They could, in some sense, have been deliberate sacrifices to the gods, and the spirits of the dead, for their pleasure daw entertainment. The Foot-soldier moves one square forward, and takes diago- nally the Elephant can move at will - North, South, East, or West. Rosicrucian Chess of The Golden Dawn Steve Nichols Format: Cased-bound/matt laminate/pp. Since the publication of the secret rituals of the Golden Dawn in the s by the late Israel Regardie, there has been much speculation about Enochian chess’. Her husband took part in some of these games, as did MacGregor Mathers.Golden Dawn hermetic order and subsumes other divination systems such as Tarot, Geomancy, and Astrology. The game, while complex, was in actual use Georgie Yeats, wife of poet William Butler Yeats, relates actually playing the game as a part of her occult training in Golden Dawn circles. Joseph Hone, biographer of William Butler Yeats, claimed, 'Mathers would shade his eyes with his hands and gaze at the empty chair at the opposite corner of the board before moving his partner's piece.'

MacGregor Mathers, who finalised the game's rules, was known to play with an invisible partner he claimed was a spirit.

The four players would form pairs of two, with each player having a partner. The rules of the game were partially derived from shatranj and other historical forms of chess the queen is played like a fers, with a two square diagonal leaping move. The chess board itself was also varicolored, and divided into four sub-boards in which each of one of the four elemental colors predominated. The main identifications of the pieces were: The four sets of pieces were variously colored, and identified with Egyptian deities or 'god-forms'. The game was four-handed because each set of pieces corresponded to one of the four classical elements and their several watchtowers, and the game was used for divination as well as competition. MacGregor Mathers, who put its rules into final form. John Dee (magus and astrologer to Queen Elizabeth I), which was later adapted by Victorian members of the Golden Dawn into 'a complete system of training and initiation.'Įnochian Chess was created by William Wynn Westcott, one of the three founders of the Golden Dawn, but the rules of the game were probably never completed by him. The name comes from the Enochian system of magic of Dr. Enochian chess is a four-player chess variant, similar to Chaturanga, associated with the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.

Enochian chess set