Joseph O’REILLY who was initiated into the
Golden Dawn in January 1892 and chose the Latin motto ‘Meus agitat molem’. He was initiated in London, but can only have
been on a visit there, because he gave 61 Upper Grangegorman, Dublin as his
address for GD correspondence.
Anyone
attempting to trace their ancestors in Ireland will know how difficult that is:
so many census and other records were destroyed in the 1920s. WHO DID HE KNOW IN THE GOLDEN DAWN was
actually easier to discover than details of Joseph’s family history and
employment, if any, because he had joined the Theosophical Society (TS), in
Ireland, in 1891. One of the TS members
who sponsored Joseph’s application was George W Russell. Russell wrote regularly for the theosophical
journals and also published poetry, all under the initials ‘AE’. Russell was active in the burgeoning Celtic
revival in Dublin, and so if you knew ‘AE’ you were also likely to know W B
Yeats; though no one called Joseph O’Reilly appears in W B Yeats’ letters. Perhaps the two of them didn’t have time to
get to know each other very well, because I think tragedy may have intervened:
Joseph’s entry in the TS membership books has a note “Dead Jan 94" on
it. It’s probably an indication of
Joseph’s priorities that the GD’s records don’t contain a note that he had
died. There’s only a note, dated 1903,
that he had let his membership lapse.
BASIC
SOURCES I USED for all Golden Dawn members.
Membership
of the Golden Dawn: The Golden Dawn Companion by R A Gilbert. Northampton: The Aquarian Press 1986. Between pages 125 and 175, Gilbert lists the
names, initiation dates and addresses of all those people who became members of
the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn or its many daughter Orders between 1888
and 1914. The list is based on the
Golden Dawn’s administrative records and its Members’ Roll - the large piece of
parchment on which all new members signed their name at their initiation. All this information had been inherited by
Gilbert but it’s now in the Freemasons’ Library at the United Grand Lodge of
England building on Great Queen Street Covent Garden.
Family
history: freebmd; ancestry.co.uk (census and probate); findmypast.co.uk;
familysearch. They don’t cover people
living in Ireland of course. Burke’s Peerage and Baronetage; Burke’s Landed
Gentry; Armorial Families; thepeerage.com; and a variety of one-family
genealogy websites.
Famous-people
sources: mostly about men, of course, but very useful even for the female
members of GD. Oxford Dictionary of
National Biography. Who Was Who. Times
Digital Archive.
Catalogues:
British Library; Freemasons’ Library.
Wikipedia;
Google; Google Books - my three best resources.
I also used other web pages, but with some caution, as - from the
historian’s point of view - they vary in quality a great deal.
Theosophical
Society: Membership Register September 1891 to January 1893 p18 Joseph O’Reilly
application dated 7 November 1891, subscription paid 1891-93. Sponsors: A W Dwyer and George W
Russell. Address as for GD initiation.
AE:
eg articles etc in Lucifer: A Theosophical Magazine which ran from 1887
to 1897 and was published by the TS in London.
Collected
Letters of W B Yeats volumes 1-III don’t contain any letters to Joseph O’Reilly.
Copyright
SALLY DAVIS
24
April 2012
