DR FELKIN AND THE HOUSE OF THE SUN
DEAN BALLINGER tells the fascinating story of what happened when one faction of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn – the occult society whose members included Yeats and Aleister Crowley – packed up and moved to a small town in New Zealand.
DEAN BALLINGER tells the fascinating story of what happened when one faction of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn – the occult society whose members included Yeats and Aleister Crowley – packed up and moved to a small town in New Zealand.
The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, established in London in 1888, is arguably the best known group in the modern history of Western magic, a stature aided by famous members of the order such as the poet WB Yeats (see FT165:48, 329:46-48) and the occultist Aleister Crowley (see FT231 and passim). While the heyday of the Golden Dawn was relatively brief, with personality conflicts and theoretical schisms leading to its rapid decline in the early 1900s, it had a substantial afterlife in a seemingly most unlikely setting: the small provincial New Zealand town of Havelock North. According to the American religious scholar Robert S Ellwood, who devoted a chapter to the subject in his excellent study Islands of the Dawn: The Story of Alternative Spirituality in New Zealand (1990), the Havelock North version of the Golden Dawn constituted the order’s “second and greater incarnation”, as it “possessed a finer temple, more members, and greater ritual finesse than the British model”, as well as lasting much longer than the “faction-ridden” original. The story of the Golden Dawn down under combines colonial esotericism with one of the key members of the original Order: British doctor Robert Felkin.
THE HAVELOCK WORK
Havelock North was founded by the New Zealand government in the 1860s, on the fertile Heretaunga Plains in the Hawke’s Bay region on the south east coast of New Zealand’s North Island. The plains were rapidly developed into one of the agricultural breadbaskets of the dominion, leading to the establishment of Havelock North as a township that supported a prosperous local population of gentlemen-farmers. At the turn of the 20th century, the 800-plus population also included numerous prominent citizens interested in contemporary progressive thought. In 1906, New Zealander
the old man made a sign like a flame in the air before appearing to vanish
Reginald Gardiner and his wife Ruth, who had spent several years living in the latter’s native Canada, settled in Havelock North to join Reginald’s brother Allen, Reverend of St Luke’s, the local Anglican church.
Over the next couple of years, while Reginald established himself as a regional businessman, the Gardiners’ homestead,
Dr Robert Felkin, who had enjoyed a life of adventure and magical intrigue before coming to New Zealand.
Stadacona, became the focal point for a salon of alternative-minded locals from Anglican and Quaker backgrounds. Calling themselves the Society of the Southern Cross, the group sought to realise social and spiritual progress in a manner inspired by contemporary cultural developments such as the Arts and Crafts movement in the UK. Alongside scions of prominent farming families, such as the Chambers and the McLeans, most members were involved in education and the arts, such as retired English teacher Mary Mitchell McLean (an in-law to the Chambers clan); Bessie Spencer, principal of the girls’ high school in the regional city of Napier; and siblings Harold and Lille Large, actor and music teacher respectively. Bessie Spencer and the Large siblings were also active Theosophists, an influence which led the Society to develop a fascination with esoteric forms of Christian belief and practice. This was exemplified by the spiritual trajectory of Harold Large. Introduced to Judaism and Buddhism via Theosophy, he came to the conclusion that “Eastern methods of [spiritual] training” were unsuitable for Westerners. These thoughts led him to leave the Theosophical Society and join the Anglican Church in the mid-1900s, shortly before becoming involved with the Stadacona milieu.
In keeping with contemporary international experiments with what are now labelled “intentional communities”, the Society decided to put their ideas into practice through a cultural movement that they labelled “The Havelock Work”. After publicising the idea through a 1908 meeting in the nearby city of Hastings, realisation of the Work took three main forms: support for local arts and crafts production; pageants and other public events, including New
Zealand’s first ever Shakespeare festival in 1912; and the publication of a journal called The Forerunner, which ran from 1907 to 1914. Alongside articles on such progressive topics as social welfare, environmentalism, and home design, The Forerunner also carried pieces on more outré subjects, such as mystical Christianity and the Society for Psychical Research. These were indicative of the esoteric agendas underlying the Work. As described by Reginald Gardiner, the Work was “a cultural society built around a silent power station”, this power station being a metaphor for the core group – the “Inner Circle” – concerned with exploring the more mystical aspects of spiritual experience, especially those relating to the power of ritual. Such explorations were initially expressed through the appropriation of the Quaker tradition of the silent meeting, in which collective sessions of silent prayer and meditation (usually held in St Luke’s) could generate a powerful atmosphere of spiritual contemplation.
In 1910, Father Charles Fitzgerald, a clergyman from a monastery in Mirfield, Yorkshire, operated by the Anglican Community of the Resurrection, journeyed to New Zealand as part of an Anglican ‘Mission of Help’ which involved work at various parishes around the country. Fitzgerald’s Anglicanism was one that accommodated less conventional forms of spirituality, such as Theosophy and membership of the Golden Dawn offshoot the Order of the Stella Matutina. It was through such circles that Mary McLean had made his acquaintance during an earlier trip to the UK. In New Zealand, McLean arranged for Fitzgerald to visit Havelock North and observe the Work in action. Impressed by the Inner Circle’s desire for more intensive mystical development, he agreed to aid this process by operating as a de facto leader, giving magical instruction via correspondence upon his return to England. As this arrangement quickly proved inadequate, Fitzgerald recommended enlisting his friend and mentor Dr Robert Felkin, the London-based head of the Stella Matutina, for the role.
ENTER DR FELKIN
On first impression, Dr Robert Felkin – a professional man from a respectable background – might appear to be one of the “muddled middle-class mediocrities” Crowley sniffed at in his reminiscences of the Golden Dawn. 2 However, Felkin’s life story of international adventure and magical intrigue bears comparison with Crowley’s own, albeit of a much more positive nature. Felkin was born in 1853 into a family of Nottingham lace manufacturers. When the business collapsed, his father relocated to Wolverhampton and worked for a varnish company run by the Mander family. Felkin was raised in the Congregationalist faith of his mother, but, as he matured, rejected their “fire and brimstone” worldview for the more liberal tenets of Anglicanism. From 1870 Felkin worked for five years in his cousin’s stocking factory in Germany, prior to embarking on a medical degree. A more esoteric spiritual path was revealed to him through an incident that occurred during this period. During an afternoon beer garden session, Felkin met a “mysterious old man” who informed him that he was being guided along a path of spiritual development by “those who see”. The old man made a sign like a flame in the air with his finger before departing so rapidly he appeared to vanish. Felkin later interpreted this as an encounter with an emissary of the Rosicrucians, and a sign that magic would play a major role in his destiny.
The famed Scottish Congregationalist doctor David Livingstone inspired Felkin to travel to Africa as a medical missionary during 1878-1880. There he won the respect of the Ugandan king Mutesa by curing his gonorrhoea with silver nitrate, as well as contracting the malaria from which he would suffer for the rest of his life. Felkin’s contact with the “pagan” spiritualities of Africa, such as an encounter with a witch doctor who allegedly changed into a leopard, caused his inchoate spirituality to shift towards a more occult view of the world. Upon returning to the UK, Felkin married Mary Mander (daughter of the varnish magnate) in 1882, and began his professional career as an MD in Edinburgh in 1884. The couple had three children over the next few years: a daughter, Nora Ethelwyn, and two sons, Samuel Denys and Robert Laurence (Felkin tending to refer to his children by their middle, rather than first, names). Mary shared her hus
band’s interests in mysticism, allegedly to his detriment. It was later insinuated (by his second wife, Harriot) that Felkin’s alcoholic tendencies could be largely attributed to Mary’s putting otherworldly interests above housekeeping duties. Returning home after a hard day’s rounds in miserable Scottish weather and finding no tea on the table, Felkin sought sustenance in liquor. Robert and Mary Felkin both joined the Theosophical Society in 1886, before enlisting in the Edinburgh branch of the Golden Dawn, the Amoun-Ra temple, in 1894.3A move to London in 1896 brought them into the fold of the central Golden Dawn temple, at that time dominated by the autocratic leadership of MacGregor Mathers. Within the Order, Felkin adopted the magical moniker “Finem Respice” or “have regard to the end”, a motto that would prove prescient in relation to the culmination of his magical career in the later phases of his life.
The years 1902-1903 were significant for Felkin. The beginning of the new century had seen the Golden Dawn in disarray, due to factors such as the ousting of Mathers in late 1900 and the negative publicity resulting from the Horos trial in 1901 (in which a couple who had set themselves up as gurus, using Golden Dawn-style practices, were convicted on charges of rape and fraud). The result was the splintering of the Order into three main factions: the Alpha et Omega group under Mathers; the Independent and Rectified Rite of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn under AE Waite; and the Order of the Stella Matutina (Morning Star) under Felkin. The basis of Felkin’s leadership of the Stella Matutina was complex, involving an alleged mandate from Rosicrucian chiefs in Europe along with psychic connections to the ‘Sun Masters’ and other magical adepts. These included an Arab called Ara Ben Shemesh, whom he would meet on the astral plane, and a more corporeal Hindu teacher named Sri Parananda. Felkin’s description of meeting Parananda provides a good example of the magical forces he believed guided his life. Relaxing in a German spa resort, he saw the figure of a bearded man of Eastern appearance, clad in cap and robes, materialise within the steam. The figure instructed Felkin to meet him in a month’s time in the lounge of London’s Carlton Hotel. Honouring the assignation, Felkin was initially dismayed at the absence of his mentor until he identified Parananda in the flesh, sans the beard and cap he had been sporting at the time of the vision. However, Felkin’s rise through the Golden Dawn ranks was tragically checked by Mary’s sudden demise from appendicitis in 1903. He went to recuperate from the shock on a retreat at the Anglican monastery in Mirfield, Yorkshire, where Father Charles Fitzgerald was based. Bonding over their mutual interests in occultism and esoteric Christianity, a friendship was forged that led Fitzgerald to recommend Felkin as spiritual advisor to the Inner Circle of the Havelock Work.
When he received the Inner Circle’s proposal in 1912, Felkin was well established in London, both as a doctor and as head of the Stella Matutina, and had remarried. Harriot Felkin, aka ‘Quæstor Lucis’ (seeker of light), shared her husband’s magical interests and bolstered his authority through her own astral contacts with masters, adepts, and secret chiefs. The Felkin children also reached adulthood around this time, the effects of growing up in a ‘magical family’ manifesting in different ways. While Ethelwyn assisted her parents and became a key figure in the Stella Matutina, her rebellious brother Laurence at one point became an acolyte of Crowley in London and participated in Thelemic ceremonies, much to the consternation of his father who regarded Crowley as a black magician. 4 After consideration, the Felkins agreed to the proposal as it presented the opportunity for themselves to be magical “pioneers on virgin soil”. In December 1912, Robert, Harriot, and Ethelwyn arrived in New Zealand for a three-month visit, their voyage paid for by the wealthy members of the Circle. Felkin was impressed by the New Zealanders’ “natural psychic potential” and hunger for esoteric knowledge, and undertook three courses of action to facilitate the ongoing development of Havelock North as a magical centre after his return to the UK. The first was to give 12 members of the Work a crash course in Stella Matutina teachings, so that they would be able to pursue magic in a self-directed manner. The second was to establish official imprimatur for the Stella Matutina in Havelock North by founding the Smaragdum Thallasses (Emerald of the Sea) Lodge and Temple. The third was to set up a New Zealand branch of another occult organisation he was involved in, the Order of the Table Round. This was an obscure group that claimed to preserve a spiritual lineage of Christian chivalry from King Arthur through to the present. Felkin had been anointed the Grandmaster of the Order around 1910 by fellow mystic Neville Meakin, who asserted that his family line constituted the secret guardians of the Order. Childless and consumptive, Meakin ensured that Felkin would perpetuate the Order before his premature demise in 1912.
WHARE RA
The Chambers family bequeathed an undeveloped plot on the outskirts of Havelock North as a base for the Lodge, and Wellington-based architect James Chapman-Taylor was commissioned to construct a headquarters building on the site. A significant figure in New Zealand art history due to his distinctive ‘Arts and Crafts’ style houses and photographic output, Chapman-Taylor also had a profound interest in occult subjects such as astrology and Theosophy. Through his Theosophical contacts he had attended the 1908 Hastings meeting, becoming a member of the Inner Circle of the Work, and also made the acquaintance of the Felkins during a trip to the UK the following year.
The foundation stone for the HQ was consecrated by Felkin before his family returned to the UK in early 1913. What came to be known as Whare Ra, or the ‘House of the Sun’ in Maori, was built on the lip of a hill and constructed in the then-new material of reinforced concrete. An upstairs area, consisting of living quarters and offices, was connected via a stairwell to a basement temple built into the hillside. Initiates would enter the stairwell through a wardrobe and be ritually guided down into the main space of the temple, a large chamber replete with Chapman-Taylor designed furniture and props, such as an altar and two large wooden ‘Pillars of Hermes’. Connected to the chamber by two sets of heavy double doors was a vault for meditation and initiation, designed with seven walls in keeping with the alleged
initiates would be ritually guided down into the main space of the temple
layout of the tomb of Christian Rosenkreutz, mythical founder of the Rosicrucians. Each wall represented one of the seven planets of Hermetic lore – Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Moon, Venus, Mercury, Sun – and was decorated with 40 squares upon which astrological, kabbalistic and tarot symbols were painted.
Whare Ra was to become the permanent residence of the Felkins on their emigration to Havelock North in 1916. Back in the UK after their initial visit down under, Robert and Harriot continued their quest to make contact with the secret order of Rosicrucian adepts whom they believed operated in Germany and were the original source of the antique magical ciphers that inspired the creation of the Golden Dawn, after being found and decoded by London coroner William Westcott in 1887. The Felkins had made prior trips to the Continent for similar purposes in 1906 and 1910: during the latter, Robert had met Rudolf Steiner (see FT205:44-51), whom he considered to be an adept and from whom he claimed to have received spiritual instruction. Their 1914 expedition was abruptly curtailed by the outbreak of WWI. Stranded in Germany as enemy aliens, the Felkins were helped by local Masons to reach neutral Holland and thence travel back to the UK. While contributing to the British war effort in the rather thankless role of an army sanitation inspector, Felkin received a petition from the Smaragdum Thallasses members, asking him to come and live permanently in Havelock North as their leader. Whare Ra would be provided as his residence, and he would be
guaranteed a good income as resident doctor for the township. 5
The Smaragdum Thallasses temple rapidly developed under Felkin’s ‘military’-style leadership, with the collective membership of the Order estimated as 300 at its peak in the early 1920s (200 in the Outer Order and 100 in the Inner Order) – a significant figure in relation to Havelock North’s small contemporary population of around 1,000 residents. However, not all the participants were locals: sources state that, at various times, the membership included national dignitaries such as generals, bishops, and Lord Jellicoe, Governor-General of New Zealand from 1920-1924. The administration of the temple was a family affair: as Golden Dawn protocol decreed each temple to be run by three ‘chiefs’, these roles were filled by Robert, Harriot, and Ethelwyn. The fact that most of the Inner Order were pillars of Havelock North society was useful in allaying public concerns about the Felkins’ ‘spiritualist’ activities. Robert S Ellwood recounts an anecdote about a new resident who asked the town board to investigate the sinister rumours surrounding the Felkins, unaware that most of the board members were also members of the temple. Needless to say, the ‘investigation’ found little ground for public concern. Felkin’s esoteric interests also influenced his medical practice, which incorporated a number of approaches that we would today term ‘alternative’. The Anthroposophical emphasis on the spiritual properties of colour inspired Felkin to experiment with colour therapy, extending Whare Ra with special ‘cells’ built for this purpose. He also claimed the ability to engage in acts of psychic healing, such as diagnosing illness through the power of touch, and, more provocatively, sending his “astral” to treat patients “at a distance”. These healing abilities bore comparison with the powers attributed to tohunga, the shaman figures central to Maori society, whom Felkin acknowledged as “natural magicians”. Felkin’s reputation in these areas led to him gaining a clientele of patients from regional Maori communities, which bolstered his practice enough to warrant additional consulting rooms being added to Whare Ra.
THE GOLDEN DUSK
The qualities of commitment and discipline that marked Felkin’s magical leadership ensured that Smaragdum Thallasses ran relatively smoothly until his death in December 1926 at the age of 73, when he was buried in the ceremonial attire of a Knight of the Table Round. While Reginald Gardiner took Felkin’s place in the triad of chiefs, Harriot Felkin became the overall leader of the group. Despite deafness and other health issues, Harriot spent the next 30-odd years running the temple, which eventually came to be referred to generally as “Whare Ra”. From 1936 to 1949 she published a journal entitled The Lantern, which was significant for printing Felkin’s autobiography “A Wayfaring Man” in serial instalments, whence derives most of the information about his life. Harriot also engaged in extensive networking with other esoteric groups in New Zealand and abroad, resulting in the most tangible legacy of the Whare Ra order. In the late 1930s, having purportedly received “astral messages” that a “master” would appear to teach mystical wisdom in the antipodes, Harriot was informed that Australian anthroposophist Charles McDowell was also in receipt of these tidings. The pair formed an alliance to develop a “spiritual centre” for the master and his teachings, and to this end purchased a large block of land, dubbed Tauhara, near Lake Taupo in
central North Island. Although the master failed to materialise, Tauhara is still in operation as a retreat and conference centre catering for spiritual groups of Eastern/New Age pedigree.
In 1959, both Harriot and Reginald Gardiner passed away at the age of 86, with Ethelwyn Felkin running Whare Ra until her own death, aged 79, three years later. The loss of these founding members precipitated major crises in the Order. In the early 1960s another Londoner, Charles Wren, emigrated to Havelock North and established his own ‘Temple of the Sun’ as an ostensible successor to Whare Ra. However, Order members disliked his personality and considered his rituals inferior to the Felkins’ teachings: Wren’s temple folded after only a few months. This same period saw another, more effective, challenge to the Order from the American esoteric group Builders Of The Adytum (BOTA). This organisation had been founded in 1938 by Paul Foster Case, an exmember of the Golden Dawn who believed the Order’s focus on ritual magic and psychic abilities was not only spiritually dangerous but peripheral to “real wisdom”. In 1963 Ann Davies, the then-head of BOTA, toured New Zealand and addressed Whare Ra members at a meeting in Napier. While most members found her American brand of mysticism too brash and overblown, an influential coterie left to establish and run a New Zealand chapter of the organisation.
The Smaragdum Thallasses temple continued to operate into the 1970s, becoming the last remnant of the original Golden Dawn organisation upon the cessation of the Hermes temple in Bristol in 1972. Generational attrition appears to have been the main impetus behind the closure of Whare Ra in August 1978: as Ellwood notes, the post-war counterculture “generally lacked the patience, the studiousness, and the sense of importance of ritual and tradition” that had typified the spiritual questing of Felkin and his followers, preferring to glean such wisdom through the likes of the hippie ‘happenings’ held at Tauhara. However, those members of the Inner Order who were also initiated into the Order of the Table Round kept this latter group alive, into the 1990s at least.
A “code of silence” among elderly exmembers, in combination with perceptions of Havelock North as a sleepy country town, meant that until recently the story of Whare Ra remained little known outside of magical and academic circles. Popular awareness of the Order has developed over the last decade through reappraisals of Chapman-Taylor’s artistic achievements, and a 2014 exhibition on Felkin and the Havelock Work at the MTG
The walls and ceiling of the Whare Ra vault. The Felkin grave at Havelock North Cemetery, final resting place of Robert, Harriot and Ethelwyn.
Hawke’s Bay regional museum in Napier. Accompanied by a detailed monograph by historian Georgina White, this has led to public radio and popular magazine features on the subject. As rediscoveries and reevaluations of 20th century magic are major features of 21st century occulture (see, for example, FT310:56-57), such attention may signal the beginnings of a more substantive Whare Ra ‘revival’.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Dr Felkin’s memoir ‘A Wayfaring Man’ has recently been reprinted in two limited edition volumes dealing with Whare Ra history: The Lantern, Vol. 1 (2012), Vol. 2 (2015), Sub Rosa Press, NZ. Downloads are available from subrosapress.org.
Georgina White, Dr Robert Felkin: Magician on the Borderland, MTG Hawke’s Bay, Napier, 2014.
Robert S Ellwood, Islands of the Dawn: The Story of Alternative Spirituality in New Zealand, University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu, 1993.
Judy Siers, The Life and Times of James Walter Chapman-Taylor, Millwood Heritage Productions, Ahuriri, Napier, 1997.
Patrick Z Zalewski, Secret Inner Order Rituals of the Golden Dawn, Falcon Press, Phoenix, Arizona, 1988.
Ellic Howe, The Magicians of the Golden Dawn, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1972.
Lucy Sargisson and Lyman Tower Sargent, Living in Utopia: New Zealand’s Intentional Communities, Ashgate, Aldershot, 2004.
NOTES
1 As stated by Georgina White, notable examples from the late 19th/early 20th century that bear comparison with the Havelock Work include Whiteway, Leo Tolstoy’s Cotswolds commune, and the Fellowship of the New Life, a London society set up by Scottish philosopher Thomas Davidson that spawned the highly influential socialist organisation The Fabian Society.
2 Gary Lachman, Aleister Crowley: Magick, Rock and Roll, and the Wickedest Man in the World, Tarcher/Penguin 2014, p59.
3 As with Crowley, Mathers and other occultists of this era, Felkin was keen on belonging to as many occult organisations as possible and on gaining status in each. For instance, in 1907 he became a Master Mason, which granted him membership in the British Masonic occult order the ‘Societa Rosicruciana in Anglia’.
4 The Crowleyan dabblings of Felkin fils feature in correspondence between Felkin and Waite in Oct 1912, documented online: https://archive.org/ stream/Ordo_Rr_Et_Ac_-_A._E._Waite/Ordo_Rr_ Et_Ac_-_A._E._Waite_djvu.txt
5 Upon his departure Felkin appointed Christina Stoddart as one of the chiefs of the London temple. He subsequently had to deal long-distance with the decline of the temple, largely due to Stoddart developing the conspiracist belief that the Stella Matutina, and other esoteric orders such as Masonry, were part of an occult plot for world domination. Stoddart published two books, Light Bearers of Darkness (1930) and Trail of the Serpent (1936), that have been influential in shaping contemporary conspiracy theories fixated upon Masonry and magic.