Book Review: Essays on Women in Western Esotericism – II
Continuing with my review of Essays on Women in Western Esotericism from March (part 1).
As editor Amy Hale points out in her introduction, the women profiled in this collection (for the most part British, living between the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries) lived at a time when women’s involvement in the esoteric was becoming more visible, as was women’s involvement with other social movements. These women saw esotericism – in varying degrees, as a route for both personal and social transformation.
Part Three – Rethinking Power, Influence, and Authority comprise of five essays examining Doreen Valiente, Florence Farr, Madeline Montalban, Freida Harris, and George Yeats.
Vivianne Crowley’s Doreen Valiente: Unmotherly Mother of Modern Witchcraft is a lively and thorough account of the life and influence of Doreen Valiente (1922-1999) – a key figure in the revival of contemporary witchcraft. Crowley explores Valiente’s early introduction to magic; her initiation into Gerald Gardner’s New Forest coven in 1953, to her later engagement with the feminist witchcraft of Starhawk and Monica Sjoo. Crowley does not shy from discussing Valiente’s time spent with right-wing movements such as The National Front and The Northern League but describes how Valiente broke with them, disagreeing with their stance on freedom of speech, abortion, contraception, and Gay rights. Crowley also draws attention to Valiente’s departure from the notion of initiatory transmission espoused by Gerald Gardner and Robert Cochrane, and how she viewed witchcraft as essentially a “mystical spirituality”, albeit one that allowed for activism.
Mel Draper’s The Crucible of Modernity: Florence Farr and the Esoteric Woman examines Florence Farr’s feminism in the light of her esoteric interests and her career as an actress. Beginning with a thorough account of Farr’s early life, her theatrical accomplishments, and her meteoric rise through the grades of the Golden Dawn, Draper examines how Florence Farr’s commitment to feminism and women’s suffrage. Although less overtly politically activist in comparison to other female occultists (i.e. Maud Gonne or Annie Horniman) Farr nonetheless held the view that individual alchemical transformation was an essential prerequisite before attempting to change the social and political landscape. Draper then turns to an examination of Farr’s 1897 book Egyptian Magic, noting that for Farr, the Egyptian Mysteries “offered a welcome alternative to the straightjacket that biblical patriarchy created for modern women” and that the goddess Isis represented, for Farr, an archetypal basis for the emerging model of womanhood that she championed in her 1910 book, Modern Woman: Her Intentions.
Julia Phillips’ contribution, Madeline Montalban: Magus of the Morning Star explores the work of journalist and magician Madeline Montalban (1910-1982). Madeline Montalban’s career straddled both the popular, public face of esotericism and also its more private, in-group aspect. She was regularly featured in Prediction magazine for nearly thirty years. Whilst Prediction was frequently scorned, as I well recall, by ‘serious’ occult practitioners, it was – especially in the 1950s when Montalban began to write for it, the only UK publication that consistently covered esoteric subjects. In the 1940s, she seems to have been associated with various British occult luminaries such as Crowley, Michael Houghton, and Gerald Gardner, and Phillips points towards a “rancorous parody” of Montalban appearing in Kenneth Grant’s 1977 book, Nightside of Eden. The less public-facing aspect of Montalban’s career is her founding of the Order of the Morning Star and the correspondence course she devised focusing on Angelic Magic, which was advertised in Prediction. Montalban was highly critical of the occult orders of the period, their (in her eyes) unnecessary obfuscations, and reliance on hierarchy. She believed that over-complicating magic led to “occult constipation”. Instead, her correspondence course made magic simple and accessible. The Order of the Morning Star did not require initiations or hierarchies, and although Montalban draw on original source texts, she created her own system, which included the Angel Lumiel, or Lucifer as an avatar of light.
Deja Whitehouse’s ‘The Seeker’: Frieda Harris’s Quest for Spiritual Fulfillment looks beyond what Harris is most remembered for – her artistic production of Crowley’s Thoth Tarot – and shows that the period of study Harris undertook with Crowley is but one phase of a lifetime’s dedication to esoteric exploration. Whitehouse points out that when Freida Harris met Crowley, she was already an established artist, her paintings having been shown in several important London exhibitions. Contrasting Harris’ life with Annie Besant and Florence Farr, Whitehouse notes that Harris was, to a degree, insecure regarding her own esoteric knowledge and that her intense relationship with Crowley sometimes put a strain on her marriage. She did not openly acknowledge her connection with Crowley until after the death of her husband.
The final contribution to this section is Susan Johnson Graf’s George Yeats: Amanuensis to Inner Plane Spirits, which examines the life of Georgie Hyde-Lees (1892-1968), a.k.a. “Mrs. William Butler Yeats”. Graf explores how Georgie’s marriage to W.B. Yeats (in October 1917) was “a magical partnership with her husband that would lead them on a fascinating journey into the realms of the afterlife and the motions of history.” George Yeats studied art and was from an early age, an avid reader with wide-ranging esoteric interests, from the works of Thomas Taylor to Mathers’ The Kabbalah Unveiled. She was also keenly interested in astrology and Spiritualism and attended some meetings of the Society for Psychical Research. She was initiated into the Amoun Temple of the Stella Matutina in 1914, and within two years, had achieved the grade of 5=6, and was admitted to the Inner Order. It is clear, Graf says, that George Yeats was a magical adept in her own right, but that this has gone for the most part unrecognized due to narratives that seek to play down George Yeats’ role in her husband’s life. Graf also sheds much light on George Yeats’ automatic writing, and how she and William Butler Yeats sought – through sexual magic – to conceive “an avatar for the coming age”.
Part Four –Embodiment – comprises essays on Eileen Garrett, Colette Aboulker-Muscat, Dion Fortune, and Hildegard of Bingen.
Elizabeth Lowry’s “Telling the World’s Fortune”: Eileen Garrett, Psychic Medium and Pioneer Parapsychologist makes the case that Eileen Garrett – trance medium and early parapsychologist – collapsed the gendered binary between the (male) psychic researcher and the (usually female) object of research, the psychic medium. Garrett achieved fame in Spiritualist circles for her psychically-received details of the crash of the British airship R101. As Lowry relates though, Garrett was frequently critical of Spiritualism, particularly of the quality of messages received by mediums. She was equally critical of some of the scientists she encountered through the Psychic Research Societies, particularly, their lack of objectivity. Lowry shows that Garrett was frequently conflicted about her own experiences and the validity of psychic research and that she emphasized – both for herself and others, a questioning stance towards the existence of anomalous phenomena.
Marla Segol’s How to Make a Magician: Kabbalah, Psychotherapy, and the Mechanics of Syncretism in Colette Aboulker-Muscat’s Waking Dreamwork profiles the life and work of Colette Aboulker-Muscat (1909-2003). This is a fascinating account of a talented esotericist – she trained as a physician at the Sorbonne, gained a Ph.D. in philosophy, and worked as a therapist, exorcist, healer, and teacher. She combined psychological and kabbalistic techniques (her paternal grandmother wrote kabbalistic commentaries) – most famously, her ‘Waking Dream’ method which Graf describes as a “kabbalistic visualization therapy combining kabbalistic and psychoanalytic discourses”. The aim was a self-fashioning that divinized the self, in order to allow access to divine power. Graf pays close attention to the discursive formation of the self, the techniques of dreamwork, and the powers accorded with this process in Aboulker-Muscat’s work. She shows how Aboulker-Muscat skillfully blended psychoanalytic concepts with those of traditional Kabbalah, producing a synthesis that incorporated both divine aspirations and the individuals’ personal and social life. Graf also highlights that Aboulker-Muscat’s work challenges a popular assumption about ‘Western Esotericism’ – that it is syncretistic, and shaped by “colonial appropriation” and orientalism. This view is mistaken, Graf argues, firstly in that it ignores the interchange that occurs between traditions. Secondly, emphasizing syncretism suggests, all too often, that Western Esotericism is inauthentic – and again ignores the hybridization taking place between religions and movements. Thirdly, casting Western Esotericism as ‘colonial appropriation’ ignores the agency of colonial subjects and their awareness of their own cosmopolitan local traditions. There is a movement in current esoteric studies towards the transglobal analysis of esoteric traditions, and Graf’s critique in this regard is timely.
The second essay on Dion Fortune to be featured in Essays on Women in Western Esotericism is Anne Parker-Perkola’s Dion Fortune and the Temples of the Numinous. Drawing on the cultural theory of Luce Irigaray and theologian Rudolph Otto, Parker-Perkola examines the psychodynamic aspects of what she terms Fortune’s “divine becomings” – whereby an ordinary or conflicted person is transformed, via occult experience; able to integrate previously hidden aspects of themselves and gain insights into the mysteries. These retrievals are driven by the gendered relationships and energetic polarities between initiator and initiate, as found in Fortune’s novels such as Moon Magic, The Goat-Foot God, and The Sea Priestess. Parker-Perkola points to the importance of secrecy, the ritual environment, and the emotional intensities required and generated by these magical operations, and then goes on to address the question of who – in Fortune’s work – is eligible for these experiences? Again, she highlights the issue of Fortune’s use of racial and evolutionary theories, and points out that “A Black Magician may be a white man or woman in Fortune’s novels, but there is no White Magician that is a black or brown woman or man.” She makes a strong case for both an intersectional approach to esoteric studies, and a more robust engagement with gender and queer theory in regard to esoteric texts. Finding in Fortune’s esotericism a kind of ecstatic jouissance, this excellent essay calls for a re-evaluation of Fortune’s occult praxis.
The final chapter in this section, Minji Lee’s True Knowledge of God Obscured in Mind and Body: Hildegard of Bingen’s Medical and Religious Understanding of Adam’s Fall explores the life and works of German Benedictine Abbess, visionary and medical practitioner Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179). Whilst, as Lee comments, Hildegard is most famous for her visions, she also used her esoteric knowledge in her medical writings, bringing together medicine, natural science, and theology. Lee shows how, in Cause et Cure, Hildegard sees that divine knowledge of God is embedded in humanity from the moment of creation and that only original sin – the root of all disease – obscures this. Lee goes on to explore how Hildegard uses the apparent weakness of women in a way that empowers women; that women’s bodies possess more potential to revive the secret knowledge of God. Hildegard argues that if people lead lives of merit, God’s knowledge will be revealed to them in sleep. As Lee highlights, Hildegard links the elemental balance of the world, disrupted by the original transgression of Adam and Eve, with the creation of storms and the Deluge. In the microcosm of the human body, such flows manifest as bodily humors and in particular, menstruation.
In her conclusion, Amy Hale highlights some possible future directions for scholarship of this nature, and in particular, the need to broaden theoretical approaches – including the influence of class, literacy, and colonialism – and how esoteric discourses both uphold and challenge gender normativity. All in all, Essays on Women in Western Esotericism is a simply excellent contribution to the field of esoteric studies, and well worth the purchase for anyone with an interest in the contributions of women esotericists to contemporary Occultism and Paganism. Hopefully, it will pave the way for future explorations of the topics, personalities, and questions raised in this stunning collection.
