ANNA KINGSFORD
& EDWARD MAITLAND:
LIVING COURTLY LOVE
PART ONE: INTRODUCTION
Just a while ago, in the context of reading about Mary Magdalene, I reviewed (re-read) Annie Besant’s Esoteric Christianity. Besant did not mention Mary Magdalene in a significant way.
I was curious, afterward, whether or not Besant mentioned Mary Magdalene in her other works, since she did not mention her in this book. So I went to a good university library (University of Nevada, Las Vegas) to find out.
I also got curious about the Theosophical Society which Besant headed for some time, at first under the tutelage of Helena P. Blavatsky (H.P.B.).
Assuming her to be a disciple of Blavatsky (which she was, to an extent) I was surprised to find another women mentioned in connection with both of their lives: Anna Kingsford. I had not heard of her before, but I had the feeling I would want to learn something about her: anyone that publishes a book at age 13, a fictional yet well-researched account set during the days of very early Christianity and involving a woman named Beatrice deserves to be looked into! Age 13!
I looked through several books on the teachings of both Besant and Blavatsky and found nothing of note on Mary Magdalene. So much for Blavatsky’s otherworldly sources of information. Did these otherworldly sources not realize that Magdalene played a big part in the very early days of Christianity? We know now.
Maybe people from the other side who communicate with the living only know what is known, or can only speculate within the boundaries of what is known, in the times of the living with whom they communicate? That comes close to calling the claims to otherworldly intelligence fakery, but that is going too far, as we will discuss in the third part of this series on Kingsford and Maitland.
There were mentions of this Kingsford woman in books about Theosophy focused on Blavatsky, primarily, and also on Besant. I was immediately attracted by something in this lengthy declaration (by a very critical author, Gertrude Marvin Williams in her Priestess of the Occult {Madame Blavatsky} by (Alfred A. Knopf, 1946), pages 218 and 219):
. . . H.P.B. was eager to know how the London Theosophical Society was prospering under its new President, the brilliant and beautiful Anna Kingsford. Threatened with the collapse of the British branch, H.P.B had endorsed the Presidency of this woman, who had her own following and could bring new blood to the Society, but it had been a reluctant concession because she did not like working with women and frequently ridiculed them in her writings. (see my note1)
Dr. Anna Kingsford shared H.P.B.’s yen for the Unknown, and in addition, possessed many superficial qualities of leadership that the Russian lacked. She had taken the degree of Doctor of Medicine at the University of Paris (see my note 2); she was fifteen years H.P.B.’s junior–in her late 30s–wore her clothes well, observed the ordinary conventions, and was better looking than H.P.B. had ever been. Inheriting independent means from her father, a prosperous London shipowner, she possessed not only an amiable husband, the Reverend Algernon Kingsford, who remained in the background, but also a devoted cavalier, collaborator, and biographer, Edward Maitland. Dr. Kingsford had charming platform manners and a flair for crusading causes, such as the horrors of vivisection. She also had mystical leanings, a vivid imagination, and impassioned memories of visions and illuminations; she had received three nocturnal visits from Saint Mary Magdalene. She herself was a reincarnation of Anne Boleyn.
From the outset, H.P.B. was jealous, referring to Anna as “that hypocritical she-devil” or, in milder mood, “the divine whistle-breeches.” Poor old H.P.B., in spite of her slovenly appearance and her high rank as an occultist, revealed in her brief encounter (see my note 3) with Dr. Kingsford that she was still subject to the corroding effects of feminine vanity.
Note 1: Is Williams correct that H. P. Blavatsky had a low opinion of women? According to Joy Dixon, in her book Divine Feminine, Theosophy and Feminism in England (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001) it was the abhorrence of the feminine trait of sentimentality that caused the Theosophical Society under Blavatsky to reject Christianity, calling it “a religion in fact for women and not for men” (page 30). It was this attitude in favor of masculine religions, religions like Hinduism and especially its offspring religion Buddhism, religions that were firmly intellectual and unsentimental, that led to the break between the society and Kingsford, continues Dixon (see her pages 165-166 for more on this topic). Dixon also mentions the bad blood between Blavatsky and Kingsford cited above from Williams, noting that she sarcastically called her the “divine Anna” in correspondence in which she was agreeing with someone seriously objecting to her attachment to Christianity.
Note 2: In England women were not allowed into universities, so Kingsford went to Paris, just as Marie Curie went to Paris because in her native Poland women were not allowed into universities.
Note 3: “Brief encounter”? Yes, Dr. Kingsford did not stay with the Theosophists for long, just over a year, and she also died young. Blavatsky wrote, to her credit, a beautiful eulogy upon Anna’s passing, in her monthly magazine.
Besant and Kingsford were mentioned together in this book: The Other World, Spiritualism and psychical research in England, 1850-1914, by Janet Oppenheim (Cambridge University Press, 1985). On her pages starting at 185 and going on for some time afterward, Oppenheim makes interesting observations about Blavatsky, Besant, and Kingsford, such as (p. 185):
It is this sense of importance that suggests certain generalizations about the role of women in the Theosophical movement. Blavatsky is, naturally, the preeminent example, but Dr. Anna Kingsford and Annie Besant also readily come to mind. While Blavatsky’s life history is so obscured by fabrication that her motives for launching Theosophy are anybody’s guess, some striking similarities in the less mythicized lives of Kingsford and Besant tempt speculation. Both were high-spirited, intelligent women who found intolerable the limitations of married life in the third quarter of the nineteenth century and who, it appears, ultimately found satisfaction in the role of religious prophet. . . .
Pages 186-187:
When Anna Kingsford and Annie Besant rebelled against the limitations of married life in Victorian Britain, they were specifically rejecting the role of Anglican clergyman’s wife. Mrs. Besant separated completely from her husband, Frank Besant, vicar of Sibsey, in the autumn of 1873, and, as is well known, traveled from religious skepticism to a position of outspoken prominence in the National Secular Society. Kingsford’s religious scruples took her in a very different direction. While Annie Besant, in a reaction shared by many contemporaries, rejected the Christian doctrines of eternal punishment and vicarious atonement, and wondered how a loving God could have created a world full of misery and sin, Kingsford’s response to the religion of her parents was more intensely personal. She grew to loath the “harshness, coldness, and meagreness” of the Anglican church and felt “its utter unrelatedness to her own spiritual needs, intellectual and emotional.” She longed for a more satisfying church service and spiritual atmosphere and, not surprisingly, found them in Roman Catholicism, to which she had been beckoned by “an apparition purporting to be that of St. Mary Magdalen.” She was formally received into the Catholic Church in 1870, under the name Mary Magdalen, . . . . Kingsford’s husband, Algernon Godfrey Kingsford, became vicar of Atcham, Shropshire, but, unlike Frank Besant, was willing to give his wife free reign. Throughout all the adventures and campaigns of her life, he remained very much a shadow figure in the background. The man who joined her in many of those campaigns and who accompanied her to Paris, where she studied medicine from 1874 to 1880, was not the Reverend Kingsford, but her loyal collaborator and biographer, Edward Maitland.
Defiance of convention became a way of life for Annie Besant and Anna Kingsford, but it was not empty defiance merely for its own sake. They were never rebels without a cause. Whether the struggle was for free thought, birth control, Fabian socialism, or Indian nationalism, Besant brought her intense zeal and energetic commitment to the effort and became a formidable public speaker in the process. Kingsford’s social causes included higher education and suffrage for women, dietary reform, and, above all, anti-vivisection. . . .
Oppenheim has many more pages on these two women leaders of the leading occult movement of their time. Kingsford died of consumption in 1888, merely 42 years of age. Besant, on the other hand, was only a year younger but lived until 1933.
Besant took the reigns of the Theosophical Society and steered it to becoming larger and more influential. Kingsford was prominent on the London Theosophy Scene for one year, and then she and Maitland founded the Hermetic Society, in 1884. Her life’s work was written down by Maitland and published through that society.
Blavatsky, according to Oppenheim (page 189) wanted no part of Christianity. Kingsford, on the other hand, believed there was much esoteric truth in Christianity and felt herself to be a Christian reformer.
Kingsford and Besant had more in common that Kingsford and Blavatsky. Continuing her discussion of the common grounds between Kingsford and Besant, Oppenheim wrote (page 190) about Kingsford:
For Blavatsky, the revelations of occult knowledge, through her own agency, rendered Christianity irrelevant and exposed its absurdities. For Kingsford and Maitland, the revelation of esoteric wisdom underscored both the venerability and universality of Christianity and equipped it to participate fully in what they believed would be the future development of religious thought.
. . . Kingsford . . . drank deeply from the occult waters and embraced unorthodoxy in diverse guises. Yet she never quite managed to break the fine thread that bound her to the Christian faith.
With Annie Besant, the thread appeared to be severed irrevocably as she made herself famous on secularist platforms around the country. Her rejection of Christianity seemed too resolute for backsliding. With the aid of Theosophy, however, she did slide back, at least to a position not unlike the Esoteric Christianity of Kingsford and Maitland.
Oppenheim serves much additional food for thought and includes this observation on page 191:
Theosophy perfectly served Besant’s needs. Consciously or not, she used it to abandon an intellectual position that no longer satisfied her, if it ever really had. Through Theosophy, she could resume her earlier quest for life’s hidden purpose without appearing to succumb entirely to blind religiosity. That she was, nevertheless, moving back toward a more overtly religious frame of mind is beyond doubt, and in her renewed receptivity to spiritual aspirations, she looked sympathetically at Christianity once again. The result, at the turn of the century, was Esoteric Christianity or The Lesser Mysteries, a volume in which Besant assumed yet another pose for her readers: the revealer of fundamental Christian truths whose exposure could strengthen the Christian faith in the modern world. She seems to have derived the book’s argument from a union of Blavatsky and Kingsford.
And there you have it. I wondered what this “Lesser Mysteries” was all about when I looked at other writings by Besant from her earlier Theosophical years (when Blavatsky was alive). I could not fathom what made these Christian mysteries “lesser” since they seemed so similar to the ancient higher mysteries spoken of in Blavatsky’s and Besant’s other works. In fact Besant takes great pains to show that these ancient mysteries are well hidden, but definitely exist, in Christianity.
Now I know: calling Christian mysteries “lesser” was likely a ‘sop’ to the Blavatsky devotees that were the mainstay of Theosophism in her time. Her book was a cautious attempt to turn a new direction, but because of her followers believing the superiority of the ancient mysteries over this relative latecomer, Christianity, she tried to not offend them. Besant taught that Original Christianity was in harmony with the ancient mysteries, but it was taken over by the blind and the superficial who were no more capable of seeing hidden truth than they were capable of seeing the bottoms of their full wine goblets.
I see this Esoteric Christianity book by Besant in a new light, now.
I was anxious, at this point in my readings in Oppenheim (who continues to make interesting and insightful observations about the beliefs in the writings of these two interesting women) to get myself to the source: Kingsford’s writings.
Alas, I could not find anything by Kingsford in the university library where I did find the books I just cited.
I did find one more book that analyzed Kingsford’s work, and perused it, and it helped me, in fact, decide what to hone in on when I finally did gain access to all of Kingsford’s works on a wonderful website: http://www.anna-kingsford.com/index.htm
This last book I perused in the library was Notorious Voices: Feminist Biblical Interpretation, 1500-1920 by Marla J. Selvidge (A Paragon House Book, 1996). I found Selvidge’s sections on Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Mary Hayes fascinating. Stanton’s The Woman’s Bible caused quite a stir in her day, and after. It was published at about the same time as Besant’s Esoteric Christianity, but on a different continent. I was intrigued to see that (page 87) Selvidge suggested the authors of the The Woman’s Bible drew on “resources from historical critical commentaries and works, the Occult, Theosophy, Astrology, and more.” That makes me think they were aware of Kingsford’s works, which would have been available then. On page 100, Blavatsky is named as an acknowledged source, not Kingsford, but this is corrected on page 195, where Selvidge writes that:
Kingsford and Maitland are included in this study because they were quoted so often by nineteenth-century women such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Matilda Joslyn Gage. No one could possibly estimate the influence they had on the women’s rights movements in England and the United States. No one knows how many other people knew their work and quoted them in their cause for equality.
I ran into the The Woman’s Bible decades ago when reading Mormon history and finding that a general authority of that church had angrily denounced that book’s assertion that the female principle is and always had been part of the God-nature. (If that interests you, the “Standing on the Principle” article on this website gives the citation.)
Selvidge’s chapter on “The Feminine as Divine” has a section on “Anna Bonus Kingsford (1846-1888) and Edward Maitland (1824-1897).” This section occupies mainly pages 186 through 195, and is largely a discussion of Kingsford’s views on and interpretations of scripture. I was interested in their rejection of the misogyne statements in the Pauline corpus. They rejected Paul as a misogynist. They were apparently not familiar with critical textual analyses suggesting these misogyne declarations were interpolations not to be blamed on Paul.
Interesting as some of that was, I was instead quite fascinated by the intimations by Selvidge of this Kingsford/Maitland creative duo being an example of “mystical love” (what I would call “courtly love").
Here are just a few statements from Selvidge concerning the relationship between Kingsford and Maitland:
Pages 186-187:
A COLLABORATION OF MYSTICAL LOVE
After traveling around the world for most of his life, Edward Maitland found a “twin-soul” in Anna Bonus Kingsford in his own country, England. In 1874, when he finally spoke with Anna, he was fifty and she was twenty-eight years old. Instantly they knew that their views of life and religion were similar. Edward had a history within Anglicanism but Anna, believing it to be the only true church, became a Roman Catholic in 1870. In 1874 she left her husband (see my note 1) in order to study medicine in Paris, France, because women were not admitted to the universities in England. In France she continued her advocacy of woman’s rights “with special emphasis on womanly attributes.” (see my note 2) After receiving her degree she practiced medicine in London.
Together Kingsford and Maitland began a life-long association that would carry them to Switzerland, France, Italy (see my note 3), and back to London again. Among the many publications which they created together, they produced The Perfect Way, a very popular, esoteric or mystical interpretation of Christianity (see my note 4) . . . .
Although Kingsford and Maitland lectured, researched, composed, traveled, and lived together, they claimed that their relationship was purely spiritual. (see my note 5) He would edit and arrange material that she would receive mystically. In spite of many debilitating illnesses, including asthma, tuberculosis, and possibly psychological disorders (see my note 6), Maitland attended to Kingsford until the day she died. This relationship caused some to gossip because Anna was legally married to an Anglican clergyman, the Reverend Algernon C. Kingsford, to whom she had bore one child. Sources suggest that the marriage was in name only and both parties enjoyed their freedoms apart from one another. (see my note 7) . . .
Note 1: She left her husband’s home to pursue her studies, but they did not divorce. Her husband was solicitous and looked out for her as best he could. She had their daughter with her in Paris, Maitland visited her there, and only lived with her there briefly. They were together on travels and in England. Her husband did not condemn their unorthodox relationship but gave her space to fulfill her vision of her life’s purpose. He believed in her gift.
Note 2: She was disillusioned about the women’s rights movement’s ridiculing a feminine woman, or a woman happy in traditional roles. She felt this was beside the point, and simply wrong. She was proudly feminine in her dress, manner and bearing, and a devoted mother. As a wife she did not fit the traditional mold, of course.
Note 3: One trip to Italy early in her relationship with Maitland was for her health, she suffered from ‘consumption’ (and ultimately died of it) in Paris, and her husband thought a holiday in sunny Italy would be beneficial. Since he was so busy with his work he actually asked Maitland to accompany and watch over her. She revived splendidly and went back to school in Paris. Together, she and Maitland had many spiritual experiences on this trip, experiences that became part of the basis for their later work.
Note 4: This ‘popular book’ came out almost 20 years before Besant’s Esoteric Christianity, hence the idea that Besant used it, learned from it, or was inspired to create her own version of 'esoteric Christianity' because of it.
Note 5: If this is so, then this is the most interesting documented case of "courtly love” and its creative effects I have ever read! This we will explore in greater detail in Part Two.
Note 6: The possible psychological disorder stems from the end of her life when she felt that her thoughts were objects and had physical power. She was extreme in her anti-vivisectionist views and willed a prominent Parisian vivisectionist who had insulted her personally to die, and he did. This is indeed a form of madness.
Note 7: In my readings I looked for but found no support for this statement by Selvidge. Admittedly, my readings are limited.
Selvidge, just like Dixon, describes the reason for their unhappiness with the Theosophical Society that welcomed them as President and Vice-President of the London group. The London group, following Blavatsky, was into esoteric Buddhism and had no use for Christianity, but Kingsford felt herself to be called to be a reformer of Christianity. So she and Maitland left, and went their own way. Selvidge says that Maitland died alone 11 years after Kingsford, and spend his time during those 11 years editing and publishing her writings and composing her biography.
That doesn’t quite exhaust what I found interesting in the books cited so far, but I am anxious to pull the thread of ‘courtly love’ in the works of Kingsford and Maitland, and especially in a book by Maitland about Kingsford and their collaboration.
To my delight and surprise, this turns out to involve Mary Magdalene, who visited Anna, and in whose name Anna became a Catholic, and whose revelations led Anna to a deeper understanding of the life-mission of Jesus Christ, according to Williams. Kingsford, however, had multiple revelatory sources later in her life from which she drew her occult knowledge, and Mary Magdalene was one among many, but Maitland did claim that she received special knowledge about Christ from "Mary Magdalen".
{See the ADDENDUM linked below for more on Mary Magdalene and 'Mary" kingsford.}
We will show the reference to this in the context of courtly love in Part Two.
I wrote Part Three because, as a former true-believer in one "restorationist" movement, I am always fascinated by examples of other such movements. For example, I was fascinated with the fact that two restoration movements, 300 years apart, both sought to re-establish the Biblical society of the Old Testament that so pleased God that he walked among them. That society, to make the restoration complete, including polygyny: one man having multiple wives. (If you want to read that comparison, click here.)
So what do the followers of Maitland and Kingsford have in common with other restoratists also led by prophets? Revelation (and a very high opinion of their importance to the world), of course! So a lot of time is spent in Part Three on the nature of revelation, a subject also addressed elsewhere on this site in a different context.
PAGE TWO: AN INSTANCE OF COURTLY LOVE
PAGE THREE: SELECTED KINGSFORD TEACHINGS
AN ADDENDUM ABOUT MARY MAGDALENE and 'MARY' KINGSFORD
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