Madeline Montalban

Madeline Montalban (born Madeline Sylvia Royals;

8 January 1910 11 January 1982) was an English
astrologer and ceremonial magician. She co-founded the
esoteric organisation known as the Order of the Morning
Star (OMS), through which she propagated her own form
of Luciferianism.
Born in Blackpool, Lancashire, Montalban moved to
London in the early 1930s, immersing herself in the citys
escort service, and inuenced by Hermeticism she taught
herself ceremonial magic. She associated with signi-
cant occultists, including Thelemites like Aleister Crow-
ley and Kenneth Grant, and Wiccans like Gerald Gard-
ner and Alex Sanders. From 1933 to 1953 she published
articles on astrology and other esoteric topics in the mag-
azine London Life, and from then until her death in the
nationally syndicated magazine Prediction. These were
accompanied by several booklets on astrology, released
using a variety of dierent pseudonyms, including Do-
lores North, Madeline Alvarez and Nina del Luna.
In 1952 she met Nicholas Heron, with whom she entered
into a relationship. After moving to Southsea in Essex,
they founded the OMS as a correspondence course in
1956, teaching subscribers their own magical rites. View-
ing Lucifer as a benevolent angelic deity, she believed
Luciferianism had its origins in ancient Babylon, and en-
couraged her followers to contact angelic beings associ-
ated with the planetary bodies to aid their spiritual de-
velopment. After her relationship with Heron ended in
1964, she returned to London, continuing to propagate
the OMS. She settled in the St. Giles district, where she
became known to the press as The Witch of St. Giles.
She died of lung cancer in 1982.
Having refused to publish her ideas in books, Montalban
became largely forgotten following her death, although
the OMS continued under new leadership. Her life and
work was mentioned in various occult texts and historical
studies of esotericism during subsequent decades; a short
biography by Julia Philips was published by the Atlantis
Bookshop in 2012.
1 Biography
1.1 Early life: 19101938
Madeline Sylvia Royals was born on 8 January 1910
in Blackpool, Lancashire.
[1][2]
Little is known of her
early life, which coincided with Britains involvement
in the First World War, although she appears to have
had a strained relationship with her parents.
[3]
Her fa-
ther, Willie Royals, was an insurance agent, while her
mother, Marion Neruda Shaw, was a tailors daughter
fromOldham. Willie and Marion had married on 28 June
1909, followed by Madelines birth seven months later.
[4]
In early life, Madeline was aicted with polio, resulting
in a lifelong withered leg and limp. Bedridden for the
course of the illness, she read literature to entertain her-
self, enjoying the works of Edward Bulwer-Lytton, H.
Rider Haggard and E. T. A. Homan. She also read the
Bible in her youth, becoming particularly enamored with
the texts of the Old Testament, and was convinced that
they contained secret messages, a theme that became a
central tenet of her later Luciferian beliefs.
[5]
Crowley, whom Montalban met in London.
In the early 1930s, she left Blackpool, and moved south
to London. Her reasons for doing so have never been sat-
isfactorily explained, and she would oer multiple, con-
tradictory accounts of her reasoning in later life. Accord-
ing to one account, her father sent her to study with the
famed occultist and mystic Aleister Crowley, who had
founded the religion of Thelema in 1904; Montalbans
1
2 1 BIOGRAPHY
biographer Julia Philips noted that while she met Crow-
ley in London, this story remains implausible. Another
of Montalbans accounts held that she moved to the cap-
ital to work for the Daily Express newspaper; this claim
has never been corroborated, and one of the papers re-
porters at the time, Justine Glass, has claimed that she
never remembered Montalban working there.
[6]
Montal-
ban often changed her stories, and informed later disciple
Michael Howard that upon arrival in London, the Daily
Express sent her to interview Crowley. According to this
story, when she rst visited him at his lodgings in Jermyn
Street, he was suering from an asthma attack, and hav-
ing had experience with this ailment from a family mem-
ber she was able to help him, earning his gratitude. They
subsequently went to the expensive Caf Royal in Regent
Street, where after their lunch, he revealed that he was
unable to pay, leaving Montalban to sort out payment.
[7]
Although her own accounts of the initial meeting are un-
reliable, Montalban met with Crowley, embracing the
citys occult scene.
[8][9]
Having a deep interest in western
esotericism, she read widely on the subject, and taught
herself the practice of magic rather than seeking out the
instruction of a teacher.
[10]
She was particularly inter-
ested in astrology, and in 1933 wrote her rst article on
the subject for the magazine London Life, entitled The
Stars in the Heavens. Her work continued to see pub-
lication in that magazine until 1953, during which time
she used dierent pseudonyms: Madeline Alvarez, Do-
lores del Castro, Michael Royals, Regina Norcli, Athene
Deluce, Nina de Luna, and the best known, Madeline
Montalban, which she created based upon the name of
a lm star whom she liked, the Mexican actor Ricardo
Montalbn.
[11]
1.2 Marriage and London Life: 19391951
By the end of the 1930s, Montalban was living on Grays
Inn Road in the Borough of Holborn.
[12]
In 1939, she
married reman George Edward North in London. They
had a daughter, Rosanna, but their relationship dete-
riorated and he left her for another woman.
[1][13]
She
later informed friends that during the Second World War,
George had served in the Royal Navy while she served
in the Womens Royal Naval Service (WRNS), although
such claims have never been corroborated.
[14]
Gerald
Gardner, founder of Gardnerian Wicca known for his
unreliable stories
[15]
claimed that he met Montalban
during the war, when she was wearing a WRNS uni-
form, and that at the time she was working as a personal
clairvoyant and psychic advisor to Lord Louis Mount-
batten. Various individuals who knew her would com-
ment that she had in her possession a framed blurry pic-
ture of Mountbatten with an individual who looked like
her.
[16][17][18]
She continued her publication of articles under an array
of pseudonyms in London Life, and from February 1947
was responsible for a regular astrological column enti-
tled You and Your Stars under the name of Nina del
Luna.
[19]
She also undertook other work, and in the late
1940s, Michael Houghton, proprietor of Bloomsbury's
esoteric-themed Atlantis Bookshop, asked her to edit a
manuscript of Gardners novel High Magics Aid, which
was set in the Late Middle Ages and which featured prac-
titioners of a Witch-Cult; Gardner later alleged that the
book contained allusions to the ritual practices of the
New Forest coven of Pagan Witches who had initiated
him into their ranks in 1939.
[1][20][21][22]
Gardner incor-
rectly believed that Montalban claimed to be a Witch;
but got evrything [sic] wrong although he credited her
with having a lively imagination.
[23]
Although initially
seeming favourable to Gardner, by the mid-1960s she
had become hostile towards him and his Gardnerian tra-
dition, considering him to be a 'dirty old man' and
sexual pervert.
[7][24]
She also expressed hostility to an-
other prominent Pagan Witch of the period, Charles
Cardell, although in the 1960s became friends with the
two Witches at the forefront of the Alexandrian Wiccan
tradition, Alex Sanders and his wife, Maxine Sanders,
who adopted some of her Luciferian angelic practices.
[25]
She personally despised being referred to as a witch,
and was particularly angry when the esoteric magazine
Man, Myth and Magic referred to her as The Witch of
St. Giles, an area of Central London which she would
later inhabit.
[26]
In his 1977 book Nightside of Eden, the Thelemite
Kenneth Grant, then leader of the Typhonian OTO, told a
story in which he claimed that both he and Gardner per-
formed rituals in the St. Giles at of a Mrs. South,
probably a reference to Montalban, who often used the
pseudonym of Mrs North. The truthfulness of Grants
claims have been scrutinised by both Doreen Valiente and
Julia Philips, who have pointed out multiple incorrect as-
sertions with his account.
[27][28][29]
1.3 Prediction and The Order of the Morn-
ing Star: 19521964
From August 1953, Montalban ceased working for Lon-
don Life, publishing her work in the magazine Prediction,
one of the countrys best-selling esoteric-themed publi-
cations. Starting with a series on the uses of the tarot, in
May 1960 she was employed to produce a regular astro-
logical column for Prediction.
[30]
Supplementing such es-
oteric endeavours, she penned a series of romantic short
stories for publication in magazines.
[31]
Throughout the
1950s she released a series of booklets under dierent
pseudonyms that were devoted to astrology; in one case,
she published the same booklet under two separate titles
and names, as Madeline Montalbans Your Stars and Love
and Madeline Alvarezs Love and the Stars. She never
wrote any books, instead preferring the shorter booklets
and articles as mediums through which to propagate her
views, and was critical of those books that taught the
reader how to perform their own horoscopes, believing
1.4 Later life: 19641982 3
that they put professional astrologers out of business.
[32]
Montalban considered Lucifer depicted here by William Blake
to be a benevolent deity who had aided humanity since ancient
times.
In 1952 she met Nicholas Heron, with whom she entered
into a relationship. An engraver, photographer and for-
mer journalist for the Brighton Argus, he shared her inter-
est in the occult, and together they developed a magical
system based upon Luciferianism, the veneration of the
deity Lucifer, or Lumiel, whom they considered to be a
benevolent angelic deity. In 1956, they founded the Or-
der of the Morning Star, or Ordo Stella Matutina (OSM),
propagating it through a correspondence course.
[33]
The
couple sent out lessons to those who paid the necessary
fees over a series of weeks, eventually leading to the
twelfth lesson, which contained The Book of Lumiel, a
short work written by Montalban that documented her un-
derstanding of Lumiel, or Lucifer, and his involvement
with humankind.
[34]
The couple initially lived together
in Torrington Place, London, from where they ran the
course, but in 1961 moved to the coastal town of Southsea
in Essex, where there was greater room for Herons en-
graving equipment.
[35]
She encouraged members of her OMS course to come
and meet with her, and developed friendships with a num-
ber of them, blurring the distinction between teacher
and pupil.
[9][36]
Meetings of OMS members were in-
formal, and rarely for ritual, with the majority of the
organisations rites requiring solitary work.
[37]
Accord-
ing to later members of her Order, Montalbans ba-
sis was in Hermeticism, although she was heavily inu-
enced by Mediaeval and Early Modern grimoires like the
Picatrix, Corpus Hermeticum, The Heptameron of Pietro
d'Abano, The Key of Solomon, The Book of Abramelin,
and Cornelius Agrippa's Three Books of Occult Philoso-
phy.
[9][37]
Unlike the founders of several older ceremo-
nial magic organisations, such as the Hermetic Order of
the Golden Dawn or the Fraternity of the Inner Light,
she did not claim any authority from higher spiritual be-
ings such as the Ascended masters or Secret Chiefs.
[9]
She believed that the Luciferian religion had its origin
among the Chaldean people of ancient Babylon in the
Middle East,
[38]
and believed that in a former life, the
OMSs members had been initiates of the Babylonian
and Ancient Egyptian priesthood from where they had
originally known each other.
[7]
She considered herself the
reincarnation of King Richard III, and was a member of
the Richard III Society; on one occasion, she visited the
site of Richards death at the Battle of Bosworth Field
with fellow OMS members, wearing a suit of armour.
[39]
In March 1964, Montalban broke from her relationship
with Heron, and moved back to London.
[40]
1.4 Later life: 19641982
From 1964 until 1966 she dwelt in a at at 8 Holly Hill,
Hampstead, which was owned by the husband of one
of her OMS students, the Latvian exile and poet Velta
Snikere.
[12]
After leaving Holly Hill, Montalban moved to
a at in the Queen Alexandra Mansions at 3 Grape Street
in the St. Giles district of Holborn. Here, she was in close
proximity to the two primary bookstores then catering to
occult interests, Atlantis Bookshop and Watkins Book-
shop, as well as to the British Museum.
[41]
She oered
one of the rooms in her at to a young astrologer and mu-
sician, Rick Hayward, whom she had met in the summer
of 1967; he joined the OMS, and in the last few months
of Montalbans life authored her astrological forecasts for
Prediction. After her death, he continued publishing as-
trological prophecies in Prediction and Prediction Annual
until summer 2012.
[42]
In 1967, Michael Howard, a young man interested in
witchcraft and the occult wrote to Montalban after read-
ing one of her articles in Prediction; she invited him to
visit her at her home. The two became friends, with Mon-
talban believing that she could see the Mark of Cain ex-
tquotedbl on him. Over the coming year, he spent much
of his time with her, and in 1968 they went on what she
called a magical mystery tour to the West Country, vis-
iting Stonehenge, Boscastle and Tintagel. In 1969, he was
initiated into Gardnerian Wicca, something she disap-
proved of, and their friendship subsequently hit a stormy
period with the pair going extquotedbl[their] own ways
for several years.
[7][43]
A lifelong smoker, Montalban developed lung cancer,
causing her death on 11 January 1982.
[9][44]
The role
of sorting out her nancial aairs fell to her friend,
Pat Arthy, who discovered that despite her emphasis on
the magical attainment of material wealth, she owned
no property and that her estate was worth less than
4 4 REFERENCES
10,000.
[45]
The copyright of her writings fell to her
daughter, Rosanna, who entrusted the running of the
OMS to two of Montalbans initiates, married couple Jo
Sheridan and Alfred Douglas, who were authorised as
the exclusive publishers of her correspondence course.
[9]
Sheridan whose real name was Patricia Douglas
opened an alternative therapy centre in Islington, North
London, in the 1980s, before retiring to Rye, East Sussex
in 2002, where she continued running the OMS corre-
spondence course until her death in 2011.
[46]
2 Personal life and magico-
religious beliefs
According to her biographer Julia Philips, Montalban had
been described by her magical students as tempestuous,
generous, humorous, demanding, kind, capricious, tal-
ented, volatile, selsh, goodhearted, [and] dramatic.
[47]
Philips noted that she was a woman who made a de-
nite impression in all those whom she encountered, but
who equally could be quite shy and disliked being inter-
viewed in anything other than print.
[47]
Philips asserted
that Montalban had a mercurial personality and could
be kind of generous at one moment and y into a violent
temper the next.
[48]
Several of her friends noted that she
was prudish when it came to sexual matters.
[49]
She would
take great pleasure in causing arguments, particularly be-
tween a couple who were romantically involved.
[50]
Describing herself as a extquotedblpagan extquotedbl,
Montalbans personal faith was Luciferian in basis, re-
volving around the veneration of Lucifer, or Lumiel,
whom she considered to be a benevolent angelic being
who had aided humanitys development. Within her Or-
der, she emphasised that her followers discover their own
personal relationship with the angelic beings, including
Lumiel.
[51]
Montalban considered astrology to be a cen-
tral part of her religious worldview, and always main-
tained that one could be a good magician only if they had
mastered astrology.
[52]
Her correspondence course fo-
cused around the seven planetary bodies that were known
in the ancient world and the angelic beings that she as-
sociated with them: Michael (Sun), Gabriel (Moon),
Samael (Mars), Raphael (Mercury), Sachiel (Jupiter),
Anael (Venus) and Cassiel (Saturn). Each of these beings
was in turn associated with certain days, hours, minerals,
plants, and animals, each of which could be used in the
creation of talismans that invoked the angelic power.
[53]
Montalban disliked the theatrical use of props and rites
in ceremonial magic, such as that performed by the Her-
metic Order of the Golden Dawn, preferring a more sim-
plistic use of ritual.
[7][54]
3 Legacy
In his book on the history of Wicca, The Triumph of the
Moon (1999), historian Ronald Hutton of Bristol Univer-
sity noted that Montalban was one of Englands most
prominent occultists of the 20th century.
[55]
Michael
Howard would refer to Montalbans teachings in his book
on Luciferian mythology, The Book of Fallen Angels
(2004).
[56]
In 2012, Neptune Press the publishing arm of Blooms-
burys Atlantis Bookshop published a short biography
of Montalban entitled Madeline Montalban: The Magus
of St Giles, written by Anglo-Australian Wiccan Julia
Philips. Philips noted that for much of the project she
found it dicult separating fact from ction when it came
to Montalbans life, but that she had been able to nev-
ertheless put together a biographical account, albeit an
incomplete one, of one of the truly great characters of
English occultism.
[57]
4 References
4.1 Footnotes
[1] Heselton 2000. p. 300.
[2] Philips 2012. p. 21.
[3] Philips 2012. pp. 2122.
[4] Philips 2012. pp. 2324.
[5] Philips 2012. pp. 2526.
[6] Philips 2012. pp. 2930.
[7] Howard 2010.
[8] Philips 2012. pp. 3133.
[9] Douglas and Sheridan 2007.
[10] Philips 2012. pp. 7374.
[11] Philips 2012. pp. 2223.
[12] Philips 2012. p. 35.
[13] Philips 2012. pp. 2627.
[14] Philips 2012. p. 27.
[15] Hutton 1999. p. 239.
[16] Valiente 1989. pp. 4950.
[17] Heselton 2000. p. 301.
[18] Philips 2012. pp. 2728.
[19] Philips 2012. p. 65.
[20] Valiente 1989. p. 49.
[21] Hutton 1999. pp. 224, 244.
4.2 Bibliography 5
[22] Heselton 2003. pp. 245246, 377.
[23] Heselton 2003. p. 246.
[24] Philips 2012. p. 69.
[25] Philips 2012. pp. 6970.
[26] Philips 2012. p. 70.
[27] Grant 1977. pp. 123124.
[28] Valiente 1989. p. 50.
[29] Philips 2012. pp. 3335.
[30] Philips 2012. pp. 6466.
[31] Philips 2012. p. 66.
[32] Philips 2012. p. 63.
[33] Philips 2012. pp. 8182.
[34] Philips 2012. pp. 9597.
[35] Philips 2012. p. 81.
[36] Philips 2012. p. 20.
[37] Philips 2012. p. 89.
[38] Philips 2012. p. 85.
[39] Philips 2012. pp. 1819.
[40] Philips 2012. p. 83.
[41] Philips 2012. pp. 36, 39.
[42] Douglas 2013.
[43] Gregorius 2013. p. 243.
[44] Philips 2012. p. 99.
[45] Philips 2012. pp. 88, 99.
[46] Howard 2012. p. 44.
[47] Philips 2012. p. 7.
[48] Philips 2012. p. 11.
[49] Philips 2012. p. 34.
[50] Philips 2012. p. 37.
[51] Philips 2012. pp. 26, 8586.
[52] Philips 2012. p. 86.
[53] Philips 2012. pp. 8687.
[54] Philips 2012. pp. 3233.
[55] Hutton 1999. p. 268.
[56] Howard 2004.
[57] Philips 2012. pp. 78.
4.2 Bibliography
Douglas, Alfred and Sheridan, Jo
(2007). Madeline Montalban and
the Order of the Morning Star.
SheridanDouglas.co.uk. Archived
from the original on 5 November
2012. Retrieved 5 November 2012.
Douglas, Alfred (February 2013).
Rick Hayward (19472012) ex-
tquotedbl. The Cauldron 147. p.
32. ISSN 0964-5594.
Grant, Kenneth (1977). Night-
side of Eden. London: Frederick
Muller. ISBN 978-0-584-10206-2.
Gregorius, Fredrik (2013). Lu-
ciferian Witchcraft: At the Cross-
roads between Paganism and Sa-
tanism. In Per Faxneld and Jes-
per Aa. Petersen. The Devils
Party: Satanism in Modernity. Ox-
ford and New York: Oxford Uni-
versity Press. pp. 229249. ISBN
978-0-19-977924-6.
Heselton, Philip (2000). Wic-
can Roots: Gerald Gardner and
the Modern Witchcraft Revival.
Chieveley, Berkshire: Capall Bann.
ISBN 978-1-86163-110-7.
Heselton, Philip (2003). Gerald
Gardner and the Cauldron of In-
spiration: An Investigation into the
Sources of Gardnerian Witchcraft.
Milverton, Somerset: Capall Bann.
ISBN 978-1-86163-164-0.
Howard, Michael (2004). The
Book of Fallen Angels. Milverton,
Somerset: Capall Bann. ISBN978-
1-86163-236-4.
Howard, Michael (February 2010).
A Seekers Journey. The Caul-
dron 135. ISSN 0964-5594.
Howard, Michael (May 2012).
Patricia 'Patsy' Douglas (1919
2011) extquotedbl. The Cauldron
144. p. 44. ISSN 0964-5594.
Hutton, Ronald (1999). The Tri-
umph of the Moon: A History of
Modern Pagan Witchcraft. New
York: Oxford University Press.
ISBN 978-0-19-162241-0.
Philips, Julia (2012). Madeline
Montalban: The Magus of St. Giles.
Bloomsbury, London: Neptune
Press. ISBN 978-0-9547063-9-5.
Valiente, Doreen (1989). The
Rebirth of Witchcraft. London:
6 4 REFERENCES
Robert Hale. ISBN 978-0-7090-
3715-6.
7
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