In Paris at the end of the 1890s, Moina Mathers did something no other member of the Golden Dawn attempted: she took ceremonial religion to a paying public. With her husband she staged the Rites of Isis at the Bodiniere theatre in 1899, appearing as the priestess Anari beside his hierophant Rameses, in performances that mixed invocation, dance and tableau and were reported in the French press with fascination. The couple presented the rites as a revival of Egyptian religion for a modern city, and interviews from those years show Moina as its articulate public voice, defending the reality of the goddess they served.
The theatrical priesthood grew from her training; she had studied at the Slade School of Fine Art, where she won prizes and met Annie Horniman, the friend whose money later kept the Mathers household afloat, and her draughtsmanship furnished the order she co-created: the god forms, the tarot designs and the temple furnishings of the Isis-Urania temple trace to her hand and to her clairvoyant vision work. After her husband's death in 1918 she came into open authority at last, leading the Alpha et Omega order that continued his line, instructing members in the visionary techniques she had pioneered, and contending with schism and with students, Paul Foster Case among them, who questioned parts of the curriculum. The public priestess of 1899 remains the emblem: the order's whole aesthetic was, to a degree the histories long understated, her artwork.