Looking back: Moina Mathers

 

She is one of those controversial and misunderstood women in early 2oth-century mgical circles, but intriguing nonetheless and I find myself wishing she had written more or confided more in others so that we had more background on her life and thought. The only revealing work done on Moina Mathers’ life has been by tarot historian and reader Mary K Greer in her study of Women of the Golden Dawn.

 

Moina Mathers was born Mina Bergson in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1865, sister of the French writer Henri Bergson who won the Nobel Prize for literature despite being Jewish.

 

 Mina, a dark-haired art stuent with deep blue eyes who reminded friends of a Pre-Raphaelite model, met Samuel McGregor Mathers at the British Museum one year before he cofounded the famous British occult society the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, working in the Western mystery tradition. As a young initiate Moina took the motto ‘I leave no traces behind’, sometimes translated as ‘I never retrace my steps’. Secrecy and silence were important to her and she would fight to maintain that secrecy and confidentiality throughout her life. She married Mathers and they became esoteric partners: in 1899 they performed the rites of Isis together in a Paris theatre.

 

McGregor Mathers is a complex and not always convincing character. He was born in Hackney but claimed Scottish lineage and took the name McGregor. He was a vegetarian and anti-vivisectionist who studied Freemasonry and then Rosicrucian traditions. After a schism in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn ( like many others, Mathers detested Crowley), Mathers formed the Alpha and Omega group. After his death from Spanish flu in 1918, Moina took on the leadership of Alpha & Omega.

The Golden Dawn was organised into Orders and women as well as men were accepted as initiates. The First Order, and here I am relying on the Golden Dawn website and Wikipedia sources only,  taught esoteric philosophy based on the Hermetic Qabalah and personal development through study and awareness of the four Classical Elements as well as what they believed were the basics of astrology, tarot, and geomancy. The Second or “Inner” Order, the Rosae Rubeae et Aureae Crucis (the Ruby Rose and Cross of Gold), taught magic proper, including scrying, astral travel, and Alchemy. The Third Order was that of the “Secret Chiefs”, who were said to be great adepts no longer in incarnate form, but who directed the activities of the lower two orders by spirit communication with the Chiefs of the Second Order. The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn attracted poets and writers and mytics: members included the Welsh writer and mytic Arthur Machen, the Irish poet Yeats, his lover and political activist Maud Gonne, Anglican writer Evelyn Underhill, Algernon Blackwood, Bram Stoker, Fiona McCleod who was known as William Sharp, Florence Farr and Aleister Crowley. Much controversy had to do with the authenticity of the Cipher Manuscripts produced by Mathers, provenance uncertain and with documents prone to disappearing.

 

The influence of the Golden Dawn was tremendous in British esoteric and literary circles, Four or five very gifted and unconventional women — Maud Gonne, Annie Horniman, Florence Farr and Moina Mathers worked together creating rituals and working magic in 1890s London, ignoring the restrictions and mores of Edwardian society. But there are few images of Moina Mathers available and little is known about her work as a magician. She was a strong-willed and dramatic personality who took the name Moina because fey Celtic mythology was very much in vogue at the time. She studied art at Slade and sketched Egyptian and Celtic artifacts in the British Museum. She entered into a devoted but unconsummated marriage with another adept. Sam McGregor Mathers was the ‘Master’ — but she was a high priestess of Isis. As a clairvoyant and diviner, she created not only rituals but the ritual chambers of the London temple were designed and decorated by her.

 

After the alcoholic and impoverished Mathers died in 1918 at the end of a devastating World War, his widow ran the Paris lodge for some time but then returned to England. Moina had fought from the outset with the young Dion Fortune and tried unsuccessfully to attack her through psychic means. Moina seems to have had a talent for making enemies: she accused the American occultist Paul Foster Case of practising sex magic in Alpha and Omega, perhaps jealous of his rapid advancement as an Adept. Case believed that sex magic was crucial and that the ’serpent fire’, the Great Magical Agent, worked through redirected sexual energies. It would be interesting to know if Moina was opposed to any kind of tantric ritual on principle or had spotted a sexual predator and wanted to protect the greater purpose (and women members) of the Alpha & Omega. In another scandalous controversy, Moina was accused of bringing about the mysterious death on Iona of her former student Netta Fornario. Several magicians  who knew Moina accused her of psychic murder. Moina was unable to defend herself against such accusations because she had been dead for 18 months before Netta died on Iona, There is no doubt though that right until the end Moina inspired fear and resentment amongst her circle. She herself died in 1928 at the age of 63 after self-imposed starvation in London.

 

She did not retrace her steps and left few traces. Her asexual ascetic marriage seems to have brought her great personal freedom and satisfaction. As a priestess, she was not afraid to exercise power and although the feud with Dion Fortune has cast Moina as a formidable, ruthless and malicious opponent, the latter did not shy away from conflict or from defending what she believed. In her extant writings Moina Mathers speaks of purity and self-sacrifice and her passionate idealism comes through without egotistic overtones or puritanism. Many ritual elements and practices familiar today, such as circle casting , out-of-body experinces, tarot readings and pentagram symbols owe their popularity to the Golden Dawn rituals recovered or created by women such as Moina Mathers.

Looking back: John Dee

 

He was Welsh, of course. John Dee claimed to be a descendant of the Welsh prince Rhodri the Great and the name Dee derives from the Welsh Du, meaning ‘black’. His family came to London jst after the coronation of a new king, Henry VII and John Dee was born in Tower Ward, London. He was educated at Catholic schools and later went on to St John’s College, Cambridge and was a founding member of Trinity College.

 

He travelled widely around Europe as a young man, a Europe caught between medieval and Renaissance. He was tall and slender, wore an artist’s smock-like gown with slit sleeves, and had a long beard white as milk: throughout his life he was considered very handsome. In his 50s, his second wife would be the 24-year-old Jane Fromond whom he would be forced to share with the medium Edward Kelley.

 

John Dee was also a collector – in the British Museum one rainy July morning I once spent an hour or two looking at his Speculum, an obsidian Aztec cult object, a hand mirror brought to Europe in the 1520s, glistening and highly reflective. He took comfort in divinatory stones and engraved seals and ancient maps.

 

John Dee was in many ways very much a Renaissance man: he studied mathematics and navigation, cartography, astronomy and produced stage plays that gave him the reputation of being a magician. He lectured on Euclid in Paris. But he also loved secrecy and mysteries and his attempts to cast horoscopes for English princesses led to his arrest. It was not a tolerant society, but it was a society that thrived on dreams of alchemy and transformation and perpetual motion machines. John Dee was a scientist but he was also a dreamer.

 

He was passionate about numerology. His influences were those of hermetic philosophy and the Platonic and Pythagorean thinking current in those centuries, the work of European  writers like Ficino. It seems strange to us now, but he saw no tension between his pagan beliefs and his love of the Christina faith, his longing to see Catholics and Protestants united.

 

At his country home, Mortlake, he built up a rare and wonderful library of old books and manuscripts. He planned a great empire conquered through navigation skills, enthralled by visions of the New World, drawing on the Prince Madog myth of a Welsh prince conquering America centuries before.  He thrived on the imaginative energies and bold dreams fostered by the reign of Elizabeth I.

 

In 1564 he sat down and wrote his first ‘hermetic’ work, Monas Hieroglyphica, then travelled all the way to Hungary to present a copy to the Holy Roman Emperor, Maximillian II. John Dee had begun to unravel the hidden meanings of the Kabbalah through his own glyph and understood the hidden mystical unity of the universe. His codes and cryptic references have made the work largely unintelligible to later generations.

 

By the 1580s Dee was disillusioned with science and the observation of nature, and turned to the supernatural, more specifically the angels. He began attuning himself to the angelic voices through a medium or scryer. A young man named Edward Kelley channelled the angelic voices as they dictated to Dee secrets  concealed in their Enochian language, both men seated at a small table with a crystal ball or  shew stone. For some years Dee and Kelley roamed around central Europe, Poland and Bohemia, where Kelley announced to Dee that the angel Urial had ordered both men to share their wives. Disillusioned, Dee broke with Kelley and returned to England.

 

Kelley is something of an archetype, the alchemist as charlatan. He claimed to be able to prepare a ‘red tincture’ with which he could transform base metals into gold. He was lustful, devious, controlling and more intterested in profiting from alchemy than scrying. But, like many tricksters, his gifts seem to have been genuine despite his fraudulent use of them.

 

Dee found his library at Mortake in ruins. After a time in tenure as an academic, he lost favour under the new king, James I, and he lived in poverty in Mortlake, cared for by his daughter Katherine. John Dee died in his early 80s, in about 1608. Even in his age and penury he was sought out as a magician and wizard by many local people and remembered as a great magical worker in London.

 

His manuscripts recording the angelic communications were first published in 1659 and became highly influential. Shakespeare may have modelled the character of Prospero in The Tempest on Dee. John Dee has become, like Francis Bacon, an Elizabethan enigma.

 

The angelic conversations are most remarkable in that they are conversations — with charming or irritable or gnomic angels. In that century of natural philosophy and theism, the problem of magic was closely bound up with the theological difficulty of discernment of spirits, so that the medieval Solomonic magick and the Enochian discourses are obscured by a justifying and unifying ethic that obscures much that is of interest to us today.

 

At various times in recent years I have explored the work and life of John Dee, listening for what resonates through medieval scholarship with our post-modern context and ways of deciphering or deconstructing the ‘magical’. I have dreamt once or twice that I am able to travel to Mortlake at Richmond-on-Thames and wander through the galleries, look at parchment scrolls and  leaf through bound books of faded script and astronomic charts. The entire library sounds to me like a grimoire.

And there is the gowned figure of John Dee just back from finding a wedge of gold in a deep pool in Brecknockshire, raising a storm the like of which had never been seen in the county. He was an uncommon magician; John Aubrey says of him  that he was ‘a mighty good man’, a man of profound erudition and strangely gifted. He lived his magic in a less deracinated and unbelieving time, endlessly curious and amzed by the unfolding worlds within and without.

Figuring it out at kitchen tables

 

Which is of course a quotation from Elizabeth Alexander’s Praise Song for the Day and says something rich and true about how we make sense of our lives, helping one another to articulate the unsaid and think more clearly.

 

A friend in Mombasa has just sent me a lively account of the celebrations in Kogelo in Kenya, where Barack Obama’s father, an economist,  grew up. It is a small dusty African town with maize fields and dirt roads and huts with corrigated-iron roofing. We do live in extraordinary times.

The dust of Africa gets under your skin and the poverty breaks your heart and the warmth of the conversations and hugs  is like being back in the womb. It gives me hope to know that the new president of the most powerful and perhaps least accountable nation in the world has this visceral connection to the continent where I live and a place I love so deeply. But even more than I am moved by Obama’s inauguration, I am moved by that will to change on the part of the American people.

To shift from fear to hope is no small thing.