Franny Moyle (27 page)

Although men were not usually admitted within the hallowed walls of Dorothy's restaurants, an exception was made for the inauguration of the Oxford Street enterprise. And so Constance brought Oscar along. They found themselves seated next to the exotic Russian émigré Madame Blavatsky and her disciple Annie Besant.

Blavatsky proved a true rival for Oscar. Smoking just as heavily as he, until their table was defined by a blue cloud of tobacco, she held court talking about the position of women in Russia. Politically women were on a footing with men in Russia, Blavatsky told a fascinated group who had gathered around the rather exotic Wilde/ Blavatsky table. What was more, women could smoke openly in Russia, just like men, she explained.

Her smoking aside, Madame Blavatsky had acquired huge fame at the time as one of the founders of the Theosophical Society. This society, which was created in New York in the mid-187os, with the objective of studying and investigating spiritual activity, had become a phenomenon across the Western world.

It is hard to imagine the importance of mysticism and spiritualism in the latter half of the nineteenth century, but rather than lying on the peripheries of social interest, it lay at its heart. Séances were
regularly held as the focus of social gatherings, and self-proclaimed mediums, professional and amateur, were highly visible. Constance's own interest in mesmerism as expressed in her juvenile letters, far from singling her out as unusual, merely shows the extent to which even the most conventional members of Victorian society were at least tolerant of and in some cases actively fascinated by the supernatural.

The Theosophical Society represented an intellectual response to spiritualism. It sought to provide credibility to spiritualism by grounding it in a system of belief. At the very core of Theosophy was the concept that that the material world cannot be separated from its spiritual counterpart. In fact, the Theosophists believed that there was a different natural order from that which separated the material and spiritual worlds. This alternative scheme of cosmogony was based on the idea of a constant flow and relationship between the material and spiritual dimensions.

Blavatsky herself promoted the study of Eastern philosophy as a means of grasping a higher understanding of the world, and of how the material and ‘supernatural' worlds interact.

Mrs Cooper-Oakley was a Theosophical enthusiast and an evangelist for the movement. So was Constance. Constance's introduction to Theosophy lay in Speranza's friendship with Anna Kingsford. Kingsford, a physician, mystic, author, vegetarian and campaigner for women's rights, had eloped and married Algernon Kingsford on the firm understanding that he would support her determination to have a career in spite of her sex. She began writing and campaigning for female enfranchisement and used her not inconsiderable private income to become briefly the proprietor of
The Lady's Own Paper
. In the early 1870s she trained as a doctor in the Paris medical school, since at that time women were unable to qualify in the UK. But then in the early 1880s she experienced a number of mystical revelations which formed the basis of first a series of lectures, and then what became a popular and seminal mystical work explaining the deeper mysteries of religion:
The Perfect Way, or The Finding of Christ
. This publication gained her a sudden and considerable
prominence in Theosophical and spiritual circles, and by 1883 she had become the president of the British Theosophical Society.

When Anna Kingsford wrote to Speranza back in 1884 to congratulate her on Oscar's engagement and secure her invitation to the big day, she was also proselytizing for the Theosophical Society, over which she now presided. Sending Speranza some of her latest writings, she had informed her of the imminent arrival in London of Alfred Percy Sinnett, who headed the movement's Indian branch:

We shall shortly have a field day in the Lodge of the Theosophical Society for the President founder of the Indian Branch is expected in London about the end of this month; and we shall have a muster of all our Fellows to greet him. He and Madame Blavatsky are due today at Marseilles where they will stay a day or two … And Madame will then go on to Nice to visit Lady Caithness … My discourses, which I remember naming to you when I saw you in town, will probably be given under the auspices of the Theosophical Society as President of the London Lodge: and therefore it is not likely they will be quite public in their characters. They will be very grave and serious.
³

In July 1884, Kingsford had also written to Constance confirming that the newly married Mrs Wilde would attend the Theosophical Society meeting the following day. ‘I hear from Mr Sinnett that there will not be much “talk”, only a short discourse by Colonel Olcott,' she had advised Constance. Constance had been a willing recruit from the start, providing Kingsford with a list of names of other people she knew who might be interested in the society. All of them had been sent invitations, Kingsford assured her.
⁴

In fact, the much anticipated visit from Sinnett that Kingsford seemed so excited about proved deeply problematic for her. Unlike Sinnett's – and for that matter Blavatsky's – version of Theosophy, which looked very much to the East for answers, Kingsford's version invited the study of the Western mystery tradition and esoteric Christianity. The spiritual traditions that had grown up in the West, also known as Hermeticism, included alchemy, herbalism, the disciplines of the Tarot and astrology. Rooted in Western antiquity, in
the ancient Hellenic and Egyptian belief systems, the Western tradition also extended to Rosicrucianism. This was a theology developed in medieval Germany by a secret society of mystics, which, again embracing the ancient past for profound answers to life, promoted a reformation of mankind according to new laws and knowledge.

When Sinnett arrived in Britain that spring, he and Kingsford found themselves at loggerheads. Sinnett had ambitions to head the London lodge himself, and Anna disagreed with his focus on Eastern mysticism. Sinnett got the upper hand, and the society attempted to mollify Anna by offering her her own ‘Hermetic Lodge'. But soon the warring factions in the Theosophical Society forced Kingsford out of it altogether, and she set up her own independent Hermetic Society. And through this society Constance came into contact with yet another hermetic order, this one deeply secret, which would become notorious for taking the study of ancient mystical texts and beliefs a stage further. It was called the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.

The Golden Dawn intended to revive ancient magic rituals that would unlock spiritual truths and experiences for its members. The founders of this extraordinary endeavour were three men: Mathers, Westcott and Woodman. Born in Hackney in the same year as Constance, Samuel Liddell Mathers was the son of a merchant's clerk who, after a short military career, found himself in Bournemouth caring for his widowed mother. He nevertheless claimed an impressive ancestry that reached back into the depths of the Scottish MacGregor clan, and by the later 1880s he was referring to himself as MacGregor Mathers. Despite his flamboyant style, Mathers was essentially an impecunious scholar who scraped a living undertaking translations and specialized in occult matters.

Like Oscar, Mathers had become a Freemason in the late 1870s, and then in 1882 he had joined the Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia – an esoteric Christian sect linked to Freemasonry that sought answers to life's great questions in the teachings of the seventeenth-century German Rosicrucian Brotherhood. Through this order he had met Dr William Wynne Westcott and Dr William Robert
Woodman. Westcott was a coroner and also had an interest in a business called the Sanitary Wood Wool Company, based at 11 Hatton Garden, London, which made surgical dressings, ‘ladies napkins' and sponges, among other things. Woodman was a former surgeon and ardent horticulturalist.

When Mathers' mother died in 1885, he moved to London and was taken under the wing of Westcott and Woodman. The two doctors, meanwhile, had both joined Anna Kingsford's Hermetic Society. By 1886 Westcott and Woodman had introduced Mathers to Anna Kingsford, and he had begun lecturing for her Hermetic Society. His lecture topics included the Kabbalah and alchemy.

Within a year of meeting Kingsford, Mathers was moving within her wider circle of literary friends, which included Oscar and Constance. George Bernard Shaw noted in his diary for 1887 that he attended a soirée at which Oscar was present, at the novelist and historian Joseph Fitzgerald Molloy's. Molloy was an enthusiastic occultist who in 1887 wrote the novel
A Modern Magician.
⁵
A year earlier Shaw had bumped into Oscar and the chiromantist Edward Heron Allen at Molloy's, where Heron Allen read his palm. But in October 1887 Oscar was there, and ‘Mathers was the name of the man who read my character from my hand'.
⁶

By 1887 Westcott had gained possession of supposedly antique cipher manuscripts and had managed to translate them sufficiently to reveal the outline of five ancient mystical rituals. Westcott asked Mathers to do more work on these rituals, refining and expanding the outlines to a point that the rituals could actually be performed, not least because Westcott claimed that he considered them to be central to a new occult order that he had discovered. This discovery was in the form of the name and address of a certain Fräulein Sprengel, which he said he had found among the pages of the cipher.

Westcott wrote to Sprengel, who apparently wrote back and authorized him to found the English branch of a secret German Rosicrucian society called Die Goldene Dämmerung. Thus Westcott established the Isis-Urania Temple of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. The rituals revived by Mathers from the cipher were
to be at the heart of the Order. He, Mathers and Woodman would be the founders and Chiefs of the Temple. Prospective members of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn could apply via the offices of the Sanitary Wood Wool Company in Holborn.

The timing of the launch of the Golden Dawn was propitious. Anna Kingsford died in February 1888. The Golden Dawn came officially into being in March that year, and many members of Kingsford's group transferred to the new society.

It seems quite clear that Mathers, Westcott and Woodman were engaged in a venture based on a considerable element of fantasy and fraud. Nevertheless Mathers, a man who embraced fantasy, combined his brilliant imagination with his knowledge of alchemy and magic to create compelling rituals. At a time when an interest in other-worldly matters was gripping Britain's bourgeoisie, there seemed to be little appetite for scepticism when it came to such ventures as the Golden Dawn. On the contrary, there seemed a strong craving among the upper middle classes for adventure. Letters of inquiry began arriving at the Sanitary Wood Wool Company offices, alongside the company's standard orders for sanitary towels and surgical dressings.

Constance was one of the thirty-two members who joined the Order in its inaugural year, of whom nine were women. Mathers may have approached her directly. He was a compelling, romantic figure. Tall, dark, athletic and marked with scars from regular boxing and fencing bouts at his local gym, often sporting a scarlet tie and velvet coat, when he was not enthusing about ancient hieroglyphs he was dreaming of fighting brave fights in far-off lands.
⁷

If not recruited through a direct approach, Constance would have been one of those interested parties who applied for membership by writing to:

G D Secretary

c/o Sanitary Wood Wool Co, 11 Hatton Garden, E.C.
⁸

After making her initial application, Constance would have been sent a pledge form, explaining that the Order was established for ‘the
purpose of the study of Occult Science, and the further investigation of the Mysteries of Life and Death, and our Environment'.
⁹
The form demanded a belief in One God and warned that the society was not designed for those who only sought superficial knowledge. Candidates were then required to pledge that they were over twenty-one, that they would keep the Order secret and that they would study the Occult with zeal. They were required to provide their address and a Latin motto, which would become their name as far as their dealings with the Golden Dawn went. Constance chose ‘Qui Patitur Vincit' (‘Who Endures Wins').

All candidates were warned that they would have to ‘persevere' a ceremony of admission, and Constance faced her own initiation on 13 November 1888. She was admitted alongside one other candidate: Anna, Comtesse de Brémont.

Many of the Order's ceremonies were held in Mark Masons' Hall, a huge Masonic institution in St James's. If Constance and her companion were initiated here, then, according to the practice of the group, they would have avoided using the main entrance to the building and instead entered through a more discreet entrance at the side.
¹⁰

But initiations were not always in such grand and impressive surroundings. Sometimes the Order took its ceremonies into the drawing rooms, studios and offices of its various middle-class members. The poet W. B. Yeats, a friend of the Wildes who joined the Order in 1890, was initiated in Mina Bergson's studio in Fitzroy Street. Bergson was a young artist who had attended the Slade School of Art and would go on to marry Mathers. She was one of the very first initiates to the Order and had already been a member for some seven months before Constance joined the group.

The highly theatrical initiation ceremony was designed to fill the candidate with both wonder and fear, and any formerly domestic interior would have been significantly transformed for the event, as would any apparently ordinary man or woman who belonged to the secret Order.

A black tunic was the standard, though optional, uniform of the
Order. Other optional wear for members included the ancient Egyptian head-dress known as a nemyss, which appears on so many Egyptian sarcophagi, made of black-and-white striped linen, which was passed around the forehead and then allowed to fall down behind the ears. Members could also wear masks, and it was mandatory for every member to wear a sash or badge that denoted their rank within the Order.