Saturday, April 6, 2013

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.

8 comments:

  1. I think of breast cancer as a modern affliction so am surprised that she passed so early of the disease in 1917. This was a fantastic profile,Cyg -- inspiring in surprising ways.

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    1. A lot of what I know about Farr comes from a very good biography. But I also learned a lot from those internal Golden Dawn documents that she wrote (they called them "Flying Rolls"); I think that Crowley had many of her words floating around in his head when he channeled the Book of the Law, too.

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  2. Another person I never heard of, and whom you've brought to life. That's a great portrait of her reclining on a fainting couch...smoking a cigarette?

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    1. It's hard to see if that's a cigarette or not; I couldn't find a better version of that old photo. It certainly has an unusually spontaneous and natural look for a photo from those days. It's a press photo from one of her appearances in a play by George Bernard Shaw. (Shaw had a crush on her, and created specific parts in his plays just for her!)

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  3. What a great theme you've come up with, and how refreshing that you're not focusing on all the usual suspects. I've never heard of Florence Farr before, but I'm glad to have discovered her via your blog.

    Fascinating reading! I'll be back for more.

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    1. Thanks, Kern! I hope not to disappoint, but there will be a few more well-known names popping up soon.

      (However, I just trashed my idea for letter "T" for being too well-known -- and not interesting enough to me to rehash wikipedia. My new "T" will be a husband and wife pair who are totally unique and well away from the beaten path...)

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  4. Our dinner party has its first female guest! I think that is a cigarette.

    I've read a lot recently about the importance of the occult in Victorian era society. It was big in the United States at the time, too.

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    1. Oh yes... have a look at Paul Foster Case and Jack Parsons -- true American originals! (The latter comes a bit too late to be Victorian, but he was macheteing through the metaphorical jungle on the same path laid out by Crowley and the Golden Dawn...)

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