“Bellosguardo…it is a haunted, legendary spot; fate and witches sweep round its walls by night, while the cry of the civetta makes music for their aërial dance…”
-Charles Godfrey Leland
Nineteenth-century Florence was haunted, and its haunters–whether of blood or spirit–were the stuff of legend. In the 1850s and 60s, Baron Kirkup garnered a reputation as a necromancer who conversed with “dead poets and emperors”. Witnesses portrayed Casa Carovana, his dilapidated apartment on the Ponte Vecchio, as a portal into another world where impish members of the intermundane host readily manifested at his behest.
Gino Fanciullacci, another “ghost-seer”, emerged onto the scene two decades later. A wunderkind who claimed to be in contact with the ghost of Dante, Fanciullacci dazzled audiences with his displays of telekinetic powers.
A lesser-known “haunted” personality who made Florence her home in the 1890s and 1900s was Roma Lister.* Lister was a passionate folklorist, medium, and colleague of Charles Godfrey Leland who wrote enthusiastically about her beliefs in and connections to Tuscan and Romagnol witches, often boasting that their powers paled in comparison to her own. The most enchanting spirit of the times, however, was perhaps Lister’s friend and fellow occultist: Walburga, Lady Paget.
Bellosguardo, the Modern Parnassus
Born Walburga Ehrengarde von Hohenthal, countess of Saxony, Lady Paget married the English diplomat Sir August Paget in 1860 and acquired Villa Bellosguardo in 1893. Situated in the cypress-clad hills above Florence, Bellosguardo had a heritage that dated back to the Middle Ages; in the thirteenth century, it had been the family home of Guido Cavalcanti, a poet and friend of Dante. Lady Paget took it upon herself to restore the villa’s antique beauty, painstakingly redesigning and expanding the grounds herself.
Inevitably, her sweeping renovations transformed Bellosguardo into a modern Parnassus. The garden assumed a new vitality: citrus plants scented the air, grapevines, jasmine, wisteria, and roses clambered up and alongside the centuries-old walls and paths, and nightingales sang cheerily in the shadow of almond trees and magnolias.
Her contemporaries agreed. Commenting on the villa’s character, the American writer Lilian Whiting and a frequent guest of Lady Paget’s wrote that it “might have belonged in a tale of Boccaccio”. Emma Cortazzo reflected that she “never saw a house combining such solid comfort with greater elegance“. Governess Ida Kremer called it “beautifully situated” with its own “menagerie” of cats, dogs, and birds. Inside, Lady Paget entertained guests in an octagonal parlour, which had a “great old-fashioned fireplace” and was furnished with bookcases and plants.
Overall, Villa Bellosguardo, not unlike Justinus Kerner’s “enchanted” Weinsberg home, reflected Lady Paget’s planetary influence. Into her orbit she drew, not just foreign dignitaries and politicians, but also a galaxy of artists and celebrities, such as Edward Burne Jones, Sir Richard and Lady Isabel Burton, Ouida, Evelyn and William de Morgan, Edward Clifford, Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Oscar Wilde, and Mary Crawford Fraser. In her Reminiscences: Social and Political (1926), Roma Lister described Villa Bellosguardo as temple in which “most of the men and women” who had “made social history” in the 1890s and 1900s offered Lady Paget homage.
When she wasn’t socialising with guests, Lady Paget was cycling, cobbling her own shoes, making paintings, and “digging roads” in her garden. But like an abbess of the Middle Ages–to which she was compared–Lady Paget was worldly and otherworldly, a friend and supporter of European monarchs and at the same time a vociferous lobbyist on issues she felt had transcendental importance. She preached incessantly on animal rights and vegetarianism, in person and in the press, using whatever venue that was at her disposal.
Her activism, which emphasised the fundamental equality and eternal nature of all living things, was the practical application of both her belief in reincarnation and her disbelief in the Devil. In her view, all beings had the potential to extricate themselves from their elemental natures and gain spiritual illumination over successive bodily incarnations. It was the idea of reincarnation, Lady Paget argued, that also gave deeper insight into “all the unseen springs of life”.
Lady Paget’s Double Life
To investigate these unseen springs, Lady Paget cultivated what she described as a “double life”–a fondness for the superlunary world and its hidden communications. This aspect of Lady Paget’s personality, which defined her worldview, has remained largely unexamined until now.
Lady Paget traced the origins of her interest in the spirits to haunting experiences in her childhood. In volume one of The Linings of Life (1928), she related that once while playing hide-and-seek in the castle of Püchau in Saxony, she climbed up a winding stair and discovered a crone-like apparition in an isolated antechamber. “The woman moved her lips, and stretched out her hand as though going to prophesy to me,” Lady Paget wrote. Terrified of the apparent phantom, she turned and fled. Years later, Lady Paget attempted to revisit the mysterious room but found that it had disappeared. In the same book, Lady Paget also said that she would often hear a voice call to her by name whenever she was “out of doors at some distance from others”.
As an adult, Lady Paget continued to have visions and dreams, many of which presaged future events and revealed people’s hidden ailments to her. At Bellosguardo, she also experimented with and claimed to be successful in “healing by suggestion in sleep”, a psychic technique derived from the American psychical researcher, Thomas Jay Hudson. “The great difficulty in this cure is to catch the right moment of applying it,” Lady Paget explained. “Your patient ought to be asleep and you yourself must be on the borders of sleep but sufficiently awake to exert your whole will-power.”
A Correspondent from The Other Shore
Another part of Lady Paget’s “double life” involved what she called a “correspondent from the other shore”–a “discarnated spirit” that spoke through Roma Lister. Lister and Lady Paget frequently made day trips to secluded areas in the countryside to practise automatic writing, and on several occasions the pair were granted communion with the spirit Fidelio, a Rosicrucian whose pedigree stretched back to the legendary Atlantean age. Lady Paget published details of Fidelio’s revelations in her book, Colloquies with an Unseen Friend (1907).
With its mentions of underground cities, Atlantean technology, and secret societies, the book caused a stir in occult circles, attracting the attention of the historian of magic Arthur Edward Waite. In “More Dealings with the Dead”, which appeared in volume eight of the Occult Review, Waite mordantly derided the work as “pleasant tales”, lacking “any tincture of likelihood”. Conversely, G.R.S. Mead, a confidante of Helena Blavatsky and the editor of The Theosophical Review, called Colloquies “exceedingly interesting” and “generally well worth reading by any students of psychical science”.
The Bellosguardo Theosophists
Mead was not the only high-ranking member of the Theosophical Society to find value in Lady Paget’s insights. At Bellosguardo in the early 1900s, she gathered about herself a circle of Theosophists who were destined to shape the rise of twentieth-century occultism. Among her associates were Franz Hartmann, a co-founder of the Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO), and two presidents of the Theosophical Society: Colonel Henry Olcott and Annie Besant. According to his niece, Elizabeth Pennell, Charles Godfrey Leland also socialised with “Dr. Franz Hartmann, Colonel Olcott, and a little group of Theosophists living at Bellosguardo”. Pennell speculated that it was “thanks to them” that Leland acquired an interest in crystal-gazing.
Many other occultists descended upon Belloguardo to attend Besant’s lectures. The villa, with its with serene, haunting ambience, proved the perfect setting. “The air was laden with the breath of orange blossoms, and the profusion of pink oleanders in bloom made a feast of color,” Lilian Whiting recounted of one talk in January 1900. “Against this rose-colored background, Annie Besant stood, her white robes falling in the long, straight lines that the artist loves, looking the priestess who might have just stepped from the processions to the temple of Eleusis.”
The Metaphysical Future
Besant’s investigations into the occult world had humanitarian goals–and Lady Paget’s were no different. As a perfectibilist, she earnestly believed that mankind was on the cusp of a new age. “One thing is certain,” she contended. “We are emerging into a semi-material atmosphere, and all new discoveries now seem to have a metaphysical side.” In Colloquies, she wrote of her “inward conviction which tells me that the days of crass materialism are over”. She confidently proclaimed that “tens of thousands were now sufficiently advanced in thought to admit of a possible intercourse with an unseen world”.
Not unlike the antediluvian Atlantis elaborated by her friend Roma Lister, Lady Paget’s not-so-distant metaphysical future would be an ideal utopia, an “amicable federation”, which would make “make wars impossible” and have the same language, dress, and customs. These advances would be made possible through open-minded, science-based experimentation and debate.
Bellosguardo’s “night-side”–its role as a haunt for the mystically inclined–was dedicated to this very project. As a kind of temenos, it had real impact on esotericists who, in expounding their own concepts of spirituality and ritual, would go on to influence the development of certain currents of twentieth-century Western occultism.
In the end it was Lady Paget’s imagination, her grasping after the Great Beyond, her love for the unknown, that made her a magnetiser par-excellence. No doubt her spirit– like the beautiful sights and sounds of Bellosguardo’s halls and garden–remained in the memories of her many occult acquaintances, gently haunting, encouraging, and inspiring them long after her death.
*For more on Roma Lister, see my article in issue #5 of Hellebore
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