30 Facts About Madeline Montalban

Madeline Montalban co-founded the esoteric organisation known as the Order of the Morning Star, through which she propagated her own form of Luciferianism.

Madeline Montalban associated with significant occultists, including Thelemites like Aleister Crowley and Kenneth Grant, and Wiccans like Gerald Gardner and Alex Sanders.

Madeline Montalban settled in the St Giles district, where she became known to the press as "The Witch of St Giles".

Madeline Montalban Sylvia Royals was born on 8 January 1910 in Blackpool, Lancashire.

Madeline Montalban's father, Willie Royals, was an insurance agent, while her mother, Marion Neruda Shaw, was a tailor's daughter from Oldham.

In early life, Madeline Montalban was afflicted with polio, resulting in a lifelong withered leg and limp.

Madeline Montalban read the Bible in her youth, becoming particularly enamored with the texts of the Old Testament, and was convinced that they contained secret messages, a theme that became a central tenet of her later Luciferian beliefs.

Madeline Montalban often changed her stories, and informed later disciple Michael Howard that upon arrival in London, the Daily Express sent her to interview Crowley.

Madeline Montalban was particularly interested in astrology, and in 1933 wrote her first article on the subject for the magazine London Life, entitled "The Stars in the Heavens".

Madeline Montalban's work continued to see publication in that magazine until 1953, during which time she used different pseudonyms: Madeline Alvarez, Dolores del Castro, Michael Royals, Regina Norcliff, Athene Deluce, Nina de Luna, and the best known, Madeline Montalban, which she created based upon the name of a film star whom she liked, the Mexican actor Ricardo Montalban.

Madeline Montalban later informed friends that during the Second World War, George had served in the Royal Navy while she served in the Women's Royal Naval Service, although such claims have never been corroborated.

Madeline Montalban continued her publication of articles under an array of pseudonyms in London Life, and from February 1947 was responsible for a regular astrological column entitled "You and Your Stars" under the name of Nina del Luna.

Madeline Montalban undertook other work, and in the late 1940s, Michael Houghton, proprietor of Bloomsbury's esoteric-themed Atlantis Bookshop, asked her to edit a manuscript of Gardner's novel High Magic's Aid, which was set in the Late Middle Ages and which featured practitioners of a Witch-Cult; Gardner later alleged that the book contained allusions to the ritual practices of the New Forest coven of Pagan Witches who had initiated him into their ranks in 1939.

Madeline Montalban personally despised being referred to as a "witch", and was particularly angry when the esoteric magazine Man, Myth and Magic referred to her as "The Witch of St Giles", an area of Central London which she would later inhabit.

From August 1953, Madeline Montalban ceased working for London Life, publishing her work in the magazine Prediction, one of the country's best-selling esoteric-themed publications.

Madeline Montalban never wrote any books, instead preferring the shorter booklets and articles as mediums through which to propagate her views, and was critical of those books that taught the reader how to perform their own horoscopes, believing that they put professional astrologers out of business.

The couple sent out lessons to those who paid the necessary fees over a series of weeks, eventually leading to the twelfth lesson, which contained The Book of Lumiel, a short work written by Madeline Montalban that documented her understanding of Lumiel, or Lucifer, and his involvement with humankind.

Madeline Montalban encouraged members of her OMS course to come and meet with her, and developed friendships with a number of them, blurring the distinction between teacher and pupil.

Madeline Montalban believed that the Luciferian religion had its origin among the Chaldean people of ancient Babylon in the Middle East, and believed that in a former life, the OMS's members had been "initiates of the Babylonian and Ancient Egyptian priesthood" from where they had originally known each other.

Madeline Montalban considered herself the reincarnation of King Richard III, and was a member of the Richard III Society; on one occasion, she visited the site of Richard's death at the Battle of Bosworth with fellow OMS members, wearing a suit of armour.

In March 1964, Madeline Montalban broke from her relationship with Heron, and moved back to London.

Madeline Montalban offered one of the rooms in her flat to a young astrologer and musician, Rick Hayward, whom she had met in the summer of 1967; he joined the OMS, and in the last few months of Montalban's life authored her astrological forecasts for Prediction.

In 1967, Michael Howard, a young man interested in witchcraft and the occult wrote to Madeline Montalban after reading one of her articles in Prediction; she invited him to visit her at her home.

Madeline Montalban invited him to become a student of the ONS, which he duly did.

The copyright of her writings fell to her daughter, Rosanna, who entrusted the running of the OMS to two of Madeline Montalban's initiates, married couple Jo Sheridan and Alfred Douglas, who were authorised as the exclusive publishers of her correspondence course.

Philips asserted that Madeline Montalban had a "mercurial personality" and could be kind and generous at one moment and fly into a violent temper the next.

Madeline Montalban would take great pleasure in causing arguments, particularly between a couple who were romantically involved.

Madeline Montalban considered astrology to be a central part of her religious worldview, and always maintained that one could be a good magician only if they had mastered astrology.

Madeline Montalban disliked the theatrical use of props and rites in ceremonial magic, such as that performed by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, preferring a more simplistic use of ritual.

The Triumph of the Moon, a 1999 history of Wicca by Bristol University historian Ronald Hutton, noted that Madeline Montalban was "one of England's most prominent occultists" of the 20th century.