Who was Fraulein Anna Sprengel?

A surprising discovery complicates the widely-accepted idea about this mysterious figure

In the newest video of The Pixie and the Sorcerers (airing soon on Repeater Radio), I say the following:

Sometime in 1887, Dr William Wynn Westcott, a physician turned coroner, got his hands on what seemed to be an ancient manuscript written in a mysterious code. Westcott was interested in Freemasonry and occultism, and he could determine that the cipher was based on the Polygraphiae libri sex of the Benedictine Abbot Johannes Trithemius from 1518  The code revealed what appeared to be outlines of rituals based on 18th century German Golden Rosy Cross order and the Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia. The rituals were written in English but not fleshed out. So Westcott called upon his friend, occultists Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, to develop the material so that the rituals could be performed. 

Within the bundle of papers comprising the Cypher Manuscript, as it came to be called, was the contact information for a Rosicrucian Adept in Germany named Fraulein Anna Sprengel written in a different hand. Westcott wrote to her, and she “authorised him to found an English branch of a German occult Order called Die Goldene Dammerung. In The Magicians of the Golden Dawn: a Documentary History of a Magical Order, Ellic Howe writes that the letters “are so full of linguistic errors and anglicisms that they could not have been written by a German.” Therefore there has been suspicion that these letters were forged by Westcott in order to lend legitimacy to the Cypher Manuscript and any plans he had for establishing an occult order of his own. By placing his interlocutor in Germany, his detractors say, it meant that there was no easy way to verify his claims. But more recent scholarship shows that maybe we ought to lend more credence to Westcott’s claims after all.  In Christopher McIntosh’s 2011 article “Fraulein Sprengel and the Origins of the Golden Dawn: A Surprising Discovery,” he re-interprets the primary documents and concludes that the handwriting of the German letters is far too fluid and confident to be written by someone who was either not a german speaker or at least not someone who had lived in Germany for quite some time. What’s more, when McIntosh read the original german letter and compared it to the translation, he saw that the translation was poorly done, and that the original German doesn’t contain the linguistic errors and anglicisms that Howe reported. There’s an even more astonishing fact that McIntosh discovered -- but I’ll come back to that later.

The piece of ephemera with the contact info for Fraulein Sprengel (pictured above) included her magical pseudonym: Sapiens Dominabitur Astris. According to McIntosh, this translates from Latin to mean “the wise person will rule the stars.” I contacted a Latin professor at my university to make sure that it does in fact mean “person” and not “man.” This is important because of that astonishing discovery I alluded to in the video. It’s also why Howe and McIntosh refer to the letter-writer as SDA (and sometimes, in Howe’s case, Soror SDA — “soror” meaning “sister” in Latin).

When Christopher McIntosh realized Ellic Howe’s error, he wondered if Howe had missed anything else while interpreting the letters. Library and Museum of Freemasonry in London and consult the original letters in the Golden Dawn Collection. “Instinct,” he writes, “told me that I would find something important there, but I was unprepared for what would prove to be a staggering discovery.” He explains what his intuition, or maybe the universe’s forces themselves, led him to: