Category: Elbert Benjamine

This 1916 photograph of a Carmel landmark appears on a timeline of historic photographs on the admirable website of the local visitor center.

The epilogue below appears in the new reprint of The Quest of the Spirit.

The Brotherhood of Light was headquartered in Los Angeles throughout its fourteen years of public work, led by Elbert and Elizabeth Benjamine and Fred Skinner. Writing of the 21 volume Brotherhood of Light lessons and private meetings commenced in 1914, with public work beginning on November 11, 1918, the Armistice Day that ended the first world war.

Its successor organization The Church of Light was formed the week of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s election to the presidency in November 1932. The Brotherhood of Light lessons were complete by 1934, although revisions continued until Elbert’s death in 1951. Its predecessor organization the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor had splintered in America due to divisions among the leaders, but continued in France, Algeria, and Israel as Max Theon’s Cosmic Philosophy for decades. Genevieve Stebbins returned to her native California in 1917 after more than thirty years in the eastern United States and England.

She returned with a second husband, Norman Astley, whom she had married in 1892 in Boston and who became the manager of her New York School of Expression and collaborator in its programs until they retired to England in 1907. Her first husband, Joseph Thompson, was the brother of her business partner Mary Thompson. The marital and business partnerships dissolved by 1892; Norman Astley filled both vacancies admirably, managing her investments and artistic endeavors with equal skill.

Their choice of Carmel-by-the-Sea as a place to retire after a life of international travel raises questions related to Astley’s former life as Thomas H. Burgoyne, who had collaborated there as a co-author with Sarah Stanley Grimké. His later life, in which he spent forty years as husband of Genevieve Stebbins included the lifespan of the Brotherhood of Light, whose lessons reflect his writings as well as hers and those of Grimké.

Elbert Benjamine’s writings reflect not only the influence of his mentors the Astleys, but also literary figures in the Monterey Bay milieu, including permanent residents Lincoln Steffens and Robinson Jeffers as well as Jack London and Upton Sinclair who visited the area and wrote about it.

Thomas Henry d’Alton (Dalton, Alton) was born April 14, 1855 in Douglas, Isle of Man. He was the son of chiropodist Thomas Henry d’Alton and Emma Rice, who had him christened in Grisham, Lancashire on July 1. He married Betsy Bella Prince May 12, 1878 in Lancaster, Lancashire and was the father of a son Thomas and a daughter Veda in Burnley, Lancashire when he adopted the pseudonym T.H. Burgoyne in 1884. Soon after Burgoyne was named Secretary of the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor, it was revealed by Theosophists that he had convicted in 1883 of obtaining money under false pretenses in West Riding, Yorkshire and had served six months in prison. Leaving his wife and children, he arrived in White County, Georgia as Burgoyne with Peter Davidson and family in 1886. Burgoyne’s periodical writings appeared solely in HBofL-related publications between 1885 and 1888: first The Occultist and The Occult Magazine in England and then Thomas Moore Johnson’s The Platonist.

After the first edition of The Light of Egypt was published in Chicago by Religio-Philosophical Publishing House in 1889, Burgoyne was published exclusively by Astro-Philosophical Publications of Denver, which released Celestial Dynamics in 1896 and Language of the Stars in 1892. All three were published as works of Zanoni, identified finally as Burgoyne only in the 1900 expanded edition of The Light of Egypt. The influence of Burgoyne’s writings was greater in continental Europe than the English-speaking world, with translations and paraphrases of The Light of Egypt in French, Russian, German, and Spanish, and the Paris occultist Papus promoting Burgoyne’s astrological teachings in his own works. Burgoyne’s letters to Thomas Moore Johnson published in Letters to the Sage are significant evidence of HBofL practices and teachings, but later he becomes the subject of others’ letters that reveal the confusion unleashed by revelation of Burgoyne’s real name and history. Theosophical leaders saw it as a way to discredit a rival organization, and the ensuing controversy destroyed the HBofL in England, but not in France where it continued to thrive, nor in America where Peter Davidson pursued his studies in Georgia independently of Council President Johnson and Secretary Burgoyne.

Zanoni was a pen name derived from a Rosicrucian themed 1842 novel by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, in which the adept teacher of the title character was named Mejnour. Peter Davidson, Provincial Grand Master of the North of the original HBof L, had written in the Scottish Highlands under the latter pen name. On July 12, 1886 the HBofL Council met in Kansas City without Burgoyne present to deliberate on evidence that d’Alton and Burgoyne were the same person. They agreed unanimously that they were identical and advised all members to avoid contact with Burgoyne and Davidson until further investigation. In St. Louis they met again on September 5, reinstating Burgoyne who was present this time as a member. Peter Davidson, on the other hand, is never mentioned again by Johnson and colleagues in the letters. This evidence implies that Burgoyne escaped the ostracism of his colleagues in the HBofL, but Davidson was blamed for the pseudonymous intrigues. Burgoyne first traveled to California in 1887, after visiting Topeka, Kansas with HBofL board member W.W. Allen, and in Denver with what was becoming the largest local group of members. He became a United States citizen in Shawnee County, Kansas in 1887. Ten years later in 1897 he obtained American citizenship as Norman Astley in New York City.

Meanwhile, in early 1887 Sarah Stanley Grimké had sent her daughter Angelina to live in Massachusetts with her father, after which she appears to have spent at least the next year in California. She left abruptly for New Zealand in 1888 before publication of her collaborative project with Burgoyne. The precise contribution of Grimké to The Light of Egypt was later described by Elbert Benjamine as assisting with The Science of the Stars portion of the 1889 edition.

One of the most salient echoes of Chevalier Louis in The Light of Egypt is Zanoni’s claim to have made “personal investigations, extending over a series of years in England, France, Germany, Austria, and the United States, with various types and phases of mediums.” In The Key to Theosophy, Blavatsky notes the continuity of adepts “used as sledge-hammers to break the theosophical heads with” which “began twelve years ago, with Mrs. Emma Hardinge Britten’s `Louis’ of Art Magic and Ghost-Land, and now ends with the “Adept” and `Author’ of The Light of Egypt.” [H. P. Blavatsky, Key to Theosophy, 239.]

Letters to the Sage includescorrespondence from Burgoyne mailed in Monterey, California in the late 1880s, but none thereafter. He did, however, live briefly in Mendocino County and advertised a forthcoming book with a Cummings mailing address in 1891. When Norman and Genevieve Astley began acquiring property in North Carolina, they were described in a February 1894 Morganton newspaper story that mentions his having lived on a California ranch, which he claims to have owned. Bureau of Land Management records for patents, which are purchases of land directly from the federal government rather than from an individual owner and show that in January 1891 160 acres of ranch land in Mendocino County was patented to a John H. Burgoyne. The land is in the northwestern portion of the county, and just twenty miles as the crow flies from Cummings where he was receiving mail in 1891.

Born in San Francisco in 1857 the only child of a lawyer James Cole Stebbins who had relocated there from upstate New York with his young wife Henrietta, Genevieve lost her mother in infancy and was cared for by her aunt Louisa. She became a successful actress in New York in her twenties and by thirty had become an acting teacher. After further studies in England and France she emerged as a public figure, becoming the most prominent American teacher of the Delsarte method of elocution and acting. She combined Delsarte methods with yogic breathing learned from a swami at Oxford, as well as exercises involving stretches and postures adapted from yoga. With her marriage to Astley in 1892 he became her business manager and in addition to running the Manhattan school they traveled up and down the east coast giving classes and performances. Between 1894 and 1906 the Astleys owned property in the Blue Ridge mountains.

After her retirement in 1907 Stebbins traveled with Astley, settling in England for several years before returning to the US in 1917. Norman Astley is far more elusive than his famous wife, and no record prior to their marriage can be solidly linked to him. We find the couple in a boarding house in Asbury Park, New Jersey in the 1900 census. Retiring first to Dittisham, Devon in 1907, they moved to St. Peter Port, Guernsey by 1911 and by 1913 were living in Slindon, Sussex which was listed as their most recent residence in the 1917 ship passenger list that recorded their return to the United States. Documentation of the Astleys’ American travels and citizenship provides dozens of such pieces of evidence of a man living more than fifty years as Norman Astley, leaving traces in five states as well as England. Thomas Henry Burgoyne, on the other hand, leaves far fewer traces, being recorded as name of an author of books and letters but appearing in no public documents other than those described above.

The thesis of Mark Singleton’s Yoga Body is that “the reciprocal influence of `harmonial’ gymnastic systems (like the American Delsartism of Genevieve Stebbins…) and modern hatha yoga is enormous.”ii 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.”[Mark Singleton, Yoga Body, 71.]

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 calisthenic 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.”[Ibid, 160.]

The Quest of the Spirit argues 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.” Henri Bergson and William James were not just philosophical colleagues but close friends, and James was intending to write the introduction to the English translation of Bergson’s Creative Evolution but died before it was completed. The language about creation and evolution in the Brotherhood of Light lessons is strongly reminiscent of Bergson’s vitalist themes, and Bergson’s younger sister Moina Mathers was one of the founders of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Like James, Bergson was interested in parapsychology; at the time of James’s death, Bergson was president of the British Society for Psychical Research. James was evidently a personal friend and not just an admired philosopher, in light of the Astleys’ residence in Boston in the early 1890s and longstanding interest in psychical research. Researcher Kelly Mullan reports that James became a friend of Stebbins at a Chautauqua conference where he and Genevieve were both speakers.

In the appendix to her magnum opus, written for this 1892 edition, Stebbins summarizes the conclusions reached in her decades as a teacher in a nine-point “my credo” of which the first three are quoted below: First—All faculties lie deep within the soul and are there potential as the oak in the acorn. Second—These faculties cannot be manifested without the cooperation of the brain, each portion of the brain having its own function. Third—Through the nervous system is established communication between brain and body; each function in the brain sympathizing with some part of the body, and corresponding surfaces also having corresponding meanings,—the upper with the upper, the lower with the lower, the anterior with the anterior, the posterior with the posterior, and so on. [Genevieve Stebbins, Dynamic Breathing and Harmonic Gymnastics, 146]

Poetics of Dance by Gabriele Brandstetter, first published in German in 1995, explains that “Stebbins’s main contribution to modern dance– her emphasis on the dynamics of dance movement– is still underestimated even today. She was the first to no longer regard dance from the perspective of dance technique, muscular training, or the systematic development of articulation, emphasizing instead its energetic principles. Stebbins’s elaboration of the Delsarte system heralded a paradigm shift in modern dance in an attempt to redefine dance movement on the basis of a vitalist understanding of dynamics. [Gabriele Brandstetter, Poetics of Dance, 4.]

Genevieve’s death in 1934 coincided with the completion of Benjamine’s Brotherhood of Light lessons and Norman’s immediate remarriage ushered in a period of discord and confusion in his personal life. He married the nurse who had cared for Genevieve within a week of her death, and his new wife Nellie Dougan immediately moved to seize his assets and declare him mentally incompetent. They relocated to Devon where she died five years later, leaving Norman to survive until 1943 living first in Plymouth and finally dying in Gloucestershire.

Carmel Neighbors

Donna Marek’s Crème de Carmel is a charming guide to local history.  She reports: “The first Spanish mission in the area was the Presideo Chapel built in 1770 in Monterey, but the following year it was relocated on the Carmel River and renamed the Mission San Carlos de Borremeo.” [Donna Marek, Crème de Carmel, 8.]  Monterey became the capital of both Californias in 1770, and continued as capital of only Alta California under Spanish rule in 1804, continuing as capital under Mexican sovereignty from 1822 through 1846. Carmel remained undeveloped except for the Carmel Mission and nearby ranches until 1888 when eighty acres in Carmel Woods was subdivided into lots. The community of Carmel-by-the-Sea was created in 1903 and rapidly developed with home sites and businesses. It was incorporated as a town on October 31, 1916.

By the late 1920s the atmosphere had changed, as it was no longer an artist colony but a popular beach resort, as reported by biographer Justin Kaplan. It continued to attract famous writers but Kaplan reports that by 1927, when Lincoln Steffens arrived, “the real colony had disappeared” but Steffens welcomed visits from Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein. “Steffens also knew John and Carol Steinbeck, and suggested that Steinbeck write a series of articles for the San Francisco News about the Oklahoma migrants and how they were treated in Monterey County. Over the next four years, those articles led to Steinbeck’s writing The Grapes of Wrath.” [Justin Kaplan, Lincoln Steffens,]

Robert Louis Stevenson had lived for several months in Monterey in 1879 and wrote articles for the Monterey Californian.  Carmel is featured in Treasure Island.  The poet Robinson “Jeffers moved to Carmel in 1916 where he and his wife raised their two sons…Jeffers built their home—called Tor house—near the ocean, an undertaking that took five years.” [Donna Marek, Crème de Carmel, 30.]

The Benedict Cottage in Carmel on Scenic Drive was the site of evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson’s 1926 scandal. The stories that surfaced about her affair threw Carmel into the national limelight.”[Ibid, 31.]

The Sea Lion Point Trail at Point Lobos is the most easily accessible short walk to scenic overlooks where the rocky shoreline and sandy beaches can be viewed from above.  The name Point Lobos would seem to imply that wolves inhabited the area, but the Spanish term for what we call Sea Lions translates to Sea Wolf, which Jack London used as a title for a book about seafarers based in the central California coast. [Jerry Emory, Monterey Bay Shoreline Guide, 254-55.]

Lincoln Steffens relocated to Carmel-by-the-Sea several years after the Astleys moved there. He is not often associated with “the occult” but his biographer Justin Kaplan commented “Despite his later claim that he had shunned the fraternities as all bunk and pretension, Steffens was glad to belong to Zeta Psi, the oldest of Berkeley’s Greek-letter societies.  And it was on his urging that Frederick Willis, his closest friend in college, also joined. Willis was interested in theosophy, the survival of the soul after death, ‘sacred occultism,’ and parapsychology, and considered himself an expert mesmerist. Like many other students he has given himself over to the passion that motivated William James, in 1884, to establish an American Society for Psychical Research with its various committees on Thought Transference, hypnotism, and Apparitions and Haunted Houses.  In the Zeta Psi fraternity house near Bancroft Way, Steffens took instruction from Willis and began his own experiments with mesmerism, clairvoyance and thought transference.” [Justin Kaplan, Lincoln Steffens, 30.]

When Steffens was an undergraduate, Berkeley was not the thriving intellecual community it later became. Kaplan reports that “as an intellectual community, as a breeding place for philosophers, William James had said in 1883, ‘it’s a poor place’; and some of his disciples who had been invite to teach there with a sense of going into exile. Yet it was at Berkeley, fifteen years later, that James, reading his paper ‘Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results,’ first announced pragmatism as a theory of truth and formulated his subsequent creed. (Ibid, 29.]

Sources Cited:

Helena P. Blavatsky, The Key to Theosophy. London: Theosophical Publishing House, 1889,

Brandstetter, Gabriele, Poetics of Dance. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.

Emory, Jerry, Monterey Bay Shoreline Guide. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.

Kaplan, Justin, Lincoln Steffens. New York: Simion and Schuster, 2013.

Marek, Donna, Crème de Carmel. New York: Roberts Reinhardt, 1994.

Singleton, Mark, Yoga Body. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.

Stebbins, Genevieve, Dynamic Breathing and Harmonic Gymnastics. New York: Edgar S. Werner, 1892.

The boundaries between fiction and non-fiction are often physical, as in separate sections of public libraries and bookstores. But in the world of occult literature the borders are indistinct between historical novels, authentic memoirs, and fictionalized autobiographies. Most interesting to me are authors who alternate between the genres. Emma Hardinge Britten and Mme. Blavatsky both wrote fiction that was claimed to be non-fiction (Ghost Land, the Mahatma Letters) and non-fiction that discussed some of the same people under their real names (Nineteenth Century Miracles, The Durbar in Lahore.) This has caused endless confusion among Spiritualists and Theosophists, along the same lines as legendary histories of Masonic and Rosicrucian orders. 

27 footnotes were added to the new edition of Tom Clark and His Wife, because Paschal Beverly Randolph’s Rosicrucian novel is full of literary quotes, geographical information about places the author had visited, and historical detail about then-current events during the Civil War and famous people involved in them. All these require explanation to be understood by contemporary readers. Several editions are already in print but none offers any editorial content giving historical context for the 161 year old book.

Sarah Stanley Grimke and Alexander Wilder are finally getting some notice from readers and have good prospects for increasing recognition, thanks to the editorial labors of Patrick Bowen and Ronnie Pontiac respectively as well as my own. Genevieve Stebbins has had considerably more recent scholarly attention, and the new edition of Quest of the Spirit has more new information about her life and partnership with Norman Astley than has ever appeared in print.  Thomas H. Burgoyne and Hurrychund Chintamon were targeted in recent books with outright defamation based on 19th century libels, whereas Grimke and Wilder have been unjustly ignored and forgotten.  The only way to counteract misinformation and disinformation about forgotten authors is to let them speak for themselves to modern readers, which has been the motive for publishing them in new editions. 

Discussion of esoteric groups’ history is frequently distorted by two opposing forces. Propaganda is defined by Oxford Language as “Information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote or publicize a particular political cause or point of view.” Polemics are defined by the same source as “a speech or piece of writing expressing a strongly critical attack on or controversial opinion about someone or something.” Neither correlates with historical reliability which requires a more neutral and objective tone to be credible.