The Revolt of the Adepts · 1900, and the diaspora

The Order tore itself apart within twelve years of its founding. Mathers' authority was challenged; he accused Westcott of forging the Sprengel letters; Crowley was sent to seize the Second Order's London vault by force and arrived in a kilt and a mask. Schism followed schism — the Stella Matutina, Waite's Independent and Rectified Rite, the Alpha et Omega.

And the wreckage is why any of this reached us. A sealed order transmits to a handful; a shattered one publishes. Out of the break came Crowley's 777 and Thelema, Waite's deck, Regardie printing the entire corpus in 1937, and Fortune's Mystical Qabalah — the four vectors by which a small Victorian society's private synthesis became the default English-language picture of the Kabbalah.

There is a real irony to hold here: the Order's secrecy was its authority claim, and its collapse is the only reason the world knows what it taught.