P.15: Psychic Androginity

The "new" occultism emerged concurrently with a range of "new" movements and social identities that characterized the final years of the old century.

A "new" occultism underpinned by an emphasis on practical magic had recourse to a masculine persona that appealed to men and women alike. During a period in which masculinity was assuming a variety of different faces, the occult offered men the possibility of a direct spiritualized experience of the other world that avoided the feminized connotations of spiritualist mediumship. Like so-called muscular Christianity, the "new" occultism also suggested (wrongly, as we shall see) a spiritualized path that might avoid the taint of homosexuality with which male spiritualist mediumship and both Anglo and Roman Catholicism were often associated.' For women, the occult presented an opportunity to develop a masculine persona that in a quite different context was being pilloried by critics of the "manly" woman.

In both cases the appeal of the "new" occultism was located in part in its distinctly robust characterization of the spiritual endeavor. In particular, an occultism that incorporated magical practice was established as an undertaking having to do with the exercise and assertion of the will. Willpower was closely associated with what Victorians referred to as the "masculine temperament," and the will was considered by many physicians to act as the guarantor of manly health and efficacy. Women were thought to incline towards "feminine passivity" and where physicians encountered evidence to the contrary they were quick to pathologize and condemn.

Within occult circles, however, the will was to be tutored and honed as the essential attribute of the magician regardless of distinction of sex. The power of willed effects is in part what magic is about, and this was how it was presented to those who went through the training grounds of the Golden Dawn's Second Order and the Theosophical Society's Esoteric Section. William Wynn Westcott told those who stood poised at the threshold of the Second Order that "an Indomitable Will" was an essential condition of entry, while Evelyn Underhill explained that "In the will there resides, for the occultist, a force as powerful and amenable as electricity."'

In contrast to both mediumship and mysticism, which were conceived as having to do with the surrender of self, magic was predicated on the assertion of an aggrandizing self and the unabashed projection of magical authority. Furthermore, mysticism was associated with an emotionalism, a state of rapture, which did not accord with the intellect-driven will to know characterizing the magical endeavor. Evelyn Underhill, trained in Golden Dawn methods but ultimately favoring the mystical path, explained the critical difference between magic and mysticism in just these terms:

In mysticism the will is united with the emotions in an impassioned desire to transcend the sense-world, in order that the self may be joined by love to the one eternal and ultimate Object of love.... In magic, the will unites with the intellect in an impassioned desire for supersensible knowledge. This is the intellectual, aggressive, and scientific temperament trying to extend its field of consciousness, until it includes the supersensible world: obviously the antithesis of mysticism, though often adopting its title and style.

Magic and mysticism were in effect subtly gender coded, with magic-"intellectual, aggressive, and scientific"-assuming a masculine status. Underhill came to see magic as "self-seeking transcendentalism," but this was not a condemnation. She was merely acknowledging the different ends to which magic was directed. Although magicians were often concerned with mystical union, they were, as Underhill claimed, systematically trained in "the deliberate exaltation of the will, till it transcends its usual limitations and obtains for the self or group of selves something which it or they did not previously possess." Colonizing in intent and "scientific" in design, magical training set out to cultivate what Underhill called the "I, Me, Mine" of individuality with a view to establishing knowledge of and control over "the supersensible world." In this sense magic was indeed "an individualistic and acquisitive science." It was also the perfect foil to a bourgeois individualism that was widely perceived to be under attack. Whatever the political persuasion of magicians, magic established the supreme importance of the individual "I" in a rapidly changing world, shored up the masculinist persona of late-Victorian men who sought spiritual enlightenment, and suggested that women might acquire if not already possess the "masculine temperament." Intellect, self-assertion, knowledge, science, and power; the occultism had it all.

Florence Farr's biographer, in a reductionist assessment of why this gifted woman devoted so much of her time and energy to magic, considers magic to have been "a necessary anodyne for an often troubled, searching personality.

Farr herself, however, considered gratified contentment "fatal" to the success of magic or the Great Work. "The man who is content with anything," she writes, "who does not feel in his most successful moments, during the most sacred earthly joys, a keen sense of want and disappointment, can never hope to find the Stone of the Wise"-by which she meant the attainment of "true wisdom and perfect happiness."" A disappointment with and corresponding indifference to the fleeting triumphs and passing pleasures of this world was characteristic of Florence Farr, but all serious occultists were encouraged to view the things of this world as only one aspect of meaningful reality. Equally, Farr used the phrase "the search for reality" in the subtitle of her novel, The Solemnization of Magic, which deals in allegorical fashion with the kind of personal transformation implied by the Great Work. Thoroughgoing personal change was considered crucial to the development of the magical Adept, while the descriptive term seeker was one that applied across the board to senior occultists. Thus the yoking of troubled and searching, which appears in different form in other accounts of this generation of women occultists, is problematic.

The issue is not that the occult necessarily attracted "troubled" women, but that it permitted women the exercise of a "masculine temperament" and provided an intellectual and spiritual outreach that were difficult to find elsewhere. Occultism appealed to an aspiring, questing nature regardless of sex, and additionally presented a viable context in which women could explore that nature while enjoying the felicities of like-minded companionship. In purely practical terms, women found in occult organizations a unique sociospiritual environment offering personal validation and an intellectual rapport that was not easily duplicated. Occultism represented itself as a learned science at a time when higher education was an option only for the few, and women were attracted by the prospect of the kind of dedicated advanced study that practical magic required. As Dorothea Hunter, "Deo Date" of the Golden Dawn, later remarked, "the Order was my university. "

Furthermore, women were successful in the magical world and rose without hindrance through the hierarchical grades. Even the male founders of the Golden Dawn, with their close ties to Freemasonry, recognized that the time had come to admit women to the inner sanctum of occult studies.

William Wynn Westcott freely acknowledged this, and Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers readily espoused an equality of the sexes that went beyond the valorization of female spiritual authority and the occult credentials of the feminine. A great admirer of Anna Kingsford, he deplored the way in which women had been written out of the orthodox Christian tradition and had no problem in delegating authority to women within the Golden Dawn. 16 Occultism thus offered women a unique form of "higher learning" together with the opportunity for seniority and leadership in occult organizations.

This does not mean, of course, that gender antagonism within occult organizations was nonexistent. There were undoubtedly those who deeply resented female authority. The battle over the presidency within the Theosophical Society between the Bertram Keightley and Annie Besant factions probably contained an element of this resentment, but the struggle was complicated by a range of other issues. It was more clearly visible in the Golden Dawn after the withdrawal of MacGregor Mathers to Paris and his nomination of Florence Farr as his London representative. Farr was highly punctilious in the matter of ceremonial, and was particularly sensitive to any debasement of the staging or intonation of ritual. In 1897 Frederick Leigh Gardner, a stockbroker with close ties to the Theosophical Society as well as the Golden Dawn, was sternly rebuked by Farr for his abrupt treatment of Adepts and appalling lack of ceremonial nicety. Gardner indignantly appealed to Mathers, who in spite of being involved in financial negotiations with him, refused to undercut Farr's authority. In the unpleasantness that followed it was arranged that Gardner should temporarily transfer from the Isis-Urania Temple to the Golden Dawn's Horus Temple at Bradford. Hardly convenient for a London-based man, there is no indication that this arrangement bore fruit.

Kingsford, Farr, and Besant each embraced unconventional domestic arrangements after turning their backs on unsatisfactory marriages to pursue complete independence and fulfillment. Equally, although their attitudes towards women and the "woman question" might differ as well as shift over the years, these women sought in their different ways to integrate their mission to establish their own autonomy and equality into the spiritual message that each espoused and propagated.

Although she supported women's suffrage all her life, Anna Bonus Kingsford came to deplore what she saw as the hostility towards men and overt championing of spinsterhood among many of its female advocates. She increasingly assumed a spiritualist championing of equality in which she argued for the balance of feminine and masculine principles in men and women alike. Similarly, Kingsford favored the full development of a woman's femininity as part of the necessary spiritual development of any female incarnation on this earth. While always favoring "Equal rights and equal experiences," she opposed what she saw as an increasingly masculinist tendency among women activists and after two years gave up the proprietorship of her magazine. Anna Kingsford of independent means, went on to become one of the pioneer women physicians who trained in Paris because her own country refused her accreditation, and in her thirties was known as a renowned orator in the causes of antivivisection, vegetarianism, and dress reform." She achieved all of this in spite of indifferent health and in addition to her role as the "divine Anna" of the "new" occultism.

Annie Besant, only a year older than Anna Kingsford, similarly rejected both Anglicanism and marriage in the form of separation from her husband. Annie Wood, raised by an impecunious but resourceful mother, and benefiting from the attentions of a wealthy and beneficent spinster, Miss Ellen Marryat, was a spirited and accomplished young woman when she met Frank Besant." Ardently religious, she had flirted with Roman Catholicism and also an interest in the American seer and mystic Thomas Lake Harris, founder of the communitarian Brotherhood of the New Life.

Mentioned at the beginning of this particular March 2004 seminar series (as an inspirer to P.B.Randolph) Harris was born in England in 1823 but left for America with his parents as a young child. During the late 1840’s he became caught up in the spiritualist ferment that had seized the state of New York, and by the 1850s was claiming for himself celestial powers that surpassed even those of Emanuel Swedenborg. His spiritual philosophy was Swedenborgian, but Harris adapted the Swedish seer's ideas about spiritual counterparts to present a heavily veiled theory of the relationship between appropriate counterparts in earthly life and the efflorescence of divine power. His personal power within his community was such that he could separate married couples at will, and insist upon celibacy even within the married state. In fact, Harris taught that sexual intercourse was original sin and the cause of the Fall, and seems to have advocated a practice later known as "Carezza," that is, sexual intercourse without either movement or orgasm. Anna Kingsford and Edward Maitland had been made aware of Harris's unconventional ideas during a meeting with his British disciple, Laurence Oliphant, but greeted his "highly fantastic conception of the Fall" with "utter repulsion." They were not impressed by the notion that the Fall had come about "through the normal use of sex. Redemption, therefore, must come through its abnormal use-that is, as we read it, through its abuse."

Anna Kingsford was subsequently to go to print in the spiritualist paper, Light, admonishing caution when reading the work of both Swedenborg and Harris, according to Maitland, "if only on account of the incompatibility of their modes of living with reliable seership."

W T Stead's old mouthpiece The Pall Mall Gazette came out against Oliphant and Harris in the early 1890’s, and in a lead editorial tried to link Annie Besant to the two "impostors."

It does seem, that Annie Horniman was upset about teachings that referred to sexual relationships between Elementals and human beings. Vestigia in turn is suggesting that Annie Horniman, as an Adeptus Minor (the 5° = 6° Grade in the Second Order), must consult a higher authority on these matters before pronouncing judgment. In practice this would have been either S. L. MacGregor Mathers or William Wynn Westcott, and this must have presented Horniman with the difficult prospect of discussing sexual questions with a man. MacGregor Mathers subsequently entered into the correspondence with Horniman, reinforcing the admonition that Horniman must refer all "matters of sex" to Westcott.

In 1901 the Golden Dawn was thrust into the limelight by the rape trial of Theo Horos, the husband of a woman who had managed to convince MacGregor Mathers some eighteen months earlier that she was the shadowy Anna Sprengel named in the Order's originary materials. This woman, the self-styled Madame Horos, had impressed Mathers with her ability to relate details of a private conversation he had had with the late Madame Blavatsky, and she had managed to steal occult manuscripts from him before he recognized his error in believing her to be the fabled Soror Sapiens Dominabitur Astris. In fact Madame Horos had already served a prison term for theft in America, but she had also founded a spiritual movement known as the Koreshan Unity and was able to impress the unwary with her knowledge of occultism and occultists. She managed to take in W T Stead and others, and by the end of 1900 was trying to gain admittance to the Golden Dawn. Alerted from Paris by Mathers, the Order's leadership were able to deflect Madame Horos, but she and her husband set up a specious Magical Order of their own, presumably using the documentation stolen from Mathers.

This Order seems to have been either a front or an excuse for sexual irregularities and monetary gain. In September 1901, however, Mr. Horos (one Frank Jackson, many years his wife's junior) was arrested on the charge of raping a sixteen-year-old girl named Daisy Adams who had been involved with their Order. Daisy Adams had been persuaded of Theo Horos's divinity and apparently succumbed to his suggestions that she share his bed. When she later began to doubt his authenticity and resisted his blandishments, she was raped in an incident that was attested to by a second woman who had recently arrived at the Horos establishment.

The Golden Dawn's Neophyte ritual, the ritual apparently used by the Horos couple, was described during the trial that followed, and excerpts from the Neophyte oath were read aloud by the Solicitor-General appearing for the prosecution. He declared that this ritual, with its dramatic oath and references to punitive retribution, was blasphemous. To the horror and mortification of Golden Dawn Adepts, the closely guarded secrets of their Order were subjected to public scrutiny, and they themselves were made to look (at best) totally lacking in sense and good judgment. The Golden Dawn was linked to a sexual scandal, the end result of which was a much publicized fifteen years' penal servitude for Mr. Horos and seven years' detention for his wife. The Golden Dawn itself, however erroneously, was now associated in the public imagination with unsavory sexual machinations and the violation of vulnerable young women. MacGregor Mathers rushed to print an explanation of his relationship with the Horos couple, but as the case was sub judice from October to December 1901 his letter to Light did not appear until January 1902.

The Horos scandal did not cause the divisions that ultimately divided the Golden Dawn, but in the wake of the trial many members left the First Order, the Second Order lost some of its most important Adepts, and the Golden Dawn itself recognized the necessity for a change of name. In june 1902 it became the Hermetic Society of the M. R. [Morgenrothe]. It was the end of an era.

But devastating though the Horos scandal might have been, it at least did not directly involve any legitimate members of the actual Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. This was palpably not the case with the scandal that erupted in the Theosophical Society in 1906, one that continued to reverberate down the years. This episode centered on the figure of Charles Webster Leadbeater, a long-time member of the Theosophical Society and trusted lieutenant of Annie Besant. Leadbeater had made himself an authority on the kind of "astral" clairvoyant activities that had been the focus of the "Secret Groups" in the Golden Dawn, and Besant greatly admired his occult and visionary powers. He had become highly successful on the international Theosophical lecture circuit on account of both his psychic abilities and particular interest in the education and training of children, and various Theosophists had entrusted their sons to his care. In early 1906, however, Mrs. Helen Dennis, the mother of one such boy and corresponding secretary of the Esoteric Section of the Theosophical Society in the United States, sent Besant a letter outlining serious charges against Leadbeater. This letter apparently accused Leadbeater of "teaching young boys given into his care habits of self-abuse and demoralizing personal practices." Furthermore, "he does this with deliberate intent and under the guise of occult training or with the promise of the increase of physical manhood.

It was also clear from these exchanges that Leadbeater was in the habit of inviting these boys into his bed, and there was some suggestion of "reciprocal practice."

Mrs. Dennis, in a furious exchange with Besant, employed the rhetoric of high Theosophical ideals and sexual purity, but the old sex-campaigner in Besant bridled at the thought that an occultist of the calibre of Leadbeater should be pilloried over (albeit injudicious) advice on masturbation. Nevertheless, a committee presided over by Colonel Olcott and including senior Theosophists like A. E Sinnett and G. R. S. Mead was formed in London to consider the entire Leadbeater issue. In the end, however, the committee decided to accept Leadbeater's resignation from the Theosophical Society and let it go at that. This seemed to bring the matter to a close. But as president of the society Besant subsequently sought Leadbeater's reinstatement, and in a highly controversial decision he was readmitted to the Theosophical Society in 1908.

The Leadbeater case forced a discussion of "self-abuse" into the open within the Theosophical Society at a time when masturbation was widely regarded as sinful, morbidly dangerous, or both." Either way it was hardly a subject for polite conversation. The arguments for and against Leadbeater's advice to boys were complicated, however, by the fact that both Leadbeater and his supporters invoked the issue of occult authority to support his actions. Leadbeater had claimed that his psychic powers enabled him to see the troubled "thought forms" that arose from the sexual torments of puberty, and he stressed the karmic consequences of the kind of immorality (namely, the resort to prostitution or homosexuality) to which such torments could lead. In fact he argued that occasional masturbation helped to maintain sexual continence, thus implicitly removing it from the taint of a sexual act, and hinted that "one at least of the great Church organizations for young men deals with the matter in the same manner."

This appeal to superior occult wisdom and religious precedent enraged some Theosophists but convinced others. It raised once again the broader question of the relationship between sexuality and spirituality, and the proper place of celibacy within the occult tradition, as well as whether or not there was some form of "higher teaching" on these subjects that was known to only very few Theosophists. It seems likely that there was an awareness of sex magic among a few key individuals within the Theosophical Society, if not direct teaching on the subject.

Within fin-de-siecle occultism the traditional Hermetic motif of hermaphroditism was understood in gendered terms, and magical practice recognized the occult significance and desirability of masculine/ feminine complementarity.

The quest for psychic androgyny is one reading of the alchemist's project that advanced members of Anna Kingsford's Hermetic Society the Theosophical Society, and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn would have understood. Theosophists spoke of a spiritualized gendered androgyny in terms of the "Divine Hermaphrodite," and William Wynn Westcott spelled out what this meant for aspiring members of the Golden Dawn's Second Order:

Unless while with us you can conceive and act as both a sister and a brother at once, you will become a curse to yourself and a stumbling block unto us, unless you forget your sex,-by the holy Tetragrammaton I beseech you to be absent. We do not ask you to be unsexed in your private life, that is a stage necessary only in a far advanced grade, to which few may reach, but in our Order this qualification is an absolute necessity or you will get no encouragement to proceed farther than the threshold .

Although this aspiration to gender androgyny is a far cry from the kind of allegations that were made against Leadbeater, it did present the possibility of a somewhat different interpretation of a refined occult "intermediate" temperament that for some undoubtedly served to complicate the Leadbeater scenario. It was certainly an important aspect of Aleister Crowley's privileging of gendered androgyny, although in his case this was tied inextricably to a celebratory and flamboyant bisexuality.

For all the tensions surrounding the issue of sexuality, Westcott's admonition to Second Order Adepts "to be absent" in gendered terms "while with us" was taken seriously by advanced occultists. Whatever their attitudes in everyday life, occultists were aware that as Adepts they were engaged in an endeavor that regarded the relationship between gender and spirituality in very specific terms. One aspect of this was the psychic androgyny that Adepts recognized as an occult goal, but another was the kind of theological feminism developed and espoused by Anna Kingsford. She certainly thought of herself as a female prophet with an ancient spiritual pedigree, and believed absolutely in the power and spiritual prestige of women. But although she was informed by her spiritual guides and teachers that the world "shall be redeemed by a 'woman, she was also encouraged to understand woman symbolically. While entranced, for example, she was given an interpretation of the biblical book of Esther that cast its heroine as "that spirit of love and interpretation which shall redeem the world. Kingsford embraced the notion of spiritual androgyny, urging male occultists to develop the "woman" within themselves, but equally linked this explicitly to the duality of the divine principle, or God. Again, although she was familiar with the Cabalistic and Swedenborgian interpretations of androgynous divinity-indeed, she and Maitland believed that they were continuing Swedenborg's work-this recognition of divine duality also derived from her own visionary experiences. Kingsford's theology, while learned in its way, was very much her own. The kind of gendered insight that she received while in a state of illumination is evidenced, for example, by her rapturous experience of God: "And now not as Man only do I behold Thee! For now Thou art to me as Woman. Lo, Thou art both. One, and Two also."

Kingsford's embracing of the concept of duality is evident in The Perfect Way, which she coauthored with Edward Maitland, and Maitland himself was deeply sympathetic to a theology that came close to heretical doctrines of the female Messiah. After her death he published some of Kingsford's "illuminations" in his aptly named Clothed with the Sun, perhaps unaware that this apocalyptic referent had last been appropriated in Britain at the beginning of the century by the self-proclaimed female Messiah, Joanna Southcott. Equally it is not insignificant that MacGregor Mathers dedicated his Kabbala Denudata to Kingsford and Maitland, readily acknowledging the spiritual debt. In an introduction redolent of the Kingsford-Maidand message, Mathers explains that "of the persons and attributes of God ... some are male and some female," noting that "the translators of the Bible have carefully crowded out of existence and smothered up every reference to the fact that the Deity is both masculine and feminine." Furthermore, unlike many conventional Swedenborgians, who resisted the equation of spiritual androgyny with social equality, Mathers emphasized that according to the Cabala "woman is equal with man, and certainly not inferior to him, as it has been the persistent endeavour of so-called Christians to make her."

Although we do not know precisely how he defined equality between the sexes, Mathers sought both in theological and practical terms to press the claims of women as well as those of the feminine. William Wynn Westcott similarly set the tone of Golden Dawn teaching when he referred to the erasure, "with baneful results," of all female connotations of "ideas of the higher powers," and was not afraid to collaborate in the Great Work with the sexually progressive Florence Farr." What mattered in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was the quality of Adeptship regardless of sexual difference or even (within limits) a certain degree of sexual nonconformity. Ultimately it was the magic that counted.

Occultists were caught up in an investigation of the personal self that pushed not only at gender boundaries but at the very concept of a bounded and discrete individuality. Indeed, as we shall see in the next chapter, fin-de-siecle occultism was concerned with an interrogation of self that not only marked its modernity but also spoke to the spiritual aspirations of a newly conceptualized subject worthy of the approaching new age.

 

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April 18, 2004