Arthur Edward Waite, Aleister Crowley, Franz Hartmann, Dion Fortune: familiar names in the London of occult journalism in the early decades of the twentieth century. Crowley and Waite each edited periodicals to circulate mystical ideas and promote their own literary outputs – Crowley’s The Equinox (volume 1, 1909-13) and Waite’s improbable Horlick’s Magazine (1904). A trove of spiritualist and theosophical magazines also sprang into existence (and in some cases faded almost as quickly), such as G. R. S. Mead’s The Quest, The Theosophical Review (succeeding Madame Blavatsky’s Lucifer), and Light, edited by David Gow, among others. One of the longest running journals in this heady period was The Occult Review, edited by Ralph Shirley (1865-1946) from 1905 until 1926. The monthly magazine provided a home to new occult writers as well as to an older crowd who had flourished in the kinetic 1890s and now sought regular employment. Importantly, Shirley was also the editing director of publishing firm William Rider & Co. from some time before 1908. The two projects alone meant that Shirley was at the forefront of delivering popular occultism to a mainstream readership.
Not unusually for an active member of the occult revival, Shirley came from an aristocratic background. He was born in 1865, the youngest son of Walter Waddington Shirley, who, at the time of his death aged just thirty-eight, had been made Regius Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Oxford and Canon of Christ Church College. The Shirleys were descended from George Shirley (1559-1622) of Astwell Castle, Northamptonshire, and a later ancestor was created Earl Ferrers in 1711, a title passed down to Ralph’s elder brother in 1866. Ralph and his siblings were also close cousins of the literary Powys family (Ralph’s mother was C. F. Powys’s half-sister), and the two families were in regular contact during their childhoods and beyond. Ralph would distract the young John Cowper Powys by asking ‘How much wood, Cousin Jack, does a woodchuck chuck when a woodchuck would chuck wood?’ During the 1880s the Shirleys moved to Wyaston House, a Georgian rectory in Oxford now part of St Peter’s College, where the Powyses would visit them in the holidays. Ralph went up to New College in 1885, giving John Cowper access to the Bodleian. Of Ralph in this period, Powys remembered his ‘absolute’ love of poetry being ‘a kind of physical necessity, like smoking tobacco or drinking tea’. It was Ralph who later introduced Powys to the doctrines of theosophy, and, when at William Rider & Co., published Powys’s first two poetry collections (1896 & 1899).
It was not long before Shirley became, as Powys puts it, ‘one of the Argonauts of Occultism in London’. He began to study astrology and astral projection under the tutelage of homeopathic physician Alfred J. Pearce, editor of Zadkiel’s Almanac and Star Lore and Future Events. He seems to have begun working for Rider at some point in the early 1890s. Rider were not yet purveyors of popular esotericism, but, according to Waite, owned the Timber Trades’ Journal and printed various manuals associated with it (thereby shielding the firm from bankruptcy). Shirley began a magazine of his own in 1902 devoted to astrology, The Horoscope, a quarterly edited under the pseudonym Rollo Ireton. Presumably this was meant to distance himself from his professional identity, at least for the time being. But The Horoscope, its pages dense with calculations and readings of current events, ran for only eight issues, folding in 1904. Shirley and the theosophist Walter Gorn Old (‘Sepharial’) wrote most of the contents, with gaps filled by astrologer George Wilde and others. The following year Shirley was already marshalling contributors for his next journal. On the suggestion of Gorn Old, he wrote to Waite asking to aid him in the new venture. Waite happily sent in an article questioning the journal’s title and arguing for a distinction to be made between the terms ‘occultism’ and ‘mysticism’, although since 1904 was the year of Horlick’s Magazine Waite did not write again until the October 1905 issue.
Clearly Shirley continued to be regarded as a talented astrologer within occult circles, for in 1907 he was giving W. B. Yeats lessons: ‘Last night I had Ralph Shirley a very good astrologer to dinner & showed him your horoscope he looked at [it] with delight as if it were the photograph of a young beauty & presently he said (I had said nothing) “what firmness of character, what a horoscope”. I am going to him tomorrow for a lesson’. (Yeats to Lady Gregory, [14 Dec 1907]). Shirley apparently taught Yeats some of the mathematical aspects to this branch of divination.
The Occult Review debuted in January 1905, published by Rider. Rider’s move to focus on the occult did not occur until 1908, when it incorporated the publisher Philip Wellby, but Wellby’s name appears on the title page for the magazine’s first five volumes, suggesting a partnership that ended in mid-1907. Shirley’s introduction described the review as ‘devoted to the investigation of super-normal phenomena and the study and discussion of psychological problems’. Waite, then, could rest easy: mysticism rarely featured, and most articles addressed occultism in history, paranormal experiences, and psychic research (hypnotism, telepathy, etc.). The occult in literature was also a common theme. Recognisable names appearing during the first few years included Andrew Lang, R. H. Benson (on the Catholic Church’s attitude to the occult), John Cowper Powys, Edward Carpenter, and the Rhymer poet Edwin Ellis. More than a handful of contributors were, or had been in the 1890s, initiates in the Order of the Golden Dawn. Shirley had far more success than with The Horoscope: his only break during this period came in 1907, when Waite took over the editorship for several months, writing the Editor’s Notes column and, four years later, even took on the Periodical Literature section when its author passed away. (Waite gives the year as 1909 in his autobiography, but this seems inaccurate).
The Occult Review was useful to Shirley as a means of promotion for Rider’s output, such as when the firm released the tarot deck designed by A. E. Waite and illustrated by Pamela Colman Smith (becoming unjustly known as the Rider-Waite deck). In his Editorial Notes for December 1909, Shirley announced its publication alongside Waite’s explanatory essay The Key to the Tarot. Waite himself wrote a piece for the same issue in elaboration. No one begrudged Shirley for advertising his own firm’s products; from a business perspective, subscribers to The Occult Review were certain to be interested in other Rider publications. Shirley also knew Bram Stoker and published five of his novels, including a reprint of Dracula. For the release of The Lair of the White Worm (1911), Shirley (writing as ‘Scrutator’, a favoured pseudonym) wrote a biographical piece for The Occult Review and was disappointed to note that Stoker had not experienced any psychic phenomena: ‘He admits the facts of Hypnotism and has an interesting theory as to why dreams come true. But beyond this he reserves judgement’. Shirley’s interactions with writers of the supernatural continued when in autumn 1914 he became captivated by Arthur Machen’s war story ‘The Bowmen’ and wrote to Machen asking whether any of it was true. A year later, still refusing to accept it as a fiction, Shirley compiled a short book of soldiers’ eye-witness accounts of the angelic visions, The Angel Warriors at Mons.
Shirley continued to edit The Occult Review until 1925 when he sold Rider and its occult publications to Hutchinson & Co., after which Harry J. Strutton took over the reins. The magazine went through several changes of identity, morphing into The London Forum in 1933 and finally Rider’s Review in 1947 until ceasing in 1958. During the last decades of his life Shirley sat on various committees, including as Vice President of the International Institute for Psychical Research and an advisory chairman for Light magazine, and wrote features on London history for The Contemporary Review. As his professional life suggests, Shirley was a respected and magnanimous publisher with a comprehensive love of literature and occult pursuits. As Powys remembered him, he was a ‘noble figure of a man … with his spacious forehead, Viking mustache’ whose aristocratic manner ‘seemed to me careless and charming instead of a morbid revenge upon life’. Wellby wrote his obituary for The Occult Review‘s April 1947 edition, praising his patience, self-discipline, and ‘earnest spiritual aspiration’. Shirley deserves more recognition than is now afforded him – or at least a more penetrating light is required to illuminate his many achievements and his role in the careers of the leading occult writers of his day.
An incomplete list of Ralph Shirley’s publications, almost all published by William Rider & Co.:
1911 – The New God and Other Essays
1914 – Prophecies and Omens of the Great War
1915 – The Angel Warriors at Mons (Newspaper Publicity Co.)
1919 – A Short Life of Abraham Lincoln
1920 – Occultists & Mystics of All Ages
[1936] – The Problem of Rebirth: An Enquiry into the Basis of the Reincarnationist Hypothesis
[1937] – The Mystery of the Human Double
Sources:
John Cowper Powys, Autobiography (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1934)
A. E. Waite, Shadows of Life and Thought (London: Selwyn and Blount, 1938)
R. A. Gilbert, A. E. Waite: Magician of Many Parts (Crucible, 1987)
P. S. W., ‘The Hon. Ralph Shirley’, The Occult Review LXXIV.2 (April 1947), p. 65.
IAPSOP’s inventory of The Occult Review
Shirley’s entry on Encyclopedia.com
DNB entry for Shirley’s father
Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats. Electronic Edition. Unpublished Letters (1905-1939).