The Satanists Of Havelock North

Back in 1998, or perhaps ’99, a friend of mine told me a story that blew my mind. He had been up late, he said, watching Jerry Springer, which at the time was omnipresent on one of New Zealand’s TV channels. The subjects of the episode were self-confessed satanists, and proud of that fact.
Jerry Springer’s controversial talk show specialises in the more extreme end of the subgenre where guests confess things to each other before a cheering/howling studio audience. It has achieved a great deal of notoriety, and even spawned an opera which was shown on British TV. It’s the kind of show where proud satan worshippers are par for the course.
(It would be a mistake to assume these satanists were the serious, studious types who adopt the methodology of Anton Lavey and use the idea of Satan as a symbolic reference for human instinct; this was Springer, so these guys would have worn upside-down crosses, listened to death metal music, and killed puppies for Satan.)
My friend was watching this episode, only half paying attention, when one of these satanists said something extraordinary. Virtually without exception, Springer’s guests are from poor blue-collar parts of the American midwest. Odds are good this Satanist was too. And what he said, that made my friend suddenly perk up with interest, is that he and his Satanist friends derive their power from Satan’s spiritual strong point on earth: Havelock North, in New Zealand.
Not just New Zealand. Havelock North in New Zealand.
Let me explain, for those not from New Zealand, about Havelock North. Located in the sunny Hawkes Bay on the northerly east coast of the North Island, Havelock North is a small, wealthy enclave so near its neighbour Hastings that they were formally amalgamated. Havelock North is more or less the nice, well-off part of Hastings, with a population of less than ten thousand people. It’s popularly known for its excellent wines, its distinctive peak, and its reclusive rich folk.
So when my friend told me this, I was dumbfounded. My friend hastened to add that he wasn’t certain this was what was said; at the extreme, he might have been dozing and dreamed the entire thing. But he was fairly sure he had heard right, and some Springer-guest satanists were sticking devil-red pins into maps of New Zealand.
My friend and I instantly decided there was only one thing for it: a Satan-hunting mission to Havelock North.
—
We never made it on our Satan-hunting mission, but I have revived the idea a half-dozen times with various potential Satan-hunters. Once we got as far as arranging leave from work, but it all fell through before it happened. The last time I was up in Havelock North, slightly over a year ago for a friend’s stag weekend, I kept my eyes peeled for Satanism but, of course, didn’t spot any.
Every time the idea came up again, I would dutifully jump on the internet, and plug [“Havelock North” satanism] into altavista or yahoo or google, and each time I came up with precisely nothing. As time went by I became satisfied that my friend had got it wrong; he’d dreamed the whole thing, or at the very least he’d drastically misheard it. None of which dampened my enthusiasm to go Satan-hunting in Havelock North, of course.
—-
A second thread.
In the mid-90s, I heard another incredible tale from a friend, which by coincidence related to Hawkes Bay as well, this time Hastings itself, Havelock North’s ‘bigger brother’. This particular friend was studying religion at Victoria University, and told me one evening of a New Zealand connection to one of the most renowned occult societies in history.
The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was founded in the late 1880s and, over the next twenty or so years, became major force in the then-burgeoning occult scene in the West. Its pedigree was impeccable, with founders drawn from the Freemasons, Freemason offshoot the Rosicrucians, and from the Blavatsky-driven Theosophy schools. The Golden Dawn drew together a large number of different strands (such as alchemy, tarot, astrology, qabbalah, etc.) into a single coherent mystery tradition, and their work was massively influential in the Western occult movement thereafter.
Among the membership of the Golden Dawn were two well-known names; W.B. Yeats, the Irish Nobel Laureate (“Turning and turning in the widening gyre/The falcon cannot hear the falconer;/Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold…”); and Aleister Crowley, the self-proclaimed Great Beast (“Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law”). (Lovecraft enhthusiasts will also note Arthur Machen in the ranks.)
The Golden Dawn, in sum, are perhaps the fulcrum of modern occultism, and occupy a central place in the hidden aspect of Western culture.
Given this status, I was surprised – to say the least – when my friend told me that when the Golden Dawn split, one faction left the U.K. and came to New Zealand. To Hastings, in fact. He had gone up there over the break, and located the house the Golden Dawn had used. It was spectacularly strange, he said – there was a huge basement temple, which the current occupiers were using to store bicycles and old magazines. They’d been quite happy for him to come in and search through the place.
I thought to myself, wow. Wouldn’t mind seeing that some day. And every now and then over the next few years, I’d tell the story of the Golden Dawn in Hastings, and the house with the temple in the basement, and wonder just what the truth of the matter was. And then I’d fire up the internet and plug in [“Golden Dawn” hastings] and see what I got. Which wasn’t ever much of anything, back in those primal pre-Google days.
—
Recently I recalled the Golden Dawn basement temple in Hastings, and I thought, I bet the internet knows the truth by now.
It does.
Wikipedia has an entry on the Stella Matutina which was one of the three factions emerging from the Golden Dawn when it split in 1903; it was London-based. In 1910, the leader and founder of the faction, Dr Robert Felkin, went to visit New Zealand at the invitation of a small group of liberal Anglicans who encouraged mysticism in their services. Arriving in 1912, Felkin and his wife decided to stay. They set up the Smaragdum Thalasses temple of Stella Matutina in their house.
The house was called Whare Ra, meaning house of the sun. (Other Golden Dawn temple names use Egyptian mythological references, so the fact that Ra is both the Egyptian sun god and the Maori word for sun would have been irresistible to Felkin). It was specially built for them by architect J.W. Chapman-Taylor. It does indeed have a great temple in its basement. It has its own Wikipedia page with photos of the exterior.
Occult work continued in Whare Ra until 1978. Then the house was sold, and forgotten enough that the residents when my friend visited didn’t know much about the house’s history.
—
When I started clicking through the net recently, I was struck by two things.
First, the fact that Whare Ra is in Havelock North, not Hastings. In other words, one of the major occult groups in the world ended up with a major stronghold in Havelock North. Now, think back to the Jerry Springer satanist – is it possible, perhaps, that this guy had read something about the Great Beast Aleister Crowley? And this reading referenced the Golden Dawn, and spoke of how one faction of that society made its way to Havelock North? To be sure, the Havelock Work (as it is known) was not Satanism, but isn’t it possible that a connection could have been established in some wannabe Satanist’s head? I think it is possible. Perhaps that guest told Jerry Springer exactly what my friend claimed. Perhaps he did say, on American TV to an international audience, that Satan’s power is centered in Havelock North, New Zealand.
Second, the fact that all of this was in Wikipedia. I didn’t need to search for it – all I needed to do was think to ask the question, and the answer was right there to be found.
Wikipedia alone has 1.6 million articles in English. Think about that number for a while. Sure, at least 100,000 of those articles are about Star Trek, but it’s still a phenomenal number, making wikipedia – and by extension, the rest of the net, which so heavily links to and from wikipedia – an amazing repository of information.
This, then, is the so-called Web 2.0 in action. Web 2.0 is a marketing term, and all it really means is this: the web is now driven by participation, not publication. This isn’t even a massive change conceptually – the early internet, pre-web, was almost entirely participant-driven, and the period when it was publisher-driven will probably appear only as a short and curious blip when the history of the web is written.
So just think of all that information at your fingertips, right now, as you read this. And understand that this is just the beginning of what is coming. The problem of information access is almost entirely solved. The problem of understanding, however, is more pronounced than ever.
—
And that’s the end of this story. Those curious about what we’re in for with Web 2.0 should check out this amazing video, by the way. It’s pretty damn cool.