Moina Bergson Mathers

Copywrite 1991 by Mary K. Greer

I am looking at two old photographs and suddenly it is London, 1887. Twenty-two-year-old art student Mina Bergson, a cloud of unruly dark hair wildly escaping the clasp that holds it, turns from her pencil study of an Egyptian pharaoh in the British Museum to discover a man staring at her. His determined, aristocratic air, and tall, obviously well-muscled body, seem more fitted to a parade ground than to this mausoleum of the dead. His wide-spaced eyes are severe, as if he could actually see the cold pride and hauteur of the pharaoh slowly but inevitably crumbling to dust; could it be himself he sees, dispassionately, remorselessly?

Mina shakes herself and tries to return to her sketch, but the man’s eyes won’t let her. Although his face remains white and still, dark shapes form around him, coalescing into a pharaonic wig crowned by a ring of three stars. His hands are crossed on what could only be the shadowy hilt of a gigantic sword layered with jewels and Celtic knots worked in gold. “I won’t marry him,” Mina murmurs to herself, surprised by the absurdity of the thought. Yet in a few months she becomes the first initiate of his new magical order, celebrating its inauguration and maiden neophyte ceremony simultaneously with her twenty-third birthday. She agrees just one year later to a spiritual marriage that will never be physically consummated, and so commences a life of total devotion in which her husband, MacGregor Mathers, is the mystic master and she, the priestess of Isis. [1]

Mina Bergson was born to orthodox Jewish parents in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1865. Her father, a professor of music, had moved around Europe teaching piano and attempting to escape the prevailing anti-Semitism. After leaving one son, Henri, in Paris to be educated by special scholarship, the family finally settled in England, where they lived on the genteel edge of poverty. Nevertheless they found the funds for Mina to study at the Slade School of Art from 1880 to 1886. She spent much of her time at the British Museum drawing and communing with Egyptian art and artifacts. When she met MacGregor Mathers in 1887, he had just published his first work, a translation of Knorr von Rosenroth’s Kabbalah Unveiled. Mathers, along with two other members of the Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia, had recently translated some mysterious cipher documents describing a series of ritual initiations. Writing to a Fraülein Sprengel whose address in Germany was included, they were allegedly authorized by letter to form a magical organization based on these rituals.

Mina (who now changed her name to the more Celtic Moina) and Mathers lived a life of ritual devotion and divined guidance in which each hour of the day was consecrated to particular gods and goddesses, and conversations with beings from other realms were commonplace. Mathers was the magician, creating rituals of great power and symbolism based on a doctrine of metaphysical correspondences. Moina was the high priestess of the goddess Isis, whom she perfectly embodied, not only for Mathers, but for the entire Order. She became their main clairvoyant, diviner, and channel for the visionary material used in the Inner Order rituals for evoking and influencing the gods. It was also Moina, using her artistic abilities and training, who designed ritual chambers creating grand and elaborate temple furnishings based on Egyptian motifs.

By all accounts Mathers was a dashing physical specimen: tall and slim, he was a former professional boxer scarred from a fencing duel. As a friend and associate of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, he had been a founding member of the Hermetic lodge of the Theosophical Society, along with the outspoken feminist Anna Kingsford, whose ideas influenced the male-female equality advocated by Mathers for the Golden Dawn’s magical workings.

Moina’s brother, Henri Bergson, raised and educated in Paris, became a famed French philosopher. His philosophy, which conceived of change and movement as being central to perceiving reality, stimulated the evolution of quantum physics, “stream of consciousness” literary technique, and the esthetics of abstract and expressionist art. He received the Nobel Prize for his physiologically- and psychologically-based concepts of human perception affirming the superiority of intuition to the analytic. Possibly influenced by Moina and Mathers, he also explored these areas as president of the British Society for Psychical Research.

Unlike the other three women, as we shall see, Moina Bergson upheld the Victorian mandate of genteel purity and devotion to her husband. On the other hand, she abandoned her family’s religious beliefs and chose to live a life of near-impoverishment dedicated to the goddesses and gods of the pagan world. Upon initiation in the Golden Dawn, each person chose a Latin motto reflecting ideas that became a theme in his or her life. Moina’s motto was Vestigia Nulla Retrorsum, meaning “I never retrace my steps.” Even when, years later, Mathers sank into depression and drink over the failure of his eccentric political fantasies, Moina, though worn by poverty, remained his staunch supporter, never admitting that he was less than the mystical genius she had first seen in him.