Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor

The Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor was an esoteric order of the 1880s that stood apart from its contemporaries in two ways: it was avowedly practical, and it worked by correspondence.

Practical occultism at a distance

Active from the early 1880s and associated with Max Theon, Peter Davidson and Thomas Henry Burgoyne, the brotherhood taught a system of practical occultism, including training it described as the development of inner powers, and claimed descent from older hidden traditions. Unlike the ceremonial lodges that would soon follow, it emphasised individual practice transmitted through mailed instruction to members in Britain, the United States and elsewhere, an early instance of the mail-order mystery school.

Small, brief and consequential

The brotherhood was short-lived as an organisation and was damaged by scandal surrounding Burgoyne, but its influence outran its size. Its teachings, particularly on inner development and on sexual magic, fed into later currents, and figures connected with it carried its ideas into subsequent movements, including the work of Theon in France and the wider reception of its written material. It is remembered less as an institution than as a channel through which a particular strand of practical occultism entered the modern Western esoteric mainstream shortly before the founding of the Golden Dawn.

The Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor taught by manuscript. Members received instruction papers, worked alone or in small groups, and the practical content, on the training of the will, on scrying, and on sexual practice, went further into technique than most contemporaries would put in writing. The material circulated in Britain, France and the United States in the mid 1880s and reached people who would matter later, including members of the Theosophical Society who were dissatisfied with its lack of practice.

The public phase ended in 1886, when the press established that Thomas Henry Burgoyne, the order's secretary, was Thomas Dalton, previously convicted of fraud. The order effectively dispersed in Britain, though its material continued to circulate and its French branch, under Papus and others, fed into the Martinist revival.

Its historical importance is out of proportion to its size and its lifespan. It supplied a working, practical, correspondence-taught system some years before the Golden Dawn, it transmitted Paschal Beverly Randolph's sexual material into European occultism, and that material reached Reuss and through him the reformed O.T.O. A great deal of what the twentieth century treated as the deep secret of Western magical orders can be traced to a short-lived body run by a man using a false name.