by Franny Moyle
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.
For her initiation Constance put on a black tunic and red shoes, allowed herself to be blindfolded and had a cord wound round her waist three times. She was then led into a room, temporarily converted into a ‘temple’. Here members wearing the yet more theatrical dress of the offices of the Order were standing in deeply symbolic arrangement, along with banners and props replete with magical symbolism.
Constance and the Comtesse held hands throughout the bizarre performance that ensued. The Comtesse was blasé and noted that the ‘theatrical ceremony … would have been amusing had it not been taken so seriously’. Constance, however, more impressionable than her colleague, was so nervous that she shook throughout. Her hands were like blocks of ice and ‘her beautiful eyes were full of tears’.11
The two women, kneeling before the Hierophant, a senior officer who, sitting on a throne, was dressed in scarlet and carried a banner, placed their left hands in his, and recited a lengthy obligation to the Order. It included an undertaking to complete secrecy. Constance would have had to acknowledge that, should she betray the Order, she would be expelled ‘as a wilfully perjured wretch, void of all moral worth, and unfit for the society of all upright and true persons’ and submit herself ‘to a deadly and hostile current of will set in motion by the chiefs of the Order, by which I should fall slain or paralysed without visible weapon, as if blasted by the Lightning Flash!’ At the m
oment at which this last terrible oath was uttered the Hiereus, another officer dressed in black, would have pressed a sword into the nape of Constance’s neck.
After this strange ordeal, blindfolds were removed and more mundane paperwork sorted out. Constance paid a ios admission fee, and then a further 2s for her annual membership. She bought a ‘sash’ to wear at Order gatherings, at a cost of 2s, and then paid a further 7s for necessary texts associated with the society: a copy of the rituals she would have to learn and the pamphlet written by Westcott entitled The Historic Lecture for Neophytes, which provided some history for the Order and contained an account of its structure and teachings.
The Golden Dawn was structured around three key stages through which members had to pass. The first of these was the society’s Outer Order, which comprised an initiate or Neophyte grade, followed by four other grades of achievement. To move between grades members were required to study and pass examinations that tested their knowledge of ancient languages such as Hebrew, the key rituals of their grade and the fundamental theories on which the Order’s beliefs were based. After study and passing crucial examinations the Neophyte could move to the Zelator grade and then through the Theoricus and Practicus grades to the highest rank of Philosophus.
Once one had achieved the status of a Philosophus, one could be initiated into the Second Order, where there were three further Grades of Adeptship. Adepts were sufficiently authoritative to be able to tutor Outer Order members and establish temples. The third and highest Order of the Golden Dawn had three further grades: Magister Templi, Magus and Ipsissimus. These grades were, however, reserved for beings that existed on the astral plane, not on mundane earth.
The Comtesse’s account of her and Constance’s introduction to the Order was written some twenty years after the event and to some extent may have been influenced by hindsight. Nevertheless Anna Brémont’s recollections are intriguing. Studying with her, the Comtesse got to know Constance well:
I learned to read in that clear mirror her noble beautiful character and discern her secret unrest and sadness, her weakness and patience under the process of disillusionment through which she was passing. I divined that she was not serious in the pursuit of occult knowledge, that she had an ulterior object in becoming a member, and that her end was to use the curious lore for some purpose other than that intended by the Order, and that her frank, truthful spirit chafed under the deception she was practising.12
The implication is that Constance had become an initiate of the Golden Dawn as part of a research project for her husband. Brémont quite clearly accuses Constance of reporting ‘the ceremony and all its details to her husband’ and of ‘giving away the lore so laboriously and enthusiastically acquired by the members’. She also notes that the disaster that would be visited on Constance and Oscar in the next decade was attributed by many members of the Order ‘to the breaking of her pledged word’.
It seems hard to conceive that Constance would put in so many hours of study at a time when she was furiously busy with her politics, was writing stories, managing the Rational Dress Gazette and had a young family to care for, just for the sake of Oscar’s inquisitiveness. Over the course of the next twelve months Constance, studious as ever, acquired a working knowledge of Hebrew, became familiar with alchemical and kabbalistic symbols, grasped astrology and divination, learned the mysteries of the Tarot, studied the significance of the rituals performed by the Golden Dawn (as well as memorizing the rituals themselves) and passed a series of exams to prove it. By November 1889 she had passed through all the grades of the Outer Order of the Golden Dawn and had attained the status of Philosophus.
It seems more likely that Constance, growing disenchanted with the conventional church, explored Theosophy, and its extension into the Golden Dawn, as a genuine alternative to conventional religious practice. It does seem credible, however, that, despite the terrible oaths she had sworn, Constance revealed the Order’s secrets to her husband.
To get a sense of the kinds of events Constance may have recounted to Oscar, it’s worth turning to Yeats. He tells how Mathers once gave him a cardboard symbol which, when he pressed it to his forehead and closed his eyes, conjured extraordinary images in his mind, images that he could not control. He saw ‘a desert and black Titan raising himself by his two hands from the middle of a heap of ancient ruins’. Mathers explained to Yeats that he ‘had seen a being of the order of Salamanders because he had shown me their symbol, but it was not necessary even to show the symbol, it would have been sufficient that he imagined it’.13
Yeats went on to link this vivid dream-like world into which he had been plunged by Mathers’ magic to the imaginary world created by artists. He enjoyed the idea that the potency of some artists’ imaginations was so great that they themselves were like wizards.
‘I had found when a boy in Dublin on a table in the Royal Irish Academy a pamphlet on Japanese art,’ Yeats recalled, ‘and read there of an animal painter so remarkable that horses he had painted upon a temple wall had slipped down after dark and trampled their neighbour’s fields of rice. Somebody had come into the temple in the early morning, had been startled by a shower of water drops, had looked up and seen painted horses still wet from the dew-covered fields, but not “trembling into stillness”.’
It’s not hard to see how such a proposition – that inanimate things might be imbued with life by powerful, imaginative magicians – might appeal to both the author of ‘Was It a Dream?’ and her husband, who in the autumn of 1889 began to write his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. The idea that this story, of a painting that develops a life of its own, growing older as its evil owner preserves his youth, may have derived specifically from conversations with Constance about the Order seems highly likely.
But Constance’s romance with the Golden Dawn was short-lived. Having achieved the highest rank in the Outer Order just a year after joining, she decided not to seek entrance into the Second Order. The membership list of the Golden Dawn notes that by November 1889 her subscription was ‘in abeyance with the sympathy of the chiefs’. That she withdrew from the Order at the moment that Oscar began to write Dorian Gray remains an intriguing coincidence.
After leaving the Order, Constance did not drop her interest in Spiritualism. She commuted it. Within a couple of years she would join the Society for Psychical Research, having met one of the founders, Frederic Myers, at Babbacombe Cliff. She and Myers quickly became friendly, corresponding and seeing one another regularly. It seems likely it would have been he who encouraged Constance to join his society as an associate in 1892. By 1894 she was a full member and was promoting the society to her friends.14
That Constance believed in an afterlife is unquestionable. That her great friend Lady Mount-Temple was hoping to provide proof of an afterlife in an experiment with Myers is also indicated. Georgina, who since the death of her husband was expecting her own demise at any time, had given Myers some specific words or phrases that, if received after her death by a medium, would indicate her continuing spiritual existence. Later, in 1892, Constance would refer to his plan. ‘Mrs Duncan wrote to me the other day to pray that you might not be taken away from us, and I answered that I could not pray this … How could I pray for longer life and more crosses, when I look forward to radiancy and joy on that lovely face … Have you sent your words to Mr Myers that you promised to him; I hope you will, so that we may have some sign of you given to us.’15
Later on, Constance also became a subscriber to Borderland, a publication that had been launched by the pioneering journalist and former editor of the Pall Mall Gazette William Thomas Stead, which featured tales of ghosts and other-worldly phenomena. Constance adored this publication and would pass it on with relish to her friends.
If Oscar had been inspired by his wife’s occult studies in writing Dorian Gray, such moments of creative cohesion between husband and wife must have been relished by Constance, because in many respects her marriage was once again encountering proble
ms. Although in the summer of 1887 she had assured Otho that she and Oscar were ‘very happy together now’, within a year she must have sensed that she and Oscar were in fact growing apart again. The glue that the launch of The Woman’s World had provided, binding them socially and aligning their careers, was beginning to thin. Oscar was quickly bored with his role as an editor, and by the summer of 1889 he had given up the helm of the periodical.
On the surface they were fine. Yeats, who joined the Wildes on Christmas Day in 1888, described Oscar’s life in Tite Street as a ‘perfect harmony … with his beautiful wife and two young children’. And yet Yeats, with terrific perception, added that his home life ‘suggested some deliberate artistic composition’.16
Oscar and Constance most certainly presented themselves to their friends and their public as a loving, committed and essentially conventional family. Oscar, like many middle- and upper-class Victorians, clearly felt a moral obligation to his wife and family, although he may well have considered extramarital sex an indulgence that married men traditionally enjoyed and which wives and society more generally were expected to tolerate. Constance, meanwhile, despite her stance as a New Woman, saw loyalty to her husband, a trait embodied by Queen Victoria herself, as a primary virtue and duty of womanhood.
‘To-day the Bowles were speaking of married life,’ she wrote to her friend Juliet Latour Temple, the adopted daughter of Lady Mount-Temple,
and of the relations between husband and wife and of the absolute importance of affirming the good in one’s husband, of affirming in fact that which one has fallen in love with, and which must exist and does exist, if one has married for love, and I don’t believe that anyone can be happy unless they do marry for love. I hope you will fall in love with some delightful man, and marry him and be very happy in loving him, and leading him upward. This is the woman’s work ‘par excellence!’17