In recent weeks I’ve been looking at certain personalities in esoteric or Craft traditions and reworking biographical profiles for my own amusement. What I am also doing is highlighting for myself aspects and dynamics that echo my own inner conflicts and attractions.
The long and bitter feud between Dion Fortne and Moina Mathers fascinates me. As a young woman Dion experienced relentless and frightening psychic attacks by Moina when she challenged the older woman’s authority and horrified Moina by publishing details of hidden teachings in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.
Years ago a friend of mine did an extraordinary painting entitled Can You Tell A Secret? In the painting, two figures are moving across a dark field, walking side by side. One of the figures has half-turned and is showing the watcher something in a half-opened hand. The other figure is oblivious to this.
That image spoke volumes to me about the act of disclosure and how it can violate others’ trust and felt need for absolute secrecy. Keeping secrets is very often an intolerable burden. The need to tell can become overpowering. But to whom do we in turn tell a secret, and who can be trusted to keep that twice-told secret? The sequence of telling and betrayal may coninue and it may be imperative that in fact the secret does get told. Can you tell a secret?
Once there must have been love, friendship, gratitude and a sense of shared endeavour and respect for one another’s spiritual gifts between Dion Fortune and Moina Mathers, the young impressionable Welsh woman and the older Jewish artist, magicians-in-becoming. That love may account for the ferocity of the later conflict between them. They haunted and possessed one another in ways neither could quite understand. Shades too of the mother and daughter relationship, the daughter’s struggle to free herself from a dominating and vindictive mother. The psychic banishing achieved by Doion Fortune did not end the preoccupation with her former mentor and for all we know the same preoccupation was felt by Moina Mathers.
Another kind of quixotic relationship was evident in the spiritual partnership of Moina Mathers and Sam McGregor Mathers, in that unconsummated marriage and the tension between empowering and fulfilling work and rituals, the freedom given to Moina by her magician husband, and then the way in which Moina chose to suffer alongside him as he lost patrons and suffered ill health and hostile rejection from his colleagues, her role as uncritical helpmeet. Moina Mathers believed Sam died because the summoning of the Secret Chiefs had drained him of vital energies. Others saw Mather’s death as a result of Spanish flu ( a global plague that killed far more people than had died in WWI) attacking a system weakedned by alcoholism and poor nutrition. Alongside the support and equality Moina experienced in this marriage, there was a curiously sublimated love that might have intensified the erotic bond between the two rather than dissipating it. Lovers who never make love together never forget one another, and that thwarted desire can become a transmuted longing and triumph over the flesh ( to use the language they might have found congenial).
And then there is the coupling of John Dee and his dubious protege Edward Kelley, roaming together around Poland, Hungary and Bohemia in the 1500s, through forest and lonely mountain hamlets and in the shadow of great castles, seeking hearings with monarchs and princes, telling their stories and giving demonstrations of their alchemical workings. Edward who could hear the angelic murmurings, and John Dee who could interpret them. They part in anger and disillusionment after Edward wants to have sex with John’s young wife, who will later die of plague in Manchester. The spectre of lust or angelic mischief-making has contaminated that high pure love between two spiritual and platonic men. And John’s companion in his last years is his faithful daughter Katherine, a Miranda perhaps after Shakespeare’s enchanting magician’s daughter in the Tempest, and maybe a witch in her own right.
Reading and unreading narratives that are ambiguous and elliptical brings me back to the stories we tell ourselves and others. In the forefront of my mind is the question of intentional community-making amongst pagani and the kinds of partnerships into which we enter; the tension between what we talk about freely in blogland what we keep back; what others reveal about us or deduce from the posted entries. What is oppositional and what is a genuine consensus, what diversity reveals about communities that have very little in common and the bigger question of unity in the face of threat and alliances to counter abusive practices. The ways in which cultural contexts obscure very simple truths, the plethora of masks and implied rituals and competing truth claims that vy for attention in virtual communities.
Who is listening out there? What constitutes common ground? And how deep does that consensus go between peers and lovers and friends among the online pagani? So many different journeys and too many misunderstandings. And, nevertheless, the conversation continues, alive with unanswerables and chance wisdom.
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