A Masonic Hymn to the Sun

This article publishes for the first time a ritual text composed by the nineteenth-century Freemason and occultist Francis George Irwin. The text is a devotional prose-poem entitled "Hymn to the sun" which appears in a book of Masonic ceremonies that Irwin produced in 1889. The Hymn provides some interesting and important insights into two issues in the study of Victorian esotericism: first, the means by which occult rituals of the era were composed; and second, the way in which individuals could make the transition from Christianity to Neo-Paganism by way of high-degree Freemasonry.