DR FELKIN & THE HOUSE OF THE SUN
The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, established in London in 1888, is arguably the best known group in the modern history of Western magic, a stature aided by famous members of the order such as the poet WB Yeats (see FT165:48, 329:46-48) and the occultist Aleister Crowley (see FT231 and passim). While the heyday of the Golden Dawn was relatively brief, with personality conflicts and theoretical schisms leading to its rapid decline in the early 1900s, it had a substantial afterlife in a seemingly most unlikely setting: the small provincial New Zealand town of Havelock North. According to the American religious scholar Robert S Ellwood, who devoted a chapter to the subject in his excellent study Islands of the Dawn: The Story of Alternative Spirituality in New Zealand (1990), the Havelock North version of the Golden Dawn constituted the order’s “second and greater incarnation”, as it “possessed a finer temple, more members, and greater ritual finesse than the British model”, as well as lasting much longer than the “faction-ridden” original. The story of the Golden Dawn down under combines colonial esotericism with one of the key members of the original Order: British doctor Robert Felkin.
THE HAVELOCK WORK
Havelock North was founded by the New Zealand government in the 1860s, on the fertile Heretaunga Plains in the Hawke’s Bay region on the south east coast of New Zealand’s North Island. The plains were rapidly developed into one of the agricultural breadbaskets of the dominion, leading to the establishment of Havelock North as a township that supported a prosperous local population of gentlemen-farmers. At the turn of the 20th century, the 800-plus population also included numerous prominent citizens interested in contemporary progressive thought. In 1906, New Zealander Reginald Gardiner and his wife Ruth, who had spent several years living in the latter’s native Canada, settled in Havelock North to join Reginald’s brother Allen, Reverend of St Luke’s, the local Anglican church.
THE OLD MAN MADE A SIGN LIKE A FLAME IN THE AIR BEFORE APPEARING TO VANISH
Over the next couple of years, while Reginald established himself as a regional businessman, the Gardiners’ homestead, Stadacona, became the focal point for a salon of alternative-minded locals from Anglican and Quaker backgrounds. Calling themselves the Society of the Southern Cross, the group sought to realise social and spiritual progress in a manner inspired by contemporary cultural developments such as the Arts and Crafts movement in the UK. Alongside scions
