Humans of London (in the 1890s)

Who isn't occasionally inspired by Humans of New York? Since I've taken a little break from writing recently and been playing with Photoshop, I thought I would share what I've come up with.

These are writers in London in the 1890s (if they had Facebook and someone got inspired by Humans of New York).

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A Woman Called Horniman

Annie Horniman

William Butler Yeats was in his mid-twenties, living in London, had joined the Isis-Urania Temple of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, when he met a rich older lady, who fell in love with him. The feeling was not mutual, but she pursued him the way he pursued Maud Gonne, and he benefitted financially from the relationship.

Annie Horniman was known as one of the 'Grand Dames' of 1890s London, though she would probably be called a 'cougar' today because she had a thing for young male artists. Today, we remember her primarily for her contributions to the world of theatre, most of which were made in pursuit of Yeats.

Of course, she loved theatre for the theatre as well. Her father thought is was sinful, but, when she was fourteen, her German governess secretly brought her and her mother to a production of the Merchant of Venice, which left a big impression on young Horniman. Her rebellious nature didn't end there. She supported women's suffrage, wore flamboyant clothing, smoked cigarettes in public, and somehow earned the nickname 'Hornibags.'

Horniman also pursued alternative religions, which is how she met Yeats through the Hermetic Order.

Charming young William Butler Yeats

According to William Michael Murphy in Family Secrets: William Butler Yeats and His Relatives (1995):

[Horniman] shared [Yeats'] interest in occult studies and in the drama and provided the financial help necessary for the staging of one of his early plays. She was a strait-laced, opinionated, righteous woman with a high opinion of her own talents that was shared by nobody who knew her. She possessed on deficiency in the pursuit of her dreams: she hated the Irish People, like many English middle-class possessors of inherited wealth believing herself inherently superior to the unwashed peasants who lived across the Irish Sea. She pursued Yeats as zealously as he pursued Maud Gonne, and with as much success. But because of her persistence she was to become one of the most influential participants in the formation of an Irish Theatre.

The theatre referred to there is the Abbey Theatre in Dublin.

In founding the Abbey, Yeats made an enemy out of Horniman. She invested a significant portion of her inheritance into the project, but he left her out of the circle of power (maybe because it was an Irish theatre project, and she hated the Irish). Consequently, Yeats wasn't the only young artist in her life. According to Murphy, Horniman's money gave her a sense of superiority over the young people she pursued, as they became increasingly dependent on her.

James Agate, a theatre critic, once said that her high-minded theatrical ventures had "an air of gloomy strenuousness" about them, but they are what won her honour and acclaim. She is one of the very few people to have both joined an occult society, and still have been awarded the Companion of Honour, which she earned in 1933.

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The Weird Magic of 1890s Writers: Enochian Magic

Practitioners of Enochian magic attempt to evoke the will of spirits or angels. As i wrote this post, I couldn't get the Black Crowes out of my head and almost called this post "Bram Stoker talks to Angels."

The word “Enochian” refers to the language practitioners use, a language recorded by Dr. John Dee and Edward Kelley in the sixteenth century. The Enochian language was delivered to Dee and Kelley, much the way Joseph Smith wrote wrote the Book of Mormon, through angels. Understanding this language would uncover the secrets of the apocryphal Book of Enoch.

The Book of Enoch is an ancient Jewish religious work, traditionally ascribed to Enoch, the great-grandfather of Noah. It is not part of the Jewish biblical canon, apart from Beta Israel. However, it is regarded as canonical by the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church and Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church, but not by any other Christian group.

Still practiced today, Enochian magic is primarily the result of the work of two men: Dee and Kelley.

Dee was a kind of spooky wise man, consulted by Queen Elizabeth I of Welsh. He liked math, astronomy, astrology, the occult, and making ships sail off in the right directions to go subjugate people. He religiously devoted his life to studying alchemy, divination and Hermetic philosophy. Of course, he had a long milky-white beard! He made Christianity magical, dreamed of uniting the world in one religion, and, like Samuel Pepys, kept a fabulous diary. He believed that numbers are the root of all knowledge. He also believed he could talk to spirits.

Kelley and Dee were friends, until sometime after Kelley insisted that God wanted them to share Dee’s wife. Kelley was a long-bearded crystal ball style wizard, I mean... medium. They must have looked like Gandalf and Radagast, which makes the whole thing with Dee’s wife, Jane, just weird.

Kelley did most of the talking to angels through his crystal ball, while Dee wrote it all down. The Writers in London in the 1890s would be glad he did. Enochian occultists assume the exploits of Dee and Kelley are more or less completely true. Though many believe they were also influenced by other magical texts.

Dee and Kelley preferred the term Angelic over Enochian and there’s no evidence they ever used it for magic because the angels didn’t really want them to. Their records are records of the system rather than a log of their workings of the system.

Their work had a big influence on Rosicrucianism, but otherwise went unnoticed until the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn formed in the 1890s. The rediscovery of Enochian magic by Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers in the 1880s led to Mathers working the material into a system of ceremonial “Magick” for the Order.

Constance Wilde, Bram Stoker, Maud Gonne, W.B. Yeats, and the many others, who joined the Order, used Enochian Magick to talk to Dee and Kelley’s angels, and could purportedly travel as auras into the spirit realm. The calls or keys that evoke the spirits are in the Enochian language that Dee and Kelley recorded, and can be used to enter visionary states, called Aethyrs.


The Aethyrs (numbered from 30-1, by our number-loving wizard friend, Dee) form a map of the universe.

The magic is practiced in a temple, which requires some specific decorating. What’s magic with good paraphernalia? Decorate your Enochian Temple with a table that has a hexagram engraved on top and a surrounding border of Enochian letters. You will also need seven planetary talismans, and five versions of the Seal of God’s Truth, made from beeswax and placed under the table with the hexagram on it. Some kind of crystal ball is also helpful, as is a magician’s ring, with the god-name Pele on it. Finally, there’s a black and red rod that you will want to use.

I’m just going to spend the rest of my afternoon imagining Bram Stoker and Constance Wilde setting up an Enochian Temple to talk to angels.

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Maud Gonne as the New Speranza

On 19 January 1892, W.B. Yeats published an article in the United Irishman, in which he compared the activist work of his beloved Maud Gonne to that of Oscar Wilde’s mother, Speranza. In her autobiography, Gonne promotes the idea that Yeats’ poem, “The Rose of the World” (written the same month) was about her, in which he links her to Helen of Troy and Diedre.

In his article, Yeats called Gonne “the new ‘Speranza’ who should do all with the voice all, or more than all, the old ‘Speranza’ did with her pen.” Clearly, he hoped to heap high praise upon his beloved friend, but it strikes me that of all the figures I’ve named so far, Speranza is the one we remember least. Yeats didn’t call Speranza old exclusively because of her age, but because that was the general view of her poetry in 1892 London. It was out-of-date.

Maybe, it’s because his poetry seems almost as old to me as hers does, but I’m beginning to see similarities in style between Yeats and Speranza. Take “The Rose of the World,” for example:

Who dreamed beauty passes like a dream?

And Speranza’s “Thekla. A Swedish Saga. The Temptation”:

Shivered, shattered, fades it waning
From the maiden like a dream.

Ok. Ok, dreams are common tropes.

So what of the validity of calling Gonne “the new Speranza?” Speranza wrote for the Young Ireland Movement in the 1840s. Her anti-British writings called for armed resistance and contributed to the Young Irelander Rebellion of 1848, which influenced generations of Irish nationalists. Gonne was in love with a right-wing French politician, Lucien Millevoye, and wanted to help him free Ireland and regain Alsace-Loraine for France. When Yeats met her, she was working to release Irish political prisoners from jail. But, when she returned to France, when Yeats was writing “The Rose of the World” for her and calling her the new Speranza, she had returned to Paris to work with Millevoye.

In the years that followed, she would have two children with Millevoye and join the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Gonne’s young Ireland consisted of children’s parties.

To be fair, Gonne was always honest with Yeats about her feelings, but the new Speranza? This she was not.

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For Love and Ireland

W.B. Yeats joined the Irish nationalist cause as much for his love of Maud Gonne, a beautiful young Irish feminist, as he did for his politics. Though Gonne liked and admired Yeats, this was a story of unrequited love.

The pair met on 30 January 1890. Biographies on Yeats call Gonne "an actress whose great beauty would haunt (Yeats) for the rest of his life." Her passionate work for the nationalist cause in Ireland and her reckless destructiveness in pursuit of her political goals plagued Yeats. Thought he tried to support those goals in his own way.

Yeats focused on drama, trying to spark a revival of Irish literature and culture. Gonne liked this, but regularly refused to marry him (between 1890 and 1901) and they remained close friends through many estrangements, including her marriage to Major John MacBride. In his poetry, Yeats compared her to Helen of Troy, whose capriciousness led to the destruction of a civilization.

In her autobiography, Gonne wrote a great deal about Yeats, including the following:

While we were still at dinner Willie Yeats arrived to see me and we all went into the drawing-room for coffee. Kathleen (Gonne) and I sat together on a big sofa amid piles of soft cushions. I was still in my dark clothes with the black veil I always wore when travelling instead of a hat, we must have made a strange contrast. I saw Willie Yeats looking critically at me and he told Kathleen he liked her dress and that she was looking younger than ever. I was on that occassion Kathleen remarked that it was hard work being beautiful, which Willie turned into his poem Adam's Curse.

Gonne actually includes the poem in its entirety here, but I trust that you can look it up, if you haven't read it.

Next day when he called to take me out to pay my customary visit to Lia Fail, he said:

"You don't take care of yourself as Kathleen does, so she looks younger than you; your face is worn and thin; but you will always be more beautiful, more beautiful than anyone I have known. You can't help that. Oh Maud, why don't you marry me and give up this tragic struggle and live a peaceful life? I could make such a beautiful life for you among artists and writers who would understand you."

"Willie, are you not tired of asking that question? How often have I told you to thank the gods that I will not marry you. You would not be happy with me."

"I am not happy without you."

"Oh yes, you are, because you make beautiful poetry out of what you call your unhappiness and you are happy in that. Marriage would be such a dull affair. Poets should never marry. I will tell you one thing, our friendship had meant a great deal to me; it has helped me often when I needed help, needed it perhaps more than you or anyone ever knew, for I never talk or even think of these things."

Like Gonne, I believe that some loves are meant to inspire and carry a person through hard times. Indeed, we should be grateful for every love we've ever had in our lives, no matter how happy or unhappy they make us.

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