In 1920, summoning the ghost of Florence Farr in his poem All Souls’ Night, William Butler Yeats wrote of his departed friend:
Before that end much had she ravelled out
From a discourse in figurative speech
By some learned Indian
On the soul's journey. How it is whirled about,
Wherever the orbit of the moon can reach,
Until it plunge into the sun;
And there, free and yet fast,
Being both Chance and Choice,
Forget its broken toys
And sink into its own delight at last.
Before becoming the Principal of a Girls’ school in Ceylon, where she died in 1917 at the age of fifty-seven, Florence Farr Emery had been an actress, a producer, a playwright, a feminist, a journalist and a novelist. With Yeats, she had also been a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a group created “for the purpose of the study of Occult Science, and the further investigation of the Mysteries of Life and Death, and our Environment”, as declared on the charter of its Isis-Urania Temple in London. Farr was initiated into the Order in July 1890, under the name of Sapientia Sapienti Dono Data, “Wisdom (or Knowledge) is a Gift Given to the Wise”. This was her “secret motto”, one which - as hinted in Yeats’ summoning - she would honour through the rest of her days.
Farr’s early encounters with the pursuit of knowledge had left her unimpressed, if not outright disgusted. She had found formal education, in the shape of a regular course of studies at Queen’s College in Harley Street, “damaging to the vital apparatus”. She was relieved to abandon it in 1880, to embark on an acting career which (briefly interrupted by a marriage happily ended in divorce) would eventually see her at the forefront of the Ibsenite movement. This, however, to the annoyance of her friend and lover George Bernard Shaw, was only one side of Farr’s polyhedric intellectual persona. With William Butler Yeats, for example, she was the beating heart of a movement for the rediscovery of oral poetry, which cast its long shadow both on the Celtic Revival and on classical scholarship.
Farr’s distaste for schooling was counterbalanced by a clear attitude for scholarship and research, which manifested all through her life. In his Autobiographies, Yeats did not conceal his resentment for Farr’s dedication to research, which he perceived as an hindrance to her role as a muse: “she was soon to spend her days in the British Museum reading-room and become erudite in many heterogeneous studies, moved by an insatiable, destroying curiosity.” For anyone in the know, this assessment of her intellectual thirst as “insatiable, destroying curiosity” was a clear reference to the tarot card of the Fool.
Her interest in the occult is perhaps the one factor unifying all of Farr’s intellectual pursuits. Even before they joined the Golden Dawn, her collaboration with Yeats was full of magical undertones. It started one evening in 1889, in the garden at Bedford Park, when Yeats saw Farr invoking the Moon Goddess Selene as the shepherd-priestess Amaryllis, in John Todhunter’s A Sicilian Idyll. It was both her image as a priestess and her voice, which classical scholar Jane Harrison would later call “mesmerising”, that captured Yeats’ imagination. It set him on a life-long mission for the promotion of oral poetry, in which he was joined by Farr and instrument maker Arnold Dolmetsch.
For her part, Farr was always attracted to the possibility of blurring the lines between play-acting, ritual and reality. Her vital contribution to the oral poetry movement, which she continued indefatigably until her move to Ceylon, went towards fulfilling Farr’s interest in performance as a kind of ritual, and vice versa: as she would write in her 1909 pamphlet The Music of Speech, “there is a magic about all arts, because all the arts can be traced to old religions.”
This was also the appeal in the ritualist magic of the Golden Dawn. Founded in 1887, the Order of placed particular emphasis on learning and scholarship, as well as on the practice of rituals. Farr rapidly went through the first four levels of initiation, from zelator to philosophus, in what was primarily an intellectual development based on learning and examinations. By 1895, she had become the Praemonstratrix, the officer in charge or rituals. In this role, she supervised Yeats’ access to the second level of the adepts, as well as initiating into the Order a young Aleister Crowley. Despite her status within the Order, Farr’s thirst for knowledge led her to found a selective group within the Isis-Urania Temple — The Sphere, focusing on the study of Egyptian symbols and rituals. This, together with the discovery that the founding documents of the Order were a forgery, eventually led to a falling out and a schism within the Golden Dawn.
Once that chapter of that life was closed, Farr looked for the power of ritual elsewhere. She found it in the philosophy of Nietzsche and in that Greek Religion to which she seemed to have been destined ever since her performance as Amaryllis. In 1903, she founded The Dancers, “A Fellowship … to fight the High and Powerful Devil, Solemnity”. The group would meet to “restore or design beautiful dances, music and poems, which will inspire the indifferent with the enthusiasm and courage which gives a lasting rapture to existence.” Sitting at the crossroads between ritual magic, Greek religion, art and philosophy, this of all her endeavours is perhaps the one that best syncretised Farr’s polyhedric interests.
Her meeting in 1902 with Tamil Ponnambalam Ramanthan, a lecturer on Eastern philosophy in London, had further enlarged Farr’s philosophical framework. This is reflected in Farr’s fiction production, much of which plays with the connection between ritual magic and philosophical enquire. Her two plays set in Ancient Egypt, The Beloved of Hathor and The Shrine of the Golden Hawk, are nothing if not a philosophical exercise, as is her second novel The Solemnisation of Jacklin: some adventures on the search for reality. A running theme through all these works is the tension between reality and spirituality, between passion and knowledge. Farr’s reflections, in her diary as well as in her published work, often strayed on the philosophy of Shopenauer, on the interaction between the Will Force and Maya — that is, the world as it appears. For Florence Farr, magic was a way to enact that philosophy: magic rituals allowed the practitioner to strengthen her Will Force and use it to tear Maya. In other words, as Farr wrote, “magic is unlimiting experience”.
In spite of her early rejection of education, learning was always an essential part of Florence Farr’s magical experience, though her “insatiable, destroying curiosity” did not always bring satisfactory results. As she demurely noted in her diary, after a life dedicated to “teaching” in one form or another, she felt that no one was wiser for all her efforts, while “half baked people like Yeats and Shaw have tremendous influence and they only tell half truths”. It is no chance that she spent the last days of her life supervising the education of young girls.
Yet, one may question whether Farr’s assessment of her own influence was accurate. Written three years after her death, Yeats’ All Souls Night is a tribute to Farr in more ways than one. As a character in the poem, her ghost is summoned willy-nilly; as an occultist and a philosopher, her spirit lives on in the very acts of writing and reading about a soul’s journey through art and eternity.