Lytton’s Disciple: Sorcerer Behind Ripper Murders

TRANSCEND MEMBERS, 12 Aug 2024

Matthew Ehret Insights – TRANSCEND Media Service

6 Aug 2024 – The following is part two of five within a larger 17-part series ‘Edgar Poe as Cultural Warrior.’ The first installment of the Jack the Ripper Case can be found here.

Robert D’Onston: Sorcerer and Lytton Disciple

As we will come to see, Robert D’Onston Stephenson had been initiated into the Rosicrucian Society by Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton in 1861, worked as a surgeon in Giuseppe Garibaldi’s army in Italy for two years (bringing him into contact with both Giuseppe Mazzini and Madame Blavatsky), and conducted black magic rituals with Bulwer’s son Lord Robert Lytton, who served as Governor General of India from 1876-1880 overseeing the worst mass genocide in Britain’s long blood-stained dominance over their ‘crown jewel’.

This occured during the same period that the Theosophists were establishing their headquarters in India in 1877, and at which time it is likely that both D’Onston and his occult childhood friend Robert Lytton would have come into direct contact with Blavatsky and Colonel Olcott.

While the Ripper murders were underway, D’Onston was a patient in London’s Whitechapel Hospital during the total duration of the killings; he began writing articles on the topic of the killer’s identity for his long-time employer The Pall Mall Gazette (for whom he worked since 1869).

After the ripper murders ended on November 9, 1888, D’Onston wrote several strange articles for the same W.T. Stead’s Pall Mall Gazette as well as Blavatsky’s Lucifer Magazine on the topic of African black magic and human sacrifice.

Robert D’Onston Stevenson was born into a rich merchant family and described his early fixation with magic and hypnosis saying “I was always… fond of everything pertaining to mysticism, astrology, witchcraft and what is commonly known as ‘occult science’ generally; and I devoured with avidity every book or tale that I could get hold of having reference to these arts.”

After studying medicine under an Edinburgh physician named Dr. James Allen, D’Onston described his friendship with a young Robert Lytton in Paris in 1859, and his obsession with meeting Edward’s father, the leading black magician of the British Empire (and secretary of the colonies under d’Israeli) Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton:

“My interest in the effects of mind upon matter once more awoke, and my physiological studies and researches were accompanied by psychological experiments. I read Lytton’s Zanoni at this time with great zest … and longed excessively to know its author; little dreaming that I should one day be the pupil of the great Magist, Bulwer Lytton- the one man in modern times for whom all systems of ancient and modern magism and magic, white or black, held no secrets”.

As outlined in part 8 of The Occult Tesla, Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton’s 1942 occult novel Zanoni represented the foundational sacred text for the modern rosicrucian revival. Zanoni was a hermetic story featuring an ancient order of immortals and outlined the techniques for recruiting new initiates into this unhuman secret society.

Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton’s works were also translated into Russian by Madame Blavatsky’s mother and represented the most formative writings on young Blavatsky’s mind prior to her forming the Theosophists. Blavatsky even had all members of her esoteric section of Theosophists study Lytton’s Zanoni, and one member Vittoria Cremers who would manage Lucifer Magazine and go into business with D’Onston a year after the ripper murders had ended had this to say of Lytton’s gospel (and D’Onston’s relationship to it):

“The first time I ever really got behind the mind of D’Onston occurred one evening when I returned to Baker Street and was mounting the first flight of stairs to enter the office. As I reached the landing I saw D’Onston standing outside the door of his room. What intrigued me however, was that he appeared to be drawing some sort of sign upon it with his thumb.
I noticed that he was tracing with his thumb the outline of a triangle on the door… I said nothing but simply passed on into the office. A few seconds elapsed and then the door was silently opened and D’Onston entered the room closing the door gently behind him. He fixed his eyes upon me as I busied myself at the desk and then asked:
‘Did you notice what I was doing, Vittoria?’
‘Yes, D’Onston’, I replied, smiling at his serious expression. ‘You were drawing something or other on the door, weren’t you?’
Did you notice what it was?’
Looked to me like a triangle.
It was a triangle.
But you’d got it upside down.
D’Onston smiled coldly. ‘Yes, Vittoria’, he said. ‘It was “upside down”, as you describe it and I’ll tell you why.’
He seated himself upon one corner of the desk, and then went on:
‘Years ago a friend of mine dropped in just before nightfall and suggested a walk. I told him I would run upstairs for my pipe and join him in the hall. I dashed up to my room and went across to the mantelpiece for my pipe.
‘Then as I turned to go downstairs I suddenly sensed some horrible Presence outside the open door. I stood still, unable to move so petrified was I with terror. I felt that I dared not venture outside that door- that if I did I should drop down dead from sheer fright.
‘At the last I summoned up sufficient willpower to creep to the door and peer out. There was nothing to be seen, Vittoria. I scurried down the stairs to join my friend as though the whole of Hell was at my heels. Together we went out into the night, I was in a sweat of fear of something, I knew not what. Only once in my life since that day Vittoria, have I known the fear fo that Presence. Later on I learned how to guard against its intrusion by making the sign of the triangle on the door of my room before entering. It is a thing I never fail to do.
This was quite true as I discovered during our residence in Baker Street, for on several other occasions I witnessed the same weird performance.
‘Keeping the spooks out I would remark, but he never replied and never and never ceased to complete his ‘upside down’ triangle. I had not the least idea at the time that there was any Magical significance either Black or White, about this sign of the triangle nor that its inversion indicated the Black Art. D’Onston said nothing about it…
‘As for his story of the ‘horrible Presence’, it faintly recalled the awe inspiring description of the Presence which figured in Bulwer Lytton’s Zanoni. I had read this book on the recommendation of Helena Blavatsky soon after I joined her. To those who may not have read this very fine work I would explain that at one period of the story Zanoni endeavours to invoke the friendly spirit of Adonai; instead he found at his side ‘the Evil Omen, the implacable Foe, with exultation and malice burning from its hell-lit eyes… As an iceberg, the breath of that Presence froze the air; as a cloud it filled the chamber and blackened the stars from heaven.
and then comes the terrible threat from this hideous Thing.
’Thou art returned to the Threshold’ it tells Zanoni. ‘Thou, whose steps have trodden the verges of the infinite! And, as the goblin of its fancy seizes on a child in the dark, mighty one, who would conquer Death, I seize upon thee.’
Fiction! it may be said. Maybe, but those beliefs were a grim reality to Bulwer Lytton, through several of whose works runs the same strain of mysticism; just as was D’Onston’s belief in the Presence which had scared him so thoroughly, a reality.”

Initiated into the Rosicrucian Mysteries

After winning over Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton with unbounded hero-worship, D’Onston was accepted as a pupil in the dark arts in 1859 writing of the experience in his 1893 autobiography:

“I entered, he was standing in the middle of the sacred pentagon, which he had drawn on the floor with red chalk, and holding in his extended right arm the baguette, which was pointed towards me. Standing thus, he asked me if I had duly considered the matter and had decided to enter upon the course. I replied that my mind was made up. He then and there administered to me the oaths of the neophyte of the Hermetic lodge of Alexandria- the oaths of obedience and secrecy’. [1]

In his 1893 autobiography, D’Onston described how he studied ‘the forbidden arts’ under Lytton: “Hermetics have to know all the practices of the forbidden art to enable them to overcome the devilish machinations of its professors”.

Immediately following his initiation into Lytton’s Rosicrucian order, the next chapter of D’Onston’s life saw the young occultist become a revolutionary in Garibaldi’s army, where D’Onston served as a chief surgeon on the front lines of battle carrying out hundreds of amputations in warfare conditions from 1860-62.

This may appear a strange career choice from a young occultist, but likely not a spontaneous decision as Garibaldi was also a grandmaster freemason and close associate of Giuseppe Mazzini. Mazzini was also close to Madame Blavatsky during this same period, and Blavatsky was known to have bragged that she had fought in Garibaldi’s army in 1859-1861… placing D’Onston and the Russian mystic into several points of contact nearly 30 years prior to the Whitechapel murders.

It should be recalled that both Garibaldi and Blavatsky were also members of the Freemasonic Rite of Memphis and Misraim alongside Esoteric Section member John Yarker, Dr. Franz Hartman- leader of the German Theosophists and Ordo Templi Orientis founder Theodor Reuss.

This period of endless amputations and death was later described by D’Onston was years as an exhilarating experience which gave him 20 years of experience within only one year. After his Italian adventures were complete, D’Onston then went to West Africa and studied black magic and even wrote articles for the Pall Mall Gazette and Lucifer Magazine in 1890 and 1891 describing his heroic murder of a woman (a witchdoctor) while there.

According to researcher Philip Stephenson (a distant relative to D’Onston), the young roscircucian’s next career move involved becoming a journalist for the Pall Mall Gazette where he was assigned to cover Sir Charles Warren’s excavations of the Temple Mount in 1869.

Philip Stephenson writes:

“In 1870 Stephenson was reporting on an archeologically excavation under the Temple Mount in Jerusalem which was led by the very same officer Charles Warren, this resulted in regularly progress reports between them. This also shows that the two men were friends at least 20 years before the Ripper murders in 1888 and that if Stephenson did have inside information about the murders”

It was while covering Sir Charles Warren’s excavations of Solomon’s Temple under the Dome of the Rock mosque for The Pall Mall Gazette that the two men became close friends.

In 1995, Philip Stephenson discovered among his relative’s possessions a leather masonic apron featuring a hidden pocket in which was featured several letters which Sir Charles Warren had written to Robert D’Onston Stephenson dated 1870.

The letters were discovered alongside a cypher manuscript making reference to certain ‘new discoveries’ Warren had made in Jerusalem.

Since the encrypted manuscript has not yet been deciphered, we are left to speculate as to what specifically Warren believed he had discovered in his excavation.

Luckily, clues do exist for the inquiring mind.

In the next installment we will continue to pull on this thread as we investigate ‘The Pagan Revival of Solomon’s Temple.’

Footnote:

[1] Citation from autobiography republished in ‘The True Face of Jack the Ripper’ by Melvin Harris, First published UK 1994, 2nd print G2 Books, 2020, p.63-64

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Matthew Ehret is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment, a  journalist, and co-founder of the Rising Tide Foundation. He is the Editor-in-Chief of Canadian Patriot Review, Senior Fellow at the American University of Moscow and host of The Great Game on Rogue News. He has authored the book series The Untold History of Canada and the recently published book series The Clash of the Two Americas. Email: matt.ehret@tutamail.com

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