Kenneth R. H. Mackenzie


Kenneth Robert Henderson Mackenzie was an English linguist, orientalist and autodidact.

Early life

Mackenzie was born on 31 October 1833 at Deptford near London, England. The following year, his family lived in Vienna, where his father, Dr. Rowland Hill Mackenzie, was assistant surgeon in the midwifery department at Imperial Hospital. When Dr. Mackenzie and his wife returned to England around 1840, Kenneth remained in Vienna for his education, excelling in languages. At 17, he was back in London, where he worked in the publishing office of Benjamin Disraeli.

Literary career

In 1851, when Mackenzie was just 18, his short introductory biography of Homer, a translation of a text by Herodotus, appeared in Theodore Alois Buckley’s The Odyssey of Homer, with the Hymns, Epigrams, and Battles of the Frogs and Mice. Literally Translated, with Explanatory Notes. At the beginning of the book, Buckley thanked Mackenzie for his Life of Homer: Attributed to Herodotus, writing, For the translation of the Pseudo-Herodotean Life of Homer, the reader is indebted to the industry of Kenneth Mackenzie, Esq. It is the earliest memoir of the supposed author of the Iliad we possess.
In 1852, the year of publication of his translation, from German, of Karl Richard Lepsius’ Briefe aus Aegypten, Aethiopen, Mackenzie also translated, from Danish, Hans Christian Andersen’s In Sweden. For T. A. Buckley’s 1852 book Great Cities of the Ancient World, Mackenzie supplied the chapters on Peking, America, and Scandinavia. In Buckley's Great Cities of the Middle Ages, the author thanked "my literary friend and coadjutor, Kenneth R. H. Mackenzie" for contributing the chapters on the cities of Spain. In Buckley's The Dawnings of Distinguished Men, the author acknowledged "I am again a grateful debtor to the kindness of my friend Kenneth R. H. Mackenzie, Esq., whose Memoir of Thomas Chatterton forms one of its most interesting chapters."
In 1853, Routledge published Mackenzie’s book Burmah and the Burmese, even as Mackenzie was busy helping Walter Savage Landor prepare a new edition of his Imaginary Conversations
In 1854, Mackenzie translated, from the German, Friedrich Wagner’s Schamyl and Circassia.
In 1855, Mackenzie translated, from the German, J. W. Wolf’s Fairy Tales Collected in the Odenwald. Between October 1858 and January 1859, at his own expense, Mackenzie published four issues of The Biological Review: A Monthly Repertory of the Science of Life. In 1859, Routledge published Master Tyll Owlglass: His Marvellous Adventures and Rare Conceits, Mackenzie’s translation of the medieval prankster story "Till Eulenspiegel", published in the U.S. in 1860 by Ticknor & Fields.
In 1861, Mackenzie traveled to Paris to meet the French occultist Eliphas Levi. In 1854, Mackenzie had met the American Rosicrucian Paschal Beverly Randolph who, in Paris in 1861, was newly appointed Supreme Grand Master for the Western World of the Fraternitas Rosae Crucis. In 1864, when Robert Wentworth Little found some old Rosicrucian rituals written in German in the storerooms of London’s Freemason’s Hall, he immediately turned to Mackenzie to help him whip these up into an esoteric order. Thinking that Mackenzie, a friend of the likes of Paschal Beverly Randolph and Eliphas Levi, had – as Mackenzie himself had claimed – been initiated into a German Rosicrucian fraternity when he lived in Vienna, Little believed Mackenzie had the “authority” to found the new, “authentic” esoteric society. In 1866, with Mackenzie’s help, Little founded the Rosicrucian Society of England, the Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia. The main leaders of the new organization were Little, William Wynn Westcott, William Robert Woodman, and Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers.
According to a report of The Gentleman's Magazine, in May 1863, Mackenzie read to the Society of Antiquaries of London an "interesting paper" on "the 'History of the Horn book' illustrated by specimens from his own collection and by photographs and woodcuts from other collections." At the time, Mackenzie was preparing for the publication of a book on the subject. The publisher, in advance of the publication, had set in type and printed the title page; only this page was ever printed. As for "the paper" read before the Society of Antiquaries, The Gentleman’s Magazine reported, it "shewed considerable research, and was listened to with much interest."
In 1870 in London, James Hogg & Son published Mackenzie’s translation of Johann Georg Ludwig Hesekiel’s Life Of Bismarck.
In 1872, the year of his marriage, seven pages of a manuscript, "Zythogala; or, Borne by the Sea: An International Romance of the Nineteenth Century By K. R. H. Mackenzie. London & Paris: Published by Authority of The Cosmological Society; Philadelphia: Mackenzie & Co. Chestnut Street; Leipsig: ‘Als Manuskript Gedruct’ Tauchnitz, 1872. Entered according to Act of Congress in the year 1872 by Robert Shelton Mackenzie of Philadelphia," made their way into the formal holdings of the British Library. The book was never published, but to this day the incomplete manuscript – just the first seven pages – remain on a shelf at the British Library.
Though known as something of an eccentric, "one of the most companionable of persons" when sober, but mean-spirited and harshly critical when under the influence of ale, with no known source of income, in 1872 Mackenzie married Alexandrina Aydon.
In 1873, Mackenzie’s friend and mentor Frederick Hockley wrote of him, "I have the utmost reluctance even to refer to Mr. Kenneth Mackenzie. I made his acquaintance about 15 or 16 years since. I found him then a very young man who having been educated in Germany possessed a thorough knowledge of German and French and his translations having been highly praised by the press, exceedingly desirous of investigating the Occult Sciences, and when sober one of the most companionable persons I ever met."
In October 1874, a publisher’s prospectus was issued for Mackenzie’s Royal Masonic Cyclopaedia. In mid-August 1875, Mackenzie wrote a friend that “when this book is finished, I shall, very likely, run over to Canada. My father in law Harrison Aydon is carrying all before him and I am in correspondence with my cousin Alexander Mackenzie the Premier ." Mackenzie corrected the last of the Cyclopaedia proofs early in 1877.
In 1881, Mackenzie edited the early issues of the Masonic periodical Kneph. He planned a book called The Game of Tarot: Archaeologically and Symbolically Considered, which was announced but not published. Another new order, the "Order of Light", was launched in 1882, followed by Mackenzie’s creation of an even more esoteric Masonic organization called the "Society of Eight," formed especially "for the study of Alchemy." In 1883, John Hogg published The Shoes of Fortune, and Other Fairy Tales by Hans Christian Andersen, "with a biographical sketch of Andersen by Kenneth R. H. Mackenzie, LLD., original English editor of Andersen's 'In Sweden'."

Death and posthumously discovered works

Kenneth R. H. Mackenzie died on 3 July 1886, shortly before his fifty-third birthday.
In August 1887, the Cipher Manuscripts were bought from Mackenzie’s wife and transferred, via A. F. A. Woodford, to William Wynn Westcott. Although the Cipher Manuscripts appeared to be in Mackenzie's handwriting, Westcott made elaborate claims concerning Mackenzie’s having received permission to open, in Britain, an order that was said to have originated in Germany, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. The Cipher Manuscripts were used to found the order.