"My red-haired niece once said to me, 'I'm so furious at my Quaker cousin. She says I have to be dull and good like her and not wicked and interesting like Aunt Olivia!' Would you like a biscuit?"
A thin, diminutive, high-spirited woman who could easily play the role of one of the witches in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz ("I'm not a witch, but I am psychic," she asserts), Olivia continually displays a sparrowlike quickness of gesture and speech, darting from one subject to another with surprising asides and startling non sequiturs ("Do you know if you feed bees sugar they get diarrhea?" she asked one journalist, apropos of nothing). She has a lively, witty, and eccentric sense of humor; believes in reincarnation, UFOs, and ghosts ("We prefer to think of them as spirit friends," she says); and intersperses her unflaggingly dramatic and rapid discourse with plummy public school locutions and exclamations like "Golly!" and "Gosh!" and "Absolutely smashing!" as if she were a character out of a children's book by Angela Brazil or Enid Blyton. "You see," Olivia explains, "if you think of your life as a circle, a great circuit, and not as a segment, you realize you need to keep it all. Most people do it in this linear way, one, two, three, four, hitting one note at a time each day. So when they're old, they've lost middle age, and when they're middle-aged, they've lost youth. What we do is go in a circle and play all the notes of the piano all the time. You want to play the symphony of life and not be stuck in one little bar of it."
But when asked a question that requires an extended answer, as when I inquire how she became what she is today, Olivia becomes silent, closes her eyes, and slowly replies. "If you could let me tune in a bit, because I'm rather inclined to talk inspirationally . . ." Then, after another long pause, she brings herself back to what her red-haired niece said about her.
"The Protestant church, in which I was brought up, used to suggest that if you wore makeup or looked glamorous or were an actress, you were 'bad.' So when my niece said what she did about me, I thought, 'Well, I've really made it!' Because I'm totally virgin, I never break the law, I'm very correct. And yet I have the great fun now of having been in the News of the World" ["Goddess of Love Cult Shocks a Rural Eden"]. (pp. 41-42)
At eight, Olivia first visited her family's fifty-room castle in southeastern Ireland, which had been occupied by the IRA and Free State forces from 1916 to 1923. First built in 1625, Clonegal Castle (or Huntington Castle, as it was also known) had kept its crenelated, semicircular tower and its seventeen-foot well dating from pre-Christian times, which made Olivia feel as if she were the conservator of the Well at the World's End, with its Water of Life. And in her castle, situated between the Slaney and Derry rivers, amid green fields and soft brown hills, she dreamed that the original hall fireplace was actually a doorway leading to other, invisible wings and rooms with different furnishings and inhabitants an extension to other worlds.
But even the everyday castle and its grounds were enchanted enough, with the six-hundred-year-old Yew Walk, a line of 120 trees bending over like wizened spirits to form an arch, under which ghostly hooded monks were said to walk after dark; the ruins to the north of the castle, known as the Abbey, which may originally have been used by monks or anchorites; the Front Avenue, consisting of majestic lime trees planted in the 1680s, which rose as high as 110 feet and provided an imposing grand entrance to the castle from the village; the Bullawn Stone, thirty yards east of the Front Avenue a huge granite boulder with a cup-shaped hollow on top that, when filled with rainwater, was, and still is, said to cure warts. In the dank, mysterious castle itself, Olivia explored a maze of tenebrous and musty oak-paneled coridors with thick, damp woolen carpets; stared at the suit of chain mail, ceremonial halberds, and buffalo heads decorating the walls; sat with a candle in the basement dungeon with its six-foot-thick walls, where the IRA had not long before incarcerated prisoners; and, in almost every room, stared at the tapestries and portraits of her ancestors in old gilded frames. (pp. 47-48)
The Fellowship, with its center at Clonegal Castle, was founded on the vernal equinox in 1976 by Olivia Robertson, Lawrence Durdin-Robertson, and Lawrence's late wife, Pamela Robertson. Their manifesto read:
Growing numbers of people are rediscovering their love for the Goddess. At first, this love may seem to be no more than an inner feeling. But soon it develops; it becomes a longing to help the Goddess actively in the manifestation of Her divine plan. Thus, one hears such enquiries as, "How can I get initiated into the Mysteries of the Goddess? How can I experience a closer communion with her? Where are her nearest temples and devotees? How can I join the priesthood of the Goddess?" and many other such questons.
The Fellowship of Isis has been founded to answer these needs. Membership provides means of promoting a closer communion between the Goddess and each member, both singly and as part of a larger group.
The Fellowship is organized on a democratic basis. All members have equal privileges within it, whether as a single member or part of an Iseum or Lyceum.
The Fellowship respects the freedom of conscience of each member. There are no vows required or commitments to secrecy. All Fellowship activities are optional, and members are free to resign or rejoin at their own choice.
The Fellowship reverences all manifestations of Life. The Rites exclude any form of sacrifice, whether actual or symbolic. Nature is revered and conserved.
The Fellowship accepts religious toleration, and is not exclusivist. Members are free to maintain other religious allegiances. Membership is open to all of every religion, tradition, and race. Children are welcomed, subject to parental consent.
The Fellowship believes in the promotion of Love, Beauty, and Abundance. No encouragement is given to asceticism.
The Fellowship seeks to develop psychic gifts, happiness, and compassion for all life. (pp. 51-52)
"In our Temple of Isis, my aim is to create rituals that teach the laws of expanding consciousness. These dramas aren't ritual magic in the practical sense, and they aren't intended to produce effects on the physical environment. Rather, they're meant to affect the minds and feelings of those taking part in group participation. For what is life as we know it but a group dreaming? And the drama of Isis and Osiris is about awakening into who we really are."
The rites, ordinations, and mysteries of the Fellowship of Isis are performed in the Temple of Isis, which occupies the entire basement area of Clonegal Castle. It is approached through a double door in the hall at the rear of the castle, in front of which stand two temple guardians with swords, originally from a Buddhist temple in Burma, and above which is a powerful mask of Neith, the Egyptian goddess of war and hunting, carved in boxwood by Derry's son, David, a sculptor in his late thirties.
After opening the door, you make your way down a flight of granite steps and find yourself in an astonishing, teeming, dizzying world. To the left as you enter is a large Tibetan gong, an amalgam of eleven metals that when struck produces a seemingly endless series of evanescent frequencies. Through a heavy iron gate you come to a seventeen-foot well that draws from a spring once sacred to the Druids. Olivia considers the water to have healing properties and has dedicated the well to Brighid, the Irish goddess of poetry, healing, and springs, and she always suggests that visitors put some drops of the icy water on their foreheads in order to experience "a tingling effect that seems to awaken the third eye."
In the dim basement light you move slowly on stone floors covered with rugs through what were once the castle's pantries, sculleries, wine cellars, and the former dungeon, now transformed into the Chapel of the Mothers. Its barrel-vaulted roof serves to represent the womb, and it contains drawings and masks of th Great Mother as well as scores of children's toys and small object of the animal, vegetable, and mineral realms.
Walking on, you almost trip over two enormous multicolored stuffed canvas dragons, affectionately called Yin and Yang, twisted lengthwise around four of the temple's nine columns. "They are our pews!" Olivia says of these fantastic, sinuous creatures, made for and given to the Fellowship by the sister of Brigitte Bardot, one of the goddesses of our century.
Wandering through the temple, you come across five chapels and twelve shrines of the zodiac which honor goddesses from all over the world. By the light of several stained glass windows and flickering candles in many tiny alcoves, you can see a gallimaufry of literally thousands of objects some kitsch, some works of art of ancient and modern sources including shells, feathers, amphorae, crystals, necklaces, chalices, trays, icons, clay pottery, wall hangings, gold cloth, visionary paintings, china birds, and masks, some found, some bought, some made by the Durdin-Robertson and by Fellowship of Isis members from Finland to Australia, Nigeria to Japan.
Finally, at the High Altar, the Holy of Holies, you behold in a special crowned niche a carved statuette of the Isis of Ten Thousand Names holding the sun disk between the horns of the moon. "She started as the Madonna of the Aquarian Age," Olivia explains, "but now she's Isis. She was also naked at first. My nephew David carved her out of a yew tree when he was fifteen, and I said 'David' I was rather proper in those days 'Molly won't clean the chapel if you have a naked Mary.' David was very annoyed. So I said, 'Why don't you dress her in water,' So he added her robes of water."
Candles surround the goddess, and on either side of her are two black figures, one representing Queen Tehani of Mu (the lost continent) and the other the Goddess Ngame of Nigeria, where more than a third of the Fellowship of Isis' members reside. "The former goddess is covering her breasts, the latter exposing them a sign of queenship," Olivia explains, adding, "You know, my second cousin Robert Graves, through a series of psychic happenings, was inspired by the Goddess Ngame to write The White Goddess. And in doing so, he himself inspired the creation of a great temple of Ngame in Nigeria, run by the famous healer and writer on the occult, the Right Reverend Archpriest Michael Okorowa, of our Fellowship of Isis priesthood. About eight hundred people attend Michael's healing rituals every Sunday in his temple courtyard, with its two large statues of Isis and Ngame. Oh, that Lady knew what She was doing, getting through to Graves!"
There are liturgical items on the altar: a sistrum, incense, holy water from Brighid's Well, holy oil for consecration and ordination, a crystal, a scarab from the Nile. "We have eight candles rising into a pyramid shape," Olivia remarks. "Eight is our number: eight-pointed star, eight-pointed year [referring to the eight festivals of the Celtic year]. On the windowsills are bottles with colored fluids that let through healing rays, as well as a large caldron containing different herbs for aromatherapy. And our ever living flame is a red lamp of Brighid a flickering candle that's meant to be lit all the time . . . though sometimes it isn't." (pp. 61-64)