Occult eugenics and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn
This is the latest chapter in my project to explore ‘spiritual eugenics’. It looks at occult eugenics in the practices and books of members of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a very influential occult society of the late 19th century. Its members believed they could use sex magic to engineer the incarnation of highly-evolved beings — an idea which would appear in later fantasy fiction, including Frank Herbert’s Dune.
As we saw in the previous chapter, in the petri dish of the late 19th and early 20th century ‘occulture’, all sorts of radical ideas grew and cross-fertilized — socialism, fascism, vegetarianism, anti-vivisection and anti-vax activism, psychical research, occultism and eugenics, to name but a few. We’ve seen how Nietzsche’s dream of the superbeing inspired Modernist intellectuals and spiritual seekers, and how it fused with the ‘creed’ of eugenics, especially in the pages of The New Age journal.
In this chapter, we will look at how the idea of spiritual eugenics was developed by members of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and its various splinter groups. We will examine the idea that magic can help not just your personal evolution into a superhuman, but can also be used during procreation, to make it more likely your children will be god-like beings who can assist the spiritual evolution of the human race. As we’ll see, this feat was attempted by everyone from WB Yeats to Aleister Crowley to L. Ron Hubbard, with mixed results.
The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was founded in 1888 by three Freemasons — Dr W.R. Woodman, a surgeon; and William Wynn Westcott, a coroner; and MacGregor Mathers, a full-time occultist. Mathers had a talent for synthesis, and he combined together various occult traditions — Kabbalah, Tarot, hermeticism, Neoplatonism — into a teachable system. It had a tiny membership — sometimes less than 100 and never more than 400 — but it included some distinguished figures.
WB Yeats, the Irish poet; Aleister Crowley, poet and black magician; Algernon Blackwood, journalist and writer of supernatural fiction; Arthur Machen, another distinguished writer of supernatural fiction; Dion Fortune, yet another author of supernatural fiction; Charles Williams, novelist and Inkling; Florence Farr, actress; Annie Horniman, founder of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin; AE Waite, the Irish writer and mystic; E. Nesbitt, the children’s book writer; Evelyn Underhill, the authority on mysticism, and Moina Mathers, wife of MacGregor and sister of philosopher Henri Bergson, were all members of the original Order or later offshoots.
Along with Blavatsky and the Theosophical Society (which we’ll examine in a later chapter), the Golden Dawn can claim to have invented modern occultism. Its lore looked back to ancient wisdom but also incorporated new ideas from psychology and psychical research, and an adapted and spiritualized theory of evolution. Professor Susan Johnston Graf writes:
The Golden Dawn taught that the point of life is for the soul to evolve. Initiation and adepthood were a way for a human to evolve spirituality…The over-arching function of the Order of the Golden Dawn was to facilitate the evolution of the human race, working through one individual at a time. [Talking to the Gods: Occultism in the Work of W. B. Yeats, Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, and Dion Fortune, 2015, p.15]
The aim for the adept was to expand one’s consciousness using hypnosis, auto-suggestion, visualization and other techniques and rituals. One should explore the subconscious and open the superconsciousness, and thereby bring oneself into contact with higher spiritual intelligences. In this, fin de siècle occultism was a progenitor for the modern human potential movement.
Algernon Blackwood, novelist and adept, wrote:
Man is greater than he knows, and…completer realization of his full possibilities lies accessible to his subconscious and superconscious powers. Herein he saw, indeed, the chief hope of progress for humanity. [The Bright Messenger]
When joining, the adept takes an oath to ‘unite myself with my higher and Divine Genius’. Eventually the adept might hope to rise to the highest grade and becomes a ‘Great Man’, or ‘Perfect Man’. The Instructions on initiation into the Second or Inner Order read: ‘In the Second Order, we are still very human but not only human — we are attempting to be ultra-human, i. e. divine.’
As one often finds in other cultural movements of the 1880s-1920s, there was also the expectation of the dawning of a glorious New Age, when humanity would collectively shift into superhumanity. The Golden Dawn believed they were midwifing this evolution. They were ‘engineers building a bridge to an unknown land’ in Crowley’s phrase. As we’ll see, a central part of this mission involved adepts using sex magic to try and channel advanced souls into their progeny, for the good of the human race.
2) Spiritual elitism and occult eugenics
The Golden Dawn was an unashamedly elitist organisation. It embraced Nietzsche’s idea that there is a tiny elite of humans who are responsible for all cultural and spiritual growth. To be an adept in the Golden Dawn was to be a member of this evolutionary elite. Israel Regardie, a disciple of Aleister Crowley’s who went on to write a popular account of Golden Dawn magic, said near the end of his life:
I would say that The Golden Dawn is an elitist system. Even in its heyday during the late 90’s and in the early part of this century, there probably were never more than 250 people at most in all the manifold temples in England… it is for those few who are willing to take evolution into their own hands, and make these attempts to transform themselves. The great mass of people are quite willing to drift along. They want no part or have no idea of voluntary forms of evolution, self-induced and self-devised. [An Interview with Israel Regardie, His Final Thoughts and Views]
Unlike the Theosophical Society, the Golden Dawn was closed to the general public. It was secret, and you needed to be invited and then initiated. The Order was hierarchical. Adepts were initiated to the first grade, and then had the chance to ascend the ten grades, according to their scholarly and magical abilities. Ruling the hierarchy were the three founders, and above them were the ‘secret chiefs’ — legendary figures who supposedly gave the founders directions, much as the ‘Masters’ supposedly gave direction to Madame Blavatsky in Theosophy. Mathers claimed the Chiefs were ‘human and living upon this earth; but possessing terrible superhuman powers’.
This secret elite organisation appealed, like Theosophy, particularly to the affluent and the educated middle class. Occult organisations, writes historian Alex Owen, had ‘a distinctly bourgeois tone that smacked of the gentleman’s private club…it was precisely this rarefied air of “people like us” that so attracted a broad swath of the middle classes’. The Occult appealed particularly to middle-class snobs with aristocratic pretensions and a taste for titles and regalia, like Crowley, Yeats, or Mathers, who called himself the ‘Comte de Glenstrae’.
Many members of the Golden Dawn or its later affiliates championed some form of positive and / or negative eugenics, including Aleister Crowley, WB Yeats, Florence Farr, Isabelle De Steiger, Dion Fortune and Algernon Blackwood.
Aleister Crowley, for example, was a huge fan of Nietzsche’s. ‘Read Nietzsche!’ he ordered the followers of Thelema, the occult religion he launched in the early 1900s. ‘Nietzsche may be regarded as one of our prophets’. Like Nietzsche, Crowley believed in an elite of superior beings, who had the right to live how they wanted. ‘Do what you want shall be the whole of the law’, his Book of the Law declares. The rest of humanity, meanwhile, were slaves, there to serve the superbeings’ will.
He followed Nietzsche in his enthusiastic rejection of Christian charity. He wrote: ‘kindness and conscientiousness and altruism are really drawbacks to the progress of humanity.’ Instead, the elite of superbeings should dominate the weak and less fit, exploit them, and if necessary, kill them. ‘Compassion is the vice of kings’, Crowley writes. ‘Stamp down the wretched and the weak.’
In his Book of the Law, which he composed in 1904 while supposedly channelling an ancient Egyptian spirit, the spirit declares
We have nothing with the outcast and the unfit: let them die in their misery. For they feel not. Compassion is the vice of kings: stamp down the wretched & the weak: this is the law of the strong: this is our law and the joy of the world.
To which Crowley adds the commentary:
there is a good deal of the Nietzschean standpoint in this…It is the evolutionary and natural view. Of what use is it to perpetuate the misery of Tuberculosis, and such diseases, as we now do? Nature’s way is to weed out the weak. This is the most merciful way, too…The Christians to the Lions!..Let weak and wry productions go back into the melting-pot, as is done with flawed steel castings. Death will purge, reincarnation make whole, these errors and abortions. Nature herself may be trusted to do this, if only we will leave her alone
In 1910, Crowley joined the Ordo Templi Orientis, a German occult organisation that also preached eugenics. According to Peter-Robert Konig, an expert on the OTO, the order aimed at a utopian reorganisation of society in which
the sexual re-education of the masses would be the responsibility of ‘priest doctors’…[P]rivate property would be eliminated, forced labour and eugenics were to be introduced, while only physically perfect parents would be permitted to have children. The religion of OTO would become that of the State. [Quoted in Hugh Urban’s chapter, ‘The Yoga of Sex’, in Hidden Intercourse: Eros and Sexuality in the History of Western Esotericism, edited by Kripal and Hanegraff]
There is a lot more to say on German occultism and eugenics — we will discuss in a later chapter.
Yeats was also a big fan of Nietzsche’s gospel of spiritual elitism: ‘I have not read anything with so much excitement’, he enthused. He was a hereditarian elitist who believed a handful of ‘natural aristocrats’ were responsible for maintaining civilization. By the 1930s, he was worried that the human race was degenerating because the lower classes were over-breeding. In On the Boiler, his far-right screed of the late 1930s, he wrote:
Since about 1900 the better stocks have not been replacing their numbers, while the stupider and less healthy have been more than replacing theirs. Unless there is a change in the public mind every rank above the lowest must degenerate and, as inferior men push up into its gaps, degenerate more and more quickly.
He thought state intervention was necessary: ‘Sooner or later we must limit the families of the unintelligent classes.’. He joined the Eugenics Society in 1937, but some scholars think he showed eugenic sympathies long before that. Certainly, fellow members of the Golden Dawn publicly championed eugenics long before the 1930s. Isabelle De Steiger, for example, joined the Eugenics Society the year it was founded, in 1909. Two years earlier, Yeats’ friend and fellow Golden Dawn adept, Florence Farr, wrote an article on occult eugenics for The New Age. She declared that, while she didn’t believe in the ‘murder of the unfit’, she did think that young people needed to think more about the future of the race when they chose their partner. But this would only happen
when a race of magicians hypnotise the innocent young into willing their own perfection. The young enchant us ; but they themselves are perhaps enchanted by Olympian supermen… These Olympian supermen that see that the purposes of our race are fulfilled would seem to act through the power of glamour… [They] do not sympathise with us any more than a stud-groom sympathises with a horse….
It would seem Farr had herself and her fellow superhuman adepts in mind for this magical eugenical programme. (Thanks to Jessica Albrecht for drawing my attention to this article on Twitter). Interestingly, Florence Farr was the daughter of William Farr, a physician who was one of the first people to propose a national policy of eugenics — in 1852, 30 years before Galton (see this article by John C. Waller).
Dion Fortune, a British novelist and member of Alpha et Omega (an offshoot of the Golden Dawn, founded in 1906) likewise urged the need for state regulation of reproduction to ensure the quality of the race. She wrote in 1947:
It will have to be realized that children are among the assets of the nation. The fertility of the soil, the flocks and herds, the mineral treasures of the rocks and the fisheries of the rivers and around the coasts, the integrity, intelligence and industry of the people and their fertility, are the assets of the race, and the government should control all these basic products in the national interest. [The Arthurian Formula]
She also suggested that evil has a role in the world as a sort of ‘Cosmic Abortion’ (in her phrase):
We can best explain the cosmic function of the Principle of Destruction by calling it by its esoteric name of the Scavenger of the Gods. Its function is to clear up behind the advancing tide of evolution, removing that which has become effete so that it may not choke and clog evolving life. [Psychic Self Defense]
There is a disturbing example of this evolutionary clearing-out in her occult novel, The Sea Priestess, where a mentally disabled ‘dribbling’ boy falls into the sea, apparently as a sacrificial victim to the pagan gods:
and he sat down with a smack and went tobogganing down the steep pitch with a blissful smile on his foolish face and plopped straight into the sea, and we never saw him, nor his hat, nor anything belonging to him again.
‘Maybe it’s just as well,’ said the old foreman.
3) Positive eugenics — breeding superbeings
Golden Dawn adepts were taught to use sex magic as a means to assist their own spiritual evolution into superbeings. The basic idea was that sexual attraction between two adepts, usually a husband and wife, created a ‘magnetic polarity’ of opposites, which generated energy that could be used for spiritual advancement. The Golden Dawn also believed that sex magic could ensure your progeny are the reincarnation of highly evolved souls who would assist the evolution of humanity.
They probably took this idea from the body of Jewish mysticism and magic known as kabbalah, and specifically from the 13th century Kabbalah text, the Zohar, which declares:
When a man cleaves to his mate and his desire is to receive her, he worships before the holy King and arouses another union, for the desire of the Holy One, blessed be He, is to cleave to the community of Israel…for we have learned that, as res result of the king’s cohabitation with the Assembly of Israel, large numbers of the righteous come into their sacred inheritance, and a multitude of blessings are bestowed upon the world.
According to a new book by Professor Marla Segol, the idea behind this passage is that, if you and your partner prepare the proper spiritual frame of mind while having sex, you can bring down the blessings of Jehovah and make it more likely that your progeny will be one of the ‘righteous’. However, you need to be careful — if the spell goes wrong or your mind is impure, you could accidentally incarnate a demon-child. (You can watch a presentation by Professor Segol here).
According to some scholars, Kabbalah is the earliest source for western sex magic. But in fact, you could argue that humans have always used magic and prayer to appeal to the heavens for healthy, blessed children. Records for this sort of fertility magic go back at least as far as ancient Rome. The Bible could be read as one long prayer to secure ‘good births’, from Abraham and Sarah, to Mary and God.
The ‘occult eugenics’ of the Golden Dawn was not, therefore, something radically new. This much is admitted by Aleister Crowley in his 1917 fantasy novel, The Moonchild, which is about the attempt by a secret order to use sex magic to create a superhuman baby. The would-be father is Cyril Grey, a dashing magician based on Crowley, and the hapless mother is the slightly ditsy and passive actress, Lisa la Guiffria.
Grey tells Lisa that spiritual eugenics is as old as religion. He says:
the idea has been almost universal in one form or another; the wish has always been for a Messiah or Superman, and the method some attempt to produce man by artificial or at least abnormal means…
He explains:
Look at the finished product, the soul ‘incarnated,’ as we may call it. There are three forces at work upon it; the soul itself, the heredity and the environment. A clever soul will therefore be careful to choose the embryo which seems most likely to be fairly free in the two latter respects. It will look for a healthy stock, for parents who will, and can, give the child every chance in life.
The magically trained can ‘catch’ the souls of higher beings ‘by performing this experiment in a specially prepared place, a place protected magically against all incompatible forces, and by invoking into that place some one force…some tremendously powerful being, angel or archangel’. What could be more progressive and humanitarian than to magically breed a messiah? Crowley writes:
Suppose that you succeed, that you can attract a soul to you who will find a way to abolish poverty, or to cure cancer, or to — oh! surely you glow with vision, a thousand heights of human progress thrusting their sunlit snows through the clouds of doubt!
Grey and his fellow magicians whisk Lisa away to an Italian villa, which they protect from attacks by a rival lodge of black magicians. Then, on an astrologically propitious date, Lisa is dressed up like Artemis, and Cyril Grey appears dressed as Pan and carries her away. Successfully impregnated, Lisa is then put into luxurious seclusion, until the foetus reaches six months old, when she sees an ‘incandescent cone’ shining before her, and round it souls awaiting incarnation: ‘she was amazed to see among them the faces of many of the great men of the race.’ She makes out the souls of Kipling, Blake, Byron, Swinburne, Tchaikovsky and even the soul of Victorian ‘man of science’ Thomas Huxley!
The thought of Thomas Huxley, Puritan champion of scientific naturalism, being reincarnated as the magical love-child of Aleister Crowley, is marvellous indeed. In fact, Huxley’s grandson Aldous would become a friend of Crowley’s, and share his interest in spiritual eugenics. Aldous also had the idea of propagating the ‘great men of the race’, but thought this could be achieved not through magic, but via artificial insemination via a ‘genius sperm bank’ — an idea that appears in his last novel, Island. Such methods weren’t available to Crowley in the 1910s, however, so he and his partner Rose Kelly tried sex magic to create a superhuman avatar. Alas, the child, named ‘Nuit Ma Ahathoor Hecate Sappho Jezebel Lilith’, died of typhus in 1906.
Yeats and his wife Georgie, both adepts of the Golden Dawn also used occult eugenics to try and create a world-saving avatar. Theirs was an unlikely match — there was a 27-year age difference between the 52-year-old Yeats and the 25-year-old Georgie, although Dion Fortune thought such an age gap was good for what she called ‘cosmic mating’, which is when a man and woman pair off solely for the magical evolution of humanity. In fact they shared a deep interest in the occult and Georgie was initiated by Yeats into the Stella Matutina order (an offshoot of the Golden Dawn).
As Ann Saddlemyer explores in her biography of Georgie, the Yeats’ marriage was magical from the get-go. The lovers matched astrology charts, got married on a propitious date, and Yeats even had the wedding ring inscribed with occult symbols. When Yeats had doubts a week after the wedding, Georgie tried to distract him by making ‘an attempt to fake automatic writing’. This attempt was a huge success — she channelled spirits for years, inspiring some of Yeats’ best poetry. The spirits also gave them advice on when and how to procreate so the foetus would become the vessel for a world-saving avatar.
Professor Graf, in her excellent article, ‘An Infant Avatar, The Mature Occultism of WB Yeats’, writes:
From 1918, shortly after they were married, until 1922, George and W. B. Yeats engaged in practices that can only be construed as sexual magic. The object of their sex magic was traditional: the incarnation of an enlightened soul that would facilitate the spiritual evolution of humankind.
Georgie even had a copy of a book called A Thousand and One Notable Nativities: ‘The Astrologer’s “Who’s Who” ’ by Alan Leo, a volume recommended by the Golden Dawn, which featured the birth date and time of illustrious people. It was an occult eugenic guide for the best astrological conditions to produce superior children.
The Yeatses were assured by the spirits that their first child would be a boy, and a superhuman one at that, so they were disconcerted when the baby was a girl. The spirits rather defensively explained that the next child would certainly be a male avatar. Two years later, Michael Yeats was born. His proud father stood guard over him, uttering magical injunctions to protect him from evil magicians, just as in Crowley’s Moonchild (in fact, the black magician Yeats feared may have been Crowley himself). The boy grew up and followed a successful career as a barrister and Irish senator, although he didn’t obviously change the course of the human race.
Other members of the Golden Dawn or later offshoots also explored the idea of sex magic as occult eugenic technique in their novels. In the supernatural fiction of Algernon Blackwood and Dion Fortune, one meets the idea that sex magic can and should be used to incarnate higher souls and thereby aid the evolution of the human race (specifically, the British race).
Blackwood’s 1921 novel, The Bright Messenger, for example, focuses on a character called Julius LeVallon, who was born from a sex magic ritual gone awry. As a result, he’s not actually human, but an elemental spirit. Although he was incarnated by accident, he is a messenger from the coming New Age, whose incarnation serves to quicken humanity and help it evolve into superhumanity (for more on this, see Graf’s Talking to the Gods].
Dion Fortune, meanwhile, thought that magicians and the guardian spirits of the race could cooperate to ensure the birth of superior humans, just as Merlin and the pagan gods had worked to engineer the birth of King Arthur . Her works of fiction and non-fiction have eugenic aims — she wants to initiate married couples into sex magic to help them to make ‘cosmic ties’, so that they have superior children and the future of the Anglo-Saxon race is assured (for more on this, see Georgia van Raalte’s recent article)
Fortune and Blackwood were both prolific writers of supernatural fiction, and its interesting to consider how this Golden Dawn meme of occult eugenics influenced later fantasy fiction, like Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Mists of Avalon, Frank Herbert’s Dune, George Lucas’ Star Wars, or JK Rowling’s Harry Potter books, all of which feature a world-saving avatar who has been magically bred to save the world (and who often has to fight off a lodge of black magicians to achieve their world-saving goal). Herbert’s idea of the Bene Gesserit, a magic order of priestesses who work over centuries to match families and breed a superbeing, seems to owe a lot to the ideas we find in the followers of the Golden Dawn and its off-shoots.
There is more that could be said about ‘occult eugenics’ — I haven’t covered American occultist Manly P. Hall’s 1922 lecture, ‘Occult Eugenics’, but it has the similar basic idea, that the ‘intellectual, spiritual and evolutionary progress of a race depends upon the ability of higher evolved egos to find proper vehicles of physical expression among the homes and parents of that race’. Nor do I have space to talk about the abortive efforts of American occultist and rocketeer Jack Parsons — assisted by L. Ron Hubbard — to use Crowleyian sex magic to incarnate a goddess (you can read about that here )
