In her writings, Vernon Lee at times formulates the spirit of place as a transhistorical, gynocentric paganism, but a number of her contemporaries took on a more explicit consideration of the pagan as a site of feminist self-realization. Chapter 5 turns fromworks about the spirit of moving through place to works addressing another form of movement: actual pagan ritual. Enmeshed within both the London decadent community and New Woman politics, Moina Mathers and Florence Farr were also among the most influential occultists of the pagan revival. These two leaders of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn developed ecological models in which human-centred measures of space and time are replaced by an understanding of the self as an evanescent engagement within an occult ecology. Taking a lesson from painter Frederick Sandys, this chapter is not about searching for occult symbols in decadent art or literature. Rather, it addresses the decadent spirit within occult works aimed, in part, at destabilizing modern gender inequality.

This chapter uses a unique collection of hundreds of issues of Golden Dawn (GD) publications and dozens of interviews with the GD leadership and activists to systematically trace its evolution from a street-level gang to the third biggest political party in Greece. The first part of the chapter briefly traces the development of the GD in the 1980s from a small National Socialist ideological movement to a marginal political party. The second part focuses on the ideological, programmatic and, more importantly, the organizational development of the party since the early 1990s. The third section focuses on its local party organizations and their activities, providing a rare overview of internal organizational life.

The local organizational life of political parties displays notable variation that merits systematic examination. The purpose of this chapter is to document the divergent trajectories of subnational organizational units, providing the basis for the subsequent analysis of developmental variation. The first section analyzes the basic characteristics of all local party organizations the Golden Dawn (GD) set up, laying the groundwork for the subsequent analysis of variation in their organizational evolution. The second section provides insights into local organizational life by analyzing the range of activities they have undertaken over a period of twenty-three years. The third section uses these data to show the distinct trajectories of the various local units of the GD and analyze variation in organizational outcomes. It first presents evidence regarding the degree of continuity these local structures display bringing to the surface cases of organizational persistence and fatality. It then delves deeper into the organizational life of local party branches and presents data regarding their activism.