This public domain book was first published in London in 1913 by Henry Glaisher and company and in New York by Edgar Werner. “A Pilgrim of the Way” (now known to be Norman Astley) was named as the author, his wife Genevieve Stebbins as the editor. This is the first reprint.
EDITORIAL NOTE
The manuscript, of which this booklet is an epitome, was placed in my hands to prepare for the press, by one whose friendship I have enjoyed for many years.
What is here presented is less than a fourth part of the whole, but omits nothing that is vital to an understanding of the Author’s comprehensive philosophy of life and action. Much that has been omitted would to-day be superfluous, as the contentions and teachings on the subjects discussed have already become demonstrated facts in science, or are accepted as probable by eminent philosophical thinkers.
Throughout, the style of the Author has been strictly preserved, and, as the conclusions reached are also the deepest convictions of my soul, in editing the work, I feel that it is the expression of my own thought and aspiration, though voiced by another “pilgrim of the way.”
GENEVIEVE STEBBINS
PREFACE
THE basic ideas in the writer’s mind, and the key therefore to the whole trend of his thought, maybe briefly summarised thus:
That all sound speculation of a true philosophy of life must be based upon the metaphysic of experience; and this must include all experience, psychical as well as physical.
That this metaphysic is identical with that view of the world and its activities which is expressed in the mind of the educated layman as common sense; but, as such, is always to be distinguished from those ideas of the uneducated mind which may arise from common ignorance.
That common sense, being the synthesis of all past experience, and the dominating attitude of mind by which the sanity of the world is preserved, is, in any final estimate, the only legitimate standard by which to evaluate those speculative ideas which rise beyond the foundation of facts.
That abstractions, not being substantial things, must not be accepted or mistaken for reality:
must not take the place of facts in laying a foundation of thought. Abstraction piled upon Abstraction forever remains Abstraction. No matter how elaborate, fascinating, and logical the structure, it is only a castle in the air, an unsubstantial bubble of the brain. The pathway to reality does not lie through its portals.
That contradiction and strife are inherent in, and, therefore, a part of existence; which itself is the manifestation of opposing movements. The shadows of life are proportionate to the light.
That the tragedy and reality of good and evil in the world being a fact of universal experience, its explanation can only be found in the assumption that the ground of existence is alogical- neither moral nor immoral but nonmoral. That the evolutionary movement of life moves on without design- flowing along the lines of least resistance. The ends attained under apparently identical conditions are always different, and never foreseen where life is the factor.
Thus grounded in experience, legitimate speculation will be based on truth; and the verification of this truth will be the reality we seek, for REALITY IS THE VERIFICATION OF EXPERIENCE. There is no reality in the universe which cannot appear.
So much for the writer’s part! For the reader, we hope he may escape the illusions of all metaphysical fog, and in voyaging into the unknown, ever keep a good breadth of clear cold water, and the healthy glint of the deep blue sea between himself and the God-forsaken wilderness of “Devil’s Island.” [Alchemy of Thought, L. P. Jacks.]
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.
Carmel Woods is an unincorporated community founded in 1922. Although Norman and Genevieve Astley returned to America in 1917, the earliest California address I found was the 1920 census which has them on Del Monte Avenue in Monterey; they first appear in Carmel in the 1926 city directory. They remained here until Genevieve’s death and Norman’s departure for England in 1934.
One remaining puzzle is where Burgoyne and Grimke had lived while writing The Light of Egypt in 1886-88. His mailing address was a post office box in Monterey at the time, but writing a book at Point Lobos would be impractical for someone living in Monterey in 1887, a long horseback ride of fifteen miles round trip, so living in the Carmel area and occasionally going into Monterey to the post office makes sense as a possibility for their living arrangements as co-authors. Here is a community history.
This week I visited Monterey and Carmel proceeding to Big Sur and beyond with a friend of many years who now lives in California. Elbert Benjamine’s description of Norman Astley includes Norman taking Elbert to Point Lobos at a place overlooking where T.H. Burgoyne wrote The Light of Egypt. So we went there and were welcomed by docents explaining where an author might have written a book at a place that could be viewed from above. They suggested that this overlook includes the likeliest possibilities.
The career of Genevieve Stebbins as a teacher of drama, dance and calisthenics had taken off by the time of her first marriage in 1888. But four years earlier she was just a struggling young actress as seen in this newpaper story dated November 9, 1884. How did she transform herself in such a short time? Studying and writing about Delsarte’s theories shows that Parisian influences were strong; Astley later refers to Henri Bergson in a way that makes me think he was a personal acquaintance. I noticed such a friendly reference to philosopher William James in his book that I wondered if they were in fact friends. This was later confirmed by a Canadian scholar who had read James discussing meeting Stebbins at a Chatauqua conference. What I cannot find is any evidence of her having been a member of the HBofL although this is stated as a fact in several books. We have all the US membership names through 1888 so she would have to have joined in Europe or after 1888– but none of the European and Israeli HBofL scholars have found any evidence. So we have confusion both with chronology and geography– when and where did she join the HBofL if she ever did?
Although it is not in print format, I consider the publication of The Quest of the Spirit as a scholarly paper on academia.edu part of the History of the Adepts book series. It is my favorite of the books in the series in fact, but there are several Stebbins scholars more qualified than I to comment on her works. As editor and publisher of Grimke, I approached Thomas Henry Burgoyne through her perspective as the only researcher pursuing her biography. From 1893 onward he must be approached as Norman Astley, and Stebbins researchers will shed more light.
If Stebbins is more popular among Church of Light readers (who I suspect account for a lot of the hits to Quest of the Spirit on academia) today, it seems appropriate because she was wildly popular in 1893.
This is the Zoom presentation to the October 2021 International Theosophical History Conference, which opened the proceedings on a rather informal note. The recording I had made for the blog and later posted had audio quality issues which are not a problem here. As for the video, don’t sit in a rocking chair while doing this– but oh well. The following thirteen presentations are all worthwhile and on the playlist.
The chapters being rather long for serialization as blog posts, I have instead created a reformatted file of the original text, along with the photographic reprint created by Marc Demarest from a copy I had scanned. Here is the page which has both links as well as the two video conference talks related to the subject. A word of clarification on my attitude to works of contested or ambiguous authorship. I have lately published works by Wilder, Grimke, and Chintamon, as books. There is no confusion about who wrote them. But for tomes like The Light of Egypt, Ghost Land, the Mahatma Letters, I feel it incumbent on any editor or publisher to identify the authors, and leave that to future generations. As for the Norman/Genevieve team, Quest of the Spirit seems to be mostly Genevieve in the first half, mostly Norman in the second half re the shift from science/philosophy to religion/psychic phenomena, and all Norman in the final appendices. But it is such a thorough collaboration between life partners that sorting out Genevieve and Norman in the text is probably impossible without original manuscripts that might provide clues.
It was not my intention to create a youtube channel, but posting this conference talk as a video led to that result, and trying to post it on academia.edu put it behind a firewall where only subscribers could see it. So am restoring it as a blog entry with the promise of a sequel by the end of this year.
When Quest of the Spirit was published in 1913, Norman Astley and Genevieve Stebbins had reached the midpoint of their forty-year marriage and of their ten year stay in England which ended in 1917 with a return to the US and Genevieve’s home state of California. Most of the text is similar in style to the earlier works of Stebbins, but several passages stand out as seeming to be in the personal voice of the “Pilgrim of the Way” to whom she attributes authorship. Internal evidence in the book leaves no alternative to her husband as the Pilgrim; my own historical research leaves no doubt that he had previously written under the pseudonyms Zanoni and Thomas H. Burgoyne. Neil Cantwell’s forensic handwriting analysis underscores this as a certainty. But the only literary evidence we have of the evolution of Astley’s ideas post-Burgoyne and post-Zanoni is in his wife’s book. The Editorial Note, Preface, and both Appendices are the most evidential about the Pilgrim and are reproduced below along with several relevant excerpts from the intervening chapters.–KPJ
EDITORIAL NOTE
The manuscript, of which this booklet is an epitome, was placed in my hands to prepare for the press, by one whose friendship I have enjoyed for many years. What is here presented is less than a fourth part of the whole, but omits nothing that is vital to an understanding of the Author’s comprehensive philosophy of life and action. Much that has been omitted would to-day be superfluous, as the contentions and teachings on the subjects discussed have already become demonstrated facts in science, or are accepted as probable by eminent philosophical thinkers. Throughout, the style of the Author has been strictly preserved, and, as the conclusions reached are also the deepest convictions of my soul, in editing the work, I feel that it is the expression of my own thought and aspiration, though voiced by another “pilgrim of the way.” GENEVIEVE STEBBINS.
PREFACE
The basic ideas in the writer’s mind, and the key therefore to the whole trend of his thought, may be briefly summarised thus : I. That all sound speculation of a true philosophy of life must be based upon the metaphysic of experience; and this must include all experience, psychical as well as physical. 2. That this metaphysic is identical with that view of the world and its activities which is expressed in the mind of the educated layman as common sense ; but, as such, is always to be distinguished from those ideas of the uneducated mind which may arise from common ignorance. 3. That common sense, being the synthesis of all past experience, and the dominating attitude of mind by which the sanity of the world is preserved, is, in any final estimate, the only legitimate standard by which to evaluate those speculative ideas which rise beyond the foundation of facts. 4. That abstractions, not being substantial things, must not be accepted or mistaken for reality: must not take the place of facts in laying a foundation of thought. Abstraction piled upon Abstraction forever remains Abstraction. No matter how elaborate, fascinating, and logical the structure, it is only a castle in the air, an unsubstantial bubble of the brain. The pathway to reality does not lie through its portals. 5. That contradiction and strife are inherent in, and, therefore, a part of existence; which itself is the manifestation of opposing movements. The shadows of life are proportionate to the light. 6. That the tragedy and reality of good and evil in the world being a fact of universal experience, its explanation can only be found in the assumption that the ground of existence is alogical-neither moral nor immoral but nonmoral. That the evolutionary movement of life moves on without design-flowing along the lines of least resistance. The ends attained under apparently identical conditions are always different, and never foreseen where life is the factor. 7. Thus grounded in experience, legitimate speculation will be based on truth; and the verification of this truth will be the reality we seek, for REALITY IS THE VERIFICATION OF EXPERIENCE. There is no reality in the universe which cannot appear.
So much for the writer’s part! For the reader, we hope he may escape the illusions of all metaphysical fog, and in voyaging into the unknown, ever keep a good breadth of clear cold water, and the healthy glint of the deep blue sea be· tween himself and the God-forsaken wilderness of “Devil’s Island.” Alchemy of Thought, L. P. Jacks.
EXCERPTS
Thus viewed, the devoted collector may feel that his life-efforts have not been in vain. Nay! he may even think that his reward has been great. This state of mind, however, comes only when the entire field of labour is surveyed as a whole. When we come to look over these possessions separately, our pride begings to diminish. When we begin to examine them under the intellectual microscope critically, we feel humiliated and reduced to our just proportions. When so examined, not one single treasure of thought is seen to be perfect; not one single stone of fact without some tiny flaw, unnoticeable to any but the expert. Deep down in the heart of our most precious gem, there lurks some unknown substance. That erstwhile perfect jewel, “The pearl of great price,” is perfect only in comparison with some greater imperfection. Why is this always the case with human effort– How is it that we are forever brought to a pause with the “Ever not quite”? (p19)
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 stmcture. We are convinced that the chief foundation-stones will be discovered in the works of Eucken, Bergson, and James.(p32)
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 a contrite heart, we begin the journey as pilgrims of “The Way.”(p40)
The survival of the human personality beyond the grave now craves our serious attention. To the writer the question: ” Is it possible for the individual consciousness of the soul, to continue in a super-physical state of being after death” can no longer arise. It was answered in the affirmative many years ago; under circumstances which rendered self-deception, telepathy or fraud upon the part of others utterly impossible. Here we must be personal. This experience came at a time when thoughts and work lay in a wholly different direction: when spirit communion, if it occupied a place in the mind at all, was certainly in the back-most of the back seats of the brain ; for the ” I ” was entirely unconscious of entertaining such ideas. A brief statement of all the necessary facts of the experience will be found in Appendix I ” A case of Spirit Identity.” It is only necessary here to point out, that coming without prejudice, as it did, with no self-seeking wish to father the issue, there was no self-deception. There was no tricky form of mediumship; no dubious clairvoyance describing symbolic images that might have any meaning and be construed to any end. On the contrary a genuine vision was perceived by a normal person in good health. A clearly defined personality appeared almost as objective as any other of the surroundings. I distinctly heard the voice speaking, (or I imagined I did) giving names, dates, and other important items, not necessary to recount here. And the result is a complete verification of every detail. In view of proposition ” 7 ” that Reality is the verification of experience. I accept this and affirm as sincerely as I can affirm any experience in my life that the communication received was a reality ; that the soul of a departed person did appear-hence survived death. What is possible in one instance is possible in others. Since that time scores of instances of identity have crossed the path of my research, but none that stands out so clearly as this. This is the one unique gem in a vast collection. But it has one tiny flaw. It is not perfect when studied from an orthodox religious point-of-view. For purposes unknown to us, some other order of spiritual intelligence may have impersonated the mother. But the absence of any conceivable reason for deception, and the fact that the message was fraught with momentous consequences and formed the turning-point in a career, compels me to reject any idea of deception. The consequences, at any rate, have been nothing but beneficial to those concerned. The possibility of the survival of the human personality beyond the grave, then, is assumed in the chapters which follow; and this tremendous fact makes all the difference in the world to the philosophical attitude of a thinker’s mind. A philosophy of life which neglects to take account of the super-normal facts of psychical research, together with the facts of religious experience, fails most lamentably to justify its name. Ere the close of the present century it will become as obsolete as medieval scholasticism.(pp61-62)
By an effort of the imagination it will not be difficult to bring before the mind’s eye an individual form composed of a finer substance than, so-called, earthly material-a substance that is self-luminous. Imagine an individual personality -a friend. Substituting a phosphorescent-like softness of light for his every outline, including dress, etc., yet, nevertheless, retaining all his distinguishing features as clearly as in life, you will have a very true picture of the reality as it appears to the clairvoyant eye under certain conditions. When the clairvoyant sensation establishes a perfect rapport, this luminous figure becomes almost as objective as any ordinary being; and in so doing loses most of its luminosity. Imagine, again, the same figure merely as outlined in a grey, or misty substance, and you have another lower, but more common form of this super-normal sight. The whole explanation of this is that the external form builds up within itself an interior, more sublimated, form of psycho-plasm. The clothing, being radio-active, like everything else, has its duplicate in a shapeless radiation around it; but when worn by an individual, the shape of the garment is outlined by the radiation from the human body.(pp 84-85)
Just as the plants absorb nutriment from the air, so the super-physical organism absorbs its nourishment from its surroundings-i.e. the psychical environment. The writer has devoted many years to arrive at these facts, and they have been verified by other seekers in all parts of the world. There can be no serious doubt as to their reality in the minds of those who have thoroughly investigated the subject, and who alone are competent to decide. (pp 86-87)
APPENDIX 1-A CASE OF SPIRIT IDENTITY
Only a brief outline of the main and necessary facts are here given to show that a theory of self deception, hallucination, telepathy, or fraud upon the part of others will not explain the facts of the case; each of these being rendered impossible by the peculiar cross-circumstances of the two sides of the case. One night, after a day’s hard study, I was trying to go to sleep, but found sleep impossible, when suddenly, the distinct form of a woman appeared before me. She stood between my bed and the window, and I remember that I could dimly see through the figure. I was not at all afraid. The apparition spoke in a faint but distinct voice, gave me her name, date of her death; together with the name and address of an unknown stranger whom she stated to be her son. Here she related a certain circumstance in her life; then asked me to write to her son and convey this information; adding, that for reasons, which I would know later, it was important for us to know each other. Acting on the spur of the moment I got out of bed and made a note of the facts, promising to write to the son. Not until I had completed the memoranda did the figure speak again. Turning half round, it said “Thank you, my friend,” then the vision disappeared. Now, if I was really asleep before, I was certainly very wide awake when the figure vanished. To say that I regarded the whole thing as a hallucination is scarcely true. I tried to persuade myself that it was a. dream-but there was the writing with the names, etc. I had heard of strange tricks performed by somnambulists, and finally, felt that that must be the explanation. I put the thing out of my mind. The idea. of writing what I considered nonsense to a fictitious stranger appeared to be the height of absurdity. Nearly two years passed by, and the entire circumstance was completely forgotten, when again I had a dream-this time a real one. Upon retiring, I had fallen asleep a.t once. The same woman again appeared in my dream. This time there was no communication whatever-nothing but a. look of profound sorrow. A feeling of remorse came over me. I remembered my former promise; but somehow I felt myself incapable of asking questions. I awoke feeling heartily ashamed of myself. Again, of course, consoling myself with the thought that it was only a. dream. Nevertheless, I could not, do what I would, rid myself of the haunting look of that sorrowful face. I determined to write to the address given to me previously. I did, and quite contrary to my expectation received an answer in due course. Now for the first time I was really astounded. A thorough investigation followed. Every detail of the first vision was confirmed. But a. still greater wonder was to follow. I found that it was no trivial affair but one of the last importance to me, which became, and still is, a dominating influence in my life. Now for the other side of the story which to me, in view of my own experience, appeared the most remarkable : ·· About the same time that the first vision appeared to me, a gentleman residing nearly two thousand miles from where I was staying, received a communication through the mediumship of a woman-friend of unusual psychic gifts. Only her immediate friends were aware of her abnormal power. This communication, purporting to come from his mother, who had been dead many years, stated that before many days he would receive a letter from a stranger who would ask certain questions and state certain things that would convince him of her identity. It is important here to say that he was very sceptical in spiritual matters. Weeks passed away. No letter was received. So he merely looked upon it as one of the ” misses ” of mediumship. About a year and a half afterwards another communication was received through the same source, saying : “Be patient; wait; I shall succeed.” However, he paid no attention to this. After five or six months’ further delay, the unlooked-for letter arrived. I need not add that it was mine. The promise of two years before was fulfilled. The explanations on both sides being compared left no room for doubt in any sensible mind. Only the most confirmed sceptic, who would refuse any testimony against his prejudice, could remain unconvinced.
APPENDIX II-NOTES UPON MAN’S PSYCHICAL CONSTITUTION
N.B.-The following paragraphs have been culled from many lengthy notes and ” communications ” received through what has been called ” automatic writing.” They are here given for what they may be worth as suggestions to other “investigators.” The Aura. The Aura of a person is a purely psychical form of atmosphere seen or felt only by sensitive temperaments. It surrounds all forms from mineral to man. Much that we call instinct in animals is nothing but a sensing of the feelings, passing as currents in the mental strata. of their race. Many times, wild animals have been observed to become suddenly suspicious, nervous, alarmed, when such warnings as scent, sound, or wind were out of the question. Transmitted by some subtle invisible current, a. sense of danger was awakened, their sphere of consciousness received the race alarm which aroused the inherited racial instinct, or memory. Man, to a greater extent than he is aware of, is influenced by this sensitive atmosphere. To the eye of a seer, it is varied in extent and changeable in colour. The planet, apart from the atmosphere of gas, has also a mental envelope, a. psychical atmosphere within the gaseous, and this must not be mistaken for the universal ether of space. Finally, the solar system has its own peculiar, psychical aura, so that planetary intercommunication is at least among the possibilities of the future. Man may be likened unto a musical instrument in his psychical constitution, and the sensitiveness of his auric sphere. He may range, according to race, from the conch, and wooden tom-tom of the savage, to the most exquisite cremona-violin, while the consciousness within the auric sphere rises from the Tasmanian Black to a Buddha, or a Jesus of Nazareth. There is, therefore, a wonderful difference in kind in the transmission and reception of thought-waves, which like light-waves in the ether, travel in their own medium. These thought-waves, producing sensation in the auric-sphere, have to be transmuted into conscious ideas; and an idea entirely foreign to our consciousness will pass without recognition, or at best, be wholly mistranslated. One human instrument will only respond to another in harmony, or sympathy with it, and in whatever sense this sympathy, or harmony is, will be the terms in which the idea will be expressed. To revert to our analogy, every human-being is in accord with some tone, or semi-tone of a musical scale. Minds corresponding to B flat will receive no message from G sharp; though there are some minds, almost neutral in their sphere of sensitiveness, who respond more or less to anything. These currents are transmitted in the psychical atmosphere of the planet. The spheres of human consciousness are but so many wireless-stations for sending or receiving messages. Each station is limited to messages of a certain kind and grade from similar stations. We are now approaching the mystery of the frequent confusion in thought transference. According to its quality of refinement, and its complex relations with the psychic form of consciousness, and the auric sphere, the human brain has every degree of receptive quality, from a clear-receiving of the thought to its reception in broken rays. As light is split up by a prism of glass, such ramifications are lost in the thought of the individual. As musicaI-instruments can be attuned to respond perfectly to each other, by training, two sympathetic persons can become so responsively attuned as to receive and transmit thought clearly, consciously, and without error. To investigate this is the great work for the psychologists of the future.
Since last summer’s talk by Carrie Streeter in Blowing Rock about Genevieve Stebbins, I have been intending to follow up in Burke County on Genevieve’s husband Norman Astley, who built a modest cabin near Paddy Creek from which he managed lumber and mining investments in the county. Last week I finally visited the current owner of Paddy Creek Campgound which occupies much of what was Astley’s land and is within sight of his cabin, and took these photos. The first shows the Paddy Creek cabin and the second the land a few miles away on Adventist Circle, across the Linville River from the Paddy Creek acreages. Both sites are very near the scenic Lake James State Park.
After being advised that Astley seemed to focus his investments in gold mining areas of the county, I visited the History Museum of Burke County in Morganton and learned of the great abundance of gold and its economic impact in the region, as well as the turn of the century boom in lumber production in which the Astleys also invested.
As publication date approached for the Alexander Wilder letters, I began anticipating new directions for research once this multi-year project was completed. High on my to-do list was getting down to Blowing Rock, North Carolina, to pursue traces of the part time residence there of Genevieve Stebbins and Norman Astley around the turn of the twentieth century. Unexpectedly in late July I learned of an upcoming presentation by an academic scholar, Carrie Streeter at the Blowing Rock Art and History Museum (BRAHM). Her topic Genevieve Stebbins was described in the attached notice on the website of the Museum.
On a weeknight it was encouraging to see 49 in attendance for an event that required an admission fee for non-members of the museum. Carrie’s presentation was intriguing, and very well received. I learned much more about Stebbins’s early life than I had known, and some details about her time in Blowing Rock that were completely new.
Publication date for the Wilder Letters is expected to be later this month and will be announced here and on the Letters to the Sage Facebook page. The second print proofs are now in the mail, so final revisions should be finished by the last week of September. Streeter’s academic CV is found on her website carriestreeter.com
For each of the past few years there has been a scholarly book or two discussing the unique role of Genevieve Stebbins promoting fresh ideas about the meaning of dance and exercise in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.Newly available in English from Oxford University Press is Poetics of Dance by Gabriele Brandstetter. First published in German in 1995, the book is described on the publisher’s website as a “classic text in dance studies” which had been a “path-breaking publication, the first to explore the relationships between the birth of modern dance, new developments in the visual arts, and the renewal of literature and drama in the form of avant-garde theatrical and movement productions of the early twentieth-century.”
The section on Stebbins begins on page 46 and runs through page 52, and is viewable through Google Books.
Brandstetter writes 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.” (p. 46)
While the impact of Stebbins’s life and work is increasingly recognized, the roots of her ideas in her early experiences with the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor are yet to be explored in depth. We can hope that she will eventually be the subject of a full biography in which this influence will be discussed at length.
There is momentous news to report soon, but in the meantime I will share a small bit of information that has become available on the Web. It is known that Genevieve Stebbins retired in 1907 from the New York School of Expression. She and her husband Norman Astley had previously owned property in the North Carolina mountains, but by 1913 were living in a small English town, Slindon in West Sussex. Their return to the US was recorded in 1917 when they moved to California.
A brief notice was posted by Astley in 1903 in volume 18 of Recreation, indicating his interests as a naturalist, which were later shared by Elbert Benjamine:
In December 1907, Astley wrote a letter to The Country-Side, the monthly journal of the B.E.N.A., the British Empire Naturalist Association, indicating that he had been residing in Devon since at least April of that year. The letter was published in 1908:
This is the first new information about the Astleys’ move to England that has emerged in several years. It turns out that between their arrival in Devon and their move to Slindon they were recorded as boarders in the 1911 Channel Islands Survey, living in St. Peter’s Port, Guernsey.
Several new books have taken notice of Genevieve Stebbins in the past three years, which I will report in coming months. Although nothing new has come to light about Thomas H. Burgoyne’s reputed demise in 1894, a wealth of new information will soon be published about Burgoyne’s first few years in America. My next blog entry will share the story of an unexpected documentary find and the book that resulted. One brand new find is a record of Burgoyne’s 1887 naturalization– either declaration of intent or actual application for citizenship– in Shawnee County, Kansas. The circumstances of this event are explained in said forthcoming book.
ps– another piece of evidence turned up recently about the Astleys in England. In 1914 they had acquired a lifelong lease in their rented home in Slindon, yet only three years later and before the end of the war the returned to the US.
This collection of essays published in 2012 includes a section by Nena Couch on Pauline Townsend, in which Genevieve Stebbins is discussed:
Of the women active in the field, Genevieve Stebbins had a wide and lasting influence on thousands who read her writings, took classes, or saw her lecture or perform, including the great American dancer Ruth St. Denis who had the opportunity to see Stebbins perform when St. Denis was a child. The event had such an impact that St. Denis credited it with being “the real birth of my art life.” St. Denis went on to say that because of Genevieve Stebbins, she “glimpsed for the first time the individual possibilities of expression and the dignity and truth of the human body…” which she explored in her own work for many decades.
The book was published by McFarland Publishing of Jefferson, NC, not far from Blowing Rock which was the vacation home of Stebbins and her husband Norman Astley.
Jody Marie Weber’s 2009 study, The Evolution of Aesthetic and Expressive Dance in Boston, was published by Cambria Press. It offers a local Bostonian perspective of the work in which Stebbins was engaged when she married Norman Astley in 1893:
It was MacKaye’s student, Genevieve Stebbins, who had the greatest impact on Delsartism in its capacity as an expressive art for women. Stebbins believed deeply that Delsarte’s theories were inspired directly by ancient Greece…Stebbins would expand the Delsarte model, emphasizing the harmonious balance of mind, body, and spirit, and providing the foundation for legitimacy of female physical expression…. (p. 32)Stebbins’s profound interest in spiritual and scientific ideas concerning breath, imagination, and the interplay between mind, body, and spirit supplied the pioneers of interpretive dance with an ample philosophical base for their movement explorations. Her work in Boston and New York had a powerful impact on the Northeast, and her widely distributed texts expanded her influence nationally.(p. 39)
Although this important book by Genevieve Stebbins is not available yet on Google books, I did find a copy on Archive.org, which Marc Demarest was able to use to create a Word document. The book will be added to the Recommended Reading list when the document has been stored in an accessible site, but meanwhile the available version at Archive.org is quite readable. This passage from the second page of the introduction gives a taste of Stebbins’s approach to science vs. religion:
To those, however, whose studies in life have enabled them to penetrate beneath, or to rise above, the bias of theological dogma, upon– the one hand, and the speculative hypotheses of scientific schools upon the other, there will be no difficulty in reading between the lines of the present contest between religion and science, which, after all, is more a war over the intellectual comprehension of terms than over basic principles in nature. This contest has been caused by a free use of modern scientific terms to express certain ideas which we clearly understand, and a thorough misuse of hoary and antique mystical terms which, unfortimately, we do not clearly understand, and of which, if we will be frank, we must admit we have only the most vague ideas and conceptions ; so that if by any formula of intellectual analysis we could separate from religious teachings and scientific hypotheses that which we really know from that which we do not know, but which on each side constitutes that unsatisfactory authority known as personal opinion, we should find nothing to fight over, nothing left, in fact, about which there could be any misconception.
Spiritual writings or ideas must always receive a spiritual interpretation before we can find any possible analogy by correspondence between the visible and the invisible worlds of existence ; while material science in its turn must give a physical explanation of its laws, otherwise they would be self-contradictory ; in each case premise and conclusion must occupy the same plane. When this test is applied, it will be found that the only difference between the two consists in the mutual misinterpretation of terms ; the one attempting to explain spiritual verities in terms of matter, and the other attempting to reveal the truths of matter by translating them in terms of mind. True science must have a pure religion for its base, and all true religion must naturally rest upon the foundations of pure science ; to this grand spiritual and intellectual goal the accumulating wisdom of humanity is now rapidly advancing.
A hiking trip I took a week ago inspired some reflections on what constitutes a “sacred place.” One aspect of the Church of Light which distinguishes it from most spiritual groups is the lack of any specific sacred places that are associated with its history. The Coral Street headquarters in Los Angeles was the CofL’s home for several decades, but does not seem to inspire reverence or nostalgia. No places associated with Zain’s early life, or those of his forerunners, are preserved or regarded in ways that typify most groups. Recently I have written about Quaker history, and earlier about Theosophy, Edgar Cayce, Baha’i, and Radhasoami, all of which are marked by “sacred places” having some meaning associated with the movement founders. But my own experience of the sacred is much more intense in natural settings than anything manmade; my hiking trips outnumber visits to churches etc. by more a hundred to one. My last hiking trip to was to a place with an intriguing connection to CofL history.
Attachment to specific places that define group identity seems to be almost crucial to spiritual groups. Adherents of Mormonism, Christian Science, and Adventism have many historic sites associated with Joseph Smith, Mary Baker Eddy, or Ellen G. White to visit which document their role in American history. Theosophists in America have several “home” properties which date to the 1920s or earlier. The Association for Research and Enlightenment has its headquarters largely in a 1929 hospital built to put in practice the Edgar Cayce readings. But by contrast the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor leadership seems like a group of spiritual nomads, uninterested in building institutions, and more oriented to appreciation of the natural world. In CofL tradition, T.H. Burgoyne went off into the California mountains to write the Brotherhood lessons in the 1880s and 90s. We know that Elbert Benjamine was leader of the Southern California Nature Club and led wilderness hikes from the 1920s through the 40s. So it struck me as significant that the property owned by Genevieve Stebbins and Norman Astley in the 1890s and until 1904 was perched on a cliff with one of the most impressive mountain views in the Appalachians.
This deed in which the property was sold in December 1904 describes it as adjacent to “to the low edge of the Cliff Rock near the N.W. corner of Miss E.C. Prudden cottage.” The Cliff Rock is what is now known as the Blowing Rock, described on its website as the oldest tourist attraction in North Carolina. It was not developed as such until the 1930s, by which time Miss Prudden had donated a large parcel of land in the Johns River Gorge which includes several waterfalls. The Glen Burney trail, which leads a mile and a half down the gorge and crosses New Year’s Creek several times, is one of the treasures of northwest North Carolina hiking. The Glen Burney and Glen Marie Falls make the ardous climb rewarding. While it is yet impossible to identify the “little cottage” that Norman Astley described owning in Blowing Rock, he did own this scenic building lot which was sold to Emma Reed Stewart for $265, around the same time they were selling holdings in nearby Burke County.
Peter Davidson migrated from the rugged Scottish Highlands to the equally rugged Blue Ridge mountains of north Georgia. Burgoyne, according to tradition, chose mountainous terrain in which to live and write in California. The Ohio-born Wagners moved throughout the mountain West before settling finally in Denver. Although members of the Church of Light have no historic buildings or sites to which we can look with nostalgia, perhaps somehow that is appropriate. The wilderness feels like a spiritual home to me more than any church ever has. Knowing how my own consciousness is uplifted by hiking in mountains with sweeping vistas, I suspect that Stebbins and Astley chose to spend time in Blowing Rock because they needed just such a break from the urban lives.
The 1913 enlarged edition of Stebbins’s guide has been available for some time in electronic format on Google Books, but for those who prefer a physical book, Nabu Press now has reprinted the work which is available through Amazon and other online booksellers. In the appendix, written for this edition, Stebbins summarizes the conclusions reached in her decades as a teacher:
This is my creed:
First—All faculties lie deep within the soul and are there potential as the oak in the acorn
Second—These faculties can not 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.
Fourth—The psychic faculties are throned in the brain, the physiological functions find their seat in the body, and action and reaction between the two swings the great pendulum of life. Thus, when anger or love quickens the circulation and changes the breathing, we recognize the physiological correspondence to the psychic faculty which, if unobstructed, is further carried outward into pantomime. Per contra, the wilful expression of an emotion which we do not feel generates it by generating the sensations connected with it, which, in their turn, are associated with analogous emotions. Note, friends, this latter statement, for upon it is founded much of my teaching.
Fifth—When emotion has been stirred, from either within or without, impulses of expression are roused into action not primarily initiated by the conscious brain. This we term instinct or inspiration.
Sixth—Again the brain must step in and judge of the impulse, remembering it for future artistic use, otherwise the emotional impulse may indicate the wrong road to true art.
Seventh—Practice in guiding both intellect and emotion when attained, is the sure road to power.
Eighth—Absolute justice in rendering unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and unto God the things that are God’s, must’ be the constant aim of the artist, if he would cultivate in himself those instincts of right which alone will enable him to separate the gold from the dross, the true from the false. This habit of right judgment in the daily life alone leads to true art.
Ninth—Trusting to his past work he feels he has stored his life’s lessons in this subconscious memory and can safely look within for his master, knowing that the light which shines there is for him the life-giving sun of his universe.
The State of Things is heard on North Carolina Public Radio on weekdays, and one of the most interesting interviews I’ve heard lately featured Sally Rhine Feather. The Brotherhood of Light lessons focus on validation of ESP via psychical research, aka parapsychology. Neither Spiritualism nor occult tradition are cited with nearly the same confidence. Yet, sixty years after Zain’s death, parapsychology as a discipline seems still to be struggling for legitimacy. Sally Rhine Feather, the daughter of pioneers in the field, gives an intimate view of its development during her childhood and youth. Research for Ghost Land took me last week to Durham, visiting the Perkins Library at Duke University, a place I’d visited faithfully while working on The Masters Revealed. The campus and the subject of my research gave me a sense of deja vu, returning to many of the same characters about whom I was writing twenty years ago. Raleigh has been my research Mecca for the last ten years, the North Carolina State Archives providing most of the material on which my last book Pell Mellers was based. Before that, Virginia Beach was the destination of dozens of research trips while working on Edgar Cayce in Context in the mid-1990s. “Theosophical history,” in terms of the international subject matter and travels pursuing Blavatsky, is starting to be a distant memory.
“North Carolina historian” is far more descriptive of what I’ve been doing for the last decade than “esoteric historian.” The State of Thingsinterviewed me about Melungeons in late July, and it reflects my recent research focus on ethnic, religious, and political minorities of 19th century North Carolina. I have a chapter on Quaker ancestors in the 2010 collection Carolina Genesis, but the focus has been primarily on local places and families rather than the Friends in a broader sense so I can’t claim the mantle of “Quaker historian.”
Most unexpectedly, a North Carolina history emphasis has emerged with my research on Genevieve Stebbins and Norman Astley, who for twelve years (1894-1906) were landowners in the mountains of Burke and Watauga Counties. They seem to have been highly successful with the New York School of Expression from their 1893 marriage through their 1907 retirement. Yet somehow they found the time to manage farms in Burke County and invest in property in a very scenic location in Blowing Rock.
Authors like Gary Lachman and Joscelyn Godwin have devoted years of sustained reseach to the field that is coming to be known as esoteric history. By contrast, I return from a long absence feeling like Rip Van Winkle. But much inspiring work has been done in the last few years, and I share news of ongoing developments in this blog with great appreciation for the creative evolution of scholarship.
Genevieve Stebbins, or rather her collaborator “A Pilgrim of the Way,” wrote in The Quest of the Spirit: “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.” Eucken will be the subject of a future blog post, but the juxtaposition of the names of Bergson and James led me to a pair of clues that are interesting in terms of Church of Light influences. 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 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.
Creative Evolution is available on Google books, but I have ordered it in hardcopy and will post more after reading it carefully. Given Stebbins and Astley’s residence in England after their retirement in 1907, it is possible that they were personally acquainted with both Bergson and Mathers. Much more digging to do here. James is also possible as a personal friend and not just an admired philosopher, in light of Stebbins’s residence in Boston in the early 1890s and longstanding interest in psychical research.
Genevieve Stebbins has been discussed at length in a new book from Oxford University Press, which makes the third scholarly work to recognize her significance within the past year. Modernism’s Mythic Pose devotes an entire chapter to Stebbins, all of which is accessible on Google Books. Church of Light members who attended my presentation on The Light of Egypt in Albuquerque will recall that Stebbins emerges as a crucial figure in our own history. Stebbins remains obscure in the world of American religious history, just as obscure as the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor. But her unique genius is being recognized in the world of dance history, and the work of contemporary authors like Preston brings Stebbins back to life for today’s reader.
The presentations at the June 24 history preconference sponsored by the Church of Light were recorded, and a DVD of all proceedings will be available to members. I went into many different avenues not mentioned in this sketch of a narrative, but am sharing it along with the slides to give a basic introduction to the mysteries associated with the authorship of The Light of Egypt.
Presentation for the Church of Light preconference, June 24 2011
PSEUDONYMS
With Marc’s presentation on Emma Hardinge Britten, you have seen the result of many years of research, which brought solutions of several longstanding puzzles. My talk is about ongoing investigations which are far from being resolved. It turns out that The Light of Egypt, the primary doctrinal book of our parent group the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor, is just as mysterious in terms of pseudonyms as anything produced by Theosophists, Rosicrucians, or Spiritualists.(screen 1-title) Its authorship presents a yet unsolved literary mystery. The Light of Egypt was published in 1889 under the pseudonym Zanoni. With publication of a second volume in 1900, it was revealed that Zanoni had been the pen name of T.H. Burgoyne, secretary of the HBofL. TLOE has generally been considered Burgoyne’s book , although CofL tradition credits others with assisting him. Burgoyne himself is just as elusive as the book attributed to him.(slide 2, slide 3) The HBofL was remarkable not just for its leaders’ use of pseudonyms, but for the success with which their secrets were kept. Even what HBofL stood for was long concealed, with wrong guesses like “Hindu Brotherhood of Luxor” suggested by critics of the group. Several outsiders, often writing under pseudonyms themselves, came up with wild guesses about the HBofL leadership, and Max Theon, “Grand Master of the Exterior Circle,” inspired the greatest confusion.(4-Theon screen) Although the name was actually a pseudonym of Louis Bimstein, son of a Warsaw rabbi, Theon was confused with two other individuals of different ethnic and religious backgrounds. (slide 5)
BURGOYNE
The name T.H. Burgoyne was itself a pseudonym adopted around the time the HBofL was founded in 1884. But within a short time it was revealed that his real name was Thomas Henry Dalton (sometimes d’Alton), and that he had served six months in prison in England in 1883 for advertising fraud. This news was spread broadcast by Theosophists who saw it as a way to discredit a rival organization. (slide6—arrest—slide7 mug shot—slide8 closeup) It destroyed the HBofL in England, but not in France (where it continued to thrive under Max Theon) nor in America where Dalton arrived as Burgoyne with Peter Davidson and family in 1886. (slide9, ship passenger list) Although he arrived in the US as Burgoyne, the pseudonym had been damaged by the Theosophists and we see no evidence of him using it for the rest of his life, other than a couple of articles published in The Platonist in 1887 and 1888. Burgoyne had been using Zanoni as a pen name ever since the HBofL journal The Occultist was established in 1885. Zanoni was a Rosicrucian themed 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 HBofL, wrote under the latter pen name. Zanoni’s identity was so well concealed that Emma Hardinge Britten was twice accused by Theosophists of authoring The Light of Egypt. (The book drew heavily on her Art Magic which might have contributed to this false accusation.) In response, Emma heaped praise on Burgoyne and scorn on his attackers, and later wrote a glowing review of his book. (slide10, Emma quote) In her introduction to the second volume of The Light of Egypt published in 1900, Belle Wagner attributed the text to Burgoyne who had allegedly died in 1894. But the language used in describing him is so circuitous as to make one wonder why the subject of his death is being treated this evasively. (slide11, slide 12 TLOE II)
SARAH AND THE GRIMKE LITERARY DYNASTY
Sarah Stanley Grimke was credited with coauthorship of The Light of Egypt by her sister, who wrote to Sarah’s daughter after her death. (slide 13 Emma Tolles). This was partially endorsed by Benjamine, and her natal chart appears on our church website.(slide 14) Daughter of an abolitionist clergyman who served in three denominations, Stanley married Archibald Grimke in 1879 and the next year bore their only child, Angelina Weld Grimke. (slide 15, slide 16) Archibald was the biracial son of Henry Grimke, a white slaveowner and Nancy Weston, a black slave. His aunts Sarah and Angelina Grimke were leaders in the abolitionist movement who like Archibald had left their native Charleston and relocated to Massachusetts. After the collapse of their marriage in 1883, Sarah took young Angelina to live with her in Michigan, but in 1887 returned the child to her father in Washington, D.C. due to the discrimination she faced as the mixed-race daughter of a white woman. For the rest of her life Sarah wrote on occultism and mental healing and traveled widely. Whatever the nature of the collaboration, it seems that Grimke played the role that our history has assigned to others– an HBofL member living in California and assisting Burgoyne in his writing. But her stay in California was not long, as in 1888 she went to New Zealand at the invitations of a publisher, and remained there until a heart attack required her return to the US where she initially stayed with her parents in Michigan. Sarah returned to California, still in poor health, and died in San Diego in 1898.
NORMAN AND GENEVIEVE
Another twist in the Light of Egypt story is that CofL tradition features one individual among Burgoyne’s associates whose identity is quite confusing.(slide17) None of the biographical data about Astley in this description, or in a published Stebbins genealogy checks out thus far. (slide18 of Stebbins bio on Astley.) The unconfirmed elements in our history include Astley’s military career, international travels prior to marrying Stebbins, and presence in California in the 19th century before the death of Burgoyne. No Emma Hadden marrying a John Astley can be found, nor any Astley births in Monmouthshire in April 1853. Genevieve Stebbins, unlike her husband, is well documented in genealogical records. Born in San Francisco in 1857, she became an actress in New York in her twenties. There are gaps in the record for Stebbins as well, most crucially in the mid-1880s when she studied in England and France and first encountered the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor. By the late 1880s 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 1893 he became her business manager and they traveled up and down the east coast giving classes and performances. Her approach to life contrasts vividly with that taught by Sarah Grimke. (slide19) Between 1894 and 1906, the Astleys owned considerable property in the North Carolina mountains. (slide 20) After her retirement in 1907, Stebbins traveled with Astley, settling in England for several years before returning to the US in 1917. The first evidence of any California residence since her youth is the 1920 census when she is 62 years old Here is Slindon as it now appears. (slide 21, Slindon today) 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, NJ in the 1900 census. They are found living in Slindon, England in 1913 and the town was listed as their most recent residence in the 1917 ship passenger list that recorded their return to the US. Some time within the next 18 years Stebbins died, as in this 1935 ship’s list Norman Astley has a younger wife named Nellie.(slide22)
CONCLUSIONS?
Since we find no evidence of Astley’s existence prior to 1893, and no evidence of Burgoyne’s death, I am far from confident that they are two different individuals. Nor, on the other hand, can we be confident that they are the same person. At this point the question must be declared unresolved, which rather complicates the task of revising and correcting our history. That history, by the way, has been repeated in a great many published sources, respectable reference books and scholarly studies included, all of them citing the C of L. For the time being, speculation will be the basis for further investigations… but here are some speculations.(slide24) Norman Astley was a character in a drama written and directed by Genevieve Stebbins, performed by Thomas Dalton. With all that remains unknown, is there anything yet established worth knowing about the mystery? In 1913, Stebbins published a book entitled The Quest of the Spirit, which is allegedly a distillation of many hundreds of manuscript pages given her by a longterm friend. This person is never named, but the book’s dedication to “Fidelio, with thoughts too sacred for words” is a strong indication that it is her husband. Some passages are consistent with that husband being the man formerly known as Burgoyne.–Slide25 book excerpt
I propose that the first portion of the passage refers to Sarah, the second to Genevieve.
Ancestry.com provided us with a great surprise ending for this story, thanks to Marc. He has learned that Thomas Henry Dalton’s first (and only legal) wife Betsy Bella Dalton immigrated to America in 1922 with their daughter Veda, and that their family has descendants alive today in California. –Veda Dalton(slide26) Dalton also had a son who left descendants. While we cannot say with confidence when or where he was born, when or where he died, or who his parents or siblings were, we do know that his daughter and wife arrived in the US in the 1920s, a time their father and husband was living in California.
This week I will give a presentation at the biennial convention of The Church of Light entitled “The Light of Egypt Mystery.” It will feature the work of two women writers who were prominent in the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor, but whose books have long been out of print. Both were honored by Elbert Benjamine as important pioneers in spreading the Brotherhood of Light teachings. Sarah Stanley Grimke’s Esoteric Lessonsis a collection of three of her published works, while Genevieve Stebbins’s The Quest of the Spiritis described as the work of “A Pilgrim of the Way”– about whose identity the book contains many clues. (These links are to complete online editions.) For reasons that I will explain in Albuquerque, these two women are as important influences on the Brotherhood of Light lessons as any man– if not more so.
A new scholarly book has just been published that features Genevieve Stebbins as an “overlooked pioneer of modern dance.” Dancefilm: Choreography and the Moving Imagedescribes 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.
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)
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.
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 Bodyis 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.