Of Ether and Colloidal Gold - Esoterica - Michigan State University

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example, members of the Theosophical Society who stressed the concepts of “Universal Brotherhood” and “One Life” advocated by Annie Besant might take these ideas to support equality, but they might also take them to emphasize the need for order and subordination in both the state and home. 19 Some historians even claim that a natural affinity exists between esoteric and fascist or totalitarian ideologies. 20 But for the purposes of this paper, it is important to point out that esotericism provided a crucial space for the articulation of unorthodox politics of all sorts, and this includes unorthodox gender politics. Women and women’s issues dominated the Theosophical Society in the last years of the nineteenth century. Dixon claims that prominent feminists were “hundreds of times more likely to join the TS [Theosophical Society] than were members of the general population.” 21 Some of these feminists had decidedly radical agendas. For example, Susan E. Gay assembled Mme. Blavatsky’s teaching about reincarnation into a “Theosophical-Feminist Manifesto,” in which she claimed that souls journeyed through both male and female bodies, gaining the noblest qualities of both sexes over time. “Spiritual equilibrium,” exemplified by Jesus, was the ideal for both sexes. Thus, manly men and womanly women were the least developed of souls. Gay insisted that men must free themselves from the delusion that physical manhood is a sort of freehold possession to be held here and hereafter, which marks off certain souls from certain others known as women, and confers on them all sorts of superior rights and privileges, including the possession and submission of “wives.” 22 Gay believed that if men realized they could find themselves reincarnated in female bodies, they might think twice about the legitimacy of female subordination. One of the most intriguing, if somewhat repellant, feminist esotericists of the nineteenth century was Frances Swiney (1847- 1919). Born in India to a military family, she married a major general at the age of twenty-four and had six children. On her return to England, she became President of the Cheltenham Branch of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies 14
and a member of the militant Women’s Social and Political Union. Although critical of what she perceived as the male bias of Theosophy, she pillaged freely from theosophical texts, ideas, and vocabulary to create her own evolutionary form of theosophy, which appeared in 1899 under the title, The Awakening of Woman, or Woman’s Part in Evolution. 23 According to Swiney, all souls are essentially feminine, but they had to progress through an initial masculine state, which she describes as “the kindergarten of humanity.” She drew on the racist theories presented by Patrick Geddes and J. Arthur Thompson in their popular biology textbook, Evolution of Sex (1889), which argued that sexual difference exists at the cellular level. Swiney used this theory in a way its authors certainly never intended, to denounce men and support female superiority. She claimed that men embody the katabolic or destructive tendencies in human nature, while women embody the anabolic or creative principle. In her view, women’s reproductive organs were as close as one could possibly come to the infinite creative power of the divine. The job of true feminists was to root out “lower, masculine” behavior. To prove her case, Swiney drew on biology, sociology, Kabbalah, the Vedanta, Gnostic Christianity (especially Mead’s Pistis Sophia), and Egyptology. In Gnosticism and Egyptian mysticism she found traces of “sublime feminism.” Christ, in her view, was a female figure, who sacrificed herself for the love of humanity by taking on a lower, male form. At her second coming Christ will appear as the woman she truly is. Swiney was a eugenicist and joined the women’s branch of the Malthusiasn League. She claimed that the “Law of the Mother” made it imperative for women to abstain from intercourse while pregnant and nursing. By ignoring this law, male-dominated societies have contributed to an alarming rise in epilepsy, insanity, idiocy, and congenital diseases. With the re-imposition of the “Law of the Mother” and an improvement in women’s economic position, motherhood will be redeemed. This would result in the gradual elimination of male babies, which are only born as a result of female weakness. In her book, which went through three revised and enlarged editions between 1899 and 1919, Swiney combines 15
Page 1: ESOTERICA Volume IX (2007) Contents
Page 4 and 5: ESOTERICA IX (2007) Articles Introd
Page 6: greater proximity with a world and
Page 9 and 10: of the world, lack of scholarship,
Page 11 and 12: from individual experience or direc
Page 13: particularly interesting is that du
Page 17 and 18: same from the earliest ages until 1
Page 19 and 20: Figure 1: Thomas Cooper Gotch, “T
Page 21 and 22: Figure 3: Arthur Hacker, “The Dro
Page 23 and 24: Figure 5: Maximillain Lenz, “A Da
Page 25 and 26: some women are observed by the atte
Page 27 and 28: Figure 8: Emmanuel Frémiet, “Gor
Page 29 and 30: y the same rules as men, like Eliot
Page 31 and 32: Figure 10: male skeleton Note the m
Page 33 and 34: As the material evolution of Nature
Page 35 and 36: Figure 12: Frederick Sandys, Morgan
Page 37 and 38: Figure 13: Fernard Khnopff, “The
Page 39 and 40: Figure 17: Edouard Toudouze, “Sal
Page 41 and 42: Figure 19: Franz von Stuck, “Sens
Page 43 and 44: Figure 21: Charles Dana Gibson, “
Page 45 and 46: Deliver Her People: Joanna Southcot
Page 47 and 48: York: Columbia University Press, 19
Page 51 and 52: Of Ether and Colloidal Gold: The Ma
Page 53 and 54: to different things and different w
Page 55 and 56: was censured by the Parisian theolo
Page 57 and 58: The great and the lesser stones In
Page 59 and 60: signifies the action upon the sourc
Page 61 and 62: Figure 3: Rosenburg castle near Kru
Page 63 and 64: e made from common gold with the he
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a prominent position in that critic
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gives them life and drives their gr
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and elixirs in the early modern per
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compact ‘skin’ of a metal, gold
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further use in this particular work
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Figure 6: The distillation of aqua
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Figure 7: The purification of gold
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eveals more in his manuscript than
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copper which would presumably inter
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Figure 10: Iron (II) oxide. A perpl
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Khunrath mentions that they involve
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for example, by pillagers during th
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which the metallic solution gives t
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and Becher recipes for ‘mercurify
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is thus “the very Ens, or Being m
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The Twelve Keys of Basil Valentine
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Figure 14: A portrayal of the cosmo
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necessary to delineate a central fe
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the lower world in the form of fier
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etween the Heaven and the Earth, wh
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in the hands of such societies, “
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ideology in the face of lost fortun
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anders/ als Abscheidung der Seele v
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car c’est inutilement qu’ils em
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Mercurium/ und wird genennt Spiritu
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p. 293). 78 Cassius, De Auro, pp. 9
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y the same hand (including a recipe
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und guten wercken der Liebe gegen d
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Schneider, Lexikon alchemistisch-ph
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(though there were often variable p
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Alchim. 674) speaks of the Stone as
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Apian’s Inscriptiones as proof of
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perpetuum, Catholicon.” 203 Cf. e
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“The Teutonicks Writings’: Tran
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Among Hartlib’s international net
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“True Repentance” and “True R
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a complete if unreliable edition of
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had made this impression on him, a
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appointed a treasurer and collector
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Wonders, wherein wee live or come,
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Charles I had supplied the funds fo
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Mysterious Art” was indeed widesp
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Christi College, Cambridge. On 22 A
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this achievement the poet and futur
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singularities” Hotham “made the
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to Fox. 91 About this time Durand b
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156
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Llwyd as Yr ymroddiad neu Bapuryn a
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Bibliographic Note Unlike the compl
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21 F.A. Janssen, “Böhme’s Werc
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5-12 February 1649 p. 21. Thomason
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‚The Flood’ of 1524 - The First
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Pamphlets But before I get to this
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to the faculty of astrology at the
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Illustration II: Carion A year late
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days itself. Johannes Carion commen
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Illustration: Dürer And the artist
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6 Zambelli: 249f. 7 Fischer: 195. 8
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Book Reviews 180
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Lima, Robert, Stages of Evil: Occul
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as a blanket epithet that functions
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of historical detective work tracin
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Terror in Eugene O’Neill’s The
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the historical chapters (chapters o
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Brutus Jones). As in the previous c
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194
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critical of Jungian depth psycholog
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Ultimately, Heller is seeking a way
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Urban, Hugh B., Magia Sexualis: Sex
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im with exotic works and figures an
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