Initiatic order · 1892-1894
The Mathers' apartment – first Ahathoor temple
Address · 1, avenue Duquesne, 75007 Paris
Metro · Saint-François-Xavier (13) / École Militaire (8)
Today · Private, seen from the street. Residential building, seen from the street.
The story
Avenue Duquesne is a broad Haussmann-era avenue in the 7th arrondissement, linking place Vauban, behind the dome of the Invalides, to the École militaire. It is a quiet, bourgeois neighborhood, far from Montmartre. The Mathers couple, heads of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, settled in Paris in the early 1890s, first on rue de Miromesnil, then at number 1 on the avenue. The neighborhood offered reasonable rents and respectability, away from bohemian circles.
Churton explains that Mathers presented his order as the heir of the 17th-century English Rosicrucians, which appealed to French Martinist circles. It was in the apartment on avenue Duquesne that the first meetings of the Paris temple were held, named Ahathoor after the Egyptian goddess Hathor. Its official consecration took place on the morning of Saturday 6 January 1894, the feast of the Epiphany, with Mathers as Imperator. Annie Horniman, the order's patron, and William Wynn Westcott, one of its three founders, attended the ceremony.
The temple followed the Mathers to Auteuil the following year. The building on avenue Duquesne is a private residence, and nothing marks this episode. Yet it marks the arrival in Paris of the British magical order that Aleister Crowley would soon join. The first Parisian members were mostly Britons living in France, gradually joined by a few French people. Mathers was also preparing his translations of old grimoires here, such as The Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage.
To be checked · Coordinates estimated from the street number. Historic site: no temple exists here today.