Quest Magazine

Jerusalem! The Real Life of William Blake

TOBIAS CHURTON
London: Watkins, 2015. 378 pp., hardcover, $23.30.

Many of us will be familiar with William Blake’s words:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.

We might wonder: “What was the source of Blake’s inner vision?” The answer is to be found in this illuminating biography of the man born in London in 1757, who at fourteen would serve a seven year apprenticeship as an engraver, but who would turn out to be so much more than that.

Blake grew up in an era rife with revolution. The cry for liberty was heard not only in America’s thirteen states but in the streets of London as well. Young Blake found the clamor for freedom inspiring, but he experienced it on a deeper level than most, for he saw the worldly cry as one stemming from an inner call for spiritual revolution: a revolution of the heavens within man, a time of revelation. He would be its prophet.

Blake was not the era’s only prophet. Emanuel Swedenborg, dying in London around the time Blake began his apprenticeship, had written Heaven and Hell, influencing Blake in seeing “heaven” — the infinite spiritual, inner worlds — as being very close, interacting with man in the world, its “mansions” corresponding to all that we see and feel. On the other hand, philosophers like Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) in Germany followed England’s John Locke in declaring Reason the messiah of man’s fortunes in the world, a perception against which Blake reacted vehemently. Blake caricatured Reason as Urizen: a false, blind, cold deity, ignorant of a higher principle.

Blake understood what his French contemporary Antoine Fabre d’Olivet (1767–1825) recognized as the limitations of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781). Fabre d’Olivet asserted that Kant had confused “rationality” with “reason.” Man’s ability to think is not the source of insight. The true “reason” is what the Greeks called nous, of which Plotinus said: “the higher reason [nous] is king.” As Churton states, “Spiritual truths transcend rationality: contrary to Kant’s philosophy, they can be known.”

Another French contemporary, the Illuminist Louis-Claude de St.-Martin (1743–1803), expressed the same message in more philosophical terms. In one of many original strokes, Churton boldly links Blake’s insights, illustrated in poetry, etchings, and paintings, to those of the Illuminists of France and Germany:

Like Blake, Illuminists responded to the Enlightenment’s elevation of Reason by recognizing that while reason constituted the inner eye of the mind, its function needed to be clarified, or illuminated, by the light beyond time and space, beyond the external senses.

Churton demonstrates how Blake used what was just becoming known of the second- and third-century Gnostics in formulating his own poetic spiritual system. Churton’s exposition of Blake’s interaction with the theosophies of Paracelsus and Jacob Boehme is outstanding.

It is not surprising that Churton is one of Britain’s leading scholars of Western esotericism, for he provides the key to understanding Blake’s esoteric genius, his art, and, most challenging of all, his prophetic visions. Consistently original, his approach regularly brings forth nuggets of insight; many illuminating asides seem almost like throwaways. Regarding Blake’s last completed commission, his engravings from the Book of Job, Churton notes: “It takes a certain kind of genius to rewrite the Bible without changing a word of it.”

Blake’s vision of the transcendental and limitless make the limited mind ask whether he was a visionary, a prophet, or simply mad. Churton makes it clear that Blake, though eccentric and provocative when he felt inclined, was not mad. Is it possible to suffer from a surfeit of sanity? Only, perhaps, among the less than sane.

Blake challenges us still, his influence extending from the Pre-Raphaelites to Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and W.B. Yeats, and on to Jim Morrison and poets, artists, and musicians such as John Zorn today.

Churton’s thorough comprehension of Blake’s experiences and his crystalline capacity to express that comprehension add up to an authoritative, definitive text. Return readings will bring greater pearls to the surface. Furthermore, the writing is not condescending or Olympian in tone, but warm, witty, and friendly. Where there is need of exposition, it is clear, indicating a disciplined and painstaking mind.

What more can you ask from a book? Here is mysticism, inspiration, creativity, art, poetry, truth, and philosophy, generously shared and beautifully presented and illustrated. It is to be treasured by all who have asked: Who are we? Where do we come from? Where are we going?

Renate zum Tobel

Renate zum Tobel has written three books of poetry and several children’s books. She is also the author of Physician of the Soul: Exploring the Mystical Meaning of the Life of Dr. Albert Schweitzer.

Empress of Swindle: The Life of Ann Odelia Diss Debar

JOHN BENEDICT BUESCHER
Forest Grove, Oregon: Typhon Press, 2014. 346 pp., paper, $19.99.

Ann Odelia Diss Debar (1849-1911?), the subject of this highly readable new biography, is one of the most notorious figures of the late nineteenth century – and oddly, someone almost unknown today. Born of humble origins in Kentucky, she developed pretensions of grandeur while still a teenager, and by the time she reached adulthood was already representing herself as the abandoned daughter of King Ludwig I of Bavaria and Lola Montez, a theatrical performer of the era.

What she really was — over the span of the next forty years — was an incorrigible con artist of the first order, given to impersonating at various times an European princess, a spiritualist medium, a Theosophical successor to H.P. Blavatsky, a swami, an ex-Catholic target of Jesuit perfidy, and a charitable reformer of fallen women (the last while apparently running brothels in Chicago).

She was married numerous times to men who were either accomplices in her endless schemes or wealthy “marks” – sometimes found dead under suspicious circumstances. By all accounts she seemingly had a strange charisma: the capacity to exhibit absolute conviction while brazenly lying, a crucial talent for someone who weighed in at 300 pounds and sported a succession of outlandish wardrobes.

Ann Odelia, as we’ll call her for short, practiced her trade in an era when it was still possible to jump from boarding house to boarding house without paying one’s bills and to blow town one step ahead of the arrival of police. However, with telegraphy firmly in place, and with the common practice of newspapers across the U.S. rapidly reprinting each other’s sensational reports of scandals and criminal escapades, she began to develop a national reputation that necessitated her constantly changing identities and locales.

John Benedict Buescher acknowledges that sources on Ann Odelia’s doings are largely confined to press reports of the era – an archive that he has thoroughly mined, witness fifty pages of newspaper and journal sources in the book’s bibliography. Given the tendency toward sensationalism in the press of that era, the reader should keep in mind that distortions can creep into any published report, but cumulatively the journalistic evidence is damning. Ann Odelia was a con artist preying upon sincere believers in spiritualism, Theosophy, Eastern philosophies, and self-improvement. But she would have had little success if her target audience hadn’t let its hunger for miracles and religious certainty sway its judgment. From her perspective, she merely gave them what they wanted, admittedly while emptying their bank accounts at the same time.

What Empress of Swindle makes clear, without dwelling upon the point, is that the modern history of esoteric interests has a much shadier back story than is usually acknowledged in official histories. Sincere seekers were repeatedly taken to the cleaners by unscrupulous mediums and “adepts” whose exploits were chronicled in the popular press, but rarely made it into historical summaries published by respectable esoteric organizations.

Hence Ann Odelia’s obscurity today. She was thoroughly enmeshed in overlapping spiritualist, Theosophist, and Eastern seeker circles, running scams and exploiting the trusting and gullible to such an extent that after she was repeatedly unmasked she was largely expunged from the esoteric record as an embarrassment to one and all. In light of this, Buescher’s biography serves as a refreshing tonic that provides some historical balance and, to its credit, is marvelously entertaining as well.

Two episodes that may be of special interest to readers of Quest involve Ann Odelia’s brushes with Theosophy and with the magical Order of the Golden Dawn.

Following the death of Mme. Blavatsky in 1891, Ann Odelia claimed to have attended HPB on her deathbed. According to Buescher, she “displayed a ring with a huge blue stone in it that she said Blavatsky had given her to signify the bequest of her spirit. Sometimes she told them [i.e. Theosophists] that she was so fat because she had ingested Madame Blavatsky’s astral body upon her death.”

Several years later, following other, more successful scams and a stint in prison, Ann Odelia became a partner with Henry B. Foulke in his efforts to assume leadership of the Aryan Branch of the TS following the death of William Q. Judge in 1896. Needless to say, they were not successful, though they did briefly receive support from Aryan Branch members opposed to Katherine Tingley’s assuming leadership.

A couple of years later, she rubbed shoulders in Paris with S.L. MacGregor Mathers, then head of the Golden Dawn. Over the course of several visits, she managed to convince him that she was in fact the legendary Anna Sprengel, the ostensible source of the original correspondence leading to the order’s founding. Shortly thereafter Mathers concluded that he had been hoodwinked, but not before she made off with a satchel containing manuscripts and documents describing the order’s rituals. Unsurprisingly, it was never returned. Subsequently, she was off to Cape Town, South Africa as “Madame Swami Viva Ananda.” She would later incorporate elements of the Golden Dawn rituals into further cults of her creation. In the end – perhaps fittingly – she simply disappeared from view. As much as we might like a neat resolution to her story, whatever transpired did so out of sight.

By the final page of Empress of Swindle, after reading of a never-ending stream of dozens of identities and ploys ranging over decades, I could only conclude that Ann Odelia Diss Debar was the Energizer Bunny of spiritual and occult scams. It is obvious that she has long deserved a full-length biography, and John Buescher has delivered one that I could hardly put down. Highly recommended.

Jay Kinney was founder and publisher of Gnosis magazine, published from 1985 to 1999. His article “Playing Those Mind Games: The Psychedelic Revolution Reconsidered” appeared in Quest, Winter 2015.

Sweet Synchronicity: Finding Annie Besant, Discovering Krishnamurti

Elizabeth Spring
N.p.: Archeon Press, 2015. 287 pp., paper, $18.86.

The early leaders of the Theosophical Society continue to inspire literature of all kinds. One of the latest additions is Elizabeth Spring’s Sweet Synchronicity. The title refers to a deep connection the author has felt to Annie Besant, partly because they were born exactly 100 years apart (Besant: October 1, 1847; Spring, October 1, 1947). This connection, in the author’s view, has been reinforced by many coincidences, or synchronicities, over the years.

The book interweaves a biography of Besant loosely interwoven with the author’s own personal experiences. Throughout it Spring emphasizes her link to Besant. She even suggests that she might be Besant’s reincarnation: “Could I have been her mother? Could I have been her? . . . I’m not sure there is a knowable answer to these questions; I think much is meant to remain a mystery.”

If Elizabeth Spring is indeed the reincarnation of Annie Besant, her memory has suffered severe damage in the passage between worlds, because the book is full of errors and distortions. It is far from clear how many of these were deliberate, even though Spring says at the outset, “although the basis of the story is true as told, there are some changes that modify the story to put it in a literary form. There are also disagreements over the nature of some of the people and events as noted in conflicting histories.”

In fact Sweet Synchronicity goes far past mere literary modifications. Sometimes the mistakes are small. While Spring makes much of an interview she had in 1988 with Rosalind Rajagopal, the longtime lover of J. Krishnamurti, she is unable even to decide on the spelling of her name: it appears repeatedly as both “Rosalind” and “Roselind.”

Other errors are both more substantial and more comical. One scene depicts a reunion between Besant and her long-estranged daughter Mabel, here described as a “young woman.” But the scene is set in 1929, and Mabel Besant was born in 1870, so she would have been fifty-nine on the supposed date of this reconciliation.

Probably the most amusing distortion appears in Spring’s account of Krishnamurti’s climactic renunciation of his role as the World Teacher, which also occurred in 1929. When he and Besant arrive at the event at which he is supposed to take on the mantle, they are “greeted immediately by Colonel Olcott.” But it would have been difficult for Henry Steel Olcott to attend this gathering, because at that point he had been dead for twenty-two years.

A more serious problem comes with Spring’s portrayal of the relations between C.W. Leadbeater and Krishnamurti. At one point Besant catches Leadbeater in an intimate moment with Krishnamurti. Outraged, she sends Leadbeater away.

In all probability nothing of this sort ever happened. It is reasonably certain that Leadbeater never approached Krishnamurti in this way: years later Krishnamurti himself denied that he had. Even in Gregory Tillett’s book The Elder Brother: A Biography of Charles Webster Leadbeater — which many Theosophists regard as hostile to its subject — the author concedes that Leadbeater “had no sexual relations with Krishnamurti.” In any event, Besant did not break with Leadbeater for this or any other reason. She was one of his staunchest defenders throughout later years.

Much of Sweet Synchronicity, particularly the second half, appears to be based on a screenplay by Spring that won a 1988 contest, complete with a $5000 prize. Her account of this event is peculiar. After winning, she is approached by a Hollywood producer who wants to option the script. But it turns out that this producer, with true Hollywood sensationalism, wants to include the story of Krishnamurti’s affair with Rosalind Rajagopal in the film. The indignant Spring refuses and tears up the check.

So on the one hand, we have Spring high-mindedly refusing to put into her screenplay something that did happen — the affair between Krishnmurti and Rosalind — but on the other hand creating a much more scurrilous scene between Leadbeater and Krishmamurti that did not happen. This is a strange sort of integrity.

In short, Sweet Synchronicity is a book that knowledgeable Theosophists are likely to find either hilarious or infuriating. While it does loosely replicate the events of Besant’s life, it does so with so many distortions that it cannot be called a biography in any meaningful sense. It could be most charitably described as an imaginative engagement with the life of Besant, although it is not an intelligent or responsible engagement.

Some are likely to see this book as an embarrassment to Theosophy. That may or may not be the case, but it certainly ought to be an embarrassment to the author.

Richard Smoley

A Most Unusual Life: Dora Van Gelder Kunz: Clairvoyant, Theosophist, Healer

KIRSTEN VAN GELDER and FRANK CHESLEY
Wheaton: Quest, 2015. 352 pp., paper, $24.95.

This lively biography of Dora van Gelder, clairvoyant, healer, and late president of the Theosophical Society in America, arose from an unusual collaboration. Its core is drawn from taped interviews of Dora by journalist Frank Chesley. Unfortunately, Chesley died before he could finish the manuscript. Kirsten Van Gelder, wife of Dora’s nephew, continued interviewing. She also drew on papers of Dora’s husband Fritz Kunz and on interviews with her coworkers to complete this work.

Dora Van Gelder was born in 1904, in Java, then in the Dutch East Indies, to a family of sugar planters. Even in her childhood she had natural clairvoyant abilities and was able to see nature spirits in the garden and woods around the house. These abilities were taken seriously at home, as her grandmother and mother had similar ones. And because the belief in nature spirits is widespread in Java — an island with a mixture of Chinese, Hindu, and Muslim cultures — people working on the plantation did not find the ability strange either. Her mother taught her meditation techniques at an early age and encouraged daily meditation practice.

Dora’s parents were leaders in the Theosophical Society and were in active contact with Theosophists living in Asia, especially India, and Australia. With the outbreak of the First World War, C.W. Leadbeater, a close coworker with Annie Besant at the Adyar headquarters of the TS, decided to stay in Australia, where he had been visiting, and open a small school to train boys both in academic studies and in spiritual abilities. Leadbeater was also a clairvoyant, and he was interested in having Dora among his eight students — the only girl. She went to Australia at the age of twelve and never lived extensively in Java again. In fact, her parents moved to Australia.

During the First World War and again during the 1930s, there were efforts to develop Theosophical communities based on common work, sharing of revenue, and common study. Dora’s parents were leaders of such a community, and Theosophists from different countries would spend time at the Manor, as the Australian community was called.

Thus she met Fritz Kunz, an American educator who had also been a student of Leadbeater’s and was working at Adyar. Despite a sixteen-year difference in age, young Dora married Fritz. He encouraged her to go with him to the U.S., where he became a popular speaker at Theosophical centers. For many years Dora devoted her life to helping him in his educational activities and raising their son, John.

In 1940, Fritz founded the journal Main Currents in Modern Thought, devoted to the concept of integrated education — a way in which science and spirituality could cooperate and share the results of their collaboration in schools and universities. Through Main Currents Dora met a good number of leading educators, but she did not speak often of her clairvoyant abilities, except to a small circle of friends.

With Fritz’s death in 1972, Main Currents ended publication and Dora could focus on her own interests. Her clairvoyant abilities had already been investigated by Shafica Karagulla, a British-trained professor of psychiatry at the State University of New York, for Karagulla’s book Breakthrough to Creativity (1967), but Dora’s name was only given as “DVK.”

Once Dora could act on her own, she and Karagulla teamed up to write The Chakras and the Human Energy Fields. Long before, Leadbeater had written books along these lines called The Chakras and Man Visible and Invisible, and Dora knew of his work from her years of training with him. Leadbeater had clairvoyant abilities, but he also had a strong imagination. He was not interested in a scientific approach, and a reader of his books cannot make a distinction between what he saw and what he imagined. Thus Dora had to start over in the study of subtle energies, but she would do so in the spirit of Main Currents rather than of “CWL,” as she called Leadbeater.

The analysis of the nature of the chakras and the alignment of their harmonious flow of energies led naturally to work with healing. With Dolores Krieger, a professor of nursing at New York University, Dora developed a technique of healing based on the universal energy as a way of to restoring order and wholeness within the patient. This marked the development of what is now known as Therapeutic Touch. Therapeutic Touch is increasingly taught to nurses and other health professionals and is widely used well beyond the TS membership.

From 1975 to 1987, Dora was president of the Theosophical Society in America and lived much of the time at its Wheaton headquarters. She had known many of the members of the second generation of the TS — Leadbeater, Annie Besant, Rukmini Devi Arundale, Krishnamurti — and so served as a kind of living memory of the organization and its activities. She published The Real World of Fairies based on her earlier clairvoyant observations. She also remained interested in the educational ideas exemplified by Main Currents. Still, her keenest interest was in the healing process. After leaving the presidency of the TS, she lived in Seattle, near her son and other relatives. She died in 1999 at age ninety-five.

René Wadlow

René Wadlow is president of the Association of World Citizens and a representative to the United Nations, Geneva, on its behalf. With a long interest in education in Africa and Asia, he collaborated with Fritz Kunz and his journal Main Currents in Modern Thought.