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Ghost Land Introduction

excerpted from Marc Demarest’s opening pages

Marc writes with clarity and conciseness that I envy and try to emulate. Here he “cuts to the chase” explaining the historical uniqueness of Ghost Land, whose Spiritualist author was the inventor of much of what we now call occultism and Theosophy. The practice of writing occult fiction and calling it genuine history did not start with Britten and Blavatsky; Freemasons and Rosicrucians did this centuries before Spiritualists and Theosophists added to the confusion. Britten’s emphatic repudiation of Theosophy in the 1890s was not a disavowal of the 1870s alliance between Spiritualists and Theosophists, but a protest against what Theosophy became in the 1880s. Demarest explains her motive for a turf war between Spiritualist Adepts and Theosophical Mahatmas, claiming credit where due and counteracting Theosophical disinformation: Ghost Land does so in print, some number of years or months (depending on how one counts) before any public description of a Great White Brotherhood by Theosophists (HPB’s claims notwithstanding.) For the rest of 2025 there will be one blog post per month from the astrological profiles in the BOL Lessons, followed by another about two weeks later that excerpts Ghost Land. This alternation might illuminate the connections between 19th century British occultism and that of the 20th century in California.