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Wednesday 26 July 2017

New Book: Upstate Cauldron, Joscelyn Godwin (Chapter 18 on Blavatsky):

Joscelyn Godwin has concocted a frothy, bubbling brew of mystery and magic in 19th century American alternative religion in his New York state cauldron for you to jump in. By the pricking of my thumbs, somewhere upstate, a cauldron comes..
 
Publishers’s Page
From 1776 to 1914, an amazing collection of prophets, mediums, sects, cults, utopian communities, and spiritual leaders arose in Upstate New York. Along with the best known of these, such as the Shakers, Mormons, and Spiritualists, this book explores more than forty other spiritual leaders or groups, some of them virtually unknown, but all of them fascinating. The author uncovers common threads that characterize these homegrown spiritualities, including roots in Western esoteric traditions, liberation from the psychological pressures of dogmatic Christianity, a preoccupation with sex, and involvement in the radical reform movements of the day. In addition to maps and photographs of surviving buildings and monuments, the book also features a gazetteer of sites listing 150 locations connected to these groups, which may be used as a helpful travel guide to the region.
 
Review by Nicole Gray
There are chapters on Madame Blavatsky and Theosophy, Cyrus Teed's hollow earth and Koreshanity, and even literary connections like L. Frank Baum, whose The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) hints of Baum's interest in Theosophy. Godwin concludes with a brief foray into the twentieth century with Elbert Hubbard and Gustav Stickley, "emphasizing the spiritual side" of these two figures and its contribution to the development of the Arts and Crafts movement, though neither Hubbard nor Stickley was expressly affiliated with any religion (p. 276). His final chapters cover New York architect and Theosophist Claude Bragdon and a series of modern-day movements and still-extant upstate communities with New Age, Eastern, and occult practices and beliefs.
https://networks.h-net.org/node/15697/reviews/91318/gray-godwin-upstate-cauldron-eccentric-spiritual-movements-early-new  

Elizabeth Lowry review
http://nr.ucpress.edu/content/20/2/131  

Magonia Review of Books
Joscelyn Godwin’s fascinating study shows that these were just the headliners; there was a multiplicity of support acts, large and small. Some were offshoots of Christianity; others were more diverse; some celebrated sex in one way or another; others preached strict abstention; some were in the forefront of racial rights and women’s rights – which, he says, “worked hand in hand”, at least until the Civil War. And then there were the sleeping preachers… http://pelicanist.blogspot.ca/2016/06/  

Quest Magazine
Theosophists appear several times in this history, not just HPB and Henry Steel Olcott, but others less known, notably Matilda Joslyn Gage, who coauthored the History of Woman Suffrage with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. Mrs. Gage was to become the mother-in-law of L. Frank Baum, passing along her interest in Theosophy to him. Baum would go on to author the Oz series of children’s books, which Godwin notes have both Theosophical and Gnostic elements. Godwin also reminds us that it was Josephine Cables, a Theosophist in Rochester, New York, who helped rouse the Theosophical Society in America out of the dormancy it had fallen into after the departure of HPB and Olcott for India in 1878. In 1882 she applied to the Adyar headquarters for a charter for a Rochester branch. It was the first American branch to be chartered since the TS’s founding in 1875.
https://www.theosophical.org/membership/renew/310-publications/quest-magazine/book-reviews  

K. Paul Johnson
Hiram Edson’s vision of Christ in the cornfield in 1844 (see chapter 8), which became the theological foundation of Adventism, happened between Clifton Springs and Port Gibson. That is about five miles from the Sacred Grove outside Palmyra, where in 1820 Joseph Smith met God the Father and Jesus Christ, and about four miles from Hydesville, where in 1848 the Fox sisters started talking to the dead. So three lasting religious movements—Adventism, Mormonism, and spiritualism, were all sparked off in that little triangle.
https://adepts.light.org/2015/06/

Wednesday 19 July 2017

Blavatsky and Painting: George William Russell (AE)


all images by George Russell

Hidden Aeons: Searching for a literary relic –
Brian J Showers - Mon, Apr 10, 2017
Yet despite all this, the name A.E. is still imbued with a certain magic, a presence that gathers around it the like-minded, drawing with a natural magnetism, ears straining to hear old traces of the new songs of Ireland. And just as they did during his lifetime, readers, historians, writers, mystics, activists, poets, students, organisers, politicians, artists, and the open-minded are still discovering kinship in A.E. and his works.
 
Hairy fairy revisited – An Irishman’s Diary on George Russell
Mon, Apr 3, 2017
He was a poet, painter, playwright and nationalist who wrote on economics and politics, and the list of names of those who attended his famous “soirées” at his home in Rathgar reads like a “who’s who” of the Dublin of his time.
There he met WB Yeats, who introduced him to theosophy. He joined the Theosophical Society in 1890, his membership certificate being signed by Madame Blavatsky, the Russian founder of the society.

Delving into the arcane: the legacy of Æ’s hidden murals
Aidan Dunne - Sat, Jul 5, 2014
Established in New York in 1875 by a small group of people centred on Helena Blavatsky, Henry Steel Olcott and Dublin-born William Quan Judge, the society held that a body of ancient, hidden knowledge lay behind all the world’s religions and, similarly, that hidden laws lay beyond the bounds of conventional scientific thought.
In Ireland, George Russell (Æ), James M Pryse and others set up a branch in Dublin, based at number 3 Ely Place. “It was a kind of commune and in many ways idealistic, even utopian,” says Moore. “The theosophists were, and are, completely non-sectarian. They believe in universal freedom and equality.”
Though it sounds as if it might be a religious cult, he points out: “It’s not. It ambitiously aimed to synthesise elements of science, philosophy and religion.”
 
Recent Wall Street Journal article on Piet Mondrian mentions Blavatsky:
Mondrian was attracted to both Catholic mysticism and Theosophical religious ideas around 1908. Theosophy—founded on the beliefs of Helena Blavatsky—stressed that a divine structure was hidden beneath everyday appearances. In 1915, the artist was briefly drawn to Christosophy—a merging of Theosophy with Christian theology created by a former Catholic priest. Mondrian had begun his diamond paintings before he broke away from Christosophy four years later.
 

From Alexei Jawlensky, Abstract Faces at Full Intensity

Will Heinrich- March 9, 2017
The son of a colonel in the imperial Russian Army, Alexei Jawlensky was 18 and a cadet when a visit to the All-Russian Exhibition of Industry and Art in Moscow in 1882 changed his life by introducing him to painting. Eventually he moved to Munich with Marianne von Werefkin, another artistic expat from the nobility, vacationed with Kandinsky, bought a van Gogh and studied Buddhism, yoga and theosophy.