Victorian occultism and phallic religion theory

Hargrave Jennings

1817 – 1890

Hargrave Jennings was a British Freemason, Rosicrucian, and occult author whose The Rosicrucians: Their Rites and Mysteries (1870) was the first substantial English-language history of Rosicrucianism, drawing on two decades of research and becoming a foundational text in the Victorian occult revival. He developed an influential and controversial theory that all religion ultimately derives from phallic and fire worship, elaborating this across works such as Phallism (1889) and the Nature Worship and Mystical Series. A member of the Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia, he was a key formative figure in the intellectual milieu from which the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn emerged.