Ellic Howe (20 September 1910 – 28 September 1991)

Abstract

Almost all that we know of the real history of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn — and thus of Yeats’s involvement with it — is due to the pioneering work of Ellic Howe and of those whom he inspired. Without his researches, and his consequent foray into detective work, the various “private collections”, between which the archives of the Order were dispersed, would have remained unknown, and even the Yorke Collection at the Warburg Institute would have continued to be woefully misunderstood both by the scholars manqués of occultism and by American academic interpreters of English eccentricity.