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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The whole strength and backbone of the achievement was its reliance on theology to explain and validate what Quimby had sought to establish rather on philosophical grounds. Psychology and philosophy are both answerable at the bar of scholarly criticism. Theology is immune to assault. Her first debt was undoubtedly to Quimby and perhaps to Emerson through Bronson Alcott…(p. 111)

Although her admirer Alcott was steeped in philosophy, Eddy was promoted by him as a divine mouthpiece, as quoted by Dakin:

The profound truths which you announce, sustained by facts of the immortal life, give to your work the seal of inspiration—reaffirm in modern phrase the Christian revelations. In times like these, so sunk in sensualism, I hail with joy your voice, speaking an assured word for God and immortality, and my joy is heightened that these words are of woman’s divinings.(p. 184)

Recently the youtube animations of Rev. Lux Newman have come to my attention, and I have found many of them worthwhile. None more than Mrs. Eddy telling her own story, in Retrospection and Introspection. Enjoy!