The Rosicrucian Order Crotona Fellowship was founded by George Alexander Sullivan (1890-1942) in Christchurch, England. As a secret society its ritual practices were largely restricted to a circle of family and friends, although a correspondence course was devised for solitary members. The Crotona Fellowship preserved its neo-Masonic, neo-Rosicrucian values and practices through the interwar period, and its intimate, esoteric nature was a seminal lay response to the stagnation of contemporary organized religion. The Crotona Fellowship had a major impact upon the development of New Age Movements and Wicca through the involvement of Peter Caddy and Gerald Gardner in its activities in the late 1930s.
The Rosicrucian Order Crotona Fellowship was founded in 1911 as The Order of Twelve and established in 1920 under its present name, although it has existed in its present form for at least one hundred years, descended from ancient Rosicrucian teachers. Its members studied the esoteric arts under the guidance of its first Grand Master, George Alexander Sullivan. The Grand Chapter of the Crotona Fellowship first operated in Birkenhead (c. 1924) and Liverpool (c. 1927) before moving to Christchurch in late 1935 and entering its most productive period.
In 1930, a group of members of the order organized by Catherine Emily Chalk began to meet regularly at a pub in Christchurch, while the annual ‘conclave’ was held in nearby Bournemouth. Some time later the group decided that a more permanent venue was required. The Crotona Fellowship established its headquarters near Christchurch in a wooden building named the Ashrama Hall, completed in 1936 in the garden of a house owned by Chalk. In 1938, on the same land, the group built the first Rosicrucian theater in England, Christchurch Garden Theater, and thirty-six members—barristers, solicitors, small business operators, teachers, and clerical workers—attended its annual gathering in 1937. In 1938 a private theater was built, presenting mystically-themed plays written by Sullivan under his journalistic pen-name Alex Matthews. The Order began to unravel after Sullivan’s death before relocating to Southampton in the early 1950s.
By the late 1930s, the original members of The Order of Twelve established the New Forest Coven with Gerald Gardner as its thirteenth member, and began developing Wiccan rituals based on Co-Masonry. A significant minority among students of Alice Bailey’s Arcane School were members of the Crotona Fellowship. The Order’s ritual practice required a small altar, a cloth with the Rosicrucian emblem, incense, candles, literature, and ritual regalia of the degree attained by each member in the neo-Masonic hierarchy. Weekend activities and the annual gathering at the grand chapter in Christchurch included communal worship, practical tasks and lectures. Over 130 lectures were included in the Order’s syllabus incorporating a wide range of occult and metaphysical material including positive thinking, healing techniques, empowering others, and growing into self-possession and self-control.
Despite intrinsic interest, the Crotona Fellowship is largely a product of the spiritual biographies of two participants: Peter Caddy and Gerald Gardner. Caddy made no secret of his indebtedness to Sullivan and the Order. In the 1960s and early 1970s he sought to transfer the spirit of the Crotona Fellowship to Findhorn community discourse and practice, renewing contact with surviving Order members and passing on some teachings at Findhorn. Caddy’s own salience in New Age networking in the 1950s and 1960s, and the importance of Findhorn for international New Age culture from the 1960s onwards, means that a ‘Rosicrucian’ factor in New Age culture cannot be discounted. Gardner’s case is more complex: he became involved with the Order briefly in 1938 and met a faction within the Crotona Fellowship which belonged to a local witch coven, the New Forest Coven, into which he was duly initiated and from which he subsequently fashioned Wicca. The history of this surviving coven in developing modern Wicca can be largely attributed to the influence of the Crotona Fellowship’s initiatic structure and esoteric fellowship upon Gardner’s syncretic system. Nevertheless, given Peter Caddy’s prominence in the genealogy of New Age from the 1950s onwards, and Gerald Gardner’s role in the creation of Wicca in the late 1940s, the Crotona Fellowship has had a major impact on alternative spirituality out of all proportion to its obscure history.
Today, the Rosicrucian Order Crotona Fellowship is an esoteric order of mystics dedicated to the study of Hermetic Science and Magical Arts. The Crotona Fellowship is the world’s oldest Wiccan organization in practice today. Our mission is to preserve the spiritual wisdom of the Rosicrucian Tradition through ceremony and ritual magic.