Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and the Modern Prometheus

Mary Shelley (née Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin); 

(30 August 1797 – 1 February 1851)

* Sun Uranus Mars conjunct in Virgo, Saturn in Cancer conjunct Ascendant, Sag Moon*

 Mary was the daughter of two social reformers ahead of their time. She was an English novelist, short story writer, dramatist, essayist, biographer, and travel writer, best known for her Gothic novel Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus (1818). 

Her father, William Godwin, was a celebrated political philosopher and historian who had briefly been a Calvinist minister. 
A cold, remote man, he had little time for anything but his philosophical endeavors.

Her mother was the philosopher and feminist 
Mary Wollstonecraft who 
sadly died from fever 
only 11 days after Mary's birth.

  Her father was left to care for Shelley and her 
 older half-sister Fanny.

 

 

He father later married Mary Jane Clairmont,

  who proved to be a cruel, shallow woman who neglected 
Fanny and Mary 

in favor of her own children.

 Mary (who was so lively 
that her father had nicknamed her Mercury)
 was frequently whipped for impertinence; rebellion came naturally to the headstrong Mary, and she refused to be subdued. 
Though the girls were given lessons in domesticity (cooking, cleaning, and other wifely duties) Mary could not pretend interest in such pursuits: she would simply take up a book and 
let the dinner burn. (Sag moon)

 Her father was the most important person in her life, 

 and his favor meant everything to her. 
(Saturn in Cancer, conjunct ascendant).
She excelled in her lessons and could hold her own in adult conversation often with the great minds of her time from a remarkably early age.

 Around the age of eight, she began reading the writings of her mother. By the time she was ten,
 she had memorized every word.

From an early age, Mary was encouraged by her father to write letters and she took an early liking to writing. She was also encouraged to embrace her father's sociopolitical liberal views and theories and was mostly informally educated, at home.

 

While she didn't have a formal education,

 she did make great use of her father's extensive library.
 Shelley could often be found reading, sometimes 
by her mother's grave. 

She also liked to daydream, escaping from her often challenging

 home life into her imagination.

 Mary spent hours at her mother's grave, 

reading or eating meals when 

the atmosphere at home was particularly bad.

 She was later sent to stay with William Baxter, 
a known radical, and his family in Scotland. (lucky)

At the age of fifteen, she was described by her father as 

"singularly bold,

 somewhat imperious, and active of mind. (Virgo Sun, Sag Moon)

 Her desire of knowledge is great, and her perseverance in everything she undertakes

 almost invincible."

  Living with the Baxters was the happiest time that 

Mary had known. 

When she returned to London a year later, 
she had grown into a woman.
 She became closer to her father than ever before, and the two engaged in constant philosophical debate.
 This served, predictably, to augment 
her stepmother's ill will.

The poet Percy Shelley (one of the greatest lyric poets of the English Romantic age and a writer of delicate beauty) was a devoted follower and friend of William Godwin's, and began spending a great deal of time 
in the Godwin home. 

(August 4, 1792
 *Sun, Venus, Uranus in Leo opposing Pluto in Leo (irresistibly charming and kinetic), Pisces Moon (a dreamy romantic innocent), Saturn conjunct Taurus Ascendant.
Mars, Jupiter, Neptune stellium in late degrees of Libra*

 Although he was married, his presence made an immediate impression on Mary, 

who began to read poetry at his inducement. 
Shelley's genuine admiration 

for the works of Mary's mother

 earned him her trust she invited him to accompany her

 on her visits to her mother's grave, 

and the two became

 inseparable. 

 

Their intellectual kinship was passionately felt by both of them,

 and they rapidly fell in love

 (she was 17 and he was married). 

Godwin was furious at this development, and immediately barred the poet from his home. 

The couple, however, refused to be separated and began a clandestine correspondence. 

With the help of Mary's stepsister, they were able to elope.

Setting up housekeeping in London was expensive, 

and money was very tight for the newly married pair. 

Relations between them were somewhat strained: 

Shelley's first wife Harriet belatedly bore him a son, and his good friend Thomas Hogg became enamored of Mary, and Percy seemed to want Mary Shelley to have an affair with his friend.

 Percy was constantly leaving home, escaping from creditors and also at the time Harriet gave birth
 to their son.

 To make matters worse, Mary became pregnant;

 the child, a daughter, died shortly after birth. 

Mary fell into an acute depression.

Having conceived a dislike for London
 (perhaps as a result of their misfortunes), 

the couple began traveling: in the English countryside,
 in France, and elsewhere. 

Mary was writing profusely.

They left to Geneva with Mary's step sister Claire Clairmont in 1816, to spend the summer with Lord Byron, 
Claire's affair at the time. The bad weather confined them to the house and they spend much of their time 
talking about galvanism and reading ghost stories
 which prompted her to write the first sketch
 of what was to become her most famous novel 
Frankenstein: or The Modern Prometheus.

Percey Bysshe Shelley

 Haunted Summer, a movie telling of the Shelleys, 
Lord Byron and the making of the monster story.

 

Later that year, Mary suffered the loss of her half-sister
 Fanny who committed suicide. 

Another suicide, this time by Percy's wife, 

occurred a short time later.

 Mary and Percy Shelly were finally able to wed in December 1816. She published a travelogue of their escape to Europe,
 History of a Six Weeks' Tour (1817), 
while continuing to work on her soon-to-famous monster tale.
 In 1818, Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus 
 debuted as a new novel from an anonymous author. 
Many thought that Percy Bysshe Shelley 
had written it since he penned its introduction. 
The book proved to be a huge success. 
That same year,
 the Shelleys moved 
 to Italy.

 And here is Ken Russell's insane take on the Mary Shelley/Frankenstein myth. 

 

The Shelleys, Claire Clairmont and her new baby Alba, 

daughter of Lord Byron,

 moved to a large building on the river Thames.

Here Shelley gave birth to Clara, her third child.

 In the same year, once more afraid of creditors,
 they all left to Italy 
without intention of ever returning. 

After leaving Alba with Lord Byron, 
who agreed to raise her with the condition that 
her mother would have nothing more to do with her, 
the group wandered around Italy, 

socializing, writing, and accumulating friends 
that would often travel 
with them.

 The lightness of their existence came to an end 
with the death 
of Shelley's two children in 1818 and 1819 
which left her devastated and alienated 
from her husband.

While Mary seemed devoted to her husband, 
she did not have the easiest marriage. Their union was riddled with adultery and heartache, including the death of two more of their children. Born in 1819, their son, Percy Florence, was the only child to live to adulthood. Mary's life was rocked by another tragedy in 1822 when her husband Percy Shelley and a friend, 
were out boating on the Gulf of Spezia in Viareggio, Italy. 
Suddenly a storm arose, during which they were run down
 by a larger vessel.
  Their yacht was overturned during the violent storm and 
Shelley died.

 

Made a widow at age 24,

 Mary Shelley worked hard to support herself and her son.

 She wrote, "For eight years I communicated, 
with unlimited freedom, with one whose genius far transcending mine awakened and guided my thoughts.... 
Now I am alone - oh, how alone! 
The stars may behold my tears and the winds drink my sighs;
 but my thoughts are a sealed treasure, 
which I can confide to none. 
O my beloved Shelley!"

She wrote several more novels, including Valperga 
and the science fiction tale The Last Man (1826).
 She also devoted herself to promoting her husband's poetry and preserving his place in literary history.
As well Mary Shelley spent much of her time translating poems by Lord Byron. For several years, Shelley faced some opposition from her late husband's father who had always disapproved 
of his son's bohemian lifestyle.

It was roughly a century after her passing that one of her novels, Mathilde, was finally released in the 1950s. 
Her lasting legacy, however, remains the classic tale of Frankenstein. This struggle between a monster 
and its creator has been an enduring part 
of popular culture.

Mary Shelley's most famous novel, Frankenstein: or The Modern Prometheus, was released anonymously when she was only 21 years old. Only from its second edition, five years later, was her name to appear as the author. It was initially thought that the author was her husband Percy, as the book was dedicated to William Godwin, his political hero. 
The work came out of a competition 
proposed by Lord Byron in the summer of 1816:
  who could write the best 
horror story. 

The central idea came to Shelly in a dream 
where she saw a student putting together parts of a man's body and working through a big engine to animate it. 
She first wrote a short story but Percy encouraged her to expand it into a novel. The novel had at the center of its plot
 a failed attempt at artificial life, by the scientist Frankenstein, which produced a monster. 

The work is considered to be a mixture of science fiction, 
gothic novel, and having elements from the Romantic movement. 
It was partly inspired by 
the electrical experiments conducted on dead
 and living animals by the Italian physicist Giovanni Aldini. Frankenstein: or The Modern Prometheus is also seen as a warning about the transformations of man 
under the Industrial Revolution. 

In what is the chronological end of the novel's story,
 even if the scene belongs to the beginning of the book; Frankenstein warns about the terrible effects of letting oneself be driven by ambition and losing control over its own possibilities.

No one could have predicted the extent of the book's popularity: it would remain the most widely-read English novel for three decades. Although it was maliciously rumored that Percy Shelley was the book's true author, Mary was catapulted to the forefront of the struggle for recognition then being waged by woman writers.

 Shelley died of brain cancer on February 1, 1851, 
in London, England.

She was buried at St. Peter's Church in Bournemouth, laid to rest alongside her father and mother and with the cremated remains of her late husband's heart.

gradesaver.com & biography.com & european.graduate.school.com & astrodatabank.com

Aleister Crowley, Jimmy Page and Boleskine House

(12 October 1875 – 1 December 1947), 

*Libra Virgo Leo Pisces Cap*

 

 

 Born 
Edward Alexander Crowley, 

he was a British occultist, mystic, poet, 
and social provocateur.

 

   He was a pansexual mystic, occultist, ceremonial magician, deviant, recreational drug experimenter, poet and accomplished mountaineer.
 He founded the religious philosophy of Thelema which enforced an idealist, libertine rule of

 “Do what thou wilt.” 

The British press named him
 “The Wickedest Man in the World.”

  Crowley is responsible for the modern day 

popularity with the occult. 

He inherited his father’s brewing wealth and attended Cambridge University.

  In 1898, at the age 23 he joined the clandestine organization, The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, thus beginning his long love affair with mysticism and the occult. However, his affiliation didn’t last long as he frequently offended the elder members of the group, famously aggravating well known poet William Butler Yeats.

 Crowley identified himself as a Freemason, and followed the teachings which were based on the Kabbalah, 
astrology, tarot and geomancy. 

Golden Dawn temples were established in London, 
Scotland, and Paris.

In 1899 he bought the Boleskine House on the 
shores of Loch Ness in Scotland 
(you know... where the Loch Ness monster lives).

  

    The Boleskine house had all of the properties 
that Crowley found necessary to perform magick rituals because it is a focal point of energy 
due to where it is sited.

Crowley bore a heavy influence on many
 musicians including Jimmy Page.

Page bought his former residence in Scotland, 
because of his fondness of Crowley and the occult.

 People believe that Crowley never properly grounded
 his rituals and the spirits are still 
roaming about the house.

Jimmy Page at Boleskine House 

Crowley was a prominent member 
of the Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO),  
and shortly after buying the Boleskine estate, 
Crowley and his wife spent time doing rituals in Egypt, believing they communicated directly with the 
Egyptian god Horus.

 

Crowley believed that Horus wanted him 
to be a prophet to inform the human race of the 
 entrance into the Aeon of Horus era,
 ushering in the 20^th century. 

The religion Crowley created, 
Thelema, says human history can be divided 
into eras of different magical and 
religious expressions.

 The first era was the Aeon of Isis (goddess worship); 
the second was Aeon of Osiris (medieval times with male god worship), and the third is the Aeon of Horus 
(modern time with child god worship). 

After more successful rituals all over the world,
 Crowley created yet another magical order 
called the Argenteum Astrum  
 and proceeded to write books 
for the remainder of his life. 

 Crowley did his “duty” of ushering in this new era
 as the Aeon of Horus, and his influence is easily seen
 in the entertainment industry. 
 Crowley’s message influenced rock mega stars such as David Bowie, the Rolling Stones, Ozzy Osbourne, 
the Beatles, the Doors
and Led Zeppelin.  

The back of a Doors album

Aleister Crowley and David Bowie

  Crowley studied Philosophy at Cambridge and later switched to English literature.

He believed he had a guardian angel, Aiwass and

 believed that he was being guided by him.   

 Crowley was depicted on the cover of 
The Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

  

 





 Crowley also enjoyed mountaineering.
 He rather exuberantly scaled K2 and Kanchenjunga,
 the 2nd and 3rd highest mountains in the world.

 

 

 He died penniless and alone.

Although the actual dates of Crowley’s death are heavily disputed (Dec 1st or 5th) it is true that he died a heroin addict in 1947 in a boarding house in 
Hastings, South East England.

 

The story of Aleister Crowley and Boleskine House

-listverse.com & wiki.com & illuminatawatcher.com

Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group

(25 January 1882 – 28 March 1941)

*Capriquarius Gemini Aries with a loaded 12th house*

Virginia Woolf was an Aquarian British writer, a novelist and essayist and one of the foremost modernists of the twentieth century.

She used the English language superbly.

Her parents were Sir Leslie Stephen (28 November, 1832) and 
Julia Prinsep Duckworth Stephen (July, 1846). Leslie Stephen was a notable historian, and author, a critic and a mountaineer.

Virginia Woolf with her father Leslie Stephen, 1902

Julia Stephen was a renowned beauty, born in British India.

 She was also the niece of the photographer

 Julia Margaret Cameron (11 June, 1815).

Julia Stephen

Sir Leslie Stephen's eminence as an editor, 

critic, and biographer, meant that his children were raised in an environment filled with the influences

 of Victorian literary society. 

Virginia's mother Julia, portrayed by Edward Burne-Jones, 1866.

Julia Stephen was equally well connected.

 She came from a family of beauties who left their mark on Victorian society as models for Pre-Raphaelite artists

 and early photographers, including her aunt

  Julia Margaret Cameron.

Virginia's mother, by Julia Margaret Cameron, her aunt

 Supplementing these influences 

was the immense library at the Stephens' house, from which Virginia and her sister Vanessa (30 May, 1879) were taught the classics.

Vanessa Bell

 

Although before Woolf was even 7 years old, her mother

was teaching her Latin, French, History

 and English literature, she read and wrote compulsively to compensate for the fact that she lacked what she called

 “a real education,” meaning a university degree.

Virginia Woolf

The sudden death of her mother in 1895, 
when Virginia was 13, and that of her half-sister Stella
 two years later, led to the first of Virginia's several 
nervous breakdowns. 
As a teenager, Woolf became so terrified of people 
that she blushed when someone spoke to her and was incapable of looking strangers in the eye.
One of the things Woolf disliked most in life was being peered at or having someone take her photograph.
For a summer, she went mad believing that the birds were chirping in Greek and King Edward VII was uttering curses from behind nearby shrubbery.

 She was, however, able to take courses of study
 (some at degree level) in Greek, Latin, German and history at the Ladies' Department of King's College London
 between 1897 and 1901. 
Woolf struggled with anorexia, believing that her body was monstrous, and that her mouth and stomach were sordid in their demand for food.

For a time, Woolf wrote while standing at a desk 3’6″ tall because she wanted to be like a painter who could instantly step away from her canvas to get a better view.
Woolf delighted in the physical act of writing words on paper. From the age of 11, she was continually experimenting with different kinds of pens in hope of finding one that would provide the perfect sensation.

^{The death of her father in 1904 provoked her most alarming collapse and she was briefly institutionalised.}

 Woolf first tried to kill herself at the age of 22 by jumping out of a window. The window she jumped from, however, was not high enough to cause serious harm.

^{Throughout her life, Woolf was plagued by periodic mood swings and associated illnesses.  Though this instability often affected her social life, her literary productivity continued with few breaks throughout her life.} 

After the death of their father and Virginia's second nervous breakdown, Vanessa and Adrian sold 22 Hyde Park Gate and bought a house in Bloomsbury.
Woolf came to know Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, Rupert Brooke, Saxon Sydney-Turner, Duncan Grant, Leonard Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, David Garnett, and Roger Fry, who together formed the nucleus of the intellectual circle of writers and artists known as the Bloomsbury Group. 
  In 1907 her sister Vanessa married Clive Bell, 
and the couple's interest in avant garde art would have an important influence on Woolf's development as an author.





  

Leonard and Virginia Woolf

 

Virginia married writer Leonard Woolf (25 November, 1880)  in 1912.
Despite his low material status the couple shared a close bond.   The two also collaborated professionally, in 1917 founding the Hogarth Press, which subsequently published Virginia's novels.  With a small, kitchen-table model printing press, 
they taught themselves to set type and print. Virginia and Leonard were budding novelists, reviewers and essayists. Their first publication, a 32-page pamphlet, sold 134 copies of the 150 printed. Within several years, they developed a commercially successful publishing company that produced 25 to 35 books per year. Virginia and Leonard were prolific writers and managed the publishing company as a part time enterprise. 

 The authors they published included C. Day Lewis, T. S. Eliot, Anna and Sigmund Freud, Maxim Gorky, Rainer Maria Rilke, Gertrude Stein, H. G. Wells, and many other notable writers. In the 1930s, they began using their influence in the literary community to address their social concerns.

T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf

They published books on disarmament, feminism, peace, 
the League of Nations, problems of race and slavery,
 economics, education, economics and psychology.
 One biographer stated the Woolfs considered Hogarth Press
 the child their marriage 
never produced. 

   

Leonard and Virginia Woolf in Hyde Park, 1925

 

The ethos of the Bloomsbury group encouraged 

a liberal approach to sexuality, 

and in 1922 she met the writer and gardener  

Vita Sackville-West (9 March, 1892), wife of Harold Nicolson. 

After a tentative start, they began a sexual relationship, 

which, according to Sackville-West, 

was only twice consummated. 

Virginia and Vita 1932

In 1928, Woolf presented Sackville-West with Orlando, a fantastical biography in which the hero's life 

spans three centuries and both sexes.

  It was meant to console Vita for the loss 

of her ancestral home, Knole.

Nigel Nicolson, Vita Sackville-West's son, wrote 

"The effect of Vita on Virginia is all contained in Orlando,

 the longest and most charming love letter

 in literature,

 in which she explores Vita,

 weaves her in and out of the centuries, 

tosses her from one sex to the other, plays with her, 

dresses her in furs, lace and emeralds, 

teases her, flirts with her, 

drops a veil of mist around her".

After their affair ended, 

the two women remained friends

  until Woolf's death in 1941. 

Woolf suffered from a mental breakdown during WW I,
  followed by subsequent periods of physical, mental and emotional breakdowns which doctors treated with psychiatric drugs. 
 Her early childhood experience of sexual abuse
 by her half brothers was thought to be the cause.
Her writing expressed the themes that troubled her the most; 
life, death, suicide, madness and past memories.
  She was hypersensitive to criticism.

Woolf often walked up to eight miles
 in the afternoon, 
sometimes jumping over ditches, climbing up hills, 
or maneuvering through barbed-wire fences if necessary.
 Virginia was a noted biographer and critic and used writing as a distraction from realty. When she realized she could not write any longer, she chose not to live. 
Woolf once said that her death would be the 
“one experience I shall never describe.”

Virginia Woolf by Man Ray 1935

After completing the manuscript of her last novel,
 Woolf fell into a depression similar to that 
which she had earlier experienced. 
The onset of World War II, the destruction of her London home during the Blitz, and the cool reception given to her 
biography of her late friend Roger Fry all worsened her condition until she was unable to work.
During the height of World War II, when it looked as if the Nazis would win, Woolf and her husband, Leonard, considered committing suicide via poisoning themselves with car exhaust. 
The couple kept a sufficient amount of petrol in their garage 
just in case.
Close to the time of Woolf’s death, a bomb was dropped on the bank of the River Ouse, causing a miniature lake to form 
that reached the edge of her garden and attracted multitudes of waterfowl.

On 28 March 1941, Woolf put on her overcoat,
 filled its pockets with stones, walked into the River Ouse 
near her home, 
and drowned herself.

Woolf's body was not found until 18 April 1941.
Her husband buried her cremated remains under an elm in the garden of Monk's House, their home in Sussex.


In her last note to her husband she wrote:

Dearest, I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can't go through another of those terrible times. And I shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can't concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don't think two people could have been happier 'til this terrible disease came. I can't fight any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I can't even write this properly. I can't read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that—everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can't go on spoiling your life any longer. I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been.

V.

This is Florence + the Machine's song What the Water Gave Me,
it is based on the story of Virginia Woolf's life and death. 
It is fantastic. 
 


Woolf is considered a major innovator
 in the English language.
 In her works she experimented with stream-of-consciousness
 and the underlying psychological as well as 
emotional motives of characters.

Woolf is arguably the major lyrical novelist 
in the English language. Woolf's best-known nonfiction works,  
A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas,
 examine the difficulties that female writers 
and intellectuals face because men hold disproportionate legal and economic power and the future of women 
in education and society. 

This is the only surviving recording of Virginia Woolf's voice. 
BBC recording 1937.



 

  Her novels are highly experimental:
 a narrative, frequently uneventful and commonplace,
 is refracted—and sometimes almost dissolved—in the characters' receptive consciousness. 
Intense lyricism and stylistic virtuosity 
fuse to create a world overabundant with auditory
 and visual impressions. 
 Her fiction is also studied for its insight into 
shell shock, war, class 
and modern British society.

Woolf's works have been translated into over 50 languages, by writers such as Jorge Luis Borges.

-wiki & astro.com/astrodatabank & flavorwire.com