Chapter 5 - Occult Ecology and the Decadent Feminism of Moina Mathers and Florence Farr

Summary

In her writings, Vernon Lee at times formulates the spirit of place as a transhistorical, gynocentric paganism, but a number of her contemporaries took on a more explicit consideration of the pagan as a site of feminist self-realization. Chapter 5 turns fromworks about the spirit of moving through place to works addressing another form of movement: actual pagan ritual. Enmeshed within both the London decadent community and New Woman politics, Moina Mathers and Florence Farr were also among the most influential occultists of the pagan revival. These two leaders of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn developed ecological models in which human-centred measures of space and time are replaced by an understanding of the self as an evanescent engagement within an occult ecology. Taking a lesson from painter Frederick Sandys, this chapter is not about searching for occult symbols in decadent art or literature. Rather, it addresses the decadent spirit within occult works aimed, in part, at destabilizing modern gender inequality.