in liddell's account, pickingill travelled widely and joined a variety of cunning lodges, gaining access to their grimoires and libraries. according to liddell, from the 1850s onward pickingill began co-operating with a group of freemasons who considered themselves to be rosicrucians and who wanted to prove that freemasonry and rosicrucianism were "siblings" of the witch-cult. two of these freemasons, hargrave jennings and w.j. hughan, became pupils of pickingill, who aided them in producing a rosicrucian manifesto that was used in the formation of the societas rosicruciana in 1865. according to liddell, pickingill's involvement with freemasons also led to the foundation of the hermetic order of the golden dawn in 1888. liddell also asserted that pickingill was influenced by a coven that had been founded in the early nineteenth century by a group of cambridge university academics led by francis barrett and whose rituals were based largely on classical sources.