The Psychological Power of Mystery: Mata Hari's Incomplete Lesson

When Margaretha Zelle arrived in Paris in 1904, she had half a franc in her pocket and no experience as a dancer. A year later, half of Europe believed she was a priestess born on the island of Java. Twelve years after that, a French firing squad executed her as a German spy.

Robert Greene tells her story in The 48 Laws of Power (1998) as an example of what he calls the law of cultivating an air of mystery. What the chapter dispatches in a single sentence is how that same story actually ends.

An identity that changed every time she told it

Zelle had no exceptional talent for dance. What she had was a very precise instinct for what the Paris public wanted to believe.

She called herself Mata Hari, literally “eye of the day” in Malay, a way of naming the sun, and began telling people she had been born in Java, that her grandmother was a Javanese princess, that as a child she had learned sacred Hindu dances in India. Journalists could never confirm any of it, because the story changed with every interview:

• Sometimes she said she had grown up in Sumatra, “riding horses, with a weapon in hand.”
• Other times she placed her childhood in India, among temples.
• She insisted that Indian women, unlike European ones, “know how to shoot, ride horses, and talk philosophy.”

None of it was true. But by the time anyone could have disproven it, it no longer mattered: the inconsistency itself had become part of the spectacle.

Why the lie didn’t cost her fame, it built it

Her breakthrough performance took place on March 13, 1905, at the Musée Guimet in Paris, a museum devoted to Asian art, before a select audience that included diplomats. Greene presents it as an instant success, and it was: within a few months the city’s salons and theaters were competing for the “Javanese” dancer.

She wasn’t especially beautiful by the standards of the time, nor an especially good dancer. What set her apart from the thousands of young women arriving in Paris every year looking for the same thing was, as Greene explains, something harder to imitate: an atmosphere.

Nothing about her could ever be stated with certainty. She was always changing, always surprising people with a new costume, a new story, a new origin.

That constant uncertainty produced a very concrete effect: people never grew tired of trying to figure her out. The more impossible it became to pin her down to a single version, the more attention she commanded.

Soon she was invited to Berlin, Vienna, Milan. She earned money and an independence unusual for a woman of her era, although a significant share of her income also came, as her biographer Pat Shipman documents, from wealthy lovers.

An already-explained world hungers for mystery

Greene places this case within a broader idea. For centuries, he argues, humanity lived surrounded by the unknown:

• diseases with no apparent cause,
• disasters attributed to the gods,
• death as the final mystery.

Science gradually lit up that darkness, turning the world into a far more explained, and therefore more predictable, place.

His point is that this same clarity created a new kind of scarcity: a world too thoroughly explained leaves little room for wonder, and people end up missing what can’t be solved at a glance.

Whoever manages to wrap themselves in something not fully decipherable, Greene suggests, fills that void.

You don’t need to be a grand figure to pull it off. It’s enough to stay silent at the moment others would speak, to leave a sentence not fully explained, or to behave in a way that doesn’t quite fit expectations.

Mata Hari took that idea to its most extreme version: she turned her entire biography into moldable material.

A count who applied the same principle with fake telegrams

In the same chapter, Greene adds a second, much smaller example to reinforce the idea: the con man Victor Lustig, who stayed in the finest hotels with a Japanese chauffeur (something nobody in those circles had seen before) and received telegrams at all hours in front of other guests, only to tear them up afterward with complete indifference.

They were blank telegrams. Lustig manufactured them himself, purely so the entire hotel would talk about the strange, elusive man in the main suite.

The logic is the same as Mata Hari’s, reduced to its simplest form: the predictable generates no curiosity, and whatever can’t be read at a glance forces others to keep watching.

If the more observable side of how we come across to others is what interests you, the social skills test explores it with no legends required.

What the book celebrates and barely tells about how it ended

This is worth pausing on, because Greene settles the ending in a single sentence (arrested, tried, convicted and executed as a German spy) and devotes his analysis to Mata Hari’s fame and independence as if that were the whole story.

It isn’t. In February 1917, in the middle of World War I, France arrested her on charges of spying for Germany. The trial was held in secret and the documents were sealed for a hundred years.

The evidence against her was, for the most part, circumstantial: letters, suspicions, the fact that she had taken lovers from several countries at war with one another.

She was accused of passing information to Germany and of having thereby contributed to the deaths of thousands of soldiers.

German intelligence services, however, already considered her by then an agent of little value, one who had barely produced any useful information.

Most historians who have reviewed the case agree today on something uncomfortable. Shipman (2007), for instance, concludes that the evidence points fairly strongly to her innocence of espionage. France likely needed a famous spy to blame for the enormous losses on the western front, and Mata Hari, already turned into a public myth by her own legend, was a perfect target for that.

Her fame, the very thing Greene celebrates as a conquest of power, is what made her visible to a tribunal that needed a resonant name.

On October 15, 1917, she was taken to the Vincennes forest. She refused the blindfold. She died by firing squad, at age 41.

Her real origin, on the other hand, was not something the trial uncovered. Her interrogator, Pierre Bouchardon, put it in writing in 1917, but as early as 1907 her own father, Adam Zelle, had published a book in Amsterdam with her real name in the title (Mevrouw M. G. MacLeod-Zelle) to defend her in the dispute with her ex-husband. That she had been born in Leeuwarden, in Friesland, and not in Java was therefore already in print a decade earlier. Even so, the exotic legend kept circulating in the popular press for years: the mystery held out even against published facts.

A book that chooses where each story ends

Almost none of these details appear in The 48 Laws of Power. The book mentions the execution in a single sentence and presents Mata Hari at the height of her fame as proof that mystery generates power, without connecting that ending to the mystery it celebrates.

It’s a pattern worth noticing in a book built entirely from historical anecdotes: it picks the fragment of each life that best illustrates the law, and passes lightly over the part that stops suiting the argument.

Something similar happens with Alcibiades, another example from the book whose story, in its chapter, closes before the outcome.

The psychological mechanism it describes (that unpredictability attracts more sustained attention than transparency) is real and observable. What isn’t true is that this mechanism always ends well for the person practicing it.

Mata Hari’s full story doesn’t disprove the mechanism Greene describes. It complicates it.

The same mystery that made her irresistible on a Parisian stage made her, twelve years later, indefensible before a military tribunal.

No version of her legend, not even the real one, helped her explain herself to people who had already decided what they needed her to be.

Sources

• Greene, R. (1998). The 48 Laws of Power. Penguin Books.
• Shipman, P. (2007). Femme Fatale: Love, Lies, and the Unknown Life of Mata Hari. William Morrow.
• Zelle, A. (1907). Mata-Hari. Mevr. M. G. Mac Leod-Zelle: De levensgeschiedenis mijner dochter en mijne grieven tegen haar vroegeren echtgenoot. Amsterdam.
• Britannica. Mata Hari: Dutch dancer and spy.