The Fringes of the Weird

My spiritual director’s training incumbent had been a directee of Fr Reginald Somerset Ward (which takes us back quite a way as Fr Ward retired in 1958), and has pondered whether some of RSW’s attitudes have rubbed off on him as a result. He will sometimes solemnly inform me that ‘Fr Somerset Ward would have advised you to take up woodwork’ or the like. It was a surprise that, when we were once discussing a brush I’d had (at second hand, I hasten to stress) with some anomalous spiritual phenomena, he claimed that ‘Somerset Ward was sort of on the outer fringe of that kind of world’ – because there is no trace of it in Ward’s writings that I have ever found.

But – following on from some of my speculations about the Golden Dawn the other week – I discover that there is a certain family connection between that outré ritual magicking and Fr Ward’s sober English mysticism. I already knew that there were clergy involved in the Golden Dawn, most notably Revd William Ayton, who married the G.D.’s Supreme Magus Samuel MacGregor Mathers to his formidable wife Moina Bergson, and who, so WB Yeats alleged, lived in perpetual terror of his bishop discovering the alchemical laboratory in his cellar. However, I hadn’t quite twigged how one of the Golden Dawn’s offshoots, the Stella Matutina, was explicitly Christian in focus. Adherents of other religions could be members of the S.M., but whereas the parent order had thought of Christianity as one reflection of an overarching esoteric tradition, the Stella Matutina saw the occult work as an aspect of Christianity. As the head of the order, Robert Felkin, stated, the suggestion was that in addition to the open, exoteric doctrines of the Church, Jesus had communicated to the disciples secret techniques of spiritual working which the occult world had now rediscovered for the benefit of the human race. We now know that what various writers have hinted was indeed actually the case, that several brothers of the Community of the Resurrection at Mirfield were members of the S.M., including Timothy Rees who eventually became Bishop of Llandaff and Frank Selwyn Bennett who was eventually Dean of Chester, as was – perhaps most surprisingly – the redoubtable Fr Alban Baverstock, twice Master of the Society of the Holy Cross. The old suggestion that there was a link between clergy who were members of the Stella Matutina and the founding of the Guild of St Raphael, which revived the healing ministry within the Anglican Church, seems to be true. When Felkin set up the branch of his Order in New Zealand – the Smaragdus-Thalasses Temple – not one bishop but several ended up as members, joining while they were bishops. That future mystical writer Evelyn Underhill was part of this was already well known, but the extent of clerical involvement is news.

We all know this because of a 2009 PhD Exeter PhD thesis by one Anthony Fuller, which traces particularly the links between Anglo-Catholics and these occult organisations. As Mr (I presume now Dr) Fuller points out, at the time the Community of the Resurrection wasn’t that large, and given that members of the Stella Matutina had to carry out a whole series of practical magical exercises and even take exams to advance in the order, its Superior, Fr Walter Frere – later Bishop of Truro – must have known what they were doing and, like them, seen no necessary contradiction between such occult antics and Christian orthodoxy, however weird we might find it now. Dr Fuller’s most striking claim is that some aspects of the original Golden Dawn’s ways of doing things were transferred from the Society of the Holy Cross – founded thirty years earlier – probably via CM Davies, an Anglican priest who had founded the SSC along with Fr Charles Lowder and others, but then renounced his orders. He wasn’t actually an adept of the G.D., but his wife was and he organised his own group for mystical Christian meditation, the Guild of the Holy Spirit. A bold and unprovable speculation; but not an unreasonable one.

So what of Fr Somerset Ward – neither, clearly, an occultist, nor even really an Anglo-Catholic (though definitely a Catholic Anglican)? His interest was in the English mystical tradition of the Middle Ages – the tradition of Richard Rolle, Walter Hilton, and Mother Julian, all of whom were being rediscovered by Anglican Churchpeople in the later 1800s. Ordained in London in 1896 – at exactly the same time that MacGregor Mathers was at his height – Ward was part of a movement to develop a deeper, more serious spiritual life among Christians. He looked back to the Middle Ages for clues as how to do it, how to recover a tradition of spiritual working which was more than just Bible reading and creed-reciting and which was not a million miles from the sacramentalism championed by the first couple of generations of the Catholic Revival in the Church of England. Others, conversely, delved into more esoteric ways of doing things to achieve exactly the same. In a sardonic mood we might ascribe the occult’s appeal to some Anglo-Catholics to dressing-up and ritual complexity, but we could read it more generously as a reflection of a genuine religious instinct: a desire to go deeper into God, even (as in the Guild of St Raphael and the experiences of Agnes Sanford) to see the most altruistic and hopeful of one’s prayers answered, prayers for healing and reconciliation. Fr Somerset Ward appears in stone on the west front of Guildford Cathedral, and just feet away from him is Evelyn Underhill, who was definitely a member of the Stella Matutina and – so Golden Dawn writer Ithell Colquhoun wondered – whose vision that led to her conversion may have been sparked off by G.D. techniques.

AC Fuller states (though without any source) that an Anglican episcopal enquiry about the year 1939 resulted in an instruction that no ordained person should be a member of any occult society. This would have been five years after Dennis Wheatley’s The Devil Rides Out was serialized in the Daily Mail and by then Middle England might have been very familiar with the motif of the clerical diabolist operating under the cover of collar and cassock. If this enquiry did actually happen (and I can’t uncover any actual evidence it did) the Anglican hierarchy would have realised, if they didn’t already know, that the picture wasn’t completely removed from the truth. In 1946 that odd figure Fr Lionel Smithett Lewis, vicar of Glastonbury, carried out the funeral service for Dion Fortune, who had always thought of herself as a Christian; by then, occultism wasn’t just a neutral spiritual technique. The ‘fringes’ of that world were far more clearly defined.