Across the skin of the Earth lie certain nodal apertures where power seeps through from dimensions older than humanity’s first stirrings. Glastonbury, Stonehenge, Macchu Picchu, the Pyramids – these are but the more widely whispered of such vortices. Yet there exists another, veiled beneath the soot‑laden skies of West Yorkshire: Bradford, a city whose mundane façades conceal an unsuspected confluence of forces.
In the waning years of the nineteenth century, this unlikely location drew to itself a congregation of Masons, Theosophists, and wanderers of more esoteric lineages – souls attuned to … who knows what? One may speculate that labyrinthine energies coiled beneath the city’s foundations called out to an unusually large number of people, but the fact is that West Yorkshire in general, and Bradford and latterly Leeds in particular, became a centre of esotericism, even remaining so to this day. Their workings, conducted at first in hotel function rooms and latterly in exquisitely decorated purpose-built temples, have remained obscured by time and deliberate silence.
But the veils are thinning, and the chronicle of their hidden labours begins, at last, to uncoil.
In the book, “Light In Extension,” Ms Seims succeeds in pointing out that the history of one particular Golden Dawn temple, in Bradford, cannot be separated from that of the local esoteric scene generally: for the personalities who comprised the former constituted the movers and shakers of the latter. At first this worked to Horus no. 5’s advantage, because this scene provided the Temple with a pool from which to draw initiates. However this also meant that instead of remaining true to the Golden Dawn egregore, Horus’ members allowed the politics of all the other local orders – Masonic and otherwise – to affect it to its detriment.
On the one hand, the Bradford Temple left behind a treasure trove of beautiful Temple equipment and documents, into which Ms Seims has delved thoroughly: she includes many colour photographs of the wonders which this archive (the so-called “Scott Collection”) holds.
On the other however, her research reveals that most of the membership of Horus no. 5 were old fashioned, rather chauvinistic Freemasons who treated their GD temple like just another “Masonic Unit,” and who only admitted a minority of females and non-masons at a sufferance. Moreover, she records at least one major schism in the temple which was caused not by something which occurred within Horus no. 5 but within the local Theosophical Society at the time.
From reading Ms Seim’s description of the Scott Collection, it appears to me that there is a major component missing, as it were. What is evident is a full set of temple equipment to run an outer order Golden Temple. What there is not, however, are any inner order documents or equipment, or any personal inner order papers of any of the members who reached the Adeptus Minor grade. There is, in short, no evidence that anyone in Bradford once having attained the 5=6 grade actually did any other further magical work.
In 1900, when the Golden Dawn schismed, instead of siding with either the London rebels, or following Mathers into the Alpha et Omega, Horus Temple no. 5 chose to do neither, going into “abeyance” – closing down, but without surrendering its warrant as it should have done, and transferring its property to the newly formed (or more accurately, “reponed”) August Order of Light. The story of Horus Temple no 5 is therefore ultimately one of a failed Golden Dawn temple.
Ms Seims’ work, by contrast, is a triumph of scholarship on the subject. It is quite clear that she has gone to great lengths in her research, dissecting the historical evidence like a forensic examiner. In doing so she has come up with a work in the same altitude if not greater as that of R A Gilbert and Ellic Howe.
Sol Ascendans - The Website of Alex Sumner 