This is a repost from October 2016, shared now as a followup to the new book on Lily Dale. NOTE– signing up to prx is free and gives you access to all of Helen Borten’s A Sense of Place episodes along with many other fun public radio documentaries.
IAPSOP.com has announced the sixth release of the Standard Spiritualist and Occult Corpus (SSOC), the online archive of esoteric texts which has noisw grown to more than 6700 titles. There are also more than fifty new or expanded periodicals holdings, thanks to the labors of Marc Demarest, John P. Deveney, and John B. Buescher at the Marion Skidmore Library in Lily Dale, New York, headquarters of the National Spiritualist Association of Churches (NSAC). Although I have yet to visit Lily Dale, reading the IAPSOP news was a trip down memory lane for me thanks to an excellent two part public radio documentary for which I was interviewed in late 1998. Part of Helen Borten’s series A Sense of Place, Madame Blavatsky and the Colonel (link to part one) made considerable use of my interview (link to part two) along with voice actor portrayals of Helena Blavatsky and Henry Olcott and associates in their own words. The environment in which the two met in 1874, a Spiritualist gathering in rural Vermont, inspired Borten to visit Lily Dale in western New York state, one of the few surviving enclaves for Spiritualists. Students of esoteric history have much to be grateful for with this upgrade, thanks to the generosity of Lily Dale in sharing its rare collections with the public, and the labors of the IAPSOP archival team. My appreciation for Ms. Borten’s documentary and my inclusion therein was renewed by this reminder of Lily Dale’s ongoing significance as home of the world’s largest Spiritualist library.