Divine Feminine: Theosophy and Feminism in England

Introduction

1 Introduction On September 3, 1911, at precisely 10:59 a.m., Annie Besant, president of the Theosophical Society and Vice President Grand Master of the Supreme Council of Universal Co-Freemasonry, laid the foundation stone for the new Theosophical Headquarters in London, just off Tavistock Square in Bloomsbury. The day and time were carefully chosen so that “the influence of the ruling planets should bless the work with power and success,” and the ceremony was conducted with full Masonic rites. The foundation stone had been ceremonially incensed as the Theosophical Society’s general secretary played music from Wagner’s Parsifal on the organ; it had been laid and tested by the perpendicular, the plumb line, and the level; now corn, wine, oil, and salt were scattered on the stone with the requisite invocations. Co-Masonry, a form of Freemasonry that admitted women, was (unof ficially) a “subsidiary activity” of the Theosophical Society in England . The Co-Masonic procession at the groundbreaking ceremony added more than just the charm of pageantry to the occasion; these invocations and rituals were designed to produce specific spiritual effects . The temporary hall on the site had been converted into a Masonic Temple for the occasion, and the ceremony had begun at 9:45 a.m. with an appeal to the Great Architect of the Universe. The Brethren were then marshaled into a great procession, which marched around the grounds to be used for the new building. The Brethren wore their Masonic regalia, the women dressed in white robes along with the aprons, collars, and jewels of their rank. It was a solemn occasion, as the “blue of the Craft, the bright scarlet of the Rose Croix, the tesselated sashes of the Royal and Holy Arch, the black and silver of the 30°, and the white and gold of the 33° passed by.” As church bells pealed in the background , the ceremony concluded with a chorus of “God Save the King” (Masonic version), and the procession re-formed in reverse order and returned to the lodge, which was closed in due and ancient form.1 A few months earlier, on June 17, 1911, a very different procession had moved through London: at the last of the great suffrage marches, 2 divine feminine The groundbreaking ceremony at the TS London Headquarters in 1911. (Adyar Library and Research Centre) the Women’s Coronation Procession, forty thousand women from all of Britain’s suffrage societies had paraded through London, along with their male supporters in the Men’s Leagues. The Women’s Coronation Procession was a counterpoint to the largely male royal processions held to celebrate the coronation. The procession dramatized, before the eyes of a watching empire, both women’s patriotism and their exclusion from the political nation. It mobilized a range of symbolic and material resources in a spectacular display of women’s solidarity in pursuit of their political goal.2 Both processions symbolically claimed a measure of urban space as their own. The suffrage marchers traced a public, political space for women on the streets of the capital, from the Embankment to the Albert Hall. The Co-Masons, in contrast, marked out a more circumscribed space on Tavistock Square, a space that was sacred and ceremonial rather than directly political. (The site is occupied today by the British Medical Association.) There were also important links between the two processions, links that have not been traced by historians. Most histories of the suffrage movement have given short shrift to women’s religiosity. Religion is treated primarily as a language that women used to express more “real” (for which read secular and political) concerns. Women’s politics and introduction 3 women’s spirituality have been dealt with in separate literatures, and only a few attempts have been made to map the relationships between them.3 So, for example, the artist Pamela Colman Smith appears in one tradition as a minor figure in the Suffrage Atelier (formed in 1909 to mobilize women’s art as suffrage propaganda). She appears in an entirely separate tradition as the artist who executed A. E. Waite’s vision for what has become known as the Rider-Waite tarot deck, the most popular and best known such deck in England or North America.4 This historiographical division of labor erases the connections between spirituality and politics in feminist political culture—connections that were clear to contemporary critics. It is...