"Happy Birthday, Bram Stoker!" / OCCULT READS PRESENTS: "Women of the Golden Dawn: Rebels and Priestesses"
ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY
November 8
Happy Birthday, Bram Stoker!
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In a house
on Marino Crescent in Clontarf, just outside Dublin, a sickly little boy lay in
bed, too weak to stand, listening to his mother’s stories. Charlotte Stoker had
survived the cholera epidemic that swept Sligo in 1832, and she told her son
about the dead and the dying, about the panicked townsfolk, and about the old
Irish lore of banshees and the restless dead. The boy wouldn’t walk until he
was seven. He was born on November 8, 1847, and the world would come to know
him as Bram Stoker.
Everyone
remembers the vampire. But six years after Dracula, Stoker wrote a
stranger, more openly magical novel, one soaked in the same Egyptian mysteries
that were consuming the Golden Dawn at that very moment…
Readers of
this column will remember our May 26th post on the
occult origins of Dracula, which looked at Stoker’s
documented friendships on the edges of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn,
and at the honest verdict that no surviving roll lists him as a member. So for
his birthday, we’d like to turn to the book that most deserves a second look: The Jewel of Seven Stars,
published by Heinemann in 1903. The sickly boy had long since become a
towering, athletic man, a Trinity College graduate, a civil servant, a theater
critic, and for decades the business manager of Henry Irving’s Lyceum Theatre
in London. He wrote novels in whatever hours the theater left him, and in this
one he turned from the Carpathians to the Nile.
The story
begins in a London house crammed with Egyptian antiquities, where the
Egyptologist Abel Trelawny is found unconscious beside his safe, apparently
attacked by something that leaves no trace. As the young narrator, Malcolm
Ross, keeps watch with Trelawny’s daughter Margaret, he learns of Queen Tera,
an ancient sorceress whose tomb Trelawny has plundered. Tera, born with seven
fingers on one hand, had planned her own resurrection across the millennia, and
the key to it is the Jewel of Seven Stars, a great ruby whose inner points of
light mirror the seven stars of the Plough. Trelawny resolves to revive her in
what he calls the Great Experiment, timed to the heavens and staged in an
isolated house on the Cornish coast. Along the way, Margaret grows uncannily
like the dead queen, raising the question of whether Tera’s spirit has found a
new home.
For an occult
reader, what’s striking is how seriously the novel takes its magic.
Stoker’s characters debate the Egyptian conception of the soul’s separate
parts, including the ka, the spiritual double that could act
independently of the body, and they treat Tera not as a monster but as a
learned adept who mastered forces modern science barely understands. Trelawny’s
experiment isn’t a séance or a spell from a grimoire. It’s an initiatory
working, built on astronomy, ritual objects, and precise preparation, and it
reads less like a Gothic thriller than like a ceremonial magician’s fantasy of
what the ancient mysteries might really have been.
That’s no
coincidence, because Stoker wrote it at the precise moment the Golden Dawn was
most in love with Egypt. Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers,
who had met his wife Moina among the Egyptian antiquities of the British
Museum, staged a public “Rites of Isis” at the Théâtre de la Bodinière in Paris
in 1899, with Moina presiding as high priestess and the explicit aim of
reviving the worship of the goddess. In London, the actress and adept Florence Farr went further still. While
researching her book Egyptian Magic in
the British Museum in the mid-1890s, Farr came to believe she had made contact
with an “Egyptian Adept,” whom scholars have linked to a mummy in the museum’s
collection, and she kept a drawing of what she regarded as her own ka,
her celestial double. Around the turn of the century, she and Olivia Shakespear wrote two Egyptian
ritual dramas, The Beloved of Hathor
and The Shrine of the Golden Hawk,
which were performed in London. A mummy in a museum, a spirit that reaches
across thousands of years, and an educated modern devotee preparing to receive
it: that was not only the plot of Stoker’s novel. It was, more or less,
Florence Farr’s spiritual life.
There’s no
documented evidence that Stoker attended Farr’s workings, saw the Mathers’
Paris rites, or drew on either directly. What we can say is that they all drank
from the same well. Victorian London was in the grip of Egyptomania: the
surgeon Thomas Pettigrew had made public mummy unwrappings a fashionable
spectacle as early as the 1830s, and the British Museum’s Egyptian galleries
drew such crowds that by 1881 they had to be opened every day. Stoker, Farr,
and the Mathers were all drawing from that same cultural current: the British
Museum’s Egyptian galleries, the era’s popular Egyptology, Theosophical
teachings about astral bodies, and a London theater world in which Stoker,
Farr, and a good many Golden Dawn initiates moved in overlapping circles. The
Jewel of Seven Stars isn’t evidence of Stoker’s membership. It’s evidence
that the ideas animating the Golden Dawn’s temples were in the very air he
breathed.
The novel also
comes with a mystery of its own. Its original ending was shockingly bleak, with
the Great Experiment going terribly wrong and leaving death in its wake. When
the book was reissued in 1912, the year Stoker died, an entire chapter had been
removed and replaced with a far gentler conclusion in which the experiment
simply fails, nobody is harmed, and the young couple marries. Popular accounts
often say Stoker’s publishers forced the change, but the circumstances remain
murky, and it’s not certain how much of the revision the ailing author made
himself. For decades, the softer version was the one most readers knew, until
modern editions, including Penguin Classics in 2008, restored the original
ending and printed the revised one alongside it.
The book’s
afterlife proved remarkably durable. Its premise, an ancient Egyptian queen
reaching across the centuries toward a modern woman who resembles her, helped
shape the mummy films of the twentieth century, and it was adapted directly by
Hammer Films in 1971 as Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb, and again in 1980
as The Awakening, starring Charlton Heston. But its truest legacy may be
the one it shares with the Golden Dawn itself: the conviction, deeply Victorian
and deeply magical, that the ancient world was not dead but sleeping, and that
the right knowledge, at the right hour, under the right stars, might wake it.
The boy who lay in bed listening to stories of the dead never stopped
listening.
Women of the Golden Dawn:
Rebels and Priestesses
By Mary K. Greer | Park
Street Press
Mary K.
Greer’s Women of the Golden Dawn: Rebels and Priestesses, published by
Park Street Press, an imprint of Inner Traditions, tells the intertwined
stories of four core members of the Order: Moina Bergson Mathers, Florence
Farr, Annie Horniman, and Maud Gonne. Greer, a longtime tarot scholar and
teacher, builds the book from letters, diaries, and Order documents, and she
treats her subjects as what they actually were: artists, activists,
theater-makers, and serious practitioners of ritual magic, rather than
footnotes to the famous men around them, including Yeats and Shaw. Moina is the
painter and high priestess of the Paris rites of Isis; Florence the actress,
composer, and adept of the British Museum’s Egyptian galleries; Annie the tea
heiress who bankrolled both the Order and modern Irish theater; and Maud the revolutionary
whom Yeats loved for decades.
What makes it
the right pairing for today’s post is that it fills in the living world behind The
Jewel of Seven Stars. Greer’s chapters on Farr’s Egyptian workings, the
Sphere Group, and her ritual dramas, and on the Mathers’ Isis revival in Paris,
show readers exactly how real the novel’s premises felt to educated Londoners
of Stoker’s day. And because two of these women, Farr and Horniman, were so
deeply embedded in the theater, the book also captures the overlapping world of
stage and temple in which Stoker spent his working life.
This is a group biography rather than a study of Stoker, who appears here only as part of the wider cultural landscape, and readers wanting a literary analysis of his Egyptian novel should look to the scholarly introductions in modern editions of the book itself. It’s also a substantial read, rich in detail rather than a quick primer. But for readers who finished today’s post wanting to meet the real priestesses who made Queen Tera’s world feel possible, Greer’s book remains the essential place to start.
(Every day, Modern Occultist News will present "This Day in Occult History" and your "Daily Occult Review" and will dive into the birthdays, rituals, breakthroughs, and crucial moments that shaped today’s many esoteric traditions. From the Hermetic revival to Witchcraft, from Crowley to cyberspace, we’ll bring the best stories and latest trends to today’s own modern occultists everywhere.)
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