F is for Florence Farr

Florence Farr (later Florence Emery) was a rare bird in the Victorian England of her youth and the Ceylon of her later years.  She lived from 1860 to 1917, and was an actress, a suffragette, a teacher, a muse, a playwright, and a renegade spell-caster.

I discovered her in relation to the last item in the above list.  She was a member of the famed Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.  Her skills as an actress were put to good use in the ritual temple; fellow initiate William Butler Yeats noted that her resonant voice could bring shivers to the entire room.  Like many other magicians of the time, she wasn't satisfied with the "curriculum" of their little club, and branched out with her own experiments.  She collected select friends together to engage in clairvoyant scrying to make contact with ancient Egyptian forces and masters who would impart their wisdom.

People may read the above and giggle a bit at the implications of schoolgirl seances and Ouija boards, but it was pretty serious business for Farr and her associates.  She wrote in an internal Golden Dawn document that

"It is the object of our lives as initiates to bring this Will to such a state of perfection, strength, and wisdom, that instead of being the plaything of fate and finding our calculations entirely upset by trivial material circumstances, we build within ourselves a fortress of strength to which we can retire in time of need."

Magic = depth psychology!  The results of her private workings, in a sub-group she called "The Sphere," were eventually the subject of envy from the other Order members who weren't invited.  It's amusing to read the letters of those outraged occultists, who disparaged her work in one paragraph, then in the next paragraph complained that she wasn't sharing the results of that work with the rest of the class!  :-)

The actual content of her visions was often quite artistically striking.  An example from A Dialogue of Vision (archived with some of her other works here)...

"I see a track of the red footprints of birds, leading to a wonderful sun; flights and flights of heavy bodied birds fly in circles round it. I count seven flights. In the sun is a cauldron where the black and white natures are melted. The pathway of red footprints means blood sacrifice, threefold renunciation, three passions for stripping the soul naked of its ignorance and illusions. One passion is love of the mystical sun. One is the passion for shining wisdom and one is a passion for energetic action. The gods never follow those paths. They are only for souls incarnate. Incarnation means a fusion of worldstuff and consciousness. In a god’s consciousness nothing exists because everything subsists. It is impossible to be conscious of omniscience because it is omniscience. So that in our sense a god is unconscious."

She also distilled these insights into avant garde plays, usually with Egyptian themes.  A modern production of these plays was discussed here; all proceeds went to breast cancer research, which is what took Florence Farr from the world too young at the age of 56.