Early life: 1910–1938 Madeline Sylvia Royals was born on 8 January 1910 in
Blackpool, Lancashire. Little is known of her early life, which coincided with Britain's involvement in the
First World War, although she appears to have had a strained relationship with her parents. Her father, Willie Royals, was an insurance agent, while her mother, Marion Neruda Shaw, was a tailor's daughter from
Oldham. Willie and Marion had married on 28 June 1909, followed by Madeline's birth seven months later. In early life, Madeline was afflicted with
polio, resulting in a lifelong withered leg and limp. Bedridden for the course of the illness, she read literature to entertain herself, enjoying the works of
Edward Bulwer-Lytton,
H. Rider Haggard and
E. T. A. Hoffmann. She also read the Bible in her youth, becoming particularly enamored with the texts of the
Old Testament, and was convinced that they contained secret messages, a theme that became a central tenet of her later Luciferian beliefs. In the early 1930s, she left Blackpool, and moved south to London. Her reasons for doing so have never been satisfactorily explained, and she would offer multiple, contradictory accounts of her reasoning in later life. According to one account, her father sent her to study with the famed occultist and mystic
Aleister Crowley, who had founded the religion of
Thelema in 1904; Montalban's biographer Julia Philips noted that while she met Crowley in London, this story remains implausible. Another of Montalban's accounts held that she moved to the capital to work for the
Daily Express newspaper; this claim has never been corroborated, and one of the paper's reporters at the time, Justine Glass, has claimed that she never remembered Montalban working there. Montalban often changed her stories, and informed later disciple
Michael Howard that upon arrival in London, the
Daily Express sent her to interview Crowley. According to this story, when she first visited him at his lodgings in Jermyn Street, he was suffering from an
asthma attack, and having had experience with this ailment from a family member she was able to help him, earning his gratitude. They subsequently went to the expensive
Café Royal in
Regent Street, where after their lunch, he revealed that he was unable to pay, leaving Montalban to sort out payment. Although her own accounts of the initial meeting are unreliable, Montalban met with Crowley, embracing the city's occult scene. Having a deep interest in
western esotericism, she read widely on the subject, and taught herself the practice of
magic rather than seeking out the instruction of a teacher. She was particularly interested in
astrology, and in 1933 wrote her first article on the subject for the magazine
London Life, entitled "The Stars in the Heavens". Her work continued to see publication in that magazine until 1953, during which time she used different pseudonyms: Madeline Alvarez, Dolores del Castro, Michael Royals, Regina Norcliff, Athene Deluce, Nina de Luna, and the best known, Madeline Montalban, which she created based upon the name of a film star whom she liked, the Mexican actor
Ricardo Montalbán.
Marriage and London Life: 1939–1951 By the end of the 1930s, Montalban was living on Grays Inn Road in the
Borough of Holborn. In 1939, she married fireman George Edward North in London. They had a daughter, Rosanna, but their relationship deteriorated and he left her for another woman. She later informed friends that during the
Second World War, George had served in the
Royal Navy while she served in the
Women's Royal Naval Service (WRNS), although such claims have never been corroborated.
Gerald Gardner, founder of
Gardnerian Wicca – known for his unreliable stories – claimed that he met Montalban during the war, when she was wearing a WRNS uniform, and that at the time she was working as a "personal clairvoyant and psychic advisor" to
Lord Louis Mountbatten. Various individuals who knew her would comment that she had in her possession a framed blurry picture of Mountbatten with an individual who looked like her. She continued her publication of articles under an array of pseudonyms in
London Life, and from February 1947 was responsible for a regular astrological column entitled "You and Your Stars" under the name of Nina del Luna. She also undertook other work, and in the late 1940s, Michael Houghton, proprietor of
Bloomsbury's esoteric-themed
Atlantis Bookshop, asked her to edit a manuscript of Gardner's novel ''High Magic's Aid'', which was set in the Late Middle Ages and which featured practitioners of a Witch-Cult; Gardner later alleged that the book contained allusions to the ritual practices of the
New Forest coven of Pagan Witches who had initiated him into their ranks in 1939. Gardner incorrectly believed that Montalban "claimed to be a Witch; but got wrong" although he credited her with having "a lively imagination." Although initially seeming favourable to Gardner, by the mid-1960s she had become hostile towards him and his Gardnerian tradition, considering him to be "a 'dirty old man' and sexual pervert." She also expressed hostility to another prominent Pagan Witch of the period,
Charles Cardell, although in the 1960s became friends with the two Witches at the forefront of the
Alexandrian Wiccan tradition,
Alex Sanders and his wife,
Maxine Sanders, who adopted some of her Luciferian angelic practices. She personally despised being referred to as a "witch", and was particularly angry when the esoteric magazine
Man, Myth and Magic referred to her as "The Witch of St. Giles", an area of Central London which she would later inhabit. In his 1977 book
Nightside of Eden, the Thelemite
Kenneth Grant, then leader of the
Typhonian OTO, told a story in which he claimed that both he and Gardner performed rituals in the St. Giles flat of a "Mrs. South", probably a reference to Montalban, who often used the pseudonym of "Mrs North". The truthfulness of Grant's claims have been scrutinised by both
Doreen Valiente and Julia Philips, who have pointed out multiple incorrect assertions with his account.
Prediction and The Order of the Morning Star: 1952–1964 From August 1953, Montalban ceased working for
London Life, publishing her work in the magazine
Prediction, one of the country's best-selling esoteric-themed publications. Starting with a series on the uses of the
tarot, in May 1960 she was employed to produce a regular astrological column for
Prediction. Supplementing such esoteric endeavours, she penned a series of romantic short stories for publication in magazines. Throughout the 1950s she released a series of booklets under different pseudonyms that were devoted to astrology; in one case, she published the same booklet under two separate titles and names, as Madeline Montalban's
Your Stars and Love and Madeline Alvarez's
Love and the Stars. She never wrote any books, instead preferring the shorter booklets and articles as mediums through which to propagate her views, and was critical of those books that taught the reader how to perform their own
horoscopes, believing that they put professional astrologers out of business. – to be a benevolent deity who had aided humanity since ancient times. In 1952 she met Nicholas Heron, with whom she entered into a relationship. An engraver, photographer and former journalist for the
Brighton Argus, he shared her interest in the occult, and together they developed a magical system based upon
Luciferianism, the veneration of the deity
Lucifer, or Lumiel, whom they considered to be a benevolent angelic deity. In 1956, they founded the Order of the Morning Star, or
Ordo Stella Matutina (OSM), propagating it through a
correspondence course. The couple sent out lessons to those who paid the necessary fees over a series of weeks, eventually leading to the twelfth lesson, which contained
The Book of Lumiel, a short work written by Montalban that documented her understanding of Lumiel, or Lucifer, and his involvement with humankind. The couple initially lived together in Torrington Place, London, from where they ran the course, but in 1961 moved to the coastal town of
Southsea in Essex, where there was greater room for Heron's engraving equipment. She encouraged members of her OMS course to come and meet with her, and developed friendships with a number of them, blurring the distinction between teacher and pupil. Meetings of OMS members were informal, and rarely for ritual, with the majority of the organisation's rites requiring solitary work. According to later members of her Order, Montalban's basis was in
Hermeticism, although she was heavily influenced by Mediaeval and Early Modern
grimoires like the
Picatrix,
Corpus Hermeticum,
The Heptameron of
Pietro d'Abano,
The Key of Solomon,
The Book of Abramelin, and
Cornelius Agrippa's
Three Books of Occult Philosophy. Unlike the founders of several older ceremonial magic organisations, such as the
Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn or the
Fraternity of the Inner Light, she did not claim any authority from higher spiritual beings such as the
Ascended masters or
Secret Chiefs. She believed that the Luciferian religion had its origin among the
Chaldean people of ancient
Babylon in the Middle East, and believed that in a former life, the OMS's members had been "initiates of the Babylonian and Ancient Egyptian priesthood" from where they had originally known each other. She considered herself the reincarnation of King
Richard III, and was a member of the
Richard III Society; on one occasion, she visited the site of Richard's death at the
Battle of Bosworth with fellow OMS members, wearing a suit of armour. In March 1964, Montalban broke from her relationship with Heron, and moved back to London.
Later life: 1964–1982 From 1964 until 1966 she dwelt in a flat at 8
Holly Hill,
Hampstead, which was owned by the husband of one of her OMS students, the Latvian exile and poet Velta Snikere. After leaving Holly Hill, Montalban moved to a flat in the Queen Alexandra Mansions at 3 Grape Street in the St. Giles district of Holborn. Here, she was in close proximity to the two primary bookstores then catering to occult interests, Atlantis Bookshop and Watkins Bookshop, as well as to the
British Museum. She offered one of the rooms in her flat to a young astrologer and musician, Rick Hayward, whom she had met in the summer of 1967; he joined the OMS, and in the last few months of Montalban's life authored her astrological forecasts for
Prediction. After her death, he continued publishing astrological prophecies in
Prediction and
Prediction Annual until summer 2012. In 1967, Michael Howard, a young man interested in witchcraft and the occult wrote to Montalban after reading one of her articles in
Prediction; she invited him to visit her at her home. The two became friends, with Montalban believing that she could see the "Mark of
Cain" in his
aura. She invited him to become a student of the ONS, which he duly did. Over the coming year, he spent much of his time with her, and in 1968 they went on what she called a "magical mystery tour" to the
West Country, visiting
Stonehenge,
Boscastle and
Tintagel. In 1969, he was initiated into Gardnerian Wicca, something she disapproved of, and their friendship subsequently "hit a stormy period" with the pair going "[their] own ways for several years." A lifelong smoker, Montalban developed lung cancer, causing her death on 11 January 1982. The role of sorting out her financial affairs fell to her friend, Pat Arthy, who discovered that despite her emphasis on the magical attainment of material wealth, she owned no property and that her estate was worth less than £10,000. The copyright of her writings fell to her daughter, Rosanna, who entrusted the running of the OMS to two of Montalban's initiates, married couple Jo Sheridan and Alfred Douglas, who were authorised as the exclusive publishers of her correspondence course. Sheridan – whose real name was Patricia Douglas – opened an alternative therapy centre in
Islington,
North London, in the 1980s, before retiring to
Rye, East Sussex in 2002, where she continued running the OMS correspondence course until her death in 2011. ==Personal life and magico-religious beliefs==