A new scholarly book has just been published that features Genevieve Stebbins as an “overlooked pioneer of modern dance.” Dancefilm: Choreography and the Moving Image describes Stebbins’s Delsartism as a “transitional phase in both the understanding of movement and the artistic potential of the body at the beginning of the twentieth century.” Most of the figures in the early history of the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor remain obscure and of little interest to scholars. But in the case of hatha yoga with last year’s Yoga Body, and in the case of modern dance in Dancefilm, Genevieve Stebbins is emerging from obscurity and being recognized as a pioneer in two different realms.
Author: Paul Johnson
There is a moment in the life of every serious soul, when things which were before unseen and unheard in the world around him become visible and audible. This startling moment comes to some sooner, to others later, but to all, who are not totally given up to the service of self, at some time surely. From that moment, a change passes over such an one, for more and more he hears mysterious voices, and clearer and more clear he sees apparitional forms floating up from the depths above which he kneels. Whence come they, what mean they? He leans over the abyss, and lo! the sounds to which he hearkens are the voices of human weeping and the forms at which he gazes are the apparitions of human woe; they beckon to him, and voices beseech him in multitudinous accent and heart-break, “come over, come down, oh! friend and brother, and help us.” Then he straightway puts away the thoughts and things of the past, and girding himself with the things and the thoughts of the divine OUGHT and the almighty MUST, he goes over and down to the rescue.
Thus opens the second chapter of Archibald Henry Grimke’s 1891 biography of the abolitionist hero William Lloyd Garrison. Reprinted last year by Cambridge University Press in its Cambridge Library Series, Grimke’s first book is an expression of hero-worship that reveals as much about its author as its subject. Preparations for the history preconference of the Church of Light have led into research on the Grimke family, because Archibald’s wife Sarah Stanley Grimke was one of the crucial figures in our history. Abolitionism was intertwined with Spiritualism, and Archibald’s family had been involved with both reform movements. This passage gives a taste of the Spiritualist element in certain abolitionist rhetoric.)
This book was published in 1913 simultaneously in New York by Edgar S. Werner and in London by Henry J. Glaisher. Genevieve Stebbins is listed as editor and arranger, and in an editorial note writes that the book is less than one quarter of the full manuscript she was given by a longtime friend. Here are passages that struck me as especially interesting:
A careful survey of ancient philosophy from Plato and Aristotle to the Summa of St. Thomas of Aquinas and (together with the more important recent writers), the modern school from Berkeley to Hegel, convinces us beyond the peradventure of a doubt that a true philosophy of life is the work of the future, in which the great philosophical systems of the past will form but a very subordinate part of the structure. We are convinced that the chief foundation-stones will be discovered in the works of Eucken, Bergson, and James. (p. 32)
Warned therefore by the failures of the past, we shall attempt the building of no system of thought. Admonished by the vagaries of intellectual speculation, when based upon the nonexistent, we shall ever rest upon the foundations of experience. Chastened in mind by the fantastic creations of an unbridled imagination, we shall conjure up no enchanted image of a final solution; but, keeping in view the finiteness of the self, and the infinity of the world, unbiased, enter upon the quest. With a humble and contrite heart, we begin the journey as pilgrims of “The Way.”(p. 40)
One of the most colorful figures in New York society of the late 19th century was Albert Rawson’s host for a seven week visit to Cyprus in 1874. Luigi di Cesnola was appointed US consul in Cyprus in 1865, and while there he became interested in archaeological digs around the island. According to his 1971 biography The Glitter and the Gold, he became “consul for three other nations, Greece, Russia, and one he never named.”(p. 89) This involvement in diplomacy in the eastern Mediterranean places him in the milieu of several important figures associated with the Theosophical Society founders. James Peebles was also a US consul in the Ottoman Empire during the same time period, while Raphael Borg was British vice-consul in Cairo and Richard F. Burton was British consul at Damascus. In the next blog post I will discuss Greek involvement in the same milieu.
Rawson was invited to Cyprus to help catalog the finds, and his artistic work is still visible in the book published by Cesnola in 1877. Before returning to America Cesnola made efforts to sell the Cypriot antiquities to the Hermitage and Louvre museums. But ultimately the collection would be sold to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and Cesnola became its founding director when the museum opened in 1880. The Cyprus collection made him rich and famous, but later led to severe criticism that undermined his reputation and that of the Met. Nonetheless he kept his job until his death in 1904, and defied his critics with full support from the Museum board.
In Rogues Gallery: The Secret Story of the Lust, Lies, Greed, and Betrayals that Made the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Broadway Books, 2009), Michael Gross begins his narrative of the Met with a 43-page chapter on Cesnola, who is introduced as “an expatriate Italian, a minor aristocrat, and a soldier of fortune who’d survived the Austrian and Crimean wars, a passage by ship to New York, years in poverty, and a suicide attempt before distinguishing himself as a Union officer in the Civil War.”(p. 23) Although he was neither a count nor a general, he claimed both titles and was widely known by the latter. Having no training in archaeology, Cesnola’s methods of acquiring and restoring objects were far from what are now professional standards. Gross concludes of Cesnola that he is “remembered, if at all, as a cultural criminal who looted and pillaged and stole not just objects but an irreplaceable opportunity to learn about the past.”(p. 64)
Cesnola adopted Louis as a first name soon after reaching the United States, and as Louis di Cesnola he comes up with some interesting hits on Google. No spiritual interests are mentioned explicitly, but the Garibaldian theme and links to Italian and Greek immigrant communities in New York are relevant to the early days of the TS in New York. More on Cesnola is found on this website in an attractive format. Albert Rawson claimed acquaintance with Garibaldi dating back to the 1850s, highly relevant as a point of common interest in that Cesnola had been closely associated with the the Italian leader.
On June 22, 1878, L’Opinione Nazionale of Florence published a letter from HPB in which she comments of Olcott that “our President, as representing the opnions of our Society, is taking a very prominent part with the Republicans of the Italian Colony in this our country in inaugurating a monument to Mazzini…The commission would like me to make an address in the Russian language; but with all the love and admiration that I avow for Mazzini I have had to refuse. “(BCW I:392) TS founder Herbert C. Monachesi was a member of the Mazzini Commission presided over by Dr. G. Ceccarini. The members of the Ionian TS in Corfu, the first branch outside New York, showed similar interest in the Mazzini celebrations in New York. My next blog post will explore the Ionian TS as a factor in the establishment of the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor.
Werner’s Directory of Elocutionists… included a brief biography of Genevieve Stebbins in 1887. More on Stebbins and second husband Norman Astley will appear in future posts, but I wanted to share the engraving to give readers another visual impression of this important figure in CofL history.
Albert Rawson in How the Arabian Nights Inspired the American Dream, 1790-1935 by Susan Nance
This 2009 book from UNC Press explores the marketing of Arab and Middle Eastern cultures in America during an era when “playing Eastern” provided a livelihood to many entrepreneurs. The book jacket describes them: “Over the course of 150 years, until the Great Depression, generations of native- and foreign-born actors took on lavish North African, Middle Eastern, or Indian costumes, accents, and names…in ways that could be controversial or celebrated but always had to be financially viable.” Among those who scrambled to make a living as intermediaries between east and west, none is more fascinating than Albert Leighton Rawson. Much of Nance’s third chapter discusses Rawson and the Shriners. What made it possible for an American like Rawson to travel to Egypt in the 1850s, and meet there Russians and Britons who shared his interest in the cultures of the Eastern Mediterranean? Nance sheds light on the changes of the period:
Growing personal wealth for some as well as blooming communication and transportation industries that integrated the telegraph, postal service, publishing, and rail with the new international steamer service made a Middle Eastern visit much more doable for Americans in terms of time, money, and health risks, than, say, India, Rhodesia, or the Philippines. For instance, in 1860 over 19,000 Americans would cross the Atlantic, and five hundred of them toured Egypt. A typical route saw Americans voyage in winter to Alexandria by ship, south through Egypt by boat on the Nile and back, then by camel and horse caravan across the Sinai, to Palestine, Syria, and perhaps Anatolia…a large minority of these tourists had the skills with which to compose publishable travel narratives and the business or social connections with which to secure publication deals.(p.34)
Nance concludes her discussion of Rawson with a summary of his complexity:
Rawson’s work for Harper’s, his appeal to Biblical scholars, and his esoteric mystical pursuits beg the question of which performance was the real Albert Leighton Rawson, and how he could shift back and forth between a Protestant-friendly persona of Holy Land scholar and illustrator and the complex guise of a brotherly Muslim mystic and confidante to chivalrous Arab warriors. Rawson presented himself to successions of different people, each in a slightly different way, more or less mystical, more or less Protestant, more or less Masonic, more or less Muslim, to serve his entrepreneurialism and the Ex Oriente Lux message he might need at any given moment. (p. 97)
In 1853 he was already lecturing to the YMCA in Boston about his knowledge of the Holy Land, so marketing himself as an expert began in his early twenties. His painting career was moderately successful but engravings seem to have been his livelihood. Rawson was one of eleven founding members of the American Watercolor Society and a fair sampling of his art is viewable online. A recent sale of his work shows a respectable price. Rawson was recently discussed in Jay Kinney’s The Masonic Myth (HarperCollins 2009), with emphasis on his role in creating the founding myth of the Shriners. He calls Rawson “something of a fringe Masonic confidence man” since he “claimed to have translated the original rituals from the Arabic and to have provided the new organization with actual contacts with Eastern brotherhoods, most notably the Bektashi order of Sufis.” This makes for an “elaborate mythos concocted by Rawson and a few others intent on fleshing out the Orientalist motif.”(p. 77) Another recent book in which Rawson is discussed is Roderick Bradford’s D.M. Bennett: The Truth Seeker (Prometheus, 2006). Rawson’s involvement with Bennett in the Free Thought movement developed in New York but extended to Europe where they appeared jointly at an 1880 Free Thought conference in Brussels. Rawson and Bennett were equally targeted during this period by crusading moralist Anthony Comstock, who exposed Rawson’s history of an 1851 larceny conviction and charges of bigamy. John Patrick Deveney has deftly unraveled some of Rawson’s automythologizing in a series articles published in Theosophical History, which Nance and Kinney draw upon in their portrayals of him. His Bible engravings were the greatest part of his published body of work, yet he was openly disdainful of Christian orthodoxy and played a public role in the Free Thought movement. It is hard to imagine him taking Sufism or Islam seriously while creating such a mockery as the Shrine rituals. But in 1893 he gave his full support to yet another venture, and perhaps the real Rawson in old age is to be found in this final legacy.
Umar F. Abd-Allah is the author of A Muslim in Victorian America: The Life of Alexander Russell Webb, published by Oxford University Press in 2006. Webb had been US consul in the Philippines in 1887 when he encountered Islam, which he embraced the following year. Webb created the American Mission as the first Islamic institution in the U.S. Abd Allah writes that Webb wrote “numerous books intended to introduce Islam to Americans, started the first Islamic press in the United States, published a journal entitled the Moslem World, and served as the representative of Islam at the 1893 World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago.” Rawson enters the narrative as an important ally of Webb’s enterprise: “One of his distinctive organizational principles was the creation of study circles `of five persons each…for study and improvement, and with the view of bringing the desired moral influences to bear upon evils now prevalent’…the most productive organizer of Webb’s circles was A.L. Rawson, a convert from Woodcliff, New Jersey, with close ties to [William Henry] Quilliam. Rawson eventually formed his own American Moslem Institute as a branch of Quilliam’s society, although he contributed to the Moslem World, which duly announced the foundation of Rawson’s organization.” Quilliam was the first native Briton to become a Muslim convert and propagandist, and his Islamic Institute in Liverpool was quite successful in attracting converts. Quilliam created an Islamic Press active in the UK from 1893 through his immigration to Turkey in 1908.
Rawson’s travels present a series of puzzles for the historian, and his 1874 Eastern Mediterranean journeys included a long stay in Cyprus with a host who soon became powerful in the New York art world. My next blog post will explore the career of Luigi Palma di Cesnola, founding director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Rawson’s artistic talents were applied to cataloging an archaeological dig that made Cesnola highly celebrated in New York while denounced as a looter in Cyprus.
When the Church of Light reorganized under its current name, the old designation Brotherhood of Light yielded to a gender neutral term. Women had participated on equal terms with men in the organization since its establishment as the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor. Yet in the HBofL lineage as well as many of those from which it derives, language about adeptship tends to be masculine. Many of the most influential authors in 19th century occultist circles were women writing about male adept heroes, for example Emma Hardinge Britten and Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. Often they used male alter egos to express claims that were actually reflections of their own experiences. In the 20th century we might add Alice Bailey, Annie Besant, Helena Roerich, Dion Fortune, and even Elizabeth Clare Prophet to the roster. “The adepts” were described in masculine terms, yet their greatest propagandists were women. After becoming acquainted with the writings of Genevieve Stebbins, I suspect that that this woman was probably the most important adept “brotherhood” teacher in the life of Elbert Benjamine, at least on the physical plane. A fine brief introduction to Stebbins is found in John Michael Greer’s Encyclopedia of the Occult. Her husband Norman Astley remains a man of mystery and the object of current research which I hope to share in future posts. But the career of Stebbins is already well documented by several recent authors, and a groundbreaking 2010 study examines her in a completely new light.
By the time Benjamin Williams accepted the task of rewriting the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor lessons, their primary author T.H. Burgoyne had been dead for fifteen years. Max Theon and Peter Davidson were preoccupied with the newer teachings of the “philosophie cosmique” and no longer much concerned with the HBofL. Henry and Belle Wagner supported the Brotherhood financially and through publishing, and their Denver group provided Benjamin Williams’s first encounter with the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor. But Genevieve Stebbins and her husband Norman Astley, who had both encountered the HBofL in Europe in the 1880s, encouraged Williams to settle in California where he became Elbert Benjamine. The Brotherhood of Light lessons were written by Benjamine almost entirely in California, and the Astleys provided the living link between Benjamine’s work in the 20th century and the international occultist networks of the 19th century who had inspired the HBofL. A detailed biography of Stebbins is found in this chapter of a 1989 history of American Delsartism by Nancy Ruyter. The dance historian discussed Stebbins again in this 1996 book. In 2002 an anthology on rhetoric included an excellent chapter on Stebbins by Jane Donawerth. Many of Stebbins’s works are available online, including her final edition of her masterwork which was published in 1913. But another work published the same year, The Quest of the Spirit, remains rare and hard to find and seems to have been jointly written with Astley. A future blog post will be devoted to this book whenever I can obtain a copy.
The long-unsung heroine in the Church of Light’s history has recently been featured in an excellent scholarly study on the history of yoga. The striking thesis of Mark Singleton in Yoga Body is that “the reciprocal influence of `harmonial’ gymnastic systems (like the American Delsartism of Genevieve Stebbins…) and modern hatha yoga is enormous.”(p. 71) While Stebbins is remembered now almost entirely as a pioneer in the history of women’s exercise and dance, the “gentler stretching, deep breathing, and `spiritual’ relaxation colloquially known in the West today as `hatha yoga’ are best exemplified by variants of the harmonial gymnastics developed by Stebbins…and others— as well as the stretching regimes of secular women’s physical culture with which they overlap.”(p. 160) Singleton’s book has been praised by an impressive array of scholarly authorities on yoga. His bibliography runs more than thirty pages and his evidence and reasoning are impeccable. But the book is also compulsively readable for anyone with more than a passing interest in yoga. Encyclopedic knowledge of his subject is evident but every detail is relevant to the main argument of the book. Four pages of the chapter “Harmonial Gymnastics and Esoteric Dance” are devoted to Stebbins, who is described as “extremely influential in forging esoteric systems of `harmonial’ movement associated with yoga that directly prefigure (and enable) the `spiritual stretching’ breathing, and relaxation regimes in the popular practice of yoga today.” (p. 143)
Genevieve Stebbins earned international fame as the great popularizer of the teachings of French acting and singing teacher Francois Delsarte (1811-71) who “became famous in Europe for his theory of esthetic principles applied to the pedagogy of dramatic expression…” By the time Stebbins emerged as a Delsarte teacher she was affiliated with the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor. Singleton concludes that “She brought these esoteric influences…to bear on her interpretation of Delsartism… to American audiences [which] initiated a veritable Delsarte craze”(p. 144) Her success in this endeavor recalls that of another former actress. The high point of Emma Hardinge Britten’s popularity was her activity in California stumping for Abraham Lincoln in 1864. Her stage presence as an actress and musician contributed to her later success as a political and Spiritualist propagandist; Stebbins likewise evolved from beginnings as an actress to a career as a propagandist. If we consider her cause to have been harmonial women’s gymnastics, it seems a quaint and obscure claim to fame. But Singleton persuasively argues that Stebbins was a highly effective propagandist for what we now know as hatha yoga, even though that was not the terminology she used. Recent studies cited by Singleton estimate that 15 million Americans and 2.5 million Britons practice hatha yoga regularly. He argues convincingly that what they call yoga owes as much to Stebbins and similar teachers as it does to any Indian tradition.
Stebbins’s Dynamic Breathing and Harmonic Gymnastics: A Complete System of Psychical, Aesthetic, and Physical Culture (1892) is as described by Singleton “a combination of callisthenic movement, deep respiration exercises, relaxation, and creative mental imagery within a harmonial religious framework. It is, in Stebbins’s words, `a completely rounded system for the development of body, brain and soul,’ a system of training which shall bring this grand trinity of the human microcosm into one continuous, interacting unison and remove the `inharmonious mental states’ that lead to discord.”(p. 146) Students of the Brotherhood of Light lessons may find some of these concepts quite familiar, and I suspect that Stebbins authored or strongly influenced some of the lessons. Both she and Astley are remembered in CofL lore as having assisted Burgoyne, but they might have first known him separately and in different places, rather than together in California. Her European travels are dated 1881 and 1885, and Astley’s US immigration was in 1885, but they did not marry until 1893 and the early history of their partnership is elusive. I am currently working on ancestry.com trying to sort out the chronology of Astley and Stebbins and their peregrinations in England, America, and India. From the point of view of identifying the network of 19th century adepts from whom the Church of Light descends, Genevieve Stebbins and Norman Astley are the key figures ensuring the movement’s survival in California. They will be the subject of future blog posts here as I learn more about their role in the Church of Light’s history.
For illumination of the origins of The Church of Light, the most intriguing scholarly biography of the past decade is The Lives of Sri Aurobindo by Peter Heehs (Columbia University Press 2008). The collision of Eastern and Western spiritualities in the 19th and 20th centuries is nowhere more vividly illustrated than in the life of Mirra Alfassa. Heehs places her in context of the life of Aurobindo Ghosh, the Bengali philosopher and yogi in whose ashram she spent the last half of a long life. Mirra is important to the Church of Light for an association that preceded her travels to India; she is by far the most celebrated disciple of Max Theon, spiritual guide of the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor.
Peter Heehs has devoted almost four decades to preservation and study of the legacy of Sri Aurobindo, having resided in India since 1971. His website links to several reviews of the biography, and I can add nothing except to concur with those who find his research exemplary, his writing clear and engaging, and his conclusions reasonable. Disgraceful attacks based on false accusations have been made by some disciples, and an attempt is underway to have him expelled from India as a result of the biography. As an author I encountered some personality-cult behavior from Theosophists and Cayce disciples, and observed similar reactions within other spiritual movements toward those who write about their founders in less than hagiographic adoration. But nothing like the torrent of abuse that has been directed at Peter Heehs! The Church of Light is noteworthy for its freedom from worshipful attitudes towards its human founders, or combativeness toward their critics. We have been very fortunate in having independent scholars produce the HBofL compilation; no “message control” issues interfered with the production or reception of that invaluable work. The CofL does not worship Burgoyne, Davidson, Theon, Zain, or any person. But if adoration or worship of Mirra Alfassa are not part of our attitude, respect and honor are definitely merited by her remarkable life.
Blanche Rachel Mirra Alfassa was born in Paris in 1878 to Sephardic Jewish parents. Her father was originally from Turkey and married her Egyptian mother in Alexandria. In 1897 she married painter Henri Morriset, and became a painter herself in the early years of the 20th century. She was drawn into the Theons’ mouvement cosmique by her brother Matteo, and became one of its most active exponents from about 1903 through 1907. The peak of her experience with the Theons was a three month visit to Algeria in 1906. The pages directly addressing Mirra’s connection with Theon and his wife Alma include this passage:
During their three month stay, Mirra underwent a profound inner development, but this was due more to Theon’s wife that to Theon himself. Madame Theon was `a marvellous woman from the point of view of experience,’ although her intellect was rather ordinary. Theon, on the other hand, had comparatively little experience, but an encyclopedic knowledge of things occult. A few lines from him was enough to inspire his wife to write pages and pages of what today might be called channeled writings. But these revelations, according to one French critic, were `written in such a bizarre manner that even the most cultivated men (unless they were themselves `Cosmic’) quickly abandoned the attempt to read them.’ Mirra was aware of the deficiencies of Madame Theon’s writing, but felt that this extraordinary woman was in contact with genuine sources of knowledge.”(253)
Aurobindo is remembered now as a yogi and philosopher of spiritual evolution, but it is only in the latter half of his long life that he reached that phase of his existence, after several years as a prominent Freedom Movement leader. Heehs follows his career from an Indian childhood, through an education in England, to his involvement in political activism in Bengal. But his 1910 retirement from politics and settling in Pondicherry was the emergence of the Aurobindo known today, as his writings focused more and more on bringing the Supramental into human experience. The result would not be a “universal religion a system, a thing of creed and intellectual belief and outward rite”; rather, it would be based on “the growing realization that there is a secret Spirit, a divine Reality, in which we are all one, that humanity is its highest present vehicle on earth, that the human race and the human being are the means by which it will progressively reveal itself here. It implies a growing attempt to live out this knowledge and bring about a kingdom of this divine Spirit upon earth.”(Heehs p. 290, citing The Ideal of Human Unity.) In The Human Cycle, Aurobindo predicted a future age in which humans “will develop progressively a greater spiritual, supra-intellectual and intuitive, perhaps in the end a more than intuitive, Gnostic consciousness.”(292) The extent to which Aurobindo’s spiritual mission was influenced by Mirra’s former association with Theon is not readily discernable from the Heehs biography, but until Theon’s teachings are better understood no historian will be able to appraise their impact.
In 1990 when my historical quest for the Theosophical Masters took me to India, Pondicherry was the last place I visited and the Aurobindo Ashram left a stronger impression of holiness than any other place I saw in six weeks in the country. And yet there was also something stale and cloying in the atmosphere, a feeling that the sacred had come and gone and people were worshipping only memories. The atmosphere of the ashram very definitely equates the Mother in status with Aurobindo in reverence. The religious intensity of the devotion made me uncomfortable, but I had a far more favorable impression of Auroville, where the dreams of all the internationalist occultists I had been following around the world found concrete expression in a late twentieth century community. If one wishes to capture the remarkable spirit of Mirra Alfassa, the best place to do so is Auroville, “a universal city in the making.” The future, not the past, is the focus of reverence in that Utopian experiment.
THE LATE LORD LYTTON AND THE MASTERS
(The Theosophist, October 1884, p. 17, newly published on www.theosophy.net along with the entire first five year run of the journal, thanks to the labors of Marc Demarest, David Reigle, and Joe Fulton among others. I mention these three because they will be attending the 2011 Church of Light preconference on Emma Hardinge Britten, Marc as featured presenter.)
The World says that the Life of Lytton promises to be very interesting, though it is naturally very Bulwerian. “One of the most curious passages in the Biography will be that (yet to come) which relates to Lytton’s researches in the occult world, partly described in Zanoni, the Strange Story, &c. He thoroughly believed in the powers with which he invested Mejnour, and practised the art of divination with a curious, and to me unaccountable, success, an example of which will be found in this first installment of the work, Vol II. pp. 328-9).
It appears that in 1860, he cast the horoscope of Disraeli, who was at that time in one of the darkest eclipses ofhis life. He had enjoyed a brief taste of office, but was doomed to a long exclusion from it–from 1859 to 1866. In 1860, then, Lord Lytton cast his nativity, and declared that the ‘figure’ surprised him, ‘it is so completely opposed to what I myself should have augured, not only from the rest of his career, but from my knowledge of the man.’ Among other things he predicted that Disraeli would gain honours ‘far beyond the most favourable prospects that could be reasonably anticipated from his past career, his present position, or his personal endowments;’ ‘he will leave a higher name than I should say his intellect quite warrants, or than would now be conjectured’ ‘his illnesses will be few and quick, but his last illness may be lingering. He is likely to live to old age, the close of his career much honoured;·’ ‘he will die whether in or out of office, in an exceptionally high position, greatly lamented, and surrounded to the end by all the magnificent planetary influences of a propitious Jupiter ;’. ‘.he will bequeath a repute out of all proportion to the opinion now entertained of his intellect even by those who think most highly of it and so on. Who would have believed all this of Disraeli in 1860 ?
Whatever may be the differences of opinion regarding Disraeli’s political views, it cannot be disputed that he predicted with accuracy the present position of parties and politics. He had himself something of the old Hebrew seer in him, and unknown to himself he was the subjected of a very remarkable study by one who still claims the mysterious brotherhood of India as a member of their own body, although he never avowed his connection with them.
Perhaps he is not the only one who has been “the subject of a remarkable study by the mysterious Brotherhood in India.” Who knows?– Ed.
KPJ comment: This appears as an unsigned article in The Theosophist and appears to have had no byline in the World from which it is quoted. The references to the Masters are quite mysterious and elliptical. CofL readers will be intrigued by this confirmation that EBL was “addicted to astrology” as he described himself from a very young age. I will be hoping to find out more about this article but wanted to share it immediately in celebration of the availability of The Theosophist 1879-1885 at theosophy.net.
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James Martin Peebles
One of the most visible leaders of Spiritualism in 19th century America, James Martin Peebles was also a pivotal factor in the intersecting histories of the Theosophical Society, the Arya Samaj of India, and the Buddhists of Sri Lanka. This occurred in 1877 when he introduced (via correspondence) Col. Olcott and Madame Blavatsky to various spiritual leaders he had met on a recent trip to South Asia. As the story goes according to several biographers, Peebles recognized Arya Samaj leader Moolji Thackersey in a photograph on the wall of the New York apartment the Colonel shared with Madame Blavatsky. This photograph had been allegedly taken on a transatlantic voyage from New York to Liverpool in 1870, where Olcott met Moolji and another Indian traveler named Tulsidas, long before the formation of the Arya Samaj. Peebles is largely a marginal figure in Theosophical Society history except for this single day, when he gave Olcott the Bombay address of Thackersey, with results that eventually led the TS to relocate to India. Here is the biographical sketch of him from a website maintained by his most recent biographer.
He condemned Blavatsky and supported her accusers the Coulombs during the SPR investigation of the TS, but after her death was on collegial terms with Olcott on an 1897 return trip to South Asia. While Peebles was both a Spiritualist and a Buddhist during his public career, his political and Free Thought involvements are equally important to his role in the history of the adepts. In 1869 he became US Consul in Trebizonde, Turkey, and en route to his assignment he participated in a Free Thought conference in Naples. Noteworthy in terms of the 1870s themes of the Theosophical Society is correspondence read from Garibaldi, the presence of his “chaplain,” and the Italian nationalist rhetoric of Peebles’s address to the group. His association with diplomatic service in the eastern Mediterranean connects him to a network of early Theosophical Society supporters, most strikingly Richard Francis Burton. Peebles described visiting the great explorer in Trieste in his first round the world trip. This 1874 article describes all the connections he made while in Europe, including the London Archaeological Society, of special interest since Burton was a major player in that organization.
In his travel memoir Around the World (1874), Peebles describes meeting Brahmo Samajis in Calcutta, one of whom had translated Emma Hardinge Britten’s Spiritual Commandments into Bengali and distributed it as a pamphlet. October 1873 is the last appearance of Peebles in ship passenger lists I can find for the 1870s. This coincides with the chronology in Around the World, copyright 1874, and contradicts Olcott’s claim that Peebles had “just arrived” from India in 1877 when he saw a picture of Olcott with Indians taken in 1870. I found no appearances of any Olcott, Tulsidas, or Thackersey in ship passenger lists from 1870 or adjacent years. The story of Thackersey and Olcott meeting on board ship was possibly unfounded, which would explain why Olcott got caught in an apparent contradiction when later telling Richard Hodgson that he’d never met a Hindu before he went to India.
Peebles claimed to have met Blavatsky in Cairo and seen her again with Olcott at the Eddy farmhouse. In fact, he spent an entire two weeks at the Eddy farmhouse during the period that Olcott and HPB met there. Like Emma Hardinge (not yet Britten) and other Spiritualists, he travelled to Salt Lake City. Their acquaintance dates back to at least 1870, and they remained friends until Emma’s death in 1899. In search of historical background on Peebles, I found a letter to abolitionist author Sojourner Truth from Oliver Johnson at the Anti-Slavery Office, NYC , 7/29/1863, which begins with the words “Yours by the hand of J.M. Peebles came promptly.” I found more on the Peebles/Sojourner connection here. Peebles seems to be one the most ubiquitous of the 19th century occultists, perhaps more of a central node in the larger network than anyone else including Emma Britten and Helena Blavatsky, involved with Spiritualism, Theosophy, Free Thought, Buddhism, and Abolitionism.
Marc Demarest’s unfolding research has suggested to me at various points that American Spiritualists had as much influence on Emma’s evolving beliefs as did the earlier European associates she memorialized as the Orphic Brotherhood. For the history of the Church of Light, these are very helpful puzzle pieces enabling us to reconstruct the history of the adepts. One of the keynotes of the CofL has been an outspoken progressive/reformist political stance, which reflects the New Deal environment in which Zain lived his most productive years. It seems odd that a group so American in spirit, so focused on progressive political values of US origin, grew out of an English occult group that drew largely on European and Middle Eastern inspiration. But when we see Emma Hardinge Britten as mainly influenced in the 1850s/60s by American progressive reformers, Zain’s emphases of the 1930s/40s appear as a reflection of the 19th century Spiritualist roots of the body of teachings.
Peebles continues to be an important founding father for contemporary Spiritualists, and is regularly consulted by mediums as can be seen in a variety of online sites.
In January I will write about the new biography of Sri Aurobindo by Peter Heehs, but in the meantime wanted to share a link to this excellent article by Christine Rhone that just appeared online about Mirra Alfassa, which is clearly written and well researched on the subject of her teacher Max Theon.
Another excellent way to get better acquainted with Mirra Alfassa is through this interpretation of her natal chart by Peter Stockinger.
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Sir Richard Francis Burton
The newest book to shed light on historical adepts is a biography of an Algerian Sufi Sheikh, Abdelkader, whose final years were spent in Damascus where he became the close friend of Richard Francis Burton and his wife Isabel. John Kiser’s Commander of the Faithful: The Life and Times of Emir Abd el-Kader was acclaimed in the New York Times as “a dramatic story of quarreling tribes, of Sufi sects and brotherhoods, of treacherous Ottoman officials, rival French generals, secret negotiations, broken truces, terrible atrocities and new forms of insurgency and counterinsurgency warfare.” All those subjects are addressed in the first half of Kiser’s book which is set in Algeria, as was his award winning Monks of Tibhirine. Abdelkader rose to fame as the leader of Algerian tribes, but the second half of the military hero’s life was as an exile increasingly recognized for his noble character and spiritual studies. He became increasingly admired in French exile before being moved to Turkey and then Damascus. While in Damascus his involvement rescuing victims of anti-Christian riots brought him international acclaim including a gift from Abraham Lincoln. When Richard and Isabel Burton arrived at a British consular post in Damascus, they soon found and befriended the Emir. Another eccentric English traveler, Lady Jane Digby, was part of the Burton entourage during this period.
My first published investigation of Madame Blavatsky was a 1986 booklet on possible Sufi connections between her teachings and those of Gurdjieff. The next focus of my investigations was the American artist Albert Rawson who promoted a variety of fringe Masonic groups in the US. Leslie Price of the Theosophical History Centre in London encouraged my research and published the resulting articles. By the time The Masters Revealed was published in 1994, I had learned of an international cast of characters involved in related Masonic activity in Egypt and the Near East. Richard Francis Burton emerged as a node in the social network of early TS supporters. Rawson and Burton have continued to be mentioned in new books about individuals they knew and whose lives were entangled with theirs. The combination of Masonic and Islamic themes and memes is found in both their works, and I recently learned of an 1892 article in which Rawson recounts decades of acquaintance with Burton.
Of the figures profiled in chapters of The Masters Revealed, Burton is the one who has reappeared in various contexts relevant to the roots of The Church of Light. About a year after joining the CofL I was invited to participate in Donna Zuckerbrot’s documentary film which has seen on four Canadian cable networks from 2008 through the present. The subtitle of the documentary Madame Blavatsky: Spiritual Traveller was taken from my remarks, quoted at the end to the effect that HPB “created the model” of the spiritual traveller, whose search for truth was global in scope. After seeing it, I realized that she was just the first person to use a global search for spiritual truth from many sources as the basis of a new movement. But Burton is more deserving of accolades for creating the model that she exemplified, which later inspired such explorers as Alexandra David-Neel. He was the most celebrated British explorer of the mid-19th century, and first met Blavatsky in Cairo in 1853 as he was preparing for his great trip to Mecca. In 1878 he joined the British Theosophical Society, but recent research by Marc Demarest indicates that he had been introduced to occult studies in England in the 1840s as a member of the so-called Orphic Brotherhood led by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Richard James Morrison (Zadkiel), and Philip Henry Stanhope.
Albert Rawson, who introduced Burton to Blavatsky, claimed four extensive journeys to the Middle East, in one of which he became acquainted with John Varley II, a painter whose family was very prominent in British astrological and occult circles from the beginning of the 19th century. Varley and his wife Isabella, the aunt of William Butler Yeats, were members of the short lived Inner Group of the London TS lodge* and lifelong Theosophists. Varley traveled extensively as a landscape painter, best known for his depictions of Egypt. The header of this blog is detail from a Varley street scene of 1870s Cairo. James Peebles, who introduced Olcott and Blavatsky to leaders of Sinhalese Buddhism and the Arya Samaj, was another American globetrotter with connections in the Free Thought movement as well as Spiritualism. Peebles in Egypt will be the subject of a future blog post in 2011, but the next entry will focus on Hurrichund Chintamon who was involved with the Arya Samaj, Theosophical Society, and Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor.
Here is the link to Albert Rawson’s piece on Burton, “Personal Recollections of Sir Richard Francis Burton, KGMG, FRS, FRGS,” and it runs from pages 565-577, with the story of Burton’s meeting Blavatsky on 573-4. John Patrick Deveney demonstrated, in two articles published in Theosophical History, that Rawson is quite untrustworthy on chronology in his memoir of acquaintance with HPB. But this new find from Rawson conflicts with that previously known article about HPB, and fits what Deveney found to be plausible times when he might have been in the Middle East. Rawson not only claims to have introduced Burton to Blavatsky (in context which makes it clear that it occurred in 1853, conflicting with his 1851 date in the Blavatsky article) but quotes Burton thanking him for an introduction to Abdelkader.
* not the Inner Group of Blavatsky’s final years, but a pro-HPB group within the fragmented London Lodge of 1884
- Emma Hardinge in the 1850s
The shared roots of the Theosophical Society and the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor have become better understood in recent years. In The Unseen Worlds of Emma Hardinge Britten, Robert Matthiesen draws a distinction between what he calls the Earlier and Later Theosophical Societies:
“Only in 1879 did a reorganized Theosophical Society once again begin to meet in India and elsewhere, but only about four of the founding members ever took much part in its activities. The large majority of them kept their distance from it, and a few of them, above all Emma Hardinge Britten, eventually became severe critics of its undertakings. Because of this great discontinuity of membership, I am inclined to speak of two Theosophical Societies (the one of 1875-76; the other from 1878 on) as separate organizations, which I shall call the Earlier and the Later Theosophical Society. The insistent claim of the Later Theosophical Society (in all its variant forms) to be the legitimate heir of the Earlier one, and the true custodian of its heritage, may have some basis in law, but it can easily obscure any profound historical examination of the Earlier Theosophical Society on its own terms…Unlike the Later Theosophical Society, the Earlier one was the joint creation, in varying but still significant ways, of most or all of its founding members.”(pp 32-34)
Emma Hardinge Britten was the most prominent of the Earlier TS authors, her Modern American Spiritualism (1870) making her the preeminent Spiritualist historian of the 19th century. Her Art Magic and Ghost Land were the first two books published by a TS Founder, and lay the groundwork for much that came after: e.g. claims of mysterious adept co-authorship and use of the term Theosophy to describe a body of teachings that can be traced back to antiquity. But Emma was so unhappy with the direction taken by the Later TS that she eventually wrote that its new claims and theories rested “at most, on the authority of a `band of brothers,’ who are of no more authority than any other band of brothers, of whom there are hosts in the East, as elsewhere, and who singly or severally are only authoritative– beyond their particular sphere of discipleship– in as far as their teachings correspond to such laws, principles, and facts, as are already proven, or are capable of being proven.” (Nineteenth Century Miracles, p. 303.) Six years later in her journal The Two Worlds, Britten was sharper in her criticism of the Theosophical Mahatmas: “The most unfortunate feature of all these claims is, however, that there is not one shadow of evidence given of its truth, except that it is the teaching of some unknown `Mahatmas,’ of whose existence again there is not even a shadow of proof, and of whose supposed doings three parties have publicly asserted the whole story to be a fiction, and the result of gross imposture. If there are `Mahatmas,’—if these Mahatmas, can give any authoritative proof of their existence even, why is not that proof forthcoming? Meanwhile, against the possibility of any such proof, first comes the pamphlet of Madame Coulomb, then of the exhaustive researches, also published, of Dr. Richard Hodgson, and finally the tremendous and disgraceful revelations made in the New York Sun, as late ago as July 20th.” (9/12/1890, p. 519)
Britten wrote in Nineteenth Century Miracles that “as long as the Society existed in that city on its original lines, the author’s name was retained as a member of the first council.”(p. 302) In the same section she describes those original lines later abandoned by Blavatsky and Olcott: “…it was deemed desirable to conduct the proceedings on the basis of a secret society…results attainable only to those who could, and would pursue, their studies, to the innermost depths of nature’s laboratories.”(p. 296) The Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor emerged in Great Britain in 1884 to offer what the original TS had provided briefly but then abandoned: instruction in practical occultism within the framework of a secret society. An Esoteric Section within the TS was created by HPB partly in response to the success of the HBofL recruiting prominent Theosophists, especially in America and France, and William Q. Judge’s pleas for a competing alternative. Emma lent tacit support and the HBofL regarded her Art Magic and Ghost Land as foundational documents — the “stones rejected by the builders” of the Later TS. She denied authorship of the HBofL’s major doctrinal work The Light of Egypt, but endorsed its value:
“We deeply regret that other matters of pressing moment have, of late, occupied our columns to the exclusion of those notices of books, pamphlets, and tracts, which we have received in great numbers, and which we hope yet to call attention to. This apology relates especially to the noble, philosophic, and instructive work, published by George Redway of London, entitled “The Light of Egypt.” We had hoped to have found space to give abundant quotations from this admirable treatise, one which supplies not only fine suggestive views of planetary cosmogony, but also furnishes a good corrective, founded, on the basis of science, fact, and reason, to the groundless assertions of theosophy, some of which appear in quotation in this numbers Leader. Ere we close this merely preliminary notice that we have been favored with a copy of “The Light of Egypt,” we would call its author’s attention to the fact that a certain American editor of a Theosophical Magazine, entitled The Path, after venting on this fine work all the abuse, scorn and display of ignorance and insolence that his malice could dictate, ends by adding that this book is “by Mrs. Emma Hardinge Britten.” We trust it needs no open disclaimer on our part to assure the gifted author of “The Light of Egypt” that this rude and uncalled-for piece of mendacity could only have been designed by the writer to add injury to insult, and compel the Editor of this journal to express her regret that she has not the smallest claim to stand in a position implying ability far beyond her capacity to attain to. It is hoped that this public disclaimer will be sufficient to atone for the intended injury to the esteemed author of “The Light of Egypt,” and explain to him the animus with which his comments on the fantastic theories of the day are received by a prominent Theosophical journalist. (The Two Worlds, August 18, 1889, p. 481.)
The bitter tone of Britten’s remarks about the TS in later life reflected disappointed expectations, in the opinion of Robert Matthiessen. Her support of the HBofL was presumably based not only on doctrinal agreement (anti-reincarnationist in the later TS sense) but on support for its pursuit of practical rather than theoretical occult study. The HBofL made the same kind of confusing assertion that the Later TS made, claiming to be the same Brotherhood of Luxor that had really been a different entity. The British HBofL leaders claimed that their work had begun in 1870 in Egypt. But as best historians can tell, there was never any HBofL as a formal organization before 1884; the previous Brotherhood of Luxor referred to an informal network of associates in early 1870s Egypt. Hence, when the Later TS leaders attacked the HBofL as an upstart group falsely claiming to have existed fourteen years earlier than it actually was created, they were justified. But then so were the HBofL leaders equally justified in arguing that the TS after its move to India was not at all the same organization it had been– and that their own teachings were more in line with those of the original TS. More than a century since these organizations diverged, we have considerable historical evidence available to disentangle the conflicting claims.
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Hermetic Wisdom Through the Ages
- The Alexandrian Library
The Church of Light renews a tradition that has gone through many phases in its two thousand year history. Hermetism flourished in second-century Egypt, and its earliest known texts are in Greek. Its central figure, Hermes, is an amalgamation of the Greek God Hermes (the planet Mercury) with the ancient Egyptian god Thoth. He is called Hermes Trismegistus, or thrice-great Hermes, for his mastery of three fields of study: astrology, alchemy, and magic. The Corpus Hermeticum is the collection of sacred texts that define early Hermetic teachings. Hermetism in its original form is defined as a religion, but from the beginning it incorporated elements of philosophy and science. Although it became extinct as a religion, the philosophy and science of Hermetism survived as an underground current influencing the history of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism.
The Greek manuscript of the Corpus Hermeticum was rediscovered in 1460 and first translated into modern languages by Marsilio Ficino, thereby becoming a major influence on the Renaissance. This rediscovery and new influence is called Hermeticism, which flourished in 16th century Christian Europe. At the time it was believed that the text dated to hundreds of years before Christ and that Hermes was a contemporary of Moses. But its alleged antiquity was undermined by scholar Isaac Casaubon in 1614, who found persuasive evidence that the Corpus dates to the early Christian era. Thereafter Hermetic teachings went back underground. However, recent scholarship has found increasing evidence of Egyptian roots of the Hermetic teachings. Discovery of the Nag Hammadi library in 1947 provided modern students of Hermetism with a hitherto unknown text, On the Ogdoad and the Ennead. Professor Gilles Quispel explains that “This work shows without any doubt that the Hermetic believer was initiated into several grades before transcending the sphere of the seven planets and the heaven of the fixed stars (the Ogdoad.) Then he would behold the God beyond and experience Himself. It is now completely certain that there existed before and after the beginning of the Christian era in Alexandria a secret society, akin to a Masonic lodge. ” (The Way of Hermes, p. 10)
The Church of Light is a renewal of the Hermetic tradition as a religion, with grades of initiation modeled on the original three fields of study: astrology, alchemy, and magic. It continues the work of the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor, founded as an organization in England in 1884, but derived from adepts who met in Egypt around 1870. Connecting these phases was Max Theon, a spiritual guide of the HBL but uninvolved in its public work. The Hermetic tradition is the common property of humanity, and no organization can contain it. The Church of Light is devoted to applying the Hermetic teachings today. The insights and information in the Hermetic tradition provide a tremendous source of spiritual guidance for seekers now and far into the future. Guided by the Hermetic axiom “As above, so below,” the Church of Light brings astrology, alchemy, and magic into daily life.