Madeline Montalban

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.

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.

Madeline Montalban (born Madeline Sylvia Royals; 8 January 1910 – 11 January 1982) was an English astrologer and ceremonial magician.

She co-founded the esoteric organisation known as the Order of the Morning Star (OMS), through which she propagated her own form of Luciferianism.

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.

Born in Blackpool, Lancashire, Montalban moved to London in the early 1930s, immersing herself in the city's esoteric subculture, and influenced by Hermeticism she taught herself ceremonial magic.

She associated with significant occultists, including Thelemites like Aleister Crowley and Kenneth Grant, and Wiccans like Gerald Gardner and Alex Sanders.

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.

By the end of the 1930s, Montalban was living on Grays Inn Road in the Borough of Holborn.

From 1933 to 1953 she published articles on astrology and other esoteric topics in the magazine London Life, and from then until her death in the nationally syndicated magazine Prediction.

These were accompanied by several booklets on astrology, released using a variety of different pseudonyms, including Dolores North, Madeline Alvarez and Nina del Luna.

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".

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 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.

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.

In 1952 she met Nicholas Heron, with whom she entered into a relationship.

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.

After moving to Southsea in Hampshire, they founded the OMS as a correspondence course in 1956, teaching subscribers their own magical rites.

Viewing Lucifer as a benevolent angelic deity, she believed Luciferianism had its origins in ancient Babylon, and encouraged her followers to contact angelic beings associated with the planetary bodies to aid their spiritual development.

After her relationship with Heron ended in 1964, she returned to London, continuing to propagate the OMS.

She settled in the St. Giles district, where she became known to the press as "The Witch of St. Giles".

She died of lung cancer in 1982.

Having refused to publish her ideas in books, Montalban became largely forgotten following her death, although the OMS continued under new leadership.

Her life and work was mentioned in various occult texts and historical studies of esotericism during subsequent decades; a short biography by Julia Philips was published by the Atlantis Bookshop in 2012.