Seen: Whare Ra

Over Christmas I was up in Hawkes Bay with Cal and her family. This visit I made sure to organise a visit to Whare Ra, the house-temple of the Golden Dawn offshoot that settled in Havelock North a century back. I wrote at length about it here, an entry that gets a lot of google traffic (perhaps unsurprisingly).
We didn’t get to go in, but I took a look from the outside. The house itself is recessed from the street so I had to creep up the driveway and peer over the ridge to see it. It is instantly recognisable as an interesting old house; most buildings in the neighbourhood (heck, in the *country*) are 70s/80s creations but this one looked like a handsome stone cottage of a type rarely seen in NZ. A brass plate on the house frontage bore a simple mark that I wish I’d copied down; it looked like a meaningful symbol rather than a decorative design.
In any case, it was neat to see the building. Apparently it is opened up for public view each year as part of the garden tour, when you can visit gardens throughout Havelock North. I might be curious enough to take advantage of that opportunity some day.
The curious might like to examine these scanned images of a Whare Ra pentagram ritual document. Found via google. Fascinating.