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.

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

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.

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.

[12] Gerald Gardner, founder of Gardnerian Wicca – known for his unreliable stories[13] – 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.

[14] 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.

[20] 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".

[26] 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.

[30] 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.

[36] 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.

[38] 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.

[41] 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.

[42] 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.

[31] 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.

[43] According to her biographer Julia Philips, Montalban had been described by her magical students as "tempestuous, generous, humorous, demanding, kind, capricious, talented, volatile, selfish, goodhearted, [and] dramatic".

[50] Her correspondence course focused around the seven planetary bodies that were known in the ancient world and the angelic beings that she associated with them: Michael (Sun), Gabriel (Moon), Samael (Mars), Raphael (Mercury), Sachiel (Jupiter), Anael (Venus) and Cassiel (Saturn).

[55] In 2012, Neptune Press – the publishing arm of Bloomsbury's Atlantis Bookshop – released the biography Madeline Montalban: The Magus of St Giles, written by Anglo-Australian Wiccan Julia Philips.

Philips noted that for much of the project she found it difficult separating fact from fiction when it came to Montalban's life, but that she had been able to nevertheless put together a biographical account, albeit incomplete, of "one of the truly great characters of English occultism.