:19:19.560 and outgoing figure compared to Woodman and Westcott, had become 0:19:19.600 --> 0:19:24.960 the organizations to facto leader. This position was further solidified 0:19:25.400 --> 0:19:29.919 when Woodman died suddenly in December eighteen ninety one. At 0:19:29.960 --> 0:19:33.040 this point, Maths wasn't employed and had been relying on 0:19:33.080 --> 0:19:37.120 the generosity of wealthy benefactor Annie Horneman to keep him 0:19:37.160 --> 0:19:41.040 and his wife, Moyna afloat. Moyner and Horneman had become 0:19:41.119 --> 0:19:44.800 friends while studying together at the prestigious Slade School of 0:19:44.920 --> 0:19:48.720 Art in London. It was Moyner who encouraged Horneman to 0:19:48.800 --> 0:19:52.040 join the Golden Dawn, which she did in eighteen ninety. 0:19:52.960 --> 0:19:57.520 Not long after, Hornaman came into a significant inheritance, and 0:19:57.640 --> 0:20:01.199 thanks to no little encouragement from Maths, she became the 0:20:01.320 --> 0:20:05.439 Order's most important financial backer. But even her wealth had 0:20:05.480 --> 0:20:09.800 its limitations, and so running low on money, Mathers and 0:20:09.840 --> 0:20:14.760 Moyner decided to relocate to Paris, perhaps feeling his grip 0:20:14.800 --> 0:20:17.720 on the Order beginning to weaken. From such a distance, 0:20:18.440 --> 0:20:21.000 it seemed Maths would have to do something drastic to 0:20:21.040 --> 0:20:25.720 reassert his authority. That something came with a startling announcement 0:20:25.920 --> 0:20:30.360 sometime in early eighteen ninety two. According to the man himself, 0:20:30.760 --> 0:20:34.119 Mathers had apparently done what no one had managed since 0:20:34.119 --> 0:20:39.200 Sprangle's silence. He had made contact with the Secret Chiefs 0:20:39.920 --> 0:20:42.960 late one evening in a darkened room of his apartment. 0:20:43.640 --> 0:20:46.800 Mathers had apparently channeled some kind of connection to the 0:20:46.840 --> 0:20:51.560 mysterious group, which it turned out weren't a shadowy group 0:20:51.600 --> 0:20:56.080 of powerful men, as some had assumed, but supernatural beings 0:20:56.480 --> 0:21:10.920 whose knowledge of esotericism stretched back thousands of years, having 0:21:10.960 --> 0:21:14.760 apparently made contact with the so called Secret Chiefs, which 0:21:14.800 --> 0:21:19.119 incidentally sound not too dissimilar to Terence McKenna's clockwork else 0:21:19.520 --> 0:21:22.760 if you're familiar with them, Mathers gave one of them 0:21:22.760 --> 0:21:27.959 a name, lux Tenebris light out of Darkness. He claimed 0:21:28.000 --> 0:21:31.720 to communicate it with this member directly on an astral plane. 0:21:32.320 --> 0:21:35.760 What exactly passed between them he would never fully explain, 0:21:36.440 --> 0:21:39.200 but it was enough it seemed to convince the rest 0:21:39.240 --> 0:21:43.480 of the Order that from now on, he, operating with 0:21:43.560 --> 0:21:47.399 the full support of the Chiefs, was the Order's rightful leader. 0:21:48.280 --> 0:21:53.000 Mathers then claimed that the Secret Chiefs had revealed instructions 0:21:53.040 --> 0:21:56.760 for an entirely new tier within the Order, known as 0:21:56.800 --> 0:22:00.600 the Second Order, built around a ceremony called the Deptus 0:22:00.680 --> 0:22:05.159 Minor Ritual. Up to this point, for its first four years, 0:22:05.760 --> 0:22:09.679 the Golden Dawn's teachings, despite its original intentions to be 0:22:09.720 --> 0:22:13.280 a more practical approach to the occult, were almost entirely 0:22:13.320 --> 0:22:17.320 theory based. Nobody had actually been taught to practice magic. 0:22:18.080 --> 0:22:23.200 The Second Order changed all of that entirely. Now members 0:22:23.240 --> 0:22:27.040 were for the first time instructed in the real mechanics 0:22:27.040 --> 0:22:30.520 of the craft, how to scry with mirrors and crystals, 0:22:31.000 --> 0:22:34.359 how to evoke spirits and demons, and how to send 0:22:34.400 --> 0:22:37.840 your own consciousness traveling out of your body into some 0:22:37.960 --> 0:22:42.399 other place entirely. A physical vault was constructed at the 0:22:42.520 --> 0:22:46.720 Order's temple in Hoburn, where initiates could complete their ascension 0:22:46.800 --> 0:22:51.320 into the Second Order, a small windowless chamber built to 0:22:51.400 --> 0:22:55.840 exact specifications. It contained a raised bed known as the pastos, 0:22:56.320 --> 0:23:02.119 an altar, four painted tablets representing fire, water, air, and earth, 0:23:02.560 --> 0:23:06.240 and an oversized crucifix known as the Cross of Obligation. 0:23:07.200 --> 0:23:10.919 Initiates in full ceremonial regalia would lie down on the 0:23:10.960 --> 0:23:15.359 pastos in near total darkness, with the Rosicrucian Cross placed 0:23:15.400 --> 0:23:19.280 over the chest, while others already initiated into the Second 0:23:19.359 --> 0:23:25.359 Order stood around them, chanting in low, overlapping voices. Many, 0:23:25.400 --> 0:23:29.440 including W. B. Yates, claimed to have strange visions while 0:23:29.440 --> 0:23:34.240 participating in the ceremony, but perhaps this was all utter 0:23:34.320 --> 0:23:40.359 buncom Perhaps as many suspect Maths' story about making contact 0:23:40.400 --> 0:23:43.760 with the so called Secret Chiefs was just a cynical 0:23:43.800 --> 0:23:47.439 and egotistical invention to exploit the good faith of the 0:23:47.560 --> 0:23:52.280 Order's members and take charge of the organization. So, how 0:23:52.359 --> 0:23:57.320 we might ask, did so many undeniably intelligent people fail 0:23:57.400 --> 0:24:00.320 to see through this and continue to stay committed to 0:24:00.359 --> 0:24:05.640 the Order? Well, the simple truth is, if the accounts 0:24:05.640 --> 0:24:09.520 are to be believed, all those rituals and magic teachings 0:24:09.840 --> 0:24:13.520 that Mathers had apparently learned over the years and later 0:24:13.920 --> 0:24:26.280 under the guidance of the Secret Chiefs actually worked. It 0:24:26.280 --> 0:24:29.040 has just gone past eight o'clock on the evening of 0:24:29.080 --> 0:24:33.480 May thirteenth, eighteen ninety six, in a hot and stuffy 0:24:33.600 --> 0:24:37.600 rented room in central London. A caudron sits at the 0:24:37.640 --> 0:24:41.840 center of the floor what one witness later simply called 0:24:41.960 --> 0:24:45.760 the hell broth, its contents given over to a low simmer, 0:24:46.440 --> 0:24:50.560 the air above it growing thicker by the minute. Around 0:24:50.600 --> 0:24:55.800 it stands four robed figures deep in concentration. That the 0:24:55.840 --> 0:24:59.199 center of them is a woman dressed in white, a 0:24:59.320 --> 0:25:03.399 yellow sash at her waist, an indigo nemes cloth, the 0:25:03.440 --> 0:25:08.640 striped headdress of a pharaoh covering her hair. Outside these 0:25:08.680 --> 0:25:12.680 four walls Florence far is one of the most celebrated 0:25:12.720 --> 0:25:16.480 actors on the London stage, a woman whose voice, according 0:25:16.520 --> 0:25:19.800 to those fortunate enough to see her perform, could make 0:25:19.840 --> 0:25:24.200 an entire house fall silent in awe. But in here 0:25:24.840 --> 0:25:29.679 she is something else. Around her neck hangs the seal 0:25:29.720 --> 0:25:33.119 of the Spirit. They have come here to raise Tafts 0:25:33.200 --> 0:25:38.919 arthurth Spirit of Mercury, a figure that some might call malevolent. 0:25:40.320 --> 0:25:44.800 Beside her stands the pale and willowy Alan Bennett, Bellow, 0:25:44.880 --> 0:25:47.840 Golden Dawn member and one of the most learned and 0:25:47.880 --> 0:25:52.480 respected occultists in London, Famed for his especially deep knowledge 0:25:52.520 --> 0:25:56.000 of the Egyptian Book of the Dead, Those who knew 0:25:56.080 --> 0:26:00.800 him call him simply the White Knight. Has written the 0:26:00.880 --> 0:26:06.080 ritual himself, a precise sequence of invocations designed to draw 0:26:06.200 --> 0:26:10.080 something up out of whatever plane it inhabits and hold 0:26:10.119 --> 0:26:13.760 it briefly inside the boundary of this room. They are 0:26:13.840 --> 0:26:17.800 joined by Charles Rosser and Frederick Lee Gardner, and together 0:26:17.920 --> 0:26:21.159 the four of them have spent weeks preparing for this moment. 0:26:22.600 --> 0:26:26.000 Bennett begins as the order always began, by making the 0:26:26.040 --> 0:26:30.720 mark of the carbalistic cross, imagining a blinding column of light. 0:26:31.119 --> 0:26:34.239 He touches the crown of his head, then traces it 0:26:34.359 --> 0:26:37.720 down to his chest, before drawing a second column of 0:26:37.800 --> 0:26:41.399 light from one shoulder to the other. Next come the 0:26:41.440 --> 0:26:46.199 words intoned repeatedly and so deeply that they vibrate in 0:26:46.280 --> 0:26:50.879 a rhythmic hum through each of the participant's chests until 0:26:50.920 --> 0:26:55.240 the air itself seems to hang heavy with them. Then 0:26:55.320 --> 0:26:59.320 Far traces the signal of Taftarthurus into the steam above 0:26:59.320 --> 0:27:02.560 the cauldron, as the four of them repeat the spirit's 0:27:02.640 --> 0:27:07.840 name over and over again into the dark. At sixteen 0:27:07.920 --> 0:27:13.160 minutes past nine. It works, as the participants will all 0:27:13.240 --> 0:27:18.240 later attest. First an arm appeared, then a leg, then 0:27:18.640 --> 0:27:22.679 appearing to gather itself out of nothing into something, a 0:27:22.800 --> 0:27:27.600 gray human shape appears, standing where a moment before there 0:27:27.640 --> 0:27:31.760 had only been steam and candlelight, and with it an 0:27:31.920 --> 0:27:36.080 unmistakable sense of power fills the room, pressing on all 0:27:36.160 --> 0:27:40.320 four of them at once. The participants stare wide eyed 0:27:40.359 --> 0:27:43.480 at it as it holds for a few brief seconds 0:27:43.840 --> 0:27:54.760 and then suddenly disappears. We don't know what any of 0:27:54.800 --> 0:27:58.760 them actually saw that night. What we do know, according 0:27:58.800 --> 0:28:02.200 to Alan Bennett's own way Words, is that within days 0:28:02.560 --> 0:28:07.199 three of them became severely unwell, with grim and horrible diseases. 0:28:07.240 --> 0:28:11.520 As he put it, it was called the taft Arthurrath Evocation. 0:28:13.280 --> 0:28:17.320 Later that year, William Westcott, still a chief adept in 0:28:17.359 --> 0:28:21.920 the organization, ceased all public engagement with the Hermetic Order 0:28:21.960 --> 0:28:25.399 of the Golden Dawn. Some said it was because of 0:28:25.440 --> 0:28:28.760 his role as the Crown Coroner that his association with 0:28:28.880 --> 0:28:32.120 magic was starting to be questioned. As a trusted man 0:28:32.160 --> 0:28:37.440 of science and reason, whatever it was, Samuel Mathers wasted 0:28:37.520 --> 0:28:42.240 no time in replacing him with Florence Farr, though many 0:28:42.320 --> 0:28:46.800 members in time, like benefactor Annie Horneman, came to distrust 0:28:46.840 --> 0:28:51.160 Samuel Mathes's validity. By eighteen ninety eight, the Order that he, 0:28:51.440 --> 0:28:54.520 William Westcott and William Woodman had built out of a 0:28:54.640 --> 0:28:59.000 strange manuscript and an enigmatic woman who many claim might 0:28:59.080 --> 0:29:01.800 never even have existed did in the first place, had 0:29:01.800 --> 0:29:05.560 grown into something with well over one hundred members drawn 0:29:05.600 --> 0:29:12.320 from every level of late Victorian society, including poets, actors, doctors, 0:29:12.360 --> 0:29:17.240 and clergymen. None of the Order's underlying uncertainty seemed to 0:29:17.240 --> 0:29:21.479 slow anyone down. If anything, the not knowing was the 0:29:21.480 --> 0:29:25.920