Abstract
<p>‘Whare Ra – house of the sun’ is a remarkable and under-studied phenomenon: a house and occult temple in rural New Zealand commissioned in 1912 by two wealthy sheep-farmers and designed by celebrated arts and crafts architect James Walter Chapman-Taylor (1878-1958) for leaders in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and their New Zealand followers. In the 1910s and 20s, those followers were Pakeha men and women, raised in Anglican, Presbyterian, and Quaker homes, who continued to go to church (some more regularly than others). In short, they were Christian occultists. In New Zealand and overseas, historians have tended to argue that the occult appealed because Christianity did not. Whare Ra’s Christian occultists do not fit that thesis. Nor do they fit the dominant narrative in New Zealand’s religious history. Based on census records, and churchgoing statistics, that history tends to present religiosity in fixed binary terms: we were either religious or we were not; we were either Christian or we were not. Drawing from deep primary research, I argue in this thesis that the largely untold story of Whare Ra reveals a much more fluid religious landscape. It illuminates under-explored dimensions of New Zealand’s religious history and enriches that history while inviting a fresh examination of the transnational occult movement and its relationship to mainstream Christianity. It also raises questions and offers insight to the beliefs, aspirations and anxieties of Hawke’s Bay’s Pakeha society in the early twentieth century. Why did Whare Ra’s founders seek to develop and empower their spiritual selves? Did their occult quest relate in some way to their histories in New Zealand, to their settlement on Māori land, and to the changing socio-political landscape of the early twentieth century? Did it reflect – in the words of WB Yeats’ biographer Roy Foster – ‘a tenuous hold on landed authority’ and ‘a search for psychic control’?[1]</p>
[1] RF Foster, <em>WB Yeats: A Life – The Apprentice Mage, 1865-1914</em> (Oxford University Press, 1997, reprint 2008), 50.</p>