Hackney’s Golden Dawn by Simon Strickland-Scott

Hackney’s Golden Dawn

Isaac Watts, Percy Shelley, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Christiana Rossetti have all been mentioned in blogs on this website and all have at least a tangential connection to people associated with Newington Green Meeting House and the local area.

All four of the above have something else in common. Their work all featured in the Oxford Book of English Mystical Verse of 1921.

Aside from the above and alongside giants of British poetry like Tennyson, Coleridge and Swinburne notable Christians who were selected for the anthology included GK Chesterton, Frederick Faber and John Henry Newman. So far, so conventional, but then there was William Butler Yeats, AE Waite and the Great Beast himself, the self-styled ‘most evil man in the world’, Aleister Crowley. Although Yates was of course a notable poet in his own right, he, Waite and Crowley had all been members of the nineteenth century occult society called the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.

The inclusion of these three alongside the ‘disgraced’ Oscar Wilde (whose wife, Constance was also a Golden Dawn member) becomes explicable when we learn that the two editors of the anthology; Daniel Nicholson and A H E Lee were members of something called the Independent and Rectified Rite. This was one of several off-shoots of the Golden Dawn following its implosion amidst scandal and in-fighting in 1903. The aforementioned Waite led the faction that created the Independent and Rectified Rite.

The original Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn had been founded in 1888 by a group of three Freemasons, the most significant of whom, for our purposes, were William Woodman and Samuel Mathers who both had local connections. (The third member of this triumvirate was William Westcott).

Samuel Mathers was born in 1854 at 11 De Beauvoir Place, Tottenham Road, Dalston. The house is no longer there; on the site now is a new build but the address has been retained.

William Woodman, a doctor, lived at Victorian Villas, Stoke Newington in the 1850’s and 1860’s from where he ran a medical practice. (I have been unable to determine the exact location of Victoria Villas). As well as his occult interests, Woodman was an enthusiastic and accomplished horticulturalist and it may well have been Stoke Newington’s reputation for the cultivation of trees and plants which attracted him to the area. Whilst living in Stoke Newington, Woodman joined the grandly named Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia, a Christian only, male only, group which engaged in research and ritual. Although formally independent of Freemasonry, membership was restricted to those who had achieved the master mason degree. It was in the SRiA that Woodman would become closely associated with the other two founding members of the Golden Dawn, though Woodman, who was somewhat older than the others, died shortly after the formation of the order.

The Golden Dawn’s formation was predicated on a (probably fake) document, written in cypher, purportedly discovered in a second-hand bookshop. Initiates followed an eclectic programme of esoteric research including Rosicrucianism, the Jewish Kabbalah and ancient Egyptian rites all wrapped up with ceremonial magic as each member progressed through a series of degrees. Despite the overtly pagan and occult bias, the order attracted several members of the Anglican clergy (including the above mentioned AHE Lee).

A couple of things which set the Golden Dawn apart from many of its rivals, in what was a fairly crowded field in an age obsessed with the occult, was its acceptance of women as equals to men, similarly Jews were also admitted as equals; a fact that was rare at the time in the occult sub-culture (as we’ve already seen with SRiA) and indeed in society generally.

Though Freemasonry in England didn’t officially discriminate against Jews (though many of its north European counterparts did) the so called ‘higher grades’, even today, include entry qualifications that require members to be Christians, or even Trinitarian Christians. Thus, Jews as well as Unitarians (to say nothing of Hindus and Muslims) remain largely excluded. Women of course have infamously always been excluded from ‘regular’ Freemasonry.

Given the Golden Dawn’s relative inclusivity it was perhaps fitting that the fourth person to be initiated after the three founders, was both Jewish and a woman. This was Mina Bergson, the sister of the French philosopher Henri Bergson. Bergson would soon marry Samuel Mathers and after the latter adopted the name McGregor to promote his claimed Scottish ancestry, she Celiticised her name to become Moina McGregor Mathers.

As Mina Bergson, she had earlier studied at the Slade School of Art where she had met and befriended Annie Horniman who later followed her into the Golden Dawn. Annie, an actress and theatre manager, was the grand-daughter of the businessman Frederick Horniman who had founded the Horniman Tea Company and had built up a vast collection of anthropological and zoological artefacts from around the world. This collection would become the basis for the Horniman Museum (opened in 1890 as the Surrey House Museum) which remains today in Forest Hill. The Mathers’ often lived beyond their means and relied on the support of friends for their subsistence. One such favour came from Annie Horniman who got Samuel a job as curator at her father’s museum. With the post came a house to live in, Stent Lodge, which lay within the grounds of the museum.

Both Waite and Yeats visited Mathers at Stent Lodge and it was here, in January 1891, that Waite and his wife Ada were initiated into the Golden Dawn.

Alas, the headstrong Mathers only lasted a few months in the job at the Horniman and soon afterwards the Mathers’ moved to Paris where Samuel would die in 1918.

Another Golden Dawn member with a Hackney connection is Welshman Arthur Machen. Born in Caerleon, Wales in 1863, Machen joined the Golden Dawn in 1899 and Waite’s Independent and Rectified Rite off-shoot in 1903. Waite’s group was less magical and more Christian mystical in orientation. In 1904 Machen’s second wife Dorothie also joined the order.

Machen became accidentally famous for triggering one of the hysterias of World War One. In 1914 Shortly after the beginning of the war, British forces narrowly avoided decimation at the hands of a much larger German army at the Battle of Mons. This was seen as nothing short of a miracle by many, and developing this notion, Machen wrote a short patriotic story called The Bowmen in which the ghosts of English bowmen from Agincourt marched to Mons to save the beleaguered British forces from defeat. The story was fiction but through retelling and twisting (as well as testimonies which were probably the hallucinations of hungry and exhausted soldiers), the ghosts became angels, and then, in a wave of superstitious nationalism surrounding the story; the Angels of Mons came to be believed as real by many. The notion swept through the country promoted by Christian ministers of various denominations through sermons and parish magazines and through the secular, but no less patriotic, press. All this happened much to Machen’s bewilderment and objection as he fought a losing battle trying to convince people that his original story on which so much had been built was entirely fictitious.

Machen had moved from Wales to London as a young adult. Though he never lived in Hackney (preferring South and West London) he often walked through North London and recorded his experiences.

Machen wrote three semi-autobiographical works; Far Off Things (1922) and Things Near and Far (1923), in which, among other things, he discusses the finding of the cypher manuscript on which the Golden Dawn was based. Finally, in this series he wrote The London Adventure (1924). The latter included reminiscences of a number of more or less random meanderings Machen had made through North London, precursors of the kind of psychogeographIcal dérive later much loved by the Situationists. Coincidentaly Britain’s foremost psychogeographer today, Iain Sinclair was, like Machen, also born in South Wales and lives in Hackney. Among his many books is Hackney: That Rose Red Empire.

Another explicitly local piece of writing was Machen’s excellent short story; An Islington Mystery, which weaves factual accounts of contemporary murders with a fictional crime.

Towards the end of his life, in the 1930’s Machen wrote a lesser-known short story called N in which a man visits Stoke Newington in search of a mysterious hidden garden he has heard about. After a number of strange encounters he fails to find the garden. One interpretation of this story is that it was an early version of the notion of higher dimensional realities; the N of the title representing the nth degree. Another more recent theory, by Chris McCabe, is that the ‘Canon’s Park’ of the story (not to be confused with the station on the Jubilee Line) was actually Abney Park with its otherworldliness of Egyptian façade and Victorian gravestones set in what was once an arboretum. Indeed the London Sound Survey blog could have been talking about Abney Park Cemetery burying the Arboretum much to Machen’s conservative distaste and thus inspiring the idea of the hidden and impossible to find garden…

In Machen’s world-view, what’s old is generally good, and what’s new is usually disagreeable and inferior. Not only do the new suburbs and vast late-Victorian cemeteries obliterate the precious countryside and its half-buried hamlets and taverns, but the London of the 1920s sounds worse than that of the 1880s.

Footnote on Stephen King

It should be noted that Machen’s N is not related to the Stephen King story of the same title, although coincidentally the influence behind the latter has been attributed to another of Machen’s works; The Great God Pan.

Talking of Stephen King, it is interesting to note that one of Machen’s Golden Dawn colleagues, Algernon Blackwood, is credited for being the first writer to incorporate Native American folklore relating to the Wendigo into literature, a theme also taken up in King’s work; Pet Sematary.

This blog is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. It was made by New Unity and Simon Strickland-Scott. Find out more: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.