Mina Bergson, and the Problem of the Invisible Collaborator

She was born Mina Bergson in Geneva in 1865, the sister of the philosopher Henri Bergson, and trained as an artist at the Slade. She was the first person initiated into the Isis-Urania temple after its founders, in March 1888, and she married MacGregor Mathers in 1890.

Her documented contribution is substantial: she painted the temple furniture and regalia, and she was the seer in the visionary work through which the couple received a good deal of the material that Mathers then wrote up as order teaching. The Rites of Isis she performed in Paris in the 1890s were public theatre with a serious intention behind them, and after her husband's death in 1918 she led the Alpha et Omega successor order until her own death in 1928.

The difficulty in writing about her is that the record was made by other people. Where she and her husband worked together, publication went out under his name; where the order remembered its history, it remembered him. She is one of several women in this period, Pamela Colman Smith, uncredited on the tarot deck that bears two other names, is the clearest parallel, whose work was absorbed into a man's reputation as a matter of course. Alex Owen's study of the period argues that this pattern is not incidental to Victorian occultism but structural to it, which is worth holding in mind whenever a nineteenth-century magical corpus is attributed cleanly to one man.