Book review: Madeline Montalban The Magus of St Giles by Julia Philips

Madeline Montalban (8 January 1910–11 January 1982) was a fascinating character in the field of 20th century magic. Stories swarmed around her until the real Madeline disappeared leaving only the stories. Writing a biography about her, as Julia Philips has done is nearly impossible, even her close friends had difficulty getting past the stories that surrounded her.

In 1998 David Goddard told me one such story about how he and Maxine Saunders met Montalban to discuss her legendary Angel Magic course. He said he had never met her before and it was a late at night meeting. He believed that she was a woman in her late 40s. They sat up talking until dawn and when the sun came into the room he suddenly realised that she must have been about 80 and he believed that she must have been casting a glamour.

Philips' book then is a collection of stories about her told through the people that knew her and there are a lot of them. In her life it is hard to find a notable occultist who was not connected to Madaline at some point. Phillips has done a good job tracking down and interviewing her students and friends and this manages to give us a good picture about the sort of person she was.

From my perspective I was interested in Madeline's connection to the Order of the Golden Dawn. Madeline formed a magic order called the Order of the Morning Star and I had worked with some of that material. There were elements of it which could be seen as being inspired by the Golden Dawn.  When I met him, the French occultist Nicolas Tereshenko told me that he was a member of Madeline Montalban's Order of the Morning Star and he said that this had links to the Golden Dawn. On a web site connected to him it claimed that he had the grade of Adeptus Maximus in her order.

I was also aware that my former teacher David Goddard had been teaching material based around the Order of the Morning Star which he described as a system of Angel Magic which pre-dated John Dee was was more reliable because “it did not come through a tainted scryer like Edward Kelly.” He also claimed he was one of the few in an ancient line of Angelic initiators who had the right to teach it.

Phillips shows that Montalban was a different sort of magician from those who were following the Golden Dawn line. Indeed she looked upon them with contempt. Her magic system, which was self created and based on her researches at the British Library, was deliberately less dramatic and simple. It was also based on her own story of Lucifer the Light Bringer. Instead of a dramatic ritual she would use an altar, talismans, tarot cards and a clearly written intention translated into a magical script. This would then be activated by working with a planetary angel on the correct day.

All this was placed in a series of 42 lessons which were a correspondence course. Promising students were sometimes given extra training but the Order of the Morning Star was the same course of Angel Magic which David had talked about. There were no initiations, no grades, it was exactly the magical path that Montalban wanted. It was certainly not connected to the Golden Dawn or any method of Angelic initiations.

To clarify this I contacted the author who told me that there was was no link she could find between Madeline and the GD.

“She was scathing about GD-style lineage and initiations so I can't imagine she would ever have any real connection to any GD group. Going along as an invited guest is another matter - she would totally do that and then ridicule it all later!” Phillips wrote.

Madeline Montalban 

All I can think of is that Nicolas Tereshenko thought the Order of the Morning Star was an English translation for the Stella Matutina. However it would be difficult how he could claim a high grade in an order that despised grades and certainly did not have an Adeptus Maximus grade.

The book also looks at Montalban's influence on Wicca. The Angel Magic system found its way into the teachings of Maxine Saunders where it was treated with a reverential awe. It is one of the few times I saw a senior Alexandrian witch throw his toys out of the pram was when he discovered that I had some parts of the course and I was not an initiated witch.

But Montalban also had a close connection with Wicca's founder Gerald Gardner and was probably his ghost writer for High Magic's Aid. As a journalist, writing regularly for Prediction Magazine on Tarot and Astrology,  she was well equipped to adapt the book from his notes. Later in her life she did not seem to hold him in much regard.

Like the “Old Sod” which was a biography about Bill Gray which I reviewed earlier, this book has to tackle the fact that its subject had a reputation for being difficult. Montalban appears to have thrown temper tantrums just because she was bored and also tended to embellish her stories.  She could also be manipulative of her students.  In the case of her stories it was because she often wanted to make a point, but sometimes it was just for the joy of telling it. Julia Phillips deals with all this in the polite way of someone who admires her subject -- calling her "mercurial". But this attitude appears to be backed up by Montalban's students, such as Leo Vinci, who feel the same way.

For the reader there is a message. Madeline's path made her the Avatar for the self initiate. Not only did she managed to prove that such a path was possible, she convinced a lot of people that it was a better way. But Madeline was different from many modern occultists. Her self initiation system was harder than many would bother with and was built on countless hours of study and thought. However it is the way of magic that if one person manages to do it, and built their own system, then it should be possible for others.

The book is well worth it.  My only problem with it is that it is a little short and I would have liked to have seen more stories of Madeline's magic in action. 

There are not many copies of Magus of St Giles available. The print run is limited to 400 signed copies which are available from AtlantisBookshop  in the UK. Given that the shop's owner Geraldine Beskin is quoted in the book, and the shop was one of Madeline's haunts it is probably the most appropriate place to buy it. I bought it online from them. I am told that Weiser Antiquarian in the US has a few copies too.

Golden Dawn Beginners Reading List

Aaron Leitch has just published a list of books which are useful for Golden Dawn and general magical studies here


His list, which is for beginners includes :

The Essential Golden Dawn : An Introduction to High Magic - Chic and Tabatha Cicero


Modern Magick: Twelve Lessons in the High Magickal Arts – Donald Michael Kraig

Self-Initiation Into the Golden Dawn Tradition: A Complete Curriculum of Study for Both the Solitary Magician and the Working Magical Group – Chic and Tabatha Cicero

Secrets of a Golden Dawn Temple – Chic and Tabatha Cicero

The Golden Dawn Ritual Tarot – Tabatha Cicero and Chic Cicero

The Golden Dawn: The Original Account of the Teachings, Rites & Ceremonies of the Hermetic Order – edited by Israel Regardie

The Complete Golden Dawn System of Magic – edited by Israel Regardie

A Garden of Pomegranates: Skrying on the Tree of Life – Israel Regardie, Chic and Tabatha Cicero

The Middle Pillar: The Balance Between Mind and Magic – Israel Regardie, Chic and Tabatha Cicero

Prometheus Rising – Robert Anton Wilson, Introduced by Israel Regardie.

Ishtar Rising: Or, Why the Goddess Went to Hell and What to Expect Now That She’s Returning – Robert Anton Wilson

Experiencing the Kabbalah: A Simple Guide to Spiritual Wholeness – Chic and Tabatha Cicero

Making Talismans: Living Entities of Power – Nick Farrell

King Over the Water: Samuel Mathers and the Golden Dawn - Nick Farrell

Mathers’ Last Secret REVISED – The Rituals and Teachings of the Alpha et Omega – Nick Farrell

By Names and Images: Bringing the Golden Dawn to Life – Peregrin Wildoak


I have not read anything by  Robert Anton Wilson and have only glanced through Modern Magick.  But to this list I would add:

Mystical Cabbalah, by Dion Fortune
(Still the best intro to Golden Dawn Cabbalah)

Training and Work of an Initiate by Dion Fortune

Esoteric Orders and Their Work  by Dion Fortune

Magician his Training and Work by Ernest Butler

Magical Imagination by Nick Farrell
I am biased but I still think this is one of the first books to help understand inner states of magic – Perigrin's is another.

The Magical Tarot of the Golden Dawn by Pat and Chris Zalewski

For the History I would add
Magicians of the Golden Dawn Ellic Howe

The “next level” of books is very long and includes everything that has been written by Pat and Chris Zalewski and Darcy Kuntz

Thoth, Neo-platonism and the Golden Dawn

The Order of the Golden Dawn makes a lot of use of the Egyptian God Thoth as one of the primal forces behind the Order. There are a number of good reasons for this, most of which are buried in secrecy. Not the secrecy in that they are protected by oaths but he secrecy that means they cannot be expressed and need to be found out. Words that are written down are not the real secrets of magic but shadows of an unexpressed truth. Once you know even a hint of them them, you are given a cosmology and a theory of magic which applies to the entire system, particularly the Golden Dawn's Z documents.

Thoth by Paola Farrell

There are many myths in connection with the birth of Thoth, but the one which is most interesting links him to Neo-Platonic thought which found expression within the Golden Dawn.

The Egyptians believed that before the Universe existed there was a watery mass of dark, directionless chaos. In this chaos lived four frog gods and four snake goddesses of chaos who interacted an created an explosion which formed a mound of earth to rise from the waters. This was the Milky Way which became identified with Hathor. On this mound Thoth, in the form of an Ibis, laid an egg and from this egg came Ra and the other Gods and thus the Earth was created.

The Neo-platonic idea of creation is that the First Mind is unknowable. In fact it can only be defined by what it is not. It is similar to the cabbalistic idea of the Ain. It is No-Thing and everything. But for some reason, unknown to us, this First Mind decided to create. A focus of itself created the Second Mind which formed ideas and from these ideas creation was built. This Second Mind was the Logos, or Word. This is what John's gospel means when it says:

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with [more properly stood before] God, and the Word was God.”

The word Logos means a lot more than just “word” it also means logic, reason and mind. These were all things that were directly attributed to Thoth. To the Egyptians words created the universe but also bought Order to chaos. This is why Thoth's wife was Maat, who represents cosmic order, and his mistress (lesser wife) was Seshat the goddess of writing.

Thoth is the prism that reveals the primal gods of the spectrum

By looking at these two different systems we see similarities. The first mind decides to create and instantly Thoth is present to create the world out words, ideas and stories. From these ideas come the gods.

These are not literal Gods but seven primal ideas (eight if you count Thoth himself). Metaphorically these primal ideas are better seen as colours of the visible spectrum rather than actual beings, or superficially their planetary attributions.

What humanity did was to place masks of myth and attributions onto these primal gods. Each of these seven is two faced having both active and passive sides, which symbolically became male and female, husbands and wives.

This process happened through-out each culture with each society picking a different colour to lead them. Roman culture for example choose Jupiter and Juno to lead them until replacing it with a very Jupiter and Juno form of Christianity.

Sometimes these Gods were made into monotheistic cults, but their inherent separateness from “Thoth” or the No-Thing. Is your god or goddess loving, mighty, just, truth etc? These are ideas. A real One Thing is not these things and is paradoxically all of them. Christianity has reflected Venus (or green ray) love cults, a solar cult and saturnian rays. Judaism shows signs of Saturn, Jupiter and Mars. Muslims are a mixture of Venus, Mars, Saturn and Jupiter rays. Even the different flavours of Buddhism emphasis different rays with some liking Saturn with others are more Mercurial. While it is possible to argue that such “ray influences” are contaminations to the idea of Monotheism it would be hard, for example, to imagine any of the Judio-christian religions without an emphasis on death and the law (Saturn) which are ideas and not the way the No Thing works. Buddhism requires its followers to follow a path and rules just as much as the Moslem faith, and these too are Saturnian.

No magician should look to create a universe from a single fragment, or sign up to a single expression of a God or Goddess. They should know that the universe is created within the One Thing and not look to Gods and Goddesses to provide them with personal salvation.  Instead they should be working to try and unite those forces and get beyond them.

Thoth is interesting because he is both a creator and appears in the Egyptian Myths as an arbiter and a balancer. As a god he is bringing all seven of the primal forces into balance (normally associated with his wife Maat). What this implies is that all the seven rays are illusions, reflections of Thoth-Maat's Truth. All actions and reactions are observed by Thoth who acts to restore the balance when things get out of hand. He does this not by the standards of law (which would be Saturn) but by the standards of the One Thing's plan.

This places Thoth in an interesting position, one which would normally be attributed to a Solar force – that of Redeemer. I do not mean that “Thoth died for your sins” that is a solar cult thing, but rather that Thoth is the abstract force that restores the balance and makes sure that Creation does not stop.

If you think of it in human terms, if the Universe was a person it would always make the same mistakes and never learn. Thoth makes sure that every experience results in evolution. So while it appear that history repeats itself a lot, it never repeats itself in exactly the same way ever again. Thoth is the One Thing's way of forgiving itself and restoring balance.

As the writer of John's gospel worked out, this makes Thoth Christ. Thoth is the word, and the logos and he is the great force of redemption in the universe. He does not, as a solar ray deity does, need to be sacrificed. Thoth knows that deep redemption happens in the universal mind, which has nothing to sacrifice anything to.

So where does Thoth sit within the Golden Dawn? In the outer order he has two places within the temple. The first is that of the Cancellerious which is a superficial understanding of his role as a god of letters. But also he stands behind the four chiefs as the sum total of all of them. He is the divine mercury which is created from the salt of matter.

In the Second Order it is through Thoth that all Z document happens. It is he who sets the template for the idea of magic working. This places the Golden Dawn magician in an interesting position. The idea of magic is seen as above the seven primal gods, but at the same time uses them.

The Particular Exordium of Z1 describes Thoth standing at “the ending of the light and the limits of Night” In otherwords he is the Alpha and Omega who stands at the dawn and sunset before the unborn ones of Time. This is a reference to the Gods who are sitting in their egg waiting to be born.

Before Ra leaves the cosmic egg, there is no time, no day or night.

Then the universe is created and the “AEONS of the Bornless Beyond” are born. In other words these are the seven primal gods or rays.

“Then was the Voice (ie the Logos, Thoth) vibrated: Then was the Name declared.”

Thoth stands at the threshold of the Entrance, Between the Universe and the Infinite, in the Sign of the Enterer while the Gods energy. Mathers' blurs this by claiming that the threshold of the entrance was the 0=0 grade, however the implication is clearly macro-cosmic too.

“In Breath did he vibrate them:
In Symbols did he record them:
For between the Light and the Darkness did he stand.
Thus are the Formulas of wisdom.”

Put basically this is the Neo-platonic view of the creation of the Gods by Thoth and the formula of magic which can be used.

When a Golden Dawn magician vibrates they are calling into creation the seven primal gods who work the rite of magic, whether it be an initiation or something minor. In essence they are working with the magician to create a new universe using the same method as Thoth.

This is the reason why the candidate stands between the pillars in the 0=0 ritual. They are standing between the ultimate light and the ultimate darkness, just like Thoth, and are creating a universe in their own sphere of sensation. Throughout their occult career they will initiate themselves in into the seven Aeons or rays and return to Thoth and look to the greater mysteries of the One Thing.