The Order That Took the Dark Side of the Planet Deliberately

The Brotherhood of Saturn is the most enduring of the continental magical lodges and the one that most self-consciously chose severity over devotion.

A Saturnian system

Founded in Berlin in 1926 by Eugen Grosche, who wrote as Gregor A. Gregorius, after a break with a German branch associated with the OTO, the lodge works a distinctive astrological and Saturnian system combining Thelemic, Hermetic and sexual-magical elements. Its doctrine centres on Saturn as a principle of severity and higher initiation, and it is this orientation toward the darker planetary principle, rather than any criminality, that sets it apart from the devotional Rosicrucian bodies and marks it in this atlas as a darker current.

Suppression and survival

Like the other German orders it was suppressed under National Socialism and refounded after the Second World War, and it has continued in Germany under later leadership. Its persistence through the twentieth century, when most magical lodges were short-lived, makes it one of the principal channels by which the Saturnian and sexual-magical strands of the German occult revival reached the present.