Olivia Robertson

I only noticed yesterday, with some sadness, that my dear and wonderfully eccentric friend, Olivia Robertson, died in November last year at the grand age of 96.   I must confess that I had not seen Olivia for many years, the last time being in the early 1970s when I made a visit to her and her family in their ancestral, and much haunted home, Huntington Castle in Ireland.
I first met her in London ten years previously through an equally eccentric friend, Vivien Godfrey-White who was a self confessed witch, and worked at the Catholic Book Shop in The Strand.  Olivia, a member of an old Irish Ascendancy family, spent her winters in London, traveling the tube in her crimson kaftans to attend seminars and assemblies across the city in matters such as ESP events and UFO sightings.   For years she had immersed herself in psychic studies after she became convinced that God was a `She’.  She once told me that she had fallen in love with an angel at the age of fifteen when he appeared to her in a series of visions.  It was then that her religious quest really began although she continued to believe in a male God until the Egyptian fertility goddess, Isis, came calling one day.   She described her as `made totally of a white incandescent light, with long black hair and dressed in luminous violet and green’.   Later visitations, one from the Irish goddess, Dana, convinced her that at some point patriarchy had marched in and taken over religion that had once, more properly, been the domain of matriarchs. 
At about the same time, her brother Derry, later to become the 21^st Baron of Strathloch, came to a similar conclusion.  This was slightly embarrassing for him because he was an ordained clergyman in the Church of Ireland.  He at once did the decent thing and wrote his resignation to his Bishop who, after some consideration, decided that it would not be necessary.
I spent a late summer with the family at Huntington when the idea of them setting up the Fellowship of Isis was conceived and the Goddess manifested as the feminine expression of divinity.    The castle made an ideal headquarters.  Built as a garrison in 1620 on the site of a 14^th century abbey, Huntington was the seat of the Robertson’s ancestors, the Esmonde family.    Within a short space of time in the early 1970s, Olivia and Derry, ably assisted by Derry’s wife Poppy and their four children, an underground temple was created in the dungeons with twelve shrines and five chapels.   Initially the village locals were outraged, then fearful but after a while one or two of them took to stopping by to observe the ceremonies.   Eventually bands of New Age Spiritualists began to stop off at the castle, to pray, to meditate and to perform in Pagan dramas.
Olivia was born in 1917 in London into a distinguished Anglo-Irish family  and for the first eight or nine years of her life she led a boring life in the suburbs.  However, this was to change dramatically when her paternal grandmother died and left Huntington Castle to her father.   It was not long after the Troubles and a somewhat risky time for an Anglo-Irish family to return to their estate.   The castle had been occupied by the IRA but fortunately they had treated it well though they had taken to locking those they did not agree with in the dungeon before court-martialing them.  The family wisely decided to be totally Irish and Olivia’s only regret was that Guy Fawkes was no longer celebrated. Visitors to the house now  included Robert Graves, WB Yeats and the nationalist mystic George Russell (or, as he liked to be known, “Æ”).   Olivia saturated herself in the spiritual dimension to life that is inevitably present in an Irish village.
Since the mid 1970s, as an Arch-priestess of the Fellowship of Isis, Olivia Robertson traveled  the world. In 1993, when the Parliament of World Religions met in Chicago, she was chosen as the representative of “neo-pagans” and walked in procession at the opening ceremony alongside Chicago’s Roman Catholic Cardinal Joseph Bernardin.    Her life was a heady combination of action packed change.    A truly unconventional human being, and now, contemplating her passing, I cannot help but wonder what became of the woman who introduced us - the White Witch, Vivien Godfrey-White.