The book series having been completed, History of the Adepts is now delving into subjects about which I have almost no expertise: Paschal Beverly Randolph and Max Theon. For a dozen years and 300 posts HOTA has focused largely on the handful of individuals named by Elbert Benjamine as predecessors of the Brotherhood of Light Lessons: Sarah Stanley Grimke, Thomas H. Burgoyne, Emma Hardinge Britten, and their associates in the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor in the US and UK. Randolph was studied by the HBofL but had died by the time it was established; Theon survived until 1927 but the last forty years of his life were spent in Algeria and his writings were in French so he vanished from the Anglo-American literary scene soon after somehow instigating (with others) formation of the HBofL. Both have abundant material newly available online so a lot of adventures and discoveries lie ahead in hitherto unexplored territories.
The final update re “shipwrecked orphans” explains the double entendre: first everything these people wrote a hundred years ago was lost due to publishing issues, then everything I wrote about them in the twenty-first century met the same fate. The Sarah Stanley Grimke Collected Works includes a prologue about Ghost Land, A Commentary on the Text of the Bhagavad-Gita includes a prologue about Hurrychund Chintamon’s dealings with the Theosophical Society, and The Quest of the Spirit has a prologue about the author’s past relationship with Grimke and an appendix about the “Hodgson Report.” I became a publisher only to rescue these essays from oblivion, as well as the authors about whom they were written. Patrick D. Bowen has shared his chapter for the Oxford University Press collection Imagining the East, which spotlights the Thomas Moore Johnson Correspondence and his own research on the discussions of yoga therein.