by Roger Dobson
Yeats’s search for enlightenment led him to join at twenty-three the Esoteric Section of the Theosophical Society, in December 1888. Its founder, the soi-disant adept Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, lived in London. The authoress of massive books of occult lore and Eastern mysticism, Isis Unveiled and The Secret Doctrine, was an enigma. Yeats describes her in The Trembling of the Veil as ‘a sort of old Irish peasant woman with an air of humour and audacious power’. Whether she was a seer or charlatan strange things occurred in her presence. On Yeats’s first visit a cuckoo clock cuckooed at him, yet the weights were off. ‘It often hoots at a stranger,’ said H.P.B. mysteriously.
The Society for Psychical Research, Yeats knew, had investigated her and pronounced her a fraud; but he was comforted by W.E. Henley, who said, ‘Of course she gets up fraudulent miracles, but a person of genius has to do something; Sarah Bernhardt sleeps in her coffin.’
And there were mysteries. Once when Yeats was at a meeting the room inexplicably filled with incense, yet someone entering could smell nothing. H.P.B. said ‘that some pupil of her Master’s was present; she seemed anxious to make light of the matter.’
Yeats never learned much more of the shadowy Masters, Khoot Hoomi and Morya, those adepts of ageless wisdom said to inhabit a secret Tibetan valley, though H.P.B.’s followers ‘seemed to feel their presence, and all spoke of them as if they were more important than any visible inhabitant of the house’.
Some encounters with the unknown were amusing. Yeats records that at one meeting ‘A big materialist sat on the astral double of a poor young Indian. It was sitting on the sofa and he was too material to be able to see it.’
Yeats maintained his scepticism and independence at a cost and after criticising the society in an article in 1890 he was asked to leave the Esoteric Section. As his objectives were not those of the theosophists—their abstraction irritated him—he was not unduly upset. And by this time he had become involved with a magical order which would have a profound effect on his life. He had met another mystical genius—Samuel Liddell Mathers, translator of The Kabbalah Unveiled, then in his mid-thirties and on the threshold of occult power. Mathers had spent years studying and copying manuscripts on magic and ritual in the British Museum, and with his gaunt face and athletic frame he was ‘a figure of romance’ to Yeats.
Yeats wrote ‘it was through him mainly that I began certain studies and experiences, that were to convince me that images well up before the mind’s eye from a deeper source than conscious or subconscious memory’.
Through Mathers, Yeats became a member of that most remarkable magical fraternity, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, or ‘The Hermetic Students’ as he calls the society in his memoirs.
Although Mathers became its chief, he did not found the Order. It was created by William Wynn Westcott, a London coroner, freemason, and by 1892 the head of the Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia. In 1887, after acquiring and decoding a cipher manuscript outlining Rosicrucian rituals, Westcott claimed he had received a charter from a German adept, Anna Sprengel, authorising him to establish a British branch of an Order allegedly descended from the seventeenth-century Rosicrucians.
Anna Sprengel is unlikely to have existed other than in Westcott’s fertile brain, and in 1890 she conveniently departed this world, leaving the architect of the Order a free hand. Westcott selected two fellow Rosicrucians, Dr W.R. Woodman and Mathers, to join him as co-rulers of the fraternity’s Isis-Urania Temple at Mark Mason’s Hall (then in Great Queen Street). A Second or Inner Order, the Ordo Rosae Rubeae et Aureae Crucis, was created to enable members to ‘attract and come into communication with spiritual and invisible beings’. Mathers, realising the members’ desire for magic rather than mere ceremony and study, formulated elaborate rituals fusing the Christian symbolism of Rosicrucianism with Egyptian and cabalistic magic, tying all the disparate elements of the Western tradition into an impressive synthesis.
Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers (1854-1918)
Mathers, who became the Order’s dominant figure, claimed that the Secret Chiefs—the mighty adepts, analogous to Madame Blavatsky’s Mahatmas—had appeared to him and passed on the wisdom on which the Inner Order was founded. Meeting them physically and on the astral plane, Mathers said these beings were ‘human and living on this earth: but possessing terrible superhuman powers’. Receiving and copying out the Second Order secrets was an ordeal that almost killed him, he claimed.
Yeats was initiated into the Outer Order shortly before his twenty-fifth birthday, in March 1890, at the Fitzroy Street studio of the artist Mina Bergson, sister of the philosopher Henri Bergson and soon to become Mrs Mathers. The poet swore an oath in which he promised to maintain the fraternity’s strict rule of secrecy; breaking the oath would unleash terrible doom from a hostile current of will.
Yeats, perhaps still conscious of this oath, reveals little in Autobiographies of the extraordinary world he entered on joining the Golden Dawn, although he does record the visions experienced during his discipleship. His friend, the actress Florence Farr, shared in them. Florence joined the Order in July 1890 and as Soror Sapienti Dono Data (Wisdom is given to the wise as a gift) made speedy progress through the four Sephirothic grades of the Outer Order. She entered the Inner Order in August 1891 and in a few years became Praemonstratrix of the London Temple. Florence was for a time under Mathers’s spell. Once, after Mathers told her he was going to imagine himself a ram, she saw sheep run to him in a field. Yeats tells how Mathers gave her a piece of cardboard marked with a coloured geometrical symbol, which she held against her forehead, and she found herself in vision walking upon a cliff, with seagulls shrieking overhead.
Trying the experiment with one of Mathers’s symbols, Yeats beheld a startling vision: ‘a desert and a black Titan raising himself up by his two hands from the middle of a heap of ancient ruins’. Years later he used the vision in one of his most celebrated poems, ‘The Second Coming’.
Taking the magical name Demon est Deus Inversus (the Devil is the converse of God), Yeats progressed through the grades of the Outer Order. He was kept occupied with pursuits such as psycho-spiritual training of the will, making talismans and magical implements, casting horoscopes, studying alchemy, numerology, the Tarot and Dr Dee’s Enochian language, divination, scrying, and meditating on symbols of every kind: all this was designed to raise his magical consciousness. Initiation into the Second Order followed in January 1893. Earlier he had introduced his great love, the beautiful Irish actress and patriot Maud Gonne, to the Order, but she severed her links shortly after her initiation in 1891. For her tastes the Golden Dawn smacked too much of freemasonry, a bulwark of the hated British Empire.
Yeats began experimenting with symbols at Sligo with his uncle, George Pollexfen, the wealthy astrologer, cabalist and freemason. Pollexfen had come to believe in the supernatural through Mary Battle, his servant who possessed second sight. The experiments of uncle and nephew led to Mary ‘crying out with nightmare’ from her bed, ‘and in the morning we would find that her dream echoed our vision’, wrote Yeats. The poet found he could transmit images telepathically to Pollexfen, and the two worked at this while walking along the seashore at Rosses Point. Although Yeats was dissatisfied that the images which flooded into his mind were disjointed and puzzling, at least he could make use of them in his poetry. Symbols such as the cross and rose and the sun and moon were integrated into his poems as reflections of the beauties and mysteries of existence and his dreams of a mystical Irish renaissance.
With the benefit of hindsight Yeats realised that many of the extravagant claims of the Golden Dawn were bogus, as were some of its adherents. To Yeats, Mathers ‘had much learning but little scholarship, much imagination and imperfect taste’, and he tells of the ‘credulity of our youth’ in accepting him as a godlike figure in communion with supernatural powers. Yet he found that using his master’s symbolism ‘the visible world would completely vanish, and that world summoned by the symbol takes its place’,
which suggests he made profound journeys into his subconscious. One day, when alone in a train travelling across Victoria railway bridge, he smelled incense. Unlike the incident at Madame Blavatsky’s there was no possibility of a secret censer. He was on his way to see Mathers, then the curator of the Horniman museum of antiquities at Forest Hill. ‘Might it not come from some spirit Mathers had called up?’ mused Yeats.
The incident is strikingly similar to the wonders experienced by Arthur Machen, a fellow G.D. initiate, who could ‘make nothing much of the great gusts of incense that were blown in those days [1899] into my nostrils, of the odours of rare gums that seemed to fume before invisible altars in Holborn, in Claremont Square, in grey streets of Clerkenwell, of the savours of the sanctuary that were perceived by me in all manner of grim London wastes and wanderings’ (Things Near & Far, Chapter Nine).
Yeats was convinced that he was experiencing supernatural manifestations. He wrote, ‘When supernatural events begin, a man first doubts his own testimony, but when they repeat themselves again and again, he doubts all human testimony.’ Unfortunately Mathers was able to offer him little guidance in such mysteries. As the 1890s progressed, his mind ‘became unhinged as Don Quixote’s was unhinged’, wrote Yeats. Living in Paris and styling himself MacGregor Mathers, the magus affected Highland costume and drank heavily. Yeats records, ‘Once when I met him in the street in his Highland clothes, with several knives in his stocking, he said, “When I am dressed like this I feel like a walking flame”.’
The increasingly paranoid behaviour of Mathers created a power struggle in the G.D. which eventually split the Order. The conflict brought to prominence a young, ambitious initiate—Frater Perdurabo, alias Aleister Crowley— ‘a certain unspeakable mad person’ said Yeats. In his Confessions Crowley claimed that Yeats, jealous of his talents, possessed ‘a black, bilious rage that shook him to the soul’. (Crowley regarded himself as the greater poet—second only to that earlier Warwickshire man—William Shakespeare.)
Because of Crowley’s already unsavoury reputation—at twenty-four—he was refused admission to the Second Order: Yeats said that a magical society was not intended to be a reformatory. At the same time the leading members of the London Temple objected to Mathers keeping the Secret Chiefs to himself. They wished to create their own links with these awesome beings but the despotic Mathers would not allow this. Throwing in his lot with Mathers, Crowley left for Paris and entered the Second Order in a ceremony at Mathers’s Ahathoor Temple in January 1900. After writing imperiously to Florence Farr and informing her that Westcott had forged the correspondence with Anna Sprengel, and so had never been in communication with the Secret Chiefs, Mathers dispatched Crowley to seize the Inner Order Temple, the Vault of the Adepts, then located in Blythe Road, Hammersmith. This Crowley did with the aid of a chucker-out from a London pub.
According to Crowley, the dissidents, including Yeats, attacked him psychically, causing his Rosy Cross to blanch and his mackintosh to burst into flames.
Invoking police help, the rebels reclaimed the Vault and set a creditor on Crowley’s trail. Yeats, whose leadership abilities kept the impractical dissidents together during the conflict, bore the brunt of Crowley’s wrath. Arthur Machen in Things Near & Far describes how Yeats—designated as ‘the Young Man in Spectacles’—was persecuted by ‘a fiend in human form, a man who was well known to be an expert in Black Magic, a man who hung up naked women in cupboards by hooks. . . . he had hired a gang in Lambeth, who were grievously to maim or preferably to slaughter the dark young man’.
Meanwhile Mathers struck back with magic. Taking some dried peas and shaking them in a sieve—one for each ‘traitor’—he summoned the powers of Beelzebub and Typhon-Set on his enemies. This mighty curse eventually bore fruit, for without a proper leader the G.D. began to disintegrate through a series of petty squabbles. Yeats became Imperator for a few months and tried to arbitrate between the separate factions before resigning in frustration. Although he continued as a member of the Stella Matutina—one of the G.D.’s two reconstituted branches—until the 1920s, he ceased to play a leading role. The glory had departed from the Order. Henceforth his precious magical studies assumed a more private character.
Nothing of the great struggle for mastery of the G.D. is recorded in Autobiographies. Yeats clearly wished to forget the whole affair. Yet his humanity ultimately won through. His great philosophical work, A Vision, published in 1925, is dedicated to Mina Mathers, in bitter-sweet memory of their old quests, and in ‘All Souls Night’ he conjures up the shade of Mathers with compassion: he had made his peace with the magus at last.
Ironically Yeats predicted the apocalypse that would shatter the Golden Dawn. His story ‘Rosa Alchemica’ (published in The Secret Rose, 1897) describes the fall of a magical society, the Order of the Alchemical Rose, whose temple is situated on the west coast of Ireland. At the climax, fearful fisher-folk break into the temple and all ends in chaos and confusion. Alas, visionary that he was, Yeats failed to foresee that the doom of the Golden Dawn would come not from without, but from within. . . .
SHERLOCK HOLMES: THE LAST MYSTERY
Antiquarian Book Monthly Review, February 1988
Somewhere in the vaults of Cox’s bank at Charing Cross lies a battered tin dispatch-box which is one of the great treasures of history. For the box, bearing the name John H. Watson, M.D., contains a wealth of unpublished narratives relating to the Victorian age’s finest intellect—the world’s first consulting detective, Mr Sherlock Holmes. Doubtless the records include some of the cases Holmes worked on before his Boswell came to immortalise him, such as those ‘pretty little problems’ intriguingly adumbrated in ‘The Musgrave Ritual’—‘the Tarleton murders, and the case of Vamberry, the wine merchant, and the adventure of the old Russian woman [Holmes in disguise?], and the singular affair of the aluminium crutch’.
One early episode is unlikely to be documented in the box, however; for aside from the fact that none of Holmes’s remarkable ratiocinative powers were utilised it proved to be a squalid and inglorious business when all the details emerged, one which could not have left Holmes feeling pleased or proud of himself. He may have confided in the faithful Watson, but both evidently exercised great caution for not a suspicion of the matter can be found in all the annals of Baker Street. Like the account of the giant rat of Sumatra it was a story for which the world was not ready. No Victorian or Edwardian writer could have dealt with the case in print, and certainly not within the decorous pages of The Strand Magazine. The scrupulous discretion of Holmes and Watson must be applauded, as the leading figure in the affair achieved a certain degree of prominence. But to borrow Holmes’s phrase from another ultra-sensitive memoir, ‘It can’t hurt now’; although the scandal is still recalled today, if only by literary scholars. Assembling all the facts leads to one inescapable conclusion: that Holmes spent his university years far from the Gothic halls of Oxford or Cambridge, and that he and Watson sought to conceal his real Alma Mater to dissociate himself from the incidents which occurred in the spring of 1876.
Sidney Paget’s illustration for ‘The Musgrave Ritual’.
Holmesian scholarship is a dignified tradition. Since early in the twentieth century a host of eminent Sherlockians such as Andrew Lang, Ronald Knox, Dorothy L. Sayers, Vincent Starrett, Desmond MacCarthy and many others have busied themselves with a minute scrutiny of the Baker Street canon. No other biographical texts have been subjected to more thorough analysis than those of John H. Watson; though it is now known that they were composed partly in collaboration with his friend and fellow medical man, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Articles galore have appeared concerning such controversial questions as the precise location of 221B Baker Street and the date of the immortal companions’ first meeting at Bart’s Hospital. Speculation has even centred around what the detective gave his amanuensis for a wedding present after the adventure of The Sign of Four.
An equally formidable mass of purely fictional theorising
is extant too. Holmes’s brushes with Jack the Ripper, Freud, Marx, Fu Manchu, Dracula and the young H.P. Lovecraft have been chronicled by modern authors. In all this material, the ‘Higher Criticism’ and the fiction, there is little to suggest the great man was not a real being of flesh and blood. After all, an interview with the elderly Holmes appeared in The Sunday Times. The national press, ever vigilant in its quest for truth, has published letters from Holmes, his brother Mycroft, Watson, Inspector Lestrade, Mrs Hudson and Professor Moriarty. Holmes’s secretary dutifully replies to all who write to 221B requesting aid. The Times has carried leaders about him and a mountain has been named in his honour in Oklahoma. The man and his exploits have developed into a seemingly imperishable mythology.
Inevitably some wild theories have been spun from the microscopic dissection of the sixty stories known in some quarters as the Sacred Writings. Nicholas Meyer in the heretical The Seven Per Cent Solution (1974) presented Moriarty, ‘the Napoleon of crime’, as a maligned innocent, the victim of the fantastic delusions of a cocaine-crazed Holmes. Even more blasphemously, one commentator has suggested that the Professor was a mythical invention of Holmes, who faked the Reichenbach death-struggle in order to take a rest cure for three years. Rex Stout’s ingenious but irreverent thesis, ‘Watson was a Woman’, need not concern us, particularly as other scholars have postulated that the good doctor may have married five times—and was possibly a bigamist.
But the most hotly contested problem concerns Holmes’s university. It is generally assumed that only Oxford and Cambridge are contenders for the honour, and distinguished advocates of the twin citadels of learning have engaged in many literary skirmishes for long years. Only now, after careful investigation, can the truth be revealed, and the most closely guarded secret of Holmes’s career laid bare. It is truly the last mystery surrounding him . . . for Holmes was neither an Oxford or a Cambridge man. His Alma Mater was almost unquestionably Manchester University, or, as it was known in his student days, Owens College.