Moina Mathers

She was born Mina Bergson in Geneva in 1865, the sister of the philosopher Henri Bergson, and trained as an artist at the Slade. She was the first person initiated into the Isis-Urania temple after its founders, in March 1888, and she married MacGregor Mathers in 1890.

Her documented contribution is substantial: she painted the temple furniture and regalia, and she was the seer in the visionary work through which the couple received a good deal of the material that Mathers then wrote up as order teaching. The Rites of Isis she performed in Paris in the 1890s were public theatre with a serious intention behind them, and after her husband's death in 1918 she led the Alpha et Omega successor order until her own death in 1928.

The difficulty in writing about her is that the record was made by other people. Where she and her husband worked together, publication went out under his name; where the order remembered its history, it remembered him. She is one of several women in this period, Pamela Colman Smith, uncredited on the tarot deck that bears two other names, is the clearest parallel, whose work was absorbed into a man's reputation as a matter of course. Alex Owen's study of the period argues that this pattern is not incidental to Victorian occultism but structural to it, which is worth holding in mind whenever a nineteenth-century magical corpus is attributed cleanly to one man.

In Paris at the end of the 1890s, Moina Mathers did something no other member of the Golden Dawn attempted: she took ceremonial religion to a paying public. With her husband she staged the Rites of Isis at the Bodiniere theatre in 1899, appearing as the priestess Anari beside his hierophant Rameses, in performances that mixed invocation, dance and tableau and were reported in the French press with fascination. The couple presented the rites as a revival of Egyptian religion for a modern city, and interviews from those years show Moina as its articulate public voice, defending the reality of the goddess they served.

The theatrical priesthood grew from her training; she had studied at the Slade School of Fine Art, where she won prizes and met Annie Horniman, the friend whose money later kept the Mathers household afloat, and her draughtsmanship furnished the order she co-created: the god forms, the tarot designs and the temple furnishings of the Isis-Urania temple trace to her hand and to her clairvoyant vision work. After her husband's death in 1918 she came into open authority at last, leading the Alpha et Omega order that continued his line, instructing members in the visionary techniques she had pioneered, and contending with schism and with students, Paul Foster Case among them, who questioned parts of the curriculum. The public priestess of 1899 remains the emblem: the order's whole aesthetic was, to a degree the histories long understated, her artwork.