Benjamen Holmscroft

Benjamen Holmscroft was a British occultist and the founder of the Arcanum.

Little is known about Holmscroft's life prior to 1879, when he briefly joined the Hermetic Order of the Rising Day. After he quit that organization in disgust, he retired to a home he claimed was his "family estate," though this appears to have been a fraud. In 1885 he sent out letters inviting a number of occult scholars to his estate, and on November 24 of that year he hosted a dinner at which the original executive committee of the Arcanum was founded.

Even with his new colleagues living under the same roof, very little about Holmscroft's history or personal life was ever known. He shunned cameras, and what photographs may exist are mostly lost. Arcanum members claimed that he appears to be in his "mid to late 40s" when he first founded the organization, but claimed to be 33; he did not look "much older than 40ish" when last seen publically 1911. He spent the next few years as a recluse and died in 1914, but the funeral was a closed casket and his body was buried in the Arcanum's private cemetery.

Holmscroft had a remarkable and cosmopolitan knowledge of the occult, but his mysterious past and equally mysterious death trouble some members of the Arcanum, who suspect that he was not what he appeared to be.