History of the Adepts

One of the many enjoyable aspects of looking anew at Ghost Land is seeing it in terms of the sequence of the author’s works.  Its predecessor, Modern American Spiritualism, is crucial in identifying parallel passages in Book II of Ghost Land, set mainly in America. This volume, never seen in book form, details Chevalier Louis de B–‘s adventures in America after the European and English occult odyssey depicted in Part I and the Indian melodrama of Part II. But for most of Ghost Land, the crucial parallel work is Nineteenth Century Miracles (1884). Here, on pp. 90-91, is found what seems to be an expression of regret about the mysterious circumstances under which Art Magic and Ghost Land were published:

In America, where the sources of popular power are derived from the people, Spiritualism may be found more generally represented by the rank and file of Society, than among the wealthier classes.

In Europe on the contrary, where the governing power centres in an hereditary and influential aristocracy, the people derive their opinions as they do their laws and fashions, from the ruling classes, and it is chiefly among these that Spiritualism flourishes.

It is not claimed that this wonderful movement is confined to any class in either hemisphere. It will be found in the hut, and the palace; in the mining camp, and the halls of legislation. Nevertheless its greatest prevalence is ever with the ruling power. Since then Spiritualism in Europe takes the deepest hold of those whose rank and station induces them to shrink from subjecting their personal experiences to public criticism, the author too frequently becomes the recipient of valuable testimony which cannot be made available, because the communicants insist on withholding their true names and addresses. “Miss E.” and “Mrs. D.;” “Captain A.” and “My Lord X,Y.Z.” are impersonals, whom no one places any confidence in. There is no satisfaction in offering such shadowy testimony to those who are asked to believe in occurrences of an unprecedented and often startling character. Resolving as we have done, not to demand credence for phenomenal incidents upon any testimony open to the charge of unreliability, we feel obliged to relegate an immense mass of interesting matter of this kind to the obscurity which unauthorized statements justly incur.

(END QUOTE)

This is quite an 1884 about-face from the 1876 promoter of Chevalier Louis de B– and his [spoiler alert] father-in-law John Cavendish Dudley in two books. In addition to blowback from the Louis character and claims on his behalf, Emma is undoubtedly here reacting to the behavior of her former colleagues Olcott and Blavatsky in India. The former enthusiast of adeptic pseudonyms sounds very disillusioned about the practice here, written the year of the Emma Coulomb revelations. But in 1892 she is once again writing on behalf of Chevalier Louis, so has apparently had third thoughts about the practice after the second thoughts revealed in this 1884 book.

Ghost Land shows evidence of familiarity with British occultism and American Spiritualism, both of which could be claimed by Britten. But it also includes settings and characters in India, Russia, and Germany; all countries unknown to Emma by personal experience.  The search for Ghost Land influences among the Russian nobility must start with her colleague Blavatsky, but also includes a mutual acquaintance of Britten and Blavatsky who will be the topic of a future blog post.

I’m looking into background for Ghost Land combing through Emma Hardinge Britten’s Spiritualist histories in search of parallel anecdotes or citations.  One of the anomalies of the text is that the author, Emma, is an English commoner with no personal experience on the European continent, recounting the adventures of European occultist nobility.  Many characters will be mentioned as Emma’s connections to this world, one of whom is described in a fascinating passage from a 1921 memoir by journalist Melville Stone.  This brief and colorful biography of the Baron de Palm connects him with the court of Bavaria and the scandal of Lola Montez.  It concludes with his association with the Theosophical Society, and his memorable funeral in which both Emma Hardinge Britten and Helena Blavatsky played prominent roles.  Each was later accused of plagiarizing materials left by de Palm for Art Magic and Isis Unveiled respectively, in one case Emma being the accuser and Helena the accused.  Yet nothing of a literary legacy of de Palm survives to lends support to any such assertions.  Stone’s description of him makes it plausible that he could be the source of anecdotes for either author, whether or not his writings played any significant role in their books.

Thanks to Marc Demarest, yesterday I discovered this incredible new tool at Google books, which allows one to search the frequency of various words and phrases in literature over time.  If astrology, Tarot, and Hermetic are our three most significant keywords, this diagram is instructive (click to enlarge):

There is a leap in astrology around 1920, just as the public work of Elbert Benjamine begins.  I think we can safely assume that his prolific writing had something to do with this, in that he was riding a wave of public interest in the subject.

As for the relative significance of terms describing our source traditions, Spiritualism, Theosophy, and occultism yield the following picture over two centuries:

As indicated in my conference presentation in Albuquerque, most of my energy as a researcher will be focused in 2012-2014 on Sarah Stanley Grimke, Thomas H. Burgoyne, and Genevieve Stebbins. A chapter discussing Burgoyne and Stebbins will be included in a forthcoming collection, and a new edition of Grimke’s collected writings will follow.

But first I have the great privilege and pleasure of sharing editorial responsibility for a new edition of Ghost Land.  My professional background is not as an academic scholar but a public library director, and regardless of the historical interest of any author’s work, “is it fun to read?” is high among my criteria for recommending a book.  Ghost Land is the most fun read out of the entire body of Victorian occult literature, in my opinion. Much of the entertainment  is in the convoluted plot twists featuring occult brotherhoods in Europe, England, and India. The book portrays itself as a series of autobiographical sketches, but was generally perceived as being a novel. Novels often have some factual basis, however, and Emma Hardinge Britten’s life was rich in episodes involving paranormal claims and experiments. Sorting out the fact from the fiction in Ghost Land is a task reminiscent of what the Jesus Seminar has tried to do with the New Testament. Just as Bible scholars have four gospels to appraise, each with its own perspective on Jesus, students of Ghost Land can find four different “gospels” in distinct sections of the book. For the Church of Light, these “gospels,” however fictional they might be, are the only narrative accounts of the occult brotherhoods alleged behind the scenes of our origins.

The last book I wrote for the Western Esoteric Traditions series for SUNY Press was about Edgar Cayce (1877-1945); growing up in coastal Virginia I first learned of him from family members who had been acquainted with him as a neighbor and friend. Like the Brotherhood of Light lessons, Cayce’s readings emphasize ESP, astrology, and constructive work on attitudes and emotions.  Cayce was also a close contemporary of Elbert Benjamine (1882-1951), so many of the political and social issues raised by his readings overlap with those on which Benjamine comments. Much of the work I did on the Cayce readings involved appraising their reliability (and unreliability) in various dimensions like health advice, predictions of the future, and portrayals of the past. Since hundreds of those readings address the historical Jesus, in order to appraise them I had to delve into the vast literature of the Jesus Seminar and its critics. Divergent views of Jesus as a historical figure are no less prevalent now than at any earlier time, but in the scholarly world those views must be grounded on evidence and reason, unlike the purely theological faith-based disputes of the past. No one seems to be on the verge of any major breakthrough in Jesus studies that will sway opinion in one direction or the other, but many scholars are working on various aspects of the mystery. Likewise with Ghost Land, three other scholars will contribute essays to the new edition, and do not expect to provide many final answers but rather to elucidate the mysteries associated with the text.

A central mystery of the text is the complicated relationship of the Orphic, Berlin, and Ellora Brotherhoods of adepts portrayed in Ghost Land to the later Mahatmas of The Occult World, Esoteric Buddhism, the Mahatma Letters, etc. This brings me back to a subject that I address with reluctance after being labeled as “controversial,” a “Blavatsky-basher,” and so forth. Applying reason and evidence to the subject of the Theosophical Masters was explicitly denounced in official Theosophical media by a handful of propagandists. The Mahatmas and adepts must remain forever beyond the reach of historians and especially heretics or unbelievers; even asking historical questions about them implies spiritual incapacity. Yet the  majority of Theosophical reviewers of The Masters Revealed were favorable, and the “no historians allowed anywhere near our sacred Mahatmas” stance of the leaders does not seem to convince all members. Source questions about the Cayce readings have not brought any denunciations from ARE (Association for Research and Enlightenment) quarters, but a stance of indifference toward the subject has been evident in the organization—although not  in its affiliated Atlantic University.  After Edgar Cayce in Context  I was ready to forgo any further literary investigations related to organizations preserving a public image based on historical avoidance. For the past decade my research and writing have been directed elsewhere than occultism and religion.  Through a series of events I discovered and joined the Church of Light at the end of 2005. Its lack of a personality cult around the founding figures has made for a welcoming environment for someone like me who is always seeking “light, more light,” even on subjects others want kept in the dark.

Ghost Land tells its story through four narrative voices,  in addition to that of Emma Hardinge Britten: Chevalier Louis as an adolescent in Part 1, as an adult in Part 2, and as an elderly man in Book II, plus his associate John Cavendish Dudley in the transition from Part 1 to Part 2. Each of these gives a somewhat different view of our roots, and at this point Marc and I are making no assumptions about the relative amounts of fact and fiction in different sections of the book. Emma has been far too reliable as a witness to history in some contexts, and far too unreliable in others, to allow for any a priori assumptions about her as a truthteller or fabulist.  She was both, which makes working on Ghost Land such a pleasure, as well as a challenge.  For the rest of 2011, my posts in this blog will consist of reports about different aspects of Ghost Land.  Due to the preponderance of spam in blog comments, I have turned off that feature, but welcome comments by email at kpauljohnson@yahoo.com.  Please identify yourself as a CofL member and whether or not you would like the comment posted; comments are invited from those who wish them to remain private as well as anyone who cares to do so publicly.

In closing, I recommend these comments by Elbert Benjamine about bias in the study of history, and in the press, from the book Imponderable Forces:

“…the histories of two countries about the same war, or the same crises, in which they were antagonists, are always varnished in such a way as to convince the child that his nation is vastly superior and that the other nation is filled with detestable people.  Napoleon, who made considerable history of sorts, and therefore was entitled to his opinion, decided that history is mostly lies.  That is, like so much else we read, see, and hear, its chief concern is to convince us, regardless of the actual facts, that someone was right and someone else was wrong…. I have singled out history as a single example  in the schools, and corporate propaganda as a single example in the colleges…others might be cited, all going to show that from the time a child enters an educational institution until he leaves college he is more or less under the influence of those who are not impartial in their views.  Propaganda of some kind is constantly at work seeking to sway his thinking into biased channels.”(p. 84)

Emma, whatever her virtues, was a propagandist for Spiritualism, first and always.  Helena likewise devoted her considerable writing talents to propaganda for Theosophy, much of which was anti-Spiritualist.  The fact that these two quarreling founding mothers of the Theosophical Society were propagandists for opposing belief systems should dissuade us from taking sides in 19^th century disputes.  Readers who are neither Spiritualists nor Theosophists perhaps stand to benefit most from the publication of a new Ghost Land edition that sheds new light on the origins of both.

This book published by Edward Maitland in 1896 describes one of the foremost proponents of Hermeticism in the nineteenth century.  Anna Kingsford was also one of the more colorful eccentrics in the history of the Theosophical Society.  It is surely more than coincidence that Kingsford’s Hermetic Society was created in the same year and the same country as Davidson/Burgoyne’s Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor.  Both resulted from a crisis that year in the British Theosophical Society.  Not only the controversy about Blavatsky’s phenomena, but also the imposition by A.P. Sinnett of the authority of his pseudonymous correspondents M. and K.H., caused the rupture.  Another striking parallel between the Hermeticism of Kingsford and that of the HBofL is the insistence that 1881 marked the pivotal shift into a new era.  But a major difference is that Kingsford’s beliefs were more rooted in esoteric Christianity, whereas the HBofL reflected the Free Thought leanings of Emma Hardinge Britten.

The reprinting of Maitland’s work by Cambridge University Press is the second instance of this reprint series yielding treasures relevant to Church of Light history.  Archibald Grimke’s biography of William Lloyd Garrison was the subject of a previous blog post.  This reprint is more directly relevant to the history of neo-Hermeticism; Kingsford is a precursor of the Church of Light in her ideas, although not organizationally.  Her Hermetic Society did not long survive her.

The Church of Light convention provided many opportunities to talk about history, and one of the tidbits I picked up during research seemed to really interest the members.   This online family tree  includes a list of the siblings of Elizabeth Benjamine, born Elva Elizabeth Dorris and married to Charles Morris before her marriage to Benjamin Williams– who became Elbert Benjamine.  Elizabeth’s youngest brother Elbert drowned in 1899

at 14 or 15 years old.  When her husband adopted a pen name years later, he chose the name of Elizabeth’s youngest brother.   Then for the surname he chose the French word for “youngest child in the family”– although he chose the feminine form.

There is a moment in the life of every serious soul, when things which were before unseen and unheard in the world around him become visible and audible. This startling moment comes to some sooner, to others later, but to all, who are not totally given up to the service of self, at some time surely. From that moment, a change passes over such an one, for more and more he hears mysterious voices, and clearer and more clear he sees apparitional forms floating up from the depths above which he kneels. Whence come they, what mean they? He leans over the abyss, and lo! the sounds to which he hearkens are the voices of human weeping and the forms at which he gazes are the apparitions of human woe; they beckon to him, and voices beseech him in multitudinous accent and heart-break, “come over, come down, oh! friend and brother, and help us.”  Then he straightway puts away the thoughts and things of the past, and girding himself with the things and the thoughts of the divine OUGHT and the almighty MUST, he goes over and down to the rescue.

Thus opens the second chapter of Archibald Henry Grimke’s 1891 biography of the abolitionist hero William Lloyd Garrison.   Reprinted last year by Cambridge University Press in its Cambridge Library Series, Grimke’s first book is an expression of hero-worship that reveals as much about its author as its subject.  Preparations for the history preconference of the Church of Light have led into research on the Grimke family, because Archibald’s wife Sarah Stanley Grimke was one of the crucial figures in our history.  Abolitionism was intertwined with Spiritualism, and Archibald’s family had been involved with both reform movements.  This passage gives a taste of the Spiritualist element in certain abolitionist rhetoric.)

One of the most colorful figures in New York society of the late 19^th century  was Albert Rawson’s host for a seven week visit to Cyprus in 1874.   Luigi di Cesnola was appointed US consul in Cyprus in 1865, and while there he became interested in archaeological digs around the island.   According to his 1971 biography The Glitter and the Gold, he became “consul for three other nations, Greece, Russia, and one he never named.”(p. 89)   This involvement in diplomacy in the eastern Mediterranean places him in the milieu of several important figures associated with the Theosophical Society founders.   James Peebles was also a US consul in the Ottoman Empire during the same time period, while Raphael Borg was British vice-consul in Cairo and Richard F. Burton was British consul at Damascus.   In the next blog post I will discuss Greek involvement in the same milieu.

Rawson was invited to Cyprus to help catalog the finds, and his artistic work is still visible in the book published by Cesnola in 1877.  Before returning to America  Cesnola made efforts to sell the Cypriot antiquities to the Hermitage and Louvre museums.  But ultimately the collection would be sold to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and Cesnola became its founding director when the museum opened in 1880.  The  Cyprus collection made him rich and famous, but later led to severe criticism that undermined his reputation and that of the Met.  Nonetheless he kept his job until his death in 1904, and defied his critics with full support from the Museum board. 

In Rogues Gallery: The Secret Story of the Lust, Lies, Greed, and Betrayals that Made the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Broadway Books, 2009), Michael Gross begins his narrative of the Met with a 43-page chapter on Cesnola, who is introduced as “an expatriate Italian, a minor aristocrat, and a soldier of fortune who’d survived the Austrian and Crimean wars, a passage by ship to New York, years in poverty, and a suicide attempt before distinguishing himself as a Union officer in the Civil War.”(p. 23)  Although he was neither a count nor a general, he claimed both titles and was widely known by the latter.  Having no training in archaeology, Cesnola’s methods of acquiring and restoring objects  were far from what are now professional standards.  Gross concludes of Cesnola that he is “remembered, if at all, as a cultural criminal who looted and pillaged and stole not just objects but an irreplaceable opportunity to learn about the past.”(p. 64)

Cesnola adopted Louis as a first name soon after reaching the United States, and as Louis di Cesnola he comes up with some interesting hits on Google.  No spiritual interests are mentioned explicitly, but the Garibaldian theme and links to Italian and Greek immigrant communities in New York are relevant to the early days of the TS in New York.  More on Cesnola is found on this website in an attractive format.  Albert Rawson claimed acquaintance with Garibaldi dating back to the 1850s, highly relevant as a point of common interest in that Cesnola had been closely associated with the the Italian leader.

On June 22, 1878, L’Opinione Nazionale of Florence published a letter from HPB in which she comments of Olcott that “our President, as representing the opnions of our Society, is taking a very prominent part with the Republicans of the Italian Colony in this our country in inaugurating a monument to Mazzini…The commission would like me to make an address in the Russian language; but with all the love and admiration that I avow for Mazzini I have had to refuse. “(BCW I:392)   TS founder Herbert C. Monachesi was a member of the Mazzini Commission presided over by Dr. G. Ceccarini.   The members of the Ionian TS in Corfu, the first branch outside New York, showed similar interest in the Mazzini celebrations in New York.  My next blog post will explore the Ionian TS as a factor in the establishment of the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor.

Albert Rawson in How the Arabian Nights Inspired the American Dream, 1790-1935 by Susan Nance

This 2009 book from UNC Press explores  the marketing of Arab and Middle Eastern cultures in America during an era when “playing Eastern” provided a livelihood to many entrepreneurs.   The book jacket describes them:  “Over the course of 150 years, until the Great Depression, generations of native- and foreign-born actors took on lavish North African, Middle Eastern, or Indian costumes, accents, and names…in ways that could be controversial or celebrated but always had to be financially viable.”   Among those who scrambled to make a living as intermediaries between east and west, none is more fascinating than Albert Leighton Rawson.  Much of Nance’s third chapter discusses Rawson and the Shriners.  What made it possible for an American like Rawson to travel to Egypt in the 1850s, and meet there Russians and Britons who shared his interest in the cultures of the Eastern Mediterranean?  Nance sheds light on the changes of the period:

Growing personal wealth for some as well as blooming communication and transportation industries that integrated the telegraph, postal service, publishing, and rail with the new international steamer service made a Middle Eastern visit much more doable for Americans in terms of time, money, and health  risks, than, say, India, Rhodesia, or the Philippines.  For instance, in 1860 over 19,000 Americans would cross the Atlantic, and five hundred of them toured Egypt.  A typical route saw Americans voyage in winter to Alexandria by ship, south through Egypt by boat on the Nile and back, then by camel and horse caravan across the Sinai, to Palestine, Syria, and perhaps Anatolia…a large minority of these tourists had the skills with which to compose publishable travel narratives and the business or social connections with which to secure publication deals.(p.34)

Nance concludes her discussion of Rawson with a summary of his complexity:

Rawson’s work for Harper’s, his appeal to Biblical scholars, and his esoteric mystical pursuits beg the question of which performance was the real Albert Leighton Rawson, and how he could shift back and forth between a Protestant-friendly persona of Holy Land scholar and illustrator and the complex guise of a brotherly Muslim mystic and confidante to chivalrous Arab warriors.  Rawson presented himself to successions of different people, each in a slightly different way, more or less mystical, more or less Protestant, more or less Masonic, more or less Muslim, to serve his entrepreneurialism and the Ex Oriente Lux message he might need at any given moment. (p. 97)

In 1853 he was already lecturing to the YMCA in Boston about his knowledge of the Holy Land, so marketing himself as an expert began in his early twenties.  His painting career was moderately successful but engravings seem to have been his livelihood.   Rawson was one of eleven founding members of the American Watercolor Society and a fair sampling of his art  is viewable online.  A recent sale of his work  shows a respectable price.  Rawson was recently discussed in Jay Kinney’s The Masonic Myth (HarperCollins 2009), with emphasis on his role in creating the founding myth of the Shriners.  He calls Rawson “something of a fringe Masonic confidence man” since he “claimed to have translated the original rituals from the Arabic and to have provided the new organization with actual contacts with Eastern brotherhoods, most notably the Bektashi order of Sufis.”  This makes for an “elaborate mythos concocted by Rawson and a few others intent on fleshing out the Orientalist motif.”(p. 77)   Another recent book in which Rawson is discussed is Roderick Bradford’s D.M. Bennett: The Truth Seeker (Prometheus, 2006).  Rawson’s involvement with Bennett in the Free Thought movement developed in New York but extended to Europe where they appeared jointly at an 1880 Free Thought conference in Brussels.  Rawson and Bennett were equally targeted during this period by crusading moralist Anthony Comstock, who exposed Rawson’s history of an 1851 larceny conviction and charges of bigamy.  John Patrick Deveney has deftly unraveled some of Rawson’s automythologizing in a series articles published in Theosophical History, which Nance and Kinney draw upon in their portrayals of him.   His Bible engravings were the greatest part of his published body of work, yet he was openly disdainful of Christian orthodoxy and played a public role in the Free Thought movement.   It is hard to imagine him taking Sufism or Islam seriously while creating such a mockery as the Shrine rituals.   But in 1893 he gave his full support to yet another venture, and perhaps the real Rawson in old age is to be found in this final legacy.

Umar F. Abd-Allah is the author of A Muslim in Victorian America: The Life of Alexander Russell Webb, published by Oxford University Press in 2006.   Webb had been US consul in the Philippines in 1887 when he encountered Islam, which he embraced the following year.  Webb created the American Mission as the first Islamic institution in the U.S.   Abd Allah writes that Webb wrote “numerous books intended to introduce Islam to Americans, started the first Islamic press in the United States, published  a journal entitled the Moslem World, and served as the representative of Islam at the 1893 World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago.”  Rawson enters the narrative as an important ally of Webb’s enterprise: “One of his distinctive organizational principles was the creation of study circles `of five persons each…for study and improvement, and with the view of bringing the desired moral influences to bear upon evils now prevalent’…the most productive organizer of Webb’s circles was A.L. Rawson, a convert from Woodcliff, New Jersey, with close ties to [William Henry] Quilliam.  Rawson eventually formed his own American Moslem Institute as a branch of Quilliam’s society, although he contributed to the Moslem World, which duly announced the foundation of Rawson’s organization.”  Quilliam was the first native Briton to become a Muslim convert and propagandist, and his Islamic Institute in Liverpool was quite successful in attracting converts.  Quilliam created an Islamic Press active in the UK from 1893 through his immigration to Turkey in 1908.

Rawson’s travels present a series of puzzles for the historian, and his 1874 Eastern Mediterranean journeys included a long stay in Cyprus with a host who soon became powerful in the New York art world.  My next blog post will explore the career of Luigi Palma di Cesnola, founding director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  Rawson’s artistic talents were applied to cataloging an archaeological dig that made Cesnola highly celebrated in New York while denounced as a looter in Cyprus.

For illumination of the origins of  The Church of Light, the most intriguing scholarly biography of the past decade is The Lives of Sri Aurobindo by Peter Heehs (Columbia University Press 2008).  The collision of Eastern and Western spiritualities in the 19^th and 20^th centuries is nowhere more vividly illustrated than in the life of Mirra Alfassa.   Heehs places her in context of the life of Aurobindo Ghosh, the Bengali philosopher and yogi in whose ashram she spent the last half of a long life.  Mirra is important to the Church of Light for an association that preceded her travels to India; she is by far the most celebrated disciple of Max Theon, spiritual guide of the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor.

Peter Heehs has devoted almost four decades to preservation and study of the legacy of Sri Aurobindo, having resided in India since 1971.  His website links to several reviews of the biography, and I can add nothing except to concur with those who find his research exemplary, his writing clear and engaging, and his conclusions reasonable.   Disgraceful attacks based on false accusations have been made by some disciples, and an attempt is underway to have him expelled from India as a result of the biography.  As an author I encountered some personality-cult behavior from Theosophists and Cayce disciples, and observed similar reactions within other spiritual movements toward those who write about their founders in less than hagiographic adoration.   But nothing like the torrent of abuse that has been directed at Peter Heehs!  The Church of Light is noteworthy for its freedom from worshipful attitudes towards its human founders, or combativeness toward their critics.  We have been very fortunate in having independent scholars produce the HBofL compilation; no “message control” issues interfered with the production or reception of that invaluable work.  The CofL does not worship Burgoyne, Davidson, Theon, Zain, or any person.  But if adoration or worship of Mirra Alfassa are not part of our attitude, respect and honor are definitely merited by her remarkable life.

Blanche Rachel Mirra Alfassa was born in Paris in 1878 to Sephardic Jewish parents.  Her father was originally from Turkey and married her Egyptian mother in Alexandria.  In 1897 she married painter Henri Morriset, and became a painter herself in the early years of the 20^th century.  She was drawn into the Theons’ mouvement cosmique by her brother Matteo, and became one of its most active exponents from about 1903 through 1907.  The peak of her experience with the Theons was a three month visit to Algeria in 1906.  The pages directly addressing Mirra’s connection with Theon and his wife Alma include this passage:

During their three month stay, Mirra underwent a profound inner development, but this was due more to Theon’s wife that to Theon himself.  Madame Theon was `a marvellous woman from the point of view of experience,’ although her intellect was rather ordinary.  Theon, on the other hand, had comparatively little experience, but an encyclopedic knowledge of things occult.  A few lines from him was enough to inspire his wife to write pages and pages of what today might be called channeled writings.  But these revelations, according to one French critic, were `written in such a bizarre manner that even the most cultivated men (unless they were themselves `Cosmic’) quickly abandoned the attempt to read them.’ Mirra was aware of the deficiencies of Madame Theon’s writing, but felt that this extraordinary woman was in contact with genuine sources of knowledge.”(253)

Aurobindo is remembered now as a yogi and philosopher of spiritual evolution, but it is only in the latter half of his long life that he reached that phase of his existence, after several years as a prominent Freedom Movement leader.    Heehs follows his career from an Indian childhood, through an education in England, to his involvement in political activism in Bengal.  But his 1910 retirement  from politics and settling in Pondicherry was the emergence of the Aurobindo known today, as his writings focused more and more on bringing the Supramental into human experience.  The result would not be a “universal religion a system, a thing of creed and intellectual belief and outward rite”; rather, it would be based on “the growing realization that there is a secret Spirit, a divine Reality, in which we are all one, that humanity is its highest present vehicle on earth, that the human race and the human being are the means by which it will progressively reveal itself here.  It implies a growing attempt to live out this knowledge and bring about a kingdom of this divine Spirit upon earth.”(Heehs p. 290, citing The Ideal of Human Unity.)  In The Human Cycle, Aurobindo predicted a future age in which humans “will develop progressively a greater spiritual, supra-intellectual and intuitive, perhaps in the end a more than intuitive, Gnostic consciousness.”(292)  The extent to which Aurobindo’s spiritual mission was influenced by Mirra’s former association with Theon is not readily discernable from the Heehs biography, but until Theon’s teachings are better understood no historian will be able to appraise their impact.

In 1990 when my historical quest for the Theosophical Masters took me to India, Pondicherry was the last place I visited and the Aurobindo Ashram left a stronger impression of holiness than any other place I saw in six weeks in the country.  And yet there was also something stale and cloying in the atmosphere, a feeling that the sacred had come and gone and people were worshipping only memories.  The atmosphere of the ashram very definitely equates the Mother in status with Aurobindo in reverence.   The religious intensity of the devotion made me uncomfortable, but I had a far more favorable impression of Auroville, where the dreams of all the internationalist occultists I had been following around the world found concrete expression in a late twentieth century community.   If one wishes to capture the remarkable spirit of Mirra Alfassa, the best place to do so is Auroville, “a universal city in the making.”  The future, not the past, is the focus of reverence in that Utopian experiment.

THE LATE LORD LYTTON AND THE MASTERS

(The Theosophist, October 1884, p. 17, newly published on www.theosophy.net along with the entire first five year run of the journal, thanks to the labors of Marc Demarest, David Reigle, and Joe Fulton among others.  I mention these three because they will be attending the 2011 Church of Light preconference on Emma Hardinge Britten, Marc as featured presenter.)

 The World says that the Life of Lytton promises to be very interesting, though it is naturally very Bulwerian. “One of the most curious passages in the Biography will be that (yet to come) which relates to Lytton’s researches in the occult world, partly described in Zanoni, the Strange Story, &c. He thoroughly believed in the powers with which he invested Mejnour, and practised the art of divination with a curious, and to me unaccountable, success, an example of which will be found in this first installment of the work, Vol II. pp. 328-9).

It appears that in 1860, he cast the horoscope of Disraeli, who was at that time in one of the darkest eclipses ofhis life. He had enjoyed a brief taste of office, but was doomed to a long exclusion from it–from 1859 to 1866.  In 1860, then, Lord Lytton cast his nativity, and declared that the ‘figure’ surprised him, ‘it is so completely opposed to what I myself should have augured, not only from the rest of his career, but from my knowledge of the man.’ Among other things he predicted that Disraeli would gain honours ‘far beyond the most favourable prospects that could be reasonably anticipated from his past career, his present position, or his personal endowments;’ ‘he will leave a higher name than I should say his intellect quite warrants, or than would now be conjectured’ ‘his illnesses will be few and quick, but his last illness may be lingering. He is likely to live to old age, the close of his career much honoured;·’ ‘he will die whether in or out of office, in an exceptionally high position, greatly lamented, and surrounded to the end by all the magnificent planetary influences of a propitious Jupiter ;’. ‘.he will bequeath a repute out of all proportion to the opinion now entertained of his intellect even by those who think most highly of it  and so on. Who would have believed all this  of Disraeli in 1860 ?

Whatever may be the differences of opinion regarding Disraeli’s political views, it  cannot be disputed that he predicted with accuracy the present position of parties and politics.  He had himself something of the old Hebrew seer in him, and unknown to himself he was the subjected of a very remarkable study by one who still claims the mysterious brotherhood of India as a member of their own body, although he never avowed his connection with them.

Perhaps he is not the only one who has been “the subject of a remarkable study by the mysterious Brotherhood in India.” Who knows?– Ed. 

KPJ comment: This appears as an unsigned article in The Theosophist and appears to have had no byline in the World from which it is quoted.  The references to the Masters are quite mysterious and elliptical.  CofL readers will be intrigued by this confirmation that EBL was “addicted to astrology” as he described himself from a very young age.  I will be hoping to find out more about this article but wanted to share it immediately in celebration of the availability of The Theosophist 1879-1885 at theosophy.net.

One of the most visible leaders of Spiritualism in 19^th century America, James Martin Peebles was also a pivotal factor in the intersecting histories of the Theosophical Society, the Arya Samaj of India, and the Buddhists of Sri Lanka.  This occurred in 1877 when he introduced  (via correspondence) Col. Olcott and Madame Blavatsky to various spiritual leaders he had met on a recent trip to South Asia.  As the story goes according to several biographers, Peebles recognized Arya Samaj leader Moolji Thackersey in a photograph on the wall of the New York apartment the Colonel shared with Madame Blavatsky.   This photograph had been allegedly taken on a transatlantic voyage from New York to Liverpool in 1870, where Olcott met Moolji and another Indian traveler named Tulsidas, long before the formation of the Arya Samaj.  Peebles is largely a marginal figure in Theosophical Society history except for this single day, when he gave Olcott the Bombay address of Thackersey, with results that eventually led the TS to relocate to India.   Here is the biographical sketch of him from a website maintained by his most recent biographer.

He condemned Blavatsky and supported her accusers the Coulombs during the SPR investigation of the TS, but after her death was on collegial terms with Olcott on an 1897 return trip to South Asia.  While Peebles was both a Spiritualist and a Buddhist during his public career, his political and Free Thought involvements are equally important to his role in the history of the adepts. In 1869 he became US Consul in Trebizonde, Turkey, and en route to his assignment he participated in a Free Thought conference in Naples.  Noteworthy in terms of the 1870s themes of the Theosophical Society is correspondence read from Garibaldi, the presence of his “chaplain,” and the Italian nationalist rhetoric of Peebles’s address to the group.   His association with diplomatic service in the eastern Mediterranean connects him to a network of early Theosophical Society supporters, most strikingly Richard Francis Burton.  Peebles described visiting the great explorer in Trieste in his first round the world trip.  This 1874 article describes all the connections he made while in Europe, including the London Archaeological Society, of special interest since Burton was a major player in that organization.

In his travel memoir Around the World (1874), Peebles describes meeting Brahmo Samajis in Calcutta, one of whom had translated Emma Hardinge Britten’s Spiritual Commandments into Bengali and distributed it as a pamphlet.  October 1873 is the last appearance of Peebles in ship passenger lists I can find for the 1870s.  This coincides with the chronology in Around the World, copyright 1874, and contradicts Olcott’s claim that Peebles had “just arrived” from India in 1877 when he saw a picture of Olcott with Indians taken in 1870.  I found no appearances of any Olcott, Tulsidas, or Thackersey in ship passenger lists from 1870 or adjacent years.  The story of Thackersey and Olcott meeting on board ship was possibly unfounded, which would explain why Olcott got caught in an apparent contradiction when later telling Richard Hodgson that he’d never met a Hindu before he went to India.

Peebles claimed to have met Blavatsky in Cairo and seen her again with Olcott at the Eddy farmhouse.  In fact, he spent an entire two weeks at the Eddy farmhouse during the period that Olcott and HPB met there.  Like Emma Hardinge (not yet Britten) and other Spiritualists, he travelled to Salt Lake City.  Their acquaintance dates back to at least 1870, and they remained friends until Emma’s death in 1899.  In search of historical background on Peebles, I found a letter to abolitionist author Sojourner Truth from Oliver Johnson at the Anti-Slavery Office, NYC , 7/29/1863, which begins with the words “Yours by the hand of J.M. Peebles came promptly.”  I found more on the Peebles/Sojourner connection here.  Peebles seems to be one the most ubiquitous of the 19th century occultists, perhaps more of a central node in the larger network than anyone else including Emma Britten and Helena Blavatsky, involved with Spiritualism, Theosophy, Free Thought, Buddhism, and Abolitionism.

Marc Demarest’s unfolding research has suggested to me at various points that American Spiritualists had as much influence on Emma’s evolving beliefs as did the earlier European associates she memorialized as the Orphic Brotherhood.   For the history of the Church of Light, these are very helpful puzzle pieces enabling us to reconstruct the history of the adepts.  One of the keynotes of the CofL has been an outspoken progressive/reformist political stance, which reflects the New Deal environment in which Zain lived his most productive years.   It seems odd that a group so American in spirit, so focused on progressive political values of US origin, grew out of an English occult group that drew largely on European and Middle Eastern inspiration.  But when we see Emma Hardinge Britten as mainly influenced in the 1850s/60s by American progressive reformers, Zain’s emphases of the 1930s/40s appear as a reflection of the 19^th century Spiritualist roots of the body of teachings.

Peebles continues to be an important founding father for contemporary Spiritualists, and is regularly consulted by mediums as can be seen in a variety of online sites.

In January I will write about the new biography of Sri Aurobindo by Peter Heehs, but in the meantime wanted to share a link to this excellent article by Christine Rhone that just appeared online about Mirra Alfassa, which is clearly written and well researched on the subject of her teacher Max Theon.

Another excellent way to get better acquainted with Mirra Alfassa is through this interpretation of her natal chart by Peter Stockinger.

The newest book to shed light on historical adepts is a biography of an Algerian Sufi Sheikh, Abdelkader, whose final years were spent in Damascus where he became the close friend of Richard Francis Burton and his wife Isabel.  John Kiser’s Commander of the Faithful: The Life and Times of Emir Abd el-Kader was acclaimed in the New York Times as “a dramatic story of quarreling tribes, of Sufi sects and brotherhoods, of treacherous Ottoman officials, rival French generals, secret negotiations, broken truces, terrible atrocities and new forms of insurgency and counterinsurgency warfare.”  All those subjects are addressed in the first half of Kiser’s book which is set in Algeria, as was his award winning Monks of Tibhirine.   Abdelkader rose to fame as the leader of Algerian tribes, but the second half of the military hero’s life  was as an exile increasingly recognized for his noble character and spiritual studies.  He became increasingly admired in French exile before being moved to Turkey and then Damascus.  While in Damascus his involvement rescuing victims of anti-Christian riots brought him international acclaim including a gift from Abraham Lincoln.   When Richard and Isabel Burton arrived at a British consular post in Damascus, they soon found and befriended the Emir.  Another eccentric English traveler, Lady Jane Digby, was part of the Burton entourage during this period.

My first published investigation of Madame Blavatsky was a 1986 booklet on possible Sufi connections between her teachings and those of Gurdjieff.  The next focus of my investigations was the American artist Albert Rawson who promoted a variety of fringe Masonic groups in the US.   Leslie Price of the Theosophical History Centre in London encouraged my research and published the resulting articles.  By the time The Masters Revealed was published in 1994, I had learned of an international cast of characters involved in related Masonic activity in Egypt and the Near East.  Richard Francis Burton emerged as a node in the social network of early TS supporters.  Rawson and Burton have continued to be mentioned in new books about individuals they knew and whose lives were entangled with theirs.   The combination of Masonic and Islamic themes and memes is found in both their works, and I recently learned of an 1892 article in which Rawson recounts decades of acquaintance with Burton.

Of the figures profiled in chapters of The Masters Revealed, Burton is the one who has reappeared in various contexts relevant to the roots of The Church of Light.  About a year after joining the CofL I was invited to participate in Donna Zuckerbrot’s documentary film  which has seen on four Canadian cable networks from 2008 through the present.  The subtitle of the documentary Madame Blavatsky: Spiritual Traveller was taken from my remarks, quoted at the end to the effect that HPB “created the model” of the spiritual traveller, whose search for truth was global in scope. After seeing  it, I realized that she was just the first person to use a global search for spiritual truth from many sources as the basis of a new movement. But Burton is more deserving of accolades for creating the model that she exemplified, which later inspired such explorers as Alexandra David-Neel.   He was the most celebrated British explorer of the mid-19th century, and first met Blavatsky in Cairo in 1853 as he was preparing for his great trip to Mecca.  In 1878 he joined the British Theosophical Society, but recent research by Marc Demarest indicates that he had been introduced to occult studies in England in the 1840s as a member of the so-called Orphic Brotherhood led by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Richard James Morrison (Zadkiel), and Philip Henry Stanhope.

Albert Rawson, who introduced Burton to Blavatsky, claimed four extensive journeys to the Middle East, in one of which he became acquainted with John Varley II, a painter whose family was very prominent in British astrological and occult circles from the beginning of the 19th century. Varley and his wife Isabella, the aunt of William Butler Yeats, were members of the short lived Inner Group of the London TS lodge* and lifelong Theosophists. Varley traveled extensively as a landscape painter, best known for his depictions of Egypt.  The header of this blog is detail from a Varley street scene of 1870s Cairo.  James Peebles, who introduced Olcott and Blavatsky to leaders of Sinhalese Buddhism and the Arya Samaj, was another American globetrotter with connections in the Free Thought movement as well as Spiritualism.   Peebles in Egypt will be the subject of a future blog post in 2011, but the next entry will focus on Hurrichund Chintamon who was involved with the Arya Samaj, Theosophical Society, and Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor.

Here is the link to Albert Rawson’s piece on Burton, “Personal Recollections of Sir Richard Francis Burton, KGMG, FRS, FRGS,” and it runs from pages 565-577, with the story of Burton’s meeting Blavatsky on 573-4.  John Patrick Deveney demonstrated, in two articles published in Theosophical History, that Rawson is quite untrustworthy on chronology in his memoir of acquaintance with HPB. But this new find from Rawson conflicts with that previously known article about HPB, and fits what Deveney found to be plausible times when he might have been in the Middle East. Rawson not only claims to have introduced Burton to Blavatsky (in context which makes it clear that it occurred in 1853, conflicting with his 1851 date in the Blavatsky article) but quotes Burton thanking him for an introduction to Abdelkader.

* not the Inner Group of Blavatsky’s final years, but a pro-HPB group within the fragmented London Lodge of 1884

Emma Hardinge in the 1850s

The shared roots of the Theosophical Society and the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor have become better understood in recent years. In The Unseen Worlds of Emma Hardinge Britten, Robert Matthiesen draws a distinction between what he calls the Earlier and Later Theosophical Societies:

“Only in 1879 did a reorganized Theosophical Society once again begin to meet in India and elsewhere, but only about four of the founding members ever took much part in its activities. The large majority of them kept their distance from it, and a few of them, above all Emma Hardinge Britten, eventually became severe critics of its undertakings. Because of this great discontinuity of membership, I am inclined to speak of two Theosophical Societies (the one of 1875-76; the other from 1878 on) as separate organizations, which I shall call the Earlier and the Later Theosophical Society. The insistent claim of the Later Theosophical Society (in all its variant forms) to be the legitimate heir of the Earlier one, and the true custodian of its heritage, may have some basis in law, but it can easily obscure any profound historical examination of the Earlier Theosophical Society on its own terms…Unlike the Later Theosophical Society, the Earlier one was the joint creation, in varying but still significant ways, of most or all of its founding members.”(pp 32-34)

Emma Hardinge Britten was the most prominent of the Earlier TS authors, her Modern American Spiritualism (1870) making her the preeminent Spiritualist historian of the 19th century.  Her Art Magic and Ghost Land were the first two books published by a TS Founder, and lay the groundwork for much that came after: e.g. claims of mysterious adept co-authorship and use of the term Theosophy to describe a body of teachings that can be traced back to antiquity. But Emma was so unhappy with the direction taken by the Later TS that she eventually wrote that its new claims and theories rested “at most, on the authority of a `band of brothers,’ who are of no more authority than any other band of brothers, of whom there are hosts in the East, as elsewhere, and who singly or severally are only authoritative– beyond their particular sphere of discipleship– in as far as their teachings correspond to such laws, principles, and facts, as are already proven, or are capable of being proven.” (Nineteenth Century Miracles, p. 303.)  Six years later in her journal The Two Worlds, Britten was sharper in her criticism of the Theosophical Mahatmas: “The most unfortunate feature of all these claims is, however, that there is not one shadow of evidence given of its truth, except that it is the teaching of some unknown `Mahatmas,’ of whose existence again there is not even a shadow of proof, and of whose supposed doings three parties have publicly asserted the whole story to be a fiction, and the result of gross imposture.  If there are `Mahatmas,’—if these Mahatmas, can give any authoritative proof of their existence even, why is not that proof forthcoming?  Meanwhile, against the possibility of any such proof, first comes the pamphlet of Madame Coulomb, then of the exhaustive researches, also published, of Dr. Richard Hodgson, and finally the tremendous and disgraceful revelations made in the New York Sun, as late ago as July 20^th.”  (9/12/1890, p. 519)

Britten wrote in Nineteenth Century Miracles that “as long as the Society existed in that city on its original lines, the author’s name was retained as a member of the first council.”(p. 302) In the same section she describes those original lines later abandoned by Blavatsky and Olcott: “…it was deemed desirable to conduct the proceedings on the basis of a secret society…results attainable only to those who could, and would pursue, their studies, to the innermost depths of nature’s laboratories.”(p. 296)  The Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor emerged in Great Britain in 1884 to offer what the original TS had provided briefly but then abandoned: instruction in practical occultism within the framework of a secret society.   An Esoteric Section within the TS was created by HPB partly in response to the success of the HBofL recruiting prominent Theosophists, especially in America and France, and William Q. Judge’s pleas for a competing alternative.  Emma lent tacit support and the HBofL regarded her Art Magic and Ghost Land as foundational documents — the “stones rejected by the builders” of the Later TS.  She denied authorship of the HBofL’s major doctrinal work The Light of Egypt, but endorsed its value:

“We deeply regret that other matters of pressing moment have, of late, occupied our columns to the exclusion of those notices of books, pamphlets, and tracts, which we have received in great numbers, and which we hope yet to call attention to.  This apology relates especially to the noble, philosophic, and instructive work, published by George Redway of London, entitled “The Light of Egypt.”  We had hoped to have found space to give abundant quotations from this admirable treatise, one which supplies not only fine suggestive views of planetary cosmogony, but also furnishes a good corrective, founded, on the basis of science, fact, and reason, to the groundless assertions of theosophy, some of which appear in quotation in this numbers Leader.  Ere we close this merely preliminary notice that we have been favored with a copy of “The Light of Egypt,” we would call its author’s attention to the fact that a certain American editor of a Theosophical Magazine, entitled The Path, after venting on this fine work all the abuse, scorn and display of ignorance and insolence that his malice could dictate, ends by adding that this book is “by Mrs. Emma Hardinge Britten.”  We trust it needs no open disclaimer on our part to assure the gifted author of “The Light of Egypt” that this rude and uncalled-for piece of mendacity could only have been designed by the writer to add injury to insult, and compel the Editor of this journal to express her regret that she has not the smallest claim to stand in a position implying ability far beyond her capacity to attain to.  It is hoped that this public disclaimer will be sufficient to atone for the intended injury to the esteemed author of “The Light of Egypt,” and explain to him the animus with which his comments on the fantastic theories of the day are received by a prominent Theosophical journalist. (The Two Worlds, August 18, 1889, p. 481.)

The bitter tone of Britten’s remarks about the TS in later life reflected disappointed expectations, in the opinion of Robert Matthiessen.  Her support of the HBofL was presumably based not only on doctrinal agreement (anti-reincarnationist in the later TS sense) but on support for its pursuit of practical rather than theoretical occult study.  The HBofL made the same kind of confusing assertion that the Later TS made, claiming to be the same Brotherhood of Luxor that had really been a different entity. The British HBofL leaders claimed that their work had begun in 1870 in Egypt. But as best historians can tell, there was never any HBofL as a formal organization before 1884; the previous Brotherhood of Luxor referred to an informal network of associates in early 1870s Egypt.  Hence, when the Later TS leaders attacked the HBofL as an upstart group falsely claiming to have existed fourteen years earlier than it actually was created, they were justified. But then so were the HBofL leaders equally justified in arguing that the TS after its move to India was not at all the same organization it had been– and that their own teachings were more in line with those of the original TS.   More than a century since these organizations diverged, we have considerable historical evidence available to disentangle the conflicting claims.

 The Alexandrian Library

The Church of Light renews a tradition that has gone through many phases in its two thousand year history. Hermetism flourished in second-century Egypt, and its earliest known texts are in Greek. Its central figure, Hermes, is an amalgamation of the Greek God Hermes (the planet Mercury) with the ancient Egyptian god Thoth. He is called Hermes Trismegistus, or thrice-great Hermes, for his mastery of three fields of study: astrology, alchemy, and magic. The Corpus Hermeticum is the collection of sacred texts that define early Hermetic teachings. Hermetism in its original form is defined as a religion, but from the beginning it incorporated elements of philosophy and science. Although it became extinct as a religion, the philosophy and science of Hermetism survived as an underground current influencing the history of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism.

The Greek manuscript of the Corpus Hermeticum was rediscovered in 1460 and first translated into modern languages by Marsilio Ficino, thereby becoming a major influence on the Renaissance. This rediscovery and new influence is called Hermeticism, which flourished in 16th century Christian Europe. At the time it was believed that the text dated to hundreds of years before Christ and that Hermes was a contemporary of Moses. But its alleged antiquity was undermined by scholar Isaac Casaubon in 1614, who found persuasive evidence that the Corpus dates to the early Christian era. Thereafter Hermetic teachings went back underground. However, recent scholarship has found increasing evidence of Egyptian roots of the Hermetic teachings. Discovery of the Nag Hammadi library in 1947 provided modern students of Hermetism with a hitherto unknown text, On the Ogdoad and the Ennead. Professor Gilles Quispel explains that “This work shows without any doubt that the Hermetic believer was initiated into several grades before transcending the sphere of the seven planets and the heaven of the fixed stars (the Ogdoad.) Then he would behold the God beyond and experience Himself. It is now completely certain that there existed before and after the beginning of the Christian era in Alexandria a secret society, akin to a Masonic lodge. ” (The Way of Hermes, p. 10)

The Church of Light is a renewal of the Hermetic tradition as a religion, with grades of initiation modeled on the original three fields of study: astrology, alchemy, and magic. It continues the work of the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor, founded as an organization in England in 1884, but derived from adepts who met in Egypt around 1870. Connecting these phases was Max Theon, a spiritual guide of the HBL but uninvolved in its public work. The Hermetic tradition is the common property of humanity, and no organization can contain it. The Church of Light is devoted to applying the Hermetic teachings today. The insights and information in the Hermetic tradition provide a tremendous source of spiritual guidance for seekers now and far into the future. Guided by the Hermetic axiom “As above, so below,” the Church of Light brings astrology, alchemy, and magic into daily life.