Literally, a resource, for once.

Esoteric occult PDFs by Crowley, Blavatsky, Frater Achad, Dion Fortune, and so on. Good stuff. Click here.

Smack! Down! Dion Fortune Style.

SOA* 2008 winner Annie Besant with her proposed
World Teacher Jiddu Krishnamurti, and handbag.

We were just on our way up to Chesed ourselves when we came across this passage in The Mystical Qabalah:

19. It is to the Sphere of Chesed that the exalted consciousness of the adept rises in his occult meditations; it is here that he receives the inspirations which he works out on the planes of form. It is here that he meets the Masters as spiritual influences contacted telepathically, without any intermingling of personality. This is the true, and the highest, mode of contact with the Masters, contact with them as mind to mind in their own sphere of exalted consciousness. When the Masters are seen clairvoyantly as robed beings, the colours of whose robes indicate their ray, they are being perceived reflected into the sphere of Yesod, which is the kingdom of phantasms and hallucinations. We are treading on precarious ground when we have to meet the Masters here. It is here that the anthropomorphic form is given to the spiritual inspiration which so misleads those psychics who cannot rise to Chesed. It is thus that the announcement of a spiritual impulse flowing out upon the world gets interpreted as the coming of a World Teacher.

Oh yes. She did.

"Team Annie" and "Team Dion" shirts are currently being printed.

We're Pretty Sure This Has Happened To Us A Few Times, As Well.

Mathers was deceived into passing over the secrets of the Golden Dawn to an American fraudulent medium and con artist known as Mrs. Horos, who also went under the names Mrs. Dutton, Mrs. Johnson, and Marie Louise of the Commune. Her magical motto was Swami Vive Ananda, so she was known among Golden Dawn members as Soror (Sister) S.V.A.

Mrs. Horus learned a smattering of Golden Dawn lore from members living in New York, and was able to use it to persuade the credulous Mathers that she possessed the Order rank of 8=3, Magister Templi, which was one grade higher than Mathers' own rank. The 7=3 rank of Mathers was the highest level that could be attained in the Second Order, so Mrs. Horos was claiming to belong to the Third Order of the Golden Dawn, the Argentum Astrum (Silver Star). At that time, the Third Order had no existence on the earthly plane (Crowley would later use the name for one of his own organizations). Indeed, Mrs. Horos claimed to be none other than Fraulein Anna Sprengel, the German adept who was the supposed establishing authority of the Golden Dawn in England, and the link with the mystical Secret Chiefs, spiritual beings who provided the Golden Dawn with its occult teachings and its legitimacy as a Rosicrucian order. Mathers felt obliged to pass over secret Second Order documents, which Mrs. Horos and her two associates promptly stole.

This woman, described by those who had met her as being about sixty years of age, extremely fat, with a gracious and attractive manner, was aided by her husband (whether legal or common law is not clear), who went under the name Theo Horos -- the "H." mentioned by Crowley -- and another man calling himself Dr. Rose Adams. Mrs. Horos and her husband were eventually arrested. As an explanation for her corpulent body, Mrs. Horos claimed that she had absorbed the spirit of Madame Blavatsky, the leader of the Theosophical Movement, at the death of Blavatsky. Such was Mathers' willingness to embrace the miraculous that he did not dispute this assertion. Hence Crowley's expression of disgust with the childlike credulity of his former teacher and leader.

From Donald Tyson's notes on the Goetia.

Who Are You, Madame Blavatsky?

A rare find: a 50-minute video on the life of Madame Blavatsky. Haven't finished watching this one yet.