5
Spirits Reformed and Reconstituted
Among the numerous communications that Banner of Light medium Mary
Theresa Shelhamer reportedly received from Spirit Violet about the afterworld
came one describing the ‘‘beautiful city’’ Zencollia. Amid its ‘‘spires and towers’’
stood a building designated the ‘‘temple of learning,’’ which Spirit Violet called
the ‘‘most massive building’’ she had ever seen. The temple included ‘‘four spacious
halls,’’ the third of which—after ‘‘Science’’ and ‘‘Literature’’—was dedicated
to ‘‘Metaphysics.’’ Spirit Violet had visited it in company with a companion
spirit, discovering there a female speaker. ‘‘The ideas she expressed were grand
and beautiful,’’ Spirit Violet acknowledged, but she also confessed that ‘‘the language
with which they were clothed was almost too abstruse for me.’’ The accompanying
spirit thought that Violet was still ‘‘too familiar’’ with earthly discourse to
understand the spirit metaphysician. But she did explain—before Ralph Waldo
Emerson’s death in 1882—that ‘‘Emerson will delight to frequent this place when
he comes over to our side of life.’’ There were also ‘‘scores of other places’’ for
‘‘such teachers as Theodore Parker, Channing, and hundreds of like noble souls,’’
who would be occupied in ‘‘earnest utterance for the lifting up and sanctification
of the people.’’1
Clearly, for Shelhamer and her spirit friends in the 1880s, metaphysics meant
Transcendentalists and their kind—engaged in a higher calling that was somewhat
obscure and somewhat intimidating. Yet it was eminently worthy since it
was for the benefit and blessing of ordinary people. The purified atmosphere of
the Hall of Metaphysics seemed a far cry from the reported excesses and vaudeville
antics of the spirits who came calling in many of the séance rooms. If the
air remained a little dry in the Hall of Metaphysics, the spirits themselves apparently
honored it and thoroughly recognized its worth. By the post–Civil War
period, a number of Americans on the earthly side of the divide were also be-
257
258 Arrivals
ginning to prefer the purer, drier air of a more detached metaphysics. The heirs
and progeny, perhaps, of the harmonialism of Andrew Jackson Davis, they parsed
their metaphysics differently from Spirit Violet, including in it much more than
Transcendentalist-style discourse. Still, many of them looked to the Transcendentalists
as founders of their tribe. More than that, the emergent metaphysicians
carried the reform spirit championed by Davis and other harmonialists into
new expressions. The reform began, first, in a spiritualism that looked to the
world and saw, in numerous intellectual and social sites, an overwhelming need
and demand for change. Reform became synonymous with ‘‘progress,’’ the great
buzzword of the age, and progress came through ‘‘science.’’ Meanwhile, science
was an enterprise in which spiritualists delighted since they regarded their own
spirit communications as its cutting edge. Reform came also, and most of all,
through the transformation of social life as, among other things, slavery and the
oppression of women fell away. A new era of equality and justice was dawning
that would also be an era of social tranquility and love.
At a certain point, however, the reform spirit turned inward to what constituted
spiritualism itself, and spiritualists began to part company with their former
practice and to turn to new venues and concerns. We have already seen the beginnings
of the process in the flamboyant Pascal Beverly Randolph who moved
noisily out of the spiritualist fold and on to other metaphysical pastures. By the
1870s and 1880s he had plenty of company. Individuals as diverse as Madame
Helena Blavatsky and Henry Steel Olcott (who founded the Theosophical Society),
Phineas Parkhurst Quimby and Warren Felt Evans (who pointed the way
toward New Thought), and Mary Baker Eddy (who established Christian Science)
moved past a spiritualism that they knew at least partially and felt they
understood. These reformers turned instead to what they considered more sophisticated
expressions of their metaphysical inclinations, and in so doing they
turned in essentially two directions. All of them harvested the ambience of the
world of spirits in works of directed imagination. For some the work continued in
material symbols—like Renaissance magicians or later Continental and English
practitioners—in a new, mostly Anglo-American, form of ‘‘angel-summoning’’
that became, properly speaking, the occult. For others the work went forward
mostly on a mental plane, although they expected that its effects would not remain
there. Among this second group, some aimed consciously to banish matter
in an exercise of denial that both diminished and exalted the physical. They
invoked divine ‘‘Principle’’ or ‘‘Truth’’ to master a sin-filled, mortal body and to
bestow upon the chastened physical self the goods of a kingdom of health and
well-being. Still others found the ingredients for Self-transformation in a ‘‘Spirit’’
immanent in matter, so that—like the Hermeticists of old and the worldwide
Spirits Reformed and Reconstituted 259
spiritual teachers they admired—they could be as gods, identified with a power
of ‘‘Good’’ that kept on giving.
Along a spectrum from occultism to mind cure and the transformation of the
Self, we can spot the familiar signature of correspondence, the drawing down of
energies of Mind and Spirit, and the strong intent to heal. In the terms of this
narrative, too, we can watch the easy glide from a (material) magic resonating,
however unconventionally, with the magical practice of a past Hermeticism to a
newer, mental magic characterizing Christian Science and New Thought. Here
a simpler work of mind and imagination prevailed; and the esoteric turned—as
in spiritualism—exoteric. The new metaphysical religion that flowered in these
expressions and related ones, however, began with the reform principle that so
much preoccupied the spiritualists.
PROGRESS, SCIENCE, AND REFORM
AMONG THE SPIRIT-SEEKERS
From the time of the early manifestations of mass spiritualism in the 1840s,
the so-called ‘‘Law of Progression’’ reigned unchallenged among believers and
their spirit visitors. One way to explain the connection could be in terms of happenstance.
The early alliance of the Fox sisters with Isaac and Amy Post and their
formerly Hicksite radical Quaker associates began a train of associations in which
reform functioned centrally and spiritualism became but one expression of the
grand principle of progress. Similarly, for the men and women who turned, with
Andrew Jackson Davis, to harmonialism, Fourierist enthusiasm guaranteed that
ideas about reform and progress would be uppermost. No doubt happenstance
was involved here, too, but once Davis elaborated his spiritualist cosmology the
Law of Progression stood at the heart of the spiritualist vision. It became, in
effect, the core principle of a spiritualist theology that refused to go away even
in the face of a small army of defrauding mediums and their disruptive spirit
companions.
Davis had begun the turn to progress as early as the trance productions that
were published as The Principles of Nature (1847). There, as we have seen, he
revised the received Swedenborgian account of the afterworld. Its three hells
were transmuted into the lower three spheres of the spirit abode, beginning
with the closest to earth, which came to be called the Summerland, and continuing
with the former Swedenborgian heavens, which now became the outer
spheres. For Davis, in accord with his planetary travels, there were other earths
beside this one, but ‘‘all earths and their inhabitants’’ constituted the first sphere.
When inhabitants died and left it, they progressed through succeeding spheres, so
260 Arrivals
that the eternity he and other spiritualists envisioned meant pilgrimage through
landscapes of ever-increasing perfection rather than eternal rest. Meanwhile, on
earth, it was already incumbent on inhabitants to refine and perfect their minds.
When this was ‘‘properly accomplished,’’ the ‘‘social world’’ would be ‘‘correspondingly
elevated, and thus be advanced to honor, goodness, and universal
peace.’’2
But this was not all. As Davis’s grand vision developed, he began to explain
that when all spirits reached the second sphere, the ‘‘various earths and planets’’
would be ‘‘depopulated,’’ and only Spirit would remain. The spirits would not
stay there, however, but would continue to progress to the sixth sphere, arriving
‘‘as near the great Positive Mind as spirits can ever locally or physically approach.’’
(Davis’s spirits, remember, were highly refined matter and thus retained a certain
physicality.) When all the spirits had come to the sixth sphere and ‘‘not a
single atom of life’’ was ‘‘wandering from home in the fields and forests of immensity,’’
the Deity contracted inward, and the ‘‘boundless vortex’’ was ‘‘convulsed
with a new manifestation of Motion . . . passing to and from center to circumference,
like mighty tides of Infinite Power.’’ The cataclysmic contraction, in turn,
brought the ‘‘law of Association or gravitation’’ to bear, so that ‘‘new suns, new
planets, and new earths’’ appeared. Once again, the ‘‘law of progression or refinement’’
could be applied, and so could the ‘‘law of Development.’’ Thus God created
‘‘a new Universe’’ and opened ‘‘new spheres of spiritual existences.’’ ‘‘These
spheres,’’ Davis prophesied, ‘‘will be as much superior to the present unspeakable
glories of the sixth sphere, as the sixth sphere is now above the second sphere; because
the highest sphere in the present order of the Universe will constitute the
second sphere in the new order which is to be developed.’’ And, we may surmise,
the process would continue through countless eons of earth time in a vision not
unlike that of the yugas, or great years, in a vastly expansive Hindu theology that
Helena Blavatsky would later invoke (see the next chapter). Davis clinched his
case with the observation that the spirit would have ‘‘no ‘final home,’’’ since ‘‘to
an immortal being, rest would be intolerable,’’ ‘‘next to annihilation,’’ and worse
than ‘‘the miseries of the fabled hell.’’ ‘‘The spirit,’’ he proclaimed, ‘‘will progress
eternally!’’3
Davis’s pronouncements found echoes seemingly everywhere within the huge
spiritualist community, and revered texts reiterated for their readers the canonicity
of the Law of Progression. Judge Edmonds, for example, found space in his
well-known work to hail the ‘‘grand doctrine of progression, whereby we learn
that as the soul of man is an emanation from the germ of the great First Cause,
so its destiny is to return toward the source whence it sprang.’’ His co-author and
medium George Dexter, the doctor, left no doubts that he agreed. After his own
Spirits Reformed and Reconstituted 261
account of spirit visits, he proclaimed as grandly, ‘‘I see progress stamped on every
aspiration of the human mind, as it is on every part of God’s universe—progress
from the animal to the intellectual—from the material to the spiritual, and bestowed
on the spirit . . . as the highest boon of its Almighty Creator.’’ And in his
introduction to Charles Linton’s Healing of the Nations, Nathaniel Tallmadge
was as effusive. ‘‘The great doctrine derived from spiritual communications,’’ he
testified, ‘‘is that of everlasting progression.’’ In his reading, too, not only did
nature teach the doctrine, but it was also eminently biblical. ‘‘The Bible teaches
Progression,’’ he affirmed, and it showed ‘‘different gradations of the progressed
and progressing spirit to that of the spirit of the just man made perfect.’’4
Summarizing the beliefs of mid-nineteenth-century spiritualists, R. Laurence
Moore pointed to four unwavering ‘‘principles.’’ Spiritualists rejected supernaturalism,
hailed natural law as inviolable, put their premium on external occurrences
rather than inward states, and saw knowledge as progressively developing
and unfolding.5 Arguably, the last of these subsumed the first three, since the
séance sitters of the era saw their practice as the living demonstration of natural
and scientific process. Moreover, the process was neither secret nor ‘‘occult’’ but
—as they saw it—clearly visible and testable for right-minded, rational observers.
That they, the séance sitters, had broken from centuries of superstition and mystification
was paramount evidence of the law of progression and their own place at
the very edge of its unfoldment. Indeed, spiritualist practice represented the prior
reform of knowledge now being corroborated in the reform of life and society.
Moore, in fact, identifies the ‘‘rhetoric of denial’’ that spiritualists, at least by
the 1870s, employed in their rejection of their ancestry. ‘‘Spiritualist publications
in the last quarter of the nineteenth century,’’ he says, ‘‘systematically repudiated
black magic, white magic, Rosicrucianism, and Cabalism. They further attacked
the ‘musty tomes’ of such individuals as Paracelsus, Cornelius Agrippa, Raymond
Tully, Nostradamus, Albertus Magnus, Eugenius Philalithes, Girolamo Cardano,
Robert Fludd, and Éliphas Lévi.’’ Hermeticism, decidedly, was out, as spiritualists
reformed esotericism. Ironically, among the first wave of reformers of spiritualism
would be the Theosophists, who self-consciously embraced the ‘‘occult’’
in a global version. Spiritualists themselves, however, were livid in their declamations
against ‘‘crude speculations,’’ ‘‘spurious philosophies,’’ and ‘‘pseudoscience.’’6
And if Hermeticism was out, true science, spiritualist science, was in.
With ‘‘science’’ as their second buzzword alongside ‘‘progress,’’ spiritualists
used the term in various ways that were ambiguous and also sometimes contradictory.
They thought that spiritualism itself was scientific, that it followed certain
universal laws and represented a sure body of knowledge. We have already
seen the eagerness with which those in the séance circles embraced mesmer-
262 Arrivals
ism, phrenomagnetism, electricity, odic force, and the like to explain the spirits.
The notion of spirit matter itself was not unlike the vaguely formulated concept
of the ‘‘ether’’ that pervaded the conventional science of the period. And when
the purported spirit raps were first sorted, with spirit cooperation, into alphabetical
letters and, thus, verbal communication, the language of the ‘‘spiritual telegraph’’
was immediately born—only four years after the famous Morse wire of
1844. Work with the spiritual telegraph, spiritualists insisted, was repeatable—
like a science. Moreover, even as they sought to open the secrets of ancient Hermetic
wisdom to the bright light of day, their ambivalence toward the Hermetic
past was clear: Overlying their Hermes was a positivism that expressed itself in frequent
preoccupation with demonstration and empirical testing. As Ann Braude
observes, it was the ‘‘interpretations of investigators,’’ rather than séance manifestations
by themselves, that ‘‘provided the content of the new religion.’’7
Spiritualist positivism became a game of challenge played with anyone bearing
proper scientific credentials. And believers did get noticed. Ernest Isaacs
wrote that ‘‘at first as curious individuals, later in groups and commissions, still
later in research societies,’’ scientists paid attention, even if most were ‘‘repelled
by the purported messages of spirits and the actions of mediums.’’ For the Fox
sisters scientific investigation turned into a daytime nightmare. By 1851, after
their spectacular sojourn in New York City, Margaret and Leah Fox visited Buffalo
and became the subject of an investigation by three faculty members from
the School of Medicine at the university there. Writing in the Buffalo Commercial
Advertiser, the trio announced that it was by skeletal manipulation that the
notorious raps were produced. Dislocated knee joints, not dislocated spirits, had
caused the noises. When Leah Fox responded with a heated challenge to the
professors, the examination grew more serious and extensive. The sisters were intimidated;
there were tears and very few raps; and the doctors held publicly to
their theory—although they owned that they could not find the ‘‘precise mechanism’’
that triggered the knee-joint dislocations.8
If respected scientists disdained the spirits, spiritualists themselves continued
to display their own version of scientific positivism. Representative of widespread
spiritualist attitudes, for example, was the memorial that Nathaniel Tallmadge
persuaded General James Shields to present to the United States Senate on behalf
of Tallmadge himself and 13,000 others. With Samuel B. Brittan involved
in its composition, according to Tallmadge, the memorial requested that Congress
appoint a commission of scientists for the purpose of investigating ‘‘Spiritual
Manifestations.’’ Invoking evidence of an ‘‘occult force’’ that could disturb ‘‘numerous
ponderable bodies,’’ of unexplained lights in dark rooms, of ubiquitous
rappings and other sounds as from musical instruments, and of the entranced
Spirits Reformed and Reconstituted 263
states of some in the presence of the ‘‘mysterious agency,’’ the petitioners sought
congressional aid. They believed, they declared, ‘‘that the process of Science and
the true interests of mankind will be greatly promoted by the proposed investigation.’’9
The fact that Congress tabled the memorial suggests that many in high
places, like most in the scientific community, remained unconvinced. Spiritualists,
however, liked to point to the convicted. Just as Judge Edmonds and Governor
and ex-Senator Tallmadge epitomized those involved in public and political
life who had been persuaded, the chemist Robert Hare (1781–1858) was regularly
exhibited as the converted scientist. From 1819 to 1847 a professor of chemistry
at the medical college of the University of Pennsylvania, Hare engaged in important
work on salts and produced novel inventions such as an oxyhydrogen blowpipe
and an electric furnace. His articles appeared frequently in the American
Journal of Science, and in 1839 the Rumford Medal of the American Academy
of Arts and Sciences had been awarded him. By 1852, however, well after his retirement
from the university and his election as a lifetime member of the Smithsonian
Institution, Hare turned his investigative skills to spiritualist phenomena.
His interest had begun innocently enough, when he was invited to a séance
circle in an affluent Philadelphia home and heard the familiar rappings. Puzzled
and intrigued, he tried to find their source in this and other circles, to no avail. He
could not accept the conclusion that all of the mediums were frauds, but neither
could he by conventional means explain the raps. Hence Hare constructed what
he would call a ‘‘spiritoscope’’ to pursue his investigation. A disk with a random
alphabet inscribed on it, an arrow that could point to one of the alphabet letters,
and a rod passing through it and connecting it to the séance table, Hare’s instrument
had pulleys and weights attached so that it would turn should the table
move. A screen separated it from the medium, assuring that it could not be directly
seen as Hare questioned her and the disk, correspondingly, revolved and so
spelled out answers to the questions asked. Rejecting electrical theories to explain
the movement and also similar postulates such as Reichenbach’s odic force and
an argument regarding mechanical pressure by British scientist Michael Faraday,
he became convinced that his device—built to debunk spiritualist explanations—proved
them instead. The spirits were real and were visiting.10
As he continued his investigative pursuits, Hare built several versions of his
spiritoscope. In so doing, he embodied in his rational positivism and empirical
meticulousness the requirements for the Baconian scientist so much in vogue
during his nineteenth-century time (recall the spirit of Lord Bacon whom John
Edmonds and George Dexter hailed as their frequent visitor). It had taken Hare
a good three months to arrive at his conclusions, he told readers in his first-person
Experimental Investigation of the Spirit Manifestations (1855). ‘‘I did not yield
264 Arrivals
the ground undisputed, and was vanquished only by the facts and reasons which,
when understood or admitted, must produce in others the conviction which
they created in me.’’ His publishers were not difficult to persuade. Partridge and
Brittan were none other than the well-known spiritualists Charles Partridge and
Samuel B. Brittan, whom we have met before. Hare’s publication overnight guaranteed
his celebrity in the spiritualist community, even as it also accorded him a
dubious status among his scientific colleagues then and critics thereafter. For example,
historian R. Laurence Moore, reflecting a common opinion, judges that
Hare ‘‘demonstrated the mental infirmities of advanced age when he turned to
spiritualism.’’ Moore observes that even the erstwhile scientist’s spiritualist publishers
found him ‘‘extremely difficult to handle’’; they complained that in letters
to the periodical Spiritual Telegraph Hare failed to address the scientific dimensions
of spiritualist phenomena. Still, his procedural rigor needs to be noticed.
If—with Edmonds, Dexter, and Tallmadge—he made the leap of faith that rendered
criticism obsolete beyond a certain point, he worked to arrive at the point
by using methods similar to those that he had employed in his earlier scientific
studies.11
Hare, despite the chagrin of his former colleagues, continued to see himself as
a scientist among scientists. In fact, one of the strongest reasons he was drawn to
the spirits was that he believed them to be sources of advanced knowledge—well
beyond what he and other earthbound mortals had discovered on their own. In
both 1854 and 1855, he brought his spiritualist research to the American Association
for the Advancement of Science, permitted to read his paper out of deference
to his age and long scientific career in the first case and omitted from the
program in the second because of his subject. Significantly, his 1854 paper did
not appear in the proceedings of the association. More to the point here, in their
elation at the presence of Hare in their midst, the spiritualist community was
announcing in the strongest of terms how important scientifically proven spirits
remained to spiritualist self-understanding. Samuel B. Brittan began a promotional
campaign, drafting Hare himself to lecture and exhibit his spiritoscope in
New York City to a crowded, standing audience of more than three thousand. In
a lecture that must have been memorable, the Baconian gave way to the believer,
and Hare testified to the theology of progress in the seven spheres, six of them
beyond the earth—those ‘‘concentric bands surrounding the earth, commencing
sixty miles above this earth and reaching out for one hundred and twenty miles.’’
The positivism was unmitigating, even as the aging scientist confessed the truth
of life in the seventh sphere to which all mortals should aspire.12
For Hare and other spiritualists, seventh-sphere life represented their horizon
of aspiration toward the reformed life, the millennial goal they longingly sought.
Spirits Reformed and Reconstituted 265
Hence the third shibboleth of this spiritualist universe of perpetual improvement
was reform. Spiritualist preoccupation with reform came with its roots,
both through Andrew Jackson Davis and through the Fox sisters and other séance
spiritualists. For Davis, Fourierism had formed the basis for the practical application
of his grand spiritualist vision in his Principles of Nature, and he continued
throughout his professional career to provide a role model of the spiritualist
who was also and preeminently a reformer. Campaigning for the reform of
marriage and divorce law and for equal rights for women, Davis worked to instantiate
his vision of eternal progress here on earth. He also wrote toward the
same end, and his five-volume Great Harmonia was predicated on a Fourierist
scheme.13 Meanwhile, the Quaker ambience in which early mass spiritualism
flourished guaranteed its alliance with reform activism from the first. By 1859, for
example, well-known abolitionist Gerrit Smith—who also affirmed the reality of
spirit communication—could comment on the dual identity of other reformerspiritualists,
assessing that ‘‘in proportion to their numbers, Spiritualists cast tenfold
as many votes for the Abolition and Temperance tickets, as did others.’’
Nearly all of the well-known abolitionists believed in the spirit manifestations,
and so did a series of other reformers. As R. Laurence Moore has summarized the
antebellum situation, those who counted themselves spiritualists ‘‘gained their
most influential defenders from men and women who managed to support the
rappers with the same enthusiasm they supported Fourierism, temperance, antislavery,
health reform, and women’s rights.’’14
In the specific case of women’s rights, Ann Braude has demonstrated that spiritualism
provided the training ground for later reform activism. A cadre of wellknown
female trance speakers learned to deliver messages in public as mouthpieces
for purported spirits and then moved on in later years to speak publicly
in their own name and for the causes about which they themselves passionately
cared. ‘‘Woman suffrage benefited more than any other movement from the
self-confidence women gained in Spiritualism,’’ Braude writes. When the suffrage
campaign took off in the post–Civil War period, spiritualist women were
there to support it. In the California of 1870, for example, Braude found that of
the nine women identified as holding suffrage meetings only one could not be
linked to spiritualism, while six were listed as lecturers in the Banner of Light.
On the basis of what she discovered in the spiritualist and reform communities,
Braude argues for the role of spiritualism in giving voice to a ‘‘crucial generation’’
of American women. By the postbellum time, an earlier millennialism and insistence
on instant societal perfection—with the spirits as prophetic messengers
of an imminent new age—had given way to a social gradualism influenced by
notions derived from the Darwinian concept of evolution. With social improve-
266 Arrivals
ment coming slowly and not all at once, spiritualists dug in during the 1870s
and 1880s, supporting the cause of equal rights for women and other crusades
as varied as American Indian rights, prison reform and an end to capital punishment,
and the rights of labor.15
An intrinsic connection between reform practice and spiritualist cosmology
reflected in the writings of Andrew Jackson Davis and other key spiritualists
meant that, from the mid-nineteenth century, the alliance of spiritualists and
reformers was hardly coincidental. The spiritualism built on a theology of eternal
progress could hardly fail to desire the early implementation of unending
betterment in the first sphere—the sphere of earth. R. Laurence Moore has, it
is true, raised provocative questions about estimating spiritualist reform activism
too highly, since by the early twentieth century both practically and substantively
the spiritualist connection with social reform was, in effect, dead.16 Indeed, the
evidence for the grand fizzle of spiritualist hopes and dreams for social reform
is hard to avoid in the period when the nineteenth century became the twentieth.
The flamboyant spiritualism of the 1850s, which had enjoyed a noticeable
resurgence in the 1880s, gave way to a spate of fragile organizations and sedate
renditions of spiritualism that were themselves so many ghosts of the formerly
vibrant movement.
Besides, judgments about a substantive connection between spiritualism and
reform need to be probed more. Visions of progress in the heavenly spheres
existed side by side with a spiritualist theology of sinlessness. The God that spiritualists
honored was not a God of vengeance, nor did he preside over an earth
in which evil held out as a concrete reality. ‘‘If there exists an Evil principle,
would not that principle be an integral element in the constitution of the Divine
Mind?’’ Davis had asked rhetorically. ‘‘God is all-in-all. . . . There is no principle,
antagonistic to God; no empire at war with Heaven!’’17 Instead, the God of love
welcomed a prepared people who were already innately good and, with free will
and the spirits to guide them, getting better all the time. The moral progress of
the human soul was, in such a universe, inevitable—all spirits, remember, would
at some point, arrive at the second sphere and then go on to the sixth—which
would then implode and be reconstituted as a new universe to be progressed
through. What, then, was a reformer to do? How or why was a reformer, after all,
necessary? Coupled with social Darwinian ideas of gradual amelioration, spiritualist
reform principles possessed, seemingly, little intellectual ballast. Why rush
to make the good better when, at its own pace, it would all get better anyway?18
Still, the long light of millennialism tempered the determinist implications
of the cosmology. Even if the excitement of arriving spirits could not be maintained
as the decade of the 1850s gave way to more troubled Civil War times
Spirits Reformed and Reconstituted 267
and then an era of fraud and excess in a vaudeville of the spirits, the literature
of the older movement had shaped the minds of leaders. So had a history of reform
associations among spiritualists. Hence a linked spiritualist-reform ideology
continued to operate even as its foundations began to crumble. The heirs to the
reform legacy would become those who, as we shall see, would reform spiritualism
itself. In the meantime, for a movement predicated on the widespread individualism
of small-time religious entrepreneurs and their informal followings,
spiritualism displayed a surprising quest for—not solitary talks with spirits—but
encompassing communities. Bret Carroll has pointed to the séance circles as incipient
communities, even as he has noticed the communal republican yearnings
of spiritualists themselves, epitomized in Andrew Jackson Davis’s vision of a
republic of spirit.19 The Fourierist underpinnings of spiritualism, of course, represent
a utopian ideal of community writ large in social relations. Likewise, the
repeated spiritualist depictions of life in the heavenly spheres always show existence
there as social—organized ubiquitously in cities and institutions and social
processes. Mary Theresa Shelhamer’s Spirit Violet and her accounts of spirit life
were not exceptional.
More than that, beyond the dreams of Fourierist community—as evinced, for
example, in the entire third section of Davis’s Principles of Nature,20 intentional
community life often encouraged spiritualism, even as spiritualist practice generated
community. For the former, George Ripley’s Brook Farm and Adin Ballou’s
Hopedale Community were cases in point. In the era before mass spiritualism,
so were the Shaker communities of the Northeast and Midwest. In the spiritualist
heyday of the 1850s, communitarians such as Robert Owen, Robert Dale
Owen, and—with free-love reputations—Josiah Warren, Mary Gove Nichols,
and Stephen Pearl Andrews were all hospitable to spiritualism. And by the 1870s,
John Humphrey Noyes’s Oneida Community of Perfectionists in upstate New
York provided still another instance. Indeed, Noyes himself owned that spiritualist
practice was, as Maren Lockwood Carden summarized, ‘‘consistent with his
lifelong teaching about the possibility of communication with members of the
primitive church.’’21
Beyond these, spiritualists formed self-conscious communities in which the
theology of spiritualism could take tangible form. The earliest, on the site of the
failed Clermont Phalanx in Ohio, began in 1847 through the efforts of John O.
Wattles, a Fourierist converted to spiritualism, but lasted only nineteen months.
By 1851, Andrew Jackson Davis was at least considering plans for a ‘‘Harmonial
Brotherhood,’’ while more concretely, the Harmonia near Battle Creek, Michigan,
in which Sojourner Truth dwelled for a time from 1857, existed as a spiritualist
commune. Meanwhile, in western New York state, near Kiantone Creek on
268 Arrivals
the border of Pennsylvania, John Murray Spear had established his own Harmonia
Community. Located close to a muddy mineral spring that, it was claimed,
the spirits had revealed for its healing powers, the community began at Spear’s
(spirit) direction with a charter for the ‘‘City of Harmonia.’’ The government
would be one of ‘‘love with innocence as its only protector,’’ and it would exalt
the sovereignty of each individual member. Crime was a disease that was treatable;
marriage was a union easily entered and left, in a sexuality of mutual consent;
equality between the sexes was mandatory; and private real estate holdings
were to be replaced by octagonal houses as promoted by Lorenzo Fowler, one of
the fabled phrenological Fowlers of the period (see the previous chapter). Spear
built Harmonia on a site claimed (by the spirits, he said) to be a prehistoric city
of utopian proportions. Now it would be the place where his spirit-inspired perpetual
motion machine called the New Motive Power—already the subject of
a failed experiment—might flourish again because of the ‘‘peculiarly favorable
electrical emanations’’ of the site. But fortune did not smile. Spear spent twenty
thousand dollars—a gift to him by an area businessman—to dig for the buried
city without success, even as his New Motive Power after being brought to New
York was trashed by an unfriendly mob. Although Harmonia hosted a National
Spiritualist Convention in 1858 and promoted an expedition to New Orleans in
1859 and 1860, the community succumbed in 1863, a victim of financial losses,
internal divisiveness, and outward opposition to its sexual permissiveness.22
The most noticed spiritualist community, however, flourished for a time at
Mountain Cove, in western Virginia (now West Virginia), after beginnings in
Auburn, New York, a site of early spiritualist excitement connected with the Fox
sisters in 1848 and 1849. The Auburn Circle there, under the mediumship of Ann
Benedict, believed itself to be visited by spirit communications from Apostles and
Prophets, among them Paul the Apostle, who through Benedict called the minister
of the Seventh Day Baptist Church in Brooklyn, New York, to Auburn. The
Reverend James L. Scott arrived as directed, and then—also called by the Apostle
—Thomas Lake Harris (1823–1906) joined him as the so-called Apostolic movement
grew. Harris, a follower of Andrew Jackson Davis and his harmonialism,
had already been dubbed the ‘‘Poet’’ within the group that edited and promoted
the Univercoelum, the early spiritualist paper published by Samuel B. Brittan. A
former Universalist minister, like so many others within spiritualist ranks, he was
speedily outgrowing Davis. By early 1851, Scott and Harris had launched a (spirit)
newspaper of their own. The movement grew as Scott continued to hold forth
in Auburn and Harris traveled to New York City to evangelize on its behalf. By
the summer, Scott claimed to be experiencing visions directing him to seek an
earthly center for the ‘‘unfolding’’ of the ‘‘heavenly kingdom’’ and a ‘‘refuge’’ for
Spirits Reformed and Reconstituted 269
God’s ‘‘obedient people.’’ In due course, the ‘‘Holy Mountain’’ was recognized by
Scott and the others at Mountain Cove in the mountains of western Virginia.23
The community that formed there lasted from 1851 to 1853, some one hundred
or so persons believing themselves to be established on the site of the original
garden of Eden and speaking the language of Christian scripture in an illuminist
version that stressed the nearness of the endtime. Roots in the Millerite
movement of the 1840s, with its expectation of the Second Coming of Jesus in
1843 and then in 1844, gave to Mountain Cove communitarians a premillennial
vision of impending catastrophe that only heightened their spiritualist belief.
Leaders and members were imbued ever more strongly with a sense that the
spirits who were aiding them required obedience and that, without spirit help,
in the short time that remained social perfection could not be attained. With
or without the spirits, though, Mountain Cove did not prosper. Unwelcome to
its Virginia neighbors for its northern doctrines of radical reform and its theological
heterodoxies, it experienced persistent internal discord. As early as the
close of 1851, sexual allegations against Scott for ‘‘licentiousness and adultery’’
orchestrated the dissension to come, even as Scott’s dismissal of Benedict and
her mediumship in order to claim himself as ‘‘medium absolute’’ increased it.
When Harris joined Scott in the spring of 1852, the two assumed co-leadership
in a patriarchalism that manifested first in Scott’s suppression of Benedict’s authority
in favor of his own, and as the Scott-Harris claims escalated, many in
the community chafed. The pair announced themselves the two ‘‘witnesses’’ in
Revelation 11:3–6, divinely chosen to prophesy—with fire emanating from their
mouths, power to turn water into blood, and power, as well, to visit the earth with
plagues; with authority, in short, to kill. Amid these threats of blood authority
and grossly inflated claims, the community came apart.24
For the larger spiritualist community, Mountain Cove had gone beyond the
pale. The subject of extended vitriolic narrative by spiritualist historians Emma
Hardinge and Eliab W. Capron, it elicited heated condemnations and a rhetoric
of thoroughgoing refusal to own it. Hardinge found Mountain Cove to
be ‘‘notorious’’—one of the ‘‘follies and fanaticisms’’ that deformed ‘‘the sacred
name of Spiritualism, under the pretence of ‘reforms.’’’ She objected strenuously
to the apostolic authority and divine insight that Scott claimed, and she noticed
negatively his ‘‘unquestionable authority’’ in matters financial. Harris fared no
better with his own claims to semi-divine status. ‘‘In one of his prayers, uttered
about this time [the fall of 1852],’’ Hardinge decried, ‘‘Harris said: ‘Oh Lord, thou
knowest we do not wish to destroy man with fire from our mouths!’’’ Nor did Eliab
Capron mince words in his earlier account, commenting on the absolutist leadership
of Scott and Harris and the gullibility of their followers. The Mountain Cove
270 Arrivals
episode, he thought, exposed ‘‘spiritual excitement’’ as a ‘‘convenient hobby for
men who had graduated through the old forms of theological mysticism, until
there was nothing new in that field to feed their love of leadership and pretence
to special calls and inspiration.’’25
Yet despite the graduation ceremonies for older forms of mysticism and the
embarrassment of many spiritualists at other spiritualists, the Mountain Cove
episode exposed a longing for an authoritarian society at least embryonic in the
séance circles. With all the talk of individualism and radical overthrow of social
constraint among spiritualists, believers who sat in the circles gave over their authority
to the direction of spirits. Their form of spiritual surrender was only writ
large in the social experiment that was Mountain Cove, not contradicted by it.
Still more, the kind of community that Mountain Cove attempted seemed to
replicate, to some extent, the visions of utopian harmony and bliss on spirit landscapes
that mediums like Mary Theresa Shelhamer gave eager listeners from the
Spirit Violets of their trances. Visionary metaphors like these urged toward social
enactment; spiritualist communities arose as the result, themselves a ‘‘natural
byproduct and a legitimate expression of Spiritualist religion,’’ as Bret Carroll
has assessed.26
Both Spear’s Harmonia and the Scott-Harris Mountain Cove, then, uncovered
within the structure of spiritualist devotionalism not hardy individualism
and American self-made spiritualizers but instead spirit-hungry men and women
ready to efface themselves before something bigger and grander than themselves
and to do it in community. By two decades later, in the 1870s, however, part
of what was bigger and grander was the melodramatic ritual of spirit presentation.
Here mediums and séance sitters mutually surrendered in outlaw episodes
in which spirits seemingly vied with one another to be bolder, more obstreperous,
and more outrageous than their spirit neighbors. The mediums who brought
them in were likewise, by this time, skillful adepts in the art of deception. But
by this time, too, self-prostrations to spirit were giving way before a discontent
that would bring not the end of spiritualism but its revision and reformation in
a series of new religious movements. The reconstituted spiritualism of the era
brought a mysticizing past together with an inventive present. In its unflagging
combinativeness, it inaugurated ever more, and more creative, forms of American
metaphysical religion.
THEOSOPHY AND THE REFORM OF SPIRITUALISM
Among the investigations of spiritualism that came from American publishing
houses in the 1870s, one appeared in 1875 called simply People from the
Spirits Reformed and Reconstituted 271
Other World. Its title page bore what in the rational-believer tradition of Judge
Edmonds, Governor Tallmadge, and scientist Hare could only be called a devout
inscription, attributed to ‘‘Lord Bacon’’: ‘‘We have set it down as a law to ourselves
to examine things to the bottom and not to receive upon credit, or reject upon improbabilities,
until there hath passed a due examination.’’ In the volume’s preface,
its author announced himself unconcerned with moral questions but intent on
examining spiritualist phenomena ‘‘only as involving a scientific question which
presses upon us for instant attention.’’ Complaining that twenty-seven years after
the Rochester rappings, ‘‘we are apparently not much nearer a scientific demonstration
of their cause than we were then,’’ he wanted to spur the scientific community
to proper attention to spiritualism. Rather than studying tumble-bugs
and pitcher-plants in ‘‘nonsensical debates,’’ scientists needed to address ‘‘the astounding
phenomenon of ‘materialization.’’’27 If the rhetoric was unexceptional
given the tradition of rational inquiry that characterized the Enlightenment side
of spiritualism, what followed—in the book and in life—marked a decisive break
with séance spiritualism. The author of the lengthy (nearly 500-page) work was
Henry Steel Olcott (1832–1907), who in the same year that the book appeared
co-founded the Theosophical Society. Together with Helena Petrovna Blavatsky
(1831–1891), he would remodel spiritualism into what the pair regarded as spiritual
truth and high teaching from Masters who were inaugurating a new era.
The major occasion for the book was also the occasion that brought the two together—the
investigation of the flamboyant spiritual mediumship of two brothers,
William and Horatio Eddy (and especially the former), on their family farm
and homestead in Chittenden, Vermont. Olcott appeared at the farm with a long
and varied background. He had been an agriculturalist, journalist, signals officer
in the Union army, civil service reformer in government employ, and lawyer. In
his youth he had seen Andrew Jackson Davis demonstrating clairvoyance, and
by the time Olcott was twenty he had himself become a spiritualist. He achieved
notice, in 1853, as a founding member of the New York Conference of Spiritualists,
an organization formed to investigate spiritualism and to give it some intellectual
ballast. But now, in his early forties and among the new urban gentry in
New York City, Olcott had for years been distant from spiritualism, until one
day, with a sudden thought of his neglect, he purchased a copy of the Banner of
Light and read of ‘‘certain incredible phenomena’’ at the Eddy farm. ‘‘I saw at
once,’’ he later recalled, ‘‘that, if it were true that visitors could see, even touch
and converse with, deceased relatives who had found means to reconstruct their
bodies and clothing so as to be temporarily solid, visible, and tangible, this was
the most important fact in modern physical science. I determined to go and see
for myself.’’28
272 Arrivals
Olcott produced an account of his visit to the farm for the New York Sun and
was promptly asked to return to Vermont by the New York Daily Graphic to investigate
more thoroughly, this time accompanied by an artist who would make
sketches. One of the readers of the original Sun article had been Blavatsky, a
decidedly unconventional Russian immigrant, newly arrived from Paris with a
mysterious past and a long involvement with certain forms of spiritualism. Born
Helena Petrovna von Hahn, at Ekaterinoslav in the Ukraine, the daughter of a
Russian army officer who had descended from German petty nobility and his
Russian aristocrat wife who was a novelist, she married the forty-year-old Nikifor
Blavatsky, the newly appointed vice-governor of Yerivan province in Armenia,
just after her seventeenth birthday. She left him after only a short time to live with
her grandfather, but when he tried to send her to her father she set out for Constantinople.
So began a period of over twenty years for which only conflicting accounts
of Blavatsky’s whereabouts and activities exist. It seems certain, however,
that she traveled extensively in Europe, the Middle East including Egypt, and
North America and that she was drawn to matters spiritual and occult, acquiring
an extensive experiential knowledge that included spiritualism and psychic phenomena.
From childhood, she had believed in the presence of invisible companions,
and that belief seems not to have deserted her during this obscure time. In
a judicious summary of what may be known about the period, Bruce Campbell
underlines the unconventional (‘‘Bohemian’’) character of her life and points
to evidence for her lengthy liaison with the opera singer Agardi Metrovitch and
the possibility that she may have given birth to one or two children, fathered respectively
by Metrovitch and one other person. Finally, evidence suggests that,
already during this period, Blavatsky was imbued with a sense of mission, feeling
herself called to a great work to come.29
When Olcott appeared at the Eddy homestead for his second visit, he met Blavatsky
there on an investigative mission of her own. The two became fast friends,
both of them identifying themselves as discontented spiritualists and Blavatsky
especially decrying the materialism of American spiritualism. Meanwhile, she
gradually led Olcott to believe that she could produce ‘‘spirit’’ manifestations and
other occult phenomena far in advance of the ones he was witnessing. From the
perspective of the study of American metaphysical religion, Olcott’s expressed
concerns were even more striking (they would later be argued far more exhaustively
by Blavatsky herself). Chafing under the refusal of the spirits to allow as
thorough an investigation as he wanted, Olcott in People from the Other World
noted Horatio Eddy’s written admission that he and his family were ‘‘the slaves of
the powers behind the phenomena.’’ Olcott went on to inveigh against mediumistic
slavery. When mediums operated ‘‘‘under control,’’’ they lost their free will,
Spirits Reformed and Reconstituted 273
and ‘‘their actions, their speech, and their very consciousness’’ were ‘‘directed by
that of another.’’ They were as helpless as mesmeric subjects to ‘‘do, or say, or
think, or see what they desire[d].’’ Still worse, the materialization medium was
even required, it appeared, to ‘‘lend from the more ethereal portions of his frame,
some of the matter that goes to form the evanescent materialized shapes of the
departed.’’30
By contrast, in Blavatsky Olcott believed he had found something different. In
the second part of a book that detailed the appearance of Blavatsky at Chittenden
and then addressed another mediumistic episode in Philadelphia involving apparent
fraud, Olcott was ready to own that Blavatsky was ‘‘one of the most remarkable
mediums in the world.’’ ‘‘Instead of being controlled by spirits to do their
will,’’ Olcott enthused, ‘‘it is she who seems to control them to do her bidding.’’
What was the secret, and how did she gain mastery? He did not know all the answers.
But he told readers that ‘‘many years of her life have been passed in Oriental
lands.’’ There what Americans called spiritualism had ‘‘for years been regarded
as the mere rudimental developments of a system.’’ In it, relationships had been
set up ‘‘between mortals and the immortals as to enable certain of the former to
have dominion over many of the latter.’’ Not willing to accept an ancient priestly
‘‘knowledge of the natural sciences’’ as an explanation for Blavatsky’s powers, he
referred instead to ‘‘those higher branches of that so-called White Magic, which
has been practised for countless centuries by the initiated.’’31 Olcott, in short,
was turning for explanation not to science, as practiced in the nineteenth century,
but to Hermeticism.
As performed by Blavatsky, the older model represented humans as powerful
beings possessing divine or semidivine agency, co-creators with God of
the universal order and able to manifest that order at will. ‘‘There are hidden
powers in man,’’ Olcott testified, ‘‘which are capable of making a god of him
on earth.’’ Meanwhile, the so-called spirits on the Eddy farm and elsewhere in
the American spiritualist universe were ‘‘humbugging elemental[s].’’ The elementals,
whom or which Blavatsky controlled, were one of ‘‘two unlike classes
of phenomena-working agents.’’ They were ‘‘sub-human nature-spirits,’’ or they
were joined at times by ‘‘earth-bound ex-human elementaries.’’ As someone with
a knowledge of magic, he thought, Blavatsky could work them to her liking.
Olcott duly noted that when she appeared at the Eddy farm, the numerous
American Indian spirits (and some Europeans) who were materializing out of
William Eddy’s cabinet gave place before new arrivals of multinational provenance.
‘‘There was,’’ he reported, ‘‘a Georgian servant boy from the Caucasus; a
Mussulman merchant from Tiflis; a Russian peasant girl, . . . a Kourdish cavalier
armed with scimitar, pistols and lance; a hideously ugly and devilish-looking
274 Arrivals
negro sorcerer from Africa . . . and a European gentleman wearing the cross and
collar of St. Anne, who was recognised by Madame Blavatsky as her uncle.’’32
At the other end of the theosophical universe that Olcott was coming to accept,
however, were the ‘‘Masters.’’ ‘‘Little by little,’’ he confided, ‘‘H. P. B. let me know
of the existence of Eastern adepts and their powers.’’ If she controlled ‘‘the occult
forces of nature,’’ she also served and did the bidding of ‘‘these Elder Brothers of
humanity.’’ They were ‘‘indispensable for the spiritual welfare of mankind,’’ and
‘‘their combined divine energy’’ was ‘‘maintained from age to age,’’ forever refreshing
‘‘the pilgrim of Earth, who struggles on toward the Divine Reality.’’ Blavatsky,
he said, had seen the Masters in visionary episodes from her youth. She
was a ‘‘faithful servant of theirs,’’ and she had come to New York from Paris at the
behest of one of the Masters, receiving a ‘‘peremptory order’’ and the next day
dropping everything to board a ship.33 Apparently, there were some beings before
whom Blavatsky was willing to bow. Mastery could still allow taking orders
from Elder Brothers.
Situated between the elementals and the Masters, the Theosophical Society
in 1875 would invent itself. In effect, Olcott, the rational investigator, had become
convinced that the phenomena produced at the Eddy homestead, despite
the limited testing that he was allowed to undertake, could not be ‘‘accounted for
on the hypothesis of fraud.’’ The manifestations were ‘‘not trickery,’’ but neither
were they ‘‘supernatural’’ nor ‘‘miracles.’’ What remained for him was to investigate
in a larger theater and still more seriously, not through the continued application
of scientific tests (the scientists could and should do that) but in terms of
a new vision of power—of Masters and elementals and other occult phenomena
—that Blavatsky had opened to him. The Theosophical Society would do just
that—expanding its compass to include a host of anomalous occurrences and
phenomena that the ‘‘scientific’’ nineteenth century had disallowed. In this context,
the new society would function as a restoration movement, gliding back past
the collective silence in the mass spiritualist interlude to the Hermetic tradition
of the West. At the same time, the restoration would also be a revitalization and
a movement forward, because the contemporary science that Olcott and fellow
travelers often disdained could also tool them to expand on the past in a new age
of occult and, in their view, scientific progress. In this post–Civil War period that
Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner dubbed the Gilded Age for its sparkling
surfaces of show and financial boom with corruption beneath, members of
the Theosophical Society would excavate the secrets of human power and mastery
that for them seemed truer and more lasting.34
In May of 1875, Olcott formed a secret ‘‘Miracle Club’’ with spiritualist séances
as its apparent major activity and Blavatsky a participant, but David Dana, the
Spirits Reformed and Reconstituted 275
medium of choice, proved unsuccessful at summoning spirits, and the New York
club fizzled. Still, Blavatsky was in the habit of hosting Sunday evening sessions
in her apartment for a small group of people interested in occultism. Among
them were Emma Hardinge (in private life, Hardinge-Britten), the well-known
spiritualist medium and historian, and her husband Dr. William Britten. Present,
too, was a youthful William Quan Judge—Irish immigrant and lawyer—who
would later play so large a role in theosophical affairs. In early September of
1875, the group heard the Freemason and Kabbalist George Felt speak on ancient
Egyptian lore, finding the key to art and architecture in an occult reading
of ‘‘The Lost Canon of Proportion of the Egyptians.’’ Olcott spontaneously
scribbled a note about starting a society for occult research and passed it to Judge,
who handed it to Blavatsky. With her nod, Olcott stood up and invited those
present to form a society to ‘‘diffuse information concerning those secret laws of
Nature which were so familiar to the Chaldeans and Egyptians, but are totally
unknown by our modern world of science.’’35
By the next evening, sixteen persons joined the group, and by ten days later,
on September 18, they decided to call themselves the Theosophical Society.
The president was Olcott, with Blavatsky corresponding secretary, and Judge the
council to the society. Bruce Campbell has pointed to the fact that the new Theosophists
were people of privilege, ‘‘solidly’’ middle class with ‘‘a large proportion
professionals,’’ and among them ‘‘several lawyers, doctors, and journalists, and
an industrialist.’’ All seemed to share an interest in religion and spirituality of a
nontraditional sort. The society, in fact, was bringing a New York City subculture
with European ties into clearer visibility. While Olcott and Blavatsky moved
in a generally spiritualist context, it was, clearly, already an expanded one. Indeed,
Theosophist Alvin Boyd Kuhn, who concurred in 1930 that the pair had
‘‘launched the Society from within the ranks of the [spiritualist] cult,’’ also addressed
the issue of in-betweenness. While the general public classified Theosophy
with ‘‘Spiritualism, New Thought, Unity and Christian Science,’’ it was not
‘‘modern,’’ as they were, but instead ‘‘a summation and synthesis of many cults
of all times.’’36
For all the enthusiasm of its beginnings, the society during its first three years
did not continue to fare well. Blavatsky and Olcott together formed the soul of the
organization, and it was they who would keep the group going, with some prodding
from Judge. Eventually the pair would transform Theosophy into a vehicle
for the synthesis of Western and Eastern metaphysical categories (with a strong
tilt toward the Eastern) intending to enhance the powers of an elite and spiritually
advanced cadre of humans. The Theosophical Society, in other words, would
be sophisticated and for sophisticates. Yet from the first it displayed, as Stephen
276 Arrivals
Prothero argues, the existence of ‘‘two theosophies.’’ Blavatsky thrived on spontaneity
and upset, Olcott on order. Blavatsky spun convoluted and highly elaborated
theoretical works that made her to Theosophy what Andrew Jackson Davis
had been to spiritualism (although, to be sure, her enthusiasm for phenomena
set her distinctly apart from the spiritualist seer). Olcott, by contrast, brought
the moralism of an American Protestant—and specifically Presbyterian and Calvinist—background
to bear on his theosophical vision. Blavatsky loved interior
spaces and secrets; Olcott carried over from the American democratic ethos and
from mass spiritualism an impulse toward public exposition in a Theosophy that
was exoteric. Thus Olcott’s version of Theosophy favored the discovery of occult
laws—something in which rational individuals could democratically engage—
even as Blavatsky, more hierarchically, would foster their unveiling. Meanwhile,
Blavatsky, the woman magus who functioned as a shaman-in-civilization, enhanced
the role of women; Olcott, with his dismissal of (largely female) mediums
as the dupes of elementals and as licentious persons given to free love and similar
practices, promoted patriarchy. Ever the aristocrat in the midst of Bohemianism,
Blavatsky brought a social consciousness far different from Olcott’s with
his middle-class gentry past. For him, the reform of spiritualism was part of the
universal reform program intimately bound to spiritualism itself and to his own
biographical trajectory. For Blavatsky, social reform programs were a matter of
indifference.37
Together, though, the two brought a sizable legacy with them from séance
spiritualism and the harmonial philosophy that was its sometime partner. As
Stephen Prothero has summarized:
Most of the liberal elements in spiritualism—its critique of Calvinist predestination
in the name of individual liberty, its anticlericalism and emphasis on
vernacular preaching by the laity, its antidogmatism and exaltation of individual
conscience, its attempt to improve the role of women in society, and,
finally, its hope of fashioning something akin to the kingdom of God on earth
—survived in the theosophies of both Olcott and Blavatsky. What did not survive
the transmigration were certain supposed spiritualist crudities—the preoccupation
with spirits of the dead, tendencies toward communalism and free
love, seemingly excessive reliance on female spiritual intermediaries, etc.—
that would not appeal to genteel and aristocratic markets.38
The communalism would make a comeback later in selected portions of theosophical
history, as we will see. Moreover, the sheer combinativeness of theosophical
doctrine, ‘‘thickly populated,’’ as Robert Ellwood notes, ‘‘with hidden
Masters and the lore of many ancient cultures,’’ could already be read as a theo-
Spirits Reformed and Reconstituted 277
retical expression of ‘‘communitas.’’ In this visionary community of the spirit,
however, what drew many to spiritualism and then Theosophy was residence in
a middle place between a credulous religious past and an agnostic and positivist
present. Olcott hailed ‘‘a reasonable and philosophical spiritualistic belief’’ and
thought it ‘‘as far removed from the superstition of the Seventeenth; and Eighteenth
Centuries, as it is from the degrading materialism of the last quarter of
the Nineteenth.’’ The late nineteenth century, he complained, ‘‘blots God out
of the Universe, strips the soul of its aspirations for a higher existence beyond the
grave, and bounds the life of man’’ by animal limits.39
Beyond the riddle of rational religious belief, however, lay the riddle of mind.
Tellingly, Olcott acknowledged that ‘‘especially Mind, active as will, was a great
problem for us.’’ Used mutually by ‘‘Eastern magus’’ and ‘‘Western mesmerist
and psychopath,’’ it could bring acclaim as a ‘‘hero’’ to one who developed it or
spiritual mediumship to another who paralyzed it. Close beside mind, for Olcott,
came the active imagination and the power of thought to fashion actual things.
When, along with mind, ‘‘imagination is simultaneously active,’’ he declared, ‘‘it
creates, by giving objectivity to just-formed mind-images.’’40 In his series of observations
Olcott had stated the terms for the combinative metaphysical religion
of the late nineteenth century and beyond. Theosophy, Christian Science, New
Thought, and a series of interrelated and entangled movements—even to the
New Age and the new spirituality of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century—would
agree to the contract.
Meanwhile, the Theosophical Society passed through a Western-oriented era
of three years until 1878. At the apex of this earlier, Western period stood Blavatsky’s
publication, in 1877, of her monumental first book, Isis Unveiled.41 There
she claimed direct dictation by the Masters—especially one with whom she most
closely identified—and she incorporated virtually all of the occult corpus of the
nineteenth century (nearly one hundred volumes) into a huge work of nearly
thirteen hundred pages. The text was divided between a first volume devoted to
‘‘Science’’ and a second to ‘‘Theology,’’ suggesting the ongoing problematic of
Theosophy as it aimed to bring the two together. From the first, however, the Blavatsky
synthesis was controversial. Bruce Campbell has detailed how the spiritualist
(and former Theosophist) William Emmette Coleman—a member of the
American Oriental Society, the Pali Text Society, and similar organizations—
claimed to have uncovered some two thousand instances of serious plagiarism.
Coleman also declared that he had uncovered a series of other quotations taken
not from original sources but from secondary ones without acknowledgment.42
If so—and the evidence was there to see—Blavatsky likewise stood in the tradition
of spiritualist mediumship, with its own flamboyant fraudulence, and—
278 Arrivals
with the mediums—in a quasi-shamanic tradition in which sacred tricksterism
had consistently been part of the religious game. Now, though, in the Blavatsky
innovation, the trickery came not merely through act and gesture but also
through words. More than that, a straightforward reading of Isis Unveiled and
later work by Blavatsky that focuses on the external event of plagiarism may oversimplify.
Even if we discount the loose nineteenth-century standards of textual
attribution, it may be argued that Blavatsky’s tricks counted, essentially, as religious
phenomena. Sacred trickery has been predicated on the assumption that
unless humans see ‘‘sign and wonders’’ (as in John 4:48), they will not believe—
and that believing is good for them. Trickery compensates for the nonproduction
of magical events on demand, even in a culture of affirmation in which devotees
insist that magic does happen. Trickery, however, acknowledges that it happens
only some of the time, not always, and not predictably.
Attention needs to be paid, too, to the complex psychological universe in
which Blavatsky’s ‘‘creative’’ writing occurred. Robert Ellwood has pointed to
the ‘‘other order’’ in which Blavatsky apparently spent much of her time, a place
where the ‘‘universe itself’’ became simultaneously ‘‘subjectivity’’ and a ‘‘cosmic
mind animated by other subjectivities, later called the Masters and the Hierarchy.’’
According to Ellwood, evidence suggests that the key to the enigmatic
Blavatsky’s marginality and liminality may have been ‘‘a mild case of dissociation
or multiple personality, a condition in which each personality may operate
by quite different values and have different goals from the others, and may not
even be aware of everything the other does.’’ Moreover the idea of Masters on
which she drew had a long history in both East and West. It is easy to point, for
example, to Hindu rishis and Buddhist bodhisattvas on Asian soil. For the West,
Masters had been evoked both in Neoplatonist and Rosicrucian writings. In the
nineteenth century, they were acknowledged by individuals such as Éliphas Lévi
[A.-L. Constant], the French magus who named Mesmer’s magnetic fluid the
‘‘astral light,’’ and the English novelist and member of the occult Golden Dawn
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, whom Blavatsky so much admired.43
Blavatsky’s Masters, however—become Mahatmas after she and Olcott left for
India in 1878—brought her over the edge when they ever more plentifully supplied
her associates with materialized letters. The Anglo-Indian journalist A. P.
Sinnett by 1883 had published both The Occult World and Esoteric Buddhism in
touch, he believed, with the Mahatmas, the former volume describing his receipt
of a series of letters from them and the latter drawn from the mysteriously materialized
letters themselves. Nevertheless, by the following year Emma Cutting
Coulomb, a staff member in Blavatsky’s household at Adyar, India, with her husband,
charged in a series of articles in the local Christian College Magazine that
Spirits Reformed and Reconstituted 279
the Mahatma letters had been produced by Blavatsky, with her housekeeper as
assistant. Especially damaging was the revelation of sliding back panels in a cabinet
in Blavatsky’s shrine room adjoining her bedroom (thus enabling letters or
other objects to ‘‘materialize,’’ as if from nowhere, within the shrine). When Australian
Richard Hodgson of the Society for Psychical Research came to Adyar on
behalf of a society committee, evidence of fraud mounted. Hodgson concluded
that Emma Coulomb’s allegations stood up to scrutiny, that all the phenomena
that he could unravel were contrived, and that Blavatsky herself had written the
large bulk of the Mahatma letters, with a few by someone else. His published
report for the society’s Committee of Investigation extended to roughly two hundred
pages.44
In 1877, however, the full mysteries of the Mahatma letters were still waiting
to be manifested from what Blavatsky would in Isis Unveiled call the ‘‘ether’’ or
the ‘‘astral light.’’ Moreover, with all of the problems associated with its composition,
Isis emerged, arguably, as a trance production, a latter-day labor in the
tradition of such works among American spiritualists. As Campbell notes, its
Western occultism reflects a subculture in which belief in adepts, ‘‘white’’ and
‘‘black’’ magic, ‘‘astral light,’’ and ‘‘elemental races or nature spirits’’ all flourished.
The Blavatsky who spoke through these pages recounted in a grand synthesis
the Hermetic tradition of the West and its nineteenth-century resonances in,
for example, spiritualism, mesmerism, and psychic phenomena. Along the way
came forays into modern science and ancient Kabbalah, denunciations of official
Christianity and expositions of the longtime Christian wisdom tradition, and—
in the most Eastern-turning materials—comparisons of Christianity to Hinduism
and Buddhism. Even amid the plagiarism—beyond, but perhaps related
to, issues of trance production—the extent of Blavatsky’s synthesis needs to be
noticed. Whatever the sources of its parts and whatever the Herculean efforts
(and they were) of Olcott and others to organize the manuscript for her, Blavatsky’s
product had become a creation in its own right. The work sold a thousand
copies in ten days, and by a year later its two reprints had also sold out. Among
Theosophists and sympathizers, it continued to achieve impressive sales.45
Behind the massive work lay Blavatsky’s conviction: ‘‘Spiritualism, in the
hands of an adept, becomes Magic, for he is learned in the art of blending together
the laws of the Universe, without breaking any of them and thereby violating
Nature.’’ By contrast, ‘‘in the hands of an inexperienced medium,’’ spiritualism
became ‘‘unconscious sorcery.’’ Such a medium opened ‘‘unknown
to himself, a door of communication between the two worlds through which
emerge the blind forces of Nature lurking in the astral Light, as well as good
and bad spirits.’’ Blavatsky minced no words for readers as she called spiritual-
280 Arrivals
ism a ‘‘strange creed’’ and assessed the majority of spiritual communications to
be ‘‘trivial, commonplace, and often vulgar.’’ Moreover, manifestations such as
those of the ‘‘uneducated Vermont farmer’’ at the Eddy homestead were ‘‘not the
forms of the persons they appeared to be’’ and were ‘‘simply their portrait statues,
constructed, animated and operated by the elementaries’’ (compare the fabled
statues of the Asclepius). Yet spiritualism alone offered a ‘‘possible last refuge of
compromise’’ between ‘‘self-styled revealed religions and materialistic philoso-
phies.’’46
In a work that announced, in its first sentence, ‘‘intimate acquaintance with
Eastern adepts,’’ what they taught Blavatsky was the ‘‘Hermetic philosophy, the
anciently universal Wisdom Religion, as the only possible key to the Absolute in
science and theology.’’ For those who might understand Hermeticism in Western
terms, it was clear that Blavatsky, already in 1877 and before, inflected the
received tradition in heavily Asian ways. Spiritualist failures would continue,
she stated emphatically, ‘‘until these pretended authorities of the West go to the
Brahmans and Lamaists of the far Orient, and respectfully ask them to impart
the alphabet of true science.’’ As significant, her Eastern adepts had taught her
‘‘an absolute and immovable faith in the omnipotence of man’s own immortal
self.’’ Invoking the ‘‘kinship’’ between the human spirit and the ‘‘Universal Soul—
God,’’ she affirmed that ‘‘Man-spirit’’ proved ‘‘God-spirit, as the one drop of water
prove[d] a source from which it must have come.’’47 Blavatsky was keeping apparent
company with the divine human. She was also, like John Dee and other
Hermeticists of old, doing her share of angel-summoning.
Even as Blavatsky exalted a Platonic ‘‘middle ground’’ (which she linked with
‘‘the abstruse systems of old India’’), she read her Platonism and philosophy in
terms of practice. ‘‘Magic was considered a divine science which led to a participation
in the attributes of Divinity itself,’’ she declared in language that recalled
the Hermetic corpus of the Renaissance. Exalting the human will and connecting
it to ‘‘manifestation,’’ Blavatsky unraveled a tale of the akasa or akasha, the
astral light known in ancient times as sacred fire and in the modern era as magnetic
fluid, ‘‘nerve-aura,’’ Reichenbach’s ‘‘od,’’ electricity, and so forth. For her
the light was identified with the nineteenth-century ‘‘ether’’—the medium and
mysterious element that, according to the common theory of light as undulation
or wave, transmitted transverse waves and permeated all space. This light
was, indeed, an akashic record, for it contained all memory and was, in fact, the
‘‘memory of god.’’ Humans were light beings, for it was the ‘‘astral soul’’ that,
in accord with ‘‘Hermetic doctrine,’’ survived the body’s death. Moreover, this
‘‘energizing principle in matter’’ possessed magical properties. Here Blavatsky
Spirits Reformed and Reconstituted 281
posited a ‘‘regular science of the soul’’ that taught ‘‘how to force the invisible to
become visible.’’ It taught, too, ‘‘the existence of elementary spirits; the nature
and magical properties of the astral light; the power of living men to bring themselves
into communication with the former through the latter.’’48
Invoking a universal spirit or world soul operative everywhere, Blavatsky turned
her attention to matters of sickness and healing. Again, her remarks arose out of
the discourse world of spiritualism, its healing practices, and her mission to correct
the ‘‘abuses of mesmeric and magnetic powers in some healing mediums.’’
In a statement that, with a shift, became the New Thought faith of the late nineteenth
century, she declared that ‘‘with expectency [sic] supplemented by faith,
one can cure himself of almost any morbific condition.’’ With the ‘‘influence of
mind over the body . . . so powerful that it has effected miracles at all ages,’’ Blavatsky
was now but a short step away from the ‘‘mind-cure’’ metaphysician. If
we follow the implicit logic of her exposition, the individual, as a reconstituted
magus, would wrest power from the medium to use his or her own (divine) Mind
as a magical instrument of healing. Meanwhile, Blavatsky instructed readers at
length in the history and structure of the human species. She announced the
existence of pre-Adamite races and charted the descent of spirit into matter, emanating
ultimately from a ‘‘central, spiritual, and Invisible sun’’ (Gnostic and Kabbalistic
in her reading but also echoing, in some respects, the occult formulation
of Andrew Jackson Davis). Clearly, she testified, Charles Darwin had gotten
his directions wrong—‘‘evolution having originally begun from above and proceeded
downward.’’ Beyond that, the human task was one of ‘‘upward progress,’’
an ascent to the ‘‘divine parent’’ and source from which it had come.49
In an anthropology that would be parsed differently in her later Secret Doctrine
(1888), Blavatsky used the Western Hermetic tradition to articulate a testimony
to the existence of subtle bodies. Nature was ‘‘triune’’ (visible, invisible,
and spiritually sourced), and so were humans. Each person possessed ‘‘his objective,
physical body; his vitalizing astral body (or soul), the real man.’’ These
two, in turn, were ‘‘brooded over and illuminated by the third—the sovereign,
the immortal spirit.’’ The success of the ‘‘real man’’ in the task of ‘‘merging himself’’
with spirit rendered him an ‘‘immortal entity.’’ In this context, magic meant
knowledge concerning all of this, and it also became the means by which control
of nature’s forces could be gained and applied ‘‘by the individual while still in
the body.’’ Always, magic existed in the service of mastery. The reform of spiritualism
that Olcott had demanded took shape in unmistakable terms in Blavatsky’s
vision. Just as he had noticed that she, unlike the Chittenden mediums, could
not be enslaved by the séance productions, so she proclaimed mediumship to
282 Arrivals
be ‘‘the opposite of adeptship’’ and announced liberation for the adept who ‘‘actively
controls himself and all inferior potencies.’’ In this there was ‘‘no miracle.’’
All that happened was ‘‘the result of law—eternal, immutable, ever active.’’50
Here, in sum, was the Western magus at the height of dominion over the secret
powers of nature. Despite all the deference to Asia, despite the attestation that
India was the ‘‘cradle of the race’’ and ‘‘Mother’’ to ‘‘philosophy, religion, arts and
sciences,’’ here lay no easy belief in reincarnation (a later fundamental in Blavatsky’s
Theosophy). ‘‘Not a rule in nature,’’ but an ‘‘exception,’’ reincarnation
occurred for this earlier Blavatsky only if ‘‘preceded by a violation of the laws
of harmony of nature.’’ To be sure, the work was hardly friendly to Christianity,
a religion that for her bore at best a derivative status. Yet Blavatsky’s reading of
the Pauline indwelling Christ (see, for example, 2 Cor. 5:17 and Gal. 2:20) as
an ‘‘embodied idea’’ and ‘‘the abstract ideal of the personal divinity indwelling
in man’’ would be echoed (and from various sources) in a continuing American
metaphysical religion.51
Already, though, even as Isis was being published and read, the personal odysseys
and external circumstances of Blavatsky and Olcott were beckoning them
and their flagging Theosophical Society in an Asian direction. Olcott had turned
over the idea of attaching the society to the Masonic order to give it stability;
and, more seriously, there had been work toward a merger with the Arya Samaj,
a Hindu reform movement that sought the restoration of the ancient teaching of
the scriptural Vedas. But even though the society’s council formally resolved to
unite with the Indian organization in May 1878, further exploration suggested
an Arya Samaj that looked too sectarian for theosophical tastes. It was in this
context that the Theosophical Society began to discover its reconstructed self.
In Old Diary Leaves, Olcott remembered the process and the joint circular that
he and Blavatsky drafted. Within the circular’s ‘‘categorical declaration of principles,’’
he observed, were ‘‘three Declared Objects.’’ The first was ‘‘the study of
occult science’’; the second, ‘‘the formation of a nucleus of universal brotherhood’’;
the third, ‘‘the revival of Oriental literature and philosophy.’’52
Olcott had written expansively on this third purpose in the circular, which
committed the organization not only to acquainting the West with ‘‘the longsuppressed
facts about Oriental religious philosophies, their ethics, chronology,
esoterism, symbolism,’’ but also and especially to focusing on esotericism. Theosophists
thus would spread ‘‘a knowledge of the sublime teachings of that pure
esoteric system of the archaic period which are mirrored in the oldest Vedas, and
in the philosophy of Gautama Buddha, Zoroaster, and Confucius.’’ Meanwhile,
internal distinctions were being set up. The New York City circular acknowledged
three theosophical sections—new members who still shared ‘‘worldly in-
Spirits Reformed and Reconstituted 283
terests,’’ intermediate students ‘‘who had withdrawn from the same or were ready
to do so,’’ and the Masters, or ‘‘adepts . . . who, without being actually members,
were at least connected with us and concerned in our work as a potential
agency for the doing of spiritual good to the world.’’ It would, however, be a decade
later—in the context of a power struggle between Olcott and Blavatsky—
before he, as president, formally created the Esoteric Section of the society.53
Three months after the appearance of the New York circular, in December
1878, Blavatsky and Olcott set sail for India. In the three years since the inception
of their society, themes of spiritualism and its reform gradually faded before
a transformed sense of mission. Still, as we will see in the next chapter, spiritualism
had set the terms for the new mission, and the reconstructed Theosophy of
1878 and after answered the questions that spiritualism raised. At the edge of the
rational material world, who would be in charge? When the myriad landscapes
of the mind were visited, who would drive the chariot? Were humans in their
day-to-day lives captive specimens to be operated by their own unconscious psyches,
by the mental powers of their fellows, or by the high commands of spirits?
Or were they, could they be, after all secretly—and then openly and spectacularly—in
charge? Was the American spiritualist interlude a heterodox episode
in the grand Hermetic scheme of things? Or was it a preparation, designed by
masterful adepts, for a higher, better spiritual vision? All of the late-nineteenthcentury
metaphysicians would find themselves compelled by this series of questions,
and all of them would find answers on the side of human mastery and
command (even if, at least in the case of Mary Baker Eddy’s Christian Science,
hedged about with testimonies to the transcendent power of God). Metaphysicians,
for the most part, would chart a course through a spiritual universe in
which humans were meant to dwell as gods.
CHRISTIAN SCIENCE AND THE RECONSTITUTION
OF MESMERISM AND MEDIUMSHIP
The same year that Henry Steel Olcott published People from the Other World,
Mary Baker Glover’s crisply titled Science and Health appeared in print.54 A work
of over 450 pages, it was the culmination of a decade of metaphysical reflection
and writing by a woman in her mid-fifties who counted herself thoroughly Christian.
Indeed, she wrote it after she claimed a spiritual discovery that would radically
reorient religion and spiritual practice for the Christian churches. Known
more familiarly as Mary Baker Eddy (1821–1910)—the name she assumed after
her marriage to Asa Gilbert Eddy in 1877—the author brought far less cosmopolitanism
than did Olcott to a work that would go through a plethora of edi-
284 Arrivals
tions until the familiar 1906 version became the standard text.55 Science and
Health stood beside the Bible for Christian Scientists, and it became the scripture
that was canonically read in Christian Science services everywhere. Eddy
herself would look back on the work in her later years in ways that hinted of the
kind of ‘‘channeled’’ text that numerous spiritualists, as well as Helena P. Blavatsky,
claimed to produce. When Eddy wrote it, she declared, she had ‘‘consulted
no other authors and read no other book but the Bible for three years.’’ Still more,
as she said, ‘‘it was not myself, but the power of Truth and love, infinitely above
me, which dictated ‘Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures.’’’56
If Eddy had begun Christian Science in mid-life, she continued to preside over
the fortunes of her religious foundation with a success that could be estimated
by the imposing Boston Mother Church dedicated at the end of 1894. These
times of abundance and fulfillment, however, had been preceded by a personal
life more bleak and compromised. Born in Bow, New Hampshire, Mary Morse
Baker had grown up in the shadow of the Congregational church with its Puritan
past and was formally admitted to membership at twelve, even though she
could not affirm her pastor’s old-school doctrine of predestination. She would
continue to affirm her connection to this Congregational world, and, in fact, the
language of sin was woven in and out of her writings throughout her life. Arguably,
she never gave up Calvinism when she embraced metaphysics. As earlier
proto-metaphysical and metaphysical practice already demonstrates, commitments
to mind and correspondence could encompass Christian categories. Now,
in what would become Baker Eddy’s Christian Science, we test the limits of such
combinativeness.
A youthful Baker married Colonel George Washington Glover of Charleston,
South Carolina, in 1843, lived with him in the South for a year, and then, when
he succumbed to yellow fever, returned to New England and gave birth to a son.
Glover was chronically ill, and her family was, for various reasons, unsupportive
in helping to care for the boisterous child. When he was five—after her recently
widowed father remarried—the little boy, George Jr., was sent away to live with
a now-married former family servant with whom Glover herself had a warm relationship.
She apparently agreed to the plan reluctantly. Her second marriage,
with the philandering dentist Daniel Patterson, ended in divorce in 1873, but she
had gone back to the surname Glover well before that.57
Hard times dogged Eddy (to use the familiar surname) as she moved from one
shabby boardinghouse to the next, living with people below her social station
because of the paucity of her means. Here she experienced the spiritual seeker
culture of her age in a readily available world of mesmerism and spiritualism.
Meanwhile, she continued to be plagued with ill health—probably mostly what
Spirits Reformed and Reconstituted 285
George Beard would by the 1880s label ‘‘American nervousness,’’ or neurasthenia.58
Eddy’s physical complaints brought her to homeopathy, hydropathy (water
cure), and mesmerism and eventually to the reformed magnetic medicine of
Phineas Parkhurst Quimby (1802–1866), a well-known mental healer practicing
in Portland, Maine. The teaching and practice of Quimby, placed beside the authoritative
message of Congregational Calvinism, became a major influence that
helped to catalyze Eddy’s own combinative system in Christian Science after his
death in 1866.
Eddy worked with Quimby not merely as a patient—for whom the ‘‘medicine’’
was in large part effective—but also as a student transcribing notes of conversations
with him, reading his own notes and sometimes ‘‘correcting’’ them,
and acting increasingly as an intellectual colleague to her mentor. Moreover, as
a Quimby patient-student, Eddy was hardly alone. Among the others who participated
in the loose Quimby community were major early leaders in the New
Thought movement. Remembering the well-known mental healer’s relationship
with the others, his son George Quimby recalled that his father would ‘‘talk hours
and hours, week in and week out . . . listening and asking questions. After these
talks he would put on paper in the shape of an essay or conversation what subject
his talk had covered.’’ Eddy, as George Quimby wrote, actively participated,
even as she pursued a one-on-one intellectual relationship with the doctor, and
her own thinking apparently intermingled with his.59
Who was this Portland healer whose thriving practice had attracted Eddy, the
ailing neurasthenic patient, and who became a major intellectual and spiritual
influence on her life? An autodidact like Eddy herself, Quimby was making
clocks in Belfast, Maine, when he attended Charles Poyen’s lectures in 1838. Attracted
to the medical applications of animal magnetism, he partnered with the
youthful Lucius Burkmar in an itinerating stage demonstration of clairvoyance
in healing. In performances that took place as the pair traveled the lyceum circuit,
Quimby mesmerized Burkmar, Burkmar ‘‘read’’ the disease that afflicted
an inquiring audience member, and then Burkmar prescribed the remedy that
would heal the illness. As the process worked—even on Quimby himself—he
raised critical questions about it and eventually became convinced that the true
agent of healing success was the power of suggestion and the belief it fostered
within each subject. Quimby had arrived, in an incipient way, at the notion of
the power of mind. In the process, he also became confident that he, too, possessed
clairvoyant powers. Subsequently parting ways with Burkmar, he began a
practice that increasingly departed from its magnetic beginnings. By the time he
settled in Portland toward the end of 1859, Quimby was styling himself a mental
healer. He was also, despite his Christian heterodoxy, a cosmological seeker
286 Arrivals
with compelling religious and theological questions. Robert Peel noted that he
attended Unitarian and Universalist churches.60 And Quimby surely knew the
Bible, as his writings reveal. Meanwhile, his religious liberalism links him to the
harmonial philosophy of Andrew Jackson Davis and other spiritualists, and some
of his ideas can also be linked to those of Emanuel Swedenborg and of the American
Transcendentalists.
In the American culture of Quimby’s era, as we have already seen, mesmerism
blended with spiritualism into a viable way to think and act, to make sense
of basic problems of human life in a kind of armchair philosophy that was also
a pragmatic set of principles for action. Quimby’s writings, rough and opaque
though they often are, record his perceptions of this nineteenth-century thought
world as he constructed his own. Whatever his knowledge of Davis (and there is
no evidence, of which I am aware, that he ever directly read the well-known spiritualist),
Quimby was intimately acquainted with spiritualism in its phenomenal
form. Ervin Seale’s complete edition of Quimby’s writings, published only as recently
as 1988, makes Quimby’s familiarity with a spiritualist discourse community
abundantly clear. (Seale’s work overturned the partial, sanitized 1921 edition
by Horatio Dresser—son of New Thought leaders Julius and Annetta Dresser—
which left out Quimby’s spiritualism and idealized his materialism.)61
The man who emerges from the Seale edition attended séances frequently
and could influence the phenomena that occurred in the circles. ‘‘I profess to
be a medium myself and am admitted to be so by the spiritualists themselves,’’
he owned in one essay and, in another, related an account of a séance at which
he proved himself to be a ‘‘healing medium.’’ He had become a medium, he
claimed, but—like the Blavatsky of a decade or more later—he enjoyed a freedom
not experienced by others. ‘‘I retained my own consciousness and at the
same time took the feelings of my patient,’’ he declared.62 Yet this Quimby—on
such close terms with spiritualists and their séances and so thoroughly familiar,
too, with the details of mesmeric practice—admitted the phenomena but, again
like Blavatsky, thoroughly disputed their cause and conditions. For him, however,
what generated mesmeric success and spiritualist manifestation were not
‘‘elementals’’ or ‘‘elementaries’’ but simple human belief and opinion.
Mesmerism and spiritualism were ‘‘phenomena without any wisdom,’’ and a
spirit was ‘‘the shadow of a person’s belief or imagination.’’ A person could not
‘‘give a fair account of the phenomena of Spiritualism’’ because the ‘‘experiments’’
were ‘‘governed by . . . belief and must be so.’’ Quimby wasted no words in
pronouncing ‘‘ghosts and spirits’’ to be ‘‘the invention of man’s superstition.’’ ‘‘So
long as people think about the dead,’’ he stated flatly, ‘‘so long there will be spirits,
for thought is spirit, and that is all the spirits there are.’’ How did the production
Spirits Reformed and Reconstituted 287
of spirits work, and what was the mechanism of spiritualist activity? Quimby’s
answer lay in the generic ‘‘power of creating ideas and making them so dense
that they could be seen by a subject that was mesmerized.’’ This was the state
that, in his single-source explanation, embraced ‘‘all the phenomena of spiritualism,
disease, religion and everything that affect[ed] the mind.’’ Nor did mesmerism
and spiritualism essentially differ. ‘‘The word ‘mesmerism,’’’ Quimby wrote,
‘‘embraces all the phenomena that ever were claimed by any intelligent spiritualists.’’
Clearly, the ‘‘other world’’ was ‘‘in the mind.’’ ‘‘The idea that any physical
demonstration’’ came ‘‘from the dead’’ was to him ‘‘totally absurd.’’63
Still, Quimby had bought into the spiritualist universe enough to reiterate
the materialist explanation for mesmeric and similar phenomena that had been
popularized by Davis and others. ‘‘Spirit’’ was ‘‘only matter in a rarefied form,
and thought, reason and knowledge’’ were ‘‘the same.’’ ‘‘Mind’’ was ‘‘the name
of a spiritual substance that can be changed’’ and was, in fact, ‘‘spiritual matter.’’
‘‘Thought’’ was ‘‘also matter, but not the same matter,’’ just as the earth was not
‘‘the same matter as the seed which is put into it.’’ Moreover, Quimby echoed the
spiritualist seer in further ways. J. Stillson Judah decades ago pointed to parallels
between Davis’s and Quimby’s etiology of disease in the discords of the human
spirit and their perception of an ‘‘atmosphere’’ surrounding a human subject that
could be affected, for good or ill, by another. He noticed, too, their mutual identification
of God with Wisdom and a series of other similar (often Swedenborgian
and Hermetic) beliefs regarding divine and human nature and human destiny.64
Regarding ‘‘spiritual matter,’’ so pervasive was Quimby’s identification between
cognitive phenomena and the material realm that it is easy to read him
as a thoroughgoing materialist, given his immersion in the language world of
mesmerism and spiritualism. Yet this conclusion fails to notice the rather bold
departure that Quimby made from mesmeric-spiritualist canons and ideas—a
departure that his patient-student Mary Baker Eddy was to take and transform
in terms of Calvinist Christianity to create Christian Science. In Quimby’s reconstruction
of the received cosmology, he combined the materialism of his
sources with an idealism that at least one mid-twentieth-century scholar linked to
Transcendentalism. Quimby’s knowledge of the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson
and other Transcendentalists was no doubt tenuous and secondhand at best, but
major newspapers habitually summarized Emerson’s lyceum lectures, and idealist
views were clearly there for the taking.65 Beyond that, a generalized Swedenborgianism
could be argued in tandem with these ideas. Judah, for example,
pointed to the essentially Swedenborgian views that Quimby held regarding what
he termed the ‘‘natural’’ and the ‘‘spiritual man,’’ and his preference for an analogical,
or allegorical, reading of scripture in the tradition of Swedenborg.66
288 Arrivals
Whatever Quimby’s sources (Davis? others?), his writings demonstrate thoroughgoing
preoccupation with a wisdom that transcended the material world of
mind and mesmeric play. Alternately cast, this wisdom operated as a metaphysical
‘‘solid’’ that suffused the world, like a ghost of the mesmeric fluidic ether
but always elusively nonmaterial. Set in this cosmological situation, two kinds
of humans inhabited the earth—the ‘‘natural man,’’ caught in the error of a materialist
mind and its attendant phenomena, and the ‘‘scientific man,’’ who saw
past the performance into the space of wisdom. Quimby argued for the wisdom
world: Calling the power that governed the material mind ‘‘spirit,’’ the Portland
physician yet recognized ‘‘a Wisdom superior to the word mind, for I always apply
the word mind to matter but never apply it to the First Cause.’’67
Still more, although Quimby was thoroughly anticlerical and opposed to orthodox
Christianity, his familiarity with Christian scripture meant that his writings
were filled with metaphysicalized biblical references to contend for his view.
Indeed, in his private papers, he betrayed a kind of messianism in which he identified
himself with the biblical Christ, at the same time typically separating Christ,
as identical to Science, from sole attachment to the historical Jesus. ‘‘Jesus never
tried to teach anything different from what I am teaching and doing every day,’’
he testified. His statement of his own case is crucial for understanding the new
production that became Eddy’s Christian Science: ‘‘Now I stand as one that has
risen from the dead or error into the light of truth, not that the dead or my error
has risen with me, but I have shaken off the old man or my religious garment and
put on the new man that is Christ or Science, and I fight these errors and show
that they are all the makings of our own mind. As I stand outside of all religious
belief, how do I stand alongside of my followers? I know that I, this wisdom, can
go and impress a person at a distance. The world may not believe it, but to the
world it is just such a belief as the belief in spirits; but to me it is a fact and this
is what I shall show.’’68
Nor were Quimby’s allusions to the higher wisdom, as Robert Peel argued
problematically, ‘‘recurrent elements of spiritual idealism which contradict the
author’s basic position.’’69A clear hierarchy of error and truth, in fact, ran through
all of Quimby’s writings. Mind, with its beliefs and opinions, existed as part of
a material order of error; wisdom rose above it; somehow Quimby—despite the
morass in which all other mortals seemingly found themselves—lived as a ‘‘scientific
man’’ in a realm beyond. Quimby, like Jesus, inhabited the wisdom world,
and Eddy had discovered the connection. This was so much so that in late 1862
her enthusiasm for her new healer-teacher embarrassed him publicly, when letters
that she wrote to the Portland Courier in the first blush of her healing experience
appeared in print. Quimby stood ‘‘upon the plane of wisdom with his truth,’’
Spirits Reformed and Reconstituted 289
she proclaimed in the second of these, and he healed ‘‘as never man healed since
Christ.’’ ‘‘P. P. Quimby,’’ she exulted, ‘‘rolls away the stone from the sepulchre of
error, and health is the resurrection.’’70
Mary Baker Eddy’s relationship with Quimby ended abruptly in January 1866
when the doctor died. Bereft of both doctor and mentor (her father Mark Baker
had also died three months before), she poured out her feelings in ‘‘Lines on
the Death of Dr. P. P. Quimby, who healed with the truth that Christ taught,
in contradistinction to all isms.’’ The poem was published in the Lynn (Massachusetts)
Weekly Reporter almost a month later. Meanwhile, less than two weeks
after Quimby’s death, Eddy fell on ice on her way to a meeting, experienced
injuries that caused severe head and neck pain with possible spinal dislocation,
and three days later, in the midst of pain that her homeopathic physician could
not assuage, read a New Testament passage. An account of one of the healing
miracles of Jesus, the narrative, she later claimed, triggered an intense experiential
state of awareness. Eddy, according to her own report and denominational
tradition, had ‘‘discovered’’ Christian Science.71
If so, what she took away cognitively from the experience, at least as she later
constructed it, linked the wisdom discourse of Quimby to the orthodoxy of her
Congregational Christian past. Now, though, instead of immersion in the world
of error that pervaded most of Quimby’s writings, a felt sense of God as the only
reality became the key to her healing and all healing. Even as Eddy brought the
unorthodox Quimby to the orthodoxy of her past, the Calvinism of her religious
construction was noticeable. At least part of the attraction of the Quimby theology
for Eddy was its predication of wisdom as an unchanging and transcendent
reality. Whatever Eddy’s connections to spiritualism—and, as we shall see, they
were many—the theological immanence that spiritualism proclaimed was for
her in the end untenable.
Eddy did, to be sure, teach what might be called a Christian version of final
union with an Oversoul become God. In the first edition of her textbook Science
and Health, for example, she wrote that ‘‘we are never Spirit until we are
God; there are no individual ‘spirits.’’’ She went on to exhort that ‘‘until we find
Life Soul, and not sense, we are not sinless, harmonious, or undying. We become
Spirit only as we reach being in God; not through death or any change of
matter, but mind, do we reach Spirit, lose sin and death, and gain man’s immortality.’’
But the journey was decidedly one to a transcendental state and order.
The published 1876 edition of Eddy’s teaching pamphlet Science of Man, for
example, declared that ‘‘Intelligence’’ was ‘‘circumference and not centre’’ and
that ‘‘Soul and Spirit’’ were ‘‘neither in man nor matter.’’ Similarly, the standard
edition of Science and Health from 1906 affirmed ‘‘God as not in man but as re-
290 Arrivals
flected by man’’ and warned against ‘‘false estimates of soul as dwelling in sense
and of mind as dwelling in matter.’’ In her ‘‘new departure of metaphysics,’’ Eddy
elsewhere told followers, God was ‘‘regarded more as absolute, supreme,’’ while
‘‘God’s fatherliness as Life, Truth, and Love’’ made ‘‘His sovereignty glorious.’’ In
practical terms, testimonies of healing the sick through Christian Science treatment
would be the means to glorify God and scale ‘‘the pinnacle of praise.’’72
Thus the Eddy who rejected the predestinarian views of her childhood church
still exalted the supreme majesty of God in ways that proclaimed the underlying
Calvinism of her past.
Christian Science scholar Stephen Gottschalk notes these connections in his
theological study of Eddy’s place in American religious culture, and he notices
as well the essential Calvinism of the metaphysical dualism she propounded.
‘‘In Christian Science as in Calvinism,’’ Gottschalk observes, ‘‘one is clearly confronted
with the Pauline antithesis of the Spirit and the flesh.’’ It is arguable, too,
that the warfare model that permeates so much of Eddy’s writing reinscribes
Calvinism with its traditional narratives of the battle between good and evil, between
God and the devil, in the life of the soul. In fact, any sustained contact
with the corpus of Eddy’s writings reveals the periodic invocation of ‘‘sin’’ as a habitual
way to distinguish reprehensible states of mind and life. We have already
seen her identifying the loss of ‘‘sin’’ in ‘‘Life Soul’’ in the first edition of Science
and Health. Later, both in the Manual of the Mother Church (1895) and in the
standard (1906) edition of Science and Health, Scientists and seekers could find
among the six ‘‘Tenets’’ of the Mother Church one that acknowledged ‘‘God’s
forgiveness of sin in the destruction of sin and the spiritual understanding that
casts out evil as unreal.’’ ‘‘Rule out of me all sin,’’ the Church Manual asked Scientists
to pray daily.73
Ostensibly committed to the unreality of sin and evil, Eddy’s writings—with
their warfare mentality that equaled or amplified Quimby’s polemical stance—
hid a Calvinist devil lurking beneath the metaphysical surface, an evil that displayed
a very tangible presence. Toward the end of Eddy’s life, that presence
took the form of a heightened personal fear of ‘‘malicious animal magnetism’’
(‘‘M.A.M.’’), as prayer workers stationed outside her door through the night contended
against claimed magnetic onslaughts. But much earlier, it is hard not to
detect a palpable sense of evil that preoccupied her. Her contentious relationships
with students and former students were cast by Eddy in terms that invited,
for her, a felt sense of sin (of others toward her) and the presence of Satan, even if
the name itself was banished to the outer darkness of theological incorrectness.
On paper, sin was ‘‘the lying supposition that life, substance, and intelligence
are both material and spiritual, and yet are separate from God.’’ But Eddy herself
Spirits Reformed and Reconstituted 291
allowed that sin was ‘‘concrete’’ as well as ‘‘abstract,’’ and in many life situations
the concreteness was manifest. Sin was a ‘‘delusion’’ and a ‘‘lie,’’ but even if she
told her followers not to fear it, she acted as though she feared it herself.74
More than that, in the consistent Christian Science language of ‘‘mortal mind’’
that Eddy created it is hard not to read a transliterated script for sin and, indeed,
for the old Calvinist theology of the total depravity of humankind. Eddy herself
was uneasy about the term, calling it a ‘‘solecism in language’’ that involved
‘‘an improper use of the word mind.’’ However, she was willing to live with the
‘‘old and imperfect’’ in her ‘‘new tongue.’’ In this context, mortal mind meant
‘‘the flesh opposed to Spirit, the human mind and evil in contradistinction to
the divine Mind, or Truth and good.’’ Still further, her ‘‘Scientific Translation
of Mortal Mind’’ announced its ‘‘first degree’’ to be ‘‘depravity,’’ identifying depravity
with the physical realm of ‘‘evil beliefs, passions and appetites, fear, depraved
will, self-justification, pride, envy, deceit, hatred, revenge, sin, sickness,
disease, death.’’ Eddy was adamant in her insistence that, seen from and in the
divine Mind, evil itself was unreal and that, therefore, mortal mind was mind
existing in a state of error. Still for all that, the language of recrimination that she
cast upon it, with its emotional tone of repugnance and rebuke, suggests that she
was making something out of this nothing in her act of warfare against it. As Ann
Braude has stated, Eddy ‘‘had no doubt that the mortal, human aspects of each
person reflected the total depravity of Adam’s legacy,’’ and she was ‘‘preoccupied
with fighting the dangerous temporal effect of the belief in evil.’’75
Eddy also feared a lifestyle that emphasized ease, relaxation, and pleasure, this
expressed in tones that suggest the Calvinist ethos that shaped her. In the spring of
1906, for example, she wrote to the young John Lathrop, who formerly served as
household staff, telling him of her sorrow ‘‘over the ease of Christian Scientists.’’
She lamented that they were habituated in the ‘‘pleasures’’ of ‘‘sense.’’ ‘‘Which
drives out quickest the tenant you wish to get out of your house, the pleasant
hours he enjoys in it or its unpleasantness?’’ she asked rhetorically. A few years
later, toward the very end of her life, her household staff, who had typically observed
a Puritan rigor, began to relax in ways that distressed her. Staff Scientists
were less vigilant in protecting her against M.A.M., and they read the Boston
newspapers, played golf, went for auto rides, and stopped sometimes at libraries in
the neighborhood. On one late-summer occasion, recounts Stephen Gottschalk,
Eddy looked out of her window as two staff members threw a ball back and forth
and another attempted to walk on his hands. She endured, as Gottschalk quotes
from Calvin Frye’s diary, ‘‘a very disturbed night and a fear she could not live!’’76
The perils of flesh and spirit, however, deferred to the presence of spirits when
Mary Glover’s first edition of Science and Health appeared in print in 1875. Pub-
292 Arrivals
lished nine years after Quimby’s death, the work displayed a woman who now
spoke with an authority of her own and a sense of knowledge gained through
hard-won experience. The text likewise displayed a woman at pains to separate
herself from mesmeric and mediumistic phenomena, so that the new warfare of
the spirit that Eddy waged was clearly directed against spiritualism and its magnetic
culture. Like her former mentor Phineas Quimby and like the founders
of Theosophy, she saw in mesmerism ‘‘unmitigated humbug,’’ and her estimate
of spiritualism was equally denunciatory. In the three-page preface to her ambitious
first edition, Eddy (then Glover) singled out mesmerism for direct rebuke.
‘‘Some shockingly false claims’’ had already been made regarding the work in
which she was engaged. ‘‘Mesmerism’’ was one, she stated flatly, and her denial
was total. ‘‘Hitherto we have never in a single instance of our discovery or practice
found the slightest resemblance between mesmerism and the science of Life.’’77
If Eddy seemed defensive, she had reason to be. In her Quimby years, she had
surely traveled in mesmeric and spiritualist circles, and even as she took her first
steps in Lynn as a practitioner of what became Christian Science many who were
close to her thought of her as a medium. Her early advertisement of her new
system of healing through ‘‘Moral Science’’ in the spiritualist Banner of Light
in 1868 no doubt helped to fuel the assumption, and so, no doubt, did her outsider
stance toward conventional medical methods.78 That acknowledged, the
vehemence of her condemnation of mesmerism and spiritualism was still startling.
Eddy, by virtue of her emotional engagement, ended up affirming what she
denied. Matter became real and so did mesmeric influence and spirit contact
with it when she fought them so strenuously. From another point of view, Beryl
Satter has suggested that Eddy’s ‘‘healing process bore a family resemblance to
mesmeric or hypnotic healing,’’79 and although the divine Mind that healed and
mortal minds caught in the morass of error were profoundly different in her system
(and so not exactly comparable), still the ghost of resemblance was there.
‘‘Mesmerism,’’ she told students, was ‘‘a belief constituting mortal mind,’’ and
‘‘error’’ was ‘‘all there is to it, which is the very antipode of science, the immortal
mind.’’ ‘‘Mesmerism’’ was ‘‘a direct appeal to personal sense . . . predicated on
the supposition that Life is in matter, and a nervo-vital fluid at that.’’ It was ‘‘error
and belief in conflict’’ and ‘‘one error at war with another’’; it was ‘‘personal sense
giving the lie to its own statements, denying the pains but admitting the pleasures
of sense.’’ Why was it so dangerous? The answer lay in its proximity to Spirit, its
ability to function as a lying proxy for the truth. ‘‘Electricity,’’ she wrote, ‘‘is the
last boundary between personal sense and Soul, and although it stands at the
threshold of Spirit it cannot enter into it, but the nearer matter approaches mind
the more potent it becomes, to produce supposed good or evil; the lightning is
Spirits Reformed and Reconstituted 293
fierce, and the electric telegram swift.’’ Eddy’s argument, in fact, replicated the
theoretical model of homeopathy in which infinitesimal doses were more potent
than gross ones. Homeopaths believed that the same substance that caused the
symptoms of a given disease in a well person would cure the disease in a patient
who was suffering from it. The key, however, was the ‘‘potentization’’ of remedies
by increasingly radical dilutions to the point that, physically speaking, not
even a trace of the original substance remained. Now, in Eddy’s warning model,
not only homeopathy but also the assorted healing modalities that kept it company
achieved heightened power with the increased dilution of their physicality.
‘‘The more ethereal matter becomes according to accepted theories, the more
powerful it is; e.g., the homoeopathic drugs, steam, and electricity, until possessing
less and less materiality, it passes into essence, and is admitted mortal mind;
not Intelligence, but belief, not Truth, but error.’’80
Siding with the mentalists and not the fluidic theorists regarding mesmeric
and related electrical phenomena, she declared electricity to be ‘‘not a vital fluid;
but an element of mind, the higher link between the grosser strata of mind,
named matter, and the more rarified called mind.’’ Rarefied or gross, the danger
in the magnetic world and its environs was ubiquitous. Thus phrenology fared no
better in Eddy’s estimate, making an individual ‘‘a thief or Christian, according to
the development of bumps on the cranium.’’ ‘‘To measure our capacities by the
size or weight of our brains, and limit our strength to the use of a muscle,’’ she admonished,
‘‘holds Life at the mercy of organization, and makes matter the status
of man.’’ Taking aim at the health reform movement of the era, which bowed
‘‘to flesh-brush, flannel, bath, diet, exercise, air, etc.,’’ she declared ‘‘physiology’’
to be ‘‘anti-Christian.’’ Meanwhile, not only magnetism but also ‘‘mediumship’’
and ‘‘galvanism’’ were ‘‘the right hands of humbug,’’ and mediumship by itself
was an ‘‘imposition’’ and a ‘‘catch-penny fraud.’’81
In Eddy’s reading, mesmerism and mediumship were clearly intertwined,
lumped together as, for practical purposes, they had functioned in the spiritualist
community in which she had sometimes, if warily, participated. Moreover,
she had been called a spirit medium, not a mesmerist, and so she experienced
mediumship as an especially potent enemy against which she needed to contend.
‘‘We have investigated the phenomenon called mediumship both to convince
ourself of its nature and cause, and to be able to explain it,’’ she told the
student readers of Science and Health, although she expressed some reservations
about her ability to do the second. Her critique, though, was undeterred,
and it was trenchant. The Rochester rappings ‘‘inaugurated a mockery destructive
to order and good morals.’’ Likewise, the ‘‘mischievous link between mind
and matter, called planchette, uttering its many falsehoods,’’ was ‘‘a prototype of
294 Arrivals
the poor work some people make of the passage from their old natures up to a
better man.’’ Eddy did not deny the sincerity of many involved in the séances,
enjoining readers to ‘‘make due distinction between mediumship and the individual’’
and affirming that there were ‘‘undoubtedly noble purposes in the hearts
of noble women and men who believe themselves mediums.’’ But like Blavatsky
and Olcott at the (ironically named) Eddy farm, she pointed to the loss of mastery
that accompanied mediumistic work. Mediumship, she warned, was a ‘‘belief
of individualized ‘spirits,’ also that they do much for you, the result of which
is you are capable of doing less for yourself.’’82
Eddy bristled angrily at mediumistic claims. Mediumship presupposed that
‘‘one man’’ was ‘‘Spirit,’’ and that he controlled ‘‘another man’’ that was ‘‘matter.’’
It taught that ‘‘bodies which return to dust or new bodies called ‘spirits’’’ were
‘‘experiencing the old sensations, and desires material, and mesmerizing earthly
mortals.’’ It taught, too, that ‘‘shadow’’ was ‘‘tangible to touch’’ and that it produced
‘‘electricity’’ and similar phenomena. She found these conclusions to be
‘‘ridiculous.’’ The spirit manifestations were the ‘‘result of tricks or belief, proceeding
from the so-called mind of man, and not the mind of God.’’ Mediumship
itself overlooked ‘‘the impossibility for a sensual mind to become spirit, or to possess
a spiritual body after what we term death,’’ something that science revealed
as ‘‘more inconsistent than for stygian darkness to emit a sun-beam.’’ ‘‘To admit
the so-called dead and living commune together,’’ Eddy asserted categorically,
was ‘‘to decide the unfitness of both for their separate positions.’’ ‘‘Mediumship
assigns to their dead a condition worse than blighted buds or mortal mildew, even
a poor purgatory where one’s chances for something narrow into nothing, or they
must return to the old stand-points of matter.’’ Its foundations lay in ‘‘secretiveness,
jugglery, credulity, superstition and belief.’’ Because of its mystical ambience,
it could ‘‘do more harm than drugs.’’83
As warrior of the spirit, Eddy with her pungency equaled or exceeded the contentiousness
of Quimby, making a similar case but making it now out of a heterodox
Calvinism instead of her mentor’s heterodox liberal Christianity. And like
the unsystematic short pieces left by Quimby, her more systematic work pointed
beyond the language of argument to a lived engagement with powerful ideas.
The center of Eddy’s work was practice, and the center of her healing practice
was argument. In the language game that was her metaphysical system, the practitioner
argued against the error that was matter, against the mortal mind of the
patient-client in its mesmerized ‘‘Adam-dream’’—until the healer broke through
to Truth and Principle. The absolutism of Eddy’s stance was uncompromising.
The false belief in matter condemned people to the scenarios of illness and pain
that they experienced. The healing role of the Christian Science practitioner
Spirits Reformed and Reconstituted 295
was meant not so much to provide compassionate care as to demonstrate Truth
in an ideal order that reduced the physical to the nothing that it was, an order
that, in short, proved the claims of the Christian gospel as Eddy herself understood
them. Like the utterly sovereign, utterly transcendent God of Calvinism,
like the God out of the whirlwind in the book of Job, Truth brooked no compromise
and demonstrated its reality by vanquishing the appearance of disease and
disorder. Christian Science healing existed not to enhance matter and materially
based humanity. It existed only to advance the Truth, the Principle, of God.
There was, of course, a cutting irony in Eddy’s adamant antimaterialism—an
antimaterialism that Stephen Gottschalk in recent work has noticed so clearly—
when juxtaposed to the early wealth of the Christian Science Mother Church
and the rising status of its mostly female practitioners.84 But a facile coupling
of the material success of the movement to the basic Eddy theology does not
stand up to scrutiny when the founder’s essentially Calvinist heterodoxy is understood.
Still more, the easy identification of Christian Science as a species of what
Sydney Ahlstrom called ‘‘harmonial religion’’ is problematic. Although the term
has obscured more than it reveals even for New Thought, in the case of Christian
Science it misreads the evidence on almost all counts. For Ahlstrom, ‘‘harmonial’’
religion signified ‘‘those forms of piety and belief in which spiritual composure,
physical health, and even economic well-being’’ were ‘‘understood to flow
from a person’s rapport with the cosmos.’’ But with human lives mired in sickness,
sin, and death—the triadic legacy of mortal mind—Eddy’s system taught
no harmony at all for the material realm but instead total and uncompromising
war. Moreover, when a ‘‘saved’’ Christian Scientist lived out of Truth and Principle,
seeing evil for the nothing that it was, there was quite literally nothing with
which to harmonize. One lived in Truth, or one did not. One could simply not
harmonize nonexistence with Principle. Eddy’s antimaterialist ‘‘scientific statement
of being,’’ in the familiar 1906 edition, brought home the point: ‘‘There
is no life, truth, intelligence, nor substance in matter. All is infinite Mind and
its infinite manifestation, for God is All-in-all. Spirit is immortal Truth; matter
is mortal error. Spirit is the real and eternal; matter is the unreal and temporal.
Spirit is God, and man is His image and likeness. Therefore, man is not material;
he is spiritual.’’85
Christian Scientists did, of course, at times speak colloquially, as other Christians
did, about getting into harmony with God. Eddy herself had taught that
sickness, sin, and death were ‘‘inharmonies’’ and had pronounced all past, present,
and future existence to be ‘‘God, and the idea of God, harmonious and
eternal.’’ ‘‘Harmonious action,’’ she wrote, ‘‘proceeds from Principle; that is, from
Soul; inharmony has no Principle.’’ She had suggested in Science and Health,
296 Arrivals
too, that the discovery of ‘‘Life Soul’’ would make one harmonious. Moreover,
at the very core of a formulaic healing event lay an intense realization on the
part of a Science practitioner of the unreality of the patient’s particular plight
or illness and the divine perfection that instead was and had been ever present.
Such realizations could be couched in the language of harmony. But perusal of
Christian Science literature reveals no preference for the term or the discourse
of harmony, and, still more, Christian Science healers were accustomed to describing
their healing work not only as ‘‘treatment’’ but also, and quite typically,
as ‘‘argument.’’ When they healed, they spoke of ‘‘demonstrating over’’ illness—
in a metaphor that evokes science and contest at once. As Stephen Gottschalk
notes, ‘‘the aims and theological standpoint of Christian Science and of harmonialism
differ so markedly that the two cannot be assumed to represent the same
tendency.’’ Pointing as well to the pain and suffering that characterized Eddy’s
personal life, he found the harmonial ascription especially inappropriate. Eddy
needed to be saved, to be born again; and she felt in her ‘‘discovery’’ of Christian
Science that her new birth in the spirit had happened.86
Yet if Eddy was a decided antimaterialist, and if she fought fiercely against the
lingering shadows of mesmerism and spiritualism, the connections between her
new ‘‘Truth’’ and these former partners would not go away. In the case of mesmerism,
we know that early Christian Science practice included some rubbing
or touching of the afflicted area of a patient’s body in the style of mesmerists (and,
imitating them, spiritualist healers). This essentially followed Quimby’s practice
growing out of his earlier healing technique in animal magnetism, and he had
typically employed water as a medium for the work. Eddy herself acknowledged
that when she started teaching she had ‘‘permitted students to manipulate the
head, ignorant that it could do harm, or hinder the power of mind.’’ According
to report, she at first actively instructed students to rub and touch—not for the
patent efficacy of these gestures but, as Quimby did, because of the belief that
they fostered in the patient: ‘‘As we believe and others believe we get nearer to
them by contact and now you would rub out a belief, and this belief is located in
the brain.’’ Like a doctor’s poultice applied for pain, so the healer should place
her ‘‘hands where the belief is to rub it out forever.’’87 Added to this, we have already
seen Eddy’s demonstrated fear, stronger as she aged, of malicious animal
magnetism.
In the case of spiritualism, Ann Braude has pointedly noticed the overlap between
Eddy’s theologically driven healing method and the discursive world of
the spiritualist community. Aside from the shared social context in which both
flourished and the similarity of the needs that drew converts to both spiritualism
and Science, the denial of evil in Christian Science from one perspective made
Spirits Reformed and Reconstituted 297
the movement look like spiritualism because of its overt rejection of this major
Calvinist category. Likewise, both spiritualism and Christian Science exalted science
to deific proportions; both opposed orthodoxies in medicine as well as religion;
and both encouraged egalitarianism by promoting women as leaders and
by supporting lay ability to function as healers. In other words, in both systems
the patient could easily take charge, and each system thus operated on a more or
less level playing field. Moreover, as Braude argues, the ‘‘most significant’’ agreement
came with the belief that there was ‘‘no change at death.’’ True the lack of
change existed, for spiritualists, as a function of the continuing material existence
of spirit bodies after the change called death and, for Scientists, in the fact that
there were never any real material bodies anyway. Even so, an underlying model
of permanence and denial of death’s edge characterized both movements.88
The language of the ‘‘Father-Mother God,’’ the ‘‘Christ Principle,’’ and God
as Principle was, as we have already seen, part of the rhetorical world of spiritualism.
Beyond that, Eddy’s early Christian Science followers seemed to move
easily in and out of the spiritualist community. Were the new practitioners—
mostly women (in the ranks as well as leaders, as we will see)—former spirit mediums?
Did they transpose their performances from spirits to Spirit in the same
manner that the women whom Ann Braude has studied left trance mediumship
on public stages for feminist speeches in their own names? Except for a few
cases, no clear answers can be given. But the questions hang there for the asking.
Braude has, for example, identified the combinative thrust of the Boston periodical
The Soul in the 1880s, a periodical at home in both spiritualist and Christian
Science circles. At least one medium and her husband—the later well-known
Swartses—attended a Christian Science course taught by Eddy, even as the husband
tried to teach what he learned from Eddy in spiritualist contexts. Beyond
this, there was the over-protest of Eddy’s relentless attack on spiritualism—‘‘mesmerism,
manipulation, or mediumship’’ as ‘‘the right hand of humbug, either a
delusion or a fraud.’’ As Braude observes, Eddy’s preoccupation with separating
Science from spiritualism suggests ‘‘that she viewed Spiritualism as the religion
with which her own faith could be most easily confused.’’89
Still, like Blavatsky and Olcott—from whom she strenuously separated herself
as well—Eddy recognized clairvoyance as fact and thought that spiritual manifestations
involved mind reading on the medium’s part. However, unlike Theosophists,
who looked to elementals for the production of phenomena, she thought
that materializations were the products of the mediumistic mind. Yet she did not
think that, in theory, spirit communication was impossible. Rather, the reality
of spirit communication needed to be demonstrated outside of matter since, by
definition, matter was irrevocably yoked to appearance and unreality. Spirits, in
298 Arrivals
the plural, were ‘‘supposed mixtures of Intelligence and matter’’ that, ‘‘science’’
revealed, could not ‘‘affinitize or dwell together.’’ But Spirit itself, in the singular,
was a thoroughly different case: there was ‘‘no Intelligence, no Life, no Substance,
no Truth, no Love but the Spiritual.’’ Eddy recognized, too, the existence
of trance states and the power they gave to otherwise reticent speakers.90 Finally,
like the spiritualists, in her own way she supported and promoted feminism even
if she had difficulties yielding authority to talented individual women who came
to her.
Given all of this, the Christian Science that Eddy shaped in her mature years
reconstituted spiritualism, turning it inside out to craft a monistic system based
on nonmaterial spirit and inverting its liberalism in her lingering Calvinism. Her
reconstitution achieved manifest success, shaping its metaphysics to a new and
Christian organization that demonstrates the extent to which metaphysical combinativeness
could reach. The formerly self-effacing Eddy spoke and acted with
decisive authority as a new religious leader, and she made and unmade institutions
in the service of her cause. The roster of her doings and undoings quickly
tells the story. She established the Christian Scientists’ Association in 1876 and
restructured it into the Church of Christ, Scientist in 1879. By 1882, she founded
the state-chartered Massachusetts Medical College in Boston and, by 1886, the
National Christian Science Association. In these years of rapid growth and development,
she encouraged graduates of the college to create regional institutes
that would spread Christian Science throughout the nation. In the states of Iowa
and Illinois alone, according to Rennie Schoepflin, sixteen institutes arose on
the Eddy model in the 1880s and the 1890s. But in 1889, with divisiveness in
church governance and increasing independence among former students, she
dissolved the Christian Science Association, closed her college, and disbanded
the Church of Christ, Scientist, all in moves to centralize and to regain control.
Several months later, in 1890, she requested that the National Christian Scientist
Association adjourn for a three-year period. Then, in 1892, she reorganized the
Boston church, founding the ‘‘Mother Church’’ so that Scientists from all across
the country would need to apply for membership therein to remain within the
institution.91
Organization proceeded apace with Eddy’s publication, in 1895, of the Manual
of the Mother Church, legislating governance matters in detail, and with the
creation, in 1898, of the main administrative units that would promote her teaching.
So tightly did she organize governance that Stephen Gottschalk could remark,
‘‘Perhaps the most amazing thing about Mrs. Eddy’s death was the fact that
it had so little apparent effect on the movement.’’92 At the same time, Eddy had
Spirits Reformed and Reconstituted 299
committed her faith to the printed word as a major means to disseminate her new
reading of the Christian gospels. From early on, practitioners and patients alike
were urged to read Science and Health. Less than a decade later (in 1884), the first
number of the Journal of Christian Science appeared (called the Christian Science
Journal from 1885), with Eddy herself as editor until she turned the journal
over to other promising women, like Emma Curtis Hopkins, who was soon fired
and went on to become a prominent New Thought leader. In addition, Eddy created,
in 1898, the Christian Science Weekly, subsequently renamed the Christian
Science Sentinel, and the same year, too, established the Christian Science Publishing
Society. When the well-known Christian Science Monitor was founded
in 1908 to provide a Christian Science perspective on national and international
news, it came under the aegis of the publishing society, as did numerous other
promotional materials for the church and for Christian Science theology.
Eddy left Boston, where she had lived at the center of her movement for seven
years, and in 1882 took up residence more reclusively near Concord, New Hampshire.
Later, in 1908, she moved to Chestnut Hill, not far from Boston, where she
ended her days. During her senior years, she oversaw a thriving movement that
attracted increasing numbers of followers and received considerable notice in
the press and public mind, some favorable and some decidedly less so. In Lynn,
where Eddy had gathered her earliest class of students, they came mostly from
the working class. But as the movement took off, this profile began to change.
Stephen Gottschalk, who has pointed to occupation as an indicator of class
status, notes—summarizing a Harvard doctoral dissertation—that by the year of
Eddy’s death Christian Scientists largely came from the middle class, a situation
that Gottschalk sees as mostly ‘‘consistent’’ from 1900 to 1950.93 Most had come,
too, as believing Protestant Christians, although they had their quarrels with
orthodoxy. Meanwhile, as the prominence of female leadership already suggests,
many more women than men joined the movement. By the last decade of the
nineteenth century, five times as many woman practitioners could be counted as
men. By the next decade, in 1906, Christian Science membership was 72.4 percent
female, at a time when all denominations together averaged 56.9 percent
women in their ranks. The pattern apparently continued through the twentieth
century, since in the 1970s the ratio of women to men within the denomination
was eight to one.94 Arguably, a new form of mediumship had arisen in their midst,
as women mediated no longer the spirits from the second or further spheres but
instead what Scientists claimed was Spirit itself—Principle, Truth, God, and
(when gender references were made) Eddy’s Father-Mother God. Without their
‘‘realization’’ as practitioners of each patient’s ‘‘true’’ state, the Truth—and heal-
300 Arrivals
ing—would not be manifested in particular human lives. So the women put up
shingles, placed advertisements, and collected set fees—professionalizing their
healing work as the séance mediums had earlier professionalized their services.95
Nor did the women shun the mission field. They roamed widely as itinerant
teachers, bridging the gap between domestic and public spaces and garnering a
swiftly building membership for Christian Science. Rennie Schoepflin has cited
statistics, for example, showing a net gain of an astounding 2,500 percent in
Christian Science membership between 1890 and 1906, when 40,011 Scientists
were claimed. Although Eddy banned the publication of membership figures
after 1908, the number of practitioners continued to grow in the early twentieth
century, with 5,394 globally in 1913 and 10,775 in 1934.96 Like the earlier mediums
who spoke in public when the spirits prompted, Christian Science women
apparently felt compelled by their sense of Truth to spread a public gospel. The
complex motivations of their missionary impulse point, once again, to the combinative
milieu in which American metaphysical religion arose and flourished.
In that milieu, too, despite all of Eddy’s efforts to build an ecclesial edifice unmoved
by religious change and reconstruction, the religious work that was Christian
Science repeatedly exhibited the combinations and recombinations that
were continually remaking metaphysics.
NEW THOUGHT AND THE RECONSTRUCTION OF
CHRISTIAN SCIENCE AND THEOSOPHY
To some extent, Eddy’s very claims to uniqueness (even if partially correct),
and to permanence and impermeability, brought change to her door. As the
standard narrative of the discovery of Christian Science took shape in her remembered
past and its public reconstruction, the gradualism of her early healing
practice gave way before Eddy’s testimony to a startling single moment of
Truth. The mentorship of Quimby dissolved before the direct visitation of Spirit.
Others, however, did not forget. Quimby’s former patient-students Warren Felt
Evans, Julius Dresser, and Annetta Seabury Dresser either indirectly (Evans) or
directly (the Dressers) challenged Eddy’s erasure of the Quimby legacy, even
as the legacy continued to function in a rising ‘‘mind-cure’’ movement. At the
same time, disenchanted Christian Scientists left Eddy when their views conflicted
with her vision or their persons with her personality. They believed that
they found in the growing mental healing movement a kinder, gentler, and more
expansive version of what they had learned in Eddy’s world. Healers shared their
skills and news with clients who, in turn, became other healers, other sharers.
The term ‘‘Christian Science’’ was invoked freely, used in a generic sense as a de-
Spirits Reformed and Reconstituted 301
scription of the new vision and healing practice. Numerous periodicals showed
what was happening (Gary Ward Materra discovered some 117 in existence by
1905), and so did popular books and monographs (Materra found 744 booklength
works for the same period). A networking movement had begun and was
spreading fast.97
It was not until the 1890s that a clear New Thought identity would be posited,
and that would occur in the context of Eddy’s copyright on the term ‘‘Christian
Science’’ in the early part of the decade and at least partially because of it.98 But
the rift between Eddy’s Christian Science and this developing ‘‘mental science’’
or generic Christian Science movement existed already in the tensile structure of
Quimby’s thought, held together, as it was, by his ability to contain paradox and
anomaly in a persuasive metaphorical quasi system. Certainly his ‘‘wisdom’’ transcending
the error-ridden minds of his patients and their sickness affirmed the
ideal order that Eddy later promoted as Spirit, Substance, Intelligence, Truth,
and the like. But, as we have also seen, Quimby saw wisdom not only as transcendent
but also as a solid or even fluidic substance pervading all reality, much
in the manner of the old magnetic fluid. He was facile enough mostly to avoid
the terms fluid and ether, but nonetheless their presence remained in the characteristics
that he attributed to wisdom.99 Even as Eddy became an absolutist of
the ideal, Quimby straddled both worlds—affirming a wisdom beyond sense and
matter and yet introducing sensate concepts as palpable, lived metaphors for the
experience of wisdom. Nowhere can this be seen more than in Quimby’s homegrown
speculations on smell and its relationship to a wisdom transcending the
senses yet within them. Quimby smelled wisdom, and he smelled sickness. He
thought of the odors that he absorbed as so many particles of the divine in a kind
of etheric atmosphere surrounding a subject.100 And he linked their diffusion as
mediumistic bearers of knowledge, or wisdom, to words and language, which
also functioned as mediumistic bearers of the same.
In so doing, Quimby hinted once more of his debt to spiritualism and, especially,
to Andrew Jackson Davis. In his speculations on magnetism, Davis had
taught that each human soul was encircled by an ‘‘atmosphere’’ that was ‘‘an emanation
from the individual, just as flowers exhale their fragrance.’’ Moreover, he
had posited, because of the emanation, ‘‘a favorable or unfavorable influence’’
that one person could have over another (this last a source, perhaps, of Eddy’s
later notion of M.A.M.). In his turn, Quimby pushed the metaphor and materialized
it further. He likened the ‘‘brain or intellect’’ to a rose, and he thought that
intelligence came through its smells as they emanated. Again, each belief, for
Quimby, contained ‘‘matter or ideas which throw off an odor like a rose.’’ In fact,
humans typically threw off ‘‘two odors: one matter and the other wisdom.’’ Mat-
302 Arrivals
ter, identified with the human mind (not wisdom), produced an odor that was
like a ‘‘polished mirror,’’ with fear reflected in it as ‘‘the image of the belief.’’ Wisdom
was wise because it could ‘‘see the image in the mirror, held there by its fear.’’
Quimby was the case in point, for it was his ‘‘wisdom’’ that disturbed his patient’s
reflected ‘‘opinion,’’ deadening the mirror ‘‘till the image or disease’’ had disappeared.
Mostly, in the terms of the analogy, Quimby focused on the smell of matter
and its manifestation as illness in the life of a patient. ‘‘The mind is under the
direction of a power independent of itself,’’ he explained, ‘‘and when the mind or
thought is formed into an idea, the idea throws off an odor that contains the cause
and effect.’’ The odor was ‘‘the trouble called disease,’’ and—unlike the doctors
who knew nothing about it—Quimby himself smelled the ‘‘spiritual life of the
idea’’ that was error. From there he could launch his healing work to banish it.101
This was because Quimby could also smell wisdom—a different odor—which
his ailing patients were unable to detect, even though the smell of wisdom could,
at least theoretically, come to them. ‘‘As a rose imparts to every living creature its
odor, so man become impregnated with wisdom, assumes an identity and sets
up for himself,’’ he argued. This wisdom might be called the ‘‘first cause’’ and
might be construed, too, to exude an ‘‘essence’’ that pervaded ‘‘all space.’’ Yet, in
a distinction that was crucial for Quimby, the sense of smell and the other senses
belonged not to the ‘‘natural man’’ but to his ‘‘scientific’’ counterpart. Such a ‘‘scientific
man’’—Quimby himself—knew odor to be the most potent of the senses,
conveying knowledge of good (as in savory food) and of danger, for smell was an
‘‘atmosphere’’ that surrounded an object or subject. Thus—and this was where
he was headed—the common atmosphere of humans in similar states of fear (in
the presence of danger) led to ‘‘a sort of language, so that language was invented
for the safety of the race.’’ Quimby, in short, had arrived at the idea that ‘‘the
sense of smell was the foundation of language’’ and at the overarching conviction
that from the material process came the higher wisdom. ‘‘Forming thought
into things or ideas became a sense,’’ and the process was ‘‘spiritual.’’102
Moreover, if the sense of smell was, indeed, the ‘‘foundation of language,’’ it
was also itself a language. Humans, like roses, threw off odors; odors enabled
Quimby to diagnose erroneous states of mind being manifested as diseases; odors
also conveyed character. Still further, distance was no factor in intuiting smells
and odors. Situated in wisdom, he claimed, ‘‘my senses could be affected . . .
when my body was at a distance of many miles from the patient. This led me to
a new discovery, and I found my senses were not in my body but that my body
was in my senses, and my knowledge located my senses just according to my wisdom.’’103
Quimby’s thinking on these matters was often circular, muddled, and
less than clear. But through his sometimes strained efforts to explain he was lay-
Spirits Reformed and Reconstituted 303
ing the groundwork for later New Thought theologies of immanence and panentheism.
Profoundly different from the hauntingly Calvinist transcendent God
of Eddy, with an ultimate divine alterity, the New Thought deity would beckon
as the God within and the God who, like a superconscious etheric fluid, permeated
all things.
It was Warren Felt Evans (1817–1889), Quimby’s other major theological student
alongside Eddy, who would articulate—much further and more clearly
than Quimby—the possibilities and powers of the resident God. At the same
time, like his doctor-teacher, Evans protected the twofold nature of divinity,
Mind transcendent and Mind within. Son of a Vermont farming family, Evans
attended Chester Academy, spent a year at Middlebury College, and then transferred,
in 1838, to Dartmouth in New Hampshire. He never graduated, since
midway through his junior year he felt a calling to the Methodist ministry. According
to Charles Braden, he held, at various times, eleven different positions
for the denomination. Then, in 1864, he joined the Swedenborgian Church of
the New Jerusalem, and the profound and abiding influence of Swedenborg became
apparent in his subsequent writings. The break from his Methodist past and
his move in an unorthodox spiritual direction were probably at some level stressful,
for he experienced both serious and chronic ‘‘nervous’’ disease. Close to the
time he officially became a Swedenborgian, his physical condition brought him
to Quimby’s Portland door. Like Eddy, Evans was healed, became a Quimby
student, and also felt a calling to be a healer himself. He began a mental healing
practice in Claremont, New Hampshire, but by 1867 had moved to the Boston
area, where, with his wife M. Charlotte Tinker, he spent over twenty years
practicing and teaching. Unlike Eddy and other mental healing professionals,
he charged no fees and accepted only free will offerings. He also apparently read
copiously and wrote a series of widely influential books on mental healing in
a religious context.104 If we track the changes from the earliest to the latest of
these works, we gain a sense of the shifting discourse community of American
metaphysics as it transitioned from high-century phrenomagnetic and Swedenborgian
séance spiritualism to the theosophizing world of the late 1870s and
1880s.
The earliest of Evans’s six mental healing books (he had previously written four
short works on aspects of Swedenborgian theology) appeared in 1869 and the
latest in 1886, together revealing a disciplined, ordering mind and a facility in argument
and exposition. Evans was bibliographically responsible in ways that signal
a professionalism and attention to detail not found in earlier, and especially
vernacular, authors. Often, but not always, he parenthetically cited sources of
quotations, giving an author’s surname, a short title, and the page or pages. Aside
304 Arrivals
from the general sophistication of these works and their at-homeness in both religious
and scientific worlds of contemporary discourse, they were cast in a decidedly
different tone from the work of either Quimby or Eddy. Instead of polemicism
and battle, in Evans readers could find affirmation and a kind of irenic
catholicity that consciously combined sources in an almost theosophical style.
The first of the mental healing books, The Mental-Cure, disclosed an Evans
who was a thorough Swedenborgian and also comfortable in a spiritualist milieu
that resonated with the harmonial theology of Davis. Mind was an ‘‘immaterial
substance,’’ but matter was also a substance, one associated with the sense experience
of resistance and force. All humans were ‘‘incarnations of the Divinity,’’ love
was supreme, and the good lay within, with ‘‘great futurities . . . hidden in the
mysterious depths of our inner being.’’105 A combined Swedenborgian-spiritualist
millennialism pervaded the text with its noticeable allusions to a coming (uppercase)
‘‘New Age’’ (of the Holy Spirit), which was ‘‘now in the order of Providence
dawning upon the world.’’ Meanwhile, its easy assumptions regarding the real
existence of spirits, its familiar references to the ‘‘Seeress of Prevorst,’’ its citation
of the ubiquitous spiritualist Samuel B. Brittan, and its doctrine of spiritual
spheres pointed in the same Swedenborgian-spiritualist direction. So did its
understanding of death as a ‘‘transition to a higher life’’ and ‘‘normal process in
development.’’ References to Gall and to phrenology as well as magnetic allusions
indicated Evans’s familiarity with spiritualist discourse, and there was the
by now well-recognized caveat regarding magnetic power and peril (‘‘a power
that can be turned to good account, or perverted to evil’’). Still more, in the
Swedenborgian reading that Evans gave to ‘‘modern spiritualism,’’ we can see the
easy conflation that he and so many others were making between the sources
out of which they built their world. Expounding on the ‘‘Swedish philosopher’’
and his doctrine of spiritual influx, Evans saw inspiration and ‘‘the commerce
of our spirits with the heavens above’’ as ‘‘the normal state of the human mind.’’
In that context, what was ‘‘called modern spiritualism’’ was ‘‘only an instinctive
reaction of the general mind against the unnatural condition it has been in for
centuries.’’106 The plan of Evan’s work was generally speaking Swedenborgian,
and he was hardly bashful about acknowledging his debt, for he quoted Swedenborg
frequently and in admiring terms (Braden, in fact, found seventeen references).107
Always though, Evans focused his account on the phenomenon of illness.
Bodily dysfunction signaled spiritual dysfunction, and the way to correct
the body lay in correction of the spirit.
Nor was there a conceptual gap between the two in the Swedenborgian universe
that Evans inhabited. Citing the authority of his Swedish mentor as well as
the New Testament Paul, Evans declared for the existence of a ‘‘spiritual body’’
Spirits Reformed and Reconstituted 305
bridging the gap between the ‘‘curious and wonderful’’ external body and the
mind. The spiritual body functioned as one among innumerable ‘‘intermediates,
through which influx descend[ed] from the higher to the lower’’—part of
a pattern in all creation. Compounded of ‘‘a substance intermediate between
pure spirit and matter,’’ it was for Evans ‘‘a sort of tertium quid,’’ literally, a ‘‘third
thing’’ that, for many in the developing New Thought movement, would seriously
alter the orthodox anthropology of human body and soul. Here the (inner
or interior) spiritual body became the harbinger of a series of multiplying bodily
spheres that traced a path from gross matter to highest spirit. The spiritual body
became, too, the harbinger of the energy pathways that traced the same route;
and, already in Evans, the roadmap was ready. ‘‘This inner form,’’ he reported, ‘‘is
the prior seat of all diseased disturbances in the body.’’ For Blavatsky and the theosophical
movement, the spiritual body (significantly, close to her ‘‘astral’’ body
of less than a decade after Evans’s book) would later be subsumed into a series
of clairvoyantly visible bodies manifested with each human frame. For many in
the New Thought movement, more abstractly, it would—in a transformed version—become
part of the triad of body, soul, and spirit.108
Where was Phineas Quimby in The Mental-Cure? He was there as a kind of
ghost among the spirits: Evans could apparently find no methodologically viable
way to acknowledge his debt. (In Mental Medicine, Evans’s second book on
mental healing—published in 1872—he did acknowledge Quimby briefly.) Yet
between the lines, as it were, Evans had surely inscribed his former mentor. In
the magnetic-spiritualist and, specifically, Davis harmonial tradition, he had affirmed
that ‘‘every material body’’ was ‘‘surrounded by an atmosphere generated
by a subtle emanation of its own substance.’’ He had gone on to declare that ‘‘the
air enveloping the globe we inhabit’’ was ‘‘charged with the minute particles proceeding
from the various objects of nature.’’ But Evans’s explanation of the emanation
in terms of the olfactory sense, his specific use of a rose as an example,
and his identification of a spiritual cause for smells and of something analogous
‘‘in the world of the mind’’ all smacked of Quimby—a Quimby easily conflated
with Swedenborg as Evans’s text progressed. Evans emulated Quimby also (and
no doubt without direct control) in the quasi-shamanic quality of his sometime
relationships with patients. Reflecting on his experiences with absent healing (a
familiar Quimby technique), he owned that he had on occasion ‘‘been sensibly
affected with their diseased state both of mind and body.’’ ‘‘Once,’’ he divulged,
‘‘where the patient was troubled with almost perpetual nausea, it occasioned
vomiting in us.’’ Still, as Braden noted, citing Mental Medicine of 1872, Evans
thought that the effects of client illness on the healer were fleeting and easily
dismissed—a ‘‘few minutes of tranquil sleep’’ would do it.109
306 Arrivals
For all his intellectual expansiveness, with Swedenborg and like Quimby,
Evans always returned to Christian moorings to explain and affirm what was
happening. According to John Teahan, well before Evans met Quimby—and fifteen
years before the inaugural publication of the Glover (Eddy) book Science
and Health—Evans had used the term ‘‘Christian Science’’ in print in his short
work The Happy Islands. But more than Quimby, the early Evans evinced a clear
orthodoxy regarding the person of Jesus—he was the ‘‘one and only God made
flesh, and dwelling among us.’’ Jesus healed by moving from cause to effect, in
a model that Evans and other mental healers should copy, discarding the glib
Baconianism of their culture for a compelling (Christian) alternative. In a particularly
cogent statement that drew a line between scientific and general cultural
orthodoxy, on the one hand, and the new metaphysical faith, on the other,
Evans declared for principle (read ‘‘Cause,’’ ‘‘Truth,’’ ‘‘Mind,’’ ‘‘Intelligence,’’ and
so forth). ‘‘We hold to the heresy,’’ he announced, ‘‘that principles come before
facts in the true order of mental growth, and the knowledge of things in their
causes, is of more worth than a recognition of effects. This we acknowledge is
not the Baconian method of philosophizing.’’110
Yet just as the spiritual body bridged the world of pure spirit and the material
realm of the body, Evans—with a strong pragmatism—saw a bridge between
principles and facts, between causes of illness and their unpleasant effects. The
bridge, as a chapter title announced, was the ‘‘sanative power of words.’’ Words
functioned as ‘‘one of the principal mediums through which mind acts upon
mind.’’ They could be written or spoken, but either way they potentially could
contain ‘‘the vital force of the soul.’’ Evans went on for pages celebrating the blessings
and wonders of words, proclaiming within them ‘‘a greater power . . . than
men are aware of’’ and telling of their creative power even as he cited German
Romantic philosopher Friedrich von Schlegel’s Philosophy of History (translated
in 1835) to support his views. For Evans, the case par excellence was Jesus, who
‘‘employed certain formulas or expressive sentences into which he concentrated
and converged his whole mental force, and made them the means of transmitting
spiritual life to the disordered mind.’’ The moral of his story was clear; a physician’s
words ‘‘oftentimes’’ accomplished more than ‘‘his medical prescriptions.’’
Evans had arrived at the doorstep of New Thought affirmation and affirmative
prayer.111
By the time he published his third healing book, Soul and Body, in 1876, Evans
was familiarly evoking his goals for the ‘‘restoration of the phrenopathic method
of healing practised by Jesus, the Christ, and his primitive disciples.’’ If the neologism
phrenopathy hints of former Methodist minister and latter-day spiritualist
La Roy Sunderland’s ‘‘pathetism,’’ it signals, too, a continuing comfort in
Spirits Reformed and Reconstituted 307
the older spiritualist discourse community. In a work that aimed to be ‘‘scientifically
religious, without being offensively theological,’’ Evans had already raised
his Swedenborgian banner on the title page of the volume, quoting from Swedenborg’s
Arcana Coelestia (on correspondences) to set the tone. Still, the easy allusions
of the volume suggest that Evans was immersing himself increasingly in
the Hermetic tradition that supported, if mostly covertly, ‘‘modern’’ spiritualism.
He acclaimed ‘‘John Baptist Van [Jan Baptista van] Helmont,’’ the seventeenthcentury
Flemish physician and scientist who was also a speculative mystic. He
knew Jacob Boehme, and he linked his notion of the ‘‘spiritual body’’ to the
‘‘perisprit’’ of the French spiritualist theorist and mystic Allan Kardec (Hippolyte
Leon Denizard Rivail), whose Book of the Spirits (1858) he had apparently read.
He linked his ‘‘spiritual body’’ as well to the ‘‘nerve-projected form’’ of Justinus
Kerner, whose work had brought the Seeress of Prevorst to public notice.112 Yet
arguably, there was nothing here that a widely read spiritualist would not cite or
invoke, and the discourse world of Evans was yet conjoined to the older spiritualist
community.
It was Evans’s next book, The Divine Law of Cure (1881), that marked his
entry into an expanded theoretical discourse to ground his metaphysical healing
practice—at this juncture, however, solely in terms of the West. Now Evans was
reading the Hermetic legacy in idealist terms more absolute and encompassing,
grounding his increasingly philosophical idealism in the philosophy of the Continent
and of England. Evans’s new cast of characters included Bishop George
Berkeley, whose subjective idealism taught that matter did not exist independent
of perception and that the apparent existence of matter was a function of
the divine Mind. The new cast likewise included the German idealist philosophers
Georg W. F. Hegel, Friedrich von Schelling, Johann Fichte, and Friedrich
Jacobi, as well as the French eclectic philosopher Victor Cousin and the English
Romantic poet and synthetic theorist of language Samuel Taylor Coleridge—all,
significantly, beloved of the New England Transcendentalists.113 Still, though,
the idealism that Evans taught was a fudging idealism, one that could yet speak
to the spiritual materialism of Davis and his sympathizers. Unlike the categorical
denial of matter that had been spread abroad by Eddy, Evans’s statement did
not deny the actuality of bodily existence but instead asserted its contingency:
It always and ever lived from the mind. Idealists, he told readers, did not deny
‘‘the reality of external things’’ but only that they had ‘‘any reality independent
of mind.’’ ‘‘The world of matter with all it contains,’’ he attested, was ‘‘bound up
in an indissoluble unity with the world of mind, and in fact exists in it.’’ It followed
that bodily properties were ‘‘only modifications of our minds.’’ They were
‘‘reducible to feelings or sensations in the soul.’’114 Enter Evans’s phrenopathic
308 Arrivals
mental healing method to reap the pragmatic benefits of the philosophic situation.
Unthought pain was unfelt pain; and disease, without wrong thought, was as
nothing. Banish the thought, and you banished the disease. Here was the ‘‘grand
remedy, the long sought panacea . . . the fundamental principle in the phrenopathic
cure.’’115
The grand remedy, however, by 1885 and The Primitive Mind-Cure had moved
into a new theosophical world that flamboyantly blended Western philosophy
and Hermeticism with Asian texts and ideas in a dramatic recasting of Evans’s
earlier gospel. Theosophy was apparently good for idealism, too, because now the
idealism had been ratcheted up a notch or two to become more uncompromising.
In a facile comparative frame that pointed toward the New Thought world
to come, Evans brought together Berkeleyan idealism, Kabbalistic lore, and a
general Hermeticism that was informed by Neoplatonic, Swedenborgian, and explicitly
Emersonian references. Even, in his catalog of names dropped and texts
quoted, he cited Blavatsky, whose Isis Unveiled had appeared in 1877. Evans, for
example, claimed her as his authority on Pythagoras and quoted her on the ‘‘universal
life-principle’’ (Blavatsky’s ‘‘ether’’). But there was also very much more.
Evans joined to his expanded Western sources a series of allusions to the Indian
Vedas and Vedanta as well as to Buddhism and even to the Muslim statement of
the eleventh- and twelfth-century Persian mystical philosopher and theologian
Al-Ghazali.116
Isis Unveiled, although oriented to Western Hermeticism, provided relatively
generous material on Hinduism and Buddhism, and clearly Evans had been
drawn to Asia in pursuit of the evanescent substance-energy alternately styled,
in this post-spiritualist culture, as the ether, the astral light, the Hindu akasa, or
the Kabbalistic ‘‘occult air.’’ Blavatsky’s authors were Evans’s authors. He cited
and quoted the English occultist ‘‘Lord Lytton’’ (Edward Bulwer-Lytton) and his
utopian novel The Coming Race (1871) with admiration, probably lifting his own
quotation from Blavatsky’s work. (It was the same line that she quoted regarding
the akasa or ‘‘vril,’’ and he tellingly provided no page citation.) He also quoted
Éliphas Lévi on the ‘‘‘universal substance’’’ (that is, the akasa) as the ‘‘‘great
arcanum of being.’’’117 Hermes Trismegistus, in Blavatskian mode, uncritically
joined the truth of Asia, even as Evan’s citations from the Kabbalah were ubiquitous.
Always, for him, however, came the pragmatic bottom line. Change the
akasa/ether, and you change the person and, so, the outcome of the illness.
Evans’s preoccupation with the ether was patent. Like Blavatsky, he sought
to blend science and Hermeticism, evoking his era’s Newtonian and scientific
concept of the ether and invoking the Hermetic testimony to go beyond it. The
Hermeticists gave this universal ‘‘aether’’ ‘‘certain occult metaphysical proper-
Spirits Reformed and Reconstituted 309
ties’’ that modern science knew nothing of; they viewed it as ‘‘a divine, luminous
principle or substance’’ permeating and also containing all things. Moreover,
they called it the ‘‘astral light,’’ which, Evans told readers, signified the ‘‘feminine
wisdom-principle.’’ The fire that the New Testament John the Baptist foretold
(Luke 3:16) was both ‘‘identical with the Holy Spirit’’ and ‘‘the universal aether
of occult philosophy.’’ Citing ‘‘the Book of Hermes, called Pimander, which signifies
the Divine Thought,’’ Evans quoted, ‘‘‘The light is I.’’’ Why did he think
this important? The answer lay in Evans’s conviction that a ‘‘thought impulse’’
could ‘‘affect and set in motion the universal aether, the life-principle.’’ It could
‘‘create a current in the astral light,’’ thus giving it ‘‘quality’’ and directing it ‘‘as a
sanative influence.’’ Few people knew of the ‘‘marvellous power’’ that was ‘‘latent
and slumbering in human nature.’’118
Evans went on to express caution about the power of thoughts and feelings
that marked the spirit of an age. He warned that the ‘‘prevailing mode of thinking
and predominant feelings of an age or community’’ could bear people on against
their will, and he linked the observation to the teachings of Jesus on the dangers
of the ‘‘world.’’ But unlike Eddy, he did not seem drawn particularly to the dangers
of magnetism, and he turned instead to the ‘‘universal life-principle’’ as the
‘‘mother principle, the feminine creative potency, the passive power in nature’’
that was ‘‘co-eternal with spirit’’ and its ‘‘correlative opposite.’’ He identified the
mother principle with matter, found it to be reactive, and declared to readers
that it could be impressed by thought. At the same time, in apparent contradiction,
he called this ‘‘primal matter’’ an ‘‘immaterial substance,’’ linked not only
to his already-trinity of the Kabbalah, Hinduism, and the Holy Spirit but also to
the Shekinah of the Hebrew Bible, the ‘‘sacred fire of the Persians,’’ ‘‘the Astral
light of the Rosicrucians,’’ the Egyptian Isis, and the Roman Catholic Mary.119
It is at this point, in his vacillation between the materiality and immateriality
of the cosmic ether, that Evans, like Emerson in Nature, struggled with the tension
between pure idealism and a material model of the world. The tension was
mediated, in Evans’s case, by the magnetic universe he had inherited and also
by the ambivalences of the Hermetic texts themselves (see chapter 1). But the
idealism was softer and less absolute than Eddy’s, and it resembled Quimby’s in
its ability to affirm and deny at once. Beyond either of them, too, lay the high
Western tradition of idealism that Evans had introduced and the theosophical
discourse out of which he was now reading recent Western idealist philosophers.
Ideas were ‘‘the causes of the existence of all material entities’’; they united ‘‘pure
intellect’’—the ‘‘masculine’’ of ‘‘Hermetic philosophy’’—with ‘‘that spiritual and
feminine principle’’ that could be designated as ‘‘feeling.’’ Natural things were
‘‘but representations of things in the realm of ideas,’’ and this view was ‘‘the old
310 Arrivals
Hermetic doctrine of correspondence’’ that had been ‘‘reproduced by Swedenborg.’’
The resemblance between ‘‘macrocosm’’ and ‘‘microcosm’’ was the ‘‘key
note’’ of Evans’s own ‘‘theosophical system.’’ All things in the microcosm preexisted
‘‘in the unseen and real world of light, the world of ideas,’’ and ‘‘after their
dissolution they return[ed] to that world.’’ Evans’s ‘‘transcendental medical science
and practical metaphysics’’ were grounded on these assumptions.120
The shamanic quality of Evans’s earlier healing experience took on new dimensions
in this theosophical representation. ‘‘Silent suggestion’’ to cure disease
was the ‘‘inner or occult word’’; it was the ‘‘‘lost word’ which modern Masonry
laments, and for which they try to find a substitute.’’ But the ‘‘inward Word’’
worked as part of a process in which the healer absorbed ‘‘the morbid condition
of the patient’’ and assumed ‘‘the psychic embryo of the disease.’’ ‘‘We take up
into ourself his [the patient’s] condition,’’ declared Evans, ‘‘in order that we may
form a clear idea of it, and this idea of it is the real disease, the ding an sich, or
thing in itself. Thus we are able to remit it or put it away from him.’’ In the end,
the healing work Evans recommended was a species of prayer, ‘‘the most intense
form of the action, or influence, of one mind upon another.’’121
The reference to prayer with which Evans ended The Primitive Mind-Cure
suggests the overriding Christian vision that informed his theosophy—unlike
that of Blavatsky or Olcott. By now the historical person Jesus had become separable
from the cosmic Christ, a separation that, as we saw, was adumbrated in
midcentury magnetic literature of a popular nature and also in the writings of
Quimby. Identical with ‘‘the Adam Kadmon of the Kabala,’’ ‘‘the Archetypal
Man of Plato,’’ and ‘‘man as he exists in the divine Idea,’’ this was ‘‘the Divine
Man, the Christ of Paul, at the same time a divine personage and a universal
humanized principle of life and light.’’ All humans were included in his being,
as ‘‘weak and imperfect’’ selves were ‘‘merged in the grand unity of the divinehuman
principle, the divine humanity of the Lord, which is the Christ.’’ Still
further, if all existed as part of this Christic whole, the Christ Idea aimed ‘‘to realize
itself in every human being.’’ The ‘‘Christ within’’ purposed to ‘‘save even the
body.’’122 It was no surprise, then, that hard on the heels of this book on ‘‘transcendental
medicine and practical metaphysics’’ Evans produced, as his final
work, Esoteric Christianity and Mental Therapeutics (1886). Here the idealism
seems still more encompassing, yet ambiguous. ‘‘What we call matter, including
the gross material body,’’ he announced, ‘‘has existence only as a false seeming.
The supreme reality in the universe is spirit.’’ What would become familiar New
Thought maxims abounded: ‘‘All that is is God, and hence is good,’’ and ‘‘all that
which is is included in God.’’ ‘‘Disease, when viewed as an evil,’’ had ‘‘no existence
except as an illusion or deceptive sensuous appearance.’’ It was ‘‘a nihility,
Spirits Reformed and Reconstituted 311
or nothingness,’’ and, indeed, ‘‘an empty show.’’ ‘‘To emancipate the inward and
real man from his imprisonment in matter and an illusory body’’ was ‘‘to cure
disease.’’123
At first glance, the language of the Evans manifesto suggests a near resemblance
to the absolute idealism of Eddy. From Christian Science quarters, however,
the response was vitriolic. An unnamed ‘‘Christian Scientist,’’ who may have
been Eddy herself, used the lead article of one issue of The Christian Science
Journal to inveigh against a book that looked suspiciously like ‘‘a twin of Theosophy.’’
Evans’s work was ‘‘a mad attempt to force Christianity . . . into the farcical
groves of Occultism,’’ to make the ‘‘doctrine’’ of Jesus ‘‘synonymous with Hindoo
occultism.’’ The reviewer was horrified to discover that, in Evans’s pages, ‘‘each
individual’’ was ‘‘a spirit,—not God, but a god’’ and that matter was a ‘‘divine
substance.’’ Eddy and other Christian Scientists of her school had good reason
to be upset. Evans had declared that—even if what was called matter was ‘‘not
matter’’ but ‘‘unreal and an illusion’’—matter ‘‘in itself’’ was ‘‘not evil.’’ He had
told readers that ‘‘in its reality and inmost essence,’’ matter was ‘‘divine—the second
emanative principle from God.’’ It was only when matter took ‘‘dominion
over spirit’’ that it became evil, because it had usurped God’s place and had thus
become ‘‘idolatrous.’’ Evans took care to underline his point: ‘‘Matter as it is in
itself, and in its place, is an invisible, divine, and immortal substance. It is the
correlative of spirit—a manifestation of spirit.’’124
Still more, Evans’s affirmation of the goodness of matter was eclipsed by his
emphasis on divine goodness, bringing a marked rhetorical departure to his work
when compared to that of Eddy. Certainly, Eddy testified to the goodness of God,
and it would be difficult to argue otherwise. That acknowledged, however, it is
significant that as early as 1876, in her first published version of the ‘‘scientific
statement of being,’’ Eddy’s catalog of Truth had included no reference to the
goodness of God—nor did the standard 1906 statement in Science and Health.
By contrast, Evans—with the Arminianized Christianity of his Methodist background
and his Swedenborgian-spiritualist engraftment upon it—had put a large
premium on the divine goodness, and he did not let readers forget. The preference
would likewise come to characterize the discourse community of New
Thought in ways that identify it clearly as different from Christian Science.125 For
Evans, the ‘‘manifested God’’ was the same as the Platonic Idea of the Good, as
‘‘the supreme and eternal Goodness,’’ and as the ‘‘Christ of Paul.’’ Still more, the
place of this Christ was twofold—first, as ‘‘the Universal Christ’’ and ‘‘God of the
macrocosm,’’ and, second, as ‘‘the Christ within’’ and ‘‘God of the microcosmic
man.’’ Evans aimed to assist ‘‘the student of Christian Theosophy’’ in exploring
‘‘the inner realm of truth.’’ Here the ‘‘unchanging i am’’ dwelled as ‘‘the Christ
312 Arrivals
within us, whose divine name is Ehejah, or I Am, that is the One and the Same.’’
‘‘So as soon as we get the true idea of our real Self, the unchanging and undying
I Am, and that the real man is not sick,’’ Evans exhorted, ‘‘we cannot avoid the
consciousness of an impulse to act out the idea and play the part of health.’’ Told
in the language of the Hermetic tradition, the assertion of divine humanity was
as striking. ‘‘It has ever been a doctrine of the esoteric philosophy and a religion
of all ages and nations,’’ wrote Evans, ‘‘that each immortal spirit is a direct emanation
from the ‘Unknown God.’ . . . Each individual spirit is [as The Christian
Science Journal had been dismayed to note] not God, but a god, and is possessed
of all the attributes of its parent source, among which are omniscience and omnipotence.’’
The human spirit possessed ‘‘deific powers.’’126
With humans as gods, Evans had biblicized the Hermetic teaching as he
articulated the ‘‘I Am’’ consciousness. The formula would continue in New
Thought throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, even as
it also functioned in theosophical culture in, for example, the early-twentiethcentury
Guy Ballard movement and, later, in the work of Elizabeth Clare
Prophet.127 Beyond that, in his proclamation of the divine humanity, Evans had
arguably undercut his idealism once more and brought to it a further degree of
conceptual ambiguity. New Thought would continue to live with the conceptual
crack as its language community and its practice affirmed and dissolved idealism
at once, teaching illusion and the divine goodness of creation at the same time.
There was an ironic symmetry in the eagerness with which the New Thought
community embraced Emerson as a founder and way-shower since he, too, had
been caught in the conceptual crack between idealism and a wholehearted affirmation
of the natural order.
Meanwhile, Evans had also articulated what became the New Thought language
of ‘‘the silence.’’ Recommending ‘‘tranquil and silent trust in the Christ,’’
he countenanced silence for the sick as he invoked the ‘‘ancient wisdom, ‘Be still,
and know that I am God.’’’ The healer, too, ‘‘should wait in the silence that lies
at the heart of things.’’ Evans recommended deep breathing, evoking the Holy
Spirit as the ‘‘breath of God’’ and likewise pointing to the Hermetic ‘‘Universal
Aether’’ and the Kabbalah. Almost he seemed a yogi as he encouraged following
the breath calmly, as close as possible to ‘‘the passive attitude of sleep.’’ And if his
mentalism did not preclude attention to the physiological process of breathing,
in still another stance he signaled New Thought practice to come and separated
it from Eddy’s Christian Science. Evans found a place, if auxiliary, for the regular
physician. ‘‘No intelligent practitioner of the mind-cure will ignore wholly
all medical science,’’ he admonished. ‘‘Mind is the only active principle in the
Spirits Reformed and Reconstituted 313
universe. The mind of a skillful surgeon performs marvels in saving the lives of
people.’’128
How influential were Evans’s books? How did they affect the New Thought
community that, by the mid-1880s, when Evans published his last two, was just
beginning to take shape? We get some, if indirect, answers in the little we know
of their publishing history. Charles Braden found a seventh edition of Evans’s
first book, The Mental-Cure of 1869, published in 1885, and also reference to a
ninth edition without a publication date. And according to Beryl Satter, this work
was translated into several foreign languages. Braden noted, too, that the copy of
Mental Medicine (1872), Evans’s second book, held by the Library of Congress
was the fifteenth edition, also issued in 1885. There was at least one other edition
of The Divine Law of Cure (1881) available in 1884. The copy of The Primitive
Mind-Cure (1885) that I have used announces itself to be a fifth edition published
in 1886—just one year after the first edition. Although we do not know the
size of any of these editions, the reprintings (for they apparently were that) are remarkable
for a man who built no organization and, from reports of meetings and
activities of the era, kept a low public profile. As Braden observed, Eddy’s Science
and Health of 1875 reached its thirteenth edition a decade later in 1885—with
‘‘the advantage of a rapidly expanding organization to aid in its circulation during
a part of this period, while Evans had at most only a small sanitarium where
he carried on his healing work.’’ Advertisements for Evans’s books appeared in
New Thought periodicals from the late 1880s (when the periodicals themselves
began to appear) until at least the close of the nineteenth century. Major public
libraries acquired the titles, and they could be found as well in the libraries of
most New Thought centers and leaders. As one example of their role, H. Emilie
Cady—whose own works were later to achieve an authoritative status in the Unity
School of Christianity founded by Charles and Myrtle Fillmore—was converted
to New Thought by reading Evans’s books. Meanwhile, evidence of the reliance
of Emma Curtis Hopkins on Evans is compelling, and Fillmore himself called
Evans’s works ‘‘the most complete of all metaphysical compilations.’’129
At the very least, Evans modeled the transformation of the thought world of
parts of an aging spiritualist community as it entered a new era under the joint
impress of Christian Science and Theosophy. His emphases and ideas—divine
goodness, the ambiguous maternity of God, the ‘‘I Am’’ presence and the Christ
(who was separable from Jesus) within, the silence, affirmative prayer and mental
suggestion, the spiritual body—all of these presaged a coming New Thought
universe and discourse community. Evans’s ambivalent idealism, with its real and
yet illusory natural order, sought to embrace both science and spirit, both the
314 Arrivals
Hermetic tradition of the West and Hindu, Buddhist, and even Muslim sources
in ways that would mark a new metaphysical discourse in the waning nineteenth
century and beyond.
Others, however, were advancing the conversation through more organized
healing work. Quimby’s students Julius Dresser and Annetta Seabury Dresser
made their way to Boston and began to teach and practice there, even as Eddy’s
star was rising in the East Coast city. For Julius Dresser, at least, the mental healing
ministry he now took up represented a decided about-face. Not two weeks
after Eddy’s catalytic fall on the ice in Lynn, she had written to Dresser for mental
healing support, but—in Yarmouth, Maine, working as a journalist—he had
expressed a remoteness from Quimby and a disregard for his work. Sixteen years
later, however, and living in California, Julius Dresser changed his mind. He
came back east and took Christian Science lessons with his wife, Annetta, from
Edward J. Arens, Eddy’s former student and now strong enemy. For whatever
reasons (Eddy’s recent biographer Gillian Gill suggests greed; the New Thought
account, anger and upset that Eddy was no longer acknowledging Quimby), the
Dressers immersed themselves in the work. They did so in a Boston that, by
the 1880s, was rife with metaphysical healers, numbers of them former Eddy
students. It was this mix of independent mental healers and former Eddyites,
often now assuming the generic Christian Science name, that coalesced as New
Thought in the decade that followed.130
Exchanges between the Eddy group and the looser mental healing community
were generally conflictual, with controversy over Quimby dominating much
of the public discourse. (At least this is the story as it was later reconstructed
in the nonprofessional first history of New Thought by the philosopher son of
the Dressers, Horatio Dresser.) But the healing work went on—lessons, practice,
and wider public lectures. So did the work of an emerging New Thought press,
with books and periodicals that underlined the cognizing instincts of the mental
science confraternity. The Dressers produced a circular in 1884, and by 1887
Julius Dresser saw the publication of his book The True History of Mental Science.
The comprehensive nature of the movement’s purview was indicated by
some of these early works. For example, Mathilda J. Barnett’s Practical Metaphysics
(1887), according to J. Stillson Judah, reflected theosophical principles
in its exposition of metaphysics; William J. Colville’s Spiritual Science of Health
and Healing the same year expressed his own background in spiritualism with
the ‘‘inspirational’’ suggestion of its extended title.131
The Church of the Divine Unity (where Dresser—himself once a candidate
for the Calvinist Baptist ministry—had delivered the lectures later incorporated
into his mental-science book) became one of the first of the quasi–New Thought
Spirits Reformed and Reconstituted 315
churches. It had been founded in 1886 by Jonathan W. Winkley, once a Unitarian
minister and also an Eddy follower, who would later, in 1900, inaugurate the
journal Practical Ideals. A year earlier, from 1885, Elizabeth Stuart—an Arens
student (after he had broken with Eddy) who went on to take a Christian Science
course from Eddy in 1881—became the catalyst for the formation of ‘‘Light,
Love, Truth’’ in Massachusetts and New York. A Connecticut group was brought
under the aegis of the organization in 1888, and in each of its locations, according
to Gary Ward Materra, all of the known officers were women.132
From its early beginnings, however, the emerging New Thought movement
was national in scope—a reality obscured by the East Coast orientation of Horatio
Dresser’s pioneering history (with its preoccupation with the Quimby-Eddy
controversy) and its shaping influence on subsequent scholarship. Newer work,
though, has told a different story of widespread New Thought foundations, beginning
in the 1880s in the Midwest and Far West and spreading to numerous
locations. ‘‘The movement’s heart and soul lay in the western states,’’ Beryl Satter
has observed. In a networking pattern that imitated séance spiritualism and,
on a smaller scale, Theosophy and that augured the future of metaphysics, New
Thought women and men fanned out as independent healer-teachers in places
large and small. By 1902, an article in the American Monthly Review of Reviews
claimed over a million followers. If any one figure could be identified as a major
influence on the early phases of this growth, that person was Emma Curtis Hopkins
(1849–1925). Indeed, both J. Gordon Melton and Gail M. Harley have read
her as the ‘‘founder’’ of New Thought, and although that assessment arguably
oversimplifies the complexity of an act of foundation, it does point to the abiding
importance of Hopkins’s role. Even in the 1960s, Charles Braden acknowledged
her reputation in New Thought circles as ‘‘the teacher’s teacher.’’133
Who was Emma Curtis Hopkins? What did she do for New Thought theology
and practice to suggest the titles that scholars have conferred on her, and how
did she do it? Born in a Connecticut farming family as Josephine Emma Curtis,
she acquired some education and married George Irving Hopkins, a high-school
English teacher, in 1874. Their son John Carver Hopkins lived until 1905, but
by that time his parents had long been separated, and his father had divorced
his mother for ‘‘abandonment.’’ What Hopkins had abandoned her husband for
was the Christian Science teaching of Mary Baker Eddy. She had met Eddy in
Manchester, New Hampshire, where Hopkins was living, had listened to Eddy
testify to Christian Science, and had experienced a healing that she attributed to
the work of the local Christian Science practitioner. After an exchange of letters,
Hopkins traveled to Boston, enrolled in an Eddy class at the end of 1883, and by
1884 was listed as a practitioner in The Journal of Christian Science. The same
316 Arrivals
year she resigned from the Congregational church of her childhood to become
a member of the First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Boston. A few months later
she was working without pay as editor of Eddy’s journal.134
But the honeymoon period in Hopkins’s relationship with Eddy was soon over.
For reasons that are shrouded and unclear but that suggest, most persuasively,
her 1885 editorial ‘‘Teachers of Metaphysics,’’ Hopkins was dismissed after some
thirteen months and ordered out of her (Christian Science) lodging. Satter has
noted Hopkins’s mystical language in the piece, with the editor—after contact
with Eddy’s teaching on ‘‘Spiritual Being’’—claiming to know God ‘‘face to face’’
and thus implying, at least for Eddy, that Hopkins was her peer. Hopkins wrote
that she had ‘‘realized the reward ‘to him that overcometh’ for an interval brief
but long enough to fix forever in my mind the sweet consummation of faithful endeavor.’’
Others have pointed to Hopkins’s friendship with another student, Mary
Plunkett, who for a variety of reasons was troubling Eddy.135 At any rate, Hopkins
was never given any explanation, and she never publicly repudiated Eddy; in fact
she wrote her letters, even after the firing, to express her regard for her former
teacher. Still, from the first, Hopkins had been moving to a drumbeat different
from the one that Eddy heard. Her earliest article for Eddy’s Christian Science
journal already signaled her theosophical interests, and her theology would develop
in the immanentist and mystical directions that marked New Thought.
Hopkins was also decidedly feminist, interested in social-action causes, intimate
—especially in her later New York years—with a literary and artistic community,
and considerably tolerant of views other than her own. Publicly, she continued
to maintain the low profile that made her barely visible in earlier histories of New
Thought.
Hopkins moved to Chicago after leaving Eddy, first editing Andrew J. Swarts’s
Mind Cure Journal and then, with Mary Plunkett, establishing the Emma Curtis
Hopkins College of Christian Science in 1886. One report from the 1920s
claimed that some six hundred students participated in Hopkins’s classes within
a year. Meanwhile, the students formed the Hopkins Metaphysical Association,
which spawned branches in numerous other places. Even with her teaching responsibilities,
Hopkins did not stay home but traveled around the country to
offer classes and form further outposts for her organization. For example, in 1887
she was in San Francisco, where she met Malinda Cramer, who later went on
to found, with Nona Brooks, the Church of Divine Science. Later in the year
Hopkins taught in Milwaukee and then in New York City, where her class included
H. Emilie Cady. Hopkins and Plunkett together created Truth magazine
as the official voice of the local Hopkins Metaphysical Associations, the national
convention of which they held in Boston toward the end of 1887. By the end of
Spirits Reformed and Reconstituted 317
that year, according to Materra, the Hopkins groups numbered twenty-one, extending
from Maine to California and functioning as the earliest national New
Thought organization.136
Plunkett (and her husband) subsequently moved to New York City, taking
Truth with them and changing its name to The International Magazine of Christian
Science. There followed a period of some cooperation and also the birth
of a new Chicago journal called Christian Science, edited by Ida Nichols with
much support from Hopkins. But Mary Plunkett’s ‘‘spiritual marriage’’ to A. Bentley
Worthington (later exposed as a bigamist with at least eight wives)—while
she was legally married to John Plunkett—heaped scandal on the New Thought
effort in New York. Plunkett and Worthington found it opportune to resettle in
Christchurch, New Zealand, and to carry on their New Thought work there.
In Chicago, however, Hopkins and her teaching remained relatively unscathed.
More important, it had become independent, and, in the context of the upheaval,
Hopkins converted her college into a seminary and ordained its graduates,
overwhelmingly women. ‘‘Christian Science is not a business or profession,’’
she was reported to have said. ‘‘It is a ministry.’’137 Her Christian Science
Theological Seminary functioned successfully until 1894, when—fatigued by
her efforts on many fronts and by infighting at the seminary—she moved to New
York City. She conducted classes and did healing work there, traveling on the
East Coast and also to England and Italy. During her Chicago time, Hopkins
taught Charles and Myrtle Fillmore, who founded Unity, and during her New
York years, she taught Ernest Holmes, who founded Religious Science. Nona
Brooks, who studied with Hopkins, co-founded Divine Science with Cramer;
still another student, Annie Rix Militz, founded the Homes of Truth; and yet another,
Frances Lord, carried New Thought to England. Hopkins’s student Helen
(Nellie) Van Anderson in 1894 began the self-consciously New Thought group
in Boston called the ‘‘Church of the Higher Life.’’ A series of other Hopkins students,
well known in movement circles, spread out across the nation, bringing
the Hopkins brand of metaphysics to numerous local communities.
We get a rare vignette of the Hopkins teaching style during the Chicago years
in one news report from the Kansas City Christian Science Thought for 1890.
There Hopkins, who was teaching a class at the Kansas City College of Christian
Science, is portrayed as a charismatic woman with extraordinary powers. The
unnamed author (was it Charles Fillmore, who edited the journal?) told readers:
‘‘After an eloquent burst of oratory, the teacher said with a peculiar quiet vehemence,
‘God is Life, Love and Truth,’ long tongues of flame shot out from her
vicinity and filled the room with a rosy light that continued throughout the remainder
of the lecture to roll over the class in waves and ripples of what seemed
318 Arrivals
golden sunlight.’’ The writer apparently had checked with others. ‘‘Many saw it
plainly while others sensed its uplifting presence in the room. We felt that we
had almost experienced a modern day of Pentacost [sic].’’138
Gail Harley, however, has distinguished between Hopkins’s Chicago years and
her New York period, and the distinction is a useful one.139 The Chicago Hopkins
followed the Eddy gospel more faithfully, although, to be sure, she departed from
it in marked and consistent ways. In the New York years, by contrast, Hopkins
barely reiterated the basic Christian Science formula regarding the nonexistence
of matter and mostly soared into a mystical stratosphere that seemed to reflect
direct experience as well as—most likely—Evans, Blavatsky, and similar sources.
In both periods, though, Hopkins’s material was mostly derivative—one reason
why the ‘‘founder’’ attribution seems strained at best—although, as we will see,
in at least two ways she did introduce new material or emphases into the theological
mix that became New Thought. Beryl Satter has argued that Hopkins
attracted people with quite different perspectives because she brought together
both Eddy and Evans, and Hopkins certainly did that. Even here, however, she
had probably been preceded in uniting Eddy with Evans by the former Methodist
minister and spiritualist Andrew J. Swarts and his mediumistic wife, Katie L.
Swarts, in their Mental Science school in Chicago. More than that, in Hopkins’s
work the alliance of Eddy and Evans was far more uneasy than the Satter analysis
allows.140 The tensions in the theological constructions of Quimby and Evans
emerge from their work as somewhat soft and malleable—cracks in the structure
on the order of the now-classic crack in Emerson’s Nature. By contrast, Eddy
opted for greater consistency and greater absolutism. It remained for Hopkins to
attempt a union of the absolutism of the Eddy Christian Science message with
the plasticity of the Evans construction. In brief, Evans was theosophical; Eddy
was not. Hopkins did not unify their teaching but rather juxtaposed it. If there
was a resolution at all, it came only in the New York period when Hopkins’s High
Mysticism paid lip service to Eddy but mostly spent its energies (and readers’)
in an impassioned declaration of what, by the mid-twentieth century and after
Aldous Huxley, would become known as the perennial philosophy.141
Hopkins’s publishing habits made it difficult for later admirers to gather her
corpus effectively. Often, she produced pamphlets that constitute brief monograph
lessons—almost sermons—on selected themes. Her Bible lessons appeared
in the Chicago Inter-Ocean (newspaper) from 1890 through 1898. Other publications
include class lessons that she had used in her teachings and her ordination
addresses. Thus her publishing history is hard at best to reconstruct. For all
that, enough material is available to provide snapshots of the Hopkins theology
at key points in her metaphysical career, and these snapshots tell us that through
Spirits Reformed and Reconstituted 319
the teaching of Hopkins, gradually Mary Baker Eddy quietly shifted backstage in
the New Thought community and a more globally inclusive Evans style moved
to the center. This is true even if in later New Thought, as we will see, only one
of two major wings of the movement could trace its instincts to the Hopkins theology—a
situation that, again, makes the attribution of New Thought foundation
to Hopkins problematic.
Hopkins’s first article in Eddy’s Journal of Christian Science (April 1884) provides
already an important clue to the different (from Eddy) cultural world in
which she lived. In a piece of eleven brief paragraphs, Hopkins managed to
cite ‘‘Buddhist Nirvana,’’ ‘‘Algazel, a Mohammedan philosopher of the twelfth
century,’’ Spinoza, Confucius, the Persian ‘‘Zend-Avest,’’ the Chandogya Upanishad,
the ‘‘Persian Desatir,’’ and the Hebrews. She sometimes quoted from these
sources, no doubt as they were quoted in other works—Evans?—she had been
reading. Her point was God’s omnipresence and the ‘‘blessed evidence’’ she
found of ‘‘universal goodness’’ and divine ‘‘impartiality’’ in the manifestation of
God ‘‘to every people and nation of the earth.’’ By November of the same year,
for all God’s universality, she was hailing the special manifestation of the divine
in the Christian Science founder. Eddy’s direct predecessor in giving the world a
‘‘system of ethics’’ with health as its ‘‘practical application’’ was ‘‘Jesus, the Christ.’’
And in an apparent allusion to the Quimby controversy, Hopkins defended Eddy
in remarkably feminist terms. From ‘‘many quarters’’ came ‘‘the bold denial of her
right to her own work.’’ Why was this so? ‘‘Because it is a woman whom God hath
chosen, this time, to be His messenger, and not Jesus or Saul.’’ Hopkins pushed on
to the general conclusion: ‘‘But Woman’s hour has struck. Who can doubt it? The
motherhood of God beats in the bosom of time, with waking energy, today.’’142
As Gail Harley has shown, the Mother God—more noticeably than the FatherMother
God of Eddy—was a distinct (and new) Hopkins emphasis. In a millennialist
division of history that echoed the twelfth-century Joachim of Fiore
or the later Emanuel Swedenborg with his announcement, reiterated in Evans,
of a New Age, Hopkins proclaimed a coming third age of the Holy Ghost. This
Holy Ghost, however, was distinctly feminine—identified with the Shekinah of
the Hebrew Bible as well as with the New Testament Spirit—and was also a sign
of a feminist future to be. The coming age would be a better era than before, and
Hopkins—far more than Eddy—avidly supported social reform causes. Meanwhile,
her pamphlet essay The Ministry of the Holy Mother appeared during her
Chicago years. In it the divine Mother was conjoined to both the Spirit and ministry
of God in a mystical statement that was also a declaration about service and
about Hopkins’s conviction that any adequate idea of God required the feminine.143
Likewise, her ordination addresses during these years regularly invoked
320 Arrivals
the motherhood of God in the Holy Spirit. The Father-Mother God was still in
charge, for Hopkins, and was never eclipsed by a sole reliance on the Mother.
Still, the Mother received her due in Hopkins’s thinking more than the divine
feminine ever would later in New Thought. After the leadership of women in the
initiating years of the movement, by the early decades of the twentieth century
a new generation of men would rise to prominence as leaders, and the Mother
would recede.
A second new emphasis in Hopkins survived—indeed blatantly—in the New
Thought movement. This was Hopkins’s evolving gospel of prosperity, a teaching
that may have been related to her own struggle with poverty in the early
years of her failed marriage with George Irving Hopkins. In fact, when Hopkins
first negotiated with Eddy to become part of a Christian Science class in Boston,
she had to explain her husband’s indebtedness and her inability to come
up with funding to support her educational goals. She worked out a special arrangement
with Eddy.144 Hence, as early as Hopkins’s ‘‘Ordination Address’’ to
her first graduating class of seminarians published in 1889, she was subtly noticing
more than divine healing activity. She saw her graduates among those who
were ‘‘ministers of the gospel of The Good,’’ and she pointed to the work of Jesus
in which ‘‘the poor were helped and fed.’’ She linked her class with those who
proclaimed a ‘‘New Dispensation of the Holy Spirit,’’ a new order ‘‘wherein the
poor may be taught and befriended, women walk fearless and glad, and childhood
be safe and free.’’ Christian Scientists, for her, declared ‘‘the omnipresence
of God the Good and deny the presence or working power of any other Principle
but the Good.’’ More than that, it was women, linked to the ‘‘Mother God’’ in
‘‘the Holy Spirit of Scripture,’’ who especially pointed toward the emphatic reading
of God as good. ‘‘Woman’s voice—the mother heart of the world,’’ Hopkins
told her graduates, was now proclaiming ‘‘the omnipresence, omnipotence and
omniscience of The Good.’’145
These suggestions grew less subtle in Hopkins’s formal lecture from the Chicago
period ‘‘How to Attain Your Good.’’ Cast in a markedly different frame
from Eddy’s Christian Science, Hopkins’s work began with a theosophical and
Evans-style ‘‘fine etheric Substance pervading all the worlds of the universe.’’
Hopkins called it ‘‘Cosmic Substance’’ and supplied as synonyms for it ‘‘Mother’’
or ‘‘Mother-Principle’’ as well as ‘‘God-Substance.’’ The human mind was ‘‘made
out of this omnipresent Mother,’’ and the ‘‘etheric substance’’ that ‘‘the common
thought and word use’’ was ‘‘only a rough shadowing forth of the truly omnipresent
Substance.’’ The ancient Egyptians (not the Hebrews) called it ‘‘the I Am
of the world,’’ and Jesus called it ‘‘Spirit’’ and a series of other titles including
‘‘God,’’ ‘‘Father,’’ and ‘‘Love.’’ Hopkins herself said it was the ‘‘Good-Substance.’’
Spirits Reformed and Reconstituted 321
She went on to invoke, like a mantra, a repeated affirmation: ‘‘There is good for
me, and I ought to have it.’’ What did the good mean for the aspiring Truth student?
Among the series of explanations, many of them generic and noetic, Hopkins
found her way to tangibility and profit. ‘‘Everything is really full of love for
you. You love the good that is for you,’’ she told students. ‘‘You can make the connection
between yourself and prosperity by saying that the good that is for you
is love.’’ With God equated with ‘‘Love’’ and ‘‘Good,’’ ‘‘all things poured down
blessings into the lap of Jesus Christ because he knew everything loved him.’’146
So, apparently, would it happen for Truth students. If the New Thought Statement
of Being posited Good at its center, it followed that abundance on earth
was one result.
In Scientific Christian Mental Practice, also a product of the Chicago years,
Hopkins continued to weave a gospel of prosperity quietly into her teaching.
Here was none of the flamboyance that would come to characterize the later
New Thought pursuit of the prosperous, nor any of the mechanical formulas that
would by then accompany the prosperity message. In a work structured—like
Eddy’s own work—on denials, first, and then affirmations, Hopkins announced
to readers a series of five ‘‘universal affirmations.’’ Here the first began ‘‘my Good
is my God,’’ and the others moved in increasingly mystical directions, invoking
identity with Spirit, with the ‘‘i am’’ presence, and with an absence of the ability to
sin. With the use of the ‘‘right word’’ and the proclamation of one’s freedom, she
told readers, each of them would ‘‘soon be more prosperous.’’ Scientists should
experience neither poverty nor grief, and one of the things they should do was
to ‘‘talk for prosperity,’’ using the affirmation ‘‘I believe in prosperity and success.’’
They should ‘‘covenant with Spirit’’ for support and do nothing for it, because
support was ‘‘the providence of the Spirit.’’ In a negative example, Hopkins held
up one pastor of an English mission who ‘‘was very much pleased that he got his
expenses paid by praying for them, and had about $14.00 left over.’’ Her unflattering
conclusion: ‘‘As all the wealth of the earth was offered him you can see that
he was not especially honoring God by having such a little bit at his disposal.’’ By
contrast, Hopkins’s good news of prosperity was predictive. ‘‘Men may gather all
the gold into a lump, and say you cannot have any, but by some way of the Spirit
you will come out with more abundant riches than all the rest put together.’’147
By the time Hopkins wrote the material in High Mysticism, healing, prosperity,
and similar concerns receded before a unitive consciousness that dominates
the studies that formed the book. Evoking ‘‘John the Revelator’’ in a series of
twelve visionary explorations probably first published separately, Hopkins’s work
illustrates why the harmonial label is problematic not only for Christian Science
but also for a major lineage of New Thought. If the word harmony appears from
322 Arrivals
time to time in Hopkins’s discourse, her message is hardly one of ‘‘rapport with
the cosmos.’’ Instead, a radical immanence prevails in these studies, in which the
language of Self-recognition and the God-Self translates the theosophized religiosity
of a dizzying catalog of traditions into an American New Thought argot.
These were surely traditions imbibed at second hand—from Evans and perhaps
Blavatsky (Hopkins at least once referred to the ‘‘secret doctrine,’’ the title of Blavatsky’s
seminal work to be examined in the next chapter) and similar authors.
What is important here, however, is how Hopkins shaped them into American
metaphysics. ‘‘When half gods go the gods arrive,’’ announced Hopkins, and she
staked out the required denials (no evil, matter, loss or lack or deprivation, fearful
thing, sin or sickness or death). But they cleared the way for affirmations that—
while they certainly reproduce the health and blessing of New Thought expectation—are
something more: mystical statements of divine identity that mince
no words and leave no space for human failure. ‘‘Highest God and inmost God
is One God,’’ Hopkins declared. ‘‘Our own Soul, our own free Spirit forever says,
in bold faith, ‘I am Truth, I am God—Omnipresence, Omnipotence, Omni-
science.’’’148
Hopkins was evoking what I am calling the enlightened body-self, a construction
of human personality and life that had been presaged in a vernacular American
context as far back as the early Mormonism of Joseph Smith with its message
of a divine future for humans. For Hopkins and the new American metaphysics,
however, the future was now, and the future was here on earth. If the transcendent
had become immanent in this Christian world gone theosophical, where
the mystical language of many traditions pointed toward a secret Self that moved
the world, somehow the ego—ennobled, transfigured, and exalted, but still the
ego—had tiptoed behind the Self. What resulted was not quite the crass and glib
formula that has been applied dismissively to New Thought—‘‘health and wealth
and metaphysics.’’ What followed, still, was something more tangible, more practical
and concrete, than the already-pragmatism of the Hermetic past—and this
because it more boldly championed the garden of delight on an earth properly
viewed and employed. Beryl Satter’s reading of a debate and then a shift from
an anti-desire rhetoric in New Thought to a clear language of desire in the early
twentieth century surely speaks to the point here.149 The secret and this-worldly
history of the Self would be a leading reason why, by the twentieth century, as
we shall see, some Americans became interested in South Asian tantrism. And
this was why, too, in their unitive consciousness many metaphysicians turned—
like earlier spiritualists and Theosophists—to concerns about social reform. As
New Thought read the script, the soul’s journey in the hereafter paled before the
significance of a mystical present that could be paradise.
Spirits Reformed and Reconstituted 323
The New Thought Hermeticists were mostly white and middle class, and they
linked their vision of paradise to the progressivism of their era. Interest in woman
suffrage and a general feminist agenda ran high, as it had for Hopkins, but metaphysicians
branched out to embrace other issues and causes as well. In fact, Gary
Ward Materra has argued that the Hopkins brand of New Thought represented
one of two divergent styles in the early movement. Materra identifies it as ‘‘affective’’
in orientation, characterized by ‘‘emphasis on the Bible, healing, and the
needs of families and communities.’’ Hopkins and those who imitated her understood
their enterprise as religion through and through. They held to a vision of
unity among all things and people, thought about relational ethics, and were concerned,
for example, about their children as well as about church building and
networking. Predominantly women, they were often feminists and social activists,
unabashed in their criticism of prevailing social and economic mores and
willing to entertain ideas of social reconstruction that extended, sometimes, even
to socialism. A number of New Thought women found fault with capitalism in
its unrelieved pursuit of profit for its own sake, even as they worked to improve
the conditions of the poor.150
Examples abound within the Hopkins Metaphysical Association and outside
it. Helen van Anderson, in Boston, used the church she formed to encourage
a Young People’s Club as a service organization for ‘‘hospitals, reformatories, or
private homes,’’ while a different committee brought New Thought teachings to
poor and sick people in their own communities. The Circle of Divine Ministry
in New York City in 1897 decided to open a room ‘‘in the lower part of the city,’’
so that ‘‘some much-neglected classes of its inhabitants, boys and so-called criminals’’
could be reached. The Denver-based Church of Divine Science staffed a
day nursery for the children of working-class mothers, and the church also aided
a group that worked with tuberculosis-ridden men without means. Nona Brooks,
its co-founder, spent seven years as the secretary of the Colorado Prison Association.
In San Francisco, the earliest Home of Truth offered free meals and clothing
to the poor through a branch office. The San Francisco Home of Truth also
for a time created a shelter for homeless men.151
New Thought people threw themselves into the settlement house movement
of the end of the century, beginning a metaphysical version of a settlement house
in 1895 in the Roxbury District of Boston. They also moved to riskier public
stances, as, for instance, in the outspoken antiwar rhetoric of Catherine Barton
and Elizabeth Towne. Nor were analyses of social problems simplistic and
naive. Barton, for example, commented on crime and criminals with the observation
of shared guilt on the part of all: ‘‘We have so constructed our social,
ethical, and religious fabric that crime is a natural outcome.’’ Anita True-
324 Arrivals
man did not think that New Thought, with its prosperity thinking, would by
itself cure the condition of a man out of a job because of economic depression.
Rather, New Thought believers needed to ‘‘readjust those conditions which enrich
the monopolist while he robs the people of even the opportunity to work.’’152
Meanwhile, as Beryl Satter notes, individuals with New Thought ties, such as
Abby Morton Diaz and Mary Livermore, embraced the form of socialism advocated
by Edward Bellamy’s novel Looking Backward (1888), which brought in
its train a series of Bellamy Clubs across the nation. Former Episcopalian pastor
R. Heber Newton in 1885 had joined Richard Ely’s American Economic
Association with its advocacy of government intervention on behalf of the disadvantaged
but by 1899 found in New Thought a religion that buttressed his
politics better than Episcopalianism had. He presided over the International
Metaphysical League in 1900, 1902, and 1906, and he served as an officer in
the New Thought Federation in 1904. Congregationalist minister Benjamin Fay
Mills, with a history of attacking monopolies and praising socialism, likewise became
a New Thought fellow traveler by 1905, founding a Los Angeles ‘‘Fellowship,’’
which Satter describes as ‘‘indistinguishable’’ in its beliefs and goals from
New Thought. Other reforming clergy among Protestants also moved into New
Thought—among them Hugh O. Pentecost, Henry Frank, J. Stitt Wilson, and
George Herron. They sought, as Satter recounts, the victory of ‘‘‘altruism over
selfism’’’ as well as the pursuit of human perfection.153
Ralph Waldo Trine, author of the classic In Tune with the Infinite (1897), was
an out-and-out New Thought socialist. But he was hardly alone, and much of his
company was female. Indeed, Materra concludes on the basis of his study that
‘‘women forged the primary links between New Thought and socialism.’’ Thus
Malinda Cramer, who co-founded Divine Science, castigated the ‘‘competitive
system’’ as the ‘‘offspring of brute evolution’’ that bore ‘‘no relation to the divine
methods of ‘each for all, and all for each.’’’ Josephine Conger, who spent two
years at radical Ruskin College in Trenton, Missouri, and there converted to socialism,
later threw herself into the socialist women’s movement. She functioned
as its leading editor and at the same time acknowledged her New Thought commitments
in the socialist print periodical world. ‘‘All the great men and women
of the world have believed in what we call New Thought,’’ she told readers of a
1903 issue of Appeal to Reason. Moreover, if a socialist organ such as Appeal to
Reason could missionize for New Thought, at least one New Thought paper, Social
Ethics, was also the official mouthpiece of the Socialist party in the state of
Kansas. Similarly, The New Life of Lewiston, Idaho, straddled the line between
its New Thought origins and its later socialist testimonies.154
What was it about New Thought that fostered socialism and a social action
Spirits Reformed and Reconstituted 325
agenda, in general? Part of the answer lies in the vernacular environment in
which early New Thought flourished—with its historic roots in midcentury spiritualism
and the reform commitments that came as part of spiritualist social culture.
When the cultural turn of the 1870s occurred and a generalized theosophical
perspective was born, reform commitments continued to run high, as the
official Theosophical Society rhetoric of the ‘‘brotherhood of man’’ suggests. The
midwestern and western spread of New Thought—to areas less immured in tradition
than the bastions of East Coast conservatism—also brought with it a populace
more likely to turn in liberal, and radical, social directions. Kansas, after all,
had not acquired a reputation as a radical state for nothing. However, beyond
these social reasons for a New Thought–socialist and social-reform alliance, the
theological vision of the New Thought movement needs to be noticed. A message
of divine immanence and unity, of all as children of the one God the Good,
from one perspective sat well with social reform for a more even distribution
of goods. Put another way, socialism provided a better conceptual fit for New
Thought than did laissez-faire or capitalist pursuit of individual aggrandizement,
pace Donald Meyer’s well-known reading of the ‘‘mind-cure’’ gospel of success.155
For all this social-action agenda within New Thought, however, a second style
—one that made Meyer at least partly right—came to dominate New Thought
after the new century began. Materra calls it ‘‘noetic.’’ In some sense, even this
style could be laid, technically, at the feet of Hopkins, because its early representative—with
whom Materra associates the noetic wing initially—was Helen
Wilmans (1832?–1907), who had begun her New Thought career as a Hopkins
student. Wilmans, however, struck out on her own and never acknowledged a
debt to her Chicago teacher. For her, New Thought counted as a business and a
science of self-mastery—she called it Mental Science—and Wilmans used the
mails so ostentatiously for her absent-healing business that she spent years in
court fighting mail fraud charges (she was acquitted, but her work never recov-
ered).156
We gain some purchase on what this noetic New Thought signaled and how
it sat with Hopkins devotees in a revelatory editorial by Charles Fillmore, cofounder
of Unity, in one number of his periodical Thought. ‘‘Helen Wilmans,’’
he confessed to readers, ‘‘objects to my use of the words God, Father, etc. . . .
She says ‘Why not credit the power spoken of to man’s creativeness and the
source of supply to nature instead of God?’’’ He went on, after the gentlemanly
courtesies, to tell readers that a ‘‘great deal’’ hinged ‘‘on Words,’’ with their use
‘‘worthy our careful consideration.’’ Fillmore voted for a theistic language and
told readers why. By contrast, the noetic style of Wilmans and a series of others,
including New Thought women Julia Seton Sears and Elizabeth Towne, points
326 Arrivals
toward more secular concerns, emphasizing entry into a ‘‘privileged male world
as full participants.’’ This style encouraged prosperity thinking much more than
Hopkins and the affective wing of New Thought did, and it saw the new ideas
as supports for greater self-reliance and business success. Here the individualism
of adults in worlds of their own making took the place of a spiritual community
at prayer and in service. A social agenda fell away, and so did the Bible and traditional
religious discourse, including a felt concern over sin or evil.157 The last
chapter will take a closer look at this style of New Thought, especially prominent
in the twentieth century.
As the New Thought movement grew and expanded, according to Materra,
the majority of the men embraced its noetic version, while the majority of the
women identified with the affective style. This division meant that—with so
many women in the overall movement—the noetic organizations generally attracted
equal or near-equal numbers of men and women, while affective networks
were strongly populated by women. Periodicals and monographs advanced
the case for each in almost a feeding frenzy of press activity as new literature
came and went, and new statements appeared, vanished, and were re-created in
slightly different guises. If New Thought put its premium on the word and its
power, divinely guided, to change earthly conditions and situations, it made good
on its commitment in the written, as well as the spoken, word. Periodicals enhanced
the national presence for groups like Mental Science and Unity, even as
the travels of Hopkins and her disciples on a burgeoning and efficient rail system
added to the nationwide spread of New Thought ideas and structures. By 1905
and the beginning of the middle years of the movement, New Thought could be
found in twenty-three states as well as in England, Mexico, and Australia. The
states with the greatest presence were New York, Massachusetts, Illinois, California,
and Colorado.158
As the movement grew into these middle years, too, New Thought denominations
came to flourish—some like Unity, Religious Science, and Divine Science,
to stay; and others, like Annie Rix Militz’s West Coast Homes of Truth and
Wilmans’s scattered Mental Science Temples, to disappear. Ordinations were
easy to come by, and—with the movement celebrating diversity—decentralization
was a major feature of organizational life. In fact, the idea of establishing
separate churches and denominations was quite foreign to this late century–early
century New Thought and, as in the case of the Unity movement, was resisted
throughout the twentieth century and on, even when all the evidence belied the
nondenominational declaration. The children of the one God preferred, despite
their obvious communitarian practices, to preserve ideologies of seeking only
the God within. Thus, as this sketch already suggests, attempts to organize were
Spirits Reformed and Reconstituted 327
fraught with difficulty. Finally, though, by 1914, the International New Thought
Alliance was formed. It had been preceded by a series of meetings and organizational
attempts, with the earliest meeting that announced itself explicitly as a
‘‘New Thought Convention’’ held in 1899 in Hartford, Connecticut. Thereafter,
in Boston, the International Metaphysical League called a convention, and organization—and
name changes—proceeded apace. Always, New Thought people
aimed for comprehensiveness, reaching out to embrace sympathizers in an erasure
of difference that was theological as well as social. Malinda Cramer’s early
periodical Harmony spoke for all. Its cover page announced it to be ‘‘a monthly
magazine of philosophy, devoted to truth, Science of Spirit, Theosophy, Metaphysics,
and to the Christ method of healing.’’ But always, with the individualism,
New Thought ecumenical organizing was tenuous at best. Charles and Myrtle
Fillmore’s Unity School of Christianity, for example, had only a brief and tense
time of inclusion in the International New Thought Alliance, from 1919 until
1922, with Charles Fillmore for many years considering the Unity movement
‘‘practical Christianity’’ and different from New Thought.159
The Reverend Solon Lauer made the case for resemblance and inclusivity at
a convention as early as 1889, explicitly naming spiritualism, Theosophy, and
Christian Science and declaring that there were ‘‘no very distinct lines of demarcation
between them.’’ All of them, he thought, shared ‘‘certain things in common,’’
and he thought, too, that ‘‘perhaps a broad and generous interpretation of
each would remove most of the points of seeming antagonism.’’ What he said next
was even more telling: ‘‘Certain it is that there are thousands of persons who read
the literature and attend the public meetings of all of these movements, and who
find much to love and admire in them.’’160 We catch a glimpse of how this process
worked in the personal spiritual odyssey of Charles Fillmore (1854–1948).
Even with his difficulties with the International New Thought Alliance (suggesting
more narrowness on his part?), Fillmore’s case is, in fact, representative. His
years of religious exploration illustrate how, in an expansive time and nation, the
habit of combination nudged Americans to forge out of the Hermetic and related
legacies of past and present the metaphysical synthesis of New Thought.
Born on a Chippewa Indian reservation in northern Minnesota, Fillmore grew
up in an Indian territory in conflict, with Chippewa, Sioux, and whites all contesting
for the land. Besides being a farmer, his father worked as an Indian agent,
and from early on that fact must have translated into as much intimacy with Indian
culture as a white in a frontier locale could normally expect to acquire. Still
more, according to Fillmore’s report, when he was six and alone with his mother
at the trading post his family operated, a roaming band of Sioux came and spirited
him away. The kidnapping did not last a day, for a few hours later the child
328 Arrivals
was returned unharmed. According to James Gaither, Fillmore later said that he
thought the Indians had used him for some sort of religious ceremony.161 How
much the Indian haunting affected his later life is difficult to determine, but
the early contact with difference would be replicated in the religious quest of
his mature years, functioning perhaps as a kind of horizon of spiritual possibility.
At any rate, by 1889 and the beginning years of the Unity movement, Fillmore
could confide to readers of his new journal Modern Thought that he had spent
twenty years in the ranks of ‘‘progressive Spiritualists.’’ He thought that spiritualism
had ‘‘done a noble work in bringing light to the world,’’ even as he deplored
the practice of the majority of contemporary adherents. ‘‘This majority,’’ he complained,
were ‘‘phenomenalists.’’ Their ‘‘tendency’’ was ‘‘to materialize the spirit
world, instead of spiritualizing the material world.’’ Half of the mediums were
‘‘unconscious subjects of some other mind.’’ By contrast, metaphysics was ‘‘the
panacea for all such,’’ because it taught the ‘‘soul’’ how it might become a ‘‘spiritual
center.’’162
Fillmore had gone beyond spiritualism, but clearly he regarded spiritualists as
metaphysical cousins who had gotten things at least half right. Rather open in his
autobiographical reminiscences, by 1894 he was telling Thought readers that he
had been ‘‘born and raised in the wilderness of the west’’ and had obtained only
a ‘‘quite limited’’ religious education, with God an ‘‘unknown factor’’ in his ‘‘conscious
mind’’ until his last few years. He added significantly, ‘‘I was always drawn
to the mysterious and occult, however, and in youth took great interest in Spiritualism
and afterward, in branches of the Hermetic philosophy.’’ If so, Fillmore
was still trying to bring others to the Hermetic fold. As summarized by Braden,
advertisements for the first issue of Modern Thought included books and periodicals
displaying interest in ‘‘the occult, Spiritualism, theosophy, Rosicrucianism,
Hermeticism, and other subjects as well as in [generic] Christian Science.’’ Hermeticism
likewise continued to influence Fillmore, for his distinctive teaching
on the ‘‘twelve powers of man’’—based on the notion that twelve seats of (spiritual)
power exist throughout the human body—was shaped by Rosicrucian ideas.
In another example, the winged globe that became Unity’s symbol grew out of a
Rosicrucian ambience, when Fillmore responded to Freeman Benjamin Dowd’s
book The Temple of the Rosy Cross.163
Fillmore never officially joined the Theosophical Society, and the names of
neither he nor his wife, Myrtle Fillmore, can be found on its membership rolls.
Still, he observed in one article that he had been ‘‘a very earnest student of Theosophy
for several years,’’ describing himself as ‘‘quite familiar with its literature’’
within which he had found ‘‘much truth.’’ He was also, he said, ‘‘personally acquainted
with several who are considered in the inner circle of the Theosophical
Spirits Reformed and Reconstituted 329
Society in America.’’ He had ‘‘studied them carefully, both from the exoteric and
esoteric standpoints,’’ and he boasted, especially, of his ‘‘near friend,’’ who was
among ‘‘the first members of the society in America’’ and ‘‘now right in the front
of the work.’’ This man had studied Sanskrit for years, had the ‘‘sacred writings of
the Hindus’’ ‘‘at his tongue’s end,’’ and had ‘‘developed quite remarkable occult
powers.’’ As in the case of the spiritualists, Fillmore found the Theosophists half
right. They were ‘‘so loaded up with head learning’’ and they had so made ‘‘of
Karma a great Moloch’’ that they did not realize that by ‘‘mental application’’
one could ‘‘wipe out . . . present conditions and make now a new environment.’’
Fillmore’s theosophical enthusiasm was apparent, as Neal Vahle has noted, in
the large number of reviews of books on Theosophy in the first (1889) issue of
Modern Thought—thirteen, among them Blavatsky’s Isis Unveiled—all of them
recommended reading. Meanwhile, Fillmore, with Theosophists, continued to
embrace reincarnation beliefs (he once told Charles Braden that he had been
St. Paul in a previous life). Likewise, his connections to Christian Science and
its thought world were obvious, since he had been an Emma Curtis Hopkins student
and had brought her to Kansas City to teach several classes.164 The largest
difference between the Christian Science world of Eddy and the New Thought
one of Fillmore was the direction of their combinations. Eddy combined Platonized
Hermeticism and spiritualist-magnetic lingerings with Calvinism; Fillmore
combined similar materials with Christian liberalism and Theosophy instead
of Calvinism.
Fillmore’s comfort in this blended and reconstructed world of differing metaphysical
possibilities was hardly remarkable. His articulateness and his outreach
suggest what numerous others in the metaphysical culture of the time were thinking,
experiencing, and doing. Especially to be noticed in all of this is how much
the comfort zone had extended to Asia. As Fillmore and so many Americans
looked eastward for spiritual inspiration and solace, however, what they found
was scarcely the unadulterated Asia of their (Romantic) vision. What they found,
instead, was the metaphysical Asia (mind, correspondences, energy, and healing
all there) that they had molded out of a Hermetic and vernacular magical past
and the pluralism of an American present. Meanwhile, as we will see, the Asia
of their discovery had also been mediated to them by the European West and
an East itself undergoing selective westernization.
6
Metaphysical Asia
Writing in the up-and-coming Metaphysical Magazine (founded and edited
by former Eddy Christian Scientist Leander Edmund Whipple in 1895), Detroit
lawyer Hamilton Gay Howard addressed the theme of personal attraction and repulsion.
With familiar nods to magnetism and electricity, Howard sententiously
looked east, cloaking his argument with the authority of ancient and modern
adepts. ‘‘This theory of electric or psychic wave currents pervading our atmosphere’’
had been ‘‘accepted by all Oriental philosophers,’’ he informed readers,
and it had also been ‘‘taught for hundreds of years in the School of Adepts, at
Thebes, which Lord Bulwer Lytton is said to have attended for three and a half
years—half the course.’’ ‘‘The whole course, requiring great self-denial and continued
physical trials was taken,’’ he believed, ‘‘by the late Madame Blavatsky,
and by Colonel Olcott, of Massachusetts, the advanced free-thinker and theosophist.’’
Howard especially wanted to underscore his conviction that the ‘‘wisdom
of the East’’ needed to be noticed, and so he excerpted a piece from a newspaper
that he identified only as the Pittsburg Dispatch. Inviting readers into a new—
and for them exotic—world, its unnamed author boasted of having before him
‘‘an English translation of a very old tantric work from the original Sanscrit, by
the Hindu pandit, Rama Prasad,’’ a work that contained ‘‘the ancient Hindu philosophy
as regards the finer forces of nature.’’ In its pages the author found, with
evident enthusiasm, references and explanations for ‘‘such things as the interstellar
ether; its general properties and subdivisions; the laws of vibration; the
circulation of the blood and of the nervous fluid; the nervous centres and the
general anatomy of the body; the rationale of psychometry and of occult phenomena,
and a good many other things of which modern science as yet knows
little or nothing.’’1
What neither Howard nor the Dispatch writer apparently knew was that Rama
330
Metaphysical Asia 331
Prasad’s book had originally appeared as a series of articles in the Indian-based
periodical The Theosophist, which had been launched in Bombay by none other
than Helena Blavatsky and Colonel Henry Steel Olcott in 1879. Prasad himself
was a decidedly Westernized Hindu and a Theosophist, a man who moved in
a discourse community that had heavily invested in reinscribing the traditional
lore of India in the scientific terms of the modern, British-inspired West. For
Prasad and those who followed him, yogic pranayama had become the ‘‘science
of breath.’’ In the lengthy exposition that preceded Prasad’s translation of the
short text from the Sanskrit, he in fact took on the famed German scholar Max
Müller for reading the Chandogya Upanishad as in places ‘‘more or less fanciful.’’
By contrast, in Prasad’s account, none of the Upanishads could be ‘‘very intelligible’’
without knowing something of ‘‘the ancient Science of Breath,’’ which
was ‘‘said to be the secret doctrine of all secret doctrines’’ and ‘‘the key of all that
is taught in the Upanishads.’’ Prasad’s allusion was a double entendre. First, the
Indian Theosophist had affirmed that traditional Indian religious thought was
scientific, and he had rendered the Sanskrit title of the work he had translated
as ‘‘The Science of Breath and the Philosophy of the Tattvas.’’ The ‘‘Tattvas’’ of
his title—literally ‘‘thatnesses’’—were, in the classical dualistic Samkyha philosophy
of India, the twenty-five principles constitutive of the material universe. In
Prasad’s usage, however—influenced probably by Helena Blavatsky’s invocation
of the ‘‘Great Breath’’ in her enormous 1888 book The Secret Doctrine (see below)
—they referred specifically to the ‘‘five modifications of the Great Breath.’’2 Thus
Prasad’s allusion to the ‘‘secret doctrine of all secret doctrines’’ pointed to Blavatsky’s
book and, so, to Theosophy.
Both the Howard article and the Dispatch excerpt that was part of it provide
windows into a late-nineteenth-century American world in which the imagined
otherness of Asia was redirected and rechanneled into culturally available templates
for making sense of difference. Arguably, these templates were supplied
by a borderlands discourse that arose on the fringes of liberal Protestantism as it
existed in constant commerce with a revived and reconstructed Hermeticism—
this available in theosophical, New Thought, and similar versions, and often in
combinations of these. If there was any one public event that signaled the process
and its continuing reinventions of the East, that event was the World’s Parliament
of Religions of 1893, held in conjunction with the huge Columbian Exposition
in Chicago. A world’s fair staged to celebrate the four-hundredth anniversary of
the European arrival in the Americas, the exposition, with its displays and attendant
events, celebrated, too, American economic and cultural ‘‘progress’’ in
a triumphalist spirit that masked an unexamined racism and imperialism.3 The
parliament did not and could not disentangle itself from the cultural climate of
332 Arrivals
its era, even if, with liberal Protestant leadership, its site was physically removed
from that of the larger event. In the downtown Chicago Loop during the month
of September, representatives of the world’s religious traditions came together
under the sign of progress, aiming to assess the religious status of the century and
to plan for the future.
Viewed with an eye toward American metaphysical religion, the group that assembled
under the liberal auspices of the parliament was decidedly congenial to
the new spirituality. The combinative instinct of parliament organizers and presenters
reproduced a central trope of American metaphysics. At the same time,
the canons that governed the selection process brought speakers who promised
to function in keeping with the conference’s theosophizing agenda—that is, an
agenda that promoted perennialism under the rubric of comparative religions.
True enough, Roman Catholic James Cardinal Gibbons led the assembled representatives
in an Our Father prayer at the Parliament’s opening session, and
Dionysios Latas, Greek Orthodox archbishop of Zante, had come from Athens.
But the unitive theme of the parliament did not go unnoticed by some traditionalists.
The General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church refused to sanction
the event, this despite the fact that John Henry Barrows, who headed the
parliament’s organizing committee, was pastor of Chicago’s First Presbyterian
Church. The Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury and the Muslim sultan of Turkey
also refused endorsement. At the other end of the spectrum, among Asian
representatives a clear theosophical presence could be found. G. N. Chakravarti,
an Indian scholar there to defend Hinduism, was a convert to Theosophy. So
was the Buddhist Anagarika Dharmapala from Ceylon (present-day Sri Lanka),
who had been encouraged by Blavatsky herself to become a scholar of Buddhist
Pali-language texts. Kinza Hirai, a lay Buddhist from Japan, similarly had been
a Theosophist. Swami Vivekananda, a Neo-Vedantin from Bengal (transformed
overnight by the media and popular acclaim into a celebrity), thought along lines
congenial to Theosophy. Among non-Asians, the American Alexander Russell
Webb (or Mohammed Webb), who had converted to Islam, still told Henry Steel
Olcott that he ‘‘had not ceased to be an ardent Theosophist.’’ Other theosophical
names also could be found among the delegates—Americans William Q. Judge
and J. D. Buck and, from England, Annie Besant and Isabel Cooper-Oakley.4
Meanwhile, the Theosophical Society, along with Christian Science, had
been accorded a separate ‘‘denominational congress’’ in conjunction with the
parliament, a recognition given only to some three dozen separate groups. Both
Theosophists and Christian Scientists were elated by attendance at their meetings.
Theosophists glowed their way through two special sessions held on weekends
to accommodate public interest, reporting that at the final one, with seats
Metaphysical Asia 333
for four thousand, hundreds more were standing in the aisles and along the walls.
An anecdote recounted how a Presbyterian minister and parliament manager
interrupted William Q. Judge’s speech on reincarnation to tell stray Presbyterians
that their own meeting was empty and that perhaps they were confused regarding
its location and should leave immediately. Supposedly, no one followed his
advice. In their turn, Christian Scientists filled the hall of four thousand to hear
an address by ‘‘Rev. Mary Baker G. Eddy, discoverer and founder of Christian
Science,’’ read to them in absentia, and to listen, too, to other Christian Science
speakers. The next day they basked in the publicity that the Chicago Inter-Ocean
provided them: ‘‘One of the best congresses yet held in connection with the Parliament
of Religions, judged by number and interest, was that of the Christian
Scientists. . . . For two hours before the hall opened crowds besieged the doors
eager to gain admission. At two o’clock, the time set for opening the proceedings,
the house was filled to the roof, no seats being available for love or money.’’5
The parliament was the brainchild of Charles Carroll Bonney (1831–1903), a
Chicago lawyer interested in comparative religions who was also, significantly, a
Swedenborgian. Bonney’s faith in the theology of divine influx shaped his idea
and subsequent participation in parliament proceedings in which he functioned
as president. He told Christian Scientists, for example, that ‘‘no more striking
manifestation of the interposition of Divine Providence in human affairs has
come in recent years than that shown in the raising up of the body of people
known as Christian Scientists.’’ They, indeed, were ‘‘called to declare the real
harmony between religion and science, and to restore the waning faith of many
in the verities of the sacred Scriptures.’’6 Nor was Bonney alone in his ecumenism
and his belief in the all-pervading presence of Spirit. Something akin to
the immanential theology of Swedenborg and most of the metaphysicians ran
through the organizing ideology of the entire World’s Parliament event.
As John Henry Barrows, chair of the parliament, introduced his massive, twovolume
edition recounting its background and transcribing its speeches, he
sounded the theme that appeared repeatedly in the messages of the various delegates.
‘‘Faith in a Divine Power to whom men believe they owe service and worship’’
had been ‘‘like the sun, a life-giving and fructifying potency in man’s intellectual
and moral development.’’ But Barrows followed up the good news of
divine immanence with the bad that delegates were aiming to correct. ‘‘Religion,
like the white light of Heaven,’’ had been ‘‘broken into many-colored fragments
by the prisms of men.’’ So the parliament aimed, as one of its objects, ‘‘to
change this many-colored radiance back into the white light of heavenly truth.’’
Its promoters, like closet Theosophists, were ‘‘striking the noble chord of universal
human brotherhood’’ and evoking a ‘‘starry music which will yet drown the
334 Arrivals
miserable discords of earth.’’ To be sure, a Christian ethos surrounded the universal
brotherhood, since it was ‘‘embodied in an Asiatic Peasant who was the Son
of God.’’ Still, the aims of the parliament stretched the liberal fabric of the Protestant
umbrella in directions that, at least potentially, wore thin the Christian
certitude of possessing the unique—and most highly evolved—religious truth.
The parliament intended ‘‘to show to men, in the most impressive way, what and
how many important truths the various Religions hold and teach in common.’’7
To that end, organizers imported ‘‘leading scholars, representing the Brahman,
Buddhist, Confucian, Parsee, Mohammedan, Jewish and other Faiths,’’
placed them alongside representatives of the Christian churches, and allowed
these others time and a platform. The results, as Richard Seager argues, were
not quite what the Chicago leaders intended. Instead, non-Christian representatives
upended the liberal Christian project and exposed its tenuousness in a
discourse intended to display the wisdom and integrity of the East.8 In so doing,
the Asians flattened Christian peaks not only for themselves but also, potentially,
for Americans. And in so doing, they also underlined a way of talking, thinking,
and being in the world that promoted the project of metaphysical religion. Now,
though, metaphysics appeared under the banner of an intercepted Asia, caught
in complex thickets between separate Asian pasts, Westernized Asian presents,
and American polysemous perceptions. By this time, too, American metaphysics
had already reached a watershed in its appropriation of global faiths to advance
its homegrown spirituality. Theosophical prominence at the World’s Parliament
of Religions was theologically and poetically appropriate. It was the Asian turn
of the Theosophical Society that had brought the universalizing discourse of the
1870s and 1880s to the authoritative statement of the 1890s. In this 1890s statement,
the power of mind took on new proportions, correspondence ruled religious
perceptions, and healing energies came from new (to non-Asian Americans)
Asian wisdoms. This chapter looks first to the Asia mediated to the West by
Theosophy and then to metaphysical American versions of yoga and Buddhism,
with the presence of Theosophy—and its partner New Thought—never far away.
THEOSOPHICAL ASIA
Helena Blavatsky and Henry Steel Olcott traveled to India in late 1878, and
they never returned to this country to stay. The Asian years of Theosophy and its
increasingly close ties with England, the growing rift of the founders with each
other, Blavatsky’s European and English sojourn, her trials and tribulations over
fraud charges, and her death in England in 1891—these do not concern my narrative
directly. Important here, instead, are the literary products of these years
Metaphysical Asia 335
and their effects on an evolving metaphysical religion in the United States. Isis
Unveiled had played a significant role in shifting an older spiritualist language
into new and more expansive vocabularies and grammars, and now the continuing
work of the theosophical leaders received an eager reception in America.
These writings model a reading of Asia that colonized it to suit American metaphysical
requirements. In so doing, as Stephen Prothero argues in the specific
case of Olcott, they ‘‘creolized’’ Asian cultural worlds with already combinative
American discourses.9
Olcott’s literary creolization project was apparent as early as 1881 when he first
produced his Buddhist Catechism, a work to be considered later. Blavatsky herself
provided the more far-reaching metaphysical scripture in her monumental
(nearly fifteen hundred pages in two volumes exclusive of front matter and index)
Secret Doctrine of 1888.10 Bruce Campbell—who calls it ‘‘a, perhaps the, major
work of occultism’’ in the nineteenth century—has recounted its publication history,
with the new book—a reconsideration and elaboration of Isis Unveiled—
announced as early as 1884. Blavatsky first planned to use The Theosophist to
issue the book, publishing it in monthly installments of the same length. But by
1885 she left India for Europe, and so that specific project folded. But Blavatsky
reportedly wrote—prodigiously—as she traveled and remained for a time in
Italy, Switzerland, Germany, and Belgium. Her handwritten material was transferred
for her into typescript, but when he saw it, Subba Row, the Indian Theosophist
who had promised to edit it, withdrew before what he regarded an impossible
task. Eventually, after Blavatsky moved to London in 1887, Archibald
and Bertram Keightley—the two Theosophists most responsible for her presence
there—created an outline for a manuscript that by then purportedly stood over a
yard high. Of the four volumes that the Keightleys suggested, only two were eventually
published as The Secret Doctrine—a first subtitled Cosmogenesis and dealing
with the evolution of the cosmos, and a second called Anthropogenesis and
addressing the theme of human evolution. Two others, Ed Fawcett and Richard
Harte, supplied help for aspects of the project.11
As in the case of Isis Unveiled (see the previous chapter), William Emmette
Coleman charged Blavatsky with plagiarism—a charge that was old news, given
her previous publishing history. She claimed that her volumes—and ‘‘the Secret
Doctrine of the Archaic ages’’—were built around stanzas from the ‘‘Book of
Dzyan,’’ a work that Blavatsky introduced as a fragment from a Tibetan Buddhist
text called the Mani Koumboum, the sacred writing of the Dzungarians, in the
northern part of the country. While she was in Tibet, she explained, she was allowed
to memorize the stanzas. But the text was ‘‘not in the possession of European
Libraries’’ and was ‘‘utterly unknown to our Philologists, or at any rate was
336 Arrivals
never heard of by them under its present name.’’ On these points, Coleman and
Blavatsky agreed, and he added that the language of Senzar, the professed original
language of the work, was completely unknown. As in the case of her first
huge work, he accused her of unacknowledged reliance on nineteenth-century
sources from which she had compiled her work. Chief among them were H. H.
Wilson’s Vishnu Purána (1840), Alexander Winchell’s World-Life; or, Comparative
Geology (1883), and John Dowson’s Hindu Classical Dictionary (1879). Nor
was he alone in speculating on her big book’s composition. René Guénon believed
it was based on Tibetan fragments, but different from the ones Blavatsky
herself claimed. Jewish mystical scholar Gershom Scholem thought its origins
lay in the Jewish Kabbalah. And according to Alvin Boyd Kuhn, Max Müller
sardonically observed that Blavatsky was either a ‘‘remarkable forger’’ or the contributor
of ‘‘the most valuable gift to archaeological research in the Orient.’’12
Yet, granted evidence for the charge of plagiarism, Blavatsky’s facility in joining
the South Asian discourse to a series of other cultural conversations—Hermetic,
Western scientific, and even Christian—marks her work with a synthetic
originality that needs to be noticed.13 Indeed, gun-shy perhaps from her experience
with Isis Unveiled, she herself indirectly acknowledged the extent of her
dependence (and also her estimate of what she had done) in her upper-case quotation
from the French essayist Michel de Montaigne in her introduction: ‘‘‘i
have here made only a nosegay of culled flowers, and have brought
nothing of my own but the string that ties them.’’’ ‘‘Pull the ‘string’
to pieces and cut it up in shreds, if you will,’’ she added. ‘‘As for the nosegay of
facts—you will never be able to make away with these.’’14 Still further, for all
the scholarly dismissal, Blavatsky’s work would shape language not only in theosophical
circles but also—as Campbell’s assessment of it has already suggested—
well beyond them. Its statement of the ‘‘secret doctrine’’ of Asia would provide
the vocabulary and grammar for a generic metaphysical discourse. In it Asian
historical particularity was effaced, and the universalizing potential of concepts
like reincarnation, karma, and subtle bodies was amplified many times over. Arguably,
the general American metaphysical project of the late twentieth and
twenty-first centuries would continue to sound themes and enact Asias that originated
in the Blavatsky opus.
Beyond that, in the elaborate sacred tale of origins that The Secret Doctrine
constructed, Blavatsky provided a story of cosmic and human origins that, whatever
it told about Asia, surely imitated the West. In its overall modeling, her narrative
resembled ancient Gnostic mythic material or Kabbalistic lore from the
Middle Ages. Like Gnostic and Kabbalistic mythologies, Blavatsky’s ambitious
theodicy explained the predicament of humans by elaborating a series of events
Metaphysical Asia 337
and entities that, in effect, harmfully separated things human from their divine
or originating source. As in older Gnostic and Kabbalistic forays, the Blavatskian
version of the order of the universe complicated human origins—as if interlarding
an explanation with numerous layers could prove the intrinsic sacrality of
humans and account for evil without alleging a flaw in the source of all. Hermes
Trismegistus stayed present in this account. Blavatsky thought the ‘‘Divine Pymander’’
and the ‘‘hermetic Fragments’’ to be echoes of the ‘‘Esoteric philosophy
and the Hindu Purânas,’’ an order historians might well want to reverse and a connection
they might want to challenge on other grounds.15 In the context of the
late nineteenth century’s preoccupation with Darwinian evolution (and Blavatsky’s
own engagement with it), The Secret Doctrine—worlds away from what by
the early twentieth century would become Protestant fundamentalism—posited
a human devolution from the divine that represented also an evolution.
‘‘Kosmos’’ existed in eternity ‘‘before the re-awakening of still slumbering Energy,’’
which became ‘‘the emanation of the Word in later systems.’’ The cosmic
system was characterized by a perpetual periodicity, a latency and activity by
turns. Always, there had been the ‘‘one life, eternal, invisible, yet Omnipresent,
without beginning or end, yet periodical in its regular manifestations, between
which periods reigns the dark mystery of non-Being; unconscious, yet absolute
Consciousness; unrealisable, yet the one self-existing reality; truly, ‘a chaos to
the sense, a Kosmos to the reason.’ Its one absolute attribute, which is itself,
eternal, ceaseless Motion, is called in esoteric parlance the ‘Great Breath,’ which
is the perpetual motion of the universe, in the sense of limitless, ever-present
space. That which is motionless cannot be Divine.’’16
If the divine was motion and energy, the divine was also Mind or Thought, the
‘‘Word’’ from which all things emanated and in which lay concealed the ‘‘plan of
every future Cosmogony and Theogony.’’ Moreover, in the Blavatskian synthesis—as
throughout American metaphysical religion—the third abiding feature
became the correspondence that ran through the layers of reality, so that spiritual
anthropology replicated the eternal patterning of the universe. God was, in
one way, neither close nor intimate; in another, the divine was alive and resonant
in every cell. The ‘‘Great Breath’’ kept on breathing, and what it breathed
was people. If this sounds like an overture in the direction of the contemplative
mind, Blavatsky’s own etymology suggests the same. She thought that ‘‘Dzyan’’
(also spelled ‘‘Dzyn’’ or ‘‘Dzen’’) was a corrupt form of Sanskrit Dhyana, which
means meditation. Beyond that, with all the preoccupation with science (both
Books I and II include a Part III titled ‘‘Science and the Secret Doctrine Contrasted’’)
that Blavatsky displayed, she was demonstrably as concerned about aesthetics.
The secret wisdom of Dzyan came packaged in ‘‘stanzas.’’ She titled the
338 Arrivals
prelude to her first volume ‘‘Proem.’’ And her preoccupations with correspondence
took the form, often, of attention to numerical symmetries akin to those
in mathematics or music. Alluding to her doctrine of seven human races and
also to the dangerous power hidden within the symmetries, she told readers that
‘‘doctrines such as the planetary chain, or the seven races, at once give a clue to
the seven-fold nature of man.’’ ‘‘Each principle,’’ she continued, was ‘‘correlated
to a plane, a planet, and a race; and the human principles are, on every plane,
correlated to seven-fold occult forces—those of the higher planes being of tremendous
power.’’17
Blavatsky’s statement of a mind-energy-correspondence triad is instructive.
Carl Jackson identifies it with ‘‘traditional Hindu philosophy’’ and suggests that
concepts of ‘‘Brahman, maya, atman, and karma’’ had been ‘‘reformulated in
Theosophical terminology,’’ with connections especially to Vedanta. But if this
was the case, it is also true that Blavatsky announced the message in ways that—
intended or not—were congenial to American metaphysicians schooled in the
moralism and work ethic of their culture’s Protestant moorings. A confirmed
perennialist, Blavatsky proclaimed her ‘‘Secret Doctrine’’ as ‘‘the universally diffused
religion of the ancient and prehistoric world,’’ and she quickly elaborated
its propositions. First came the ‘‘metaphysical one absolute—be-ness,’’ the
‘‘rootless root’’ that could only be known by negation, ‘‘beyond all thought or
speculation’’ and symbolized both as ‘‘absolute abstract Space’’ and ‘‘absolute Abstract
Motion.’’ Second came an affirmation of the eternity of the universe as a
‘‘boundless plane,’’ a ‘‘playground’’ for countless appearing and disappearing universes,
so that the ‘‘law of periodicity, of flux and reflux, ebb and flow’’ ruled absolutely.
Third—and the existential concern that drove the first two—came the
‘‘fundamental identity of all Souls with the Universal Over-Soul,’’ which was ‘‘an
aspect of the Unknown Root.’’ There was, therefore, an ‘‘obligatory pilgrimage for
every Soul—a spark of the former—through the Cycle of Incarnation (or ‘Necessity’)
in accordance with Cyclic and Karmic law.’’ Blavatsky’s world emerged
as a hard-work universe in which there were ‘‘no privileges or special gifts in man’’
except for ‘‘those won by his own Ego through personal effort and merit throughout
a long series of metempsychoses and reincarnations.’’18 This multiplication
of incarnations (beyond the Asian sources)—the cycle of seemingly endless returns
for still more growth (for the soul on a ‘‘spiritual’’ path)—became a hallmark
of later theosophical discourse into the twenty-first century. Souls on earth
went to school and learned metaphysical lessons as they journeyed.
Blavatsky’s ‘‘slanderers’’ would generate ‘‘bad Karma,’’ but for those on the
path the aesthetics of contemplation opened out into vast expanses. Here space,
‘‘the eternal parent wrapped in her ever invisible robes had slum-
Metaphysical Asia 339
bered once again for seven eternities.’’ Eventually, though, the spatial
‘‘mother’’ swelled and expanded ‘‘like the bud of the lotus.’’ Her vibration
touched the light in the midst of darkness; a single ray entered the ‘‘motherdeep’’;
and the egg therein became the ‘‘world-egg.’’ So it went, as already
the number seven began to be manifested both inside and outside the egg. The
‘‘great mother,’’ who was at least once called the ‘‘father-mother,’’ was the
eternal cosmic source from which the divine, the spiritual, and all of the ‘‘mindborn’’
emanated. We need not follow Blavatsky’s narrative further to glimpse
behind its overproduction what Alvin Kuhn called ‘‘a recital of the scheme according
to which the primal unity of unmanifest Being breaks up into differentiation
and multiformity and so fills space with conscious evolving beings.’’19
It is, however, worth marking the points in the narrative that reinforce the
Hermeticism of the past and reconstitute it as a new statement for the times—
a statement that, for Americans, domesticated Asia as a function of vernacularized
Western mystical categories. Indian sacred lore in the Vishnu Purana told
of a vast egg that floated on cosmic waters. Vishnu entered the egg as the creator
Brahma—to produce the three worlds of earth, atmosphere, and heaven;
he, in turn, preserved them through countless ages and finally destroyed them
with flames as Rudra. Then rain fell to form one vast ocean, and, like a coiled
snake, Vishnu slept on the waters. The time from Brahma’s initial act of creation
to the time of destruction was called a day of Brahma, or a Kalpa. Within each
Kalpa, a thousand cycles passed. These were known as Maha Yugas (literally,
‘‘great years’’), with each extending for 4,320,000 human years or 12,000 years
of the gods (a year of the gods being 360 human years, and a day of the gods
being a single human year). Every Maha Yuga was in turn subdivided into four
lesser Yugas, with each shorter than the previous one. During these increasingly
shorter Yugas observance of law declined and humankind grew ever more corrupt,
with the shortest and most devolved of them being the Kali Yuga of 1,800
years. After the thousand Maha Yugas, Vishnu’s sleep upon the ocean lasted as
long. Finally, at the end of this protracted night, Vishnu woke up and re-created
the worlds as Brahma; and so a distinct day of Brahma began anew. But that
was not all. Brahma had a life span, and thus there were 100 years of 360 days
and nights of Brahma respectively, whereupon the original evolution of life and
worlds reversed itself and Vishnu returned to the contemplation of his Supreme
Self, alone with eternal Time (Kala), Spirit (Purusha), and Primary Matter (Prakriti).
When Vishnu decided that he wanted to play once more, the vast drama
of creation again unfolded.20
In the midst of this cosmic theater of epic proportions, the Vishnu Purana
warned that humans were living in the Kali Yuga, the most devolved state of its
340 Arrivals
current Maha Yuga. Blavatsky, at least manifestly, followed its narrative. The Kali
Yuga that the West had reached was ‘‘an age black with horrors.’’ ‘‘Man’’ was
‘‘his own destroyer’’ in a Kali Yuga that reigned ‘‘supreme’’ not only in India but
also there. Yet more than the Vishnu Purana, Blavatsky historicized freely and
pointedly. She predicted that ‘‘about nine years’’ from the time she was writing,
‘‘the first cycle of the first five millenniums, that began with the great cycle of
the Kali-Yuga’’ would end. More apocalyptically, she declared that humans stood
‘‘at the very close of the cycle of 5,000 years of the present Aryan Kaliyuga; and
between this time and 1897’’ there would be ‘‘a large rent made in the Veil of
Nature,’’ with ‘‘materialistic science’’ receiving a ‘‘death-blow.’’ Still further, in
Blavatsky’s opus the language of the Yugas receded, and, in fact, at least one extended
reference to the Kali Yuga read it decidedly more positively. At the Kali
Yuga’s close, Blavatsky announced, quoting one source at length, the minds of
the living would be awakened, becoming clear as crystal. They would give birth
to a new race who would be truly human beings, following the laws of the age
of purity. Blavatsky thought that the ‘‘blessings’’ of the Kali Yuga were ‘‘well described’’
and that they ‘‘fit in admirably even with that which one sees and hears
in Europe and other civilized and Christian lands in full XIXth, and at the dawn
of the XXth century of our great era of enlightenment.’’ As important here,
working between what she claimed were esoteric Buddhist and Vedantic (Raja
Yoga) sources as interpreted already in theosophical writings, she regarded the
Kalpas as ‘‘Rounds.’’ Indeed, what preoccupied her—more than Kalpas and Yugas—were
‘‘Rounds,’’ with each ‘‘Round’’ in the human saga ‘‘composed of the
Yugas of the seven periods of Humanity.’’21
Since all things traveled in sevens in Blavatsky’s universe, every star or planet
was linked to six ‘‘companion globes.’’ Life proceeded on the seven globes in
seven rounds or cycles, with rest periods or times of ‘‘obscuration’’ between, and
in a complex rebirthing process each globe had to ‘‘transfer its life and energy to
another planet.’’ Into this cosmic scenario of action and rest, Blavatsky inserted
the earth, and in so doing she historicized her narrative in ways that hinted more
of Western occultism than Eastern puranas. The earth, as the ‘‘visible representative
of its invisible superior fellow globes,’’ was required to live through seven
rounds. For the first three, it formed and consolidated; for the fourth, it settled
and hardened; and in the final three, it returned ‘‘to its first ethereal form . . .
spiritualised, so to say.’’ Significantly, in the fourth round humanity came to be,
and in the later rounds the human race would be ‘‘ever tending to reassume its
primeval form.’’ ‘‘Man’’ would become ‘‘a God and then—god, like every other
atom in the Universe.’’22
Here, in the fourth round, a series of ‘‘root-races’’ had sprung up in succession,
each of them dwelling on a particular continent. As Blavatsky plotted their his-
Metaphysical Asia 341
tory, in what Bruce Campbell has called a ‘‘process of involution and evolution,’’
she invoked ‘‘Ethereal’’ beginnings and a ‘‘spiritual’’ end. The earliest (prehistoric)
root-race, the ‘‘Self-born,’’ arose on a continent called ‘‘The Imperishable
Sacred Land.’’ Thereafter came a second race on the ‘‘Hyperborean’’ continent,
a third on Lemuria, and a fourth on Atlantis. After that, the fifth root-race, the
Aryan, appeared, and it was this race that flourished in most of recorded history,
including Blavatsky’s nineteenth century. She had first identified its continent
as ‘‘America’’ but went on to explain that, as it was ‘‘situated at the Antipodes,’’ it
was ‘‘Europe and Asia Minor, almost coeval with it’’ and then simply Europe as
the ‘‘fifth great Continent.’’23
From whence had Blavatsky synthesized this material that took shape as a dissident
history of the human species? If a reconstructed (which to a degree she
acknowledged) metaphysical Asia supplied a part and Western Hermeticism contributed
another part, a third came from a mix of novelistic sources with popular
science accounts of the period. Plato, of course, had been the ancient literary
source for Atlantean speculation in his Timaeus and his unfinished Critias. But
by Blavatsky’s time Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea (with
an English translation in 1873) and Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race
(with, in its publication year, 1871, five editions) brought Atlantean themes—
and the notion of hidden, forgotten human history—to the fore. By 1882, however,
these science fiction sources were eclipsed by Ignatius Donnelly’s Atlantis:
The Antediluvian World, the work of a former Republican lieutenant governor of
Minnesota, United States congressman, and continuing civil servant and politician.
With seven editions in the year of its publication and accolades from William
Gladstone, prime minister of England, the work was translated into Swedish
the year after it appeared and by 1890 had been printed in twenty-three American
and twenty-six English editions. Donnelly had immersed himself in the latest
findings of his era’s science and had summarized the material. Here Plato’s description
of the island-continent of Atlantis could be read historically, with the
natural catastrophe that destroyed it obliterating a spectacular human civilization.
Still more, some of the Atlanteans had managed to escape and survive. England’s
civilization was Atlantean in its origins and that of the United States thus
derivatively so.24
Blavatsky’s third root-race of Lemurians looked even more credible in terms of
the science of the time. The Pacific ‘‘land of lemurs’’ had first been proposed by
Philip Lutley Sclater, former secretary of the London Zoological Society, fellow
of the Royal Society, and friend of Thomas Huxley and Charles Darwin. Interested
in ornithology and the fauna of Central and South America, he theorized
species distribution in evolutionary terms, invoking a land bridge that began in
Madagascar, moved through southern India, and ended in the Malay Peninsula,
342 Arrivals
and calling it Lemuria. Later, the well-known German evolutionary biologist
Ernst Heinrich Haeckel argued for Sclater’s Lemuria as the original home of
humankind, even if he later changed his mind. Like Atlantis, Lemuria had sunk
into the sea, well below the surface of the Indian Ocean. Its former existence,
however, helped Haeckel in explaining the way that migration assisted the geographical
distribution of humans.25
Blavatsky absorbed it all—Vishnu, Hermes, popularized science, and even
the Christian narrative of the original sin and fall of humanity—in the comprehensive
unity of her account. The Atlanteans of her telling had fallen into sin
and begotten monsters. In the racialism characteristic of her time, she reported
that they had started out being brown-colored but later became ‘‘black with sin,’’
degenerating into ‘‘magical practices and gross animality.’’ They were ‘‘the first
‘Sacrificers’ to the gods of matter,’’ and their worship devolved into ‘‘self-worship’’
and ‘‘phallicism.’’ ‘‘Marked with a character of sorcery,’’ they had lost the ability
to use their ‘‘third eye.’’ Still, the shadow of Atlantean evil was swept away for
Blavatsky in the ebb and flow of the law of periodicity. The Atlanteans, in effect,
had died because their time had come, not—she stated specifically—because of
their depravity or because they had become ‘‘black with sin.’’ And in yet another
apparent contradiction, their development as ‘‘giants whose physical beauty and
strength reached their climax’’ followed evolutionary law.26
Read another—Asian and Hermetic—way, however, the fall that began human
history meant the ‘‘descent’’ onto earth of the gods who became incarnate
in human beings. Every avatar (or, Blavatsky said, ‘‘incarnation’’) meant ‘‘the
fall of a God into generation,’’ and she went on to cite the Upanishads for support.
There was a loss of purity here, a compromise with perfection rather than
a moral decision by a weak and disobedient human pair. But the ‘‘Fall of Spirit
into generation’’ was necessary for self-consciousness, for Atman by itself would
pass into ‘‘‘non-being, which is absolute Being.’’’ At the same time, the universe
of humans was an illusory affair; it was Maya, with everything ‘‘temporary
therein.’’ Evil came with thought, which introduced a principle of finitude and
separation, and it was related, too, to karmic law in which over countless eons
of time humans worked out their destiny. Blavatsky orchestrated a complex choreography
between this destiny and human freedom, rejecting notions of fatalism
and invoking free agency for humans in their earthly sojourn. No individual
could escape what she called a ‘‘ruling Destiny,’’ but always a choice of paths to it
existed. Karma neither created nor designed. Rather, each human planned and
created ‘‘causes,’’ and the law of karma adjusted ‘‘the effects.’’ ‘‘Those who believe
in Karma have to believe in destiny,’’ she declared, ‘‘which, from birth to
death, every man is weaving thread by thread around himself, as a spider does his
Metaphysical Asia 343
cobweb.’’27 According to The Secret Doctrine’s report, Atlanteans and Lemurians
had done so, and likewise members of the Aryan race were presently so engaged.
Given all of this—and the exotic call of lost worlds and ancient, unknown
peoples—the metaphysical afterlife of Blavatsky’s Atlantis and Lemuria proved
as extensive as her reinscription of the law of karma and reincarnation. Meanwhile,
Asia beckoned again in her doctrine of the subtle bodies. Newly impressed
(since Isis Unveiled) with the all-encompassing ‘‘sevenfold principle,’’ which she
found everywhere in nature, she discovered the seven once more. Whereas previously
in Isis she had found nature and humanity to be triune—each human
had a physical, astral, and spiritual body (or body, soul, and spirit)—now a grand
multiplication of subtle bodies took place. Just as the visible planets and their
rulers (the planetary gods) numbered the fabled seven, ‘‘principles in Man’’ corresponded.
Seven bodies existed on ‘‘three material planes and one spiritual
plane,’’ and they boasted Asian-sounding names that had already been divulged
to A. P. Sinnett in Esoteric Buddhism (by the Mahatmas, he claimed). The highest
body was the ‘‘atma’’ (Hindu Atman, or ‘‘Universal Spirit’’); the lowest, the
‘‘gross Matter’’ of the physical body. On an ascending scale in between came the
‘‘life’’ body, or the ‘‘Prana’’ (literally, ‘‘breath’’ as the ‘‘active power producing all
vital phenomena’’); the astral body, or Linga-Sarira (an ‘‘inert vehicle or form on
which the body [was] moulded’’); the animal soul, or ‘‘Kama-rupa’’ (the ‘‘principle
of animal desire’’); the ‘‘Manas’’ (Mind, or human soul); and the ‘‘Buddhi’’
(spiritual soul). In this ambitious and overarching schema, Blavatsky had provided
a tour de force on the ‘‘Septenary Element in the Vedas,’’ but she was also
backtracking toward the West. She told readers that, in the ancient world, ‘‘socalled
Christian Gnostics had adopted this time-honoured system’’ and that she
had found Kabbalistic borrowings, too.28
Not all the parts of the septenary human were fully developed, however, and
this, too, supported Blavatsky’s earlier threefold designation. As Kuhn summarized,
for her humans were ‘‘sevenfold potentially, threefold actually,’’ and this
meant that of the ‘‘seven principles only the lower three have been brought from
latency to activity.’’ Blavatsky employed the term Monad to describe the AtmaBuddhi,
the last two—and highest—‘‘principles’’ within the septenary human,
and she called the Monad the ‘‘dual soul.’’ She also called the human Monad, in
its ‘‘informing principle,’’ the ‘‘higher self,’’ and saw it as ‘‘one and the same’’
with an ‘‘animal Monad,’’ even if the first was ‘‘endowed with divine intelligence’’
and the second ‘‘with instinctual faculty alone.’’ Human Monads participated in
a far vaster monadic universe, since individual Monads were ‘‘spontaneously selfactive’’
units characteristic of nature. In an echo of the mid-nineteenth-century
spiritualist cosmology, all ‘‘Matter’’ was ‘‘Spirit, and vice versâ’’; and ‘‘the Uni-
344 Arrivals
verse and the Deity which informs it’’ were ‘‘unthinkable apart from each other.’’
Monads evolved through succeeding incarnations to become human, but Blavatsky
distinguished the process from Darwinian biological evolution or even metaphysical
descriptions of external evolution of the Monad through many forms.
Instead, the ‘‘evolution of the internal or real man’’ was ‘‘purely spiritual’’; it represented
a ‘‘journey of the ‘pilgrim-soul’ through various states of not only matter
but Self-consciousness and self-perception.’’ It stopped being human only when
it became ‘‘absolutely divine.’’29
Absoluteness, however, was the far goal. As in Andrew Jackson Davis’s midcentury
cosmology of eternal progress and imploding worlds, Blavatsky’s humanmade-god
was, indeed, a ‘‘pilgrim-soul.’’ Theosophist Alvin Kuhn, commenting
on The Secret Doctrine, pointed to ‘‘the far-off summit’’ of human life ‘‘in the
seventh Round,’’ when all seven human principles would exist in ‘‘full flower’’
and each human would be ‘‘the divine man he was before—only now conscious
of his divinity.’’ But on the way, there was much to be done and achieved. He
especially noted how, in the Blavatskian schema, when all that was evolving attained
the seventh globe of a round, a return to the originating condition followed—yet
with wisdom gained through experience and, so, a superior state of
consciousness.30 Here, in effect, was a Western gloss on the materials from which
Blavatsky constructed her metaphysical universe. Asia had been read and, at least
historically speaking, misread many times over. But the misreadings themselves
constituted the creative aspect of Blavatsky’s work, and the theosophical misreadings
continued. The Asia of historical essentialism arguably never existed, and
historical revisionism, at least in the West, re-created Asia again and again. The
theosophical Asia molded by Americans and Anglophiles in general bent South
Asian history and traditional lore—however much it was already bent by Asians
to their own needs—into a new metaphysical version with a shape distinctly Victorian
and moralistic.31
By 1890, for example, the children of American Theosophists in New York and
elsewhere could discover from a theosophical ‘‘catechism’’ in William Q. Judge’s
periodical The Path that the ‘‘Secret Doctrine’’ was most like ‘‘the Buddhist religion
and the religion of the Brahmans,’’ which included ‘‘more than two-thirds of
all mankind.’’ They could discover, too, that Jesus Christ had also taught the same
truths esoterically but that the ‘‘Secret Doctrine’’ contained ‘‘more theosophical
knowledge than any other body of teaching.’’ It was ‘‘the Science-Religion,’’
in that it searched ‘‘for facts or laws in nature,’’ and it rested on the three principles
of ‘‘Being or Life,’’ the ‘‘law of periodicity,’’ and the ‘‘identity of all souls
with the Oversoul.’’ Learning by rote or by teacher’s paraphrase, theosophical
children could absorb a theology in which all nature was ‘‘ensouled,’’ with the
Metaphysical Asia 345
‘‘world soul’’ entering ‘‘into the elements, such as air, fire, water, and then into the
mineral, vegetable, animal, and human worlds.’’ Each ‘‘soul spark,’’ they would
learn, went ‘‘through all things thus’’ and slowly reached ‘‘perfection,’’ with ‘‘soulunion
with the all’’ as the ‘‘only real state.’’ Meanwhile, they were assured that the
‘‘Life Principle’’ that flowed through all could be called ‘‘the living Breath of the
unknown Eternal One’’ and that its ‘‘great Law’’ was ‘‘Karma.’’ Matter, or ‘‘Substance,’’
said the catechism, was that into which the ‘‘Great Breath’’ breathed, and
they could identify it as the ‘‘World Mother or the Oversoul.’’ When they asked
what next, the stock children’s answers explained that ‘‘after a long period, The
Great Breath’’ was ‘‘drawn in again’’ and that then the world ‘‘all dissolved back
again into The Breath.’’ The ‘‘Breath,’’ however, moved ‘‘to and fro,’’ and young
readers were brought back to the law of Karma, with its ‘‘strict justice’’ as ‘‘the
eternal nature of all being’’ and ‘‘Universal Brotherhood’’ as the moral of the tale.
Where could ‘‘an example of this in human life’’ be found? The answer came
swift and sure. ‘‘If I speak an angry word to any one at the beginning of the day, it
makes both him and me feel differently for some time. This affects what we say
to others, changes them to us, and so all are injured by the one selfish deed.’’32
The practical simplicity of the teaching was inescapable, suited more to the
urbanized American Northeast with its Anglo-Protestant culture of moralism
than a putative South Asian ashram. The progress of the soul-spark through the
forms—the return of the Monad to the One—not only performed itself as agency
but, ever and especially, as moral agency. Several readings away from Blavatsky’s
Hindu and Hermetic sources, Judge’s Theosophy functioned as a distinct species
of American metaphysical religion. Meanwhile, the American lodges flourished.
The same year that the children of would-be adepts were learning their theosophical
catechism, The Path was reporting some thirty-four American branches
of the Theosophical Society, with lodges not only in obvious places like New
York, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Boston but also in medium-sized
cities such as Cincinnati, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, and St. Louis and smaller
ones like Grand Island (Nebraska), Bridgeport (Connecticut), Decorah (Iowa),
Santa Cruz (California), and Muskegon (Michigan). A year later, the magazine
counted fifty-four lodges in North America, including one in Toronto, Canada,
a sizable number of the 258 lodges worldwide. By the next year (1892), there were
sixty North American lodges, including the single Canadian lodge. The pattern
was similar for the next two years. There were seventy-seven North American
lodges in 1893 and eighty-four the following year, including three in Canada for
both years.33
By this time, Judge was heavily embroiled in the conflict with Henry Steel
Olcott that would lead to rupture and independence for what became the Theo-
346 Arrivals
sophical Society in America. Beginning after Blavatsky’s death in 1891, Judge
claimed esoteric privileges and declared his personal contact with the Masters
or Mahatmas of theosophical lore (see the previous chapter). In a bitter feud between
the two men continents apart (Olcott, the president of the Theosophical
Society, was in India), judicial proceedings were launched against Judge, who
was vice president. Accused of deception on a series of matters, of falsely claiming
communication with Masters, and of also falsely sending personal messages
and orders as if authorized by Masters, Judge faced a council and committee of
the Theosophical Society that first found grounds not to act against him. However,
when evidence contained in the private papers of the Englishwoman Annie
Besant—who would later head the society—was made public without her consent,
matters came to a head. A convention of the society in 1894 resolved, after
Olcott’s urging, that Judge should resign as vice president and go through a reelection
process. The American section responded quickly. Meeting in a Boston
convention the following year, members voted to secede, declaring their autonomy
and changing the name of the American section to ‘‘The Theosophical
Society in America.’’ Then they elected Judge president for life—a role he held
only for a year until his death in 1896. In his turn, Olcott expelled Judge from the
parent Theosophical Society. No winner took all. Most of the American lodges
followed Judge, but later—with lecturing and organizing efforts on the part of
Besant and Countess Constance Wachtmeister, the widow of a former Swedish
ambassador to London—some of the American work of the parent body was re-
couped.34
For both branches of the society in the United States, American readings of
Asia continued to mold it to metaphysical categories already abroad in the nation.
Here could be found roots both in the Hermetic tradition of the West and in
the polyglot and combinative culture of the land, in which Native American and
African American memory and practice functioned as the repressed knowledge
of white Americans. And here, too, could be found a spirituality that, however
much and however vociferously it protested, was engrafted on the Anglo-Protestant
base that had shaped public culture. We need not subscribe to an essentialism
that posits a one true reading of Asia to notice that Americans were creating
an Asia to their own visionary requirements, an Asia of their dreams that would
facilitate the shaping of their waking selves and Selves.
THE METAPHYSICS OF AMERICAN YOGA
Metaphysical Self-fashioning, strongly influenced by theosophical representations
of Asia, grew apace as the nineteenth century wound down and the new
Metaphysical Asia 347
century dawned. It spilled out of self-conscious metaphysical categories and became
more general ways of talking and acting. Nowhere was this more the case
than in the national appropriation of the ‘‘Brahmanism’’ Blavatsky loved in the
American experience of yoga. The process of appropriation and the shift in public
language and perception over time were remarkable. Americans moved from
a thorough revulsion, in the early to mid years of the nineteenth century, toward
anything remotely yogic (this among the most liberal elites) to a cautious
acceptance of certain aspects of meditation yoga (again among the most liberal
and now, usually, Theosophists). But in all of this, disdain for hatha, or physical,
yoga continued. In the twentieth century, the theosophical legacy combined
with aspects of New Thought, with already Westernized South Asian discourses,
and with growing interest in South Asian tantra to create a new and American
yogic product. This American yoga increasingly came to value the physical as a
route to the transcendent. Along the way, it began to pay attention to the all but
overlooked language of the Self in earlier American transcriptions of the AtmanBrahman
equation until, by the early and middle twentieth century, American
yoga gave fuller—though still limited—acknowledgment to the Self. In the midst
of this, what I have already called the enlightened body-self became, more and
more, the approved cultural transcription of metaphysical ‘‘mind.’’
The most useful place to begin following this story of American transformation
is with the Transcendentalists. Nineteenth-century statements that figured this
Self had spoken in terms of the Oversoul; and, as we have already seen, American
language of the Oversoul preceded Blavatsky and needs to be laid at Transcendental
doors. In his well-known essay on the theme in 1841, Ralph Waldo Emerson
had announced that ‘‘man’’ was a ‘‘stream whose source is hidden’’ and had
pointed to the soul that declared ‘‘I am born into the great, the universal mind.’’
He had also affirmed that the person so lived by the Oversoul would ‘‘cease from
what is base and frivolous in his life, and be content with all places and with any
service he can render.’’ As Frederic Ives Carpenter long ago showed, this forthright
declaration of American mysticism originated not in Asian sources but in
Western Neoplatonism with its idea of a World Soul in which all discrete and
individual souls were joined. It was Souls, not Selves, that Emerson affirmed,
and—even though he already knew that Atman equaled Brahman—his rhetorical
choices were Western. It could be said that a grand enlargement of the individual
soul ran through Emerson’s statement, and that is certainly true. But the
call was one to asceticism (cease from the ‘‘base and frivolous’’), to nonattachment
(be content wherever you are), and to nonpreferential service (give any service
you can). Peace and tranquility, more than radical transformation, characterized
Emerson’s vision of the soul in union with the Oversoul: ‘‘He will calmly
348 Arrivals
front the morrow in the negligency of that trust which carries God with it, and so
hath already the whole future in the bottom of the heart,’’ Emerson concluded.35
Emerson’s younger friend, the second-generation Transcendentalist Henry
David Thoreau, at first glance seems more forthcoming in making explicit yogic
connections. There is at least one tantalizing letter, written in 1849, in which
Thoreau invoked yoga, quoting passages from his South Asian reading and affirming
that he ‘‘would fain practice the yoga faithfully.’’ ‘‘To some extent, and at
rare intervals,’’ he confided, ‘‘even I am a yogin.’’ By the time he lived at Walden
Pond and then wrote about his sojourn there, Thoreau had immersed himself
in Asian classics. His language in Walden was a veritable catalog of his reading,
and he knew all about the ‘‘conscious penance’’ of the Brahmins of India,
‘‘sitting exposed to four fires and looking in the face of the sun; or hanging suspended
with their heads downward, over flames.’’ More affirmatively, later in the
text he was quoting a ‘‘Hindoo philosopher’’ on how the soul, with the help of a
‘‘‘holy teacher,’’’ finally ‘‘‘knows itself to be Brahme.’’’ Nor is it difficult to find
an evocation of meditation yoga in Thoreau’s well-known account of how he
spent his days at the pond: ‘‘In the morning,’’ he wrote, he bathed his ‘‘intellect
in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagvat Geeta.’’ After he
put his book down, he went to his well for water. What followed next was reverie,
or meditation, or mysticism. ‘‘There,’’ he remembered, he would ‘‘meet the servant
of the Brahmin, priest of Brahma and Vishnu and Indra, who still sits in his
temple on the Ganges reading the Vedas, or dwells at the root of a tree with his
crust and water jug. I meet his servant come to draw water for his master, and
our buckets as it were grate together in the same well. The pure Walden water
is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges.’’ For Thoreau, the message was
clear. The old Puritan covenant of works and the ‘‘conscious penance’’ of the
Brahmins had both disappeared in a new and more persuasive vision. ‘‘I realized
what the Orientals mean by contemplation and the forsaking of works.’’36
For all that, the complex texture of Thoreau’s literary work and his thinking
in general make it overambitious to call him fully a yogi.37 In the specific case of
Walden, for example, the Hindu references interspersed through the substantial
text exist side by side with a plethora of literary allusions to Western, Islamic, and
East Asian texts. Thoreau read voraciously and apparently forgot little. His work
was an encyclopedic record of his intellectual and spiritual project, and to elevate
one set of references above the others hints of misreading and does not make
good critical sense. Like all complex thinkers, Thoreau expressed considerable
ambivalence about religious and philosophical wisdom and where it lay: There
was a tensile quality to his Asia. Still more, if Thoreau celebrated Asia, in the
end he pruned it for planting in the domestic soil of Concord, Massachusetts,
Metaphysical Asia 349
grafting it to Puritan-Calvinist roots. If Asia knew the bliss of the contemplative
life, and if it was ‘‘infinitely wise,’’ it was also ‘‘infinitely stagnant.’’ The breakthrough
had come, for him, not in India but in the ‘‘western part’’ of Asia, where
there ‘‘appeared a youth, wholly unforetold by them,—not being absorbed into
Brahm, but bringing Brahm down to earth and to mankind.’’ As Arthur Versluis
has argued, Thoreau’s views were ‘‘essentially Unitarian,’’ and the Harvard moral
philosophy had shaped his spirituality in abiding ways.38
Walden first appeared in 1854, and by a year later Lydia Maria Child, the sister
of Transcendentalist minister Convers Francis and a notable author in her own
right, was publishing her huge three-volume Progress of Religious Ideas, through
Successive Ages. The first comprehensive American account of comparative religions
(outside of Hannah Adams’s more limited 1817 Dictionary of All Religions;
see below), Child’s work was intended, as she wrote in the preface, to treat ‘‘all
religions with reverence.’’ Its index was innocent of references to the Atman or
to yoga, and the most germane references, in its opening chapter on ‘‘Hindostan,
or India,’’ were to ‘‘Brahm.’’ ‘‘Brahm’’ was for Child the ‘‘one invisible God,’’
the ‘‘invisible Supreme Being,’’ one with Nature, and evidence of ‘‘Hindoo’’ pantheism.
‘‘They believe that all life, whether in essence or form, proceeds constantly
from Brahm,’’ she explained. In this context, Child told of the union of
the soul with the divine, at least in the case of the Brahmin who turned his back
to society to become the classic forest dweller. ‘‘He must renounce his family,’’
she told readers, ‘‘give up every species of property, sleep on the ground, and annihilate
his body by such self-torments as ingenuity can devise. By this process
he may finally attain absorption into the Divine Soul, which is the great object
of devotional efforts among the Hindoos.’’39 The message for Child was clear,
and it was a works righteousness of asceticism—not the sensual delight of the self
finding its Self—that ruled her Hindu mystic.
There was neither Atman nor yoga, either, in the index references of Transcendentalist
(Unitarian) minister James Freeman Clarke, who published Ten Great
Religions some sixteen years later, in 1871. Nor was his message uncritical: ‘‘An
ultra, one-sided idealism is the central tendency of the Hindoo mind. The God
of Brahmanism is an intelligence, absorbed in the rest of profound contemplation.
The good man of this religion is he who withdraws from an evil world into
abstract thought.’’ Thus the first problem of Hindu spirituality was the lack of a
service orientation on the part of the yogi (or, for Clarke, simply the ‘‘Hindoo’’
contemplative). The second—and from the rhetoric, worse—problem was the
extreme asceticism and denigration of this world that accompanied the Hindu
seeker. Clarke’s existential horror was consummate: ‘‘They torture themselves
with self-inflicted torments; for the body is the great enemy of the soul’s salva-
350 Arrivals
tion, and they must beat it down by ascetic mortifications. . . . In one part of
India, therefore, devotees are swinging on hooks in honor of Siva, hanging themselves
by the feet, head downwards over a fire, rolling on a bed of prickly thorns,
jumping on a couch filled with sharp knives, boring holes in their tongues, and
sticking their bodies full of pins and needles, or perhaps holding the arms over
the head till they stiffen in that position.’’ While some beat their flesh into submission
(with evocations of the Catholic Middle Ages), perhaps worst of all for
Clarke was the third problem. ‘‘Meantime in other places whole regions are
given over to sensual indulgences, and companies of abandoned women are connected
with different temples and consecrate their gains to the support of their
worship.’’40 Tantra on stage, we may surmise.
Members of the Transcendental circle had thus brought Asia to American
notice—or at least to the notice of the Americans who read their texts and, especially
in Emerson’s case, heard them speak. But it was an Asia that, for all the
metaphysical admiration that Emerson and Thoreau in particular evinced, got
mixed marks and was ultimately found wanting. Significantly, Child had titled
her work The Progress of Religious Ideas. Over the accounts of Asia hovered
Romantic notions of progress toward the Good and the Better and hovered,
too, an incipient form of the doctrine of evolution. This was hardly Darwinism
yet, except perhaps in the case of Clarke: The Origin of Species did not appear
until 1858. But Emerson, already in the first (1836) edition of his little book Nature,
prefaced his introduction with an epigraph declaring that ‘‘striving to be
man, the worm / Mounts through all the spires of form.’’41 Here was Lamarckian
evolution, with its insistence that all life forms were continuous, that they had
arisen gradually over ages, and that characteristics acquired because of need were
passed on to progeny. As for humans, so for their religions. The Christian faith
stood at the pinnacle of the world’s spiritual traditions, and the Transcendentalists,
for all their Asiatic tours, knew that home ground was best ground. Failures of
servanthood, extreme asceticism, and—at least for Clarke—an equally extreme
libertinism marred South Asian spirituality. In the horrified descriptions of yogis
hanging head downwards over fires and in other excruciating postures, we can
read, perhaps, early-warning reports on the dangerous asanas of hatha yoga. The
Brahm who spent his existence contemplating his own navel was not the Brahm
in whose company mid-nineteenth-century Americans felt particularly comfort-
able.
If there were few full-time yogis in Transcendental forests, the Theosophical
Society has already introduced us to a different reading of Asia. Blavatsky had
clearly used South Asian classics as a major part of a complex theological synthesis
that provided, for Theosophists, an intricate roadmap to mark their spiritual
Metaphysical Asia 351
path. As we will see for Olcott, especially concerning Buddhism, he was enthusiastic
about these classics, too. Even in Isis Unveiled, Blavatsky knew the Atman
and knew it in Indian terms as the Self. More than that, she displayed considerable
admiration for yogis, whom she portrayed as spiritual athletes who readily
performed miracles and generally evidenced awesome physical and psychological
prowess. In the face of typical criticism of yogis as ‘‘obscene ascetics’’ who
shocked Western sensibilities by going naked, she warmly defended them. By
the time she wrote The Secret Doctrine, she was calling yoga itself ‘‘mystic meditation’’
and the source of ‘‘Supreme Wisdom,’’ preferring Raja Yoga—which she
identified with the classical system ascribed to Patanjali as well as with two other
schools—as the ‘‘best and simplest.’’ She continued to be fascinated by the socalled
siddhi powers, the esoteric abilities that conferred supernormal control of
physical and psychological reality. Quoting a Hindu text, she saw the ultimate
wisdom of ‘‘Yogism’’ in perceiving ‘‘‘by means of the self the seat abiding in the
self’ where dwells the Brahman free from all.’’ Yet the world of hatha yoga—
the physical yoga to ready the body for meditative practice—remained an alien
and uninviting realm. Blavatsky saw it as a ‘‘lower’’ form and linked it to ‘‘torture
and self-maceration’’—language that echoed the earlier reports of yogis hanging
downwards over fires. Moreover, even pranayama, or control of the breath, belonged,
for Blavatsky, to the ‘‘lower Yoga.’’ ‘‘The Hatha so called,’’ she warned,
‘‘was and still is discountenanced by the Arhats. It is injurious to the health and
alone can never develop into Raj Yoga.’’42
Blavatsky’s Key to Theosophy (1889) offered readers the clearest explication of
her distinctive reading of the Atman, now transposed from South Asia to function
as part of an eclectic and synthetic theological edifice. In her schema of seven
bodies in which only the first was fully physical, she had identified the ‘‘Atma’’ as
the seventh and highest metaphysical body, ‘‘one with the Absolute, as its radiation.’’
She thought that the ‘‘Atma-Buddhi’’ was not to be identified with the
Universal World Soul of ancient Greek mystical philosophy. Yet she clearly—
if provisionally—saw the Atma(n) as the Higher Self, ‘‘inseparable from its one
and absolute Meta-Spirit as the sunbeam is inseparable from sunlight.’’ And significantly,
she declared the Atma, ‘‘the inseparable ray of the Universal and one
self,’’ to be the ‘‘God above, more than within, us.’’43
The same year that Blavatsky published her Key to Theosophy, William Judge
produced his reading of the Yoga Sutras traditionally attributed to Patanjali.
Using an English translation produced in Bombay in 1885 by Tookeram Tatya,
an Indian member of the Theosophical Society, Judge emphasized a distinction
between hatha and raja yoga already suggested by Blavatsky. His preface clearly
explained the difference he saw between the two and warned readers of the dan-
352 Arrivals
gers of hatha yoga, quoting from the words of Henry Steel Olcott in the earlier
Bombay edition. Hatha yoga worked to establish health and train the will, wrote
Olcott, but ‘‘the processes prescribed to arrive at this end are so difficult that only
a few resolute souls go through all the stages of its practice, while many have
failed and died in the attempt. It is therefore strongly denounced by all the philosophers.’’
Minimizing allusions to ‘‘postures’’ (the asanas) in the Yoga Sutras,
Judge went on to laud raja yoga, which, he said, was ‘‘certainly spiritual.’’ Hatha
was distinctly not. Instead, it resulted in ‘‘psychic development at the delay or
expense of the spiritual nature.’’ When the Patanjali text announced, in translation,
‘‘A posture assumed by a Yogee must be steady and pleasant,’’ Judge was
quick to explain that the ‘‘postures’’ of the various yogic systems were ‘‘not absolutely
essential to the successful pursuit of the practice of concentration and attainment
of its ultimate fruits.’’ More than that, he found them ‘‘only possible for
Hindus,’’ who had practiced them from childhood and who knew their physiological
effects. Still, Judge was fairly complacent about the dangers: ‘‘These last
named practices and results may allure the Western student, but from our knowledge
of inherent racial difficulties there is not much fear that many will persist
in them.’’44
What appealed to a late-nineteenth-century Anglo-American about the Yoga
Sutras, we can guess, was the moral inscription that the text—and Judge’s presentation
of it—wrote over yogic practice. As in the theosophical children’s catechism
that he had published in The Path, Judge insisted on virtue. The Patanjali
yogi developed such qualities as ‘‘harmlessness and kindness,’’ ‘‘veracity,’’ ‘‘abstinence
from theft,’’ ‘‘continence,’’ the elimination of ‘‘covetousness,’’ and similar
virtues along the way to the proverbial flight of the Alone to the Alone. There
was no discourse of the Self in this rendering, no prevailing language that Atman
was Brahman, but instead a translation that hailed the ‘‘Isolation’’ of the soul.
Judge was quick to explain that the translated text did not mean ‘‘that a man is
isolated from his fellows, becoming cold and dead, but only that the Soul is isolated
or freed from the bondage of matter and desire.’’ His anti-isolationist reading
accorded well with readings by later translators, but the reasons for Judge’s
caveat were neither textual nor linguistic. For him, instead, theosophical (and
Christian) brotherhood had become Hindu righteousness. Beyond that, in the
original Yoga Sutras there were the tantalizing allusions to the siddhi powers.
The accomplished yogi, for example, could ‘‘move his body from one place to
another with the quickness of thought, to extend the operations of his senses beyond
the trammels of place or the obstructions of matter, and to alter any natural
object from one form to another.’’ Judge remained ambivalent about what he
understood as these exploits of ‘‘Will.’’ He was clearly fascinated, but he worried
Metaphysical Asia 353
over the inextricable bond, for most, between will and desire, and he seemed
grateful, or at least relieved, at the circumspection of the Patanjali text. ‘‘Patanjali
and his school well knew that the secret of directing the will with ten times
the ordinary force might be discovered if they outlined the method, and then
bad men whose desires were strong and conscience wanting, would use it with
impunity against their fellows.’’45 Malicious animal magnetism, or its near relative,
apparently inhabited the East as well as the West.
Judge’s work elicited at least one (fairly negative) review in the New York
Times, suggesting some awareness of yoga, however minimal, among American
readers (‘‘those who love to be muddled may be safely recommended this little
book’’). Even further, by the 1890s Theosophists were exempting pranayama
(yogic breathing) from their strictures against hatha yoga—different from Blavatsky
who had found both to be ‘‘lower.’’ Prasad’s Nature’s Finer Forces was making
its mark—in what may have been, as J. Gordon Melton has suggested, ‘‘the first
book to explain and advocate the practice of yoga.’’ Significantly, in Prasad’s work
along with the much-vaunted ‘‘Science of Breath’’ came chapters on ‘‘Evolution,’’
‘‘The Mind,’’ and ‘‘The Manifestations of Psychic Force.’’ These are themes that
at once evoke the preoccupations of the theosophical world and point the way
toward a later American history of yoga as a transformed metaphysic.46
Theosophical interest in meditation yoga, however, would continue under
the rubric of raja yoga—a term that became current in American metaphysical
circles after 1896 when Swami Vivekananda’s Raja-Yoga first appeared (see
below). Raja yoga, in general, had already made its appeal, if vaguely, among
Theosophists, since—as we saw—Blavatsky had invoked the term. After Vivekananda’s
pathbreaking work, though, Theosophists learned more clearly that the
‘‘aphorisms’’ of Patanjali they so admired were, in fact, an exposition of raja yoga,
containing techniques for stilling the fluctuations of the mind and promoting
mental concentration in order to attain samadhi, participation in the bliss of the
divine consciousness. What they did not realize in this new learning was that
they were being encouraged to read the dualistic Patanjali work in ways that were
monistic. They were learning, in effect, no longer the isolation of the soul from
matter and desire but the presence of a divine source of bliss within an embodied
individual consciousness.
Judge’s successor as the head of the Theosophical Society in America (the
American branch of the Theosophical Society that had broken away from the
international organization) was Katherine Tingley (1847–1929), whose colony
at Point Loma, California, with its ‘‘applied Theosophy,’’ became a showcase for
the raja. But it was a raja decidedly changed, even from the moral transformation
already part of the Judge reading. Tingley used raja yoga as a new descrip-
354 Arrivals
tive term for the work of socializing children in her experimental school. Her
Raja Yoga School opened in 1900, including American and Cuban children,
and from the first it aimed at creating a ‘‘pure moral atmosphere’’ for its (resident)
students. Reading, especially of newspapers and magazines, was censored,
daily silence was observed, sexual activity (that is, masturbation) was severely proscribed,
and physical activities—but not hatha yoga—were encouraged. Since
the body housed the ‘‘spiritual Ego,’’ hygiene and physical health became preoccupations.
As W. Michael Ashcraft has summarized, Point Loma raja yoga
meant ‘‘a lifestyle of faculty coordination, uniting all of the faculties to achieve
spiritual and moral maturity.’’47 Under this regime, in effect, to be metaphysical
meant, first and primarily, to be moral.
Meanwhile, Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902), the now-famed South Asian
‘‘other’’ who had helped Theosophists think more, and more precisely, about raja
yoga, was broadcasting his views to a wider audience. After participating in the
World’s Parliament of Religions, he stayed to tour and lecture, visiting major
cities not only in the East but also in the Midwest and the South. Even Christian
Scientists welcomed him; in 1894 he offered a lecture series in Maine under their
sponsorship. (He called them ‘‘Vedantins’’ in a letter to other monastics back in
India, telling them that the Scientists had grafted the teaching of the nondualist
Advaita onto the Bible.) By 1895, he had founded the Vedanta Society in New
York and subsequently, in 1897, the Ramakrishna Mission and the Ramakrishna
Order in India. In the midst of this activity, Vivekananda produced four books on
yoga—essentially stenographed transcriptions of his lectures. The first three accorded
with the classical tradition—karma (the yoga of works), bhakti (the yoga
of devotion), and jnana (the yoga of knowledge). The last concerned raja yoga
(the meditation yoga that Theosophists had already identified with the Patanjali
Yoga Sutras, although it was not explicitly named there). The book that Vivekananda
produced under the title Raja-Yoga sold out in a matter of months in 1896
and was ready for a new edition by November.48
There was no separate work from Vivekananda on hatha yoga, but as Elizabeth
De Michelis has argued, his reconfiguration of the Yoga Sutras in RajaYoga
both reflected and augmented an emerging spirituality significantly different
from Indian classical spiritual teaching. De Michelis links the spirituality
to individualism and, following Dutch scholar Wouter Hanegraaff, to a ‘‘New
Age religion’’ of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and then to
the New Age movement of the later century and continuing.49 The designation
‘‘New Age religion’’ is somewhat misleading here, with a presentism that minimizes
connections to an earlier America. Instead, what should be clear in this
Metaphysical Asia 355
context are the patent lines of connection to American metaphysical religion—
to its lengthy history and its evolving reinvention of discourse and practice.
Vivekananda, in his late-nineteenth-century moment, became a major conversation
partner in the discourse, epitomizing the revolving doors that were already
connecting East with West with East again in British India. De Michelis
has noted that his relationship with the fabled Indian mystic Ramakrishna (1836–
1886) was far more ambiguous than it has been read to be in the devotional
literature of India and the American Vedanta movement. She has also pointed
to his connections with the Hindu reformist body the Brahmo Samaj. A religious
and social movement of elite Bengalis, from 1828 it had moved through a
series of phases, influenced by Western contacts with Unitarian Christianity, with
ideas about science, and eventually with Theosophy (when Blavatsky and Olcott
settled in Bombay). Vivekananda’s debt to the Brahmo Samaj, De Michelis estimates,
cannot ‘‘be overstated.’’ Meanwhile, Bengal itself welcomed Romantic,
Transcendental, occult, and theosophical ideas that were spread by literature,
public lectures, and personal contacts. None other than William Judge, for example,
lectured there in a tour during the summer of 1884.50
Making his way in the metaphysical culture of the United States, which lionized
him after 1893, Vivekananda quickly learned the American metaphysical
dialect, and he creolized his presentation of an already combinative IndianWestern
spirituality to please American ears and tastes. His highly influential
Raja-Yoga exhibited the skill with which he blended his own message with the
discourse of his American hosts. In semantic choices already familiar to his Indian
milieu and also true to metaphysical form, he hailed the ‘‘science’’ of rajayoga,
which—unlike the ‘‘unpardonable manner of some modern scientists’’—
did not ‘‘deny the existence of facts’’ that were ‘‘difficult to explain.’’ This meant
‘‘miracles, and answers to prayers, and powers of faith.’’ Instead of the ‘‘superstitious
explanation of attributing them to the agency of a being, or beings, above
the clouds,’’ he posited an explanation that could be read with familiarity and
recognition by metaphysically inclined Americans. Raja-yoga (like Theosophy
and New Thought) taught that ‘‘each man is only a conduit for the infinite ocean
of knowledge and power that lies behind mankind.’’ If ‘‘desires and wants’’ were
‘‘in man,’’ likewise the ‘‘power of supply’’ (a metaphysical term that marked the
presence of divine abundance) was also there. ‘‘Wherever and whenever a desire,
a want, a prayer has been fulfilled,’’ Vivekananda emphasized, ‘‘it was out of this
infinite magazine that the supply came, and not from any supernatural being.’’51
Nor did Vivekananda confine himself to using jargon and code, dropping
buzzwords into metaphysical ears or minds. Success in meditation began with
356 Arrivals
establishing a strong physiological foundation, and he countenanced this for
American listeners and readers by specifically citing metaphysical practitioners.
‘‘Always use a mental effort, what is usually called ‘Christian Science,’ to keep
the body strong,’’ he enjoined. When he approached the subject of pranayama,
he linked the discipline of the breath to various species of metaphysical practice,
all of them suggesting that he read them in terms congenial to ‘‘noetic’’
New Thought. ‘‘Sects in every country’’ had attempted ‘‘control of Prana.’’ In
America, he reminded readers, there were ‘‘Mind-healers, Faith-healers, Spiritualists,
Christian Scientists, Hypnotists, etc.,’’ and, whether they were aware or
not, ‘‘at the back of each’’ lay ‘‘this control of the Prana.’’ De Michelis has pointed
both to a ‘‘prana model’’ (breath) and a ‘‘samadhi model’’ (bliss) in the text, each
of them a significant reinterpretation of traditional Indian teaching in terms congenial
to Vivekananda’s audience. In her reading, his text linked the energy of
prana to mesmeric belief and practice—and, it can be added, to notions of subtle
electricity and Blavatsky’s language of ether and Great Breath already abroad
in the metaphysical community. Likewise, samadhi became transformed from
the Patanjali radical flight of liberation in isolation from the world, with which
Judge had struggled. Instead, De Michelis argues, the samadhi theme should be
read in terms of ‘‘God-realization’’ become ‘‘Self-realization’’ and likewise ‘‘realization
of human potential.’’52 In other words, American yoga was making the
choice—congenial to Theosophy and New Thought and surely influenced by
them—for a philosophy of monism and a theology of immanence.
We can add, too, a bliss consciousness that already hinted of the tantric reading
to come. Indeed, Vivekananda explicitly cited the kundalini, in tantrism the
powerful but latent spiritual energy ‘‘asleep’’ at the base of the spine that, when
awakened, traveled upward and brought transformative meditation states. He
called it ‘‘psychic prana’’ and the ‘‘‘Lotus of the Kundalini,’’’ telling how on its
journey to the ‘‘thousand-petalled lotus in the brain’’ the Yogi would experience
‘‘layer after layer of the mind’’ opening and ‘‘all the different visions and wonderful
powers.’’ It was significant, too, that he likened the energy and ‘‘vibration’’
of pranayama to electric current, with its aim ‘‘to rouse the coiled-up power . . .
called the Kundalini.’’ On arrival in the brain, the result became ‘‘the full blaze
of illumination, the perception of the Self.’’ The aroused kundalini brought ‘‘all
knowledge’’ and represented ‘‘the one and only way to attaining Divine Wisdom,
superconscious perception, the realization of the spirit.’’ Here all prayers were
answered, for when a person received a positive response the ‘‘fulfilment’’ came
‘‘from his own nature.’’ The individual had ‘‘succeeded by the mental attitude of
prayer in waking up a bit of this infinite power which is coiled up within himself.’’
Metaphysical Asia 357
Raja-yoga was ‘‘the science of religion, the rationale of all worship, all prayers,
forms, ceremonies, and miracles.’’53
In the psychologized context of his meditation yoga, Vivekananda had few
things to say about the hatha. Pranayama and the transformed consciousness it
evoked did require attention to posture (as did the cultivation of the kundalini)—
sitting with spine erect and in a straight line with the neck and head. ‘‘Let the
whole weight of the body be supported by the ribs,’’ Vivekananda advised, ‘‘and
then you will have an easy natural posture, with the spine straight. You will easily
see that you cannot think very high thoughts with the chest in.’’ But like Blavatsky
and Judge, he skirted away from an embrace of the purely physical. Hatha yoga,
he thought, aimed entirely at making the body ‘‘very strong.’’ ‘‘We have nothing
to do with it here,’’ he explained both pragmatically and condescendingly, ‘‘because
its practices are very difficult, and cannot be learned in a day, and, after all,
do not lead to much spiritual growth.’’ For all that, De Michelis has argued his
seminal role as ‘‘creator’’ of what she terms ‘‘fully-fledged Modern Yoga,’’ which
for her includes, but is not limited to, ‘‘Modern Postural Yoga.’’ In a designation
that encompasses not only the United States but all of the West in interaction
with the Indian Subcontinent, she credits Vivekananda’s Raja-Yoga with ‘‘immediately’’
starting ‘‘something of a ‘yoga renaissance’ both in India and in the
West.’’54 Yet as important as Vivekananda was, it needs to be noticed that among
American metaphysicians and the public at large the yogic turn was more complex,
beginning gradually and growing because of a series of players and performances
yet to be staged.
By the time Raja-Yoga appeared, public awareness, even of hatha, had already
begun. In 1893, for example, at least one spoof on ‘‘A Western Yoga’’ had appeared
in the columns of the New York Times, complete with theosophical allusions to
the astral body, progress, and ‘‘Yoga’’ as the ‘‘science of the soul’’ and ‘‘holy sorcery’’
(an apparent allusion to siddhis). ‘‘The power comes from meditation and
concentration of the mind. One must posture in silence and abstraction. And
this can be best attained . . . by standing on one leg and looking at the tip of
the nose.’’55 Still, as the tone of the Times piece suggests, after the World’s Parliament
and even after the 1896 appearance of Vivekananda’s Raja-Yoga, the
American experience of yoga remained guarded. Meditation yoga signaled exoticism
and the promise of something that was spiritually more. It also fed into
evolving discourses of the mind and its powers—a point to which I shall return—
and it suggested a ‘‘scientific’’ perspective that could address religiophilosophical
themes rationally and pragmatically. At the cutting edge of this discourse,
the yogic practice of pranayama had begun to bring some idealizing American
358 Arrivals
devotees of religious liberalism back to their senses and their bodies. The mind
had a home, and the house itself would need to be dusted and swept, even by
metaphysicians. More than that, a clean house could bring the body—and the
mind—to a state of delight.
Given this nineteenth-century history and its ambivalences, however—given
the tortured bodies of its yogis hanging upside down—how did hatha yoga (and
the body and mind of delight) come to prevail as preferred American yogic practice?
If Vivekananda alone was not enough, how else did Americans incorporate
into their discourse and practice the translated language of the Self in union with
the universe—and, in the American context, the (lower-case) self and selves?
Against the backdrop of hatha yoga’s ascendancy, what, in general, happened to
the metaphysical mind and to forms of meditation yoga? Any satisfactory answer
to these questions must begin with the recognition, already suggested, that the
route to the enlightened body-self and its American metaphysical entourage
was circuitous. Yet the American teachers pointing toward an American yogic
future were there, and they supplied important hints of what was to come. J. Gordon
Melton has identified two such early twentieth-century figures in William
Walker Atkinson and Pierre Bernard, both of them teachers of hatha who located
it in a larger yogic context.56 What is intriguing about the pair is that between
them they introduced the major themes that have come to characterize American
yoga with its covert metaphysical content.
William Walker Atkinson (1862–1932), who had a business background, was
drawn to the American metaphysical tradition and became a leading New
Thought author. He apparently moved to Chicago around the beginning of the
twentieth century and from there produced a prodigious set of titles, one after
another, book after book. As they are reproduced in the on-line library catalog
of the University of California, they clearly display Atkinson’s preoccupation
with a series of themes. They speak of subconscious and superconscious planes
of the mind, of the powers of mind and thought, of the attainability of health
and success, of the exercise of will and its effects in the American pragmatic
version of psychic forces. Here was New Thought in its brashest, least Christianized
and God-dependent version; here was the rationalist—the noetic—
tradition that Gary Ward Materra distinguishes from the more affective and socially
concerned version taught by Emma Curtis Hopkins and her students.
Titles such as these, for example, carry the argument in unambiguous witness:
The Law of the New Thought (1902); Thought-Force in Business and Everyday
Life (18th ed., 1903); Dynamic Thought; or, The Law of Vibrant Energy (1906);
Self-Healing by Thought Force (1907); The Inner Consciousness (1908); The
Secret of Success (1908); The Will: Its Nature, Power, and Development (1909);
Metaphysical Asia 359
Mind and Body; or, Mental States and Physical Conditions (1910); Mind-Power:
The Secret of Mental Magic (1912).57
Readers of these books, however, likely did not know that Atkinson was also
the author of another series of works on yoga under a pseudonym designed to
suggest their South Asian provenance. From 1902, as Yogi Ramacharaka, Atkinson
published a different set of titles. Significantly, along with books on ‘‘Yogi
philosophy and Oriental mysticism,’’ by 1904 his Hatha Yoga; or, The Yoga Philosophy
of Physical Well-Being appeared, and by a year later the related Science
of Breath, with again the next year A Series of Lessons in Raja Yoga and The Science
of Psychic Healing. Apparently, Atkinson wrote from experience. Gordon
Melton remarks that he ‘‘became an accomplished student of yoga, so much so
that his books circulated and were well received in India.’’ Whatever his personal
yogic success, Ramacharaka’s titles already suggest the influence of Theosophy
(and likely Vivekananda) in their evocation of raja yoga, siddhi powers, and pranayama.
Linked to Atkinson’s New Thought themes—with, in his case, their
theosophical tilt toward ideas of magical and occult powers of mind—the conceptual
frame is not hard to read. Ramacharaka cited and quoted from Mabel
Collins’s theosophical devotional classic Light on the Path in his work on raja
yoga, and his general teaching throughout was theosophical.58
Each human being was composed of a series of five hierarchical planes from
the lowest, which was vegetative, through to the instinctive, the intellectual, the
intuitive, and finally the plane of Cosmic Knowing. ‘‘Man is a Centre of Consciousness
in the great One Life of the Universe,’’ Ramacharaka wrote. He continued
in an evolutionary declaration: ‘‘His soul has climbed a great many steps
before it reached its present position and stage of unfoldment. And it will pass
through many more steps until it is entirely free and delivered from the necessity
of its swaddling clothes.’’ According to the ‘‘Yogi philosophy,’’ even the ‘‘atoms of
matter’’ had ‘‘life and an elementary manifestation of mind,’’ while at the highest
level ‘‘the higher regions of the mind, while belonging to the individual, and a
part of himself, are so far above his ordinary consciousness that to all intents and
purposes messages from them are as orders from another and higher soul.’’ Still,
there were the ‘‘confining sheaths’’—in an evocation of the lower bodies of which
Blavatsky had written—and the ‘‘Higher Self’’ had to do the best that it could.
If one could reach the cosmic plane, the fortunate individual would be ‘‘able to
see fully, plainly and completely that there is One Great Life underlying all the
countless forms and shapes of manifestation.’’ Separateness was ‘‘‘the working
fiction of the universe.’’’ In this context, mental healing was but the restoration
of ‘‘normal conditions’’ on the vegetative plane, so that this level of consciousness
could ‘‘do its work without the hindrance of adverse conscious thought.’’59
360 Arrivals
With this anthropology as backdrop, Yogi Ramacharaka conceived the work
of yogic adepts to be awakening their consciousness of the ‘‘Real Self,’’ a process
that, he explained, the Yogi Masters taught in two steps. The first was the ‘‘Consciousness
of the I,’’ with a life not dependent on the body; and the second—
familiar in a New Thought context—was the ‘‘Consciousness of the ‘i am,’’’ identified
with the ‘‘Universal Life.’’ Thus, before one sought mastery of the secrets of
the universe outside, one ‘‘should master the Universe within—the Kingdom of
the Self.’’ In the world within could be found ‘‘that wonderful thing, the Will,’’
which was ‘‘but faintly understood by those ignorant of the Yogi Philosophy—the
Power of the Ego—its birthright from the Absolute.’’ Emersonian echoes could
be heard in the allusion to Will (Emerson’s Transcendental gospel Nature in
1836 had announced its power) and also in Ramacharaka’s instructions about distinguishing
between the ‘‘I’’ and the ‘‘Not I.’’ But the ‘‘Real Self of Man’’ was ‘‘the
Divine Spark sent forth from the Sacred Flame.’’ It was the ‘‘Child of the Divine
Parent. . . . Immortal—Eternal—Indestructible—Invincible.’’ For Ramacharaka,
in the progression that was raja yoga, the Real Self, ‘‘setting aside first this, and
then that . . . finally discards all of the ‘Not I’ leaving the Real Self free and delivered
from its bondage to its appendages.’’ Pragmatically (and tellingly), however:
‘‘Then it returns to the discarded appendages, and makes use of them.’’60
The Ramacharaka-Atkinson synthesis was smooth and seamless. Here was
Theosophy yoked to the ancient texts of India in their Westernized Neo-Vedantin
transmission and yoked as well to an American celebration of will and control.
Higher Self and ego self played in not-too-distant fields, ready to join to enhance
the waking, everyday existence of the body in which they dwelled. For what was
decidedly new about Ramacharaka’s American yoga was the body. His works
on hatha, on the breath, and on psychic healing were companion books that
pointed toward the enhancement of the high self through enhancement of its
earthly residence. Given all of this, the results were meager. The claims that Yogi
Ramacharaka made for hatha yoga seem strikingly spare, and his description of
the asanas suggests instead their continuity with simple calisthenics. If his books
went to India, as Melton reports, we have to wonder who was reading them.
Meanwhile, in the United States, in the context of late-century and newcentury
worry regarding ‘‘overcivilization’’ and of Theodore Roosevelt’s widely
influential celebration of ‘‘the strenuous life’’ (as he titled his 1901 book), a new
moral crusade was championing bodily vigor, direct action, and experience over
the learning that could be gleaned from books. The natural environment, far
from the corruption and debilitating ethos of cities, became an object of cultus.
By 1903 Outlook magazine was describing nature as the ‘‘middle ground between
God and man’’ and the ‘‘playground of the soul.’’ Camping and scouting would
Metaphysical Asia 361
institutionalize these sentiments, as physical training assumed new ascendancy
as part of moral education. At the same time, natural hygiene and physical culture—older
nineteenth-century currents in the health reform movement—had
joined forces to lead to the gymnasium. Calisthenics were in, and they beckoned
with the promise of glowing health for those who would be zealous. Will power
became equated with muscle power and, in a culture characterized by the language
of ‘‘muscular Christianity,’’ became a force for public and private good
order. ‘‘The identification of morality with muscularity was to grow as an article
of hygienic faith through the final third of the [nineteenth] century and the Progressive
years,’’ explains James C. Whorton in his landmark Crusaders for Fitness.
‘‘The arena would become congested with competing programs of health build-
ing.’’61
Ramacharaka was a thorough child of his times. ‘‘Hatha yoga,’’ he wrote, ‘‘is
that branch of the Yoga philosophy which deals with the physical body—its care
—its well being—its health—its strengths—and all that tends to keep it in its
natural and normal state of health.’’ It could appeal to American denizens of the
‘‘strenuous life’’ because it was ‘‘first, nature; second, nature, and last nature.’’
‘‘By all means,’’ Ramacharaka encouraged readers, ‘‘apply the nature test to all
theories of this kind—our own included—and if they do not square with nature,
discard them.’’ Not a ‘‘doctor book,’’ his work was instead concerned with ‘‘the
Healthy Man—its main purpose to help people conform to the standard of the
normal man.’’ The asanas that followed were listed as ‘‘yogi physical exercises,’’
and, to be sure, they were generally active and aerobic. They did not resemble
the classical postures that have been identified with hatha yoga. ‘‘Swing back the
hands until the arms stand out straight. . . . The arms should be swung with a
rapid movement, and with animation and life. Do not go to sleep over the work,
or rather play.’’62
What did this yogic workout have to do with the meditative and mystical pursuit
that characterized raja yoga? Ramacharaka’s answer was fairly trite and perfunctory.
The body was ‘‘necessary’’ for human ‘‘manifestation and growth’’; it
was the ‘‘Temple of the Spirit’’; its care and development constituted a ‘‘worthy
task’’ since an ‘‘unhealthy and imperfectly developed physical body’’ would obstruct
the proper functioning of the mind. The ‘‘instrument’’ could not be ‘‘used
to the best advantage by its master, the Spirit.’’ The closest Ramacharaka came
to later and standard explanations of quieting the body to prepare it for meditation
or altering consciousness through certain yogic asanas—inversions, forward
bends, for example—was his appeal to instrumentalism. The body was the instrument
for the ‘‘real part’’ of a person ‘‘in the work of Soul growth.’’ The yogic
devotee would ‘‘feel as proud [of his body] as does the master violinist of the
362 Arrivals
Stradivarius which responds almost with intelligence to the touch of his bow.’’
More than that, Ramacharaka was at pains to separate his teaching from the
American knowledge of yoga that we have already met in Transcendentalist and
theosophical circles. ‘‘In India,’’ explained Ramacharaka, ‘‘there exists a horde of
ignorant mendicants of the lower fakir class, who pose as Hatha Yogis, but who
have not the slightest conception of the underlying principles of that branch of
Yoga.’’ They engaged in ‘‘tricks,’’ such as reversing the peristaltic action of their intestines
to eject items introduced into the colon from ‘‘the gullet.’’ ‘‘Rank frauds
or self-deluded fanatics,’’ these people were ‘‘akin to the class of fanatics in India
. . . who refuse to wash the body, for religious reasons; or who sit with up-lifted
arm until it is withered; or who allow their finger nails to grow until they pierce
their hands; or who sit so still that their birds build nests in their hair; or who
perform other ridiculous feats, in order to pose as ‘holy men.’’’63
Yogi Ramacharaka did tell readers that they needed to ‘‘throw some mind’’
into their hatha yoga. He also offered a tantalizing discussion, surrounded by
late-Victorian caveats and veiled allusions, of ‘‘transmuting reproductive energy’’
through pranayama (raising energy from the sexual organs at the base of the spine
to the crown of the head to be used in meditation, as in the discourse of kundalini).
‘‘Keep the mind fixed on the idea of Energy, and away from ordinary sexual
thoughts and imaginings,’’ cautioned Ramacharaka. In essence, however, Ramacharaka/Atkinson
had communicated a yoga of Will and self-efforting, a selfconstruction
that called on a Higher (divine) Self to achieve enhanced ego goals.
In so doing, he had effectively linked the language and intent of New Thought to
that of Theosophy. He had also succeeded in joining hatha yoga—at least in his
hatha yoga book—to raja and other forms of yoga as a venerable and respected
branch. But the enlightened body-self was more a devotee of the strenuous life
than of the bliss of yogic connection. A brisk ‘‘yogi bath’’ and body rub were partners
to the active asanas of Ramacharaka’s yogic world. The chapters in his text
point toward natural hygiene and physical culture and toward the mantra that
characterized the devotees of the health building movement—a sound mind in
a sound body.64
Six years after Ramacharaka was urging devotees to the yogi bath and body
rub, however, New York City could boast its own tantric master. Pierre Bernard
(1875–1955), or Perry Arnold Baker as he was born, came from a middle-class
family in Leon, Iowa (although he went by several assumed names, probably
partly for protection from the law). When he met Sylvais Hamati, a Syrian-Indian
man who taught yoga in Lincoln, Nebraska, in the 1880s and 1890s, his new
teacher changed his life. With Hamati and others, he moved to California, where
his attraction to metaphysical themes led him to conduct an academy in San
Metaphysical Asia 363
Francisco dedicated to hypnosis until, probably because of legal hassles, he left
the area. Around 1905, Bernard founded his ‘‘Tantrik’’ order and published the
first and only issue of his International Journal of the Tantrik Order in America:
Vira Sadhana in New York City. There, with the name Pierre Arnold Bernard
(used already in his San Francisco days and to which he at some point prefixed
a ‘‘Dr.’’), he opened the New York Sanskrit College. According to reports, hatha
yoga was taught on the first floor, while upstairs tantric initiates were ushered
into deeper secrets. Dogged by sex scandals and hounded by the press as Oom
the Omnipotent, he was apparently as flamboyant as the name suggests, reportedly
sitting enthroned in the upstairs room before his wealthy initiates and receiving
their worshipful adulation. His wife, Blanche deVries, was also a student,
an ‘‘Oriental’’ dancer, and a teacher of hatha yoga. She taught, too, it was said,
a softer form of tantrism than her husband’s more provocative version.65
Yet there was telling evidence that Bernard was still a serious student of South
Asian yogic themes. By 1924, he had purchased a seventy-acre estate in Nyack,
New York, which became a colony for his elite and socially well-placed devotees.
Here he located his impressive library, described by a website devoted to him
as the ‘‘finest collection of Sanskrit works (original texts, manuscripts and translations)
in the United States at the time.’’ Indeed, the library contained ‘‘approximately
7000 volumes on the subjects of philosophy, ethics, psychology,
education and metaphysics as well as much collateral material on physiology,
medicine and related sciences.’’ Students flocked to Nyack, and Asian teachers
visited. Eventually, Bernard purchased more property in the area, and he also
opened a series of tantric centers in Cleveland, Philadelphia, Chicago, and New
York City as well as a men’s camp for tantra on Long Island. Unlike AtkinsonRamacharaka,
who seemed rarely to have an unpublished thought, Bernard left
little in writing. Nevertheless, as Gordon Melton has estimated, his work in shaping
American yoga was ‘‘immense.’’ This work looked to the human body as aesthetic
and pleasurable in ways that went beyond the more muscular approach of
the natural hygiene movement and the traditional tantrism of India. As Bernard
announced in the lone issue of his journal, ‘‘The trained imagination no longer
worships before the shrines of churches, pagodas and mosques or there would be
blaspheming the greatest, grandest and most sublime temple in the universe, the
miracle of miracles, the human body.’’ In the specific case of hatha yoga, we gain
a few clues to the substance and direction of Bernard’s work through his journal’s
stylized illustration of an ‘‘American tantrik in the practice of his yoga.’’ Here the
American yogi sits in padmasana (lotus posture), spine erect, with hands held in
special mudras or hand gestures. Evidently, too, Bernard knew about inversions
and was practicing headstands, at least, at Nyack, invoking the ‘‘Art of Reversion’’
364 Arrivals
and enjoining students to ‘‘reverse your circulation, not once but several times a
day.’’66
If we move beyond the early-twentieth-century teachers that Melton cites, we
find that Bernard’s legacy continued thematically in part in the doctoral dissertation
completed by his nephew Theos Bernard (d. 1947) in 1943 at Columbia
University. Published as Hatha Yoga: The Report of a Personal Experience
(1950), this work boasted thirty-seven full-page glossy black and white plates, including
a frontispiece—photographs of Bernard in classical hatha yoga postures.
In the first American work to include such representations, here were, among
others, padmasana (lotus), sarvangasana (shoulderstand), halasana (the plough
—a shoulderstand variation), pascimotanasana (seated forward bend), bhujangasana
(cobra), sirsasana (headstand), and other asanas familiar to twenty-firstcentury
students of hatha yoga. Bernard’s published bibliography, divided with
scholarly correctness into primary and secondary sources, was instructive. In addition
to primary sources such as the Patanjali Yoga Sutras, the Hatha Yoga Pradipika,
the Gheranda Samhita, and the Siva Samhita, the bibliography tellingly
listed among secondary works a number ascribed to the popular and controversial
pseudonymous Arthur Avalon. These included the well-known Serpent
Power—a major conduit for Western knowledge of tantrism and kundalini, identifying—with
more precision and elaboration than Vivekananda—the energy
coiled at the base of the spine as sexually charged and emphasizing its power to
bring samadhi. Here samadhi, true to form, was understood as the bliss-inducing
ecstasy of the self contemplating its Self. Secondary sources also listed works
by the mysticizing scholar of Tibetan lore W. Y. Evans-Wentz and by Sir John
Woodroffe (as distinct from Arthur Avalon). One work, by V. G. Rele, was titled
provocatively enough The Mysterious Kundalini, and several—S. Sundaram’s
Yoga Physical Culture, Yogi Vithaldas’s The Yoga System of Health, and Shri Yogendra’s
Yoga Personal Hygiene—pointed unmistakably toward hatha.67 There
will be more to say about Shri Yogendra, who would make his way to the United
States and exert significant influence in the nation.
What is of concern here, however, is the substance and tenor of the Bernard
text. Theos Bernard did not offer distanced learning acquired from his reading
and family influence. On the contrary, he went to India, and he went native.
‘‘When I went to India, I did not present myself as an academic research student,
trying to probe into the intimacies of ancient cultural patterns; instead, I became
a disciple.’’ Beyond that, he understood the hatha yoga he was presenting to
readers as thoroughly tantric. Hatha yoga, he explained, was predicated centrally
on the control of the breath, and he went on to link the term hatha itself to ‘‘the
flowing of breath in the right nostril, called the ‘sun breath,’ and the flowing of
Metaphysical Asia 365
breath in the left nostril, called the ‘moon breath.’’’ Hatha yoga meant the union
of these two breaths to ‘‘induce a mental condition called samadhi.’’ ‘‘This,’’ he
went on to assure readers, ‘‘is not an imaginary or mythical state, though it is explained
by myths, but is an actual condition that can be subjectively experienced
and objectively observed.’’ How did yogis reach this condition? The answer lay
in the purification of the body and the physical techniques of yoga—intended
‘‘to make dynamic a latent force in the body called Kundalini.’’ Kundalini yoga
led in turn to laya yoga, in which the ‘‘single aim’’ was ‘‘stilling the mind,’’ while
finally the mind’s complete subjection, understood as the ‘‘Royal Road,’’ was raja
yoga. This, not surprisingly, was the scheme laid out by the formidable Arthur
Avalon, whom Bernard identified, according to the era’s conventional wisdom,
with Sir John Woodroffe. Thus, following Avalon, he told readers that ‘‘all these
forms are often classified under the general heading Tantrik Yoga, since they represent
the practical discipline based on tantrik philosophy.’’68
What Bernard described thereafter in this very personal account was surely
startling—seeming almost to confirm long-ago Transcendentalist descriptions of
yogic excess but inverting them to celebrate the physical feats he could eventually
perform. He claimed that he held three-hour headstands and that he practiced
a series of kriyas (‘‘actions’’ or, as he called them, ‘‘duties’’) recommended
in the Hatha Yoga Pradipika, including the purificatory dhauti karma in which
he swallowed a three-foot length of cloth to cleanse his digestive tract.
Begin with a small piece of cloth about three feet long. I found that an ordinary
four-inch surgeon’s gauze met every requirement. First put the cloth in a basin
of water, and after it is thoroughly saturated insert one end of it as far back in the
throat as possible and go through the motions of eating and swallowing. This
will encourage the throat to take hold. There may be some spasms, but they will
soon pass, as will all soreness that is experienced. It will take only a few days for
the throat and stomach to accommodate themselves. Do not try to accomplish
the feat on the first day. I began with a few inches and increased the length a
little each day until I had swallowed the required twenty-two and one-half feet.
With a little patience, anyone can master the technique in about three weeks.69
Bernard’s text progressed through detailed instructions for pranayama and
body locks (mudras, bandhas), disclosing purported yogic secrets and quoting
(translated) texts generously along the way. There were practices of listening to
internal sound and seeing inner light; there was a candle exercise—staring into
its light to create a retinal afterimage. Thereafter came a series of other rigorous
purifications, pranayamas, and hatha yoga exercises. As he introduced these,
Bernard embellished his account with the claim of a three-month retreat to gain
366 Arrivals
samadhi, although Paul G. Hackett has concluded from ‘‘substantial evidence’’
that the retreat never happened. The ‘‘retreat,’’ however, functioned as a useful
teaching tool. Complete with an initiatory ceremony to induce the awakening of
kundalini and a warning by Bernard’s teacher that no ceremony could actually
achieve that goal, the narrative could at once discipline and mystify a generation
of seeker-readers. Bernard would confess to them that, indeed, the ceremony had
brought him a foretaste of samadhi—but not the experience itself. What was the
lesson? ‘‘During my studies of the science of Yoga I found that it holds no magic,
performs no miracles, and reveals nothing supernatural. I was directed at every
stage to practice if I wanted to know its secrets.’’ It was practice alone that could
bring the ‘‘Knowledge of the True,’’ and the nature of that knowledge remained
for him and his readers a ‘‘mystery.’’70
If Theos Bernard had, in fact, discovered tantra, it was a tantra that in practice
operated far differently from all reports of the elder Bernard’s tantrism. It also
contrasted strikingly with the ‘‘tantric’’ practice that would emerge in the New
Age movement and new spirituality, in general, by the late twentieth century.
Bernard’s ‘‘Tantrik philosophy’’ and practice meant rigorous asceticism, flight
from the world, totalitarian dedication, and various inscriptions on the body
that looked remarkably similar to those that had been written off with disgust
and revulsion in nineteenth-century accounts. The Self that Bernard could find
through the awakened kundalini and samadhi seemed a far cry from the softer,
kinder, ego-friendlier Self that later flourished as the enlightened body-self in the
American practice of yoga. At the same time, Pierre Bernard and Theos Bernard,
along with William Walker Atkinson/Yogi Ramacharaka had set important directions
for an American yogic future, and they had underlined its connections to
American metaphysical religion. Here siddhi powers had become Will Power;
the world was Will and (health-building and/or ascetic) Desire; Will could succeed,
and Desire could find fulfillment. The body could be liberated into a state
of never-dreamed-of health and well-being. Even if attained through harshness
and asceticism, there was a (disciplined and discipline-producing) pleasure that
surpassed all knowledge in this body’s pleasure, and Will, Desire, Health, and
Pleasure could all lead into the highest spiritual realities that humans might experience
and receive. Best of all, in the American mode, humans could achieve
all of this for and in themselves. In the noetic style of one side of the New
Thought movement and in echoes of an inherited Hermeticism and earlier
nineteenth-century reinventions of the theme, they could be as gods.
That acknowledged, just as in the earlier heyday of Vivekananda, Americans
did not always need to work alone, with only books as teachers. Nor did they need
to travel, like Theos Bernard, to South Asia (although, to be sure, they some-
Metaphysical Asia 367
times did and in increasing numbers as the twentieth century progressed). Well
before the 1965 change in the immigration law—which brought more Asians
and more elite Asians to the nation—the East kept coming to the West. Yogic
teachers were announcing that they possessed healing knowledge for American
disciples. Shri Yogendra was a major case in point. During his research stay in
India in 1937, the younger Bernard had made his way to the Yoga Institute of
Bombay, where the already metaphysical Yogendra taught his ‘‘scientific’’ yoga—
the man whom Melton credits with being ‘‘largely responsible for the revival and
spread of hatha yoga in the twentieth century.’’ Now Yogendra came to other
American seekers. A disciple of Paramahansa Madhavadasaji of Malsar, Shri Yogendra
(born in 1897 as Manibhai Haribhai Desai) after a several-year sojourn
with his guru returned to the householder life, marrying instead of becoming
a renunciant and swami. He had learned from his teacher, especially, the study
and practice of hatha yoga, and he would thereafter work to put it on an academic
footing and to establish its ‘‘scientific’’ basis. In this context, according to
his biographer, Yogendra came to America at the end of 1919 with the aim of
‘‘popularizing yoga.’’ He was already a man with a mission. One anecdote had it
that just before Madhavadasaji’s death in 1922 the aged teacher wrote Yogendra
saying that his American task was akin to Vivekananda’s in spreading the fame
of Ramakrishna. Yogendra went back to India less than five years after he came,
however, intending to return to the United States but thwarted by the restrictive
immigration legislation of 1924. Still, he had managed to found his Yoga Institute
at Santa Cruz, California, and he had written four works on yoga.71
We glean some sense of Yogendra’s teaching from these works, and in general
they resonate more with the natural hygiene/physical culture orientation of
Yogi Ramacharaka than with the tantric ambience of the Bernards. For Yogendra,
hatha was the ‘‘primal yoga effort’’ and ‘‘the methodical approach to the attainment
of the highest in Yoga.’’ It recognized ‘‘the concept of the wholeness of
Man,’’ and it proposed ‘‘to achieve psychosomatic sublimation through a system
of physical culture.’’ This included ‘‘physical education, hygiene, therapy, and
biologic control of the autonomous nervous system affecting the hygiene of the
mind and moral behaviour.’’ Allusions to what Avalon and Bernard had called the
kundalini were careful and restrained: ‘‘The hathayogins have laid down various
practices for the methodical sublimation not only of sex but also of all baser instincts.’’
Seemingly more important than samadhi was the basic biological goal
of survival and longevity. ‘‘If yoga succeeds with the yogins in the present as it did
in the past, it can hardly be doubted why any man following the yoga code of controlled
biological living should not live more than a hundred years.’’ (His teacher
purportedly died at the age of 122, so Yogendra no doubt wrote confidently.)72
368 Arrivals
Yogendra’s yoga was based on the Hatha Yoga Pradipika, and that text’s concern
for purification, which we have already seen in the yogic experiment of
Theos Bernard, became for Yogendra a question of health and hygiene. ‘‘Even
the civilized society has been sick, to a more or less extent, throughout history,’’
he would later write in Why Yoga, ‘‘because human civilization and culture did
not fully succeed in weeding out the grass roots of savage inherited potentials.’’
He was thoroughly committed to the science that grounded the health-building
enterprise; he worked with medical professionals in New York; and he knew such
natural health celebrities as Bernarr Macfadden, Benedict Lust, and John Harvey
Kellogg. Still, the science he preached was a science of the spiritual. Hatha yoga
would put its students ‘‘in the direct touch with the Reality (of objects on which
they contemplate).’’ Moreover, the physical body that demanded the rigorous
discipline of natural hygiene was but one of a series of bodies. In the textual tradition
of South Asia and in the language that Theosophists were continuing to
invoke, he could insist that ‘‘yoga recognizes more subtle bodies or sheaths . . .
than one.’’73
Clearly, Yogendra belonged to a new and nontraditional cadre of Asian teachers.
Neither an ancient chanter of texts nor a renunciant hidden away for years
in Himalayan hills, like Vivekananda he was already partially a Westerner before
he ever came to the United States. Growing up in British India, matriculating—
before he met his guru—at St. Xavier’s College in Bombay, translating the yogic
message into a scientific argot, linking his religiophilosophical views to those of
Plotinus and Henri Bergson, Yogendra was a blended product of East and West.
He was a transnational before the term and the concept became current.74 As
with Vivekananda, it is too simple to say that East (Yogendra) met West (Americans)
in the United States in the 1920s. More complexly, East-West met West,
and, as we have seen, the West that got met was already textually in touch with
Asian sources and some of its seekers had traveled to sit at the feet of South Asian
masters.
The combinative habit was, if anything, even more prominent in the celebrated
Bengali Paramahansa Yogananda (1893–1952), who came to America in
1920 to attend, as India’s delegate, the International Congress of Religious Liberals
in Boston. He remained to lecture and teach on the East Coast and then to
establish the headquarters of the Self-Realization Fellowship, which he founded
in 1920, in Los Angeles. As the name he chose for his American organization already
suggests, it is in Yogananda that we get a thoroughly conscious language
of the Self to refer to the Atman and its long-hailed union with Brahman. But
Yogananda’s language of the Self was hardly incessant, and, indeed, he spoke as
much, or more, of the Christ within. Born as Mukunda Lal Ghosh in Gorakhpur
Metaphysical Asia 369
in northeastern India, close to the Himalayas, Yogananda—like his guru Sri Yukteswar
Giri and his guru’s guru (who was also his father’s guru) Lahiri Mahasaya
—was a Westernized Hindu long before he made his way to the West Coast of the
United States. His father had been a railroad official, and the younger Ghosh’s
attempts to run away to the Himalayas were thwarted and disdained. When, in
1910, Mukunda Ghosh met and came under the tutelage of Sri Yukteswar, he
was urged by his guru to attend Calcutta University. He graduated in 1915. It was
only thereafter that he took formal vows as a swami and renunciant.
Yogananda’s Autobiography of a Yogi (1946) is an important document in constructing
any account of what happened to Yogananda, to yoga, and to its metaphysical
American form. A complex and enormously skillful hybrid of traditional
Indic elements, combinative Hindu-Western culture in India, and self-fashioning
and posturing, Yogananda’s work appealed to American readers even as it drew
them into an alternate world. Thus the autobiography provides clues to an important
transition time for American yoga. On the one side stood the fascination
of marvel and miracle, of the siddhi powers that the yogic tradition encompassed.
Here was the mysterious Mahavatar Babaji, hailed by Yogananda as the
founding guru from which his lineage descended. This Babaji was hundreds of
years old, materialized and dematerialized at will (and in so doing supplied indirect
insight into the possible sources of Madame Blavatsky’s Mahatmas), and
had appeared to Yogananda to commission him to spread his kriya yoga to the
West. On the other side came the running barrage of footnotes with its Christian
gospel references and theological points regarding Christ, its copious supply of
quotations from Emerson, and its steady commentary on what Yogananda considered
cutting-edge science (to establish yoga’s scientific credentials).75
Indeed, what Paramahansa Yogananda stressed about kriya yoga was its unequaled
utility as a ‘‘scientific’’ path to the attainment of samadhi—with practical
details revealed only after an initiatory period in the Self-Realization Fellowship.76
His Boston address to the conference of religious liberals, as revised and
expanded in 1924, is instructive. Ambitiously titled ‘‘The Science of Religion’’
and so evoking Christian Science, Religious Science, Divine Science, and a
modest army of self-conscious metaphysicians, Yogananda’s address pronounced
the universality and oneness of religion. It hailed the nature of God as bliss
and declared the existence of four fundamental religious methods to reach
God. Three of them—intellectual, devotional, meditative—were less good. The
fourth—the ‘‘scientific method’’ or ‘‘yoga’’—would lead to ‘‘bliss-consciousness.’’
This method would separate the ‘‘Self’’ from the body without death and
smacked of the mysterious kundalini power already admired by Theosophists.
‘‘The scientific method teaches a process enabling us to draw to our central part
370 Arrivals
—spine and brain—the life current distributed throughout the organs and other
parts of our body. The process consists of magnetizing the spinal column and
the brain, which contain the seven main centers, with the result that the distributed
life electricity is drawn back to the original centers of discharge and is experienced
in the form of light. In this state the spiritual Self can consciously free
itself from its bodily and mental distractions.’’77
The combinative habit was unmistakable. Here was Vivekananda’s raja yoga
transmuted, with the metaphysical assistance of Arthur Avalon and company,
into a new, more tantric version. And here, too, were echoes of animal magnetism
and phrenomagnetic electricity imported from the nineteenth century
along with Blavatsky’s astral light and ether. Nor had physical culture left the
equation. Kriya yoga flourished, for Yogananda, in a context in which the physical
body became active and energized. In 1918, he had opened a school for boys
in Ranchi, a town in Bihar, some two hundred miles from Calcutta. Students
there not only learned yoga meditation but also what Yogananda called ‘‘a unique
system of health and physical development, Yogoda,’’ the principles of which he
believed he had discovered two years earlier. ‘‘Realizing that man’s body is like
an electric battery,’’ he wrote, ‘‘I reasoned that it could be recharged with energy
through the direct agency of the human will.’’ He went on to describe the effects
at Ranchi. The boys ‘‘responded well to Yogoda training, developing extraordinary
ability to shift the life force from one part of the body to another part and to
sit in perfect poise in difficult asanas (postures). They performed feats of strength
and endurance that many powerful adults could not equal.’’ If the language of
energy and electricity, even for the boys, hinted of tantrism—perhaps disguised
for an American audience and surely already reinvented in India in a Westernized
Hindu milieu—Yogananda was a sign of evolving times.78 He had brought
tantric themes in touch with an American language of science that circled New
Thought and theosophical themes and that coexisted comfortably with liberal
versions of Christianity. The kundalini had met the Self, and the Self was discovered
to be the living Christ presence within.
After Yogendra and Yogananda a series of yogic teachers—of hatha and meditation
yoga and both of them combined—came and went in the American yogic
world. Kriya yoga itself fractured into a series of competing forms and teachers. As
for others, there is not space here to tarry even on leading names, although some
do come to mind—Indra Devi (Eugenie Petersen), who was healed in India by
the famed Krishnamacharya and studied with him; Yogi Grupta, who followed
Swami Sivananda Saraswati, founder of the Divine Life Society; Swami Satchidananda,
also a popularizer of Sivananda’s ‘‘integral yoga’’; Richard Hittleman,
who authored numerous popular books and introduced hatha yoga to television
Metaphysical Asia 371
in the 1960s. Meanwhile, with the publication of B. K. S. Iyengar’s Light on Yoga
(1966), which became a Bible to the hatha yoga world, with his visits to America,
and with the ambitious worldwide certification process for Iyengar teachers, a
canonicity was emerging.79 Along the way, yoga got feminized, and women became
the major producers and consumers of yogic asanas. In meditation yoga,
likewise, divine mothers and female spiritual teachers proliferated—and kundalini
prevailed as their general message. Against the backdrop of the civil rights
movement, the Vietnam War, second-wave feminism, and rising ethnic consciousness,
more and more non-Asian Americans were turning east and refashioning
what they found there. New forms of spirituality were abounding, in the
New Age movement and beyond.
Among meditation yoga teachers, the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi achieved celebrity
during the 1960s when, discovered by the Beatles, he taught the simple silent
mantra practice that he called Transcendental Meditation. Tellingly, it brought
with it promises not of samadhi but of lowered blood pressure, increased intelligence,
relief from stress, and reduction of crime in locales inhabited by a critical
mass of meditators. By the 1970s, Swami Muktananda visited the United
States, preaching a ‘‘meditation revolution.’’ His American disciples in Siddha
Yoga practiced and, under his successor Swami Chidvilasananda (Gurumayi),
rationalized and domesticated a form of tantric yoga. Important here, Muktananda’s
message told of interior consciousness and bliss, of the divinity of the
Self that echoed, in stronger, more insistent language, the earlier teaching of the
Self-Realization Fellowship. ‘‘Honor your Self, worship your Self, meditate on
your Self,’’ Muktananda enjoined. ‘‘God dwells within you as you.’’ Still further,
at South Fallsburg, New York, in Muktananda’s American ashram, hatha yoga
was in. Between them, the Maharishi and Muktananda spelled out for devotees
the new Americanized version of ancient India—a world bathed in spiritual consciousness
and bliss that also had become a pleasure-dome and abode of thisworldly
good health, good fortune, and thorough enjoyment.80
On the other side of the continent, at Esalen in Big Sur country along the
California coast, the message was theorized and practiced with new selfconsciousness
at the height of the human potential movement of the 1960s and
beyond. Esalen’s co-founder Michael Murphy as a young man had traveled to
India in 1956 and spent sixteen months at the Pondicherry ashram of the decidedly
Westernized and metaphysically inclined guru Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950).
Even though Aurobindo by then was dead, Murphy—who had devoured his philosophy
at Stanford—never forgot. His Esalen Institute acted as an important
culture broker, a model of certain metaphysical themes, and a broadcaster of the
new-enlightenment message of the Self/self and its embodied blissfulness. It was
372 Arrivals
Esalen that gave the word to many Americans who otherwise might not have
heard the news—or, at least, not heard it so clearly and authoritatively. Esalen
understood the human potential to reside in the enlightened body-self. Its bodywork
brigade, its lush beachside ceremonies of nudity and hot tub, its elusively
present marijuana, its evolving humanistic and transpersonal psychologies for
the self-in-relation, its social vision of one interconnected, interracial, and interethnic
world—all of these beg for a metaphysical reading. From Murphy’s side,
they selectively re-present American metaphysical religion as it encountered, in
Aurobindo, a metaphysical Asia. Esalen Self-fashioning taught a cross-section of
Americans, and it led them to sacrality in a secular world, to their realization as
new American gods who walked a pleasurable earth, and to yogic regimes that
subverted religion-as-usual.81
If in surveying this late-twentieth-century spiritual landscape we pronounce
this transformed American yoga simply a reinscribed version of Vivekananda or a
transliterated form of Indian tantrism, arguably we obscure more than we inform.
It is true that if we single out hatha yoga, scholars of yogic India have pointed
unmistakably to its tantric origins, and likewise, in another context, De Michelis
has pointed to the influence of Vivekananda.82 As practiced in twentieth- and
twenty-first-century America, however, it would be glib to call hatha yoga a tantric
practice or to invoke Vivekananda too strenuously as its ideological buttress.
Nor, despite the popularity of kundalini in numerous contexts, can meditation
forms of yoga prevalent in New Age, or simply new, spirituality be described, in
uncontested ways, as tantric. Rather, the enlightened body-self has functioned
at the center of both hatha and meditation yogas. In so doing, it has re-presented
the home-grown metaphysical and practice-oriented religiosity of Theosophy
and New Thought as they met new, more expansive times—in touch with an already
combinative metaphysical Asia. If Americans inherited Transcendentalist
idealism with its Oversoul gone Indic and if unawares they also absorbed a revised
Hermeticism and spiritualism, more concretely they had at hand pragmatic
schemes for transformation in Theosophy and New Thought. They might never
name the movements nor know their sources, but they had learned techniques
that promised access to their own hidden mental powers and their body-selves
in Will and Desire, health and positive thinking, wealth and metaphysics. They
could imprint their new yogic practice—their strategy for sacred success—with
their own made-in-America history. They could also, it turned out, look to another
form of metaphysical Asia in the exoticized re-presentations of Buddhism
that Americans had been encountering, beginning from the early nineteenth
century.
Metaphysical Asia 373
METAPHYSICAL RELIGION AND BUDDHIST MYSTERY
Still earlier than this, in 1784, Massachusetts resident Hannah Adams (1755–
1831) published what must be counted the first attempt at a comparative religions
survey in the United States. The work went through second and third editions
in 1791 and 1801 respectively, and in 1817 the fourth and most inclusive version
appeared as A Dictionary of All Religions and Religious Denominations. Along
the way, the work had twice changed its title, and it had also seen publication
in two British editions.83 Adams’s book really was a dictionary, and entries appeared
in uninflected alphabetical order, with no separate article on Buddhism
at all. Instead, ‘‘Birmans’’—in Burma—worshiped the ‘‘Boodh,’’ while in Japan
a religion called ‘‘Budso’’ had been introduced from China and Siam, begun by
‘‘Budha,’’ who represented the ninth appearance of the Hindu Vishnu. Among
the ‘‘Chinese,’’ people worshiped ‘‘Foe’’ (the Buddha). Among the ‘‘Thibetians,’’
however, Adams lingered with the ‘‘Grand Lama,’’ in what was by far the longest
Buddhist entry, captivated apparently by the doctrinal and ritual embroidery that
her sources provided. She dwelled on divine claims for the Lama, confiding that
he was ‘‘their Sovereign Pontiff,’’ and she remarked on the mysticizing practices
that surrounded the choice of successor. She reported, too, that, among others,
the inhabitants of ‘‘Thibet,’’ especially, accepted the near-universal Eastern doctrine
of metempsychosis or ‘‘transmigration of the soul.’’ And she closed still
more emphatically on the ‘‘Thibetians’’ as the Roman Catholics of Asia, quoting
sources regarding holy water, song, alms, prayers, sacrifices for the dead, convents
of monks and friars, the use of beads, and the wearing of mitres and caps.84
There seemed little in this catalog of wide-eyed wonder to create a metaphysical
American future for Buddhism—even if, reading the past from a later perspective,
a gloss on practical mysticism might be deciphered in the account of Tibet.
By the mid-nineteenth century, matters had not much changed. Whereas the
Transcendentalists had discovered South Asian classics like the Bhagavad-Gita
and the Laws of Manu, no comparable Buddhist text stirred non-Asian Americans
so strongly. True, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody had translated a short part of
Eugène Burnouf’s French translation of the Lotus Sutra for the Transcendental
periodical The Dial in 1844. But confusion reigned among the Transcendental
elite regarding Buddhism, and they apparently conflated it with the traditional
South Asian religious culture known to Westerners as Hinduism. In a
letter to Elizabeth Hoar, for example, Emerson hailed the arrival in Concord
of the ‘‘Bhagvat-Geeta,’’ which he identified as ‘‘the much renowned book of
Buddhism, extracts of which I have often admired.’’85 Later, even as Chinese
374 Arrivals
immigrants brought Buddhism to the nation, and especially to the West Coast,
between the 1850s and 1880s, their religious practice did not attract significant
non-Asian notice. When the Japanese arrived in California at the end of the
1890s, the pattern was similar. Immigrant presence, clearly, did not signal religious
transfer.
It should not be surprising, then, that at midcentury Buddhism seemed the
quintessential religion of the unknown and exotic other. Webster’s American Dictionary
of the English Language for 1849, for example, acknowledged that ‘‘one
third of the human race’’ followed the religion of ‘‘Boodhism.’’ It went on to explain—in
what seemed a muddled account of the yugas and the sleep of Vishnu
—that at far intervals ‘‘a Boodh, or deity’’ appeared ‘‘to restore the world from a
state of ignorance and decay’’ and then sank ‘‘into a state of entire non-existence,
or rather, perhaps, of bare existence without attributes, action, or consciousness.’’
The entry called nirvana ‘‘the ultimate supreme good’’ and explained that
there had been four ‘‘Boodhs,’’ with the last ‘‘Gaudama.’’ By 1864, however, Webster’s
Buddhism had changed its American stripes, now emerging as the doctrine
taught by ‘‘the Hindu sage, Gautama, surnamed Buddha, ‘the awakened
or enlightened.’’’ It was ‘‘at first atheistic’’ and aimed at ‘‘release from existence’’
(nirvana), but it also exhibited ‘‘admirable humanity and morality,’’ even if it involved
‘‘idolatrous worship of its founder and of other supposed kindred beings.’’
Still, there was not much here, even in the 1864 definition, to entice a metaphysician.
Nor was there seven years later, when James Freeman Clarke published his
theologically driven comparative religions survey Ten Great Religions. There he
read Buddhism as the ‘‘Protestantism of the East,’’ with ‘‘forms’’ that resembled
‘‘Romanism’’ but a ‘‘spirit’’ that, in its revolt and protest against Brahmanism and
in its affirmation of law and humanity, looked to him decidedly Protestant. Buddhism
was rational and humane, he thought, but in the end he found it wanting.
It represented a ‘‘doctrine of works’’ in contrast to the Christian teaching of
‘‘grace.’’86
Did a metaphysical Buddhism ever emerge on American shores? Did anything
similar to the process of the reinvention of South Asian yoga among nonAsian
Americans occur? And if so, what and how? The questions are particularly
timely for the narrative here because scholars have pointed to the late nineteenth
century as the era when Buddhism at last began to attract significant attention
among non-Asians. Historian Carl Jackson, for instance, characterizes the last
two decades of the century in terms of its ‘‘Buddhist vogue,’’ when the tradition
became ‘‘almost fashionable.’’ He also alludes, for 1900, to contemporary skeptical
aspersions on what some perceived as a ‘‘‘Neo-Buddhist’ craze.’’ Meanwhile,
American religious historian Thomas Tweed identifies the years from 1879 to
Metaphysical Asia 375
1912 as an age of ‘‘significant interest’’ in Buddhism.87 Given this acknowledgment,
the vogue and the interest may be charted in two ways. Together the two
serve to illumine a non-Asian attraction to Buddhism that was mediated in large
measure by American metaphysical religion and that subsumed Asian discourses
and practices into familiar metaphysical categories. The first approach—the one
explored more extensively here—looks to a literary history of American engagement
with Buddhism as the tradition was reshaped to Western and metaphysical
liking. The second tracks non-Asian American Buddhist sympathizers or converts
through the latter part of the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth
according to the same or similar canons of interpretation.
For the literary history, Carl Jackson has pointed to Charles D. B. Mills’s The
Indian Saint of 1876 as the first full-length treatment of the life of the Buddha by
an American. The work boasted a Transcendentalist link, since Bronson Alcott
had functioned as an intellectual and spiritual mentor for Mills and had also contacted
publishers to help him get his manuscript into print. Mills openly advocated
Buddhism in the work, and his critics were none too friendly. And although
he lectured and published short pieces thereafter, suggesting perhaps some following,
his book could not be characterized as a galvanizing text for American
spiritual seekers nor as particularly metaphysical. It was in 1879, however, in a
book published first in England, that the American public encountered a life of
the Buddha that successfully captured a significant number of them. Sir Edwin
Arnold’s The Light of Asia became the first of a trilogy of overseas works that
offered complexly combinative and metaphysical readings of the Buddha and
the Buddhist tradition. Arnold’s Light provided a free-verse rendering that softened
Asian rough edges and refashioned the Buddha along lines that were ideologically
congenial to Westerners. According to Jackson, estimates suggest that
Arnold’s poem appeared in sixty English and eighty American editions, with sales
of between 500,000 and 1 million copies in Britain and the United States. Arnold
had been helped in promoting his book by his Transcendental connections in
the states. A widower, he had married again, and his second wife was the daughter
of Transcendentalist William Henry Channing, who enthusiastically worked to
publicize the volume and enlisted the aid of friends. Bronson Alcott himself saw
the initial American edition through to print and worked to get early reviews of
it by George Ripley and other friendly critics. Beyond that, the first American edition
boasted a letter from Channing and reviews that read as endorsements. But
much more than Transcendentalism was at work. ‘‘Enthusiastically reviewed and
widely quoted, hotly attacked and passionately defended,’’ says Jackson, ‘‘perhaps
no work on Buddhism has ever approached its popular success.’’ Suddenly, after
years of almost invisibility, Buddhism was achieving marked American notice.88
376 Arrivals
The Siddhartha (Gautama) of Arnold’s poem was inserted into a Christian
template in the narrative of his beginnings. However, as the narrative unfolded
Arnold subtly shaped it in metaphysical directions. For the Christian template,
there was, to begin, his mother Queen Maya’s ‘‘strange dream’’ of impregnation
by a heavenly star. Then came the ‘‘dream-readers’’ who predicted a child
of ‘‘wondrous wisdom,’’ ‘‘Devas singing songs’’ at his birth, and the ‘‘grey-haired
saint, Asita,’’ confessing ‘‘Thou art Buddh, / And thou wilt preach the Law and
save all flesh / Who learn the Law.’’ Merchants arrived, ‘‘bringing, on tidings of
this birth, rich gifts.’’ When the young prince was eight, he astounded the teachers
who asked him to transcribe the sacred Gayatri (Light) mantra by writing in
many languages and then engaging in equally dazzling numerical feats ‘‘beyond
their learning taught.’’ Siddhartha already knew that his mission was to ‘‘teach
compassion unto men.’’ Despite his aging royal father’s attempts to keep him in
a state of ‘‘forgetting,’’ with no mention made at court ‘‘of death or age, / Sorrow,
or pain, or sickness,’’ he took the steps that led to his encounter with all of
them. So the prince renounced his heritage and left his young wife, Yasodhara,
and child yet unborn, announcing to her that his chariot would not ‘‘roll with
bloody wheels / From victory to victory.’’ Instead he would be a wanderer ‘‘clad
in no prouder garb than outcasts wear, / Fed with no meats save what the charitable
/ Give of their will, sheltered with no more pomp / Than the dim cave lends
or the jungle-bush.’’ He would give ‘‘all, laying it down for love of men.’’ And—
significant for the metaphysically inclined—he would spend himself ‘‘to search
for truth, / Wringing the secret of deliverance forth, / Whether it lurk in hells or
hide in heavens.’’ Searching thus, ‘‘Death might find him conqueror of death,’’
since he would seek ‘‘for all men’s sake’’ until the truth was found.89
In the lavishness of his origins as well as in his marriage and his announced
need to search for truth, Siddhartha parted company with the man from Nazareth.
He also confessed a different gospel as he left palace precincts, instructing
that his father, the king, be told ‘‘there is hope for man only in man’’ and
that therefore he would ‘‘cast away’’ his ‘‘world’’ in order to ‘‘save’’ it. Still, he
shunned the yogis in their forest austerities (which Arnold described according
to the familiar conventions of horror that were part of earlier nineteenth-century
discourse) and instead operated as a veritable Asian Jesus. When he saw a lamb
that was lame, ‘‘our Lord . . . full tenderly / . . . took the limping lamb upon his
neck,’’ exhorting that ‘‘’twere all as good to ease one beast of grief / As sit and
watch the sorrows of the world / In yonder caverns with the priests who pray.’’ He
also ignored caste law, seeking ‘‘that light which somewhere shines / To lighten
all men’s darkness.’’90
Finally, under the Bodhi-tree, the ‘‘Tree of Wisdom,’’ tempted (like Jesus)—
Metaphysical Asia 377
but by ‘‘the fiends who war with Wisdom and the Light’’—he withstood the ‘‘ten
chief Sins.’’ Then, in the ‘‘third watch,’’ surprising things happened:
Our Lord . . . saw
By light which shines beyond our mortal ken
The line of all his lives in all the worlds,
Far back and farther back and farthest yet,
Five hundred lives and fifty.
He saw ‘‘how new life reaps what the old life did sow,’’ and
in the middle watch
Our Lord attained Abhidjna—insight vast
Ranging beyond this sphere to spheres unnamed,
System on system, countless worlds and suns
Moving in splendid measures, band by band.
With ‘‘unsealed vision,’’ he ‘‘saw those Lords of Light who hold their worlds / By
bonds invisible, how they themselves / Circle obedient round mightier orbs.’’ At
the ‘‘fourth watch,’’ the ‘‘secret came,’’ and he learned the ‘‘noble truth’’ of sorrow,
broke through delusion, and saw past ‘‘the aching craze to live’’ until he reached
nameless quiet, nameless joy,
Blessed nirvana—sinless, stirless rest—
That change which never changes!
So it was that the ‘‘Dawn’’ came ‘‘with Buddh’s Victory.’’ He was ‘‘glorified with
the Conquest gained for all / And lightened by a Light greater than Day’s.’’ Disciples
came, and they acknowledged ‘‘a Buddh / Who doth deliver men and save
all flesh.’’ But this savior, unlike the one from Nazareth, taught ‘‘how man hath
no fate except past deeds, / No Hell but what he makes, no Heaven too high.’’
‘‘Pray not!’’ he enjoined, ‘‘the Darkness will not brighten.’’ ‘‘Within yourselves
deliverance must be sought; / Each man his prison makes.’’ Yet, in a theistic moment,
he could proclaim that there was ‘‘fixed a Power divine which moves to
good, / Only its laws endure.’’ And he could confess that the Dharma Law, ‘‘the
Law which moves to righteousness, / which none at last can turn aside or stay; /
The heart of it is Love.’’91
Arguably, Arnold had deftly conducted readers into a territory into which they
might not otherwise have walked, assuring them with unmistakable analogical
references that the Buddha was actually a lot like Jesus. This was true in the major
outlines of Siddhartha’s life, in his teachings of compassion and love, and in the
moralism of the ‘‘eightfold path’’ to which his teachings led. Moreover, the spec-
378 Arrivals
tacular narrative of his enlightenment let out all stops in its mysticizing narrative
that revealed the earnest heart and soul of a true devotee. However, it also cast the
devotee—the Buddha—into a speculative metaphysical context that morphed
the East into Western notions of the grandiose. Still further, it read the Buddha’s
enlightenment in humanizing terms that, as in the Hermetic tradition of the
West, proclaimed a subtle message of individual mastery and control. If Arnold’s
Buddha was a savior, he saved people by teaching them to save themselves. Tellingly,
Theosophists loved Arnold, and he obligingly returned the favor. Asked
once in an interview if he had ever met Blavatsky, he replied that he knew her
‘‘very well’’ and was ‘‘acquainted with Col. Olcott and A. P. Sinnett [the theosophical
author of Esoteric Buddhism].’’ Arnold believed there was ‘‘no doubt
that the theosophical movement . . . had an excellent effect upon humanity.’’ It
had, he said, ‘‘made a large number of people understand what all India always
understood, . . . the importance of invisible things.’’ Blavatsky, though, had the
final word. According to the terms of her will, Theosophists were to gather annually
on her death day and read from The Light of Asia along with any edition
of the Bhagavad Gita.92
Olcott had met Arnold at a dinner in 1884, calling the event ‘‘one of the notable
incidents of that London summer.’’ Afterwards Arnold invited him to lunch at
his house, where the poet presented him with pages from the original manuscript
of The Light of Asia. Two years later, in Ceylon where Arnold, his wife,
and daughter were visiting, Olcott ‘‘set to work to organise a fitting public reception
to one who had laid the whole Buddhist world under deep obligations
by the writing of his Light of Asia.’’ By this time, Olcott had published his own
short and metaphysical work on Buddhism. His deceptively simple Buddhist
Catechism of 1881, in traditional question-and-answer format, was already moving
through its numerous editions, some forty in Olcott’s lifetime and, by 1970,
forty-five. Still more, by 1888 Olcott could declare in his historical diary that the
catechism had been printed in ‘‘English, French, German, Sinhalese, Japanese,
Arabic, and Burmese,’’ and by 1895 he could express satisfaction that it was ‘‘circulating
in nearly twenty languages.’’93 Olcott’s catechism had clearly not been
written for an American audience. He produced it for use in the schools that he
had created to foster educational reform in Ceylon; at first appearance it was
available in both Sinhalese and English. At the heart of the ‘‘Buddhist revival’’ on
the island, the catechism’s ‘‘Protestant Buddhism’’ of the middle class continued
as part of the curriculum of Sri Lankan schools through the twentieth century.
Meanwhile, many of the subsequent editions and translations of Olcott’s Buddhist
Catechism were created for use in Asia, and a series of London editions and
at least two French editions appeared as well during Olcott’s lifetime. The first
Metaphysical Asia 379
American edition (from the Sinhalese) came in 1885, edited with notes by the
Theosophist Elliott Coues, a professor and scientist attached to the Smithsonian
in Washington, D.C., who also wrote in New Thought journals. By 1887, Coues’s
version had become available in a third edition. From what can be determined,
a New York edition appeared, too, in 1897, and another in Talent, Oregon, in
1915. Later American editions continued to be produced.94
All of this limns out a large international, and especially Asian, following (with
print runs in the tens of thousands and more) for Olcott’s small volume. It suggests
as well a substantial American audience that created enough demand to
keep the book in print. But what was it that Olcott was telling the world about
Buddhism? How was he reading the tradition, and what did that reading have
to do with metaphysics? For this last, there was already reason to suspect a connection.
The year before he produced the catechism, Olcott and Blavatsky had
gone through a public ceremony in Ceylon as an Asian acknowledgment of their
Buddhism. The pair had, even while still in America, both publicly and privately
declared themselves Buddhists, and as Olcott explained in Old Diary Leaves the
pansil ceremony was ‘‘but a formal confirmation of our previous professions.’’ He
hastened, however, to define the kind of Buddhism that he and Blavatsky had
embraced. Not that of ‘‘a debased modern Buddhist sectarian,’’ he declared, but
rather ‘‘our Buddhism was that of the Master-Adept Gautama Buddha, which
was identically the Wisdom Religion of the Aryan Upanishads, and the soul of
all the ancient world-faiths. Our Buddhism was, in a word, a philosophy, not a
creed.’’ Moreover, even as Olcott called it a philosophy and a moral philosophy
(see below), it was also, as his allusions reveal, an emphatically mysticizing philosophy.
Years later, in 1893, he would receive a letter from Max Müller thoroughly
debunking an ‘‘esoteric’’ reading of Buddhism, and Olcott would as thoroughly
repudiate the missive, regretting that Müller had never been able to visit
India and talk for himself to Indian pandits.95
If metaphysics structured the subtext of Olcott’s Buddhist Catechism, the
metaphysical construction was already decidedly complex and manifestly combinative.
Stephen Prothero has recounted the circumstances that surrounded
the catechism’s initial publication, complete with a prepublication wrangle with
Hikkaduve Sumangala, an influential Sinhalese scholar monk, over Olcott’s
treatment of nirvana. Olcott was forced to yield on the matter of publicly acknowledging
Theravada and Mahayana disagreements over nirvana (which Olcott
wanted to air) in order to gain Sulmangala’s stamp of approval. However, as
Prothero has argued, that was a superficial matter in terms of the overall creolization
that the project represented. ‘‘If the lexicon of this creole catechism was
Buddhist,’’ Prothero maintains, ‘‘its grammar or deep structure was Christian, and
380 Arrivals
its accent, clearly theosophical.’’ Indeed, although not overtly, the catechism was
anti-Christian. The questions it posed to Sinhalese Buddhist children arose out of
a polemic meant to demean Christianity by exalting Buddhism in a subtly comparative
context directed by Christian concerns and categories. It purported to
understand Buddhism within that (Christian) frame, citing, for example, themes
of salvation and missionization dear to the hearts of American Protestant Christians.
However, the Buddhism it taught was a religion of the texts, and with
post-Reformation and anti-Catholic dudgeon, it valorized beliefs and minimized
rituals, employing American Protestant primitivist categories that read the ‘‘real’’
Buddhism as its earliest manifestations and forms. Of the five chapters in the
thirty-third edition that Olcott was working on in 1897, one was devoted to a history
of Buddhism as chronicled by the scholarly Orientalists of the period and
another to ‘‘Buddhism and Science.’’96
From its first official page, the catechism’s revisionary intent was apparent.
Later editions carried a subtext of notes hardly suited to the children who were
its purported audience, with the first of them announcing that Olcott had been
brought ‘‘under protest’’ to employ the term religion for Buddhism, which was
actually a (noble) ‘‘moral philosophy.’’ Buddhism really meant ‘‘‘an approach or
coming to enlightenment’’’ or, possibly, ‘‘a following of the Doctrine of Sakyamuni’’
(the Buddha). It was the Christian missionaries (read ‘‘bad’’) who conferred
the inept title of ‘‘religion’’ on Buddhism. Religion was out; philosophy
was in. But in Olcott’s version of the latter, philosophy took a quintessentially
American Christian twist. It was, as Olcott said, ‘‘moral,’’ and a great part of the
doctrinal exposition thereafter preoccupied itself with rules of morality and right
living. Thus it revised the practiced Buddhism, the ‘‘lived religion’’ of Ceylon, to
meet primitivist, textualist, and morally righteous requirements as demanded by
Olcott’s own conceptual frame. Buddhist dates were computed on a Christian
grid (so many years ‘‘before the Christian era’’), and Sakyamuni himself, like a
Horatio Alger hero, had earned his title as the Buddha by good, hard work. The
title described a mental state after the mind had ‘‘reached the culmination of development,’’
and it signaled enlightenment, or ‘‘all-perfect wisdom.’’ Knowledge
must be gained not by asceticism but by the ‘‘opening of the mind.’’ In the midst
of the moralism and the loving concern of the Buddha for suffering and spiritually
hungry people, it brought the potential for control of the ‘‘Iddhi’’ (that is,
siddhi), the ‘‘exceptional spiritual powers’’ not unlike those conferred by Western
adeptship. These, Olcott assured the children, were ‘‘natural to all men and
capable of being developed by a certain course of training.’’97
He also told them that the whole spirit of Buddhism could be expressed in the
word justice, and that the ‘‘other good words’’ that expressed ‘‘the essence of Bud-
Metaphysical Asia 381
dhism’’ were ‘‘self-culture and universal love.’’ This, manifestly, did not include
conventional worship experience. ‘‘External worship’’ was ‘‘a fetter that one has
to break if he is to advance higher.’’ ‘‘From the beginning,’’ declared Olcott, the
Buddha ‘‘condemned the observance of ceremonies and other external practices,
which only tend to increase our spiritual blindness and our clinging to mere lifeless
forms.’’ By contrast, instead of a ‘‘creating God’’ and ‘‘vicarious Savior’’ to be
attended to, instead of ‘‘rites, prayers, penances, priests or intercessory saints,’’ one
redeemed oneself. Here, in the hinterland of the spirit, one perceived the highest
truths not by reason but by intuition—‘‘a mental state in which any desired truth’’
was ‘‘instantaneously grasped.’’ But in the final state of jnana (‘‘knowledge’’) and
samadhi, was the mind ‘‘a blank’’ and thought ‘‘arrested’’? Resoundingly not,
for—like a practiced Hermetic adept with American cultural instincts—it was
‘‘then that one’s consciousness’’ was ‘‘most intensely active, and one’s power to
gain knowledge correspondingly vast.’’98
Meanwhile, the Buddha himself, with his attained knowledge of the highest
states, was a light being, with ‘‘a divine radiance sent forth from within by the
power of his holiness.’’ This light, however, was hardly his sole possession. Rather,
all Arhats (the finally enlightened) emitted shining light, ‘‘stronger and brighter
in proportion to the spiritual development of the person.’’ Europeans called it
‘‘the human aura,’’ and the ‘‘great scientist’’ Baron Von Reichenbach had ‘‘fully
described’’ it ‘‘in his Researches, published in 1844–5.’’ The light, in Olcott’s mantric
refrain, was ‘‘natural,’’ possessed not only by ‘‘all human beings but [also]
animals, trees, plants and even stones.’’ In the case of the Buddha or an Arhat,
it was simply ‘‘immensely brighter and more extended’’ as ‘‘evidence of their superior
development in the power of Iddhi.’’99
Arhats—like theosophical Mahatmas or the elementals who created spiritualist
manifestations—could impress ‘‘pictures’’ by their ‘‘thought and trained
will-power’’ on the minds of others. Olcott did not make the theosophical or spiritualist
connections in print, but he was hardly shy about noticing ‘‘hypnotic suggestion’’
and adding that the power to create illusion was ‘‘familiar to all students
of mesmerism and hypnotism.’’ Did Buddhism ‘‘admit that man has in his nature
any latent powers for the production of phenomena commonly called ‘miracles’’’?
Yes, and they were, of course, ‘‘natural, not supernatural,’’ able to be ‘‘developed
by a certain system’’ laid down in Buddhist sacred writings. Always, for Olcott,
matters of spirit led to matters of will and mastery. Thus, for obtaining iddhi, four
things were necessary: ‘‘The will, its exertion, mental development, and [in a
bow to Protestant Christian moralism] discrimination between right and wrong.’’
And, in a not-so-obscure reference (for the initiated) to spiritualist elementals,
Buddhist children learned that ‘‘elemental invisible beings’’ could be brought to
382 Arrivals
their feet. The ‘‘Buddhist doctrine’’ was ‘‘that, by interior self-development and
conquest over his baser nature, the Arhat becomes superior to even the most formidable
of the Devas, and may subject and control the lower orders.’’100
Amidst this opening of Buddhist mystery for the luminous gaze of the enlightened
body-self (to be sure, a troubled construct for traditional Buddhism), the
abiding theosophical message of tolerance and universal brotherhood could be
found intact. Buddhism was (unlike Christianity?) ‘‘a religion of noble tolerance,
of universal brotherhood, of righteousness and justice.’’ It possessed ‘‘no taint of
selfishness, sectarianism or intolerance.’’ Still further (and unastonishing in light
of continued theosophical teaching), its ‘‘two leading ideas’’ that were ‘‘chiefly
taking hold upon the western mind’’ were ‘‘those of Karma and Reincarnation,’’
with ‘‘the rapidity of their acceptance . . . very surprising.’’101 Olcott, in short, had
refashioned Buddhism to his own American Protestant and metaphysical needs.
Whatever Sinhalese children may have thought of their revised tradition as a result,
on the American side of the waters his Buddhist reinvention would instruct
a cohort of spiritual seekers in ways that corroborated their developed and developing
metaphysical instincts. Moral they would be (at least that was the ideal),
but also masters—in a mastery that echoed their own Hermetic heritage now
combined many times over with the impress of newer times and peoples.
Olcott, however, was not alone as a theosophical insider with a reconstruction
of Buddhism that reached American readers. In fact, before his Buddhist Catechism
saw its first American edition in 1885, A. P. Sinnett’s Esoteric Buddhism
had already been available in Boston for two years. The book had been published
the same year (1883) in London by Trübner. In the United States, Houghton,
Mifflin took it on and apparently did well with the title, since it was reprinted annually
through at least 1888 and appeared at least four times more through the
1890s. The 1885 and 1886 editions both called themselves the fifth edition; an
1895 printing styled itself the sixth; and by 1898 Houghton, Mifflin told readers
it was presenting them with a ‘‘New American Edition.’’102 Anglo-Indian Sinnett,
editor of the British Indian newspaper The Pioneer, openly acknowledged
what he considered his true sources in the preface to the original edition. The
‘‘secret doctrine’’ that he was ‘‘now enabled to expound’’ had been ‘‘given out to
the world at last by the free grace of those in whose keeping’’ it had ‘‘hitherto lain.’’
It had come from ‘‘esoteric teachers’’ who had ‘‘chosen to work’’ through him,
and especially from one of them, as he confided later. In short, his material had
come through Blavatsky’s Mahatmas. Some of it had also come, as his exposition
and appended bibliography made clear, from Orientalists T. W. Rhys Davids,
Arthur Lillie, Hermann Oldenberg, and Robert Spence Hardy, as well as from
the French magus Éliphas Lévi, among others. Moreover, Sinnett explained that
Metaphysical Asia 383
part of the material had been published earlier in the theosophical monthly the
Theosophist. There and in its later book form in Esoteric Buddhism, it functioned
as what Charles J. Ryan has called a ‘‘harbinger’’ of Blavatsky’s Secret Doctrine. In
fact, it might almost be assessed as a rough draft for some sections of Blavatsky’s
huge work—a rough draft that she freely criticized and corrected in her later exposition
and about which she seemed flustered even at its initial publication.103
The reflecting hall of mirrors within the theosophical community meant, in
effect, that American readers were eagerly—and in much briefer and more manageable
compass—imbibing the metaphysical theology that would shape The
Secret Doctrine. As they did so, after Sinnett’s initial (and tendentious) discussion
of ‘‘Esoteric Teachers,’’ they were introduced to three separate discourses.
The first and framing one rehearsed the future Blavatskian cosmology of rounds
and root races, complete with an exposition of the septenary ‘‘constitution of
man,’’ with the seven ‘‘bodies’’—or ‘‘principles,’’ as Sinnett termed them—listed
as ‘‘The Body,’’ ‘‘Vitality,’’ ‘‘Astral Body,’’ ‘‘Animal Soul,’’ ‘‘Human Soul,’’ ‘‘Spiritual
Soul,’’ and ‘‘Spirit.’’ Still more, as Sinnett explored the terrain that Blavatsky
would later visit more exhaustively, he probed a perceived distinction between
‘‘personality’’ and ‘‘individuality’’ that would weave its way into later New
Thought discourse. Linking his work with Olcott’s Buddhist Catechism, in which
a lengthy note explained to readers that when humans were reborn they came
with a succession of personalities, Sinnett followed the logic of difference even
further. Olcott had declared that ‘‘though personalities ever shift, the one line
of life along which they are strung like beads, runs unbroken,’’ and he had called
the line an ‘‘individual vital undulation.’’ Now Sinnett pursued the theme especially
in terms of issues of personal immortality, quoting Blavatsky’s earlier Isis
Unveiled, in which she was already trying to sort out terms. To gain a sense of
how well the Asian theosophical inoculation took in the American metaphysical
world, we need only cast a glance at Charles Fillmore as he duly observed
the theosophical distinction. ‘‘God has but one Son, the Christ, the one ideal
man. This divine conjunction was accomplished by Jesus, and the Christ shone
out through His mortal self and illumined it, until it lost its personality and disappeared
into divine individuality.’’104
As for Sinnett, he knew about Atlantis and Lemuria, about ‘‘periodic cataclysm’’
and ‘‘cyclic law,’’ and he saw it all in the familiar Blavatskian mode that
at once disdained and affirmed Darwinian evolution. The scientific spin was
‘‘simply an independent discovery of a portion—unhappily but a small portion
—of the vast natural truth.’’ This planet’s evolution was ‘‘linked with the life
and evolutionary processes of several other planets’’; there was more, far more,
than Darwin dreamed. Rather than the limited Darwinian narrative, announced
384 Arrivals
Sinnett, evolution happened ‘‘by a spiral progress through the worlds.’’ He was
expounding Blavatskian globes and chains—and a process of mastery and godmaking
that body-selves on the path to enlightenment could internalize imaginatively
and with apparent ease.105 This, however, was the far side of Blavatsky.
On her near side, in the early 1880s, she was still rehashing old preoccupations
with spiritualism, and the Mahatma guidance of Sinnett obligingly fed him portions
of the conversation. Sinnett’s second discourse in Esoteric Buddhism, inserted
in the fifth and sixth chapters on ‘‘Devachan’’ and ‘‘Kama Loca,’’ revisited
the Blavatskian adjustments to the reconstituted spiritualist universe. Devachan
—which Sinnett had encountered in the Mahatma letter known among Theosophists
as the ‘‘Devachan Letter’’—became Buddhist heaven in theosophical
lore, although Sinnett and other Theosophists were quick to point to differences.
What survived in Devachan, according to Sinnett, was ‘‘man’s own self-conscious
personality, under some restrictions’’ but still ‘‘the same personality as regards its
higher feelings, aspirations, affections, and even tastes, as it was on earth.’’ The
spirits there were so absorbed in their bliss world that they were mostly impervious
to earthly overtures, and so they offered very little to spiritualist interaction.
They did not themselves visit the earth, and the only viable way to get in touch
was for a medium to get ‘‘odylized’’ in contact with ‘‘the aura of the spirit in the
Devachan’’ and thus become, however briefly, ‘‘that departed personality.’’ How
did it happen? The answer lay in the ‘‘rapport’’ that was plainly ‘‘an identity of
molecular vibration between the astral part of the incarnate medium and the
astral part of the disincarnate personality.’’ Devachan functioned as a rest home
for the recently dead, but a rest home to which they repaired for a very long time.
Sinnett reported that ‘‘re-birth in less than fifteen hundred years’’ was ‘‘spoken
of as almost impossible.’’106
By contrast, Kama loca was the ‘‘region of desire.’’ Linked, in Buddhist lore, to
domains in which desire and attachment ruled, it there extended to humans and
animals as well as to the devas (the gods of Vedic and later India) and the asuras
(their demonic younger brothers and inexorable enemies), and it included hell.
Sinnett’s Blavatskian gloss expanded on Buddhist tradition to provide readers
with an extended polemic against the spiritualism of his nineteenth-century
time. He associated Kama loca with the animal soul, a principle (the fourth) of
will and desire in the human constitution that was deactivated by death. ‘‘This
fact’’ explained ‘‘many, though by no means all, of the phenomena of spiritualistic
mediumship.’’ Indeed, the ‘‘astral shell’’ could be ‘‘galvanized for a time in the
mediumistic current into a state of consciousness and life.’’ Hence the spirits in
Kama loca in some sense fed on mediums, taking energy out instead of putting it
in. Sinnett went on to explore the behavior of these spirits, their difference from
Metaphysical Asia 385
the ‘‘semi-intelligent creatures of the astral light’’ called ‘‘elementals,’’ and the
limits of their power in using mediums. (They could not be guaranteed recovery
of their earthly personalities but instead were ‘‘just as likely to reflect some quite
different personality, caught from the suggestions of the medium’s mind.’’) The
animal soul, or fourth principle, that inhabited Kama loca characteristically drew
to itself the fifth principle in the human constitution—the human soul—dragging
it down and separating it from the two higher elements of the self (the sixth
and seventh) that dwelled instead in Devachan. The ‘‘Kama loca entity’’ thus was
‘‘not truly master of his own acts’’ but ‘‘rather the sport of his own already established
affinities.’’ Still, lamentable as this was, such a one was ‘‘on his way to Devachan.’’
All of this meant that, from the point of view of spiritual progress, spiritualist
engagement with mediums was a hindrance and a distraction, ‘‘at war’’ with
the spirit’s ‘‘higher impulses.’’ The more frequent the spirit’s visits to the séances,
the more it would be drawn back to ‘‘physical life,’’ even as ‘‘the more serious the
retardation of its spiritual progress.’’ Meanwhile, since the Kama loca sojourner
was anyway preoccupied with what was happening in this new abode, spiritualism
offered only dull-edged contact with the former earthbound person.107
Sinnett expanded on the anti-spiritualist theme, warning effusively of the harm
done to the Kama loca spirit. His rhetoric, in fact, was more than a clue and provided
an unambiguous announcement: ‘‘Esoteric Buddhism’’ was a synonym for
Theosophy. When Sinnett finally devoted his third discourse, in the ninth and
tenth chapters, to more immediately recognizable Buddhist themes—‘‘Buddha’’
and ‘‘Nirvana’’—they read almost as interpolations, abrupt departures from the
cosmic and anti-spiritualist discourses of the Blavatsky synthesis. Buddha, however,
manifestly belonged in this theosophical universe, even as his historical existence
as Siddhartha Gautama was downplayed by being cast against a Hinduized
cosmic scheme. A Buddha visited earth ‘‘for each of the seven races of the great
planetary period,’’ and Gautama was ‘‘the fourth of the series.’’ Here and elsewhere,
Sinnett turned to the work of Rhys Davids to buttress his assertions, but
the historical Buddha of Sinnett emerged not according to Orientalist canons
but instead as a Theosophist. Gautama was an adept, and his lived experience
on earth dissolved in Sinnett’s speculation on his initiatory prowess. Serious exposition
of the life of Siddhartha was manifestly out. ‘‘To know when Gautama
Buddha was born, what is recorded of his teaching, and what popular legends
have gathered round his biography, is to know next to nothing of the real Buddha,
so much greater than either the historical moral teacher, or the fantastic
demi-god of tradition.’’108
As for nirvana—the ultimate spiritual goal in Buddhist systems—the ‘‘sublimely
blessed state’’ required a finessed reading from Sinnett. In the ‘‘no-self’’
386 Arrivals
teaching of early Buddhism, nirvana of necessity meant a state of selflessness, in
which there was no subject (no self) to be the enjoyer. In later Buddhism of the
Mahayana school, nirvana was emphasized less than the idea of postponing one’s
final enlightenment in order to help to enlighten others. Either way—and in
variations—nirvana could best be described in Western terms through notions of
negative theology (not this, not that); etymologically, it meant the ‘‘blowing out’’
or ‘‘expiration’’ (as of a flame). By contrast, Sinnett had been telling readers that
the ‘‘supreme development of individuality’’ was the ‘‘great reward’’ reserved not
only for adepts but also for those who demonstrated more good than evil in their
incarnations. Thus his nirvana, if it reflected South Asia at all, reflected Hindu,
and perhaps Neo-Vedantin, notions of the realization of the essential oneness
of Atman with Brahman, Self with universe. ‘‘All that words can convey is that
Nirvana is a sublime state of conscious rest in omniscience,’’ Sinnett wrote.109
The question of whether nirvana was ‘‘held by Buddhism to be equivalent to
annihilation’’ was extravagant. Rather, the Buddha had experienced ‘‘the passing
of his own Ego-spirit into the ineffable condition of Nirvana.’’ Although Sinnett
owned that he only had ‘‘stray hints’’ about the experience, he thought that it exacted
‘‘a total suspension of animation in the body for periods of time compared
to which the longest cataleptic trances known to ordinary science’’ were ‘‘insignificant.’’
It was a state that tempted one to stay and not return. By contrast, the
Buddha had returned: he had come back ‘‘for duty’s sake’’ in order to finish his
earthly life. Thereafter he had kept coming back in ‘‘a supererogatory series of
incarnations for the sake of humanity at large.’’ Still, nirvana was a state to which
all of humankind should ultimately progress. Nirvana was ‘‘truly the key-note of
esoteric Buddhism, as of the hitherto rather misdirected studies of external scholars.’’
It was ‘‘the great end of the whole stupendous evolution of humanity.’’ And
it had to do, finally, with mind—with a state of all-knowing, of ‘‘that which we
ordinarily describe as omniscience.’’ Goodness without wisdom was not enough.
It was by ‘‘a steady pursuit of, and desire for, real spiritual truth, not by an idle,
however well-meaning acquiescence in the fashionable dogmas of the nearest
church, that men launch their souls into the subjective state.’’110 Somehow, Sinnett
had glossed nirvana inside out, or better, had engrafted it onto a Westernstyle
progressivism. His call to progress through mind had transformed nirvana
into the goal of a modern religious seeker who, in the American context, could
blend its identity fluidly with New Thought categories and a generalized spirituality
of the enlightened body-self.
In that American context, it needs to be asked how many Buddhists or Buddhist
sympathizers there actually were and what sort of Buddhism they embraced
in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. If the ‘‘Buddhist’’ texts that
Metaphysical Asia 387
Americans were reading came with Theosophy and metaphysics embedded,
what did that condition signal for Buddhism itself? Thomas Tweed’s study of
early American Buddhists and Buddhism has pointed toward some general answers
to these questions. Using the subscription list of the San Francisco–based
Light of Dharma, published from 1901 to 1907 by the Japanese Pure Land Buddhist
Mission (with prominent Asian Buddhists as well as noted Western Buddhist
scholars such as T. W. Rhys Davids contributing articles), Tweed could
demonstrate the presence of Buddhists or Buddhist sympathizers in twenty-four
states and two U. S. possessions. He was also willing to estimate the number of
Euro-American Buddhists or Buddhist sympathizers in the United States during
what he regarded as the peak years of American interest, 1893 to 1907. He
thought that for each of these years ‘‘probably two or three thousand’’ Americans
with European roots considered themselves ‘‘primarily or secondarily’’ Buddhist
and ‘‘tens of thousands more’’ sympathized to some degree with the tradition.
Much earlier, in 1889, Henry Steel Olcott had more expansively recorded that
‘‘there must be at least 50,000’’ professed Buddhists in the United States.111
Tweed, however, was not content with judging numbers. He went on to distinguish
among types of American Buddhist sympathizers and adherents during
the last quarter of the nineteenth century and on until 1912. Extrapolating from
what he encountered, he identified those he termed esoterics, rationalists, and
romantics, although he found most of his advocates to be mixed types in their
lived experience. Buddhist esoterics, for Tweed, were ‘‘occult’’ and were ‘‘characterized,
in part, by an emphasis on hidden sources of religious truth and meaning
and by belief in a spiritual or nonmaterial realm that [was] populated by a plurality
of nonhuman or suprahuman realities.’’ These could be contacted through
various sacralizing practices or altered states of mind. By contrast, Buddhist rationalists
had roots in the Enlightenment and its deism, in Unitarianism and Transcendentalism,
and later in the Free Religious Association and Ethical Culture
Society. These individuals, he said, ‘‘focused on rational-discursive means of attaining
religious truth and meaning as opposed to revelational or experiential
means,’’ and they found in the self the source of authority. Finally, Buddhist
romantics signaled a more cultural approach to Buddhism. They were, as Tweed
described them, ‘‘the exotic-culture type.’’ Their attraction to Buddhism came
as ‘‘part of an immersion in, and attachment to, a Buddhist culture as a whole—
its art, architecture, music, drama, customs, language, and literature as well as
its religion.’’ Often, it happened, their focus was on a specific Buddhist nation.
Perhaps surprisingly, too, among the types that he found, Tweed was willing to
argue that, whatever might be assumed about the prevalence of Buddhist romantics,
‘‘the majority were not romantics but esoterics.’’112
388 Arrivals
Still more, when we look for a metaphysical Asia in the neo-Buddhist minds
of the Americans that Tweed has studied, we can find it in both the esoteric and
rational types. If metaphysical religion found expression in America in both material
and mental versions of magic—if transformation of mind involved alternately
miracle or positivist reconstruction of the self—then the enlightened
body-selves of Americans could enact their owners’ differing choices. As in the
earlier heyday of spiritualism, they could move toward the more flamboyant phenomenal
manifestations of mind (as in Blavatsky’s esoteric version of Theosophy).
Or they could move toward the more philosophical and speculative perspectives
advanced especially by the noetic side of New Thought. In the blended
world in which students of Theosophy, New Thought, and new American Asia
dwelled, boundary lines were effaced or fuzzed over, and appropriation was a habitual,
unremarkable, and even unconscious strategy.
In Olcott and Sinnett, the theosophical and esoteric Buddhist connections
were, as we have seen, unambiguous (although, to be sure, something might be
said as well for Olcott’s tilt toward rationalism in his abiding interest in moral
philosophy). If an example of the metaphysical inclinations of Tweed’s Buddhist
rationalists—his second type—be sought, Paul Carus offers a striking case.
A Buddhist sympathizer (he never converted), Carus (1852–1919) was Germanborn
and German-educated, with a doctorate from Tübingen. As an American
philosopher, he edited the magazine Open Court, founded to succeed The Index,
which had been the periodical voice of the Free Religious Association. Carus
became identified with the Open Court Publishing Company in rural LaSalle,
Illinois, outside Chicago, where—as head—he promoted a metaphysical Asian
connection. His philosophical monism was reflected in the title of a second periodical
he edited for many years, The Monist. Carus had been drawn especially
to Buddhism at the World’s Parliament of Religions, where he formed a personal
connection with Anagarika Dharmapala of Ceylon and with Zen Master Soyen
Shaku of Japan. Later, the connection extended to Soyen’s well-known disciple
Daisetz T. Suzuki, who worked for Open Court, even as Carus’s ties to Japanese
Buddhism would continue throughout his life. At the parliament itself, however,
he was already addressing his audience in a speech significantly titled ‘‘Science:
A Religious Revelation.’’113
There Carus disputed the notion that religion would eventually disappear,
averring instead that it had ‘‘so penetrated our life that we have ceased to notice
it as an independent power.’’ Linking religion to morality, he called God not
personal but ‘‘superpersonal,’’ and he named science ‘‘a revelation of God,’’ as
the printed title of his address already suggests. But Carus’s focus quickly shifted
to ‘‘truth,’’ in his view the foundation for both science and legitimate religion,
Metaphysical Asia 389
and he thought that religion had ‘‘often, in former ages, by instinct, as it were,
found truths, and boldly stated their practical applications, while the science of
the time was not sufficiently advanced to prove them.’’ Similarly, religion had
taught moral truths before humans could rationally argue their way to them. ‘‘Almost
all religions’’ had ‘‘drawn upon that wondrous resource of human insight,
inspiration, which reveals a truth, not in a systematic and scientific way, but at a
glance, as it were, and by divination.’’ Now, however, science was on the scene,
and antipathy toward it was a ‘‘grievous fault’’ and ‘‘moral error,’’ indeed, an ‘‘irreligious
attitude.’’ Both religion and science, Carus concluded, were ‘‘indestructible.’’
‘‘Science,’’ he declared, was ‘‘the method of searching for the truth,’’ and
religion was ‘‘the enthusiasm and good will to live a life of truth.’’114
Within the brief compass of Carus’s address, he had expressed the same concerns
for science and truth that preoccupied New Thought practitioners and
shaped their language. But there was more. The year after the parliament, Carus
published the work that would guarantee him an abiding American reputation
and seal his connection to the discourse community of New Thought. He was
talking the talk that these other sorts of believers did, and his Buddhist rationalism
would find congenial resonances with their conversations. Carus’s The
Gospel of Buddha, produced by his own press, made its mark on American publishing,
going through thirteen editions by 1910 and already, in 1894, at least fifteen
printings. It offered not a Buddhism emancipated from dogma and ‘‘superstition,’’
as its author thought, but a Buddhism that reinvented Edwin Arnold
in American terms and—in the midst of doing so—introduced Americans to
a Christianized Buddha who sounded remarkably like a New Thought pundit.
‘‘Truth’’ was Carus’s mantra. And ‘‘truth,’’ in his rendering, transformed Buddhism’s
Four Noble Truths into the preamble to an identity discourse speaking
more of Carus’s metaphysical context than of an uninflected Buddhist Asia.115
Like Arnold’s Light of Asia, Carus’s work presented itself as a free-verse narrative.
In physical format, it obligingly went further to call attention to its poetic
genre, with marginal numbers added to the verses in each of its one hundred
chapters, even if most of the chapters read more like prose than Arnold’s did. Beyond
that, if the text told Americans in more emphatic terms ‘‘I am a poem,’’ it
also told them more emphatically ‘‘I am a poem for Christians.’’ Its title invocation
of the ‘‘Gospel’’ was hardly subtle. Still more, Carus conveniently supplied
readers with a three-column ‘‘Table of Reference,’’ the first column citing chapter
and verse in The Gospel of Buddha, the second—in much abbreviated form—
his sources, and the third, ‘‘Parallelisms,’’ mostly to New Testament gospels and
other biblical sources. Carus had worked hard, and he gave readers seventy-five
Gospel citations, some of them double and triple references to Synoptic Gos-
390 Arrivals
pel narratives. His smattering of other references—to New Testament epistles,
to the Old Testament book of Exodus, to the theory of evolution and the Christian
doctrine of the Trinity, to an occasional contemporary work—likewise revealed
his concerns and sense of audience.116 Yet Carus’s table of Gospels was, in
fact, a work of supererogation. Any nineteenth- or early-twentieth-century reader
plunging into the text would have needed to be totally innocent of New Testament
narrative to ignore his message that the Buddha strikingly resembled Jesus.
For all the Christian dress in which the Buddha made his appearance, however,
this Buddha acted as a subversive agent, undercutting the Christianity of
mainstream America in favor of something that hinted strongly of New Thought.
Here was a pointed kinship to the ‘‘truth’’ teaching of the latest American version
of metaphysical religion—just at the time when it was coming fully into
its American identity. Carus began by acknowledging the no-atman teaching
of Buddhism as a denial of a ‘‘mysterious ego-entity’’ sometimes linked to ‘‘a
kind of soul-monad.’’ However, this meant, for Carus, that Buddhist teaching was
‘‘monistic’’ and that ‘‘the thoughts of a man’’ constituted his ‘‘soul’’ and were ‘‘if
anything . . . his self.’’ The Buddha’s nirvana was an ‘‘ideal state’’ in which the
human soul, ‘‘cleansed of all selfishness and sin,’’ became ‘‘a habitation of
the truth.’’ Already oriented by these remarks before they ever got to the life of the
Buddha, Carus’s readers encountered a three-chapter introduction that formed
an effusive paean to truth (not coldly ‘‘rational,’’ but instead with emotional registers
turned on and turned high). Truth was ‘‘wealth,’’ and a ‘‘life of truth’’ was
‘‘happiness.’’ Truth knew ‘‘neither birth nor death’’ and, indestructible, it had ‘‘no
beginning and no end.’’ ‘‘Hail the truth,’’ Carus enjoined. ‘‘The Truth is the immortal
part of the mind,’’ and, conversely, ‘‘you attain to immortality by filling
your minds with truth.’’ Still more, wary of the self, like a dutiful Buddhist sympathizer,
Carus was yet a good enough American metaphysician to distinguish
between the ‘‘false self and the true self.’’ The ego constituted the false; the soul,
the true; and Carus had Buddhism and metaphysics as well. As his third chapter
clearly announced, truth was the ‘‘saviour from sin and misery.’’117
Nor were preface and introduction sufficient for Carus to make his point. As
the narrative life of the Buddha unfolded, readers learned that Queen Maya, his
mother, became impregnated when ‘‘the spirit of truth descended upon her.’’
Later, Prince Siddhartha as a young man still in his palace but troubled by the
problem of evil ‘‘beheld with his mind’s eye’’ a ‘‘celestial visitor’’ who told him
that ‘‘‘only the truth abideth forever.’’’ Urged to follow the path of this truth, Siddhartha—after
the vision disappeared—told himself that he had ‘‘‘awakened to
the truth’’’ and was ‘‘‘resolved’’’ to accomplish his purpose. Intent already (in
Carus’s reading) on becoming a Buddha, Siddhartha affirmed that there was ‘‘‘no
Metaphysical Asia 391
departure from truth’’’ in the speech of the Buddhas. Later, after he attained
Buddhahood, in the renowned Benares sermon of traditional lore, Carus’s Buddha
preached the message of truth with a metaphysical vengeance:
‘‘Happy is he who has found the truth.
The truth is noble and sweet; the truth can deliver you from evil. There is
no saviour in the world except the truth.
Have confidence in the truth, although you may not be able to comprehend
it, although you may suppose its sweetness to be bitter, although you may
shrink from it at first. Trust in the truth.
The truth is best as it is. No one can alter it; neither can any one improve
it. Have faith in the truth and live it.’’118
Like Jesus, Buddha gave his disciples his Great Commission, but this commission
was distinctly metaphysical. After the ‘‘devas and saints and all the good
spirits of the departed generations’’ had shouted their joy that ‘‘‘the kingdom of
Truth will be preached upon earth,’’’ he directed his followers to ‘‘‘spread the
truth and preach the doctrine in all quarters of the world.’’’ When he visited his
aged father in the midst of his preaching career, Buddha told the old king that his
son was gone and in his place was ‘‘‘the teacher of truth’’’ and ‘‘‘preacher of righteousness.’’’
He taught his disciple Ananda ‘‘‘the mirror of truth’’’ that was ‘‘‘the
straightest way to enlightenment,’’’ and in his farewell sermon Carus’s Buddha
declared significantly (to Ananda again) that he had ‘‘‘preached the truth without
making any distinction between exoteric and esoteric doctrine.’’’ After his death,
or passage to nirvana, as disciples told one another what the Buddha meant, one
of them called him the ‘‘‘visible appearance’’’ and ‘‘‘bodily incarnation’’’ of truth,
remembering that the Buddha had said that he himself was the truth.119
In the midst of this unremitting truth in the world of Carus’s Buddha, what
of self—which some Americans had learned to rely on and enjoy for its inmost
divinity? In a semantic exercise that took away and simultaneously gave back,
this Buddha taught that the truth was ‘‘‘large enough to receive the yearnings
and aspirations of all selfs.’’’ When the selves broke apart ‘‘‘like soap-bubbles,’’’
their future was yet intact, with the Buddha telling his disciples that ‘‘‘their contents
will be preserved and in the truth they will lead a life everlasting.’’’ There
was no self, to be sure, if the soul was the self, but ‘‘‘on the other hand,’’’ said
this Buddha, there was ‘‘‘mind.’’’ The person who understood the soul to be the
mind and acknowledged the existence of mind taught ‘‘‘the truth which leads to
clearness and enlightenment.’’’ With the body subject to dissolution, incapable
of being saved by any sacrifice, Buddha enjoined his followers to seek ‘‘‘the life
that is of the mind.’’’ Carus, however, had still not had enough of truth. As he
392 Arrivals
summarized for readers the meaning of his constructed Buddha and testified
effusively to his own admiration for him, he closed by reiterating his truth claims
once again. The truth had ‘‘appeared upon earth,’’ and the ‘‘kingdom of truth’’
had been ‘‘founded.’’ There was ‘‘no room for truth in space,’’ even though it was
‘‘infinite.’’ Nor was there room for truth ‘‘in sentiency.’’ Surprisingly, there was
no room for truth either in ‘‘rationality.’’ ‘‘Rationality,’’ wrote Carus, was a ‘‘twoedged
sword’’ that could serve both love and hatred. It was the ‘‘platform’’ on
which the truth stood, with no truth ‘‘attainable’’ without it. ‘‘Nevertheless,’’ he
warned, ‘‘in mere rationality there is no room for truth, though it be the instrument
that masters the things of the world.’’120
The Buddhist rationalist had perhaps clipped his own wings. In the process, he
had done very much more—proclaiming a Buddha and a Buddhist teaching that
resonated with the metaphysical vocabulary of New Thought. The point is not
that Asian Buddhism was not metaphysically inclined already—even if Americans
chose selectively from their Asian mentors, largely discarding the ritual and
ceremonial life of practical religion as so much superstition. The point is, rather,
that Carus had executed a tour de force for truth teaching, in the process translating
the Christian gospel itself, in its neo-Buddhist guise, into a metaphysical
version that corroborated the major theological confession of New Thought.
‘‘Truth teaching’’ was in; evangelical religion-as-usual was out. For Carus, there
was nothing esoteric about any of this, whatever the testimonials of Theosophists
and run-of-the-mill occultists of any stripe. He was wary of mystical overdrive,
but his more sedate and controlled metaphysic still led him to a territory that
neighbored the theosophical world.
The success of Carus’s work lingered into the twentieth century. Yet with the
new century Buddhism itself began to shift, following a path that, as Victorian
culture waned, departed significantly from that of American yoga. Only after
the quota reforms initiated by the immigration law of 1965 did large numbers
of South Asians begin to enter the country, juxtaposing their reality to the constructed
images of non-South-Asian Americans. Earlier, the Johnson-Reed Act
of 1924 had limited immigration to 2 percent of the nationals from any country
who lived in the United States at the time of the 1890 Census. By contrast, the
late nineteenth century and early twentieth had seen a significant immigration
of East Asians from Japan and China. Asian contact limited the American imaginary,
as did contact with Asians in the nation’s wars. Meanwhile, different from
the American yogic world—in which fluidity and guru-like followings begot networks
of practitioners—American Buddhism saw a significant institutional presence
as the twentieth century progressed. By its second half, as Thomas Tweed
has noted, non-Asian Americans could find Buddhist organizations and authori-
Metaphysical Asia 393
tative Asian teachers.121 Teachers, institutions, and supports for a sustained practice
all added up to a self-conscious identity that distinguished this American
Buddhism and marked its separation from the more diffuse world of American
metaphysical religion. A fellow traveler this conversionist, export Buddhism certainly
became, and in a series of versions—Zen, Tibetan, Vipassana—a close and
intimate fellow traveler, too. However, institutions, teachers, and rubrics of practice
all worked to shift discourse and to imprint it with a life of its own, distinct
from the larger world of American metaphysics. At the very least, Buddhism—
with its no-self doctrine—raised compelling questions and fostered pragmatic
compromises for those inclined to pursue private quests for the enlightenment
of body-selves. Nineteenth-century Buddhist best sellers in the United States had
largely fudged the problem. But denial could not dissolve it. The construction
of an American Buddhist religious universe distinct from a more diffuse metaphysical
religion went a long way toward positioning Buddhism in spaces that
kept the enlightened body-self within talking distance without full embrace.
Meanwhile, the larger world of American metaphysics would grow incrementally
in the new times dawning. From a series of perspectives and operational directions,
Americans would converge on the received discourse and practice that
Theosophy and New Thought had broadcast widely. Not bound by the sectarian
strictures that controlled Christian Science, Theosophy and New Thought
seemed happiest shaping language at large and inserting themselves as the secret
doctrine that fed the religious rationales of people who never joined or even perhaps
knew them. Mind and correspondence, energy and healing—they could
come in many guises. Metaphysical religion flourished, took new forms, in its
dominant variant appropriated the ethnic versions of Indians, blacks, Latinos,
and others, and reemerged before century’s end as the religion of the New Age,
continuing on after. Actually, though, the term—and the movement—deceived.
There were, in truth, new ages for all, and to single out one New Age is decidedly
to miss the point. Americans, who had always loved newness, celebrated it
yet again, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, in multiple incarnations.