The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was founded in 1888 on two documents. The first was a manuscript in cipher containing outlines of initiation rituals and a scheme of grades. The second was a correspondence with a German adept, referred to as Fraulein Sprengel, said to have been reached through an address found with the manuscript, who authorised the founders to establish a temple in England.
The correspondence was the warrant. Without it the order was three London Freemasons with an interesting document; with it, they were a chartered branch of a continuing tradition. William Wynn Westcott produced the letters, and Samuel Liddell Mathers wrote most of the rituals out of the cipher material and a great deal of additional reading.
In 1900 the arrangement came apart. Mathers wrote that the Sprengel letters had been fabricated by Westcott, and Westcott withdrew from the order. Mathers, having removed one warrant, asserted another, claiming his own direct contact with the Secret Chiefs, and members who would not accept it deposed him. Aleister Crowley, then a junior member, took Mathers side in the immediate quarrel and later advanced a claim of his own on a different basis. Historians of the order, working from the surviving papers, treat the Sprengel correspondence as a fabrication, and the cipher manuscript itself as nineteenth century rather than ancient.