Andrew Paul Wood on Shadow Worlds - A History of the Occult and Esoteric in New Zealand

Author Andrew Paul Wood.

Andrew Paul Wood tells David Herkt the story of Aotearoa New Zealand’s many occult organisations – and the intriguing people involved.

Aotearoa New Zealand has an unsuspected history, which is only now being revealed in its entirety.

Sir Edmund Hillary, when he first stood with Tenzing Norgay on the summit of Mt Everest in 1953, was already a member of an occult organisation, the Theosophical Society. The group had a belief that the spiritual evolution of humanity is overseen by a secret spiritual hierarchy, the Masters of Ancient Wisdom, who were supposedly based in the Himalayas. Hillary remained a member until the mid-1950s.

Then, somewhat surprisingly, for much of the 20th century, Havelock North in Hawke’s Bay was the world’s great centres for occult activity. The most powerful group in the town was directly descended from a secret English order, the Golden Dawn, which had included the poet W.B. Yeats and the Irish revolutionary, suffragette and actress Maud Gonne among its members.

The Havelock North organisation, founded in 1912, was named the Smaragdum Thalasses. It used a hidden basement temple, the Whare Ra, in a now heritage-listed Chapman Taylor house, for its initiation rites. The temple entrance was a concealed door in the back of a wardrobe. The British writer, C.S. Lewis, seems to have heard this story and it formed the basis for the mysterious entrance to Narnia in his children’s novel, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.

By the 1930s, the organisation had more than 300 local members, and it wasn’t the only occult group in the town. There were others, including the Radiant Living movement. Havelock North even had its own visiting alchemist, Frater Albertus, working on the Paracelsian transmutation of base-metals into gold.

“Our history is far from the bland and bucolic story that has been sold us,” explains Andrew Paul Wood, the author of the new and comprehensive Shadow Worlds: A History of the Occult and Esoteric in New Zealand. “So many of the leading and best-known figures in our colonial and modern history have been directly involved in the “high weird” of the organised occult and esoteric – sometimes on a global scale.

“The remains of it are all around, in our architecture, our politics, our heroes and our villains. I wanted to write this book because while it’s a relatively mainstream area of historical and sociological research these days, the general public have no idea quite how ubiquitous these things were and are – and how they moulded modern Aotearoa.

“I just wanted to “re-enchant” our history,” he adds. “It’s a carnival of fascinating characters, secrets and scandals, but also it’s an ordinary part of many ordinary people’s ordinary lives.”

“For instance, it amuses me endlessly,” he laughs, “that the White House, the Auckland nightclub and bordello, is in a huge, pillared building on Queen St, which was originally built as a Theosophical Temple. People pass it every day and just don’t know.”

While the writing of the book might have taken two or three years, Wood’s research has been very much a long-term project. He distils this knowledge around distinct occult movements – and the personalities behind them.

“Dr Robert Felkin is someone who is fascinating,” Woods begins, returning to the subject of Havelock North.

“He started in the Golden Dawn in England and spent time in Africa recording things like African medical practices and observed an indigenous caesarean section and wrote it up for a journal. He caught a huge number of diseases and acquired a drinking habit, returned to England in time for the implosion of the Golden Dawn, and eventually headed one of the splinter groups.

“He ended up in New Zealand, in Havelock North, working as a doctor, and he set up the Smaragdum Thalasses, which means ‘Emerald of the Seas’, more commonly known as the Whare Ra … Suddenly, Havelock North is not only the occult capital of New Zealand, but the occult capital of the world. It later became a major centre for Rudolf Steiner’s Anthroposophy movement and all sorts of other things ...

“They pretty much ran Havelock North. Occasionally someone would get upset about it and complain to the council.

Author Andrew Paul Wood.

“Felkin, when he arrived in New Zealand,” Wood adds, “was also the highest-ranking Freemason with the highest degree. Traditionally, until the mid-1950s, the Governor-General was always the top-ranking Freemason in the country, as well as being the head of the Scouts ... But when he was out of the country, Felkin became the highest-ranking Freemason.”

There was another splinter group from the Golden Dawn, headed by the notorious Aleister Crowley – a mountaineer like Sir Edmund Hillary, but someone who soon who was soon dubbed the “Wickedest Man in the World” by newspapers of the era because of the use of sex and drugs in his “magick”. He was also known as “the Great Beast” by some of his followers. Crowley had a number of New Zealand connections.

His tarot deck, used for divination and insight, is now regarded as one of the world’s more “potent” packs. It was illustrated by Lady Freida Harris, who worked with Crowley designing the cards.

“Freida married Percy Harris, who would go on to be a British politician and peer. Percy was the son of Wolf Harris, the founder of the prominent Dunedin firm Bing, Harris & Co,” says Wood. “Freida and Percy spent the first two years of married life in New Zealand before returning to the UK, but their son Jack went on to run the Dunedin company and was a high-profile figure in business and politics.”

Freida’s interest in the occult eventually led her to Crowley. He was then dependent on heroin, and between 1938 and 1943, the pair worked on the design of the deck of 78 cards published in 1944. Harris gave Crowley a stipend and she was one of the executors of his will.

There was also Katherine Mansfield.

“In the UK, any book written about her will talk about her connections to the Occult movement and her interest in the area … Yet in New Zealand, she has long been an untouchable person, so you never read about it, but there she is fluffing around with Aleister Crowley – doing hashish – and, of course, when she dies at Fontainebleau, it was run by the Russian-born mystic Gurdjieff … It seems to have been so difficult for the New Zealand literary establishment to touch these things.”

There were also the charismatic rogues and those who preyed upon people’s willingness to believe in something more than daily life and work.

“I have always been quite fascinated by Arthur Worthington,” explains Wood, “He was one of the country’s more notorious conmen and he has been edited out of history to an extent. I lived in Christchurch for over 20 years and I had never heard of him. He was an American bigamist and conman, and he turned up in 1890 in Christchurch.”

Worthington had a dizzying range of identities. He had been imprisoned and had more than eight bigamous marriages before he arrived in New Zealand. He had also discovered the financial rewards of preying on other people’s faith.

“I think of Christchurch as being fairly strait-laced and a picture of propriety, not long out of being a Church of England colony, but then Worthington arrives and within a year he’d managed to create a powerbase for himself where people were giving him money, hand over fist. He built himself a very impressive building with columns on Latimer Square as a place of worship and he had a huge house for him and his Mistress Magdala. The sexual and financial scandals were enormous.

“The more I got into the book, the more it created its own impetus, and so did the way it slotted into various progressive movements, like the Labour movement, early environmentalism, and particularly feminism,” Wood explains. “Almost inevitably, if I was looking at say a woman in the Theosophical Society or who was a medium, I would find their names on the Suffragette Rolls for woman’s suffrage.

“I soon realised – particularly in the 19th and early 20th century, up to World War II – that you had people who were otherwise marginalised by society, particularly women, and also to a certain extent Māori, who were forced out of holding positions of leadership, and who basically created for themselves a shadow society and economy, where they could do those things. Spiritualism didn’t exclude women for example, and it was sometimes it was one of the few opportunities women had of making money.”

Wood reveals the sheer variety of occult groups which have existed in New Zealand, from the Rosicrucians to the United Order of Ancient Druids, based in Grey Lynn, which had some 50 lodges throughout the country and was only wound up in 1995. The well-known Red Mole Theatre group in the 1970s conducted performances were often “rites” in an older sense of the word.

“Everyone has an image in their head of Sir Edmund Hillary, the solid, quiet, rugged type, but he had a very sensitive side as well and theosophy was – I don’t know whether mainstream is quite the right word – but it wasn’t that unusual. He certainly found a place for himself in the Radiant Living Movement.

“The shopfront of Radiant Living was respectable and straightforward and was about how you can improve your health by doing lots of special exercises and eating the appropriate diet, purging out all the toxins ... not that distant from a lot of fad diets these days, but at the back end it is all descendants of the invisible masters and magical rays,” Wood says.

“A lot of this has been ignored. These high-profile people appear in the history books and there are many stories about them and their involvement with the occult, but we feel that it is kind of embarrassing and we don’t want to deal with it. We feel it is shameful or discredits these people, but I don’t feel that at all.”

Shadow Worlds: The History of the Occult and Esoteric in New Zealand (Massey University Press, $55) is out on July 13.