Frederick Hockley: Victorian Crystal-Gazer and Magic Collector

Frederick Hockley (1808–1885) was an English accountant, Freemason and occultist who spent his life copying and collecting manuscripts of magic and conducting experiments in crystal-gazing. Trained as a copyist in the London bookshop of John Denley, he assembled one of the most important private collections of magical texts in Victorian Britain and kept detailed records of thousands of answers received through seers and crystals. His manuscripts passed after his death to a new generation of occultists and remain a key source for the transmission of ritual magic from the Georgian era to the Golden Dawn.

Who Was Frederick Hockley?§

Hockley was born in 1808 in Hoxton, on the northern edge of the City of London; a few sources give 1809. Little is known of his family or schooling, and historians have reconstructed his life largely from census returns, Masonic records and clues in his own manuscripts. He spent most of his career as an accountant, latterly with a firm of solicitors at Gray's Inn, and lived for long periods in Croydon.

His importance lies in his private occupations. Over more than sixty years Hockley copied, illustrated and annotated texts of ceremonial magic, astrology and alchemy, and he pursued crystal-gazing with a persistence and record-keeping that make him one of the best-documented practitioners of the century. He stands between the world of Georgian compilers such as Francis Barrett, author of The Magus, and the late Victorian magical orders.

Copyist for John Denley: A Library of Manuscript Magic§

At about sixteen Hockley joined the staff of John Denley, a bookseller near the Strand who specialised in astrology, magic and the occult sciences. For around fifteen years he worked as a copyist, transcriber and illustrator, producing fair copies of rare magical manuscripts which Denley sold to collectors. Denley's shop was a meeting point for London's small community of astrologers and occult students, and it was long said that Barrett had drawn on books from the same source.

The work gave Hockley access to texts available almost nowhere else, and he kept copies for himself. His collection eventually included versions of Solomonic texts, the Lemegeton, the Ars Notoria, Ebenezer Sibly's Clavis, treatises on talismans and spirits, alchemical works and Rosicrucian documents. Among the latter was a transcription of the admission of the physician Sigismund Bacstrom into a "Society of the Rosa Crucis" in Mauritius in 1794, a document Hockley later exhibited to fellow Rosicrucians. His fine hand and carefully drawn seals made his copies prized, and many modern editions of English grimoires rest on Hockley manuscripts.

Crystal-Gazing and the Crowned Angel§

Hockley was convinced that the crystal and the magic mirror were the only true means of communicating with the spirit world. Giving evidence in 1869 to the London Dialectical Society's committee on Spiritualism, he said that he had begun experimenting with crystals and mirrors around 1824. His methods drew on older material such as "The Art of Drawing Spirits into Crystals", printed in The Magus, and on manuscript rituals of invocation.

Like most Victorian scryers, Hockley usually worked with a seer, who looked into the crystal while he put questions and wrote down the answers. In the early 1850s his chief seer was a young woman, Emma Leigh, through whom he recorded long series of communications attributed to a being called the "Crowned Angel of the Seventh Sphere". The answers ranged over theology, the afterlife, the nature of spirits and practical questions, and Hockley bound them into volumes. He claimed to have filled around thirty volumes containing upwards of twelve thousand answers.

These records belong to the wider history of clairvoyance and psychical research. Historians read them as evidence of how angel magic, Swedenborgian ideas of the spirit world and early Spiritualism blended in mid-Victorian England; they are not proof of any claimed contact, and Hockley himself treated them as material for study.

Spiritualism, Freemasonry and the Rosicrucian Society§

When Spiritualism arrived from America in the early 1850s, Hockley was already an experienced practitioner of spirit communication. He held séances at Croydon from 1853 and moved in Spiritualist circles for the rest of his life, joining the London Spiritualist Alliance in 1884. Contemporaries called him "the eminent spiritualist" or "the eminent occultist".

Through Spiritualism he met Francis George Irwin, a Bristol Freemason with esoteric interests, who arranged his initiation into Freemasonry in British Lodge No. 8 on 21 March 1864; he entered the Royal Arch in 1865. Irwin later enrolled him in the Bristol College of the Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia, and in 1875, on the recommendation of Kenneth R. H. Mackenzie, he joined the Society's Metropolitan College in London. Hockley rarely attended meetings, but he was close to Mackenzie and several members who later shaped the occult revival. Through these friendships his manuscripts and experience became known to men such as William Wynn Westcott.

Death in 1885 and the Fate of His Manuscripts§

Hockley died on 10 November 1885. His will left a modest estate to his heirs and directed that his books, manuscripts, crystals and mirrors be sold. The Spiritualist publisher James Burns bought the crystals and mirrors and advertised them in 1886; their later history is unknown. The library was dispersed, and individual manuscripts passed through dealers and collectors to occultists of the next generation.

Hockley's death came three years before the founding of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn by Westcott, Mathers and Woodman, all of whom moved in the same Masonic and Rosicrucian circles. It has sometimes been suggested that Hockley's papers contributed to the Order's sources, or even that he was connected with the mysterious cipher manuscript on which its rituals were based. No firm evidence supports these claims, but they reflect his reputation as the custodian of an older tradition. His copy of a Bacstrom letter, by contrast, can be traced: it was bought by the French alchemist Pierre Dujols in 1913.

Hockley's Legacy and Modern Editions§

For most of the twentieth century Hockley was known mainly to specialists. Interest grew after John Hamill edited a selection of his writings as The Rosicrucian Seer (1986). Since 2008 a series of editions has published his transcriptions of grimoires and his own works on scrying, including Invocating by Magic Crystals and Mirrors, while Joseph Peterson's edition of The Clavis or Key to the Magic of Solomon (2009) presents material from Sibly and Hockley. A Book of the Offices of Spirits (2011) reproduces a Hockley transcription of a sixteenth-century spirit catalogue.

The scrying volumes have also resurfaced. The Library of Congress holds twelve volumes, eleven titled The Crystal (Croydon, 1853–1862) and one called A Work of Angels & Spirits (1857), most of them in the collection of the escape artist Harry Houdini, who acquired them by means that remain unclear. They are probably part of the thirty volumes Hockley described. Together with his copied grimoires, they make Hockley a central figure in the history of British occultism and of Victorian attempts to speak with angels.

Frequently asked questions§

Who was Frederick Hockley?§

Frederick Hockley (1808–1885) was a London accountant, Freemason and occultist who copied and collected magical manuscripts and practised crystal-gazing. He worked as a copyist for the occult bookseller John Denley and later belonged to the Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia.

What was the Crowned Angel?§

The "Crowned Angel of the Seventh Sphere" was the name given to the spirit whose answers Hockley recorded through his seer Emma Leigh in the 1850s. The communications, bound into volumes, dealt with religion, the spirit world and personal questions.

Was Hockley a member of the Golden Dawn?§

No. He died in 1885, three years before the Golden Dawn was founded. He knew several of its future founders through Freemasonry and the Rosicrucian Society, and his manuscripts were valued by the following generation.

Where are Hockley's manuscripts today?§

They were sold and dispersed after his death. Copies and originals are in private and public collections, and the Library of Congress holds twelve volumes of his crystal-gazing records, mostly from Harry Houdini's collection.

Sources and further reading§

• The Rosicrucian Seer: Magical Writings of Frederick Hockley — John Hamill, 1986
• Invocating by Magic Crystals and Mirrors — Frederick Hockley, 2010
• The Clavis or Key to the Magic of Solomon — Ebenezer Sibly & Frederick Hockley, 2009
• A Book of the Offices of Spirits — John Porter, 2011
• Victorian Occultism and the Making of Modern Magic: Invoking Tradition — Alison Butler, 2011
• The Theosophical Enlightenment — Joscelyn Godwin, 1994
• The Magicians of the Golden Dawn — Ellic Howe, 1972