Hurrychund Chintamon and Freemasonry

Posted on June 8, 2013 by admin

Among the many things for which I am indebted to Leslie Price, one had been forgotten on my bookshelves for many years until this week. A damaged, discarded library copy of A Commentary on the Text of the Bhavagad Gita happens to be the earliest book authored by any founding member of the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor. Its dedication, surprising to me, was to the Freemasons of the world:

TO THE FREEMASONS OF THE WORLD, A HARMLESS AND KINDLY CRAFT, THE PARTIZANS OF MORAL INDEPENDENCE AND MENTAL FREEDOM, WHOSE PURPOSE IT IS TO TEACH MIND TO STAND ALONE, UNFETTERED BY THE MOORINGS OF SOCIAL, POLITICAL, OR RELIGIOUS PREJUDICE, THIS WORK, AS A MARK OF HIGH ESTEEM AND FRATERNAL CONSIDERATION, IS DEDICATED, BY THEIR HUMBLE BROTHER, THE AUTHOR.

But I should not have been surprised in light of this list of Chintamon’s writings of the 1870s:

A history of Lodge Rising Star of Western India identifies Chintamon as the first Hindu accepted into the craft there:

For the first time it was in this year [1872] that a Hindu Brother named Harichand Chintaman sought admission in the lodge as a visitor. As on the ground of their being polytheists and not monotheists the Hindus were not taken in the Order, a discussion arose but ultimately the Worshipful Master admitted the Brother as he belonged to a regularly constituted lodge of Masons in England and also held a certificate from the Grand Lodge.

Google search yielded evidence that up to twenty years later Chintamon was again actively involved in the world of London Freemasonry, long past his associations with the Arya Samaj, Theosophical Society, and HBofL. He was quoted in Ars Quatour Coronatum in discussion at a meeting of the Quator Coronati Lodge in 1891 on the subject of the relationship of Masonry to Hinduism:

A list of those present at the meeting includes Wynn Westcott among others:

Via ancestry.com I learn that Chintamon was still in London listed in a voting directory of 1894. Secondary sources indicate he returned to India within the decade.

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V. Loy Edwards, author of the Church of Light mantram

Posted on June 1, 2013 by admin

This week I was surprised to learn that a meditation I have used regularly as the Church of Light mantram was authored by a man named V. Loy Edwards, who died in 1925, four years before the first publication of it I have found in Google books. Having temporarily misplaced my copy (which was tucked in the pages of a book), I looked it up only by typing the first few words “my soul is one with the universe, and my spirit is an emanation from deity.” The only publication of this affirmation I have found other than Church of Light documents was in the November 1929 issue of The Star, edited by J. Krishnamurti, where the author is identified as V. Loy Edwards.

Edwards died July 10,1925 in New Orleans at the age of 31. He is buried in Woodlawn Cemetery. The adoption of his meditation by the Church of Light as its official mantram is attested in many publications, for example in volume 21, Personal Alchemy. The passage is reminiscent of one from the 1900 edition ofThe Light of Egypt, a letter from T.H. Burgoyne advising the student to use this phrase while concentrating one’s soul at the solar plexus: “my soul is one with the Universe, and my spirit an emanation from God.” This is further elaborated in Celestial Dynamics by the same author, so it seems likely that Edwards was associated with the students of Burgoyne, and hence with the Brotherhood of Light (the name of what is now the Church of Light from 1915 through 1932.) The last US Census entry for him, in 1920, finds him a 25-year-old U.S. Army sargeant in Salt Lake City. Newspaper reports from October 1918 indicate that he was from Provencal, Louisiana, and seriously wounded in action at the end of WWI.

In August 1929, Jiddu Krishnamurti gave his “Truth is a Pathless land” speech at Ommen in the Netherlands. He re-read portions for the American press in 1930, now viewable on Youtube (the second of these two clips). As Krishnamurti was repudiating the organization for which The Star was an official journal, The Order of the Star in the East, that journal was publishing the meditation which is now known to all Church of Light members as our own. How did this young man, otherwise invisible to history, write a work that touched two organizations as unlike each other as the Church of Light and the Order of the Star in the East? Perhaps the self-reliance implicit in the meditation appealed to Krishnamurti’s new anti-authoritarian line of teaching in 1929.

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Susan E. Morrison and the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor

Posted on May 16, 2013 by admin

When Astro-Philosophical Publications published Sarah Stanley Grimke’s Esoteric Lessons in 1900, another author received most of the attention in the catalog at the end of the book. Belle M. Wagner’s novel Within the Temple of Isis occupies the first two pages of the catalog and part of the third, with endorsements by a total of five individuals: Zanoni, S.E. Morrison, D.C. Grunow, Minnie Higgin, and Thomas M. Johnson. The only one of these to have any prominence in the literary world is Johnson, who is succinct about the virtues of Wagner’s novel. He wrote, “I have read “Within the Temple of Isis” with much interest and pleasure. It is the best representation of the process of “The Transmutation of Souls” which I know of.” Zanoni now sounds less like T.H. Burgoyne than an all-purpose shill for the Wagners, writing “This is an Occult Novel of rare value, as it contains a vast deal of Occult lore on many subjects. Soul-Transfer and Soul-Marriage are especially dealt with in a scientific manner. Everybody should read it.” In light of other references to Zanoni of 1900 as the defunct Burgoyne now accessible through mediumship by Belle Wagner, the independent existence of that “reviewer” is somewhat tenuous. Much more intense is a personal testimony from a woman, Susan E. Morrison, who knew the Wagners personally in Colorado and later was acquainted with Elbert Benjamine in California. She enthused “It is the most intensely soul-stirring work that it has ever been my privilege to read. It certainly touched the keynote that connects my soul with Deity Himself.” But who is Susan Morrison?

Ancestry.com has yielded the basic information of her birth in Vermont in 1874, and her death in California seventy years later, but sheds no light on why this woman of modest means, who was a house servant for most of her working life, was involved in an organization like the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor. Between 1910 and 1918, the transformation of the secret society into an open membership brotherhood/church was an expression of the needs of a changing spiritual marketplace. Susan Morrison was a figure who like Elbert Benjamine witnessed the transformation.

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The Sage of Osceola: Thomas M. Johnson

Posted on May 1, 2013 by admin

The most respected, distinguished founder of the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor in America was unquestionably Thomas Moore Johnson, the “Missouri Platonist.” He was the first Council President in 1886 and was actively involved through the closing of the order in 1909. Johnson’s descendants have preserved his legacy in the Johnson Library and Museum in Osceola, Missouri, the town where he lived almost all his life. Son of a Virginia-born Missouri U.S. Senator who became a Confederate Senator, Johnson’s teen years were disrupted by the Civil War, at the outset of which Kansans burned Osceola to the ground. After the war he studied at Notre Dame and traveled to New England to pursue the acquaintance of Transcendalists including Bronson Alcott and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Since Sarah Stanley Grimke moved in the same circles at the same time, it seems likely that her initial contact with the HBofL was through Johnson.

There are several worthwhile sources available online in addition to the information provided by JLM. Most of his journal The Platonist is accessible via Google Books (see previous blog post). In 1947 his son Franklin donated thousands of volumes of Johnson’s philosophy collection to the University of Missouri, where it is preserved as the Thomas Moore Johnson Collection of Philosophy. Six weeks ago, Newtopia Magazine published a colorful and informative portrait of Johnson by Ronnie Pontiac, entitled Thomas Johnson: Platonism Meets Sex Magic on the Prairie. Rest assured that the obscure pre-history of the Church of Light will be increasingly illuminated as scholars discover and explore the legacy of this remarkable American.

There is one correction I need to make to the abovementioned article. The identification of Genevieve Stebbins’s husband Norman Astley as T.H. Burgoyne dropping one pseudonym for another is not an established fact– just an inescapable conclusion. Yet what seems inescapable now might prove impossible down the road. Even though I can find no evidence of “Captain Norman Astley” existing prior to Stebbins marrying him, or “T.H. Burgoyne” dying, there is always the possibility of Astley’s birth certificate or Burgoyne’s death certificate emerging to pull the rug out from under this hypothesis. Marc Demarest and I both hope for more solid confirmation by the time the Esoteric Lessons of Sarah S. Grimke are published.

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State of the Occult 2013: Smoley and Horowitz

Posted on April 10, 2013 by admin

Richard Smoley has a new collection out entitled Supernatural, which I have ordered but not yet received. There are discussions of Hermeticism, Kabbalah, and 19th century interpretations thereof that make it relevant to Church of Light history, so I will post in future about the book. But while waiting for it I found this excellent joint interview with Smoley and Mitch Horowitz, author and editor of the collection respectively. The passages that struck me as immediately relevant to CofL readers are these:

Richard:
To take a counterexample, there were H.P. Blavatsky’s Masters, whoever they were, and Blavatsky felt the need to disguise their identity; they may have disguised their own identities for their own purposes. But it got to the point where people just didn’t believe they existed at all, and that really hurt Blavatsky’s movement. She said at one point that she would rather be taken as a fraud than have the Masters’ identify revealed or compromised, so she was aware of this issue, and chose to deal with it in the way she did. But from my own point of view, I wanted to have it be intellectually honest, to say, “This is what I experienced; this is where I experienced it,” without a lot of magic-mirror stuff.

Mitch:
But I think that we risk allowing ourselves to be defined by our critics, or by people who are unable to take any measure of the values or the qualities that emerge from occult and New Age movements, if we don’t forthrightly speak to some of our own experiences and interests. I think it behooves serious writers today to do that, and it’s also ethically important that we pull back from the overreliance on disguised or changed identities, and especially composite characters, or altered events or things of that nature, because I think that while those devices may have their place in certain circumstances, and while privacy and discretion is sometimes important, I believe that any followers of new religious movements, or any followers of esoteric, or occult, or New Age philosophies — because charges of chicanery, fairly or not, have been so often directed at these cultures — have a special obligation to try to be as straightforward as possible..
Elbert Benjamine avoided any use of pseudonyms or personal names in reference to “the Brotherhood” and refrained from the kind of authoritarian claims made by Blavatsky and also to a lesser extent by Britten. (Concerning Theosophical Mahatmas and Spiritualist Adepts, respectively.) Hence The Church of Light does not have “a lot of magic mirror stuff” in terms of historical claims about its origins. (Even though magic mirrors were quite literally a strong interest of its HBofL predecessors.) This means that the researcher’s effort to “be as straightforward as possible” does not face the same obstacles as in movements more committed to authorities that are of dubious historical reality. Nor does it involve dealing with ideological gatekeepers guarding access to documents and archives, exerting message control, etc. as I experienced with larger organizations. Instead the main obstacle to overcome for exploring the CofL’s roots is scarcity of relevant information. However, in Albuquerque this summer I will be reporting on an amazing new development that changes the situation considerably. 2013 is looking to be a banner year for historical breakthroughs– stay tuned.

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Dexter C. Grunow

Posted on April 1, 2013 by admin

The Astro-Philosophical Publications edition of Esoteric Lessons includes eight pages of descriptions of other titles from the same publisher. By far the most promotional attention is given to Belle M. Wagner’s novel Within the Temple of Isis. Among those who testify to its merits are “Zanoni.” As only the Wagners know who Zanoni is at this point (1900), his objectivity on Belle’s novel is open to question. Zanoni will be the topic of my presentation at the biennial convention of the Church of Light, starting with the 1842 novel of that name and tracing the pseudonym through 1900 and the second volume of The Light of Egypt. The most eminent and influential name among the promoters of Wagner’s novel was Thomas M. Johnson, about whom there will be more in future blog posts. Quite a few researchers seem to be discovering the great relevance of Johnson’s role in late 19th century occultism, simultaneously and in complementary ways. Minnie Higgins, whose role in The Light of Egypt was mentioned in a previous entry and has become more interesting with new evidence, gave a full page of glorious praise to Within the Temple of Isis. Her status as astrologer of the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor in 1909, whose death led to Elbert Benjamine’s appointment as her successor, has insured her a footnote in history. But two other names in the promotional literature for Belle’s novel have never come to any author’s notice, as best I can tell at this point: D.C. Grunow and S.E. Morrison. Future posts will delve into each of them in more detail, but the only extensive reference to either is found in this 1913 article from the Battle Creek Idea in which Grunow, a meteorologist, is quoted on the virtues of a sanitarium. Born in New York of German immigrant parents, Grunow served in the army for two decades before joining the civilian Weather Service. In 1908 he was listed in the city directory of Baker City, Oregon, but had earlier served in Idaho, and retired to Valentine, Nebraska.

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Charubel, the Welsh astrologer John Thomas

Posted on March 3, 2013 by admin

In the befuddled world of the occult antiquarian and esoteric historian, there are rare moments that are like sun breaking through clouds. Today’s blog post by Marc Demarest reintroduces a figure who had always seemed an obscure footnote, now in the heroic lead role as a major node in the occult network that immediately preceded, and produced, the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor.

The best place to start is Theosophical History editor James A. Santucci’s description of the research of Robert Gilbert on Thomas’s groups (detailed in a full article accessible to subscribers here.)

“The Disappointed Magus: John Thomas and His ‘Celestial Brotherhood’” by Robert A. Gilbert. The Celestial Brotherhood, or as it was known to the general public, “the British and Foreign Society of Occultists,” was a short-lived organization that in the words of Mr. Gilbert: “mimicked, consciously or otherwise, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Both worked a system of progressive grades; both professed to receive teachings from hidden Adepts on the inner planes; both practiced magical and quasi-magical rituals; and both had an autocratic and eccentric earthly Chief… The first mention of his British and Foreign Society of Occultists was in July 1884, which appeared in the inaugural issue of The Seer and Celestial Reformer, later renamed The Occultist (announced in the December 1884 issue of The Seer) beginning with the January 1885 issue “at the behest of ‘the Leaders or Masters of a certain “Noble Order.” . . .” This “Noble Order” was the H.B. of L. or the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor, so the obvious references were to Peter Davidson and Thomas Henry Burgoyne. Whatever connection existed between the leaders of the H.B. of L. and Thomas ended abruptly with The Occultist remaining under the purview of Thomas and Davidson and Burgoyne introducing a new magazine, The Occult Magazine, in February 1885. Thomas gives his version in the July 1886 issue of The Occultist,which is reproduced on page 312 of The Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor by Joscelyn Godwin, Christian Chanel, and John P. Deveney (York Beach, Maine: Samuel Weiser, Inc., 1995).

Somehow this issue of the journal escaped my attention at the time, but Marc’s tying Emma Hardinge Britten’s social network to the HBofL via Thomas gives context that enables us to more fully appreciate work by Gilbert and Kim Farnell. Farnell has a charming brief portrait of the seer/astrologer on her website, based on research for her 1998 biography of Walter “Sepharial” Old. Her biography of Old was very helpful in disentangling his relationship with Blavatsky, as Farnell’s study of Mabel Collins did for its subject in 2005. A valuable history of the Astrological Lodge of London puts Charubel in context of late Victorian astrology. The most extensive excerpts from his collaboration with Old, Degrees of the Zodiac Symbolized, are found in this 2005 reprint.

The abundant new HBofL periodicals on IAPSOP announced today make this a redletter day for Church of Light history. Explaining the HBofL as a continuation of the Celestial Brotherhood and BFSO: British and Foreign Society of Occultists adds to its significance.

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The Great Game: the Geopolitics of Secret Knowledge

Posted on March 1, 2013 by admin

Gauri Viswanathan has previously commented insightfully on the Mahatma Letters received by A.P. Sinnett, in an article published in the Autumn 2000 issue of Critical Inquiry, “The Ordinary Business of Occultism.” She characterized the Mahatma Letters as “an extraordinary work” that is “marvelously constructed and richly textured” and “justly deserves much closer attention than it has received, particularly since it sheds valuable light on the complex dynamics of colonial relations, as well as on the institutionalization of Eastern thought and the disenchantment of religion in the modern world.” In the 2010 collection published by Routledge, Locating Transnational Ideals, she contributes chapter 12 which pursues the discussion further. About three fourths of the chapter is readable on Google Books. Two excerpts provided below illustrate the specialized knowledge and unique insights of the author, Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University:

These letters, in turn, defied British surveillance methods authorizing the interception of mail by her claim that she had perfected a form of communication beyond interception because it was telepathic, clairvoyant, and astral. In a dynamic of concealment and revelation that informed much of Blavatsky’s writing, letters were a crucial site for the selective use of secrecy to create both imperviousness to state surveillance and epistemological uncertainty in those monitoring her movements…(p. 192)

Playing a critical role in the Great Game, the maharajas of Kashmir and Indore staged an encounter between Russia and England drawing on the help of the Theosophists as they resisted incursions by the British into the princely native states. The Great Game, in other words, does not simply concern the struggle between Russia and England for control of Central Asia but represents a significant moment in the Indian movement of resistance to British rule originating in the native states outside British control, in alliance with the Theosophical Society.(195)

This line of inquiry is of personal interest to me, since it is the first scholarly investigation to delve deeper into the political aspects of the arrival of Theosophy in India. But it is also relevant to the Church of Light, in that an Indian whistle-blower about secret identities and letters promoted by the Theosophists helped inspire the establishment of its parent group the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor. (The role of this man, Hurrychund Chintamon, is explored in my chapter of the forthcoming Con Artists, Enthusiasts, and True Believers.) I hope that that Viswanathan will develop this examination of the letters into an entire book. She is far better qualified to shed new light on this subject than any previous commentator, as indicated by these excerpts from her biography on Columbia University’s website:

Gauri Viswanathan is Class of 1933 Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University. She has published widely on education, religion, and culture; nineteenth-century British and colonial cultural studies; and the history of modern disciplines….Prof. Viswanathan’s current work is on modern occultism and the writing of alternative religious histories. She has held numerous visiting chairs, among them the Beckman Professorship at Berkeley, and was most recently an affiliated fellow at the American Academy in Rome. She has received Guggenheim, NEH, and Mellon fellowships, and was a fellow at various international research institutes.

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Hypatia Magazine website

Posted on February 17, 2013 by admin

The Greek journal of esoteric tradition studies, Hypatia, will soon be available online in English translation. The original Greek edition is already online at the website. Editor Erica Georgiades was an organizer of the conference on esoteric traditions in the ancient and modern world last June that included presentations in absentia by Marc Demarest and me, both now viewable on Youtube along with six other presentations.

American history has been my sole obsession as a researcher and writer for the last twenty years. But in the late 1980s and early 90s, Europe and Asia were far more interesting to me. The “Rip Van Winkle” feeling upon reading Gary Lachman’s new biography of Blavatsky coincides with work I’ve been doing for Ghost Land and Con Artists, Enthusiasts, and True Believers. Research on the former focused almost entirely on Europe, although Britten’s book was published in America. And for Con Artists, although Colonel Olcott is American, my new research on him has been centered on India. So in 2012 for the first time in two decades I’ve been thinking much about Asia and Europe in the late 19th century, and how a generation of American spiritual pioneers developed a global perspective through travels to the Old World. It has been very encouraging to see this new research welcomed as part of conferences in Europe in 2012. Next month I will post about the revival of interest in Adelma von Vay in Slovenia and adjacent countries, and how Ghost Land relates to this development.

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Eden’s Outcasts on Bronson Alcott’s astrology

Posted on February 8, 2013 by admin

Eden’s Outcasts by John Matteson describes an early, unpublished manuscript that Bronson Alcott produced many years before he published a very different work under the same title, Tablets, in 1868.

Influenced by another current interest, astrology, he began to construct a series of arcane tables—the “Tablets” from which his manuscript took its title—that purported to explain the various aspects of the human psyche. He began to illustrate his journals with charts and diagrams, all striving to work out a theory that would unify the brain, the body, magnetism, and the stars. He was, he wrote, in a “blaze of being.” The next year, he remembered the giddy, obsessed zeal with which he pursued his idea: ” Now the mysterious meters and scales and planes are opened to us, and we view wonderingly the Crimson Tablets and report of them all day long. It is no longer Many but One with us…I am drawn on by enchantment.” (201)

This manuscript increases the relevance of Alcott as an influence on the young Sarah Stanley Grimke. He is among her very first influences from the Transcendentalist and New Thought/Christian Science milieux in the late 1870s. But while most of her writings on astrology were not to appear for more than twenty years, after her death, the above passage makes it clear that one of her first mentors wrote in very much the same vein. “Arcane tables” purporting to explain the human psyche via charts and diagrams describes a major element of Grimke’s approach in her Esoteric Lessons.

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