The Revd William Alexander Ayton joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in July 1888, some four months after Dr William Wynn Westcott had founded the Order. Ayton was Westcott's twentieth recruit and was described by S.L. MacGregor Mathers, a co-founder with Westcott of the Golden Dawn, as someone who united the Order with 'the great adepts of the past'.

By any standard, as Ellic Howe reveals in his Introduction and extensive notes, W.A. Ayton, Vicar of Chacombe in Oxfordshire, was a strange and remarkable man. His letters to F.L. Gardner and others, published here for the first time, show that he had a formidable knowledge of alchemical and occult literature and that he experimented assiduously with alchemical procedures. They also contain many fascinating insights into the mind of one of the last representatives of the English hermetic tradition and an inside view of the Golden Dawn itself.