Cauda Pavonis 15:2

Women Rebels in the Golden Dawn

By

Virginia Hyde

 

Interest in the hermetic and occultist organizations involving the poet William Butler Yeats continues both in the scholarly community and among today's members of such groups. Mary K. Greer's book, Women of the Golden Dawn: Rebels and Priestesses (Rochester, VT, 1995), is a remarkable compendium on the activities of four prominent women of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (founded in 1888); it has something for both audiences.¹ Greer fittingly spotlights the order's pioneering welcome to women members. Focusing on Florence Farr, Annie Horniman, Maud Gonne, and Moina Bergson Mathers (born Mina), Greer shows how the organization gave them opportunities for personal and creative growth as well as knitting them together with others into a distinctive community. The author has employed a broad canvas, moving from figure to figure, including those close to each of the four women, eventually bringing unlikely cohorts together with the actual members of the order; here are references to John O'Leary, Ida Jameson, Beatrice Webb, George Bernard Shaw, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, John Synge, Ezra Pound, Lucien Millevoye, Sean MacBride, Yeats, and many others. One finds, for example, the actress Florence Farr with May Morris (William Morris's daughter) and Lily Yeats (W. B. Yeats's sister), engaging in projects for the Socialist League at the Morris home. Or one hears how Shaw's palm was read by a founder of the Golden Dawn, the flamboyant mage S. L. MacGregor Mathers. Though presenting only a cross-section of its age, this book is quite detailed, even including astrological charts for the four women as well as for Yeats, Shaw, Synge, and Mathers. And it is up to date on the more traditional biographical scholarship.

Greer also quotes feminist and other literary and art criticism--including, for just two examples, Elaine Showalter's Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siecle (1990) and Pamela Nunn's Victorian Women Artists (1987)--and displays art work on the dust-jacket (from Walter Crane's A Masque of the Four Seasons [1905-9]) as well as inside, rightly associating the four featured women--"New Women" all--with the late Pre-Raphaelite or fin de siecle "period" as it experienced a long after-life into the turn of the century. The book is divided into sections named for the "four seasons" and dealing with stages of the women's lives in terms of spring, summer, autumn, and winter. It displays plentiful photographs of its subjects and some of their contemporaries and successors.

Perhaps it is least successful in a penchant for categories that seems ultimately related to a system of correspondences but that sometimes stereotypes each of the four in terms of Nina Auerbach's "shadows" or Victorian types: Annie as "Old Maid," Florence as "Fallen Woman," Maud as "Predator" or even "Demon," and Moina as "Victim" or "Angel in the House." But Greer's more complex account of their lives belies such simplicity, making each a palpable personality. By the term "rebels and priestesses" of the title, she means that all four embodied certain "taboos" running counter to the norms of their time but, through their strong commitments to culture as well as their iconoclasm, they helped to effect aesthetic, spiritual, social, and political changes.

Quoting Yeats that "all knowledge . . . is biography," Greer gives a wealth of information on the women's comings of age, loves, careers, and deaths. All were artists in some way, and the author has made use of books like Florence's The Dancing Faun (1894) and The Solemnization of Jacklin (1912) and Maud's A Servant of the Queen (1938) as well as Florence's and Moina's artworks; while Annie is best known as a patron of the arts--who bought and funded the Abbey Theater in Dublin--she is also depicted here as the artist who delighted in designing the elaborate costumes for Yeats's play, The King's Threshold (1903). Indeed, she was, like Moina, a graduate of London's Slade Art School that Yeats himself had attended. The two women met there as students, followed by Annie's frequent financial aid to the Mathers couple while they were developing the Golden Dawn. Certainly one memorable depiction is of Moina as a celibate sacred wife (one striking photograph shows her as the high priestess Anari in the Rites of Isis); some years after her marriage, she wrote proudly to Annie how she and Mathers had remained "perfectly clean" and sexless. One of the book's most poignant details concerns Maud Gonne, the Irish revolutionary whose secret affair in France with the French militant Millevoye produced two children (during the years when Yeats unknowingly wooed her). The son, Georges, had died in infancy, but Maud still had one of his booties when she was dying, asking that it be buried with her. She had lived the longest of the four women, dying in 1953 in her 87th year.

Although all four main figures were complex women, perhaps Florence Farr emerges as the most enigmatic. Greer reports her affair with George Bernard Shaw, explaining his reference to "really intimate conversation" as a "euphemism" for their sexual trysts. But she casts doubt on rumors of Florence's many lovers and makes the actress's spiritual side far more intriguing. In a personal shrine, Florence kept her own rather eerie drawing of an Egyptian face which may be that of her "Ka," the presence which she considered to be her "celestial double"; moreover, she felt she had encountered an Egyptian "adept" while working in the British Museum and decided she had lived previous lives. Such details not only reveal Florence's own deepest preoccupations but also offer insight into W. B. Yeats's unfinished novel, The Speckled Bird, and perhaps suggest the mystic quality he valued in her performances of his own occultist plays. Near the end of her life, Florence cut her ties with her homeland and went to Ceylon to be a school principal and continue her spiritual studies. But she was dying of cancer, not reaching her 57th birthday in 1917 but suffering the earliest death of the four women.

Greer includes a "Timeline of Western Magic" from the Egyptian Book of the Dead (c. 1000 B. C.) to the founding of the Golden Dawn. Included in the "Timeline" are such figures as Albertus Magnus, the Templars, Moses of Leon, Nicholas and Pernelle Flamel, Henry Cornelius Agrippa, John Dee, Jacob Boehme, Thomas Vaughn, and others. She also explains some of the shifts and divisions in the secret societies of late Victorian London. Madame Blavatsky had introduced theosophy there in the 1880s; but Dr. Anna Kingsford (also an editor and activist for women's rights) and Edward Maitland, both heads in the Theosophical Society, broke away from it in hopes of establishing an Esoteric Church based on Christian mysticism. They founded the Hermetic Society in 1885. The Golden Dawn was seemingly even more syncretic: it had a charter from Anna Sprengel of the German Golden Twilight and enacted rituals completed by William Wynn Westcott and Macgregor Mathers, combining such elements as Hermeticism, Masonic ceremony, the Kabbalah, and other occult sources. In 1895, the order suffered a crisis over the "Elemental Theory" of Thomas Lake Harris, apparently concerning sexual contacts between humans and "elementals"; and Annie Horniman quarreled with Moina Mathers over it. Besides recording these developments in the nineteenth-century groups, this book also takes note of the continuing societies of today.

Women of the Golden Dawn will raise some academic eyebrows--not to mention hackles--by its plea for more astrology in biographies (amply present in this case), its true-believer descriptions of Golden Dawn rituals and "skrying in the spirit vision," or "astral" journeys, and its invitation to readers to emulate the spirituality of these women. It is a true representative of the era and ethos of which it speaks. But it is more: resting firmly on a great deal of work, much of it traditional scholarship, its marshaling of historic and artistic details can not be discounted. It can prove useful to those whose specialties include turn-of-the-century occultism, theater, art, or literature; the rise of the "New Woman"; Yeats (whose own recently-published "automatic writing" experiments, with wife Georgie, would be right at home here); or simply extraordinary people, dynamic in their time. Well-told, their story of rich interrelationships can scarcely fail to interest any reader.

Washington State University

Notes

¹See also William T. Gorsky, Yeats and Alchemy (Albany: State University of New York Press), 1996, ix-xv + 223. See also Elaine Showalter's Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siécle (1990) and Pamela Nunn's Victorian Women Artists (1987).