(portrait of Mathers in ritual headdress)

Samuel Liddell "MacGregor" Mathers (1854-1918) was the key figure in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, one of its three original founders, and the person responsible for keeping it true to its original purpose, to act as a training school for Western ceremonial magicians. Although he was arguably the greatest English magician since John Dee, he is not well know outside Golden Dawn circles.

Mathers began life as the son of a merchant clerk in the London borough of Hackney. His father died when he was a boy, and his mother moved to Bournemouth, a town on the English Channel. He continued to live there with his mother until her death in 1885.

His childhood and youth were scholastically undistinguished. School did not interest him. He had a natural talent for the French language, but was poor in mathematics. Military and occult subjects were his only pursuits (William Butler Yeats later wrote that Mathers' twin passions were magic and the theory of war). He joined the First Hampshire Infantry Volunteers to satisfy his first love. The second was addressed when Mathers became a Freemason of the Lodge of Hengist at Bournemouth in 1877. Over a period of eighteen months he progressed through the three Masonic degrees of Entered Apprentice, Fellow Craft and Master Mason.

It was through the mystical ceremonies and symbolism of Freemasonry that Mathers found his way into the world of practical magic. A fellow Mason at Bournemouth, Frederick Holland, was a metallurgist with a side interest in occultism and alchemy. One of the co-founders of the Golden Dawn, Wynn Westcott, later remarked of Mathers: "While at Bournemouth his studies were directed to mystical ideas by his acquaintance with Frederick Holland, a deep student of mystical philosophy." This comment has led to speculation that Holland became Mathers' mentor in magic and the Kabbalah. Whatever the depth of the association, it was probably Holland who confirmed to the young Mathers the value of practical occultism.

Throughout his life Mathers was of a mystical disposition. He was incapable of holding down a regular job, and spent all his time dreaming of the glories of his Celtic ancestry and of ancient sorceries. He was a natural leader, and had the power to convey his dreams so clearly and with such force that others shared his belief in their inevitable reality.

While involved with the Masonic Lodge of Hengist, Mathers met the two other men who would help him to establish the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. One was a retired physician and Hebrew scholar named Dr. William Robert Woodman. The other was also a medical man, the London coroner Dr. William Wynn Westcott. Both were Master Masons and leaders of the esoteric Masonic order, Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia (Rosicrucian Society in England). Westcott encouraged Mathers to become a member of the S.R.I.A. and for years functioned as Mathers teacher. Mathers quickly became one of the three leaders of the Society, which was to act as the ceremonial foundation for the future Golden Dawn.

The death of Mathers' mother from pneumonia in 1885 freed him from Bournemouth. He moved to London, where he lived on the edge of destitution, surviving on the gentle charity of his Mason friends. Westcott and Woodman jointly paid Mathers a modest salary to translate into English a portion of the Latin text of Knorr von Rosenroth's Kabbalah Denudata. Mathers spent his days doing esoteric research in the Reading Room of the British Museum, and entertained himself with amateur boxing and other martial pursuits. The poet Yeats later wrote about this period in Mathers' life: "One that boxed with him nightly has told me that for many weeks he could knock him down, though Mathers was the stronger man, and only knew long after that during these weeks Mathers starved."

Part of Mathers' research involved his family tree. He became convinced that he was a member of the clan MacGregor and descended from the line of Scottish kings. This pleasant dream, which began when Mathers was a boy, evolved into an obsession. He eventually took to wearing a kilt as his customary clothing and added "MacGregor" to his name. He began to use the title Comte de Glenstrae, and upon joining the Societas Rosicruciana adopted as his personal motto the clan MacGregor motto in Gaelic 'S Rioghail Mo Dhream (Royal Is My Race). He would later use this as one of his magical mottoes in the Golden Dawn.

Physically Mathers was a handsome man with liquid, introspective eyes and an athletic but thin body. His face Yeats described as "gaunt but resolute" -- he had a moustache, a strong nose but a slightly receding chin. He struck Yeats as a figure torn from some ancient romance. Another member of the future Golden Dawn, the writer A. E. Waite, also knew Mathers during these formative years, but Waite was less kind in his characterization, describing Mathers as a "strange person with rather fish-like eyes."

In 1887 Mathers' translation The Kabbalah Unveiled was published. This gave him some shadow of legitimacy as an authority on occult subjects. In this capacity he was introduced to a young French art student, Mina Bergson (1865-1928), who had come to London to study drawing and painting. Mina was the sister of the famed philosopher Henri Bergson. This meeting took place in the Egyptian Galleries of the British Museum, where Mina had set up her drawing board to copy some of the antiquities on display. Mathers must have struck Mina as a very strange duck in his kilt, with his mysterious allusions to dread occult secrets and his perpetually dreaming expression. They struck up a casual acquaintance. Not many days passed before Mathers asked her to marry him. Mina refused. Speaking to one of her friends, she referred to Mathers as "an interesting man whom she did not want to marry."

This initial skepticism quickly turned to admiration, and then to outright adoration. It has been speculated that Mathers worked some form of love magic upon the young Frenchwoman. They became close but probably platonic friends. Mina was the first recruited member of the newly-established Isis-Urania Temple of the Golden Dawn in London when the Temple opened in 1888. In 1890 Mathers married Mina. Westcott would later write to a friend "Mrs. Mathers was obsessed by Samuel Liddell Mathers." It seems inevitable that Mathers would use his newly-acquired skills in magic to win the affection of the woman he loved.

Regardless of how the marriage was brought about, it resulted in an enduring love-bond between these two remarkable individuals. There is some evidence that the marriage was never consummated, in the ordinary physical sense. Mina had a lifelong revulsion against sex, not only the act but even the concept, which struck her as degrading and animalistic. Mathers probably did not press her to surrender her body to him, since he already possessed her mind and heart, and was in any case only interested in spiritual matters. In 1895 Mina wrote to her wealthy friend Annie Horniman concerning the question of sexual congress between human beings and spirits: "I have always chosen as well as 'SRDM' [Mathers] to have nothing whatever to do with any sexual connection -- we have both kept perfectly clean I know, as regards the human, the elemental, and any other thing whatever."

I cannot help wondering whether this intense hatred of sex on Mina's part was connected in some way with an unpleasant childhood sexual event, perhaps in a family context, perhaps involving her brother. Mina and Henri were always distant and cool toward each other -- Henri disapproved of his sister's choice in a husband, but there may have been more to it than that. However, there is no explicit evidence of any childhood sexual trauma in Mina's life.

Mina was responsible for almost all the symbolic artwork used by the Golden Dawn in its temples and documents, and was the artist who painted the Golden Dawn Tarot. She even did a portrait of Mathers in oils, which is extant (see Ithell Colquhoun's Sword of Wisdom, the frontispiece). More than this, Mina was a gifted spirit medium and psychic who directly aided Mathers in his communications with the hierarchy of spirits known as the Secret Chiefs. It was the Secret Chiefs who transmitted, through Mathers and Mina, the immensely influential system of magic taught by the Golden Dawn to its members. This system of magic forms the basis for almost all the magic being presently worked in English-speaking nations. In a very real sense Mina was Mathers professional partner, just as much as the scryer Edward Kelley had been the partner of Dr. John Dee three centuries earlier.

Mathers must have existed in a perpetual waking dream during this period in his life. He found psychic communication with the Secret Chiefs intensely painful, but felt duty-bound to act as the living agent for the spirits. On rare occasions he met the representatives of the Secret Chiefs face to face. This was even more of a strain. Mathers wrote in a letter to the members of the Golden Dawn:

"Almost the whole of the Second Order Knowledge has been obtained by me from them in various ways; by clairvoyance, by Astral projection on their part and on mine -- by the table, by the ring and disc, at times by a direct Voice audible to my external ear, and that of Vestigia [Mina Mathers], at times copied from books brought before me, I know not how, and which disappeared from my vision when the transcription was finished; at times by appointment Astrally at a certain place, till then unknown to me; and appointments made in the same manner and kept in the same manner as in the case of those rare occasions when I have met them by appointment in the physical body.

For a time, the newly founded Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn flourished. The London temple attracted some of the most gifted and influential artists in England, among them Yeats and the celebrated stage actress Florence Farr, both of whom helped to give the rituals of the Golden Dawn a professional presentation. Mathers was able to move with his wife to Paris, where he opened a new temple. All this was made possible by the generosity of Mina's friend, Annie Horniman, who appears to have had a suppressed lesbian attraction to Mina. Horniman loathed Mathers, but gave him an allowance of 443 pounds per year so that Mina would not suffer destitution. Given Mina's horror of sex, it is unlikely that Horniman's desire was ever reciprocated.

Mathers and Mina continued to receive instructions from the Secret Chiefs while living in Paris. According to Mina, it was the Secret Chiefs who ordered Mathers to move from London to Paris. In the introduction to the 1926 edition of The Kabbalah Unveiled Mina wrote of her husband "he was told by his Occult teachers to transfer his occult centre to Paris." This is not so farfetched as it may at first appear. Centuries earlier, John Dee had been ordered by the Enochian spirits to leave England to live in Bohemia, something that Dee had not the slightest inclination to do. Dee obeyed the commands of the spirits, just as Mathers obeyed them.

The parallels that exist between the reception of the Golden Dawn teachings by Mathers and the reception of the Enochian teachings by Dee are fascinating. Both were received psychically from hierarchies of spiritual beings. Both teachings were received in the main after the spirits involved had ordered their human contacts to leave England and take up residence on the Continent. Both sets of teachings were received by a partnership between two persons, one possessed of uncommon psychic receptiveness, the other having an extensive technical knowledge of ritual magic. Both receptions ceased when this partnership was broken. Both receptions often involved the tangible, tactile perception of spirits by one or both partners. Both used traditional scrying methods -- Dee the crystal, Mathers the pendulum and table. The reference by Mathers to a table probably refers to an early variety of Ouija, although it may refer to table rappings, which were a popular form of spirit communication in the Victorian Era.

Back in England, Horniman became disenchanted with Mathers dictatorial proclamations concerning the running of the Golden Dawn. She reasonably came to the conclusion that since she was essentially keeping the Order afloat with her wealthy family's money, she had a right to share equally in its administration. Mathers did not see the matter in the same terms -- he was running the Golden Dawn as the Secret Chiefs told him to run it, and in his mind there was no room for disunity.

The Golden Dawn slowly began to fall apart, not as a result of outer forces, but due to bickering between its leaders. Each of them, it seemed, possessed a huge ego and was convinced that he or she was the only member who knew the right direction for the Order. A split developed between the London and Paris branches in 1900. Mathers continued to run the Paris temple. Yeats became head of the London temple. Three years later Annie Horniman left the Order in disgust, taking her family money with her. Mathers and his wife endured considerable hardship in the decade prior to the First World War. Mathers survived on whatever grants of funds and acts of charity he could find.

At the time of the rift between Mathers and the London members, Aleister Crowley was one of Mathers main pupils in magic. Crowley held both Mathers and his wife in reverential awe. It is a sign of Mathers influence over the younger Crowley that Crowley began to boast of his royal Scottish ancestry. Later he bought a property in the Highlands of Scotland and took to calling himself the Laird of Boleskine. His claim to royal Scottish blood was even less plausible than that of Mathers. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and Crowley tried to imitate Mathers in every respect. Crowley regarded Mathers as a saint and his wife as a goddess incarnate. Later, after Crowley learned that the supposed German authority upon which the Golden Dawn had been founded was a fraud perpetrated by Mathers and Westcott, he turned against his teacher and came to look upon Mathers as a black magician and Mina as a harlot.

Both extreme views were unwarranted. Mathers was not a saint or a Satanist, merely a man obsessed with a mystical vision. He hoped that his Rosicrucian society, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, would sow the seeds for a world reformation and usher in a new age of enlightenment. This has been a common dream of mystics throughout the ages, as yet unfulfilled.

In addition to the actual Golden Dawn documents received psychically from the Secret Chiefs, Mathers' main contribution to the current of Western magic was his translations. The most important of these is The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage, a grimoire that teaches the manner for establishing communication with one's Holy Guardian Angel, a tutelary spirit that will instruct the magician in all secret arts and teach him sacred wisdom. Mathers translated it from a French manuscript. The book also contains sets of magic squares fabled by modern magicians for their miraculous virtues. Almost as significant is Mathers edition of The Key of Solomon the King which Mathers compiled from a number of manuscript sources. Both these books have become important standard works in the literature of Western magic. Mathers' Kabbalah Unveiled is significant mainly for its introduction, in which he teaches various techniques of the practical Kabbalah, a subject virtually unknown in Mathers' day. He also translated a French manuscript titled The Grimoire of Armadel but this is a relatively minor work. Equally minor is his essay The Tarot, which reveals almost nothing of his deep esoteric knowledge on this subject.

Mathers died in the great flu epidemic that swept through Europe at the end of the First World War. His wife Mina continued to head one branch of the Golden Dawn until her death ten years later. Cut off from the dynamic influence of her husband, she was unable to supply any additional communications of significance from the Secret Chiefs. However, a few of her students were notable figures in occultism, perhaps the most prominent being Dion Fortune.